Tag Archives: food

Bad Meals, North Roxbury and Woody

Posted on by Steve Higgins

It’s always good to pick up my iPad and see that my scheduled post has been successfully posted but the next task is to start thinking about a new one for next week. What can I write about? Has anything interesting happened to me? Have I read a great book or watched something good on TV? No? Well, that’s me up the creek without a paddle then.

It’s cold, in fact it’s bloody cold and it’s no secret that I hate the cold. I could write about the cold I suppose but then I’ve done that before. This is my 695th post so it’s no surprise that a lot of what comes to mind I’ve actually already written about.

I’ve not done anything particularly interesting lately worth writing about. As usual I’ve been dining out at a number of restaurants. As I’ve mentioned in my introductory page, dining out is one of the great experiences of life, especially for someone like me who is perhaps in the evening of his life. I’m not the sporty or athletic type, I’m more of a quieter, more relaxed type of guy.

One disappointing aspect of dining out recently was having a really poor meal at not one but two of my favourite restaurants. A restaurant I suppose is only as good as its chef and until these two restaurants gets themselves new chefs they will have to make it through life without my custom. I really do hate getting a sub-standard meal, it just really ruins my evening. After one meal last week we were going on to our usual pub quiz and to make up for the bad food I ordered a portion of cheesy chips to go with my pint. The cheesy chips weren’t that great after all and nothing, not even the winning of the quiz (actually a joint win, we tied with another team) could cheer me up.

When we returned home I picked up my iPad and one of the first items I clicked on was a routine by the comedian Peter Kay about people in a restaurant who complain about the food to themselves but smile at the waiter and tell him everything is ok. Won’t be coming here again they say when he has gone. That is probably the essence of being English. To be fair, I am quite happy to send food back when I can’t eat it but I just try and muddle through when it just isn’t very exciting.

What else have I done lately? Well, as usual I read quite a lot. I’ve recently finished a book by Mia Farrow called What Falls Away. It’s an autobiography that was really interesting and very well written. I particularly liked her memories of her youth in California with her mother and father and family. Her father was a film director, John Farrow and her mother was an actress who was most famously Jane to Johnny Weissmuller’s Tarzan. The family lived at 809 North Roxbury Drive, Beverley Hills, an exclusive area of Hollywood and it turns out a whole lot of famous people lived on that road. Her next door neighbours were the Roaches, the family of Hal Roach, a producer who was at the centre of the silent comedies of the early part of the motion picture boom. Other neighbours were Lucille Ball, Jack Benny, Peter Falk (Columbo) Ginger Rogers and in later years, Madonna.

In the latter part of the book Mia talks mostly about Woody Allen with whom she started a relationship with in 1980. I’m a huge fan of Woody and his films. The two met in 1979 and were introduced to each other by Michael Caine. Woody invited her to his New Year’s Eve Party and later, in April of 1980, Mia received a call from his secretary asking if Mia would like to meet Woody for lunch.

Mia builds up an affectionate picture of Woody and gives the reader some interesting anecdotes. Woody may look in his films as though he just throws any old thing on to wear but in real life he is super keen about his wardrobe. According to Mia he pored over Vogue magazine and many of his suits were tailor made for him.

When he came to stay at Mia’s summer house he refused to use the shower so Mia brought in a builder and had the whole thing redone to his requirements and guess what, he still wouldn’t shower there, even though he brought his own shower mat along.

Woody had a long retinue of doctors for each of his many ailments and kept their phone numbers on him at all times. He also had a thermometer on his person and when he was feeling unwell would take his temperature every few minutes.

Despite their relationship the two never married or even lived together. They both had apartments on opposite sides of Central Park in New York and the two would blink their lights and wave to each other across the park.

Woody never seemed to be interested in her large family of children, most of whom were adopted. In 1985 Mia adopted newborn baby girl Dylan. Woody appeared to find Dylan irresistible and Mia felt that this had been a breakthrough, that he was finally beginning to interact with her children. Sadly things take a darker tone here and Mia began to feel Woody’s interest in Dylan was more of an obsession.

Later, he takes an interest in Soon-Yi, another of Mia’s adopted daughters and by then a teenager. Mia is shocked when she finds Woody has become involved with Soon-Yi in a wholly inappropriate way and later is horrified when she begins to feel Dylan has been abused.

This of course is only Mia’s side of the story. Did Woody abuse Dylan? The authorities seemed to think not but in a later custody hearing they declined to give Woody visitation rights. Woody married Soon-Yi in 1997 and the couple adopted two children.

Although I love Woody Allen’s films, this book made me look at Woody in a completely different light.

Just lately I’ve been taking a long look at my blogs and I’ve generally been a little disappointed. Not by the content but after quite a few years as a blogger I was hoping to have a lot of followers and readers, sold lots of copies of my books and perhaps even made a little income from my work. I sometimes look at my stats on Google analytics as well as those on WordPress itself and wonder what more could be done to gain a larger readership. Interestingly, almost as soon as I had those thoughts, my stats took on a huge boom and I had a weekend of incredible stats, mostly coming from the USA. Why should Americans be interested in my blog posts? Well, I could also ask why is a guy from the north of England so interested in the USA? I have a great interest in Hollywood, US politics, US TV shows, the city of New York so if I’m interested in all that then why shouldn’t Americans be interested in the things that I write about?

A message appeared on my iPad from Google Analytics to tell me about a huge ‘spike’ in my readership. Well, I did run an advertisement on WordPress. I had a budget limit of $35 and about 36 hours later I received a message telling me that my ad had finished as I had hit my budget limit. Of course that could also mean I’ve sold a few extra books this month.

Wait a minute, hang on while I check my Amazon sales page!

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Comfort Food

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I started off this post with the title food memories, not meaning memories of food but more the memories that are conjured up by eating food. What I’m really talking about is comfort food and the way food can comfort you by bringing back old and comfortable memories.

I’m going to start with ham sandwiches. To begin with I love bread and I love sandwiches. One of the recent highlights -if I can use that word in this context- of my brother’s recent funeral (maybe highlights is the wrong word after all) was the buffet. I really do love a good buffet. Sandwiches, obviously, pork pies, sausage rolls, salads; yes I love all that. Not long ago I was alone and missing my brother and feeling a little sorry for myself and so I made myself a cup of tea and a ham sandwich and as I was eating it a whole raft of memories seemed to sail by.

I used to come home for my school dinners and the usual sort of thing we would have for lunch were sandwiches. Sometimes cheese, sometimes corned beef but more often than not we’d have ham sandwiches. Nothing fancy, just plain old boiled ham on white bread. Later, when we had moved house and I no longer came home for dinner, my mother would make me up a lunchbox with sandwiches and sometimes her home made cakes.

Later still when I started work in city centre Manchester what did she push into my hands as I left for work? Yes, my trusty lunchbox filled with ham sandwiches.

When I was no longer living at home, I would occasionally spend my dinner breaks having a pub lunch or eating in our work’s canteen although usually I’d bring my own sandwiches. Even at my very last job, just prior to retiring, if you came across me in our rest area I’d be sat with a cup of tea and a sandwich, more often than not ham on white bread.

Probably the very first thing I could make for myself was tomato soup. Well, I didn’t actually make it. No, I opened the can, emptied it into a pan and warmed it up. To this day I love tomato soup. I sometimes even have it in restaurants. I just think soup is the perfect starter to a meal and I must confess, I’m more of a starter and main person than a main and dessert man.

