What’s cooking - Pt XXCVII: Chicken in white wine and caper sauce, followed by apple tarte Tatin

Cooking a meal today, yippee. I like cooking, but so rarely get the chance to, mainly, I think, because my wife is jealous of her influence in the kitchen and, possibly, because she knows I cook tastier things than her. She has, on rare occasions, attempted something, usually involving salmon, but almost always it is something starkly British, such as shepherd’s pie and boiled vegetables.

There’s nothing wrong with shepherd’s pie (or its first cousin, cottage pie - I never know which is which), but like most dishes they can be made so

they are appealing, appetising and attractive, or they can resemble something found in a pretty mediocre works canteen. I’m sorry to say my wife’s cooking belongs in that latter category. (I’m not being very nice, am I? But I am being honest, in the certain knowledge that she doesn’t read this blog. In fact, the number of times she has used the internet could, without exaggeration be counted on the fingers of one hand, bearing in mind that the thumb doesn’t count as a finger.)

My sister is coming across to Britain to visit our stepmother and will be arriving in the later afternoon, and as I like cooking, I have made it my excuse for cooking something. After the above, some might claim smug, introduction, I am perhaps riding for a fall when I reveal what I plan to prepare. However. . .

I’ve shall be cooking chicken breast in white wine and caper sauce, with new potatoes (which I might, purely for the hell of it, roast) with flash-fried leeks (i.e. so that they are still a tad crunchy) served with a little lemon juice. Pudding will be an apple tarte Tatin with cream, tarte Tatin being one of the simplest puddings to create, although admittedly I shall be using ready-made puff pastry. I started it off yesterday to save

time: melt 50g of butter in a cast-iron pan (because it will later go into the oven and so a wooden or plastic handle - or plastic anywhere - would be a no-no), a very little water and sugar. Peel and slice, in generous slices, several cooking apples and layer them in the pan. Add a few more knobs of butter and a sprinkling of sugar, then cook briefly on a low heat, then let it cool.

That was all yesterday. Today I shall cover it all with the pastry, then bake it. I really don’t think a pudding could be any simpler, except, perhaps, fruit salad, which is another of my favourites. (I do dislike dishes which demand a lot of fannying around in the kitchen.) I have bought a bottle of Gewürzgtraminer and a second, cheaper, bottle of some other white wine (I can’t remember which) for the chicken dish. Bon appetit.

Where does Putin, the Crimea and the Ukraine come into all this? They don’t, except that I’d be surprised if Putin can cook. He’s more one for wrestling with bears and posing for pictures with a bare torso. Not a lot of call for posing for piccies when you are in the kitchen (except, perhaps, if you are modelling for some truly recherché porn magazine).

Paperclips at dawn? Don’t worry, Vlad lad, this lady will probably just give you a good talking to. As for van Rompuy, all that’s missing is a 99 Flake

A British prime minister of the 1930s, Stanley Baldwin, was no friend of the press and said they had ‘power without responsibility’ which, he added, was ‘the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages’. When I looked up the news this morning and saw Herman van Rompuy swanning around with the Ukrainian interim prime minister Arseniy

Yatseniuk, promising the good Ukrainian folk several billions of our money and generally behaving as though we should take him seriously, I thought that is pretty much also true of the EU: it has asquired all the trappings of a state and very much plays the part of a state, but at the end of the day it is of less consequence than a fart in the wind.

The trouble is the EU seems to believe its own bullshit. It was EU meddling in the first place, assisted no doubt by a little extra meddling from Uncle Sam, which helped create this crisis, though Putin found himself unable to say no when he was handed a golden opportunity to advance Russian interests. Van Rompuy, who to be honest I find impossible to take seriously - he looks to me as though he has yet to have his first sexual experience involving someone else - and his sidekick Baroness Ashton will love all the statesman-like swanning around, but they are living proof that there ain’t no delusion quite like self-delusion.

Here’s a picture of van Rompuy with another of his pals. I bring it to you at great personal danger because this photo is now officially banned by

Brussels and was never taken. All, or almost, all copies were tracked down and destroyed. So how have I got one? Well, all I’ll say is that writing this ’ere blog is a serious business and a sacred task I most 
certainly don’t take lightly. The truth will out (or something - Subs please check). Then there’s this pic (left, couresy of the EU press office) of Herman relaxing on one of his rare days off.

Another candidate for the Who The Hell Does She Think She Is Kidding Award 2014 is one Baroness Ashton (or Baroness Who? as she was known for several decades after being appointed the EU’s ‘‪High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy‬’. As a general rule, the longer the title, the more meaningless the job, and Ashton’s title is a good case in point).

