Christmas on a budget

 My editor had announced that we had a budget for Christmas as she flounced into the office wearing a green dress with ruffles that -- I hope -- was supposed to make her look like a Christmas tree.  The brown leggings certainly contributed to the effect by making her seem like she had a knobbly, bulbous trunk, but overall it all seemed a bit try-hard and while I found it more to be pitied than laughed-at, there were certainly smirks around the office after she left.

"You mean for the Christmas party?" I said.  Being the food-and-drink correspondent I was probably the only person who was actively hating the Christmas party.  Not only was I obliged to attend, but I would be working as the paper required me to review the party and would publish the article.  I'd tried, one year, reviewing it accurately and had been bullied into coming into the office on Boxing Day to rewrite it until I "got it right" so I was resigned to my fate.

"No, for the whole of Christmas," she chirruped like a budgie that's got into its owner's meth supply.

"That dress better not be part of it!" came a sharp-toned comment from somewhere deep in the office.  I stared at my desk and pretended that I'd not seen who said it while my editor glared menacingly around the room.

"We can increase the budget if we let someone go," she said.  "Though that would be a shame, just before Christmas.  And this dress, for those of you taking such an interest, is for the charity auction this afternoon."

"We'll be sorry to see you go," I said sincerely.  She was still hunting for her earlier critic and missed my implication.

"In fact," she said, her scowl relaxing as she gave up on hunting insultors, "we are going to have a theme week" -- everyone groaned in unison -- "of Christmas on a Budget this year.  We're going to run a series of articles on regifting, handmaking gifts from things you might otherwise throw out, cutting down on gift lists without offending people, and Christmas dinner on a budget!"  She ended triumphantly and smiled at me.  I frowned back.

"You want me to write recipes?" I asked.  I'd tried once; the Blonde had agreed to take notes and by the time we'd finished trying to make scones we had three empty bottles of London-sourced gin and a recipe that began (and ended) "Take a bottle of gin."  We might have eaten a block of butter, too.

"No," she said.  "But there are several greasy-spoons that are offering a budget Christmas lunch that you should review.  I've emailed you the details."

I hesitated.  This was much more my remit than writing recipes, but I've pretty much reviewed exactly one not-high-end restaurant in my life, and it didn't go well.  Comparing it with L'Escargot and The Fat Duck was, in hind-sight, not a good choice, but even so my observation that the food I'd been served was normally what I'd expect the protein I usually received to have been fed on was both accurate and unflattering.

"Theme week," sang my editor, and flounced into her office.

I opened my email, ignoring the swell of conversation about how flammable my editor's dress looked, and viewed the list she'd sent me with interest.  Even though it seemed faintly wrong, the idea of turning a full English Breakfast into a substitute Christmas lunch had a certain je ne sais quoi about it and the first 'menu' that suggested that bubble-and-squeak was a perfect replacement for brussels sprouts fried in bacon fat wasn't that outlandish.  I wrote the address down and noted that it closed before I'd normally start getting dressed for dinner.  Maybe it woudl have to be lunch after all.

There was no way I could think of that I'd get the Blonde to accompany me on this though.

