secret recipe

Just been looking at my stats, don't say I don't know how to give the public what they want.

Recipe for Nigella Lawson Hokey pokey cinder toffee from BBC2 Nigella Express.

Feeds: one hungry cookery writer, a film crew and a cab driver.
Chatty engaging preample:
You can get the ingredients from most supermarkets but Iceland is best ( I usually pop down in a Hanson cab) as they do multi-packs of crunchies.

1. With a sharp knife (make sure it's organic or a least free range) remove the outer wrapper of the crunchie.

(l love this bit it always reminds me of something my Granny use to say "posh people keep all their money by being too cheap to take flowers to a friend's house when they have sweated for hours to cook them dinner (sorry supper,)")

2. Next carefully slice off the chocolate. (I like to save this to eat late at night with some mustard or maybe you can use it to make "tiffin cake" which I call "rocky road" because we sell this programme to the americans).

3. Next take the last toffee hammer in Britain and break up the hokey pokey.

4. Now if you are going out to dinner (strangely as married person on your own) you may need to distract the host so I put the toffee in a nice tin (which I'll embarrisingly asked for back off my friends at the end of evening, even though my friend had her heart set on it)
that or use the ash tray from a 1960's camper van I lifted mine when I was boosting the cooler box from Jamie Oliver's split screen camper.

5. Lastly enjoy the crunchie sorry hoke pokey in the back of the cab in between swigs of pea and ham soup from your special Disney's Black hole flask.

Ps if you can't find real crunchie maybe if fairs in town you could buy some of that stale cinder toffee , the candy floss man use to sell. That had been in a dusty bag for a few weeks and just scrapped off the roof of your mouth, in preparation for a chewy stale brandy snap, and for lastly losing a tooth on a rock hard sour toffee apple.

Anyway I've got to dash and eat some goat curry in a lift before picking the kids up from councilling, they are having problems living in an alternative universe full fo fake "friends" a false replica of my house and where their step dad has completely disappeared.


Meanwhile on channel 4 Jamie is climbing trees with an elderly Italian man and later over on More 4 Gordon Ramsay has a sperm test.

Oh you've come back the credits have just finished and Nigella has popped back to microwave a rustlers Ranch burger, which she crams with tunnock caramel wafers and washes down with some apricot Yop.
You don't think she's eaten her husband do you?

Use it or Lose IT!

Make sure you are registered to vote.

Timely reminder in the paper to make sure you are on the electoral roll. I need to check mine as I got the form recently and haven't sent it back. Whatever you think of politics if you haven't got a vote you have even less of say.

Comedy Shorts

Sad News:

Heard Arthur Smith talking warmly on the radio this morning about Ned Sherrin’s on the sad announcement of Ned’s death.

Arthur’s parents haven’t been reading the school dress code, if they had they’d know that summer uniform is not to be worn after 1st October and yet when I saw young AS in the flesh less than 40 mins later (on the tube) he was flouting the rules by wearing a fine pair of knee length “combat” shorts. I think letter home is needed!

oh I wish you could smell this

What we learnt from tonight's telly.
Nigella Express:

God love her but Nigella’s new series is trying my patience. It seems she’s not only a good cook but also a time traveller, seeing as she swanned around in tonight's show on a routemaster although they stopped being used on most regular routes almost 3 years ago.
She’s also in contravention of :

TFL Conditions of Carriage

12.1.3. You must not bring with you anything that:
• is likely to cause injury or offence to other customers

By eating sesame noodles on the bus she's breaking the bylaws. It’s a fact no matter how gorgeous a Chinese dish maybe if you are in a packed bus someon else's smells rank. The sickly peanut mixing with sesame urgggh!

Also can we stop with the product placement for your "salad serving hands".

Also if you are going to pretend to have "friends" get some your own age. 12 year old researchers don’t live in glamorous West London basement flats. Also they would you think you are a right weirdo cheap skate, if you turned up for dinner with some "crunchie" (sorry cinder toffee no sorry we are being twee aren't we "hokey pokey" ) instead of at least 2 bottles of wine.
And lastly what’s with drinking soup all over place, like a demented bus spotter.

Just to be even handed how many times is Jaime going to use his spice shaker before he’s done for product placement? I thought a fuck off stone pestle and mortar was "v' fing" for knocking up "sum of me old pesto" Jaime? (see naked chef series 1-4)

And finally things in Burma’s must be really bad as the BEEB have sent in Fergal Keane to cover the story. A man who’s never knowing under emoted. A man who is also never less than 5 words away from saying “poignant” or “”humanity”

Electile malfunction

Usual nonsensical political coverage over the weekend:

The big day: The fuss about choosing the date of the election is just inner circle politico gossip. As far as I can see there are only a handful of days in any year which are likely to have elections on them anyway. Also what all the columnists etc fail to see is that most people are just interested in when the election is, the machinations around the date are rather dull.
Political reporters’ obsession with the process of politics is a general malaise. This morning on the Today programme in an interview with the shadow Chancellor George Osbourne the interviewer (sorry couldn’t remember which one it was) kept trying to work up rifts in the Tories rather than looking at what there official policies where. Now I’m all for holding politicians to account but time taken discussing internal politics is time not devoted to actual policies. Every weekend the Observer et al have endless columns by Andrew Rawnsley etc which spend inches of newsprint mulling over internal party politics, Westminster feuds etc. All portrayed as nationally important but of little interest to even engaged informed people.


