Passata on it’s own I knew would be pretty dull – it’s just sieved tomatoes at the end of the day – so first I fried a bit of garlic, dried basil and dried oregano in a little bit of olive oil; then I added the passata and stirred well. I warmed it through a bit, then gave it a little taste. It was still a tad bland, so I added a bit of salt. Tasting it again the flavour had certainly pepped up but now I thought it a little bitter, so I chucked is a sprinkling of sugar. That did the trick, and soon I was left with a simple pasta sauce as nice as any I’d tasted before.

The first and most obvious advantage I noticed in making your own sauce is that there are no bits in to annoy the kids – or to annoy me when having to pick them out – so long as you don’t stupidly add them in the first place. But I also realised that this must be pretty much all that pasta sauce manufacturers are doing; taking passata and adding stuff to it. The beauty of adding that stuff yourself, of course, is that now, rather than shopping around and trying to find a pasta sauce that is just to your liking, it is just as easy to buy passata and then customise your sauce however you like depending on your situation or mood; so, just garlic, oregano and basil if we’re eating with the kids, but, say, onions, capers and chillies too if it’s just me and the wife. And it is, of course, far cheaper to do yourself what you’d otherwise be paying Sig. Dolmio to do for you. So, now you know what to do, take this rotten old tree and make it bear fruit.

But a warning; this knowledge is dangerous. There is a lucrative pasta sauce industry out there, charging up to £2 for little more than 35p passata with bits. That’s quite a mark-up, their profit margins must be enormous, but can this last? I doubt it. It can’t be long before word spreads and it becomes common knowledge that what had looked at first glance to be the manufacturers “adding value” now seems to be little more than “adding oregano”. I fear we have an enormous, inflated and overheated “pomodoro bubble” here which is about to pop, splashing tomato sauce all over the tiling and hob. So I’m entrusting you to use this new information wisely and cautiously. Sell your shares in Ragu for sure, but allow this information to simmer out gradually, so there is just a gradual decline in the sales of those inefficient and overpriced pasta sauces rather than a sudden crash, giving the manufacturers enough time to find another way to rip us off. The last thing I want to see is a penniless and dejected Loyd Grossman, his pasta sauce business in tatters, begging to be let back on MasterChef; but as a contestant, imploring one and all that the only thing he’s ever wanted to do is to work in a kitchen.

One of my big problems is that I really love the taste of beer, which is why the aforementioned Kaliber is out of the question. As a kid I was always baffled when my mates moaned about the taste of beer, saying it was disgusting but, if you wanted to get drunk in those pre-alcopop days, you just had to get it down you. Were that mad? Beer’s lovely, I thought. From sipping my dad’s home-brew stout while watching the Five Nations Rugby Union, to passing around a sneaky Roughneck flask filled with the contents of one of those diddy cans of Heineken one school lunch time (which, amazingly now, I remember as tasting impossibly bitter), I’ve been hooked on beer; but more on the taste than on the variable effect. So, finding a drinkable low- or non-alcohol version of the fine beverage was always going to be tricky.

But not impossible, as I found out during the course of last year, and one of my many concerted efforts to cut down on the booze. So if you’re struggling with your New Year’s abstinence and certain that trying a Kaliber will almost certainly turn you to drink, here are my top choices for low-alcohol drinking; drawn, in fairness, from a not very wide sample.