Flattened

"There's been an accident," said the Blonde poking her head around the door.  I was contemplating dressing so I was in my Burberry dressing gown (a Christmas gift from our slightly bewildered next-door neighbour) and my argyll socks.  "And you might be wearing it."
"Ha very ha," I said, having heard that "Lol" had fallen out of fashion to the extent that only 2% of the population now used it.  I suspected that most of that 2% worked in our advertising department, based on a sample of emails that had inexplicably escaped my spam filter.  I also wondered how language mavens came up with such figures, for surely they couldn't be out on the streets with their notebooks and tablets, shoving dictaphones under people's noses and demanding that they explain how they express themselves.  Though I confess to thinking that it might be quite endearing to have a walrus-moustachioed duffer glaring at me through through his monocle and asking questions like "And do you normally decline that adjective when conversing with your chums?".  And then to realising that I was just bringing back slightly repressed memories of my Latin lessons and Mr. Throbdust.
"Yes, well," said the Blonde.  She had that look in her eye that suggested that if I didn't get a move on she'd be picking my clothes out for me, so I picked a shirt at random from the wardrobe. It was frilly down the front so I put it back and picked up the polo shirt next to it.  "A steamroller seems to have gotten away from its driver and rolled over a bicycle and someone's bag of cricket kit."
"Was anyone hurt?"
"I hope so," said the Blonde. She doesn't like London's feral cyclists.
I put on some dark trousers and considered the shoe rack.  I have exactly two pairs of shoes: work shoes and wedding shoes.  I put the work shoes on.
"Where are we going for tea then?" she asked.  "I might need to change."
"Der ebene Tafel," I said, trying to get the right harshness and clippedness into the sounds.  "The name's German apparently, but the food is modern European."
"...does that mean cabbage?"  The Blonde can put enough suspicion into a single question to make interrogation experts look like pussies.
"Only if you're lucky," I said with a half-smile.

*

Der ebene Tafel has a nice bar upstairs of the restaurant where we bought a moderately priced glass of prosecco and an outrageously priced glass of craft beer and sat on stools that looked like they'd been salvaged from a council-run leisure centre cafeteria and looked at other couples sitting around drinking and waiting to be seated.  The restaurant itself had looked moderately busy, which was impressive given that they'd been open three months already and I'd expected the buzz around them to have died down a little.  The walls were hung with art from Geraldinium Holmes's latest exhibition which I utterly failed to recognise but had the Blonde making little gasps of admiration and pointing things out to me.  Eventually I asked her why everyone in the pictures looked as though they were starving.

"Oh, that was the theme of the exhibition," said the Blonde.  "She called it Maigre, obviously, and the pictures are all inspired by hunger-strikers.  She allegedly starved one live model for thirteen days to get the right shadows on the ribs."

"She sounds delightful," I said, looking away from the pictures.

"She's wanted in eight countries for suspected human right abuses," said the Blonde.  "It's significantly increased her market worth."

Thankfully the waiter came and seated us downstairs in the restaurant before I could have more details pointed out in the pictures.

The restaurant décor was disappointing: the shag-pile carpet might have been intended to shock but it just looked like a hygiene nightmare; the tables were octagonal and looked like Claes Olaf rip-offs, and the the cutlery, though interesting shaped, seemed impratical (while the industrial aesthetic makes a change, a fork with only one tine is really just a very thin-bladed knife, and the knife with parallel blades seemed useless unless you were trying to snort coke off your plate).  The Blonde picked up the spoon, which possessed two convex sides and rapped it on the table.  It broke, and our waiter replaced it with ill grace.  Then he presented us with menus.

I ordered the multi-hued beetroot salad for starters and the Blonde opted for sauced clams.  When the plates arrived, I found myself frowning.

"I could put this in an envelope and post it to myself," I said.  The beetroots were sliced paper thin, as was everything else on the plate, including the leaves and herbs.  The whole thing was flatter than the soles of my shoes.  I looked at the Blonde's plate and it too was disturbingly flat.  I understood the point of the fork now; the only way to get the flesh out of the shells of the clams was to slide a very thin blade in there and scrape.  Each shell was barely 2mm thick and probably 15cm long.

"It's very... hard work," she said, with a sigh.

The mains were similar: my steak covered my entire plate twice over but was as thin as the beetroot slices.  I couldn't tell you how it was cooked, and I'm only sure it was because it was the wrong colour for tartare.  There was a sensation of beef, but barely that.  The Blonde ordered the spatchcocked chicken and that came out nearly eight times the size of mine.  It was neatly folded on the plate like an accordian and could probably have been worn by Lady Gaga to a Premier in Leicester Square.

"How flat are the desserts?" I asked the waiter as he passed by.

"Don't order the Napoleon," he said with a ghost of a smile.

