Sunday 30 December 2012

Caramelised Onion Cheese Toastie



2012. Twenty Twelve. Two thousand and twelve (no one says that, it’s so unbrandable).

It’s been a year, hasn’t it? Well, not just any year but a year with one extra day! It’s such a joy to be gifted with yet another day, which doesn’t really mean anything at all when you remember that the mechanical parts of our bodies don’t work in or take account of days or years. So you haven’t really lived for another day at all; it was just another span of time that was called something different.

What did you do with that extra non-day? I complained that I had to be at work for another day with no thanks or praise and wondered whether I should mention it to my boss so he could adjust my pay accordingly. A colleague advised me against this and pointed out that, thanks to Queenie, we would be getting an extra day off anyway. I couldn’t be arsed to work out whether I would be better off, worse off or exactly the same, so I just shut up and did some work.

In the middle section of the year, a miasma of happiness and togetherness forcibly descended onto the UK or maybe just London (I became very London-centric at this point and often thought that “east, west” etc. on the weather forecast was referring to Hackney and Shepherd’s Bush, not Norfolk and Cornwall).

We all know what happened this year. Loads of big stuff; stuff that everyone thought we would completely fuck up but actually turned out rather well. When Jeremy Hunt had the bell ringing incident, I thought that the Olympics had peaked before it had even begun but in actual fact, the sports were really great too (and we were also treated to a second instance of political-it-must-be-satire thanks to Boris dangling from a zip wire).

But forget about the Olympics and the Jubilee and the end of the world that didn’t happen and the re-election of Obama and all that stuff because none of it really matters. This wasn’t the year of Team GB (I bet they’re really regretting their homage to Jimmy Savile now aren’t they?) or the Royals or the prank phone call or the president we wish we had for ourselves; this was the year of….dum dum dum

Paul McCartney: the embarrassingly avuncular Beatle that somebody (against the will of everyone in the UK) expropriated for the benefit of, um, everyone in the UK.

I’m not going to slam him though because he is a brilliant, brilliant musician and seems (as far as you can tell, which you never really can) to be an okay kind of guy (not withstanding the Heather Mills years). Caveat, caveat.

Finally, I should say that my basis for thinking Paul might be a nice guy is thanks to his cameo in The Simpsons episode called “Lisa The Vegetarian”.


 Paul and his late wife Linda inexplicably find themselves on the roof of the Kwik-E-Mart with Apu and Lisa where a discussion about vegetarianism begins. Surely you have to be quite nice to be a veggie – at least not a total psychopath. Anyway, this was all but forgotten until Christmas day when Paul came into my 2012 yet again with his “Meat Free Monday Cookbook”.

It’s really, really good and I like the fact he takes a realistic view of a meat-free life, rather than just bulldozing meat-eaters with PETA pictures. The book is broken down into seasons (always helpful, so you can incorporate the most plentiful and therefore, cheapest vegetables into your meals), weeks (for each Monday) and meals (breakfast, packed lunch, lunch, snack/side, dinner and dessert).

One such packed lunch caught my eye: the cheese and onion sandwich. It uses goats’ cheese and cream cheese mixed together and sandwiched, with caramelised red onion and rocket, between two slices of granary bread. Caramelissssssanything makes me drool and I was craving a cheese toastie, so I decided to sack off the goats cheese etc. and make a good old toastie with the addition of caramelised onion.

Something so "sweaty" has never looked or tasted this good.
Heat some oil in a frying pan and add half a sliced red onion. Allow the onion to sweat. When it begins to wilt, add a quarter of a teaspoon of sugar, a teaspoon of balsamic vinegar and a little seasoning. Cook for another 3 – 4 minutes.

I used edam cheese and made these in a normal toastie maker.
It was divine. So, so lovely and I can still smell the onions in the kitchen, which is a bloody good thing. So Paul, you are forgiven and will be allowed to return to our screens limitlessly in 2013. 
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Disgusting Peppered "Steak" Sandwich

It doesn't look really bad. But it is. 


The disclaimer at the bottom of my last post got me thinking; I was sure that I had had to provide some kind of food-related hazard warning before. Lo and behold, after a search through my blogging archives (the blogs that I write and then never post, due to being lazy and uninspired), I found the disclaimer in question.

Ready, Marty McFly? We’re going back in time to April 2012, when my life looked like this:

"Disclaimer: Before I start this particular blog let me just tell you that the resultant meal you will eat after toiling for actually not very long is fucking disgusting. So, please feel free to disregard this one and move along.

As usual, quite some time has gone by since my last update. It is now nearly May which is sort of nearly half way through the year and so it’s basically nearly 2013 and I have wasted all of 2012 by eating Milka bars and refreshing my Twitter home page.