HWF Championship.
George Osbourne sounded like he was playing a drinking game when interviewed this morning. You may remember the Fast show sketch with Ted and Ralph where Ralph has to tell Ted some bad news, unfortunately Ted and his mate are playing a game where you have to put a veg name in between each word or pay a forfeit.

Well, Osbourne was doing this, this morning but with the insidious meaningless phrase “hardworking families” He slipped it or similar prose into virtually every sentence.

Tax for hardworking families will be reduced to help hardworking families; capital gains will rise to benefit hardworking families. We hardworking families are hardworking families so hardworking families desperate hardworking families to hardworking families get hardworking families elected hardworking families we hardworking families will hardworking families ignore hardworking families 2/3rds hardworking families of hardworking families the hardworking families population and hardworking families only hardworking families mention hardworking families all hardworking families the hardworking families time.

Funnily enough “hardworking families” doesn’t really include a lot of people who think it refers to them. In Britain it means white middle/upper middle class families where both married biological parents and children share the same house: Where both parents work full time. If you are mixed race, mixed up family, divorced ,gay, a single parent, single, old, disabled, born overseas, un-employed, not driven by material happiness it doesn’t refer to. It’s basically the chippy Daily Mail/Express reading constituency for Tory and Labour who have recently started to see themselves as victims. See Speed cameras, congestion charge, Capital gains tax campaigns.

They are only people in society who can expect help from the government everyone else is either expect to pay up and shut up or be glad of whatever pittance is left. Don’t expect to buy a house, be treated in a clean hospital, not have your liberty infringed, travel of pleasant uncrowned trains, if you are not a hardworking family.
There’s various interesting expansions of this point elsewhere on the web.

BBC

Wikipedia

It almost makes you long for the days of the "deserving and un-deserving poor" !

Less than Fragrant

Go to David Hepworth's site for an excellent demolition of the cult of celebrity, in this case the dreadful "Putney Travelodge" raises her medusa like pampered head....

Taking the Pith

Getting the Juice flowing
Picture the scene:
It’s late Thursday evening 6:50 ish in a plush but soulless corporate meeting room, around a table 7 people are bathed in the bluish light of a power point presentation. Their expensive suits are starting to feel gritty, they are all regretting that last cup of burnt coffee, but they can’t leave until they have “that” idea, they’ve seen the market research and it tells them everything and nothing. The head of section is desperate to head off to a golfing city break. Just then the second most junior drone in desperation pipes up “well, why don’t we add a hint of "Orange”. Eureka!

In the world of consumer products food in particular the “Orangification” of things, is the last gasp re-vamp of any company. Once you’ve made it “king-size”, and then “mini”, when you’ve made it “lite”, “reduced the salt by 55%”and given the world the “planet” version or if it can’t turned into a breakfast cereal, a chocolate biscuit or one of those frozen milkshake doo dahs MacDonald’s sell, the fateful day will come when it get’s a squeeze of orange.

The latest product to “pipped up” is Coke, but Kit kat, Twix, wispa, aero etc have all been “Citrused up”. It’s not just comestibles one of the first things the towering genii behind changing “Jif liquid” to “CIF “was to add a hint of Orange “to brighten and refresh your room”. The Mighty Mr Muscle shipped in Jaffa juice to clean your windows and of course in order to sell French phones to British people a whole telecom company got zesty. One can’t but help but think this all stems from when we shipped in a bunch of ruddy yellow German Dutch chinless wonders to run the country 300 years ago!

Honourable exceptions: Kurious Orange.
Terry’s chocolate orange (plain): a design classic and still a fancy treat in my house.sunday update Thanks to K for pointing out my foolish mistake.

Orange matchmakers: the curiously old fashioned chocolates from a time when a bunch of flowers and box of chocs was seemingly every woman’s ideal gift. In the “olden days” young girls after choosing their crockery pattern also had to settle on their taste in chocolate (for life!) hard or soft, plain or milk, every mum had one. Match makers I fear were never in the same league as Terry’s All Gold or Black Magic (Satan’s favourite after dinner treat?), although they had their charms especially the sliding box with it’s 3-4 compartments and the pleasing nubbly texture. I fear they weren’t the best seduction tool being the sweetmeat equivalent of twiglets. They didn’t even provide a “you start that end I’ll start this end meet you in the middle lady and tramp moment” being too small unlike liquorice boot laces, chocolate fingers or say curly wurlys!

So on the whole in most things in life from sun dresses to suntans, chocolate to oven cleaner if they get the citrus press out just say no.


Make you own Orange man!!!