An Idiot’s Guide to Sandwiches, Invading a Screen Near You

Can I just ask: what is with all the tv chefs teaching us how to make sandwiches these days?? Ok, I’m down with Jamie Oliver gunning for bacon sarnie perfection, or the king of all grilled cheese. But the reason I reckon he can get away with it is the lad factor. He presents as a blokes’ bloke, and a hellavalotta blokes can’t cook for toffee, so yeah, maybe they do need their hands holding to bung some eggs and mango chutney on a bit of flat-bread.

But Nigella, Domestic Goddess non-pareil? Rick Stein, with his expertise in fish cookery and depth of knowledge in the realms of Indian Spicing? Yes, the former has never made any bones about using cheats, tricks and shortcuts to maximise flavour… but in her last series, she was slated for pronouncing mashed avo on toast a recipe… and yet, lo and behold, she’s gone and done it again. Her ‘revelation’ of a fried brie, fig and parma ham sandwich… uh, hello? Ham and cheese. Not new. Toasting them, also not new. Fruit with cheese, duh, check out the long and glorious tradition of chutneys!

And Rick! Rick, Rick, Rick. Love him to bits… but, an open sandwich? You really want to use up airspace and time showing us how to strew lettuce, chicken, avo and tomato on pieces of sour-dough?

Nigel Slater does it too, though I’m more inclined to forgive him, as often he’s using the sandwich as a vehicle for transforming leftovers, and it usually does involve a bit of actual, you know, cooking.

Is this a case of the lowest common denominator? Can it be that despite the popularity of cooking shows, and the prevalence of cookbooks on best-seller lists, that viewers have genuinely reached the abysmal nadir of requiring instruction on how to arrange the contents of their fridges on pieces of bread? Or is it precisely the opposite, a symptom of the over-development, the burgeoning, of foodie culture, whereby cookery tv has become SO popular it has literally left itself nothing else to fill all of the minutes and hours that must be allocated to drooling over pots, pans and plates, to satisfy demand?

They also feel the need to tell us how to cut up veg. Mary Berry, Jamie, Gordon F-Word Ramsay, and now Rick too, seem to think that their viewers can’t work out how to tackle a squash, or a red pepper, or an avocado without factoring in a trip to A&E (or the ER, Stateside). Guys? When I want to slice and dice veg, as happens quite frequently, what with being a vegetarian and all, that’s what I do. You’ll know about it on the more rare occasions when my own limbs and other appendages are the target!

Is it just me? Am I just weird for actually watching these people in the hopes that they will show me how to do something new, something I didn’t know how to do, or make, before?

One Handheld PA Minus Ritalin Goes Beeping Bananas and What’s Geography Got to Do with Sweet FA?

Just made Nigella’s Chocolate Olive Oil Cake. Luscious is a word that was, without doubt, invented to describe this cake. Also, unctious. And further to the chocolate theme, I learned today, via my sneaky-cute Tunnel Bear VPN and the BBC’s ‘Further Back in Time for Dinner’ (I do love Giles Coren) that Roald Dahl’s ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ was inspired by the writer’s boyhood taste-testing for the Cadbury’s chocolate factory near his school in the 1930s. Which, I guess, is what geography has to do with Sweet FA. It may also be noted that I mark up my trusty Googlemaps with a liberal spackling of stars, denoting the locations of yummy cafés and bubble tea places before travelling anywhere. So loath though I am to admit it, sweet and geography are in fact intimately related after all.

Surfacing into the bluster and confusion of Leicester Square, her phone goes manic; her stressed out blonde twit of a handheld PA clearly forgot to take her Ritalin. Probably her mother, leaving a vendetta-blood-trail of messages. Which she will deal with in a better frame of mind, such as when she’s well and truly smashed and seeing double.
Which would, of course, entail booze. She turned her back on Leicester Square’s mish mash of overpriced cinemas, greased cardboard pizza-by-the-slice holes-in-the-wall and barftastic out-of-town-teens, and marched herself through the cluttered cobblestoned alleys edging on Chinatown. There was a new pop-up place round the proverbial corner. No name, that she remembered. Dimly lit by bare bulbs, stripped brick walls in shadow, it was provided of counter and booths, they did mean sliders and a drinks menu offering fresh twists on all the classics.
Three variations on a martini theme later, she digs the ditzy, hormonal PA phone from her bag. Presses down on the opposite ear as she lifts it, to muffle the noise of other people’s raucous night on the town, thinking briefly of Negronis in Milan, of suave Italians under the chandeliers of Bar Basso.