Talking of 2012, has anyone been watching the Beeb’s Twenty Twelve? (I still find it funny to ask my “readers” these questions; it makes me feel all self-important as if I am actually writing a real blog). Anyway, it’s bloody brilliant. In it, my boss is wonderfully portrayed by the excellent Jessica Hynes. That’s a joke, obviously, but not a very good one. I can’t be arsed.

So, here is a list of a few things that have recently made my life a bit shit:

A few months ago I over-enthusiastically told an old friend that we should just FORGET about emails and Facebook and actually write to each other. She said “OK” but really, I bet she was thinking “Yeah right. You can’t even find the time to reply to a text with the word “yes” so how are you going to actually buy some paper and an envelope and then sit down and WRITE something”.

If that was what she was thinking, she was right because I never did write a thing and now the price of stamps has fucking quadrupled or something…so, that showed me.

I stupidly stumbled upon these pictures and spent a long time looking at them, whilst eating digestives and pulling at the fat on my cheeks.

I am accustomed to chatting to people in the kitchen at work and then agreeing to do something that they haven’t even put pressure on me to do. One such case was when I agreed to help a lawyer-cum-writer-cum-occasional-tv-commentator prepare a case against the UK government. No biggie then.

I should have known better because after spending 24 years with myself I know that I am lazy, unmotivated, prone to u-turns on commitments and always panicking. True to form, here I am with a long list of Directives that I do not understand but pretended at the time that I did. You will now understand why I decided to write this blog.

One final thing that was shit this week was the sandwich I made yesterday. Asda has a period, once every couple of months, where luxury pizzas, Activia yoghurts and Covent Garden soups are all on offer. This is the BEST time ever and I will elbow children, pregnant women and pensioners out of the way just to reach that last pizza. Even if I can’t fit everything I have bought into my fridge, it’s okay because I just pop it right into the oven and have an extra meal or two that day.

This week, the deal was off so I sullenly moped around the other aisles to see what other offers there were. I found some Quorn peppered steaks for £1 and dolefully chucked them into my wheely basket".

The offending item.

(this is where the post ends)

I obviously never posted this meal because I never got round to finishing the story. It goes like this:

I know, I KNOW that Quorn products aren’t exactly like meat. I knoooow. However, some are better than others, as will be demonstrated in the coming weeks with a post on the best veggie chilli I have ever made or even tasted. These bloody peppered “steaks” are just awful though and I don’t think it has anything to do with my cooking.



This is more of a health warning than a good old recipe but if you are an insane vegetarian who would like to pay some money to feel really sick, then get a “steak”, some rocket, tomato and bread and bundle it all together.

You’re so welcome!
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Edo Sushi



I left my job in the City with a magnificent leaving do. We went to Sushi Samba (where I had 1 of my 4 minor vegetarian fuck ups this year) and we went to a wild club where our table cost more than my law degree. We lost one of my bosses in Soho and as the most sober person, I was sent to find him (he had gone to score and later returned, courtesy of a bemused rickshaw driver, with all the buttons missing from his shirt). My other boss had blood all down HIS shirt and claimed not to know why. His PA looked like the woman at the beginning of that anti-binge drinking advert. She then looked like a naked version of that woman in the advert when I caught her with my (also naked) boss doing something that adults often do when they are naked with other people.

I left my job, not because I didn’t like it but because it wasn’t something I wanted to do forever and at 24, you have to start thinking about what you are going to do forever, don’t you? The ideas of a house (not a room), a mortgage (not rent), a marriage (not fucking around) and, gulp, a brood (I don’t even know) occasionally creep into your drug addled thoughts.

But then, you’re only 24. So you swiftly assure yourself…”Fuck this, I’m only 24!!! I don’t need to think about serious things for ages; possibly not for 20 years or forever!!”, so I joined the music industry!

I didn’t go to a label or a recording studio, I became a management assistant! In management, you have to be really organised and motivated and organised and a bit of a servant and organised. I quickly realised that I wasn’t doing any of the work I was meant to be doing, unless it was something I couldn’t get away with not doing.

For example, “Laura, could you please get me a Starbucks and water the garden?” “Yes, of course” and I did!

Or…

“Laura, could you please find us some artists who you think would go well with these producers, then burn some CDs and then research some recording studios and then find me a new cleaner?” “Yes, of course” and I didn’t!

All this work was piling up and I was very worried. As I may have said before, I am an 80% panic/20% work type of person. I pretended that everything was fine whilst doing absolutely no work. One weekend, I thought about this mess and instead of rationally deciding to stay late a few nights and do the work, I panicked.

On Monday morning, I went into the office, made my boss a cup of tea, set up her diary for the day and quit. I said that I didn’t want to be in London anymore and that music wasn’t for me and that…and that…..I wanted to be a teacher!

In actual fact, a terrible realisation had hit me: I wasn’t a manager at all; I needed a manager!