• Bohemia: 0.0% abv. This is the one that started it all off, a chance purchase that I was delighted to discover was not only not disgusting but was in fact actually quite pleasant. The first thing I noticed was that it doesn’t smell nasty, with that vulcanised rubber scent I had found with other alcohol-free brews. Instead it has a lighter, almost floral smell, and the taste itself I can best describe as exhibiting a subtle “lager flavour”, with a slightly bitter malt finish. Unlike most alcohol-free beers that pride themselves on being made in the normal manner but with the alcohol (and flavour!) removed at the last minute, Bohemia is brewed so that no alcohol is produced in the first place. The result, I guess, is more a beer-flavoured soft drink, which rather than trying and failing to taste like a real beer instead gives you something that is reminiscent of beer, rather in the way that cherryade is reminiscent of cherries without quite tasting like a cherry. But that’s fine by me as it’s still nicer than some regular lagers; Robinson’s Einhorn, I’m looking at you. Bohemia is especially good on a sweltering day when you could murder a cold one, or with a spicy curry or a chilli where it successfully fools me into thinking I’m having a real beer (until I finish the curry, that is, when the illusion is shattered and I tend to bail out). Bohemia is widely available in most supermarkets – Morrisons, Sainsbury and Tesco certainly stock it – and you can buy it in 33cl bottles and cans.
  
• Erdinger Weissbrau Alkoholfrei: 0.5% abv. Bohemia is great if you fancy a swift half, but what should you do if you’d like a longer drink, perhaps a few beers while watching Top Gear on Dave Ja Vu? Well, I’d rather go to the pub myself, but if for some unfathomable reason you actually like watching Top Gear on Dave Ja Vu and want to accompany it with a few alcohol-free beers, what then? Well the clue is that I’ve started this paragraph with the words “Erdinger Weissbrau Alkoholfrei”, as that is the beer I would suggest. It comes in a decent-sized 50cl bottle, and for the benefit of non-German speakers is an alcohol-free wheat beer. First impressions aren’t encouraging; opening the bottles reveals that familiar Kaliber-like smell, and when poured into a glass it froths up unnaturally in a manner unlike any normal beer. An inauspicious start, then; but once it has settled down it looks much better, being reassuringly cloudy, and the taste, I reckon, could easily be mistaken for that of a real beer, a nice premium larger. You get a hit of sharpness at first, initial grapefruity-citrus notes, which then gradually give way to a smooth, mellow, and genuine wheat-beery finish. Very pleasant to drink at anytime, and it is certainly one I can enjoy a few bottles of in its own right, rather than something I’d take as a grudging alternative to the real thing (unless I want to get shit-faced, of course). Just when you think it can’t get any better you find that it’s even brewed in accordance with the Bavarian Purity Law of 1516, contains a mere 125 calories a bottle, is isotonic, apparently, and is rich in unspecified vitamins. What more do you want (except alcohol)? Erdinger is available from Tesco and The Alcohol Free Shop, and this entry would have a red “Best Buy” star on it, if I could be bothered.
  
• Bernard Free Amber Beer: 0.5 abv. But what if I don’t like lager, you ask? Well, then I’d say that you need to pay better attention because I’ve already told you; then I’ll take a deep breath and again refer you to the words in bold at the start of this paragraph, because Bernard Free may be just what you need. It smells and looks like the real deal straight off, like a genuine dark Czech beer, which is pretty much what it tastes like; it has a delicious mildly-bitter nutty taste, a slight hint of burnt treacle, and just a lurking of liquorice. Very nice indeed. So nice that just as you’re thinking you’ve found the perfect alcohol-free winter ale the taste suddenly fades away to a watery nothingness and you realise it doesn’t have much depth to it; the answer is to take another swig, I guess. This wateriness may be the reason why I found that a bottle at the back of my fridge had actually frozen solid, so I tend to leave it in a cool corner of my kitchen instead. Still, the flavour is very nice while it lasts, and is an interesting alternative to the above lagers. You can buy it in 50cl bottles from Tesco; it actually won an award in the 2009 Tesco drink awards so I suspect it may be exclusive to them, but you may find it elsewhere. I haven’t, though.

So, they’re my three favourites so far, but it is just my opinion, and you may well disagree. I know people who like Beck’s Blue, for instance, and while it does taste impressively authentic it is just a bit unremittingly hoppy for my tastes. Others rate Cobra 0.0%, but I personally file it alongside Bitburger in the Kaliber bin with all those other unreconstructed alcohol-free beers. I’ve also had a couple of bottles of Holsten in the pub when the designated driver, and they seemed okay; but in truth I’ve had too few to give an opinion.

