Copy and Pasty

In their magnum opus Give Him a Ball and a Yard of Grass, noted philosophers Sultans of Ping FC once observed that ‘man can have no greater love than give 90 minutes to his friends.’ They were wrong of course, as proved this week by my friend K who responded to my plaintive pleas in the cyber wilderness for a Gregg’s Cheese and Onion pasty BY FRICKIN’ MAKING ME SOME…


Yes, in quite literally amazing scenes I have been feasting like a king/drunken Northerner on hot melty cheese pasty goodness right here in Melbourne village (see above). And whilst there is nothing quite like the taste of a fresh Gregg’s pasty, I have to say that even if I wasn't faced with absurdly rigorous quarantine laws and the absence of some kind of matter transporter, these were damn fine pasties.

My sincere thanks to Ms K for turning my homesickness into overeating-of-cheese-pasties-in-one-sitting sickness, one of the nicest medical conditions on Earth (second only to that little understood affliction, Toomuchcurry…)

Pi in the Sky

Calling all scientists. I need your help in a quest of utmost importance that could change life in the antipodes forever. Come Bunsen, come Beaker, Come Doc Emmet Brown. Come Spock, Professor Frink and your pal, Doctor Nick. Come Doctor David Banner, but don’t get angry – for it is your scientific brain and not your enormous green hands that I need.*

For what purpose do I hear you cry? What is my sudden urgent need for the way of the petri dish and test tube after years of wanton neglect? Science, my needs are simple but they are magnificent; I need you to clone a cheese pasty. But wait. Hold on. Don’t turn away with a tut and a swirl of your pristine white lab coat (for one it’s dangerous in a lab with so many open flames and glass equipment). This is no ordinary fromage-filled baked savoury product – this is a Gregg’s three cheese and onion pasty.

‘Hold on there Mint Custard my dear chap’, I hear you say, ‘cloning of a pasty? Why don’t you just buy one?’ 'Well, like, duh, I eloquently retort – they don’t sell Gregg’s pasties in Australia do they? If they did I’d be happier about 17% more of the time and an equivalent amount wider in the waist. If they did I wouldn’t pine for them like a newborn puppy separated from its mother. If they did I wouldn’t beg overseas visitors to try and smuggle them back in their hand luggage – because even a 24-hour old cold Gregg’s cheese and onion pasty that’s been squashed under a mountain of duty free plonk and used travel stockings is still better than any pasty in Australia.

And of course it’s illegal (no, thank you over-zealous Australian quarantine laws) which means that no one ever tried – until now. Kind of. Because one kind soul at my work who happens to hail from the North East took pity on me and, doing the best she could, successfully smuggled her used pasty bag on the plane after indulging in some last minute snackage at the 24-hour Gregg’s at Newcastle airport. But the news, dear science, is that the bag WAS NOT EMPTY. Buried in its depths was a luxuriant amount of slightly crusty illegal pasty crumbs. In short, pasty DNA.

Now I may have no idea how science works, but I have been Questacon and more importantly I have seen the important bits of Jurassic Park (though not the whole film because I got scared of the velociraptors). If Richard Attenborough can clone a walking crunching biting dinosaur then surely science, surely, I can indulge my baked-turophilia down under?

Science, I may have shunned you aged 16 for the allure of the language lab and the promise of attractive mademoiselles but now I recognise the error of my ways and come crawling to you cap in hand begging for your nerdy expertise. Help me. Scientists of the world, hear my plea. Join with me and together we can share melty cheesy pasty goodness.

* I did try and think of some famous fictional lady scientists but as already explored by Astrodyke there aren’t any really… are there? Boo..

How to Cook... Cheese Savoury

What is your favourite food? Your absolute favourite. The one you’d have request for your last meal. The food you’d choose if, as a result of some unlikely and disastrous gastric surgery your Doctor said you had to eat for the rest of your life? When push doesn’t so much come to shove as jizz in its face? When someone is indeed holding you down, with a gun to your head and screaming ‘tell me your favourite… just fucking tell me!’ You know - that kind of favourite food?