They were very mad: “You have really left us in the lurch here. Do you know that Diana Vickers’ sister wanted this job? We turned her down you know because we thought you would be better. We waited for TWO months for you to work your notice. TWO MONTHS. Even though we needed someone straight away. We could have had Diana’s sister; she really wanted this job you know”.

I didn’t care; I just thought “get me out of here right now”.

I put my room on the market, lugged every belonging I had back up to my parents’ house and registered at a temping agency.

I was worried that being up north would mean there would be no good places to eat lunch. However, during my first placement at the temping agency, I was introduced to a lovely little sushi takeaway in Sheffield city centre: Edo Sushi.

It’s extremely tiny and you can’t eat in, which is not really a problem because you can trundle along to the Winter Gardens in Sheffield and just sit there and eat it, which is much nicer than a real indoor place. There is one particularly nice member of staff – a lady, who works on the front counter. I have a bit of a crush on her, I think. Not in a sexy way but just in a I wish you were my best friend and we watched films together and thought the same things sort of way. All the other staff are nice too.

The reason I am writing about this place isn’t because of the building or the staff but because it does good, authentic Japanese food that is in the centre of Sheffield, so may be good for people nipping out on their lunch breaks.

Veggie Edo Box - £4.50 at lunchtime (the fish one is the same price)

Aubergine Katsu Curry - usually £6ish but £4.50 if you ask nicely.

It's really fucking good.
Disclaimer: As I have no readers, it hardly needs to be said that I have not been paid in money or free stuff to write this post. Having said that, if Edo Sushi or anyone else wants to send me free stuff, I promise to be absolutely and utterly corrupt and write whatever you want me to say.
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Saturday 29 December 2012

Smarties Cookies



Where do I begin? I’ve already tried to begin an “update” blog like this many, many times BUT like I just said…where do I begin? I can’t even be bothered to go onto the blog to see where I last left you guys (ha ha, guys, readers, of which I have none).

Anyway, I’m pretty sure that everything I wrote about before now eg: oh, my life in London is so tragic! and I keep making an arse of myself in a job that actually pays me enough to afford a room! seems pretty cool and glamorous now. The kind of life I wished I was living was the closest I've ever been to the life I was living! Only, I didn’t realise it at the time.

I remember when I first found out that the Olympics were going to be held in London. It was 2005 and I was (I’ve been trying to calculate this for 10 minutes but my festive drunk head just can’t work it out)….17. I was 17. I remember doing a much quicker calculation to work out how old I would be in 2012. I would be 24. I am 24!

I had all these ideas about how I would probably have a fit, successful boyfriend. I would reside in London and we would share a flat together. The flat would be really sleek and modern and definitely in a really good area of London. Not a REALLY good area like Kensington but a realistic area. Like Islington. I would also have a job but it wouldn’t be a stressy job and I definitely wouldn’t have to commute. I’d come home and cook an incredibly complex three-course meal and we’d eat with our like-minded friends over candlelight and talk about music and films and art and our opinions would all be intelligent and similar. We'd all feel so....at home, wanted and belonging to something.

I would suddenly have changed body shape and instead of looking really clumpy and uncomfortable in a pencil skirt, I'd look sleek and business-like. My hair would no longer be frizzy and limp, as I would have presumably conjured up £10,000 of disposable income for a hair transplant. All my bad personality traits (I won’t list them here as that is surely a very negative exercise) would have magically disappeared (I also paid for a therapist) and I would suddenly be generous, accepting, wildly sociable, not constantly anxious and paranoid and loved by everyone. Shit. Can you now work out my bad personality traits?

So basically, it didn’t happen.

I tried to make some cookies today and they also failed. I know that it is always proper to credit your recipes but I got these cookies from a really nice blogger and I’m pretty sure that the recipe is fine and it’s just me that fucked them all up but I’m hesitating as to whether to link here.


Upon first tasting of the cookies, I said “these taste like sausages”. My mum and brother did not agree with this. Once the cookies had cooled down, I said “these taste of nothing at all”. My mum and brother remained silent, which is, I think, a sign that these cookies taste of nothing at all.

I wondered whether I had put too much baking powder or bicarbonate of soda in the mixture because I have sometimes heard that this can ruin the flavour. However, as I don’t know what too much baking powder or bicarbonate of soda tastes like, it’s difficult to accurately say that this was the problem.

Try these at your peril. Perhaps if you are really bored or in desperate need of something to nibble on eg: all your cardboard boxes have disappeared and you need something else to chew on ASAP. A good alternative, I feel, would be to simply bypass the cookie part and just eat a tube of Smarties.

One more thing. The 24 year old me of my dreams would 1) not have made anything that turned out wrong and 2) if, by some freak accident, she HAD made something substandard, she wouldn’t waste the calories by eating them all.

I am currently eating the 5th cookie of the most disgusting batch of cookies I have ever made or tasted.




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