None of the first three messages are from her mother. But by now the queue is stacking up, like traffic on the M25 around a three car pile-up.
She likes the music in here, sultry, but with a decent spine of base. She lifts her empty glass suggestively at the bartender dancing and spinning on the other side of the granite strip, easier than the whole menu farce… Pick your own inebriation delivery system. Customise your own calorie delivery system. But sometimes, such as when there’s a three-four-five car pile up backing up your phone and sending the ditzy thing to the edge of a schizto-paranoid freakout, you frankly don’t have the time, energy or attention span to worry about what to mix with your vodka and do you want the new potatoes or mixed game chips with that?
Of course, it was always possible that her metaphoric denigration of her schitzoid freak phone was in fact displaced, that it was actually her own brain with the problems she was so busy sticking to her phone.
Another martini type thing landed in front of her, the empty swept away, and she still had yet to find out what this six-seven-eight car pile-up on her phone was all about. Procrastination being, in fact, her middle name.

Lena Procrastination Bellington, do you take this man to be your…
Your what? Was there even a name for what Danielli wanted her to be?
Hang it, even her bloody schitzoid phone pile-up had to be better than this.
‘Ello? Lena? Zis is Madellena. I ‘ave talked with Nicholi, and I think we should be talking before you talk wiz ‘im. So, ah, ring me back when you can… yes, ah, ciao ciao.’
And beeeeeep.
‘Hey, Lena. Why aren’t you picking up?’ Danielli. The freaky Italian porn-prom on a stick expected her to be at his beck and call, while he could just sashay off for a Stuart-shagathon whenever he felt like it? ‘Anyway, think there might be a bit of a situation with Nicholi… So, uh, ring me back, yeah? Preferably before you talk to him… God, you haven’t talked to him already, have you?’ ambient traffic noise, the swish of passing cars maybe, hard to distinguish beneath the thrum of base pushing up against the bare bricks of the bar. ‘Anyway, get back to me when you can. See ya.’
She removes the phone from her sweaty ear for a second, stares at it, like the bloody piece of plastic could explain.
Beeeep.
‘What the hell are you doing, marrying that gay ponce? Are you trying to play the girl-fucks -best-friend thing? You want your life to be a chick flick, is that it?’ Nicholi. Lena squeezed her eyes shut. When really, it was her ears that needing shutting. Maybe her brain, too. Nailed shut, with crime scene tape draped around it for good measure. ‘Because chick flicks are cheap. Cheap and fake. Thought you were better than that. But you’re just a cheap fake. A fraud, just like him.’
Beeeeep.
‘Alright Miss High and Mighty. Since you’re too good talk to your own bloody mother to my fucking face, we’ll do this over the fucking phone. Cath told me all about –‘
She unsticks the phone from her ear. Hits delete message, delete message, delete message. Not bothering to listen to the rest of the traffic accident of her life. The casualties, the DOAs, the mangled write-offs scraped from tarmac to wrecking yard to be stripped down for salvageable parts.

She takes a hefty swig of her drink, swishes it around her mouth, the sour sharpness of the alcohol across her tongue, fire at the back of her throat. She wants to bathe her brain in it. Like you do a baby, carefully, in the kitchen sink. But she doesn’t really have a kitchen sink anymore. Her lease is up at the end of the week. She handed in her notice weeks ago. She has a plane ticket booked for Milan in the morning. Movers will come a cart her stuff away to a storage facility somewhere in the arse-end of nowhere, overseen by her landlady, who recommended the company. Some family connection.
Who knew they could actually be useful? Family connections. What a joke. A pathetic joke, like something from a cheap Woolworth’s Christmas cracker, that comes with a stupid tissue paper hat in magenta or lemon-yellow.
On the bar next to her glass, her phone starts up its frantic buzz again.
Danielli’s number lights up the screen. A bunch of pixels, conspiring to form the shapes of numbers. She’s always hated numbers.
She kills the call, but not two seconds later, it starts up again.
‘What?’ she snaps.
‘Where are you?’
Why is that always the first thing he says to her? What has location, geography, got to do with sweet fuck-all? Good question. If location was such a pesky, trivial detail, why was she here, and not at home. Correction, not in her almost ex-flat. Why was she moving to Milan? If she was moving to Milan. Clearly, she saw location as some kinda cosmic answer too. Maybe the answer to that other question, the one Danielli wasn’t asking: how are you?
‘Lena?’
‘Yeah. I’m here.’