"This has been interesting," said the Blonde.  "Perhaps we could go somewhere where there's actual food next?"

I nodded my agreement, realising that I'd managed to confuse my napkin with my beef, but that the napkin seemed to have had more texture to it.

Turkey club

It was raining outside, which was how you could tell, at a glance, that it was a British Bank Holiday.  The weather is traditional, as are the predictions of the weather, complaining about the weather, and dragging the children off to do whatever you’d planned to do if it turned out nice after all.  I have many memories, as a child, of sitting on a grey, wet beach in the drizzle, wondering if the tide would sneak in while it was foggy and cut us off from the land, stranding us to drown slowly in a grey gloom better suited to making foreign films.  I could almost have forgiven my parents if that had happened, as at least my death might have been recorded by a passing Italian with a penchant for large-breasted actresses and a depressive streak a mile wide.

“Who are you reviewing today?”  The voice shocked me from my reverie and I stopped looking out of the window and looked around the office instead.  The office had been empty, a fact I’d been counting on when I’d fled the house and come in earlier in the morning.  The Blonde had her mother over, who is also, technically a Blonde (though not one I’ve dated), and the conversation had been threatening to get on the subject of weddings, grandchildren and other things I’d rather not discuss without a decent bottle of whiskey and a non-disclosure agreement signed by all parties.

“There’s a new place,” I muttered, spotting my Editor leaning against the doorway.  I can only assume that she was attempting to look louche, but she looked like a constipated actress from a 60s Public Information Film.  “For a change they’re not run by a celebrity chef or theming the food to a culture that went extinct two hundred years ago, or localising themselves to an area of Europe so small that it can’t actually sustain agriculture forcing the local cuisine to be large rock-based.  They’re describing themselves as ‘Comfort Food’, which makes a nice change.”

“I was hoping you might do Contemporary British next,” said my Editor, lounging a little more artistically.  I wondered for a moment if she’d ever done any of those Health & Safety videos about being sexually harassed in the workplace, and then rejected the idea as ridiculous.  “I’ve been talking with the Futures committee–“

“The what?”

“The Futures committee, they’re new.”  Well, I could have told her that, since I’d never heard of them before.  I raised an eyebrow to indicate she should continue.  “They’re kind of like a think-tank, they’ve been tasked with looking to the future and predicting what the public will want to read about in two months to a year’s time.  I was talking to them, and they think British Contemporary is going to be a real thing.”

“Thing?” I said with heavy emphasis.  “Oh well, if it’s going to be a thing….”

“Don’t be snooty,” she said.  “You’re always just following trends, going to what’s just opened.  Why not broaden your remit a little and go to places that aren’t even open yet?”

“Because I’d go hungry?” I said.  “Because my readers want to go to these places, or not go and tell their friends that I’ve derided it to the point that they wouldn’t be seen dead there.  They don’t want to not go to places and then tell their friends that it’s the next big thing.  Where’s the fun in that?”

“Yes, but you could tr–“

“No I can’t!  You’ve reprimanded me and cut my expenses budget for going to places that weren’t open yet!”

“You were claiming to go to places that didn’t exist.”

“They did exist!  They were just so execrable that they’d closed down by the time you got the fact-checkers to look over the receipts!”

“Fine,” she sighed, looking a little careworn.  I thought that maybe she looked like Marlene Dietrich as Dietrich did yesterday.  “Just make sure that it’s on my desk by Wednesday.”

*

The Turkey Club’s headline item on the menu was a “reconsidered and deconstructed Turkey Club sandwich, served with parsnip and swede fries and a choice of ketchups”.  I ordered it, noting that much of the rest of the menu was carb-heavy and probably did constitute comfort food.  It was still pouring with rain outside, and the idea of spending the evening inside stuffing myself with dumplings, pasta, sandwiches and red wine was strongly appealing.  So much so that I was actually looking forward to the food when it arrived.

