The Dark Side of the Spoon

Veronica Wadley: Ken’s been quiet - there’s nothing much happening in Lodnod today. Any ideas?

Bored Sub: Well, there is this flood thing happening up North…

VW: That’s not going to sell papers. We haven’t scared the City for at least 24 hours.

BS: I was thinking, have you read any Ballard?

VW: That’ll do.

BS: Can I go to the pub now?

Apologies to Bored Subs and the DarkSide for the blog hijack.

Couldn’t resist. PT

SPAGHETTI CARBONARA

An uncompromising Italian defender of a dish, but still light enough on its feet to please the girls. The classic Roman Carbonara has been bastardised beyond recognition around the globe for years, not least by me.

Yet again my mother taught me this first, and the version I learned was the original sin, just pasta bacon and eggs, seasoned with nutmeg, pepper and parmesan. But after my Greek years I always put cream and mushrooms in it. When my ex and I used to roar into Zakynthos town square on the Honda Lead at midnight, we’d head for this one place where they did a fantastic Carbonara, Greek-style, dripping with krema galaktos. Lovely suppertime grub.

Also on Zakynthos, I came across the worst Carbonara in the world. The ex was working at this place, and the daytime chef was – well, put it this way, he wasn’t a chef. I ordered a Carb, and out came this mush which had shedloads of nasty cheese in it, and great big fucking chunks of….. luncheon meat! So horrible I remember it to this day. Anyway….

400g spaghetti

4 rashers smoked bacon

100g sliced mushrooms

2 cloves garlic, crushed and minced

2 egg yolks

1 tsp grated nutmeg

250ml cream

salt and pepper

plenty of grated Parmesan

Cook the pasta according to packet instructions.

Meanwhile chop the bacon then sauté it for around 5 minutes with the garlic and mushrooms. When the pasta is ready drain it, and add to the bacon etc the cream. Get this bubbling away nicely before adding the spaghetti, and toss, stir, do whatever you have to do to get it all nicely mixed. Add the nutmeg and salt and pepper, then remove from the heat. Make sure everyone is ready, then finally add the whisked egg yolks and stir in.

This dish has to be served piping hot.

And yes, it is that simple.

Oh, yeah – vegetarians, just leave out the bacon. It won’t be as nice. I won’t keep on.

W11 is a very strange place, and I’m not sure about it at all. I’ve been in London 20 years on and off in 12 and a half months, and until Chelsea in 2005 I’d never really done West London.

But even that was nothing to the Imaginary World that is Notting Hill. I have never seen so many of such low calibre so far up their own bottoms. The other half of the population are descended from Martin Amis’ 1989 creation Keith Talent, antihero of ‘London Fields’. Keith himself runs a stall right next to the one I work on Portobello Market on Saturday.

“Let’s have a go at these, they’re cheap, clear ‘em up.”

That’s what Keith Talent says.

Anthony Worrall Thompson was in the shop the other week. I didn’t serve him, as I was packing dates in the basement at the time, but I watched him on the CCTV.

My colleague thought he might have been Rick Stein. Nah. I can tell one celebrity chef from the other.

It’s nice to know alot about something most people don’t know much about. I enjoy explaining the whole science of this thing. When I am talking to someone who is genuinely responsive, who is obviously interested for whatever reason, I blossom.

These people leave the shop knowing things they didn’t know before. And in the same way that I love to experience new things, bringing new knowledge to people is much the same buzz. They leave the shop with those three or four bags of alchemy, and all the way home they are plotting as to what they can do with them.

It woz me, Guv. It was me wot told ‘em.

Some people, of course (especially round here) just won’t be told. These upper middle class folk zoom around in their SUV’s, in their cock-replacement Lamborghinis, eating their £10.50 a go Full English - no, really, Keith Talent would starve if he had to pay the prices round here - and they sell whatever they’re selling to the tourists.

I’m not saying I don’t. That market stall on a Saturday, I tell you what, my European language skills are coming on in leaps and bounds.

It’s essentially good, but the whole area is reeking of mulitplicity and deceit. Nothing is quite what it seems. It is a reasonable enough area to pass the time, I suppose, but at the same time never suppose any depth here.

Put these well-known facts together. Hugh Grant. Film. Blue Door. Book Shop.

The shop, and the stall, are within a flick of Hugh Grant’s fringe away from all of the above.

It is plain that we are no longer talking about an authentic London market. When Keith Talent was winning darts contests in Portobello pubs (Correct me if I’m wrong MA, but I guess Keith lived in Trellick Tower), maybe. 18 years later, you’d need to know how to say darts in Brazilian. Yes, I know.

But I can learn from all of these people. They can all contribute to what will happen, when darkside is no longer merely midnight ramblings and is a physical thing, with windows and shelves and a door or two and perhaps even some tables and a fridge or two. Who knows?

Ok, so you don’t really care about food, and only came across this site thinking it would be not Freudian, but Floydian. Which it is, but in a Keith way, not a Roger, David, Rick, Nick and I suppose we should mention Syd, way.

Anyway, should you be more interested in football than food, coming soon to a stadium near you will be the one and only Newcastle United. They will be followed on their tours and travails by none other than Darkside. So coming soon to a monitor near you will be thedarksideofthetoon.co.uk

An irreverant look at the fortunes of the Toon. In the meantime, let’s all laugh at Sunderland…..

LENTIL SOUP

Ok, the next name on our teamsheet, to fill the role of sturdy, steadfast centre back, is another of my nother’s classics. It’s a cold Winter’s night and you need warming up, so what do you make? Soup, of course, and not just any soup. Lentil soup, thick enough to stand your spoon up in, hearty, hale and delicious.