A run-through of Ashdown’s working history will demonstrate just how supremely qualified she is to negotiate with canny operators such as Vladimir Putin. ‘Cathy’ Ashton, as she is known by assorted political luvvies, cut her political teeth as an asministrator for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and ended up as CND’s national treasurer and vice-chairs. In 1983 she began working for something called the Central Countil for Education and Training in Social Work and from that year until 1989 she was a director of something called Business in the Community. (Adding the word ‘community’ to your organisation or group’s name is usually a useful way of sounding responsible and garnering government support for whatever you’re doing as these days even the Tories like to be percieved as ‘progressive’.)

During the 1990s (when, I assume, her children were young and she chose to cut back a little on work to take care of them) she was a ‘freelance policy adviser’ and, no, I can’t imagine what such an animal does, either. But whatever it was, it was sufficient to get her appointed a life peer by Tony Blair (the chap who spent several years and several hundred thousands of lives looking for the end of the rainbow in Iraq and later Afghanistan).

Appointing someone as a life peer is useful political ploy here in Britain to bring someone into government without going through the bother - and in most case having to run the risk - of having them stand for election and perhaps not impressing too many voters.

After a spell of chairing - chairing, not running - the Hertfordshire Health Authority and then gaining some much-needed political nous by becoming vice-president of that viper’s nest of backstabbing and double-dealing, the National Council for One-Parent Families (which will most certainly have Vlad the Lad quaking in his boots), she eventually landed her first government job when she was appointed Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Department of Education and Skills. For those unaware of that British government department none of its responsibilities overlap with those of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and historically never has done.

Two years later - which means she was either pretty hopeless or so good at her job that her talents might be better employed elsewhere, Cathy washed up as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Department for Constitutional Affairs. Here, apparently, she was responsible for looking after the National Archives and the ‘Public Guardianship Office’ (and suggestions as to what that might be on the usual postcard please and sent to me forthwith).

Two years after that appointment which was made a Privy Councillor and a year later when the Ministry of Justice was set up to take over from the Wig and Pen, Cheapside, as the HQ of our brightest and best legal minds, Cathy became Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State there. At no point, you’ll notice if you haven’t fallen asleep wading through the above, did Cathy stand for election or in any way gain a popular mandate. But there again making sure the pencils stay sharpened in the Kew offices of the National Archives isn’t too onerous a job. In October 2008 which was appointed the UK’s European Commissioner and took over responsibility for trade negotiations between the EU and who ever wanted to negotiate trade with the EU.

If you have read the above, you might have noted that our Cathy has absolutely no trade or commercial experience at all - not a jot. And just how effective she was in that job might be gauged from the fact that the didn’t have it for long - barely 13 months later she was appointed the EU’s ‘‪High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy‬’, grandly described at the time as the EU’s Foreign Secretary (US: Secretary of State, Germ: Auslandsminister, Fr: etc, etc i.e. I have no idea and can’t be arsed looking it up). That appointment was something of a stitch-up - fluke wouldn’t be too strong a word - and it was greeted with derision.

Apparently, Tony Blair was angling to become the EU President, but for once our European cousins (who can obviously spot a nine euro note when they see one, having enough of their own) saw sense and as one turned him down. So our then prime minister, Gordon Brown agreed to withdraw. Blair as a candidate on the condition that a Brit was appointed ‪High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy‬. Bizarre - very, very bizarre - but sadly true.

So Cathy, who might be very nice for all I know, has plenty of experience running offices is pitched against Vlad the Lad, a former KGB colonel and that most extraordinary of Russians, a fucking teetotaller. And if that last fact doesn’t scare the living daylights out of you - a Russian who doesn’t drink vodka to excess and then some - you are probably no longer breathing.

Here’s the question everyone is asking: does she carry a gun? Answer: No, she doesn’t. Damn!

Why can’t I feel more outrage? Perhaps because neither side is as kitchen-clean as it likes to show itself. But looking at leading folk on both sides, we should be very careful to get involved. (Beware the US moral high ground)

I feel awful. I have a strong suspicion that I ought to be outraged by the actions of the Russians of marching into Crimea but for some reason I am finding it rather difficult working myself into a lather of indignation. And I don’t know why.

My first principle is Don’t Take Sides, especially in a business as murky as this. And while I’m not taking sides, I shall merely record a little of what has been going through my mind. So Yanukovich was corrupt and pocketed large sums of moolah. Yes, he should have been gotten rid of and the people of the Ukraine would have had their opportunity to do so at the election which was due in May.