“Excuse me?” I asked almost the second the waiter’s hand had let go on the plate.  He looked at me, and I swear I saw the glitter of a tear in his eye.  “This isn’t a club sandwich.”

There were slices of toasted white bread wrapped around chunks of turkey that had been dipped in some kind of gravy to try and keep them moist; there was lettuce and tomato, and that was it.

“Where’s the middle slice of bread?  The bacon?  The egg?” I asked, aware that I sounded slightly hectoring, but unable to stop myself.  A club sandwich is an easy recipe, it’s just the execution that’s hard.  I noted at this point that rather than skewering the quarters that the sandwich was cut into, the chef had opted to staple them together instead.

“The classic club sandwich,” said the waiter in a tone of recital, “does in fact not have a third slice of bread.  The owners have gone back to the original recipe.”

“That’s as maybe,” I said.  “People expect three slices these days, and it doesn’t say on the menu that you’re skimping on the bread.  And where is the bacon?  Or the egg?”

“Egg’s not classical either,” said the waiter.  There was a hint of apology in his voice, but he seemed to be avoiding the most important question.

“Where’s the bacon?”

“The turkey gravy has been made with rendered bacon fat,” he said, now holding his hands up in front of him as though to ward me off.  “The idea of bacon is present all the way through the sandwich!”

I ate it anyway.  It was a passably good sandwich as it went, but it wasn’t a club sandwich as anyone would understand it today, and calling it such showed a strong lack of understanding of marketing realities from the chef.  I wrote that down when I thought it to make sure it got into the review.  The chips were uninteresting, but then I find swede terminally dull even when the Americans try and make it more interesting by calling it rutabaga.  All in all I was quite disappointed and had to console myself by ordering six desserts, each with an individual pot of creme anglaise and calling it custard whenever the waiter was in earshot.  That almost cheered me up.

Laboutrou II

Laboutrou is a foot-fetish bar, though I confess I didn’t know this straight-away and had to look it up on the internet.  They serve food and inadequately-clad women with elegant feet and have a bar that looks well-stocked from the pictures, though the feet and ankles, often supported in stilettos, rather obscure the picture and made it hard for me to figure out what I thought the food might be like.  Plain, I suspected.  Simple stuff, probably cooked ok.  Nothing special, but then it would still be much better than the place from last night, and it would give me a review to turn in.  My editor might frown a little, but I could point out (gently, of course) that this just supported diversity and recognised that we draw our readership from all walks of life.  Which is largely bull; people will read it because they’re curious that we’ve got the gall to tell them that such a place exists, and the cojones to go there and find out what it’s like.  And as “Jim the Sales guy” knows, some of them will be curious, or desperate, enough to go there themselves “for the food” and then he’s got customers for life.  Or at least until they move on to something a little more hard-core.

I turned up wearing my suit and realised that I was little overdressed.  The bar had seats at the bar and at well spaced tables, and a catwalk of sorts ran through the whole room.  There were two girls out on the catwalk with long, elegant legs and limited clothing, and the tables closest to the catwalk were all already taken.  The only two that were empty had Reserved signs prominently displayed.  Most of the people in there were men, clad in denim jeans and flannel shirts or heavy-cotton t-shirts and paid no attention to anyone coming in.  There was a stag party, judging from the costumers (two cows, a sheep, an inflatable sheep with sunglasses, a fox, and a Santa Claus because there’s always one guy who doesn’t understand that there’s a theme or can’t be bothered to hire the right kind of costume), and there were a couple of women here and there.  That surprised me a little, and then I realised that I had no right to be surprised.  The bar advertised its food, with the foot as optional, so there was no reason for women to feel like this was a male-only space.

The maître’d took one look at me and ushered me over to my seat the bar without asking my name.  I raised an eyebrow and he nodded – I was seriously overdressed.  I slipped my tie off and into my pocket, but the room didn’t seem like anywhere I wanted to risk an expensive jacket ending up on the floor.

“What’ll it be, then, dude?” asked a bartender, seemingly appearing out of nowhere.  He looked me up and down.  “Brandy sends her regards, she’s ill tonight.  Got toe flu.”