When Elves Attack

And no, I do not mean the delectable Orlando Bloom, in his extended-ear and sexy-longbow guise. And possibly the only role in which he was ever plausible, because, not to put too fine an (arrow)point on it, the guy can’t act for unicorn manure, as attempts to feature him in other films, where he actually had lines to say, proved. No, we are not talking about Legolas and his kick-ass Tolkien kin. Or maybe you are. Maybe you’re one of those Tolkien geeks who, once started, just cannot leave Orcs’ orifices, Hobbits’ habits and dragonology alone. Nothing wrong with that. A certain film director even made it cool. But here and now I am talking about elves of an even chillier breed, the North Pole, sleigh and reindeer type, the toy workshop type, the Chris Kringle worker-drone type.

Of which I am one. And even have the Harrods-issued badge to prove it. I jest not. Not that I know where said badge is currently to be located, what with the cross-continental move and scrambled packing frenzy before I left, but… The thing exists. It is mine. And if Harrods says I am an elf, well, it must be true.

Of course, my elvish activities neither stem from nor stopped at my season in the Christmas Grotto at a certain well-known department store. That was truly exhausting, eight or nine-hour shifts entertaining throngs of families waiting in Line to meet one of the eight or nine Santas on the Harrods payroll. Sloanies with their super-tank prams, families up for the day from the counties dressed in their finest matching Burberry, once a Dad and his two teenage daughters just off a flight from the States, in their pajamas. Although in light of the recent fad for Onesies, and the troupe of college kids I met in the line for California Screamin’ at the California Adventure Park next to Disneyland, all of them clad in pajamas, the sight of that bunch from Colorado or wherever, cozying up to Santa in their PJs is no longer quite so surprising. We ‘elves’ hacked renditions of Jingle Bells and We Wish You a Merry Christmas out through our colds and threw lollipops and Harrods’ biscuits in the general direction of squadrons of small sticky hands, snapped photos of the darlings snuggled up to the Big Man and got more and more jaded about the whole ho-ho-ho thang. I have done perhaps more than my fair share of Christmas seasons in retail, but that one still trumps the lot.

Of course, Christmas in China may well surpass even that experience in terms of extremes… If the Halloween Party was anything to go by, it sounds like my time as a Harrods Elf may stand me in good stead.

And yet, despite so many years enduring Christmas retail on the front line, I still love the season. Adore it. I used to start watching Christmas movies – White Christmas, Charlie Brown’s Christmas – soon after my birthday. Suffice to say, I am Leo. I am hoping to chat to a friend of mine back in London later on today (when he wakes up) about how to go about downloading these films, to satisfy the craving. Naughty, I know. But what’s a Bing-aholic to do? Actually, it’s actually Danny Kay – his rubber features, eager-puppy bounce and his see-through coy act that really gets me, though the two of them together are a class act.

‘My dear partner, when what’s left of you gets around to getting what’s left to be gotten, what’s left to be gotten won’t be worth getting, whatever it is you’ve got left.’

‘When I figure out what that means, I’ll come back with a crushing reply.’

Can you tell I’ve watched that flick maybe a few thousand times?

 

But there seems to be a bit of synchronicity at work surrounding the whole Christmas thing.

