On killing yourself for free stuff and Hot Toddies (Chai and Tahini Hot Chocolate)

Free stuff comes to those who persevere and I had persevered for a whole week. ‘Free’ is a relative term though and relative, in this instance, to carrying the stuff down 10 flights of stairs and up one, door handle or no door handle.

We still have our door handle.

Free stuff gets you into situations you wouldn’t be in for all the money in the world. This is how we ended up locked into a storage unit terrain at exactly the same time a group that looked nothing if not criminal were depositing/collecting/god knows their guns/drugs/god knows.

We left without the trailer.

Free stuff means you’re not choosing things but trusting things. Trusting that either it will fit through the door or the rain will stop so that you don’t have to leave the thing you didn’t choose to be suede under a tarp in the rain. Rain isn’t good for suede and tarps aren’t magic.

We got it through the door.

Free stuff is always exciting and we were excited so we planned a meal around the occasion. We were to get a free couch and so we were to eat our first dinner on the couch and let dinner cook whilst we were out getting the couch.

We were out getting the couch longer than expected.

We had burned our dinner.

I’d gotten a cold.

We didn’t eat our dinner on the couch (suede is hard to clean anyway).

We drank Hot Toddies.

Here's a recipe for our Hot Toddy and more on the couch drinks.

A Sauerkraut Spritz because why not?

It’s noisy and your eyes need a moment to adjust to the dark. There’s no room for elbows and people keep jostling past, the jostle all the more so a jostle because of the full skirts and aprons. Everything is dark wood, copper or printed cloth. And antler. There’s a lot of antler if you count up all the buttons. You smell onions frying and yeasty clouds of beer. It’s cold outside and you feel your face flushing from the warmth, from the beer. Those skirts are swishing back and fourth from the kitchen, their matrons handling big trays laden with heavy food. A bowl is placed is front of you. The cold has made you hungry and everyone around you is already eating. Inside it is a mass of steaming bacon and other pig’s anatomy, slivers of cabbage, juniper berries, bay leaf and thickly cut apple. You have primeval German brot (bread) on the side and are already spooning out yellow senf (mustard) with one of those little wooden spoons. 

How to eat watermelon in six weird ways in two parts, Pt. 1

Some alternative things to do with watermelon when cutting it into slices, getting drippy sticky and spitting pits like you’re 5 just doesn’t cut it (possibly because you’ve been doing this all summer long and even before the summer really started with imported watermelons from Turkey) and that don’t involve smearing it with suntan lotion and wearing a life vest like a diaper*.

 1. Sprinkle it with hot chilli flakes, salty salt and oil from olives

You can still cut this one into slices but then you should use a knife and fork to eat it them.

2. Make watermelon à la Provençale (it involves wine)

Make a circular incision around the stalk of watermelon, cut off the end and scoop out some flesh. Shake the fruit (over the sink) so that some of the seeds fall out (into the sink) and fill with a dry rosé (specifically, Tavel wine, which indicates wine from an appellation of the southern Rhone valley, the only AOC in France to solely produce rosé and a rosé, at that, which was, apparently, the favourite of Louis XIV). Stop the top with the cut off end and seal with cling film. Chill in fridge for at least 2 hours.

To serve, take off end, strain wine, cut rest of watermelon into those slices we were talking about and serve with the wine.

3. Mix it with tomatoes and call it a salad

Whisk together 1tbsp sugar, 1 tsp salt, ¼ tsp cayenne pepper in a small bowl. Quarter and thinly slice ½ small red onion and toss it in ¼ cup white wine vinegar. Set aside to rest until onion softens and mellows which will take about 30 minutes.

Combine 4 beefsteak tomatoes cut into hunks with 1 medium watermelon, also cut into chunks. Pour in onion-vinegar mixture along with some extra virgin olive oil and toss. Add salt and pepper to taste.

This will serve about 5 people and is the recipe of a friend.

*This happened.  

Tongue's a-bub-bubblin'

Someone had to babysit the tongue. It is, as I write, a-bubblin’ and bouncin’ in the that there pot. It’s raining out. My instructions are to wait for the white stuff to flake off: if you’ve ever looked at your own tongue in the mirror after burning it, you’ll know what I’m looking for. Takes about two hours for a tongue this big and by ‘big’ I mean a forearm’s worth of muscle tuned to plucking blades of grass. Big enough for it not to be ready in time for dinner last night by 9 o’clock so we had Italian instead and more than one aperitif.

Tongue’s great, though I never thought I’d say it. But then, I’ve had to back down from higher mountains I’ve talked my way up. For years (3) I’ve maintained zero interest in the more internal of internal meats; not that I constantly had to defend myself but the suggestion has, on more than one occasion, come up. Turns out most of these things (minus kidneys) are delicious. The cow version of them anyway. Once I was tasked to make an extra sheep’s liver into something riffed from Ottolenghi’s Plenty. I managed to make it green but it was gross.

Show mercy to pineapples, make tepache

For all the times I’ve thought to myself ,“I could do that”, this was for then.