I tried not to laugh, but I couldn’t control the smirk.  The bartender caught it.

“Yeah,” he sighed.  “Everyone laughs dude, go ahead.  It’s a real thing though, when you’re parading your feet around like they do all night five nights a week.  Occupational hazard.  You can ask your doctor.”

I managed to get the smirk under control and turn it into what I hoped was a friendly grin.  “Right,” I said.  “It’s fine, sorry.  In my line of work you get all kinds of odd digestive ailments from time to time that people don’t believe are real either.”

“I don’t want to hear about that dude, that’s disgusting!  You eating or not?”

Toe flu fine for dinner conversation but Montezuma’s Revenge wasn’t?  Well actually, he might have a point there.  I picked up the menu and scanned it: bar food seemed about the right description.

“Chicken strippers, onion rings,…” I rattled off seven items and then turned to the drinks list.  To my surprise all the beers listed were local or described as craft.  After several moments of indecision I realised that I’d already ordered enough food for two, so I ordered three different beers as well.  The bartender looked a little stunned.

“All for you, right?  ‘Cos you can’t feed the girls.”

I blinked as the image of little signs dotted around the catwalk reading “Do not feed the models” swam before my vision, and then it was gone again.  “All for me,” I agreed.  “Part of the job.”

And here, dear reader, is the crux of the matter.  The food that arrived was so good that I was oblivious to the girls wandering around the room for the rest of the two hours that I was there.  There could have been two hobbits chasing Gollum for all I knew or cared, but that food was incredible.  The chicken strippers were little juicy goujons of delight coated in a delicate batter that was expertly seasoned and spiced and delivered on the promise that the Colonel made for a distinctly different piece of chicken.  The onion rings weren’t slimy, they were crisp on the outside and meltingly soft on the inside; there was a creaminess to them that I eventually got the chef to reveal was a soubise that the onions were dipped in before they were battered and fried.  The beers took a bit of working out, but eventually I figured which to pair with which foods and my mouth was rapturous about it.  The whole evening was so far removed from the one two days ago that it was hard to believe that I could find two such different establishments in the same city.

When I got home, the Blonde was sitting in the living room with the television off and her lips pur

Laboutrou I

The phone rang while I was staring at a blank piece of paper so I answered it immediately.  It had barely had a chance to start its electronic imitation of a ringing bell for the second time before I was barking “Hello?” into it, anxious to be drawn away from the writer’s block that was plaguing me.

In all fairness though, it wasn’t entirely my fault that the muse had abandoned me and was lounging around on some other writer’s couch, her cigarette dangling loosely from the corner of her slightly slack, over-lipsticked mouth, her dress falling indiscreetly off one shoulder and her mussed hair covering half her face in a way that would have made the head-chef at Borridges bite through his wooden spoon and declare a fifty-percent off special for the next hour.  The restaurant that I’d been sent to the previous evening was as dull as the soup they served and as tired as the meat in the main course.  I’d struggled to stay awake through dessert, and the food sat heavily both in my stomach and on my mind.  I had to write about this?  Pigs would have rejected it as swill, but even if I were brutally honest and said so, it would only increase business to that miserable hole from people curious to see if things could really be as bad as I’d described.  The only fitting review for it was utter silence, the damnation praise whispered in far corners where only the wind can hear it.  But handing in a blank piece of paper (again) would irritate my editor to the point where my pay-cheque might find itself similarly blank and depressingly unsigned.

“Oh,” said a voice at the other end.  It was tinny and echoey, it sounded like its owner was somewhere cavernous, possibly fornicated.  My thoughts were swept away in an instant to a grand dining room, four stories high where trapeze artists – all french, dressed in form-fitting leotards and possessing moustaches that would take people nostalgically back to the nineteen-twenties despite their having not been born till the nineteen eighties – swung back and forth above the diners as a prandial display of excess that would have delighted the noble heads of Europe.  “Oh, hi!  It’s me!”