If I were back in London, this wouldn’t be the case, it would be perfectly natural for every second thought to refer to seasonal issues as the capital gears up for its annual spending spree and revelry is in the air, with companies having their Christmas bashes early and tinselly advertising splashed on every surface and flaunted in every ad break on TV. But not here. And this is why I suggest synchronicity…

Because yesterday I spent quite some time doing battle with the widget function, so I could post a gallery of my artsy-fartsy endeavours over the years… Most of which have been either directly or indirectly related to Christmas. Advent Calendars, well, that’s obvious. Doll dresses, less so. We had a long-standing tradition in my family that we all got a doll from Father Christmas every year. And as I got older, and my seamstress skills developed, guess who ended up making the dresses to accompany said dolls? The Elf. That’s me. This went on until quite recently, as I have sisters who are considerably younger than myself. The gift bags sprang from my discovery that I could whip one of these things up quicker than if I phaffed around with wrapping paper, tape and ribbon… Although that said, being me, these got more and more decorative, with appliques and beading, so that the ones here actually took me quite a bit longer than the aforementioned traditional methods of wrapping would have. Whatever. I can never resist a bit of beading. The little ornaments were from the time I made a large wall hanging fabric advent calendar with pockets. The ornaments were in the pockets. I actually found stitching a Baby Jesus and Holy Mummy quite amusing. But that’s just me.

So then, later on in the evening yesterday, I was chatting to my sort-of-ex on Skype, and was reminded of other Christmassy activities which I will be missing out on this year. Because, of course, his studio’s annual Christmas Open Weekend is coming up. My sort-of-ex is a printer. Meaning, he and his business partner design for and print with old, mostly Victorian and Edwardian printing presses. His website, where you can admire his beautiful work, is, http://www.sortdesign.com. Every year, round about now it became a bit of a cottage industry overdrive, as myself, my sort-of-ex, and his Ma prepared stock, not just for the Open Studios, but also to fill large seasonal orders from places like Liberty, Tate Modern, Conran and Paperchase. We’d sit in front of the telly, creasing, collating and plastic-baggying hundreds and hundreds of greeting cards, or party packs or writing sets…

And for the Open Studios I also always made cookies. Lemon and Chocolate. My sort-of-ex preferred the Lemon, his business partner was a sucker for the Chocolate ones. Sometimes I improvised on the theme. Soaked sultanas in brandy for a subtle kick in the lemon cookies, or swapped the lemon out for orange, complimented by the sour-sweetness of dried cranberries. Always spent ages cutting glace cherries into the right size morsels to stud the top of each cookie. But not this year. I suppose I could make cookies for the teachers at school – but would have to round up all the ingredients, probably on the net, first, and then, although I’m told there’s an oven at school, I’d have to wangle the use of it, and then try to work the thing out…

Because that’s something you don’t think of, when moving somewhere that doesn’t use the Latin alphabet… Controls for things – your remote control for the TV or the AC, the dial on your washing machine? You can’t actually read any of them. Can’t tell if you’re pressing the button to start the DVD or to reprogramme the TV, which you probably don’t want to be doing – if only you knew you were doing it in the first place! Getting your laundry done is actually a guessing game. As for the TV, although two different people have told me what to do, I still haven’t completely cracked it. Which is why, rather than frustrate myself when all I want to do is veg, I mostly stick to the offerings of iplayer. Which also has the benefit of being in a language I understand. although I should give Chinese TV another whirl. If only because it would improve my language skills. Certainly not for the quality of the programming. I don’t need to be able to understand Chinese to tell that most of the stuff on the box here is… Melodrama, slapstick, the news. Not exactly aimed at Einstein. But then, I am no Einstein, my language skills aren’t even on a par with your average five-year old here, so who am I to complain? Better to shut up, and find out how to download Snoopy and Bing and the Snowman doing their seasonal stuff.

So this morning, after quite a bit of Christmas-related traffic in my brain (betcha I have a special place in my brain which totally lights up a CAT scan, like to the point of nuclear fusion, when Christmas mania takes hold) when I walked into the supermarket in the mall, I noticed that they had Christmas banners up. Looked around for any sign of accompanying Christmassy merchandise… Nada.

My Christmas ornaments, the result of many years’ careful collecting, are stuck in customs in some port, the name of which I can’t remember or probably pronounce. As is my sewing machine, my paints. If I’m going to start getting my inner Elf on, I’m going to have to be even more creative than usual, methinks.