Just thinking about tomato soup brings back memories of sitting in my mum’s kitchen slurping my soup and telling Bob, our dog, that no meat was involved and he was wasting his time tapping my leg with his paw as no tit bits would be forthcoming.

A slightly unrelated picture: Cheese in a French restaurant with a pichet of vin rouge

Mum had a very sunny kitchen and I can vaguely remember sitting there on the day I first started work, eating my porridge and drinking my tea and feeling slightly apprehensive. My dad set off for work on his bike and mum gave him his sandwiches and brew can before he left. Perhaps he wished me good luck as he left, perhaps he just gave a sort of nod to me and mum and then went on his way. Anyway, just as I was leaving, mum gave me my lunch of ham sandwiches and then I walked down to the bus stop and joined the other commuters on their way to work.

The dish that I first learned to actually make was boiled eggs. I like my eggs not too runny and not too hard preferably served with two slices of toast. I don’t have then very often these days but Liz does make really good boiled eggs. When I make them, they either come out hard or with the white not done enough although there was a time when I was much younger when I could do them perfectly. Two eggs and two rounds of lightly done toast make a lovely breakfast.

Boiled eggs and toast: Yummy

Another comfort food for me is a cheese and ham toastie. Cheese and ham are two of my favourite ingredients so why not add them together for a really comforting snack. Two slices of white bread, buttered on the outside. Add a slice of ham, some grated cheddar cheese and chopped onion and slap them either on a toastie maker or dry fry them in a pan. I tend to cook them on my George Foreman grill and they are so nice for a late evening snack with a glass of red wine of course.

Years ago, when I started work on the buses my friends told me that would be the end of my social life because of shifts and early starts and late finishes. As it happened nothing could have been further from the truth. Because we worked such odd hours it seemed to me that me and my colleagues were even more determined to socialise. After early shifts we were down at the busman’s club playing snooker, pool or cards. It was the same after a late shift. Our club was open till 12 so we would be able to get in for a last pint and a quick game of cards or pool. Personally, I have never been interested in cards but back in those afternoons after the end of an early shift I learned to play snooker. I was a pretty keen player for a while; I even had my own cue.

Sometimes we even went down to a local night club, Genevieve’s, where the bouncers used to let us in as long as we took off our bus badges.

After a split shift finishing round about 7 I used to either visit a pub not far from the depot or up to the club and something that they both served was a cheese and ham toastie. Eating one today reminds me of early evenings either in a Stockport pub called the Unity, now sadly closed, or our busman’s club. The only food the club served apart from crisps and nuts was a toastie. I’d usually have one while waiting for either the pool or the snooker table with a pint of Boddingtons listening to the banter of my fellow busmen.

Here’s one final food memory. As we’ve had a certain amount of hot weather lately, Liz and I have been having an increased number of barbecues. We are cooking the usual stuff of course; burgers, kebabs and steaks. We also have some vegetarian elements like padron peppers and mini sweetcorns. We also have been having home grown new potatoes. They are not actually cooked on the barbecue although we do tend to warm them up on the heat when they have cooled down. New potatoes are wonderful with just a knob of butter. At our last barby I ate them with coleslaw which brought back another bus related food memory.

In the last few years of GM Buses, when the government forced the splitting of the company into two separate parts, GM Buses North and GM Buses South, I was working in Metro Comms, our communications room. I was allocated to GM Buses North and I wasn’t very happy as our comms room was in the heart of GM south territory. Originally Atherton depot was earmarked for the North comms room and I bought a house in Newton-le-Willows, a short drive away. Then the company decided to switch comms to Oldham giving me an hour drive to work. Not only that, sometimes in the winter I would leave Newton in the rain and arrive at work in Oldham to find two foot of snow.

Still, we had a nice set up in Oldham, a nice comms room to ourselves which our bosses and supervisors rarely visited and a nice kitchen which we shared with a couple of computer guys and the HR staff. Naturally I usually had sandwiches for lunch but sometimes in the summer I’d walk up to the shopping centre and get myself a baked potato and coleslaw from a street food vendor who had a small stall with a portable oven. One day I made my way up there, ordered my spud and realised I had forgotten my wallet (a trick perfected by my colleagues in the Noble Order of Tightwads) and he said ‘never mind, give me the money tomorrow’ which was really nice of him.

There we go then, that’s my short list of comfort foods, all of which bring back good memories.

What are your comfort foods?

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What I Ate in a Week

Posted on by Steve Higgins

As usual I’ve been stressing about to what to write about in my next blog post. It’s a great feeling to have an idea, create a post, polish it, make some graphics and add pictures and a video and then to see it finally published but then I start thinking about next week. What can I write about next?

Last Saturday I dragged myself up and into the kitchen for a cup of tea. Returning to the bedroom with the tea, Liz was watching Saturday Kitchen and I began browsing through my emails. One of the guests on Saturday Kitchen was the Hollywood actor Stanley Tucci. Stanley has appeared in a number of films and you might remember him from The Devil Wears Prada. Anne Hathaway becomes the assistant to the head of a fashion magazine played by Meryl Streep. Stanley Tucci played the art director of the magazine who becomes a sort of fashion mentor to Anne.

It turns out that Tucci, currently living in London, is a bit of a food buff and amateur chef and he was in the studio to cook some food and talk about his latest book What I Ate in A Year. Wow I thought and as I looked up, a picture of a flashing light bulb appeared above my head with a sign saying ‘new blog post idea!’

I won’t be writing about a year of eating but a week sounds a little more blog post sized so here we go.

Monday

A typical breakfast for me tends to involve poached eggs either on toast or on a crumpet but I do rather like Liz’s full breakfast which she serves with a poached egg, grilled bacon, sausage, black pudding and fried tomatoes and mushrooms. That’s a pretty big meal so we don’t have that every day. We rarely eat lunch and even when I was working I used to just have a sandwich for lunch.

A must for us on a Monday night is a visit to the Ego restaurant in Lytham. They have a special Monday offer which includes two courses for a much cheaper than usual price and also £10 off a bottle of wine. We used to have the sharing board for starters but this week I plumped for the cheesy mushrooms and Liz had the scallops. For the main course I’ll sometimes go for a steak or if I’m not madly hungry I might go for something a little smaller. On our last visit I decided to go for the beef bourguignon and Liz went for a dish off the new menu, lamb kleftico, served in a rather odd way in the paper package in which it was cooked.

Tuesday

Tuesday is our usual stay at home and alcohol free night. We’ll be drinking a lot of tea especially while I’m working on a new blog post so we sometimes decide to go for a chippy tea. Our local chip shop does a cheapy Tuesday deal which consists of an extra large portion of chips, two medium sized battered fish and two side orders for which we usually get a tub of peas and a tub of curry. I’m not a great lover of fish but I do like my battered cod or hake. Another bonus is that our local chippy delivers so all I have to do is get the teapot warmed up while we wait for our food.

Wednesday

Once a month Liz and I go out with our local curry club for an Indian meal at a great Indian restaurant in St Annes called Imli. It’s a friendly place and they do a super offer which includes poppadoms and all the chutneys followed by a starter and a main served with either rice or a naan bread. I was once a bit cheeky and asked for chips with my chicken tikka bhuna curry but the portion was a little too large so I’ve reverted back to pilau rice.