I contemplated, for a moment, the idea that maître’d’s might be so accustomed now to my presence in their dining rooms that they expected to be recognised simply by voice and background noise, and reluctantly concluded that that probably wasn’t the case.

“Me who?  Is this about a reservation?” I asked.  Perhaps I had another dinner (on expenses) waiting for me that I could write about instead of the Limbo I’d endured yesterday.

“Oh you silly!  Reservations are for Indians!  It’s Brandy!”

I suppose it’s sexist and old-fashioned but it wasn’t the name that finally brought the face to my mind, but the repeated, breathless exclamations.  Well, that and the realisation that she was serious about the Indians.  It was the Blonde.  Only it wasn’t, it was the Blonde before the Blonde.  The ex-Blonde, though that makes it sound like she changed her hair-colour, or the pre-Blonde, but again we have the hair-colour-change problem but in the other order.  “The Blonde I was dating before the current Blonde” is better, though not perfect, and rather a mouthful.  Calling her the “other Blonde” could only land me in more trouble than I’m probably in for referring to girlfriends as “the Blonde” in the first place, and the apparent tacit admission that I date women based on their hair colour alone (I don’t).  However, the Blonder might well do, as the current Blonde at least knows better than to assume that Reservations mean Indians.

“Hi Blondie,” I said, my mind still trying to reconcile what I should be calling her.

“Brandy, silly!  Hi, look, you still eat food, right?”

“Yes,” I said, wondering where this conversation could possibly be going.  “I’m not dead yet.”

“Oh hee, hee, hee!  You’re still so funny!  Look!” (I resisted the urge to turn my head and look out of the window) “I’m working at Laboutrou now and Jim!  He’s the sales guy!  He’s funny too!  Jim found out that I know you!  Hee, hee, hee!  He asked if you would come and review us!  Isn’t that funny?!”

“Sure,” I said.  “What time’s dinner?”

Rawberry Horecake

Desserts are tricky things.  Too often I find them relegated to the end of the menu, somewhere to dump them out of sight and out of mind because the chef would far rather be doing something interesting with the starters or exotic with the mains.  The dessert comes as an afterthought, and might as well be tipped out of a tin, microwaved until it smokes and then submerged in industrial custard.  That said, I do remember one restaurant where the chef was far more interested in doing the wait-staff than the food.  That was a long, hungry evening listening to ecstatic screams that only served to let me know that the chef was actually good at things he turned his mind to.  But mostly, I avoid the desserts or order them only because the Blonde is on a diet and wants to look longingly at the food before refusing to eat any of it and sulking about it in the cab on the way home.

“There’s a dessert restaurant you’ve not reviewed yet,” said my editor, waving a copy of some free newspaper at me.  “They’ve reviewed it in here, and I’m fed up with them scooping us!”

“They only appear to be scooping us because you use their restaurant pages to decide what to send me to review next,” I riposted.  “You’ve completely ignored my review of Porkgasm and it’s been three weeks now.  You’ve also ignored my review of Arabetty, and there are no other restaurants in London serving Raven on the menu.”

“Who wants to eat raven?  People like desserts.  You like desserts.  Go and review this place.”

“I don’t like desserts,” I said with feeling.  So much so that I had to spit in the wastebin to get the memory of the taste of industrial custard out of my mouth.

“Don’t spit in the bins, people copy you and then the cleaners complain that everything’s soggy.”

“Why do the cleaners care?” I asked, puzzled suddenly.  “What are they doing with the rubbish that they care if it’s soggy or not?”

“I don’t know,” she said waving the free paper at me.  “Desserts!”

“I don’t like them,” I said.  “I think I told you that already.”

“Why not?  Who doesn’t like something sweet to finish a meal with?  Like, Bombe Chocolat with gianduja sauce and Nutella noisettes, for example.”

I thought about that for a moment.   “That would make even an Oompa Loompa sick,” I said.  “And anyway, most desserts come served with industrial custard.”  I spat again.