The Russians insist his removal was a coup and, you know, I really can’t see it any other way, either. And if you accept that it was a coup – you might not, of course – then the chap is still the legitimate president of the Ukraine. It is a bit thick when, as in Egypt, a coup is only a coup when the good folk in the West decide. I like to be a little more straightforward on these matters. You can, perhaps, argue that some coups are legitimate and that this one was, but you are already on sticky ground if you do that. It has been pretty obvious over these past few years that the West (for which read the EU and the US) have been wooing the Ukraine into its camp.

And one thing we can be certain of is that it wasn’t for the greater glory and universal benefit of the people of the Ukraine. It was just another move in the longstanding diplomatic game which has been going on for centuries of gaining influence. Certainly, the people of the Ukraine would probably be economically better off if their country were part of the West than part of the East, but the improving the economic well-being of the Ukrainians was never a motive. A few nights ago, as part of its coverage of

what was happening in Kiev – and before Putin sent in troops to Crimea – Newsnight, not a programme given to sensationalism – had a report of far-right and ne0-Nazi elements among the anti-government protesters. Several were interviewed.

It seems also to have been the case that gangs of these neo-Nazis had taken to patrolling the streets of Kiev carrying batons in the absence of the city’s police. Then tonight I heard suggestions that these neo-Nazis were, in fact, Russian agents provocateur sent in to justify Putin’s claim that the new government in Kiev if riddled with neo-Nazi nationalist. True or not? Who knows? How can we know the truth? Well, we can’t at this stage.

There’s also the rather inconvenient fact that we, the Good Guys, aren’t above invasion ourselves, in Iraq and Afghanistan (and to this day I cannot think of a single good reason why the US and Britain invaded Iraq. It made no sense at all, none whatsoever). So it is awfully difficult to take the moral high ground on this one, although that is what we seem to be doing. And here is my final thought: the EU is once again proving as if further proof were necessary that when push comes to shove it couldn’t organise a tearound in anger, let alone a coherent, rational and intelligent response to the crisis in the Ukraine and Crimea.

The only thing I am certain of at this point is that I dearly and sincerely hope no one gets killed on either side.
. . .

This below was written a day later than the above, but I have decided to make it an addendum rather than start a new entry.

Anyone wanting a few facts about the situation in Ukraine and that the choice between one side and the other in this confrontation might care to visit this page from the Guardian. It is a rundown of some of the folk who make up the provisional government in Kiev and it doesn’t make encouraging reading. Incidentally, it is unclear who has been appointing them.

Let’s highlight the Olexander Turchynov, the ‘interim president’. According to the Guardian he is the deputy leader of Fatherland, and was previously the head of Ukraine’s domestic security service and has close ties to Yulia Tymoshenko. Fatherland is regarded as pretty much right of centre, if not right-wing and is suspected of being anti-semitic.

Then there is Oleksandr Sych, the deputy prime minister who is not exactly right-of-centre but proudly a far-right nationalist. His profile in the Guardian states that he ‘once publicly suggested that women should “lead the kind of lifestyle to avoid the risk of rape, including refraining from drinking alcohol and being in controversial company”.’ He belongs to the Svoboda (Freedom) party and is against abortion.

Rather further to the right is Dimity Yarosh who is now deputy leader of the department responsible of national security. He is head of the militant

Dimitry Yarosh makes a speech, flanked by two of
his bodyguards. The chap on the right most certainly
did not much like the look of the photographer
ultra-right-wing Praiyiy Sektor and is thought to be behind much of the violence during the recent protests.

These are the chaps the West is championing. Having said that, I should prefer to remain even-handed and state quite clearly that I would turn down the chance to break a lance for Vladimir Putin. On the face of it the situation in the Ukraine could be likened to the choice of suffering a fatal heart attack or a fatal stroke. It will need all the diplomatic skills of those in the West we trust with our security to ensure we come out of it unscathed. But I’m not holding my breath. As I remarked above it’s a wonder the EU can organise a tearound.

PS Incidentally, here’s an interesting site I came across. The usual caveat applies: don’t believe everything from the off, but investigate it, keep your feet on the ground, and evaluate what you come across with extreme diligence. But always keep an open mind.

Boy, do they grow up fast

My, how they grow. I am writing this sitting in The White Hart in Llangybi, South Wales, having a glass of wine or three and waiting for my daughter. She is three miles away at the Caerleon branch (which I’m certain isn’t the right word, but my knowledge of matters and concepts to do with academia is mercifully restricted to not knowing how to spell peddagoggy) of the University of South Wales being interviewed for a place on its primary school teaching training course.


