Griddle Pan Me This

1^st Gent: Was Jesus with the fishes five thousand?
2^nd Gent: No, fifty.

Such were the words of two men in front of me in the queue at Feeding the 5000 yesterday: an event in Trafalgar Square to "highlight the ease of cutting the unimaginable levels of food waste in the the UK and internationally". The men went on to discuss national bankruptcy, Gordon Brown and those bastard Scots with their subsidised whisky.

The message of this event was clear: all of you with your fresh fruit and vegetables – you posers – you never eat it, you don't even like it, you just let it go soft and then throw it out, yous ought to stick to Mars Bars and the smaller sized baked bean tins – that way you won't be so fucking wasteful. I'm paraphrasing here – there may have been something about supermarkets as well.

Their plan was to feed five thousand or so people with food that would otherwise have been discarded. Naturally, there was a long queue and the organisers had been instructed by London authorities that the queue should not extend beyond a certain point so as not to impede the free flow of pedestrian traffic across the square. In deference to this instruction, a battalion of stewards had been hired to corral the queuers. Their leader was equipped with a megaphone and she moved up and down the queue, shouting at it, telling it to bunch up. In addition, it was snowing and there was a stiff breeze. The experience of queueing was thus something like being in a jolly Gulag.


The free food was very good: bread, fruit, a smoothie, a vegetable curry and an onion bhaji. The curry was tasty and nicely spiced: how had they got hold of such a quantity discarded spices? I'm sure supermarkets throw away perfectly fresh spices all the time but this must be almost nothing compared to the quantities of fruit and vegetables that they throw away. It's one thing to stew vegetables for the five thousand but quite another to spice the five thousand. Clever them.

Upon leaving I was distracted by this zombie bear.


It turned out to be a snare and I found myself fallen among operatives of the World Wide Fund for Nature. They had me on all sides and immediately I was set about by their representative Bex to whom I surrendered my contact details so that they could telephone in the coming days to arrange the payment of my ransom.

***My next aim for the outdoor part of my day was Christmas shopping. I had been given money by my grandmothers with which to buy presents for me from them: I buy them, I hand them over to them, they wrap them, I am presented with them on Christmas Day. It ill becomes you to scoff at the Christmas traditions of other families, so stop it: this is entirely sane behaviour.

The task was plainly a very simple one. I was aware, however, of a few things to be borne in mind: these items must be light and small as I will have to carry them in my luggage on the train; also, it would not do to spend all afternoon shopping for them – the Christmas spirit is not kindled by shopping for yourself. Beyond that, clearly I am well placed to know what I like so it should be easy.

So it was that, not three hours later, my attention was drawn to a cast-iron griddle pan. A few more hours carrying it all over town revealed that it really was of singularly robust construction – a welcome addition to my kitchen equipment. Having assembled a handful of other suitable trinkets, I was able to return home, griddle-panning London shoppers and commuters about the shins as I went.

Mussel Inn

Not a pun of my own creation but the name of restaurant that I went to three times over the Christmas period. On the walls are painted great blue cartoon waves. The tables and chairs are made from clean and pleasing pine. Immediately prior to the first of these three most recent visits I had been in the St James Centre; a fetid, marshy place of retail and swarming crowds. The combination of blue waves and crisp pine furniture relieved me of my St James Centre-induced troglodytic hunch and mistrustful countenance and reminded me that our nation is a prosperous archipelago; a place where the sea and its rich bounty is never far away.

A portion of the selfsame bounty is served up in the Mussel Inn nearly every day. The mussel stars. Mussels can be eaten by the (literal) bucket-load or the more manageable plate-load. At lunchtime a plate-load of mussels in one of a variety of simple preparations, some crusty bread, a bowl of chips or a salad, and a bottle of beer, a glass of wine or a soft drink are yours for £7.50. This is called the Lunchtime Quickie and it is thus that the Mussel Inn provides for the impecunious and the stingy.

The mussels are, to a man, plump and healthy (albeit dead, of course). They come plated in piles that are immersed up to about 5cm in a mixture of white wine, cream, shallots and parsley (or some variation on that theme). Other options that I did not eat and that do not follow this pattern include the 'Moroccan' and a preparation involving red peppers. My companion on all three occasions chose the Moroccan. He reported that its ingredients were deserving of companionship with mussels and found that the spiciness varied.

After the meal you are given a hot towel that creates a disquieting smell of nappies. The waiting staff are neither rude nor overly intrusive and obsequious. So pleasing is the experience that it seems to me that there should be modest restaurants serving mussels all over the country. Such places would be at least as deserving of synonymity with Scotland as tartan and shortbread.