“Don’t spit,” said my editor reflexively.  “What’s industrial custard?  Is it like custard powder?”

“No,” I said.  “No, custard powder as least would be reconstituted custard, and for all his other faults, Mr. Bird managed to put together pretty much the right ingredients for custard.  Industrial custard is vat grown from genetically modified bacteria that basically just float on top of the custard eating slime, sunbathing, and pumping out custard.  It’s as cheap as you can get, you just buy a vat and top it up with the right kind of nutrient slime every week.  Then you turn a spigot at the bottom and out runs your custard ready for reheating and pouring over your microwaved desserts.”

“That sounds horrible,” said my editor.  A sub-editor walked past her and spat in her bin.

“No spitting!  See what you’ve done now!”  She glared at me.

“Fine, I’ll go review your restaurant,” I said.  Leaving the office seemed like a good idea all of a sudden.

*

The restaurant called itself Just Desserts and I tried very hard to smile at the sign, but unlike the middle-aged matrons waddling in in front of me I couldn’t find such an obvious pun funny.  I waited while the maître’d seated them at a round table, politely deflecting their comments about his marital status, their attempts to show him photographs of their offspring, and the occasional sly hand attempting to pinch his bottom; then he approached me.

“Table for one?” he asked, his voice sepulchrally deep.  I half-smiled and nodded.  I pointed to a two-seater table in the middle back of the room.  “That one would be nice,” I said.

“That’s our Valentine’s table,” said the maître’d.  “How about I seat you outside?”  It was single-digit temperature even sat out of the wind, so I demurred.  “Very well,” he sighed.  “Try and look romantic while you’re sat there please.  If anyone asks, your date went to the toilet half-an-hour ago and you’re still waiting.”

I refrained from comment, just in case he still thought he could make good on seating me outside and sat down to look at the menu and the dining room.  The dining room appeared to have been done a new designer who hadn’t yet learned how to tone their urges down a bit.  The seats were opulent and deeply cushioned, and I sank at least three inches into my chair.  The table was solid mahogany, mostly concealed by the pristine white linen tablecloth, and the napkins were so heavily starched I could have shaved with the creases.  The room had a high ceiling, in the corners of which plaster cherubs were floating and molesting grapes.  There were only a few other customers, the largest table being that of the matrons who were now being noisy and getting drunk on Eiswein.  I looked at the menu.

Rawberry Horecake read the first item, so I stopped and read it again.  I read it a third time, and then raised a hand.  A waiter appeared as though I’d announced my intention to leave without paying.

“What’s this?” I said, pointing.

“Rawberry Horecake,” said the waiter.  “Should I read the rest of the menu to you too, Sir?”

“Thank-you, I can read,” I said.  “I just can’t guess what that’s a typo for.”

“It’s not a typo, Sir,” said the waiter.  “That’s the name of the dish.”

“Then what on earth is it?” I asked.

“Have you heard of Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm?” asked the waiter, and I nodded, only to regret it when he finished talking ten minutes later.

“I’ll take one to go, thank-you,” I said.  I’d leave the dessert on my editor’s desk and hopefully discourage her from any more mad notions of sending to review these places.  Suddenly the industrial custard didn’t seem so bad after all.  I licked my lips.

Smokiness

The Blonde had gone on holiday with her two best friends which she’d apparently known from birth.  She will spend hours a day on the phone to them, usually after she’s just come back from lunch with them, or shopping with, or Yoga-lates with them, leading me to wonder if there’s anything that ever happens in any of their lives that the other two don’t immediately know about.  It’s as though they’re attempting to defy the Copenhagen interpretation all by themselves by ensuring that perfect information is transmitted to distinct locations simultaneously and instantaneously.  But anyway, it had been Thursday afternoon, and I had been browsing on Amazon to see if there was anything humorous I could buy with my work’s credit card and have shipped to my editor’s desk, when the Blonde hobbled in clutching her hip.  I looked up, and adopted an expression of concern.