Thursday

Thursday is our quiz night and we tend to eat out before going down to the pub for the quiz. This week we went down to Spagó in Lytham who have yet another special offer running on Thursdays. (Noticed a trend at all in this dining out saga?) The Spagó deal is two courses for £12.95 or three for £17.95. The only drawback here is that the wine is a little dear so I sometimes drive down and we’ll just have one glass of wine each and a large jug of water. The menu changes every week and the last time we visited I had the cauliflower soup with garlic and pesto and a main course of lamb stew with mash and carrots. The portions are a little small but perfect if you are not in the mood for a huge meal. The service is pretty good and so I have plenty of time to drop Liz off at the quiz and to park the car up somewhere for the night so I can walk down and pick it up in the morning and enjoy a few beers at the quiz.

Friday

We don’t often go out on a Friday. If I’m back in Manchester I’ll usually make some food for my brother and he’ll come round and we’ll eat and have a catch up. My favourite meal to make is probably chilli or spaghetti Bolognese. I make both those dishes pretty much using the recipes I’ve used for years, even so, sometimes the finished dish will be wonderful, other times not as good. What do I do wrong? Actually I’ve no idea. A few weeks ago I made a curry using minced chicken. As I was making it I realised I had no garlic but even so, the end dish was pretty good.

Sometimes Liz and I will stay at home on a Friday but not so long ago we met up with some friends and went to Olivers, a small place in St Annes that serves pizza and pasta. My favourite dish there is a sharing board which consists of the chef’s home made bread, olive oil, mayonnaise, parma ham, salami, cheese, olives and we always substitute the potatas bravas with a tomato and onion salad.

Saturday

Last Saturday we went to the Number Fifteen pub to watch April Moon, one of our favourite local bands. I say local although Jason and April are actually from Canada. Anyway, prior to seeing them perform we decided to eat at a new place called the Dip, Drizzle and Drink. It styles itself as a Spanish tapas bar. We’d been once before when it first opened and I wasn’t too impressed but we thought we’d give it another go now they have been running for a while. We had another sharing board which was pretty similar to the one at Olivers and followed it with a couple of tapas, meatballs for me and sizzling prawns for Liz. The prawns were a little fiery for our taste but I loved that sharing board. I don’t usually care for green olives but the ones served here were really tasty.

Sunday

I always look forward to my Sunday dinner but this week we were out again. Down at the Catholic church they had a charity night which involved betting on various filmed horse races for a few pence at a time. Sadly I only won one race although I did win two bottles of wine in the raffle. Food was served later which was a hotpot supper. It was rather yummy as usual although bread buns were substituted for the usual pastry topping. Pity as I rather like that pastry. Anyway, there was quite a bit leftover so I helped myself to seconds.

Anyway, all that food talk has made me hungry. Sandwich anyone?

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My Life in 5 Meals

Posted on by Steve Higgins

That may sound like an odd title for a blog post but I actually pinched it from the BBC website before adding a small but subtle change. I was scanning through the news and right at the bottom of the page I saw something about My Life in 5 Dishes. It was actually a BBC podcast series in which several celebs are interviewed and asked to name 5 meals that somehow relate to their lives. One episode which I partially listened to was Nigella Lawson talking about elements of her life including her mother who had various eating disorders and died when Nigella was young. A dish she used to make was a sort of chicken stew and Nigella used to make the same dish for her family which in turn brought back memories of her mother.

(Click here to listen to the BBC podcast)

Anyway, that’s enough about Nigella, time to crack on with my five dishes.

Boiled Eggs

Yes I know boiled eggs is a rather simple dish but actually it’s the first meal, apart from cereal and tomato soup, that I ever actually made myself rather than just putting cornflakes in a dish and adding milk or opening a can of soup and heating it up.

I’ve always liked boiled eggs, not only because it’s the first thing I ever made for myself but also because I just like eggs. I prefer my boiled eggs soft but not runny although like a lot of the things I make myself, they don’t always turn out the way I want them to. Still, I like eggs soft or hard so even if I overdo them, I’ll still enjoy my eggs. Two minutes and fifty seconds is my optimum boiling time but I tend to be slow in putting the toast in and so usually at the two minutes fifty deadline I’m still buttering my toast and so my eggs will be overdone. (Note to self: start the toast off sooner!)

Liz makes great boiled eggs. She usually takes the eggs out of the fridge in advance and brings them up to room temperature by popping them in a pan of warm water for a while which also stops them cracking in the pan.

Egg on toast with beans and a sausage

One of the reasons I like this dish is that when I was a bus driver, I always used to have this meal in our canteen. The canteen used to have a breakfast special which was egg, bacon, sausage and either beans or tomatoes and a slice of toast, all for a very cheap one British pound. This was of course back in the late 70s and early 80s. I used to find though that the breakfast special didn’t quite fill me up so that’s when I developed the egg on toast with beans dish. There was a time when I didn’t like my egg to touch my beans and the canteen staff used to make me a barrier with the sausage between the beans and the egg which they all seemed to think was quite funny. After a few trials with just beans on toast I decided to go adventurous and have the beans on top of the egg and then I found I really liked it that way, especially when I threw in a sausage on the side.

Here’s a sort of odd footnote though. Yesterday I had egg, bacon, sausage and beans for breakfast and guess what, I used the sausage as barrier to stop the beans spreading all over the plate to my egg!

Sunday Lunch

I’ve always loved the great British Sunday roast. My mother used to make a really lovely roast beef dinner. The beef always had that wonderful melt in your mouth texture. I once asked her how she made it and she told me she roasted the beef in a casserole dish with a little stock or water at a high heat for 20 minutes and then lowered the heat down and cooked the meat very slowly. These days my favourite for Sunday dinner is a gammon joint. Liz cooks it slowly in a pan of water and dried peas and the result is lovely. Throw in some roast spuds, some peas, some carrot and turnip or swede, some Yorkshire pudding and gravy and you can’t go wrong. Just thinking about it brings back the memories of childhood, huddling up in front of the fire watching television and of course if mum called out that dinner was ready my dad took great delight in switching off the TV while we ate.

Later my brother and I would be back on the rug in front of the fire drinking tea and watching some old black and white film while Bob, our family dog, tried his best to push past us and get as close as possible to the fire.

Chicken Curry

In my late teens, when my friends and I used to go out, we’d sometimes end up at a Chinese restaurant in a village called Gatley. A long time ago Gatley used to be a traditional country village but these days it has been caught up in an urban sprawl and is not quite the same as it used to be. I always used to plump for chicken Maryland which was probably the only non Chinese dish on the menu and was just chicken in breadcrumbs. After tasting some of the dishes my friends were ordering I one day took the plunge and ordered a Chinese chicken curry with fried rice and today it’s one of the only two dishes I tend to order in Chinese restaurants, either that or chicken with green peppers and black bean sauce.

Not so long ago I went back to Gatley and had a walk round and even made a little video. One of the former pubs there is now a Tesco supermarket. A café I used to go in was still a café but seemed to be permanently closed. The Prince of Wales, the pub where I had my very first pint of beer is still there. Another pub, The Horse and Farrier is just a few minutes walk further on. Once, when I was in the 5th form at school, my friends and I nipped inside for a lunchtime pint. We left our jackets and briefcases outside and had just ordered a few pints when who should walk in but our physics teacher, the highly unpopular Mr Farragher. Luckily there was a back door that led to the beer garden so we legged it out the back way, picked up our jackets and bags and quickly left.

