Author Archives: Ben

Occasional recipes: chicken with brown things

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I must credit Teresa Nielsen-Hayden with this one, but her version on Making Light provides three full meals. Here’s how to make one meal for three people.

Take:

  • a couple of chicken breasts
  • 150g Israeli couscous. [I hadn’t met this before but the grains are noticeably bigger than normal couscous. Couldn’t find it in Tesco: Best Beloved had to get Mediterranean couscous from Waitrose. As I believe Israel is right next to the Mediterranean, this obviously sufficed.]
  • 1 onion
  • 1/2 cup chopped cashew nuts [well, whole cashew nuts zapped a couple of times in the food processor. Teresa goes for hazelnuts but, hey.]
  • 1 small handful mixed dried mushrooms
  • 1/2 cup dry sherry
Soak the mushrooms in a pint of boiling water for at least half an hour. Then chop them up, but keep the water they soaked in. Also make yourself two pints of stock: chicken or vegetable will do.
Lightly fry the couscous in oil to brown it. I’ve not done this before but Teresa said, so why not? Honestly can’t tell if it made a difference, though … Do likewise with the nuts. Also fry the onions. Chop up the chicken and brown well and good in oil.
Whether you do all this in series or parallel is a function of time, cooking utensils and oven top space. What matters is that at some point you have browned chicken, mushrooms, nuts and onions which you can bung altogether with the mushroom broth into a wok. Simmer on medium heat for 15 minutes. After 15 minutes, add the couscous and simmer for a further 15.
This is when you want that extra stock, because the couscous soaks up liquid like there’s no tomorrow. In the remaining 15 minutes I got through the full 2 pints. I could maybe have simmered it a bit longer because it was only a little bit sloppy. But not very.
Teresa says season to taste while it’s simmering and suggests sage, oregano, basil, salt, pepper, and a pinch of smoked sweet paprika. I didn’t use any of those because frankly the mushroom broth makes it strong and salty enough. However, shortly before it’s done, add the dry sherry.
Wash down with red wine and Best Beloved’s delicious lemon sponge layer pudding, but that recipe is not mine to share.

I for one welcome our web-literate overlords

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42% to Evan Harris (Lib.Dem.), 42.3% to Nicola Blackwood (Con.). Oxford West & Abingdon goes to the Conservatives. That’s democracy.

Let no one accuse this woman of being behind the times. Her up to the minute new-fangled web technology intertube thingy still says:

Am I unreasonable to expect a passable degree of web literacy among our elected representatives? Especially from those children born in 1979 who pretty well grew up with it? Or is this just sour grapes? Time will tell.

I’ll be fair. I gather she was a gracious opponent at the recent hustings. Meanwhile, please will the media stop banging on about the utterly dispensable Lembit Opik losing his seat, just because he’s the one with a silly name and lamentable personal life.

I could just write this tomorrow and save the speculation

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… but it’s lunchtime on a cold, grey day and I have an hour to fill.

So, Ben’s prediction for the election: whoever wins tomorrow, the losers will indulge in months if not years of navel-gazing trying to analyse their defeat, and produce a new winning strategy for the next election almost indistinguishable from the strategy that lost them this one. An interesting article by Ben Goldacre explains why. Studies show that people can be comprehensively owned by clear and incontrovertible evidence that is contrary to their beliefs, and not only continue to believe but actually have those beliefs confirmed (in their own minds) by the contradiction. It’s now a scientifically observed phenomenon. (Scientific? Yes: it’s a theory that offers an explanation for observed data and is independently testable and verifiable. Scientific.)

This also explains current behaviour as well as future. It explains why Labour continues to believe that the affairs of man can be micro-managed by legislation, despite an ever more lamentable catalogue of badly written laws: look after the letter of the law and the spirit takes care of itself. On second thoughts, just dispense with the spirit and make do with the ever-more badly written bit.

It explains why even if the Conservatives aren’t quite the party of Norman “on your bike” Tebbit any more (and Cameron, I think, is genuinely trying to distance his party from that era), the spirit still lurks not far beneath the surface. “Phwah phwah phwah what you don’t have a comfortable financial cushion to fall back on at any time phwah phwah how can you not be absolute master of your own destiny it’s all your own fault you know phwah phwah phwah.” And it explains how they can still be the party that can adopt a candidate who ‘founded a church that tried to “cure” homosexuals by driving out their “demons” through prayer’, and believe that a prospective MP with that on her CV is still in with a chance. If Sutton and Cheam is Conservative tomorrow morning it really can only be that the other candidates just didn’t try hard enough.

(It would be fun to be a fly on the wall at one of her exorcisms.

Priest: “Be gone, demons of gayness!”

Demon 1: “Not in these shoes, girlfriend.”

Demon 2: “Ooh, get you!”

Demon 3: “Nice frock …”

In keeping with Goldacre’s article, of course, failure to produce any demons at all will not dissuade people from trying.)

And it explains why a Lib-Dem government, or even a Lib-Dem-controlled balance of power, just wouldn’t work, because they would consistently expect everyone to be sensible and rational and grown-up and they’re not.

And all of this explains why I don’t particularly want any of that lot to win, but am resigned to the fact that one of them will and I do hope it’s not Labour.