My main reasoning in writing this post was to a) fill up some space on this almost-forgotten blog, and b) tell people who’ve never looked at alcohol-free beer for years – not since they feel Lawrie McMenemy betrayed them over Barbican – that this stuff may deserve a second look. And there is much more to explore than those mentioned here as The Alcohol Free Shop website makes clear, with many more varieties of beers and a huge selection of wines also. And I for one feel far more virtuous tipping a load of Bohemia empties in the recycling; even if, to the casual observer, it still probably makes me look like a piss-head.

So, what will you be drinking tonight? Fancy a wheat-beer? Interesting. But will it be a brain-rotting, sclerosis-inducing Hoegaarden, or an alcohol-free, low-calorie, not to mention vitamin-rich Erdinger? Well, speak for yourself, but as I’ve a tense football match to get through I’m going to hunker down with a crate of full-fat Stella. Don’t look at me like that. I’ll be good tomorrow.

A few weeks ago I came across this video, wherein Flying Rodent took some of the words from this post by Devil’s Kitchen and put them to his own animation, with a little help from Xtranormal, a new(ish) video-making site. DK’s original post actually starts off quite intelligently, more or less echoing my own thoughts on the differences between “positive libertarianism” and “negative libertarianism”; but then he goes and ruins it all – at least by my reckoning – in claiming that he belongs to the former category. I’m sure he honestly believes it; but the rest of his post is pretty much DK-by-numbers in my experience, the sort of thing I’ve read umpteen times before. Anyway, Flying Rodent’s animated version lifts up our Devil’s humble prose beautifully by placing his words in a more fitting context altogether, and with hilarious consequences.

Which got me to thinking about whether I could also use Xtranormal to amusing effect – perhaps by animating my MasterChef post from a few months back – and do you know what, I’m not sure that I can. But here, regardless, is the fruit of my efforts.

Ingredients:

• 600grs. rice
• 200grs. loin
• 200grs. eel
• 200grs. sausage
• 200grs. peas
• 100grs. green beans
• 10grs. paprika
• 12 shellfishes
• 1/8l. Oli litre
• 1 Tomato chicken
• 2 peppers
• 4 ripe tomatoes
• 1 onion
• 3 garlics, saffron, salt and parsley

Method:

1. Finely chop the onions and brown in rit healed in «Paella» cortingdish
2. Add the tomatoes, prawns, feons and carjennt pepper
3. Corb for appros 10 minutes
4. Add the fish, rausage and chicken, miaing all together
5. Put in the rice and pour bating water (about doulle volume tree)
6. Leoson sal gratic partey
7. Limofort 20 minutes all liquid up
8. Decorte sitig of paper sever medi in the «Paella» coting dish

I publish this in the certain knowledge that were I to translate my instructions for, say, sausage, mash, peas and onion gravy into Spanish, the result would be similar. Still, with a scoop of good luck, your finished paella should look something like this.

Terry: “I haven’t got much time for the Irish or the Welsh, and the Scots are worse than the Koreans”

Bob: “And you never could stand southerners”

Terry: “To tell you the truth I don’t much like anyone outside this town. And there aren’t many families down our street that I can stand”

But enough, please, of such lycanthropy and other such knowing malapropisms. If I’m not going to write about the G20, what should I write about instead? Well, I was thinking: what about cooking? Because I like cooking, I do; I find it the perfect accompaniment to listening to the radio. I can relax and enjoy it, even if I am at best a competent, attentive but uninspired sort of a cook. And I can’t imagine a situation where someone criticises a recipe to the extent that they seem to be anti-recipes, or praises a recipe without apparently acknowledging some recipes’ failings, can you? Do people ever sound off about a recipe they know little about based only upon a few facts, plenty of speculation and a bucket load of prejudice? Does anyone ever, for example, assume there is either too much or too little garlic in a recipe before they have read the list of ingredients? I’m hoping not. Recipes, surely, are one area where one keeps an open mind in the absence of any facts, where one is prepared to adopt a “wait and see” approach, rather than to jump to a conclusion in the first instance and to then stick with it regardless of whether or not subsequent instances support or refute your initial assumptions (unless a recipe involves liver, of course, in which case damn it to hell and back).