After that we used to refer to the pub as the Horse and Farragher!

Back in the 80s after a night out in Manchester, we would sometimes pop into a place called the Plaza Café in the city centre. They served curry but they only had three types, mild, hot and suicide. I can still hear one of my friends calling out for ‘three suicides please!’

Chilli Con Carne

I wasn’t sure what to choose for my last dish. I’m not a great pizza fan although I do like making a pizza but the quality of my home-made pizza dough is not consistent. Sometimes it’s good and other times it’s just average. I like to serve my pizza with a fresh side salad or coleslaw. I like a lot of Italian dishes these days, particularly spaghetti aglio e olio which is spaghetti with garlic and chilli. Another dish I’ve always enjoyed making is chilli con carne. I like to start it off in a big pan or my old wok and then transfer everything into my slow cooker and serve it later with chips and rice.

Well after all that I’m not sure what to have for tea. Chilli? Well, I should have started that a while ago. Egg on toast with beans? Nah, I had eggs for breakfast. I think I might go for that old favourite, one thing I’ve not mentioned yet. A cheese sandwich!

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TV, Julia and Chopping Onions

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Not so long ago I published a post called A Kind of Foodie Sort of Blog Post. It was about cookery and food and brought me in quite a few new readers as well as some new subscribers. A lot of those subscribers were food bloggers and to a certain extent they must be feeling a little short changed with their new subscription as I haven’t written much on the food and drink subject since. Anyway, at least they have had some different content for a change, stuff about 60s and 70s TV shows, classic films and secondhand books and so on. A change is a good as a rest as they say. Anyway, perhaps it’s time to redress the balance and thank those new readers for their support with another foodie sort of blog.

I’ve not been at my best this week. I tested positive for Covid 19 and at one point I felt so bad I thought I might have picked up Covid 20 and 21 as well. I’m feeling much better now and another positive lately has been in the bread making department. A few weeks ago, I made a loaf of bread without the assistance of my bread maker. I’d read somewhere that it’s best to make a wholemeal loaf using a combination of white and wholemeal flour. I found a recipe in one of my numerous cookery books which called for 500g of flour so I thought I’d use 250g of each. As it happened, I only had a little wholemeal flour so I made up the shortfall with white. I added my yeast and salt and olive oil, mixed it up and gave the result a good kneading and left it to prove for thirty minutes.

It rose quite well so I gave it a second kneading and then found I didn’t have a tin in which to bake it. After a rather frantic search I came across one of my mother’s old cake tins and used that. My bread later came out of the oven looking wonderful and tasted just as good. I do love warm bread with a good lashing of butter. Now you might be thinking well done, he’s managed to make himself a loaf of bread, bravo! Yes, I was feeling pretty pleased with myself but could I reproduce that feat, could I make another?

Only yesterday I made another loaf using a 50-50 white and wholewheat flour mix. It wasn’t quite as good as the first one so I reckon in future I might use a 40-60 mix, even so, I’m already looking forward to the next loaf. Also, the thing is, once you have some great bread you need something equally as good to have with it, great cheese or pâté or great soup even. Perhaps it’s time to take a look in my cookbooks or see what my favourite TV chefs have to offer on the small screen.

Talking about TV chefs I want to talk about a TV show, a current TV show. Yes, not from the 1960’s or 70’s like I usually write about but an actual current mainstream TV show. It’s Julia, the story of American TV chef Julia Child.

These days a lot of new TV shows always seem to be on some TV channel that I don’t have access to, Disney+ or Netflix for instance but happily, Julia is currently showing on Sky Showcase which, thanks to Liz’s Sky subscription I can actually get to see.

Those of us in the UK are probably not that familiar with Julia Child. In the 1950’s she lived in Paris with her diplomat husband where she embarked on a training course to be a French chef. She learned all the tricks and techniques of French cookery and she was so keen about it, she decided to write a cookery book called Mastering The Art of French Cooking which she hoped would bring the excellence of French cuisine into the American home.

The TV series picks up Julia later living back in the USA when she gets invited onto a local TV show to talk about her book and rather than just talk about cookery she took into the interview room a hot plate, a pan and some eggs and proceeded to cook the interviewer an omelette.

Julia is played by Sarah Lancashire, a British TV veteran. She started her career in TV soap Coronation St where she played the dizzy Raquel. She played the character for five years but then left to do other things as she apparently tired of the relentless fame of being a TV soap star. Since then, she has starred in many other TV productions and series. In 2000 she signed a ‘golden handcuffs’ deal binding her exclusively to the TV channel ITV. The deal was worth 1.3 million pounds and made Sarah the highest paid UK actress at the time.

It’s hard to say why I like Julia so much. Lancashire is excellent as Julia as is David Hyde Pierce who you might remember from the US sitcom Frasier where he played Frasier’s brother Niles. It appears to be a faithful reconstruction of 1950s America. It’s gently humorous and it’s interesting to see the dynamics of TV production in the 1950s, what the TV executives of the time thought would and would not work and also how the idea of a TV chef came about. There are no car chases and explosions but instead there is plenty of food.

I’m not a great cook myself but I do like watching food programmes, especially those that highlight the skills of a particular chef and how we, the great food eating, TV watching public can try to emulate them.

Now this isn’t the first time Julia has been portrayed on the screen. In 2009 Nora Ephron wrote and directed the film Julie and Julia. It was based on two books, My Life in France, an autobiography by Julia Child and a memoir by Julie Powell based on her blog, in which she decided to cook all 524 recipes in Julia’s cookbook, in a 365-day period. Meryl Streep played Julia Child in the film and I’d be hard pushed to name another film based on a blog, if indeed there are any. Meryl’s version of Julia Child was quite unsurprisingly very similar to Sarah’s and I’d be hard pushed to say which I prefer.

In the film Amy Adams plays Julie Powell, the blogger who decides to cook all of Julia Child’s recipes, all 524 of them for her blog. She experiences a number of disasters and frustrations but she finally pulls off her task and to her surprise, her blog ends up with a huge amount of followers and becomes a great success. The film also looks at the other Julia’s life in France and the trials and tribulations of learning to be a French chef. I mentioned earlier about the skills of a chef and I do love those moments in TV cookery when the celebrity chef will dazzle the viewer with their incredible chopping skills on an onion or something. For me it’s just chop, chop, chop, gradually getting through the onion. For the experts is one quick superfast ch-ch-ch-chop with an entire onion reduced to slices in seconds and in the film, Meryl Streep as Julia goes on a great chopping spree to hone her chopping skills.

I can completely identify with the disasters and frustrations experienced by blogger Julie as can most amateur cooks. Sometimes I have made a fabulous meal, other times I’ve produced that same meal using the same recipe and it’s been a little tame to say the least. What made the difference between the outstanding chilli from last week and the insipid offering from today? What did I do wrong? Was it the meat or the seasoning? Did I miss an ingredient? Usually, I never manage to work out why my food went wrong which is really annoying.