There are Mussel Inns on Rose Street in Edinburgh and Hope Street in Glasgow.

Christmas Reminiscences with Fouls

Last night I had a meal that inspired me. I have not had a worse plate of food all year. It was that style of Christmas meal that you have once or twice a December with a group of people with whom you are related through some institution.

Familiarity with this practice is engrained early in life. I remember a few such meals at primary school: there was one year where we were required to put in orders months in advance. There was a seating plan and table service – a glorious occasion, undiluted Christmassyness. Another year we were back to cafeteria service and by the time I got there none of the Christmas food was left so I was given Chicken In The Jungle with Smiley Faces. Chicken In The Jungle is food that belongs to a benighted future where the people no longer know what chickens or jungles are. There were posters next to the illuminated bain-marie stations of cartoon chickens galloping around a lush cartoon rainforest.

It was an exciting time to be nourished as a child: we were the first generation to be fed entirely on this kind of space food. Jamie Oliver put a stop to the practice a few years ago and children now grow strong on something called NutritionalSoup!: a consommé made from the garlic and rosemary tears that Oliver cried when he first encountered Turkey Twizzlers (themselves a genetic descendant of Chicken In The Jungle). The next generation to eat the way we did will be born on a Space Ark on a ten thousand year journey to find a new Earth. All the food will made from a substance called Recalibrated_Nuriton_5 which is formed by harvesting intergalactic dust and pressing it into patties.

The Christmas Feed tradition continued at high school. For a few years the caterers developed the unfortunate habit of serving us heated balls of wafer thin sandwich turkey. This was not a gratifying eat. The balls were accompanied by something called Tasty Gravy: a yellow liquid substance that perhaps leaks out of sandwich turkey when it is heated. There was an option to have either a Taz or a Freddo to compliment your meal. It was customary to feel glum once you had finished.

Which brings me to last night’s experience. The event was held in a pub near where I live. As I entered I spied a large group of people sitting in a conservatory. The atmosphere was effervescent and I approached eagerly. It did seem that they were involved in some kind of Christmas meal but it became quickly apparent that I recognised no one and this was not my party. Ten minutes later I found a side door outside that led to a dungeon. This dank place was crammed with people and saturated with noise. Bill Nighy's version of Wet Wet Wet's Love is All Around was playing at full volume and on loop; a boy sat knocking two bottles of wine together and yelling; many of the rest of the room’s inhabitants comprised a surging mass of pilgrims piling on to the bar. I hunkered down on a chair and through the stampeding hordes I perceived some oppressed faces that I recognised: this was my party.

Plates of food began to turn up sporadically. At one point I had before me a plate with a mushroom doused in cheese and a cold can of chopped tomatoes on it – this soon disappeared again. Not long after, I got my hands on another plate of food; it was the main event: the turkey meal. The plate's architect had sought to evoke Orkney: various items sat like islands in a brown sea of gravy. He also made a comment about the dangers of rising sea levels: surplus gravy cascaded off the plate and formed puddles on the table; puddles for someone to put their elbows in later on. The largest of the islands was an anemic, floppy wedge. It was a proud statement of the sovereignty of human will: the pallid slice possessed no properties to recommend it as turkey to a discerning mind, and yet it was turkey! It was turkey because we said it was turkey. Human beings are the originators of meaning in the universe! What we say goes.

By dividing the other things on the plate into smaller pieces using a knife and fork and then putting them in my mouth where I ground them down further using my teeth I was able to make a paste that I could swallow. Once this stuff had reached my stomach it did not cause me to be instantly sick: it seemed that it was food. There were a few exceptions. An appealing looking object that appeared to be a chipolata wrapped in bacon tasted of plasticine. So did the cauliflower.

Overall the experience was what it must be like for a ghost to eat. When eating the carrots, for example, I was dimly aware of apprehending something like the taste of carrots but this felt more like a memory than a living experience. It was a tantalising wisp of something once vital now forgotten.

What explains the popularity of this Christmas tradition? Red-faced people in paper crowns, a rambunctious mood, giggly colleagues: all these I like; all these could exist without crap turkey. Have a curry, have a hearty stew, have drinks and a buffet. Save the roasted bird for the big day. Not that there is anything particularly despicable about bad food per se. Disgusting cheesey things, low grade meat things and nonsense pies have their sickly gluttonous place. But these weak, tasteless roast approximations elicit consternation from high falutin’ gastrognomes and gobbling half-donner-pizza-and-chips fanciers alike. This is awful. It must stop.