So, I think I may turn this old place into a recipe blog, to build on the huge popularity of my toast, pensioner pie and MasterChef posts. And what better place to start than with the nation’s favourite (is it really?): curry! Yes, just follow my simple instructions and the most perfect Chicken Jalfrezi could soon be yours to enjoy.

1. First, slice two good sized chicken breasts nice and finely
2. Brown the sliced chicken in a splash of olive oil over a medium heat for a few minutes until just turning golden
3. Take a jar of Geeta’s Spice & Stir Jalfrezi Sauce, remove the spice pot from the top of the jar and stir in the spices, frying for a few minutes
4. Add the sauce from the jar, stirring well, until the pot is nicely simmering
5. Chuck in some leftovers. I used the remains of a jar of Lime Pickle the other day, and a potato from under the sink that was past its best
6. Transfer the whole lot into the slow cooker. Poor the mixture into the cooker off the back of a wooden spoon to avoid those splashes of curry sauce that you can’t fully remove from the worksurface until the sun has bleached them
7. Cook for around an hour or more (the longer the better), then bung in a tin of chickpeas (I got mine buy-one-get-one-free from Morrisons) and stir. Leave for a further 20 minutes
8. Rinse the required amount of basmati rice in water three times, then set to boil in unsalted water for around 12 minutes
9. When the rice is cooked, drain and set aside for 5 minutes
10. Rip up a good clump of fresh coriander and add to the curry, stirring well
11. Serve
12. Eat

Finally, a few dos and don’ts.

Do drain the rice thoroughly and set aside, as this gives a chance for any excess moisture to evaporate off the rice, leaving it light and fluffy, lovely and dry. Also, keep an eye on the curry; the longer you leave it the more tender the chicken, but you may want to add a bit of water now and then to ensure it doesn’t dry out.

Don’t read what it says on the side of the jar; not just the instructions which suggest you should cook the curry for a much shorter time – a mere twenty minutes or so – but also the part that tells you that Jalfrezi

was originally a dish of the British Raj named after Colonel Frazer of the British Raj army, and is now found on many restaurant menus. Generally cooked with chicken, peppers, onions and green chillies, Jalfrezi has an aromatic zesty flavour with an added ‘kick’. Jalfrezi, or jhal frezi, means dry fry and as such this delicious hot dish does not have much gravy. Instead the spicy thick sauce tantalisingly clings to the chicken or meat

Can Jalfrezi really be named after a Colonel Frazer and mean dry fry? Is this coincidence, or bollocks? Is Geeta trying to have her curry and eat it? Whatever; perhaps the money saved on proofreading the label – in failing to spot that contradiction, as well as in the clumsy repetition of the phrase “British Raj” (yeah, I now, like I’ve got room to talk) – has been ably deployed in creating the quite delicious curry sauce itself. If so, then who cares? For if you do try Geeta’s my recipe for Chicken Jalfrezi, you will find out for yourself that the resulting curry really is very fine indeed.

Anyway, here’s a picture.

John: So, what did you think of Stephanie?

Greg: I thought Steph was brilliant. She’s got the lot.

John: I agree.

Greg: She’s what MasterChef is all about. This is why we love this job so much.

John: Absolutely.

Greg: I mean, first off you’ve got those sweet cherry lips on a really pretty face, but then there’s that amazing body to go alongside it. Cracking tits…

John: I really like what she did with those highlights in her hair?

Greg: Her hair is lovely; my only question mark is over her legs.