So, shall I look in my recipe books for a soup recipe to go with my fabulous fresh bread or just make a sandwich? Maybe it’s time to settle down with Julia Child’s book? I was saving it for a holiday read but what the heck, I think it’s time for a cheese sandwich, a cup of tea and a good read.

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The Idea, The Inspiration and The Kebab

Posted on by Steve Higgins

A few weeks back I was asked to test some new editing software for a company whose software I used to use regularly. They were trying something new, in fact a feature that I had advocated a few times on one of their forums. It was a surprise to be asked to test the new feature but also rather nice. It’s always nice to be acknowledged so anyway as soon as the feature was enabled I set out to make a test video.

I thought about doing a new version of my usual content. You know the sort of thing, the videos that you usually find down at the end of my blogs extolling the virtues of Floating in Space and A Warrior of Words. Instead, I thought of doing a quick few minutes on the subject of poetry writing. It was called Ideas, Inspiration and Effort.

Nothing can start without an idea. Amateur writers like me just tend to wait for an idea to come but to be really professional you have to make the ideas come. You have to sit down and start writing. It’s only then that the ideas come. The same is true for blogs. I do get ideas. I get them driving to work. I get them while watching television. Sometimes I get no ideas at all but then I can always write about the books that I read, the old TV shows that I like and the classic black and white films that I watch on TV. Either way, blogs or poems, everything starts with the idea.

Next comes the inspiration. Again, when I’m in amateur writer mode I usually just wait for the inspiration to come. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn’t. The thing that makes it come is just to start writing. Sitting down at the keyboard with the TV on and the sound off, that’s usually when inspiration strikes. Last week if you may remember I was doing battle with my electric company because they wouldn’t give me my money back, the money that I had paid, in error, into the wrong account. I wasn’t happy about it at the time but on reflection I could see the funny side and that is hopefully what made that particular blog post rather amusing. The good thing as well is that it’s that kind of self-deprecating humour which Floating in Space is all about so if you liked that post, you should like Floating. (An in-post plug for Floating! Hey, I’m pretty pleased with that.)

The same is true for poetry, once I have an idea I start playing with words until inspiration finally comes. Then of course I need to make the effort. The effort to get down to work, typing away until the first draft is ready. Then more effort comes, the effort to edit and to develop the blog or poem until I think it’s finished. That of course is where I usually fail. I don’t have my editor on my back, I don’t have a publishing company that has paid me a million-dollar advance and is waiting for the book I promised them. The only promise I have made is to myself, a promise to one day complete another book which actually may be a long time coming. The thing is there are so many other things to do, restaurants to visit, books to read, TV shows to watch and so on.

Anyway, it’s time for another blog post and as usual lately I’m struggling. What I need is an idea. So using my own method above I thought about an idea and I came up with disappointment. Yes, what has disappointed me lately? Let me see, well there was the pizza I made the other day.

When I spend a little time on my own I tend to eat a lot of snack food. I do love sandwiches as you might have guessed if you had read this old post about sandwiches but sometimes I like to do something a little more exciting. I do like cooking with my slow cooker and I’ve made numerous bologneses, chillis and curries in this way but the other day I thought I’d try and make a pizza, a proper pizza made from scratch. I had some flour and yeast and I had Jamie’s Italian, Jamie Oliver’s Italian cook book to guide me so what could go wrong? I mixed all the ingredients and made some basic dough then I gave it a good kneading and eventually I got a good spongy dough. I left it to prove and a bit later made it into a few portions. I left one to rise once again and made a simple tomato sauce using tinned tomatoes. Later I slapped on the sauce then some cheese, some pepperoni and some onions and I was all ready to bake. Jamie recommended putting the oven on its hottest setting, gas mark 9 so I slapped the pizza in and about ten minutes later it was looking good.

The crusts were ok but the rest was a bit soggy. Even so, it was pretty reasonable. The next day I tried again and looking at some other recipes I thought it was better to cook the base first and then add the toppings and cook again. I did that, added the toppings but this time I left it in too long and the pizza emerged a little frazzled. Maybe I should just stick with chilli in future.

Here’s something else that was disappointing. Sitting down to eat I was happy to find that The Time Tunnel, the sixties Sci-fi TV show was about to start on the Horror channel. It’s about two American scientists ‘lost in the swirling maze of past and future ages, during the first experiments on America’s greatest and most secret project, the Time Tunnel. Tony Newman and Doug Phillips now tumble helplessly toward a new fantastic adventure, somewhere along the infinite corridors of time’ as the opening blurb used to go.

The Time Tunnel starts off with a Congressman coming to investigate the growing budget of the time tunnel complex and threatens to close things down unless he sees results. Scientist Tony Newman decides he must therefore travel back in time to prove that the tunnel really works and save the project. Tony ends up on the ill-fated liner Titanic. His colleague Doug follows him back to 1912 and the control room struggle to shift the two in time before the ship sinks. Unable to return the duo to the present, the technicians struggle every week to shift the duo to somewhere new just in the nick of time. One episode that I particularly remember was when the pair land in Pearl Harbour, just before the Japanese attack in 1941. Tony meets himself as a young boy and finally solves the mystery of the disappearance of his father in the attack.

The Time Tunnel was a sci fi series from the 1960’s and as a child I was crazy about it. I thought it was wonderful but it only lasted one season before producer Irwin Allen moved on to something new. I had missed the first few episodes of this latest re-run but as I settled down I realised that my favourite episode, the one about Pearl Harbour, was about to start.

Tony lived there as a child and his father was reported as missing in action so the first thing Tony and Doug decide to do is to go and visit him. Cue some rather daft dialogue and some clumsy situations which led on to more clumsy dialogue and daft situations. What a disappointment that episode was and yet for years and years I’ve looked forward to finally seeing it again. There are some things which just don’t stand the test of time.

Another thing that I found rather disappointing this week was a large donner kebab. My last few shifts at work this week went pretty well and as I drove home after the last one I thought it was time to treat myself. I ordered a large donner with salad and chilli sauce, took it home and settled down with a small beer.

The salad was as limp as the Time Tunnel dialogue, the chilli sauce didn’t have much get up and go and the donner meat had seen better days. All in all, I could have done with a trip through the time tunnel to Manchester city centre in 1986 and gone to my very favourite kebab emporium where they served donner on naan bread with fresh salad and a tasty hot chilli sauce. Yes, I had the idea, I had the inspiration, I just wish I hadn’t made the effort and got that kebab!

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Enjoying The Fruits of Our Labours

Posted on by Steve Higgins

A while back I wrote a post about Liz’s garden and all the things that were growing there. Now we’re in September it might be a good time to look again and see how things are.

The tomatoes have done well. There are not too many to show you because we both love tomatoes and between us we’ve scoffed a great deal. We’ve had some fried with bacon, sausage and eggs and some in my favourite salad; tomato and onion with plenty of olive oil.

We didn’t get many peas or broad beans but I’m guessing if we did Liz and daughter Zoë would have soon eaten those too. They like to eat them raw, nibbling on them as they pass by.

The cauliflower are not looking great as they have been the victim of some serious nibbling by the garden’s indigenous insect population. The insects can’t have been that keen on the celeriac as even though they were planted right next door to the cauliflower they are looking well.

We had a good crop of strawberries this year but they too have been harvested and eaten. We like them served with raspberries and some Greek yoghurt.