It was, I admit, also a measure taken in desperation; desperate to counter the rain and the way it was flattening our spirits. My sister had come to spend 10 days of engineering picnic baskets to bikes and jumping off boats. Instead, she spent 8 of them trapped indoors on a roll mat.

What to do? Finally do what I said I could if everyone else was: put something in a jar and ferment it.

So we made tepache, Mexican moonshine made of the skins and hearts of a pineapples, water, cinnamon and brown sugar. We put it in a big pickle jar (what else?), sealed it, put a cute sticker on it and waited for the wild yeasts to come. Then we poured it over ice, sat back on the roll mat and watched the rains.

Note on the taste: 

Tepache turns out to be pretty damn sweet and after a few days of experimenting, we figured out the following:

1. It’s best mixed with a Mexican beer
2. Unless you like the sweet thing and then you can add rum or tequila
3. The longer you leave it, the more effervescent it becomes, buzzy, malty. I never read the last step of the instructions below until I wrote them out now, 7 days later and mine’s still not strained, not in the fridge, definitely still fermenting and I’m still alive. So go for it.

Egyptians put bread in the tombs

Bread was once nourishing. Jesus was a fan, Thoreau too. Sandwiches were invented and families were brought up on the stuff. During the war, flour was bulked out with sawdust. Then we got Wonder Bread, which, for anyone not familiar with the concept of artificial bread, is artificial bread. It doesn’t mould. It doesn’t live, practically sawdust. Bread is chemically leavened, chemically preserved, “more the product of the embalmer’s art than the baker’s”. All of a sudden gluten was bad for us and everyone knew that it was especially bad for them, personally. You can find recipes for making pancakes… with cauliflower… Dieticians tell us to eat fat and protein. Others, only to eat things that are green. They tell us to go back to the forager’s diet, to a beginning full of nuts and seeds. They tell us to look over a major step in our evolution; that it’s no big deal that finally, with things like the bread made from our first experiments in farming grains 10,000 years ago, we had a constant source of calories, something we could store throughout the winter. No big deal that with bread, we evolved from hoping we’d find a deer to kill to masters of our own dinners.

Then I found the breads made by restaurant As. Great bread, alive, organic, hearty, chewy. Something you can keep using for a month. Add a bit of water, put it in the oven and it’s back to fluffy. Back to crusty. And the baguettes of Le Fournil deserve poems but for the fact they'll be old by lunch time. 

But these breads are exceptions. Much of the rest you find in Amsterdam will go un-reversibly stale within days. It’ll likely only be ¾ baked too, and flavourless. What to do with all those lemons in life? Make lemonade.

Two recipes for your leftover bread and a special mention.

India Yellow and fregola with green peas, mint and ricotta

Green Ground, Cooking Apple Green, Olive, Card Room Green, Breakfast Room Green, Green Smoke, Vert De Terre…  All the shades of nature available in a pot of paint. Armed only with a 2x2 cm square of colour, one must have nerves of steel to choose the right one. I should know: We're currently in the process of deciding between three different shades of yellow, one of which is positively mustard (India Yellow) versus the golden Print Room Yellow or Citron. I’m discovering what sort of stomach I have. 

Pasta with anchovy and (lots) of garlic

Even my grandparents were taking leftovers home from Anthony’s. It’s the kind of Italian with the eternally grated Parmesan on the table next to the chilli flakes that could only have been chillies a very long time ago. “Cheap and cheery” the English say. Roll-out American-Italian.

The menus are laminated and everything has that ‘home-made red sauce’ taste. Except for a dish I have since developed cravings for – no room for marinara there. No room for anything, in fact, other than lots of garlic, olive oil and anchovies.

I always order (and make) it with linguini but my mom swears by angel hair. Since I've been making my own, or, more accurately, since I started adding lemon zest to anything I can, I've been adding lemon zest to lend the dish a little elegance (read: cut through some of the oil). But that’s ‘elegance’ in a narrow sense – in terms of stand-out, all encompassing elegance, this bowl of pasta has heaps of it in its simplest form.

• 1 tin of anchovies packed in olive oil
• 7-8 pieces of garlic
• Pasta
• Good extra virgin olive oil
• Parmesan 
• Salt and pepper

Bring a pan of well-salted water to the boil for your pasta. Heat a little oil in a heavy-based pan whilst you finely chop the garlic and anchovy fillets and then add to the oil. Take off heat once the garlic starts to brown.

Reserve a little of the pasta's cooking water and add a few tablespoons of this, along with the cooked pasta, to the pan with your garlic and anchovy. Divide between bowls and top with black pepper and parmesan. Try before you add any salt! 

Slow roast harissa chicken

There wasn’t enough room on a postcard for the harissa stories of Tunisia. Everywhere you went there would be harissa, homemade and slightly different to the one last night or that which caused the stain on your shirt at lunch. Some were hot, most bright red, others only barely to be glimpsed under fathoms of olive oil. All were to be soaked up by toasted bread.

At home we make our own version to accompany almost anything we eat with blackened lemons: from steak to lamb, bulgur wheat to dark greens. It can be made as spicy as you like, thick spoonfuls of red or, the more olive oil you add, more of a marinade. Or do what the postcards say: serve with hot garlic bread and dip.