It’s other major advantage is that it is as cheap as chips, which makes it ideal for the itinerant student or the worthless dole jockey, both roles I have excelled in during my life. Buy a loaf of bread, and you can feed if not quite the 5,000 a good seven or eight on one bag of red lentils.

The following recipe contains bacon and ham stock. Should you suffer the misfortune of being vegetarian, simply leave out the pig derivatives. It won’t be as nice, but will still be perfectly tolerable.

All recipes on Dark Side, incidentally, feed four well unless otherwise stated.

250g Red lentils

Ham stock (or veggie), difficult to be exact but between 1.5-2litres

4 rashers smoked bacon

2 carrots, diced

1 large onion, chopped

2 cloves garlic, chopped

2 tbs tomato puree

1tbs curry paste or powder

salt and pepper

lots of chopped flat leaf parsley

First sweat down the onion, carrot, garlic and bacon for a good 20 mins, until slushy and squidgy. Then add the lentils and give it a good stir, letting the pulses get nicely mixed with everything else. Add the tomato puree and the curry paste and stir again.

Finally add the stock. Bring to the boil and then simmer the soup for an hour or so, until the lentils have cooked down completely and the whole thing is a deliciously orange, quicksand-resembling gloop. With any luck you will have a few slightly burnt bits stuck to the pan. Attack these with a wooden spoon and stir them all in, they will only improve the experience. Check the seasoning, then stir in the chopped parsley.

If you like you can put the soup through a blender, but I wouldn’t bother personally.

Serve with crusty bread and butter, or even better with a nice fish finger sarnie.

Well, after six weeks or so as a spice merchant, a purveyor of culinary potions, I know one thing – I have found out what it is I want to do. I have also had confirmation that there are some things I still don’t want to do, and these include being talked to like a monkey, being told off for not doing things I haven’t not done yet, and being presented with situations (rules) in which I can find absolutely no logic.

During the time I’ve been working in the shop, I have also been seeing someone about certain issues I have had with myself for many years, issues I feel have been holding me back severely in my plans for world domination. Not least among them has been a total failure to deal adequately with authority, which I have always seen as the enemy.

I will be the first to admit that authority is often necessary. However I fail to see the purpose in authority for authority’s sake. I talk here of those situations in life where someone in charge will labour this fact for the sole reason of consolidating their actual or perceived power. Or those situations where authority is a bully. My problem is how to deal with this.

As I explained to the counsellor, in the past I have always reacted by fighting tooth and nail against it. This course of action though has led me nowhere really, and it is always myself who ends up out in the cold. My counsellor has suggested tackling it in a more subtle way, by explaining to the person concerned that I feel unhappy at my treatment, or my situation, but not actually saying I’m unhappy with them. Let them work out that bit for themselves.

So I find myself now in a position to try this theory out. The Commandant is the bugbear. She is obviously so well accustomed to ruling by fear that she knows no other way. It is verboten to answer back, under any circumstances. This applies to almost everyone, so it’s not as if she’s picking exclusively on me. And let’s be honest, she doesn’t seem to have done too badly out of it, either. As for me, I have tried applying the bullshit filters, unsuccessfully. The in-house management style, as it were, is threatening to become an issue.

The Commandant’s singular management style, furthermore, is well known throughout W11. On first taking the job I received wry glances, rueful raises of eyebrows. ‘You don’t know what you’re letting yourself in for,’ they said, shaking their heads sympathetically, while in the same movement looking quickly about to make sure she wasn’t listening.

But I really like the job I’m doing, and personally I feel I’m very good at it, too. So how do I keep her happy, at the same time as keeping me happy? However well I do the job, she will find fault, for that is the way of the Commandant. She looks for fault before anything else. But as she pays the wages, that ultimately is her prerogative. I can do no more than perform the job as well as I can, recognise her ways and conform to them as much as possible. Arbeit macht frei, and all that.

I put up with enough arses while I was in catering to last a lifetime, that was one of the reasons I got out of it. Of course I recognise that there are arses everywhere, and everyone has to deal with them, and some are better at it than others, some are blessed with not really caring that much. I always cared, probably too much most of the time. It goes back to when I was a kid, when after 10 years of submission I learned the only way to fight bullies was to – well, fight them. That doesn’t work in the grown up world, unfortunately, a lesson I have been slow to learn. So I will try harder to apply the bullshit filters, keep her as happy as I can, and get on with getting out of the whole experience what I need to get out of it.

For as I said at the beginning, now I know what I want to do…I want to do what she does. I have been waiting a long time for my epiphany, to find a way which I know 100% I can do, which I know 100% I will be better at than most people, which I know 100% is practical and not just more pie in the sky. My mother has often told me to stop chasing rainbows, to stop aiming for the stars without taking into account the sky in between.

What I am seeing in my mind now is the sky. There may be stars and rainbows in it, but that doesn’t matter. I am looking for the first time at a sky which in itself is enough.

And hereby hangs the basic thread of this tale. The best person to learn from over the immediate future, to learn the tricks from, is of course the Commandant. Which is what I mean when I say that I need to get out of this what I need, which is knowledge. We could be good for each other, she and I. Maybe she could even learn a few things from me. So I will heed the advice of my counsellor, and I will find the common ground which surely is there. And this will be one of the first tremblings in the Big Bang which will eventually form my own shop, my own Universe, here on the Dark Side of The Spoon.