My favourite food is unquestionably sandwiches. I love sandwiches. I love cold sandwiches, bread sandwiches, sandwiches in rolls, toasted sandwiches, open sandwiches, pre-packaged sandwiches, crusts on, crusts off, white, brown, wholemeal, multigrain, sough dough, Turkish, club and baguette. I love picnic sandwiches, 24-hour garage sandwiches, buffet sandwiches and even limp working lunch sarnies with repetitive fillings and a dearth of pescatarian options. In France I was mocked daily for being an English ignoramus who cut his mopping up bread in half and filled it with fancy fare from my plate. I didn’t care. I love sandwiches.

As a sandwich lover, Newcastle-upon-Tyne is some kind of heaven for random food groups lovingly served up between two pieces of bread-related product. Whilst it’s hard to argue with the iconic Gregg’s Cheese and Onion Pastie as the north east food of choice, they are sadly only available at Gregg’s and so based on availability alone, the sandwich reigns supreme.

Before Prêt-a-Manger came along and baguette-ified everything, sandwiches in Newcastle were generally served in Stotties – flat, round bread buns unlike any other bread bun on Earth. Their size and shape make them highly conducive to stuffing with huge amounts of filling with minimum spillage. Amongst my pre-vegetarian Stottie favourites were chicken and sweetcorn; ham and pease pudding; chips and chilli sauce; tuna salad and egg and bacon rolls.

However, there is one sandwich filling that stands head and shoulders above the rest. It’s cheesy, it’s tangy, it’s crunchy, it’s very orange. It is Cheese Savoury and this is how you make it…

You Will Need:

• 250g of mature cheddar cheese
• A red onion
• 1 medium sized carrot
• Ranch dressing or Creamy Mayonnaise
• Salt and Pepper
• 1 box of tissues
• 1 pair of googly stick on eyes (optional)

Step 1: Grate cheese into a bowl. All of it. Use a proper grater - one that you can lose skin on; you need your cheese chunky.

Step 2: Grate the onion. Use tissues as required until eyesight returns. (Mint Custard endorses the 'Limited Edition' Wall-E tissues, still available from a well known purveyor of paper hankies who clearly overestimated how popular the movie would be amongst tissue users). Chuck grated onion in the bowl with cheese.

Step 3: Grate carrot. To make this more entertaining I applied googly eyes to the carrot. Whilst grating I made noises like Robert Shaw as he slid down the deck into the mouth of Jaws. This is optional. Place grated carrot in bowl. This is not optional.

Step 4: take a moment to remember your fallen carrot comrade.

Step 5: season your cheese, carrot and onion with salt and pepper. I'd go less salt than pepper.

Step 6: Add some ranch sauce. How much? Well, as all great minds know - moisture is the essence of wetness, and wetness is the essence of beauty. So go ape...

Step 7: I know what you're thinking; he ate it already and then did a sick. Not so. Mix the contents of the bowl and you too will have a fresh batch of tasty luminous orange vomit-impersonating cheese savoury. Yum!

Step 8: the Serving Suggestion. For nostalgia's sake I have tried to replicate the joys of a Gregg's Cheese Savoury Salad sandwich. Sadly we have no Stotties in Melbourne so naturally I have resorted to cheap innuendo and plumped for a lovely pair of baps.

So there you have it - tangy, tasty Cheese Savoury. Stick it in the fridge and it should stand you in good stead for a few days. The 250g worth of cheese I pimped lasted all week, including another bap, two toasties (with fresh tomato) and a veggie burger. Fromagic.

Look for other tasty English Cooking recipes elsewhere on Mint Custard.