She is 18 in August, yet it seems like only yesterday that I was changing her nappy, bouncing her on my knee, reading her nursery rhymes and drying her tears. My observation on the transience of our children’s childhood is by no means new, but just as poignant, not to say as sad, as every other time it has been made since mankind took to rubbing sticks of wood together to get the central heating going. My daughter has set her mind on becoming a primary school teacher, and good on her.

I must admit, though, that when she was younger and showed no particular preference for any profession in any direction, I had hopes that she might become a doctor, say, and I would one day find myself in the enviable position of being able to nudge the nearest Indian and tell him: ‘See that woman, there? She’s my daughter. And she’s a doctor!’ Depending upon whether his daughter is also a doctor or not, one-upmanship doesn’t come any better. But it wasn’t to be.

As a younger girl she showed an aptitude for mathematics (she most certainly didn’t get it from me) and even though, I’m not to sure of the details, she was chosen to represent Cornwall (or was it just North Cornwall) and some kind of maths olympiad the maths skills seem to have died a death. However, for a while and on the strength of her prowess at doing sums rather better than her peers for a while, he sights were set on a career in accountancy. And Lord how my heart sank. But it didn’t last, and after she had spent some time doing work experience at a local primary school and like me, finding a real joy in the company of children, the decided a primary school teacher was what she wanted to be.

. . .

I finished off the above part of the entry at home once we had driven - I had driven - the 140-odd miles back home to Cornwall. But I must recount (as best I can - sometimes these things don’t come across quite as well when written down) a scene at the pub. Sitting near me were three elderly chaps, older than me by a few year. Two were drinking beer - lager and Guinness - and the third was drinking wine.

The wine drinker wasn’t saying too much, the Guinness drinker was contributing a little more, but the lager drinker, who spoke with a thick Newport accent, was holding forth about nothing in particular as only chaps such as him know how to hold forth. Then at one point he observed that ‘the world has gone nuts’.

This was too much for me, and I turned around and told him that I had realised that the world was nuts by the time I was four. When, I asked, had he first realised that the world was basically bonkers. He’s tell me he told me, and proceeded to do some at quite some length as only some South Walian men can do, men who could make the Second Coming sound a pretty dull affair and one, if possible, to be missed.

He first realised, he said, that the world had gone nuts when ‘they’ decided to close, then knock down, Newport bus station, and build another just 100 yards away. This action I gather was the height of stupidity. For example, he told me, whereas before folk could catch a bus, arrive at Newport bus station, get off their bus and were immediately at Newport market which was just next door, now - Lord, the horror of it! - they had to walk several hundred yards to the market from the new bus station! He took the best part of 15 minutes to expand on it all and I got rather bored.

So I told him that was just a local, not to say quite trivial, incidence of the world being nuts. Could he, I asked, give me a far, far more serious example of how the world had conclusively lost its marbles? ‘I can,’ said his friend, the man drinking Guinness. ‘When they closed Cardiff bus station,’ he said.

Perhaps you had to be there. But it was typical of the humour in South Wales.

So it’s goodbye from Nichi Vendola, who has paid the price of being a ‘coming man’, and hello to Matteo Renzi. Then I consort with a cousin who insists on reminding me of my father’s James Bond years, and B. Mc. and I finally meet and discover good food doesn’t necessarily need a lick of paint

So farewell, then, Nichi Vendola, much-heralded in what seems like two centuries ago as ‘Italy’s coming man’ (by the BBC and others) and like almost all coming men since the dawn of time, he has sunk without a trace. Well, not exactly, of course: I’m sure the good folk in Italy, and specifically, Apuglia, still talk about him, nudging each other discretely when he comes into view or appears on TV and telling each other era volta un coming man, but we here in Old Blighty, where these things matter, haven’t heard a whisper about him ever since.

Perhaps he is still coming, who knows, but it is rare for a former coming man to come again. So farewell, then, Nichi Vendola, who is apparently paying the price for being openly gay, but – far, far more seriously — who wrote poetry. Can’t have that in a politician, now come we. What next? Left-wing principles? Well, blow me, aren’t they exactly what the man espoused! All in all he only has himself to blame (and me, perhaps, as I mentioned him in this ’ere blog more than two years ago, which might well be a kiss of death). Instead rising without trace a certain Matteo Renzi has agreed to be Italy’s new prime minister for the next few weeks.

Renzi, might be a tad to the left, though apparently not too much, just enough for it to be mentioned in the Guardian (who sniffily refer to him as ‘centre-left’. There’s no pleasing them, is there). Quite apart from not being openly gay, he is openly straight and flaunts his wife, two sons and a daughter; and, crucially, he doesn’t write poetry (which will comes as something of a relief to Rome’s Establishment, though he doesn’t compose operas, either, or drive badly, which is something of a black

mark against him in some circles. The Pope is said to be rather put out, but feels that as a non-Italian, it is best he say nothing).