John: Too skinny? She can work on that though, add a dash of fake tan perhaps? But her arse, oh mate, you cant say her arse isn’t anything other than fantastic.

Greg: Her arse is to die for.

John: So Stephanie’s through, no question. What about Jenny?

Greg: I dunno. You turn up here with a pasty and pallid complexion? You have this lank hair and bleached white down on your top lip? And then you wear these baggy grey jogging pants? No, it just didn’t work for me.

John: Not at all! I don’t know what the hell she was thinking of but I’ll tell you one thing; she sure ain’t no MasterChef.

Greg: Jenny’s gone.

John: Bye!

Greg: Which means it’s between Kerry and Jane. Now for me Kerry is simply wonderful. Those deep blue eyes you could just drown in, the way that gorgeous auburn hair falls in ringlets over her shoulders. It’s just that when she opens her mouth…

John: Her voice is horrible, she talks crap all the time and she’s really annoying! Jane, on the other hand: she’s funny, vivacious, intelligent. Just very ordinary looking.

Greg: Plain Jane, while Kerry looks magnificent. Man, those jugs! I can’t stop thinking about them. If you could just get her to keep her trap shut…

John: But you can’t, and that’s her problem. She looks great but I think we’ve seen the best of Kerry, she’s as good as she’s ever going to be, but with Jane there’s so much more potential.

Greg: But can you see her winning MasterChef? Really?

John: Perhaps, I don’t think she’s that far off. If she can knuckle down and improve her presentation a little, add a subtle touch of make-up, if she could just do something with her hair…

Greg: But I don’t think there’s anything to work with there. We’d be taking a big, big gamble on Jane whereas Kerry looks the part right now.

John: Oh boy this is tough. Well, we’ve got to decide, Greg. So who’s it going to be: Kerry or Jane?

Greg closes his eyes and exhales heavily; John throws his head back and stares at the ceiling. They are in torment.

We can all remember, no doubt, that day in our early childhood when a world of sure certainties was rocked to the core by the discovery that the tomato, hitherto considered a vegetable, is in fact a fruit, thus shattering the comfortable “fruit=sweet, vegetable=savoury” thesis that formed the cornerstone of what was then almost our entire understanding of cuisine. Since then we have grown upwards, perhaps outwards, and hopefully wiser, but we have never forgotten that quirky foodie exception: the tomato, the fruit that acts like a vegetable.

But with time the status of the tomato has begun to puzzle me more and more. Sure it’s a fruit, I can understand that; but why is it almost uniquely considered to be such an oddity; why is it placed on a pedestal? If a tomato is considered a fruit and not a vegetable then what of cucumbers, peppers, aubergines? By the same definition they are just as fruity as tomatoes, so why is it always the strange case of the tomato that stands out and is so unimaginatively invoked? And if these three and others, such as butternut squashes and courgettes, are also to be thought of a fruits (and they are) then this insistent “tomato is a fruit, actually” argument seems to kick off a whole scary development for me. For while we’re at it, aren’t peas and beans considered pulses? And aren’t even potatoes more rightfully tubers? Will this revision of the tomato’s standing begin a worrying chain of events that can only lead downwards, inexorably downwards, until one wonders if there is anything left in the world that can truly be considered a vegetable at all? Is there, in fact, such a thing as a vegetable, really? And if such a fundamental is questioned, if there are, after all, no vegetables, then wither humankind?