The padron peppers are looking good. I’ve seen padron peppers on the tapas menu in Lanzarote in the past but I’ve never tried them. This year we’ve had plenty of peppers on the barbecue and I have to say, I’ve got to really like them.

I grew some chilli pepper plants from seeds. Most have not done too well except for one which has resided on the kitchen window sill throughout the summer. That plant has a few chillies just waiting to be added to either a good chilli con carne or any one of a number of spicy dishes served in our household like Liz’s hot goats’ cheese with spinach and chilli. Another chilli plant, one that came direct from the garden centre sale is doing really well, that’s it in the picture above.

There is some garlic too, over on the far side of the garden which comes in pretty handy for curries and all sorts of spicy dishes. We sometimes add some to our tomato and onion salads too.

I’ve got two olive trees and both seem to have fruit on them, whether they will become fully rounded olives is another story. Some nice black olives would come in pretty handy as they are really nice when added to the tomato and onion salad I mentioned earlier.

It’s been nice to see that the apple pips I planted earlier this year have sprouted into two small plants about six inches high. Might be a few years before I see any apples though. that’s one of the apple plants in the collage below, bottom right.

Some years ago, I grew some lemon plants from pips. I really do love growing things from pips. It’s like having a close up of nature renewing itself. My lemon trees are probably about three years old now and according to the internet, they have to be three to five years old to produce fruit. That’s if they will produce fruit. The thing is if they did produce fruit, if they did actually produce a lemon for me that would be so wonderful, I’d be over the moon.

I’d probably cut a big slice of my lemon -my future lemon- and drop it into a gin and tonic with a whole lot of ice or maybe even a Bacardi and Pepsi Max. Then I’d savour it and quietly thank my tree for giving me a lemon. Once, Liz and I rented a villa in Spain and in the gardens were a whole bunch of lemon trees so we could pick one whenever we wanted.

I do have another lemon tree, a shop bought lemon tree. It’s only small but is obviously grafted and came with a few lemons already growing on it. After a few days my two small lemons dropped off and that was that. I’ve had it for about a year but I’ve watered it regularly, letting it dry out just like they say in those how to do it YouTube videos and blogs that I’ve been researching. I’ve fed it too with the correct fertilizers and nutrients. The other day I noticed something on one of the branches, something that at first glance seemed like a small bit of fluff or something that had been blown in on the breeze but it wasn’t. It was a flower and the beginning of a small lemon!

September has never been one of my favourite months. The days are getting shorter and cooler but last week here in the north west UK we had something of a mini heatwave so rather than go out to a restaurant or eat inside, it was time to crank up our very handy mini gas barbeque. As usual we started off with a tomato and onion salad. Slice your home grown tomatoes and place them in a dish, sprinkle with finely chopped red onions, pour over a glug of good olive oil and season well and if you fancy, throw in a few black olives and even some garlic; lovely.

Another addition is a tomato, chive and rice salad and some homemade slaw. We usually add a bag of salad leaves and we’ll nibble on all that while Liz slaps on our first course, small kebabs made from beef lorne sausages seasoned with cumin and some salt and pepper.

Next up on the little barbeque are some padron peppers, home grown of course, just simply seasoned and rubbed with olive oil.

A couple of homemade burgers go on the grill and I like them served up in a toasted bun with some of my tomatoes and onions and a nice portion of either mustard or tomato sauce. Final course, a small steak served medium for me and medium rare for Liz. Glass of wine? Don’t mind if I do!

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A Week in the Life of a Locked Down Blogger

Posted on by Steve Higgins

A major disaster happened to me this week. Not an actual disaster like a car crash or anything but for a writer and blogger it was the blogging equivalent.

I spent a few days at my mother’s house as usual, checking the mail, tidying the garden, giving the heating a good blast in this cold weather and so on. It’s also good, especially being a writer, to have some time alone to work on my various projects like my blog, my books and my videos. Last week I did just that. I added a few more pages to the two novels I’ve been writing and tinkered with some of my videos as well as creating some new ones.

I added a couple of my new videos to two Facebook pages, one for amateur video makers and another for YouTubers. They both did quite well there and brought in some new viewers. All my videos have a link back to this blog and all these blog posts have a link to my books, Floating in Space and A Warrior of Words so with a little luck these new video viewers might even add to my sales which in turn will add to the Higgins coffers.

The crazy thing about the pandemic and the resulting lockdown is that just lately I’ve been spending less money so I’ve actually got a little more in the bank than usual. My usual spending on restaurants, pubs and taxis has stopped completely and I do wonder how all those establishments are faring without me.

This Valentine’s Day, instead of dining out we dined in. We ordered in a full restaurant meal, including wine and settled down in front of the fire to await delivery. I’d ordered the meal a few days before from the Birley Arms, a pub I haven’t visited for many years but it does have a restaurant with a reputation for great food. The day after I ordered the food my phone rang and someone came on the line asking about my order. They didn’t say they were from the Birley Arms, in fact I didn’t actually catch their name but they started talking about my food order so I guessed it was they. All was in hand but apparently I hadn’t specified when the food was for. Now as I’d ordered the Valentine’s Day special I thought it was pretty obvious we would be wanting it for Valentine’s Day. That thought hadn’t occurred to my caller until I mentioned it but he quickly recovered, said something about just making sure and he was off.

What else has happened to me this week? Well, for a long while I’ve been after an eye test; it must be over two years since I last had one. Every time I called the opticians they gave me a date weeks into the future and as I wasn’t sure which shift I was on I always declined and said, I’ll get back to you. I tried again recently as now I have a brand new app on my phone which shows the days I am working. Great! I’ve had the app for a few months and it works fine. I tried it the other day, one hand on the app and the other poised to call the opticians and of course, it wasn’t working. Nothing I could do would get it to work again, not uninstalling, reinstalling, pressing force stop, updating my mobile phone software; nothing.

Anyway, diary at hand – manual diary that is, you know, the old-fashioned type made of cardboard and paper – I went online to the optician’s eye test booking app and lo and behold, there was a free appointment the next day. Presumably a cancellation but what the heck, I grabbed it anyway.

The opticians had changed considerably since my last visit but of course everything now has been affected by Coronavirus. Masks were mandatory as was hand sanitising. I was gradually moved to various socially distanced seating areas, finally ending up with the optician. My eye test was a traditional one using those special glasses where the optician drops in various differing lenses to adjust your vision. So much better than my last eye test at Specsavers. No offence Specsavers but I really do not like having my head in an electronic headset where the lenses are changed at the touch of a button.

Later I decided to order my new glasses from Goggles4U, an online site that I found and have since bombarded me with various offers. The new specs were cheap and were made even cheaper by various discounts. I had some problems getting my order through and then heard from somewhere that my new eyewear would be coming from Pakistan! Was this a con I thought?

Well as it happens my new specs arrived and they are just great. It always feels so good to have a new set of lenses. Everything looks so good and so sharp. People with 20/20 vision probably take perfect sight for granted but as a spectacle wearer since I have been a child, I assure you, I do not.