The status of former coming man Nichi Vendola might well be gauged from the rather distressing news that his entry on English Wikipedia (‘The fount of all knowledge — no fact too trivial!’) has not been updated since November 2013. And even though there has been some tinkering to his Italian Wikipedia entry as recently as last week, the most recent news of him recorded there is that from 2011 when he was in line to take over the leadership of the Italian Left and fight the next general election for them. Or not, as we now know.

Moral of the story: if you hear of someone touting you as ‘the coming man’, do everything you can to silence him (murder might well be legally and morally acceptable under the circumstances). And if, of course, you are a woman being touted as ‘the coming man’, you have even more grounds for outrage and violent action.

. . .

From leaving work in Kensington at 6pm on Wednesday (6.09pm for the OCD sufferers among you) until arriving home here in Cornwall last night at 9.30pm (9.27pm), I seem to have spent almost all that time getting to know the lesser highways of Sussex, Kent, Hampshire and Dorset, and becoming acquainted with the several thousand roundabouts dotted around those counties.

My reason for taking to the roads was to visit a German cousin in St Leonards-on-Sea where he and his wife have holed up for a year (they are not short of a penny, he being a scion of a family which owns and runs a shipyard, but just because he’s a distant cousin, please don’t run away with the idea that I have more than two pennies to rub together).

He is always good company, though I noticed he is wheezing a great deal and as he is a non-smoker and 68, there might be some grounds for concern. It was he who, three years ago when I attended his 65th birthday party in Freiburg (a trip recorded here) who first told me that my father’s nickname among the German side of our family was Der Spion (The Spy), in acknowledgement of what I had so far thought was only occasional work for MI6.

What he told me two nights ago would make it seem that my father’s work was a little more extensive. In fact, whereas before I had always thought he had been employed by the BBC all his working life and just did a little spying to help out his pals in MI6, I’m beginning to wonder whether it wasn’t the other way around. On Thursday night Paul, my cousin, told me that when he was about 13 and was staying with us in Berlin, my father took him along into East Berlin on a trip to see a high up member of the SED Politbüro and asked him to play with the chap’s son while he and the chap went off to discuss whatever they wanted to discuss.

I shall get onto MI6 and find out whether, my father now pushing up daisies for these past 22 years, there isn’t a little more they might care to tell me. No doubt they will see me off with a flee in my ear and quote ‘national security’, but as a hack of some standing I shan’t back off unless they agree to buy me a drink.

. . .

From visiting Paul in St Leonards it was then on to The Lamb Inn in Wartling, East Sussex, to meet up with someone who went to the same school as me and who does me the honour of reading my ramblings, but who I had not met before. (I started at the Oratory School in September 1963 and he left in December 1964 and was, if I’ve worked this out, three years above me.

We talked about the usual things at such meetings between two old boys who had somehow survived boarding school — who was bent, quite why the food was so awful (actually, we didn’t discuss that but we must as it it a perpetual mystery to me who the caterers all managed to reduce perfectly good food to something akin to pigswill merely by cooking it. Correction, the chips were good, and there were always plenty of kippers and toast). I learnt one or two things I didn’t know (e.g. my house, Fitzalan, was regarded — I can’t quite remember the word he used — as the leading house. EDIT: I think this is where Zebadee things I should have said Fitzalan was regarded as smart.)If that’s true, and I can’t think my lunch companion was lying, I find it difficult to believe.

The Lamb Inn was interesting. The first thing I have to say is that the food was very good — we both had guinea fowl breast with porcini risotto.

A rare snapshot of the Lamb Inn taken in 1756 when photography was still in its infancy and colour photos were still a distant dream

risotto — but the only way I can describe the place itself is genteelly shabby. Apparently, the place was revamped by the present two owners, but what they did is not at all obvious. It first, second and third sight the house would seem not to have been touched since the Fifties.

Actually, come to think of it, and this is something my school contemporary pointed out, the loos were very modern. So perhaps the genteel shabby look is the new look and for once in my life I am in a vanguard. We had a table in front of a wood stove and it was all very pleasant. I could have stayed another few hours, but knowing what a bastard my drive home to Cornwall from East Sussex would be, I set off at 3.15pm. But I shall most certainly go back there again, and I would recommend it. The background music was provided by a set of Sixties LPs played on what we elderly folk quaintly call a ‘record player’. Yet the two owners (who might well have been brothers) could not have been older than 26.