In recent years this disturbing trend has become if anything even more pronounced, where every truism has turned out to be a lie and where you simply don’t know what to believe anymore. I blame QI. Because what sort of world are we living in where strawberries, raspberries and blueberries are not berries, yet avocados and pomegranates apparently are. Or take a simple bag of mixed nuts (nuts being fruit, of course, lest we forget), containing, say, peanuts, cashews, almonds, macadamia and brazil nuts. Ho-ho, we laugh as we spot the “may contain nuts” warning on the side of the packet; only we shouldn’t be laughing because while it may contain nuts, unless a stray hazelnut or similar has fallen into the bag in error it shouldn’t contain nuts. Rather we are holding a bag of assorted seeds, drupes, kernels, capsules and legumes, and so if all has gone according to plan there won’t be a genuine nut in sight. And what’s that? Really? Oh right. News just in: it appears that a cranberry isn’t a berry either, but…what…a tomato is! I might have fucking well known! The bloody tomato! That’s what kicked this whole thing off in the first place. Right, that’s it, I’ve had enough! Before someone tells me that that a cow is a type of cacti and that rabbits are kettles I’m going to hold onto what little sanity I have left by going back to the beginning, to that simpler, happier time when I knew what was what and the world wasn’t crumbling around my ears. In other words I’m reverting to my sweet/savoury definition of what is or is not a fruit; I’m deciding that a tomato is a vegetable and that is that, and anyone who disagrees with me is a pedant, a dullard and a stinking wanker.

But just for sport – because it won’t change what I think – let’s check out what Wikipedia has to say on the subject. Ah, this looks promising…

The term fruit has many different meanings depending on context. In botany, a fruit is the ripened ovary—together with seeds—of a flowering plant. In many species, the fruit incorporates the ripened ovary and the surrounding tissues. Fruits are the means by which flowering plants disseminate seeds.[1] In cuisine, when food items are called “fruit”, the term is most often used for those plant fruits that are edible and sweet and fleshy, examples of which include plums, apples and oranges.

And this…

The term “vegetable” generally means the edible parts of plants. The definition of the word is traditional rather than scientific, however. Therefore the usage is somewhat arbitrary and subjective, as it is determined by individual cultural customs of food selection and food preparation… In general, vegetables are regarded by cooks as being suitable for savory or salted dishes, rather than sweet dishes, although there are many exceptions, such as pumpkin pie.

So…

Though it is botanically a berry, a subset of fruit, the tomato is nutritionally categorized as a vegetable (see below). Since “vegetable” is not a botanical term, there is no contradiction in a plant part being a fruit botanically while still being considered a vegetable…the term “vegetable” has no botanical meaning and is purely a culinary term.

They even include this handy cut-out-and-keep guide to carry with you wherever you go. You know, just in case.

Thank you, Wikipedia, some common sense at last, and I apologise if I have ever cast doubt on the veracity of some of your entries in the past. Now I feel truly free to call a spade a spade and a tomato a vegetable, to put a stop to this nonsense once and for all; for it turns out while it may very well be right to call the tomato a fruit, it is wrong to say that it isn’t a vegetable.

Next Time: why Jaffa Cakes are biscuits.

They say Pensioner Pie is back in style. I say it never went out. Of style.

I’m more of a Chicken & Mushroom man myself, but I’ll try anything once.

Introducing new “Toast Plus”, a bold and startling innovation. Just in case, whether through failing eyesight or sheer laziness, you are unable to read the accompanying photograph (left), “Toast Plus” re-imagines the humblest of breakfasts by offering the delighted consumer the possibility of “thick cut toast with a choice of toppings”. Interested? Better still; each topping retails for a mere 15 pence each.

I’ll level with you. I really don’t think that coming up with the concept of selling toast and toppings is worthy of branding the whole experience “Toast Plus”, still less of designing a little accompanying logo of a stylised half-eaten slice of bread. I always thought that toasting some bread and slapping on some spread and jam was a pretty open-sourceish, public-domainy kind of thing. Just what have the bakers done to claim it as their own? Should they really be troubling the patent office? Sure, they boast of their toast being “mega thick”, but that is an option only denied most of us because of the tyranny of the sliced loaf that some of their fellow baking brethren have foisted upon us.

I am not disparaging bakers in general, I acknowledge that they are vital to the production of bread, which is an important ingredient in toast; but if we allow one of their number to get away with this, then we can only imagine what could happen next…