Category Archives: At home in Birkenhead

Pomegranates

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You can’t help feeling when eating up pomegranate seeds that these must be good for you. The two books cooks I am using this summer seem to have pomegranate either on or in every other recipe.

If the seeds have not been mixed up with beetroot or tomatoes or cucumber they will have scattered over some spiced lamb or chicken with tahini yogurt or a plate of sliced beef. And the juice is in every salad mixed up with oil and herbs and some pomegranate molasses for extra intensity.

I have got so now I cannot leave the greengrocers without having at least one in my bag just in case I might need it. I took two of them home with me this morning.

Half of the seeds have gone on top of some cooked beetroot that has been mixed up with feta and dill and the rest of the seeds are going into the salad. We are eating the beetroot and salad with piri-piri chicken cooked on the barberque and a spinach and fennel pie from the Morito cookbook and fried potatoes.

When we were in Spain at Christmas some of the trees still had old and withered pomegranate fruit hanging from their branches. There is something obscene about them. Especially when you open them out and prise out the seeds, each one caught in a thin membrane holding together the sweet tannic juice.

We spent a large part of the day in Liverpool, admiring the graffiti and looking at art out of car boots. We had lunch in the Kazimer Garden drinking Liverpool organic Summer Wheat Beer in the sun before going to look at more graffiti in the Baltic triangle and picking up two bottles of very good beer (just drunk – should have saved them) from The mad hatter Brewing Company.

 

All of a sudden Liverpool is looking pretty good in the sun.

A plague of frogs

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After two days of grey sky and rain the sun has come out so we have been out in the garden.

The rain had weighed everything down, plants have buckled and collapsed under it and the branches which overhang the bed that runs down the left of the garden are bowed over covering the bed in shadow.

For the first time in a couple of weeks there has been time to get outside, to do some tidying up and plant a few more things for the veg patch.

As I walked over the lawn I saw some strange insect crawling across the grass. Looking closer I saw that it was a baby frog no more than half an inch long. Having spotted the one the grass was suddenly alive with them and we stood still, afraid to put down our feet, for fear of standing on one of them. Hopefully a few of them will make it back to the pond next year so we can have them come visit again.

In the greenhouse the one tomato plant I planted from seed is now all of two inches tall. By way of contrast the seedlings I bought from B & Q a few  weeks ago are four foot tall and already starting to bud with small green fruit.

The garlic I planted last year in September looks almost ready for pulling and in a few weeks time we are going to have more golden beetroot than we will know what to do with.

The weather is good enough for a barbeque but I haven’t planned for that. But their is a large piece of pork marinading in quince paste and pomegranate mollasses and a bowl of chickpeas getting ready to be made into falafel.

Saturday I made tomato soup and pork scratchings. The pork scratchings are very good. It was a fatty piece of pig skin that I cut up and mixed with paprika, salt, pepper, garlic and some olive oil and cooked in a low oven for a couple of hours. I am having to slap hands away from the box in which I am keeping them.

Still listening to Bobby Womack.

Retuning

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Read the music press that is designed for men of a certain age (some of whom stroke their beards) there has been a lot of excitement this last few weeks on the first three Led Zeppelin albums being remastered and reupholstered and sent out into the world again.

I was tempted. I have all the albums in the attic and haven’t listened to them for years. Here would be a great opportunity to reinvest in them and this time round there would be a some sonic clarity to clear away the 1970’s murk.

But I resisted that temptation. Instead I bought myself a pre-amp for the record deck. I had been promising myself one of these for years.

I have known for a long time that the sound of the record deck needed some boosting but somewhere along the way I had stopped listening to records in the way that I had in the past. The ease of CDs had got the better of me.

So I got the pre-amp and I plugged it in and Galen and me did a test. The nearest test subject was Dexy’s Don’t Stand Me Down. So we started it on vinyl and then tried it on CD. Vinyl won hands down. It still wasn’t as loud but there was a physicality from the sound.

This evening I moved the testing on to Led Zeppelin and took an opportunity to try out Dazed & Confused  as loud as it would go (and I thought the neighbours would tolerate – not, of course, necessarily the same thing). Five minutes in I found myself with an air guitar in my hands, on my knees puling out Jimmy Page moves in a purple Japanese jump suit.

So all I need to now is try find a way to sort out my life so I can spend my days moving to and from a turntable turning over and changing records preferably eating good food as I do so.

We spent some time touching on that this afternoon with a long brunch with friends in the sun that finished about 6.00 in the evening. Very little cooking for me until I got home and put a beer can up a chicken’s backside to cook on the barbeque. I find that sort of thing relaxing.

Listening to Dexys – nailing a picture to a wall

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A long time ago we lived just off Cowley Road in Oxford about four minutes walk from a pub called The Bullingdon Arms.

The pub, or a version of it, is still there but it is no longer the place it used to be.

Twenty years ago it was run by Joe Ryan who made sure that each pint was served with a shamrock shaped into its creamy top, there were no cushions on the stools, fluid opening hours, a music system that only played old Irish Rebel songs and a Jack Russell called Misty. There was a yard at the back the roof of which was made out of pieces of corrugated plastic sheeting and a small back bar where I watched Germany beat England on penalties in Italy in 1990.

I was reminded of all this this evening listening to the first Dexys Midnight Runners album and the first song in which Kevin Rowland runs through a list of his favourite Irish writers; Oscar Wilde, Brendan Behan, Sean O’Casey, George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, Eugene O’Neill, Edna O’Brien andLawrence Stern. One of the walls in the back room of The Bullingdon had a black and white picture of them all.

Joe Ryan had to give up the pub when the brewery tried to tidy the place up and when they couldn’t do that just put the rent up so he couldn’t afford to keep it on. It was a good local.

I was listening to Dexys as I have been trying out some improvements I have been trying to make to the playing of records in the house.They seem to be working. I tried Galen out playing a record and then the same music on CD. He came out in favour of the record. It had a more natural sound. Good lad!

There were only two kids to feed this evening so I gave them chicken and chips. I fed myself a bulgar wheat salad and lamb meatballs made with dried barberries taking more or less based on a recipe from  Sabrina Ghayour’s Persiana.

Still listening to Dexys now late in the evening. On vinyl. But feeling a bit of a fraud not having bought the records first time round. They still get me though.

The man is a fuckin’ genius. They should have nailed his picture to the wall in The Bullingdon.