Out
of Order
By
Dominic Horton
The
theme of last week's Lowlife was food and after being delivered
safely home from the Flagon & Gorses last night (Sunday) by
Chilli Willy I decided to round off a triumphant footballing weekend
by having a celebratory Asda Sweet Chilli Chicken pizza (“cooks
from frozen in just 12 minutes.”) When things are going
spectacularly well life has a cunning habit of delivering a smack in
the face to bring you down to Earth with a bang and so it was last
night. Just as the cooking procedure was reaching its
culinary culmination to produce a workmanlike but more
than satisfactory pizza the handle of the oven door decided to fall
off, rendering the over door to be permanently open. Given the
lateness of the hour I secured the oven door with sticky tape (after
letting it cool down first of course – I am a fool but not a
complete and utter fool) and decided to fathom out how to fix it in
the morning. But this morning bought no immediate answers to the
conundrum. I suspect the answer to the problem may lie in the use of
super glue, which is a substance that terrifies me as I fear sticking
my fingers to something and having to spend the rest of my life with
my Aston Villa mug attached to my hand is not an attractive prospect.
 |
| The Frymaster General, typically eating a fry up. |
The
oven and grill being out of bounds this morning was a grave
disappointment as I have a few sausages to cook, which are an over
spill from the weekend. I didn't want to fry the sausages as they
would be too greasy for my tender constitution so the only
other alternative was to spark the George Formby grill into action
but that would cook the bangers to the other extreme and suck
all of the fat out of them leaving them dry and lifeless. So I made
do with cooking an egg in the microwave for a sandwich. I learnt
years ago via the trial and error method that you have to pierce the
yoke before cooking an egg in the microwave or it will explode like a
packed Holte End at Villa Park having witnessed the team scoring a
goal against West Bromwich Albion.
After
years of detailed experimentation I have finally settled on cheap
frozen pizzas as my post-pub food of choice. The post-pub pizza (PPP)
has many benefits: they are cheap (you can pick them up for as little
as a quid each), they are quick to cook (if you have a fully
functioning oven that is), they are infinitely more healthy
than your average takeaway and most of all they keep me away
from my nemesis, the Baby Faced Assassin at the Rhareli Peking
Chinese takeaway. Incidentally, when I walked past the Peking
last week the Assassin oddly was running up and down on the spot
behind the counter, which means that he might be trying to make his
dead time at work useful by exercising. More likely he had
regretfully eaten one of his own meals which had given him loose
bowels and he was trying to hold a movement in as Mr Ping the chef
was on the karsi.
When
I lived with El Pistolero at No 2 we used to cook fishfinger curries
on return from the pub and we fried the fishfingers for speed. The
frying pan that we had – which was more battered than the
fishfingers – only accommodated 9 fishfingers so we
either had 4 ½ each in our curries or we had to toss for the prize
of having 5 instead of 4. If my dear departed friend Alfie C was in
attendance he would treat us to a post-pub delicacy which he called
bubble and squeak. He would take whatever was in the freezer and
defrost it in the microwave, which was often so full that it's
contents could not turn. He would then mold the various foodstuffs
together before frying them into a kind of pattie which he would then
put into a sandwich. The quality of the bubble and squeak was
variable as it would depend on what was in the freezer at the time
and on how many drinks Alfie C had imbibed on the evening in
question.
 |
| My out of order oven. |
Together
with the Woodcutter, Alfie C would spend a fair proportion of his
leisure hours at No 2. The Woodcutter enacted the most impressive
post-pub eating performance that I have ever witnessed when he ate a
bag of fish and chips whilst he was asleep and snoring
and intermittently singing the odd lyric from Elvis
Presley's She's Not You.
Once
the Frymaster General and I returned to No 2 from the Imp's stag trip
to Torquay in a state of dishevellment only to find Alfie C
and the Woodcutter on our sofa drinking vodka and
watching television. To this day I have no idea how they got in
the house. Alfie cooked bubble and squeak that night, which was the
last thing I needed in my condition, and I joined them in the lounge
for vodka, which was a decision that I regretted in the morning when
I was in such a delicate state that if I was a Catholic they would
have given me the last rites. The Frymaster advised me that if I
wanted to survive that I had to eat, even if I couldn't face it. As
an act of kind charity the Frymaster made me a bowl of chicken noodle
soup and for once he managed to cook something without frying it,
which was virtually unprecedented given that I have witnessed him fry
pasta, fruit and even salad. Fried salad is something that even
grossly obese Americans have not thought of. Small doses of the soup
lead me on the slow road to recovery and ever since then I have
heeded the Frymaster's sage advice when I have woken in a less than
optimum state.
 |
| Beanfeast, by request of Toby In-Tents |
Around
the time of the bubble and squeak and fried salad episodes Alexander
Sutcliffe and I discovered powdered instant Chinese curry sauce,
which was surprisingly good and I suspect that it is the very stuff
that the Rhareli Peking and other Chinese takeaways use. No 2 was a
bit of a revolving door of waifs and strays and quiet a number of my
associates lived there over the years. Sutcliffe was so taken with
the instant curry sauce that he had it for every meal, with a few
mushrooms and onions and a bit of rice. At the time Sutcliffe was a
very faddy eater and he would eat a particular foodstuff exclusively
for a fortnight before getting fed up with it and moving on to
something else. On a trip to the supermarket he once bought a whole
sack of spuds as he planned to eat nothing but baked potatoes for the
foreseeable future. On that trip his flatulence was so
appallingly ripe that he managed to clear the whole supermarket
in ten minutes flat – even one of the cashiers fled the building.
You
knew when Sutcliffe had drunk a skin full on a Saturday as to
counteract his Sunday morning hangover he would blast out Led
Zeppelin at full volume. On the Sunday evening he had a strange
practice to chase away the booze terrors: he would chill two bottles
of white wine but instead of savouring them over the course of the
evening he would guzzle them in 20 minutes flat, leaving him
boozeless and only having instant apple tea to drink, which was
another one of his fads.
 |
| El Pistolero |
When
I lived at No 2 I was in my 20's so I still had a student mentality
to food so I could live off such staples as frozen microwave kebabs
(two for £1) and Beanfeast, which was a dehydrated mixture of
vegetarian soya mince in either a curry, chilli or bolognase
flavouring and when cooked it produced a kind of gruel which even
Oliver Twist would turn his nose up at. The soya used to play havoc
with my stomach and it made me trump constantly but I was told by
Still-in-Fjord that once my system got used to the soya that things
would settle down. But things didn't settle down and on average I
used to fart 30 times an hour, so that in addition to the Frymaster's
feet and frying stenches made for an interesting odour. But Beanfeast
was very cheap so I stuck with it, despite the protests of my
housemates.
All
this food talk is making me hungry and I just fancy those sausages
but as the oven is out of order I'll have to make do without. When I
pop out to the pound shop to buy some super glue I could always nip
into Greggs for a consolatory sausage roll, which will at least make
the task of fixing the oven a bit more palatable.
©
Dominic Horton, March 2015.
Lowlife
is dedicated to the memory of the late Jonathan Rendall
Email:
lordhofr@gmail.com
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