Okay, let’s get back to Valentine’s Day and there we were, waiting with bated breath and dangling tongues for our food. The appointed time came and went. Knives and forks had been deployed and the plates were warming and just at the point when I was searching for the pub phone number to complain, our Valentine’s feast arrived. There seemed to be quite a lot of it but then again, the meal consisted of appetisers, starters, mains and puddings. We slapped it into the oven to keep warm before nibbling on the appetisers and then it was on to the starters. One big mistake was when we put everything in the oven, we had forgotten that one starter was pâté. Warm pâté was new, not something I’d tried before but I liked it.

Round about then I realised the delivery guy had not left any wine. A quick call and happily the driver was nearby with an order for someone else so the wine came shortly after. Luckily, another bottle of red was already warming by the fire but with so much food, that second bottle came in pretty handy.

Just to make your mouth water, we had various appetisers including crab on toast and belly pork fritters. Starters were smoked salmon, prawns and scallops for Liz and duck spring roll and chicken liver pate for me. Mains were Beef Rossini for me and Rack of Lamb for Liz and a bevy of desserts, all for me as Liz isn’t a lover of sweet things.

We enjoyed the meal although I have to admit, being served at a nice table in a restaurant doesn’t really compare to a take away, even a restaurant standard one.

So what was the big disaster you might be thinking? Before I get to the main one here’s another. Back in January I bought a bundle of six CDs. They were advertised for £25 and I offered £18, the seller declined but they failed to sell and the buyer came back to me and finally accepted my offer. I waited and waited but they never turned up. I contacted the seller and she asked me to wait a little longer in case Covid had affected the Royal Mail. The CDs still didn’t arrive so ‘sorry’ I said, ‘I want my £18 back’. The seller duly refunded me and the very next day, what should turn up but the CDs!

I’m not sure PayPal understood when I asked how could I refund a refund?

Finally, back to the disaster I spoke of earlier. At my mother’s house I had done some writing and fiddled with my videos. After staying for a couple of nights I tidied up, took out the rubbish and gave the place a hoover. Outside in my car I began to wonder if I had forgotten anything but it was cold and whisps of snow were in the air so I drove off. Later I realised I had left behind my iPad and laptop! Nightmare!

Luckily, I updated my iPad a few years back and still had my old one so this blog post is my first written completely on an iPad. A number of my apps were missing so apologies for the lack of graphics.

Hopefully I’ll have my trusty laptop back for next week’s blog instalment, as long as I don’t suffer protracted symptoms from laptop separation syndrome of course!

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Sandwiches: More Ramblings of a Locked Down Blogger (Part 3)

Posted on by Steve Higgins

While the lockdown is still ongoing there is not much going on my little life except for work, television and eating. I’ve written a lot about TV in the past, in fact as a couch potato of the highest order, TV viewing is one of the few activities in which I can claim to be an expert. Still, when it comes to food I’m an expert too, an expert in knowing just exactly what I like. Just in case you the reader ever decides to ask me over for dinner I thought it might be an idea to blog about my favourite foods.

Sandwiches.

What I thought I’d do is just stick with sandwiches for now. Now you might be thinking sandwiches, wow, that’s not really grabbing me, what else is available on WordPress? Where’s my google tab when I need it?

Let me see if I can just stop you from navigating away, just for a minute.

Personally, I love sandwiches. I have sandwiches every day at work and even on my days off, I tend to look longingly towards the bread bin round about early afternoon, especially if I’ve had an early breakfast.

A while back I was eating in the work’s mess room and one of my colleagues, a lady, in fact a lady of somewhat larger proportions sat nearby, and we began talking about healthy food. A lot of what she was saying was some sort of a rant about people who eat unhealthily and regrettably not a lot of what she was saying has quite caught in any lasting way onto my memory banks, but I was able to remark, in response, that my lunch, ham salad on a brown bun, was pretty healthy.

Healthy? She replied in a very shocked and surprised manner. Bread?

What’s wrong with bread I asked? It’s one of the oldest foods known to man.

As a general rule I should add that it is better never to argue with a woman who has found an almost religious fervour for the techniques of dieting and weight loss. Bread as far as I am concerned is one of the oldest and healthiest forms of food. Over on Wikipedia it is described thus:

Bread is a staple food prepared from a dough of flour and water, usually by baking. Throughout recorded history it has been a prominent food in large parts of the world. It is one of the oldest man-made foods, having been of significant importance since the dawn of agriculture, and plays an essential role in both religious rituals and secular culture. 

The name sandwich comes from John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich who one night asked his valet to bring him some meat between two slices of bread so that he could continue his card game, apparently cribbage, and eat without using a fork or getting his hands greasy. Sandwiches though, at least a form of sandwich, arrived in the world at a much earlier date and bread in various forms has been used to scoop up or wrap food in many cultures all over the world. I have always liked the humble sandwich because the sandwich enables one to eat on the go and as a hungry bus or van driver I’ve always taken advantage of that fact. Even today working in a purpose built hi tech control centre, my colleagues complain when the microwave is out of order or the oven has failed. Ha, I think, you should have brought a sandwich!

Anyway, here are a few of my favourites.

Bacon Sarnie

We in the northwest of England sometimes call a sandwich a sarnie or a butty and one universally loved in the north is a bacon butty or bacon barm. A barm, actually a barmcake, is a round white bread bun or bap. Cut one across the middle, butter it and slap on some grilled bacon and there you have the perfect way to start the day. As a further refinement, slap on some brown sauce or even an egg.

Sausage Sarnie

Similar to the bacon sarnie. Slap a few sausages on the griddle or pan. Cook until ready. Slice down the middle and arrange on your bread. Perfect with brown sauce.

Bacon Grill Sarnie

Bacon grill comes in a tin and is similar to spam in appearance and texture although in taste it is similar to sausage meat or bacon. Like a Big Mac it’s supremely unhealthy but one sandwich every now and again won’t hurt. Open the tin, slice the bacon grill and slap it on either a frying pan or under the grill for a few minutes. Transfer straight away to some buttered white bread and enjoy.

Ham salad

Probably what I’ll be eating tonight at work, I prefer this on a brown bun, split it in half, slap on the butter or margarine then chop some iceberg lettuce, some red onions, some sliced tomatoes, salt and pepper and then plenty of thinly sliced ham.

Cheese and onion

Not much to this one, get a brown bun, cut in half, slap on the butter or margarine and then you’re ready for some cheddar cheese either sliced or grated. Throw in some red onions to taste. This is nice on some plain white bread too.

Cheese and ham Toastie.

You really need a toastie maker for this but if you haven’t got one you can either grill your toastie or dry fry in frying pan. Butter the bread on the outside so it won’t stick in the toastie maker. Throw on your ham, grate some cheese and add a little onion. Slap it into the toastie maker until the cheese starts to melt. Great after a busy late shift at work. Serve with chilled lager.

The Steve Higgins Special

There’s a great moment in the Woody Allen film Broadway Danny Rose. The films starts and ends with a group of comedians, actually real-life US comedians discussing the world of comedy in New York. The conversation turns to Broadway Danny Rose, an agent who has a stable of not so great artists. Later, at the end of the film they mention that Danny Rose has received the ultimate New York honour, a sandwich named after him in the deli where they congregate. Here then is my own contender for that special honour. If I ever get to New York I might just mention it to any deli owner willing to listen.

I prefer this with a fresh white bap but it’s equally as good with a brown bun: split and butter it. Slap on some thinly sliced honey roast ham, then some grated cheddar and to finish off add a generous portion of coleslaw. Settle down, tune the TV onto your favourite channel, pour yourself a cup of tea and enjoy!