“Are you alright, darling?  Was the shopping too much?” I asked.  I’ve learned how to add a rich timbre of sincerity to my voice through too many occasions of being accused of being sarcastic when saying such things.

“It was Yoga-lates, actually,” she said.  I know only that it’s some kind of combination of Yoga and Pilates and that it was endorsed, for a while, by that political party who wanted to save the world by Yogic flying.  “I collided with Jenna and we then both hit other things.  It hurts, I don’t mind telling you that.”

Jenna, as I understood it, was the teacher of the class, though the Blonde often had acidic things to say about her which made me wonder why she attended the class at all.  I harboured the suspicion that the Blonde only went because her best friends went, and one of them was determined to go because they had a crush on Jenna.  I wondered if this collision would have caused ripples in the waters of friendship.

“We’re going to Monaco tomorrow,” said the Blonde.  I shook my head.

“That’s rather short notice,” I said.  “I’ve agreed to do the obits column this weekend, I’m not sure I can just mail it in from Monaco.”

“Not you,” said the Blonde witheringly, and I obligingly withered.  “The girls and me, we’re going.  Strictly a girly weekend of massages, spa treatments and general relaxation so I can get something done about this hip.”

I nodded, and decided it was best to keep quiet.  I waved her off to her taxi the following morning, and then found an excuse to work from home that afternoon, so that I wouldn’t be around to blame when an elephant’s foot umbrella stand, autographed by the members of Fleetwood Mac, landed on my editor’s desk in the most flamboyant gift wrap I could request.

Saturday morning, left alone and looking at wonderfully blue skies and sunshine through the window, I decided to break out the barbecue and smoke something.  There was a bag of charcoal left over from last summer, and it looked as though I’d remembered to clean the barbecue out before storing it this time, so all that I need was something for the smokiness, and something to absorb it.  I did consider briefly trying to smoke the vodka but it seemed like it would better to drink it instead (later; at this time of the morning I’m strictly coffee and cigarettes until the bacon rolls have arrived).  There was a bag of snails in the fridge, but I thought that they’d just taste of smoke (I have yet to find anything snails naturally taste of other than rubber), so that left the Blonde’s birthday cake.

Her birthday was two weeks ago, but due to a mix up between bakers the cake had only arrived Wednesday of this week.  She’d looked at it, ooh-ed a little over the exquisite icing, and then reminded me she was on a strict diet until she was happy with the way she looked in her bathing costume.  The cake had been sitting in the fridge ever since, so I figured it would be acceptable to smoke it and see how vanilla cream cake worked with a smokey infusion.

Find something to generate the smoke was tougher; there were no bags of applewood-chips or hickory-chips left over, and when I checked the garden the trees all looked to be tougher than me.  There were nettles, but nettle-smoke didn’t sound that tasty.  Checking the kitchen I thought I was going to have to try smoking with seven-grain flour for a while, and then I found a box of single-estate tea that the Blonde’s mother had given up at Christmas as part of a hamper.  Perfect!

The barbecue was a cinch to set up for smoking, so the tea-leaves went into a little foil tray that sat directly on the coals, and the cake sat on the grill. I closed the lid, and waited.

About twenty minutes later I heard an odd sloughing sound and eyed the barbecue with suspicion.  When, a few minutes later still, smoke started leaking out from it I opened it up to check on the cake.

The icing had melted and slid off the cake onto the coals and over the tea-leaves, where it then caramelised and started burning, hence the black, acrid smoke that was now billowing out (the fresh air providing new oxygen to the coals).  I scooped the cake off the grill and slammed the lid back down.  I let the barbecue cool down and then take it to the tip and replace it: there’s no way I was trying to clean burnt caramel off the wretched thing.  The cake, sooty and smelling of tar, went back in the fridge.  The Blonde wasn’t back until Monday; I had time to find someone to recover it with icing, and since she wasn’t going to eat it anyway, she’d never know.