Fires.

I very nearly added a line in that last paragraph above about turning up the heating, after all, summer is long gone and now the temperature has dropped considerably. Liz still has a traditional fireplace and it is nice to sit in front of a roaring coal fire (with a steaming hot cuppa and my ham, cheese and coleslaw special) while we still have the chance. The government has banned the sale of coal from next year, so we have been buying extra supplies.

Our first few coal fires this year were a little smoky, so we felt that maybe the chimney could do with a clean. Many years ago, when I lived at home we had a coal fire. My Mum used to get up early and sort out the fire which would have been left murmuring away from the previous night. In those days the fire also heated the water in the house so no fire, no hot water.

I can fondly remember evenings sat in front of a fire watching television. Our old family dog, Bob, so named because all my Dad’s dogs were called Bob, would make his way forcefully to a spot right in front of the fire. After forcefully pushing either me or my brother out of the way he used to get as close as he possibly could to the fire and gaze thoughtfully into the flames until his nose dried up and Mum would shout at him until he reluctantly moved. A dog with a dry nose? No, not on Mum’s watch!

The visit from the chimney sweep was a big event for us kids back then. The lounge would be covered with white sheets and the sweep would bring his collection of brushes and connecting rods. Firstly, the brush would be shoved up the chimney then the next rod would be screwed on and the brush shoved up further. Then the next rod or pole would be connected until the chimney sweep would ask me and my brother to nip outside and look out for the brush popping out of the chimney.

It was always pretty exciting to see the brush pop up out of the chimney. We’d rush back in and advise him of the situation. Then he would bring down the brush, disconnect the rods and pack things away. Mum would spend forever then cleaning up despite the sheets that covered all the furniture. The dark fingers of soot would appear on the window frames and mantelpiece but the fire that evening would be brighter than ever.

I’m not sure if there still are chimney sweeps in the 21st century but it so happens that Liz has a set of chimney rods and brush, so we set about cleaning the chimney ourselves. The fireplace was sealed with a sheet of plastic and the brush poked through a small hole keeping the lounge free of soot. Ramming that brush up wasn’t so easy but finally I made some headway and started on the next connector and then the next and so on. Luckily for me Liz lives in a bungalow so there wasn’t too far to go but after a while I ended up stripping off my top as I was pouring with sweat. Afterwards, covered with soot and sweat it was time for a shower.

They must have been a tough old lot those chimney sweeps!

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5 TV Chefs Who Will Change the Way You Cook!

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I do like my food. Like everyone I have my likes and dislikes, for instance, I’m not a great lover of fish although I’ve been known to eat cod, hake, calamari and even mussels. Good food though is more than just ingredients or produce and a good chef is in his own way as much of an artist as a great painter or a poet. I do love watching great TV cookery shows and although I am not a great cook, I have sometimes tried to follow the advice of various TV cooks who have inspired me to make something exciting. The results will not be spoken about here but getting back to those TV chefs, who is your favourite?

Ken Hom.

A few years back when I first lived on my own, I saw one of Ken’s TV shows and began to wonder if I could actually make some tasty Chinese food. I remember going down to the Chinese supermarket in Manchester and picking up various things like sesame oil, lemongrass and of course, my first wok. Chinese cooking is quick and fresh and most of the work is in the preparation because the actual stir frying is a pretty quick process.

I followed all of Ken’s instructions and seasoned my wok and now and again I manage to dish out some reasonable food. I couldn’t quite find the clip of Ken Hom that I wanted to show but below is a recent clip with Ken talking about his food.

While I’m on the subject, wonder what I did with my wok?

Antonio Carlucci.

One of my favourite cuisines is Italian. Some people say pasta is boring but I’ve never really felt that at all. I love pasta, especially spaghetti and my favourite pasta dish is a very simple one spaghetti aglio olio e peperoncino. It’s basically spaghetti with garlic, olive oil and chilli. Simple and tasty and it’s always handy to have some fresh bread nearby to mop up the olive oil. Antonio Carlucci, who sadly died in 2017, made a great series back in the eighties and one of the highlights was where he visited some small Italian village and the locals showed him their authentic versions of pasta or how they made a ragu for instance. I’ve always liked simple rustic cooking and I think that is what is at the heart of Antonio’s food.

If I remember correctly that ragu was something involving tomatoes, onions and garlic, all of my favourite ingredients. I couldn’t find a clip from it on YouTube so here’s one of Antonio in his later years.

Jamie Oliver.

Jamie Oliver is a very modern cook and he seems to cultivate a sort of Jack the lad streetwise fast-talking persona but he really is a great modern chef. In his many TV shows he caters for the modern household where people come home from work after a busy day and inspires them to cook some simple and fresh food instead of just shoving a frozen pizza in the oven.

Jamie made his TV debut in 1999. He was spotted by a TV producer making a documentary about the River Cafe where he was working at the time. His TV show the Naked Chef followed soon after and his cookbook from the series was a best seller. I’ve got quite a few of his cookbooks in my collection which I always refer to when I get down to some serious cookery.

Here’s one of his many YouTube videos showing how to make another of my favourite Italian dishes, Bolognese.

Keith Floyd.

Keith Floyd is the master of the TV cookery programme and his shows from the seventies and eighties were the forerunners of some of today’s TV cookery shows. Floyd visited lots of places, soaked up the local atmosphere, checked out the local dishes and produce and then turned up somewhere, a village square, a beach or even a local restaurant and started cooking. During each monologue to the camera, Keith made sure the cameraman filmed exactly what he wanted him to film, giving a running commentary on the ingredients and the cooking process as well as directions to the cameraman. The supping of wine during the cooking was clearly compulsory. His shows were a mix of travelogue and cooking visiting various far flung places and his impact on the genre is still visible in today’s food programming.

Rick Stein.

Rick is a direct link to Floyd in many ways. Rick’s first appearance on TV was when Floyd visited his famous fish restaurant in Padstow and later when Floyd’s producer wanted to work with someone new, Rick turned out to be the obvious choice. Rick, together with producer David Pritchard produced a series called Ocean Odyssey which was a big hit and the two went on to make more foodie programmes together. A recent series and one of my favourites was Rick Stein’s Long Weekends. Incidentally, a while back I reviewed Ricks autobiography which is well worth a read if you ever see it on the bookshelves.

Graham Kerr.

I had always thought that Graham Kerr, AKA the Galloping Gourmet was Australian but a quick check over on Wikipedia showed me I was wrong. Kerr was born in London to Scottish parents who were hoteliers and later Kerr moved to New Zealand where he became a culinary advisor to the New Zealand Air Force.

In New Zealand Keith appeared in a highly successful cookery show called Entertaining with Kerr. Later the show moved to Australia and later still Graham and his wife Treena made the move to Canada. There Graham began a new cookery show produced by Treena called the Galloping Gourmet which again was very successful. The title came from Kerr’s fast moving and enthusiastic style in which he literally galloped into the studio.

The format of the show was a film travelogue followed by Graham cooking a dish inspired by his travels live in the studio. I remember watching his shows as a child where he would taste the dish and then give the camera a look of food rapture before running into the audience and grabbing someone to taste his food. I loved it and it’s always been one of my foodie favourites.

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