We Seem To Be Made To Suffer

I haven’t seen any new robots around Melbourne for a while but I was quite touched last night by the tragic tale of Cheesoid, Mitchell and Webb’s ‘robot that smells.’ If you haven’t seen it yet I’d heartily recommend a few minutes here on You Tube. I take my hat off to them for a story that starts off so cheerfully and yet descends so quickly into Frankenstein-esque existentialist horror. And for bringing together robots and cheese in the name of comedy and pathos (‘Why Cheesoid exist...? Cheesoid hate self…’)

'Petril'

Naturally enough Cheesoid got me thinking about other famous comedy robots, so here’s a list of some of my other favourites, starting with (might as well get him out of the way):

Marvin the Paranoid Android (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) The original and best, Marvin is the Robfather – the don of all crap but lovable robots. He epitomises anthropomorphised boxes-painted silver, covered in crappy LEDs and old oven knobs and bestowed with a voices that are highly unlikely for machines meant to make human life better.

Of course Marvin had life through the Hitchhikers books and radio series long before he first appeared on telly, so its his droning, moaning voice that is his most recognisable and endearing feature (‘The first ten million years were the worst, and the second ten million years, they were the worst too. The third ten million I didn't enjoy at all. After that I went into a bit of a decline.’)

This is just as well because I’m sure if Marvin could have seen the lame-arsed job the BBC props department did with his physical incarnation he would really have had something to moan about. Still, he now has a whole BBC mini-site dedicated to him, which might have made him smile somewhere inside. Maybe.



Talkie Toaster (Red Dwarf) Naturally enough for a show set in the future, cargo vessel the Red Dwarf has more than its fair share of inhabitants with artificial intelligence. This seems to balance out the lack of natural intelligence shown by Lister, Rimmer and the Cat. ‘Service Mechanoid’ Kryten and ship’s computer Holly are the most celebrated, but they are a little too developed for this particular list. Elsewhere there are the Skutters, wandering about the enormous ship undertaking menial cleaning tasks, insulting Rimmer with the middle digit of their three-pronged claws and renacting key scenes from their favourite John Wayne movies.

And yet of all the artificial lifeforms on Red Dwarf, none tickles me more than the Talkie Toaster. Like the best robots he has just one mission (I toast therefore I am) and goes to great lengths to make sure that he carries out his directive. To tell you more would be to spoil his joys, so I suggest just watching his finest moment, trying to persuade a disinterested Lister to partake in some warmed-up bread products.



Alternatively you can look at attempts by real people with real jobs to make a real Talkie Toaster by clicking here.

Dylan (Vic Reeves Big Night Out) It’s interesting how much sympathy can be engendered by a plastic flip-top bin on wheels with flashing lights, deely-bopper eyes and a computerised Middlesbrough accent, but I still feel sad about poor Dylan. When he first rolled onto the Big Night Out stage as the cheery ‘special friend’ of Les, Vic Reves’ silent and oft-abused sidekick, who could have known the sorry existence he would have to endure.

Constantly berated by Vic as Les’ ‘sycophantic little robot’ Dylan responds to Vic’s ongoing cruelty to him and Les with a camp and indignant “ooh you bugger!” Despite his loyalty to Les, he eventually dies an ignominious death at the hands of a 'quite riled' Mr Dennis (a newsagent who doesn’t stock Curly Wurleys because they are far too elaborate). His appearances were fleeting so I’m not sure why Dylan’s memory has stayed with me all these years (apart from saying ‘ooh, you bugger’ makes me laugh) but I’m glad to have the opportunity to commemorate his short-lived life.

Ooh, you bugger!

Medibot (Look Around You) Medibot is the future of medical science according to the Tomorrow’s World-parodying 1979-tastic vision of the world that is Look Around You. Despite resembling a cake tin attached to a police filing cabinet he is able to perform any number of complex surgeries with only minimal assistance from his friend and keeper, Dr Franklin Fu.



His only reward is a serving of his much beloved hundreds and thousands (sugar sprinkles for all you Australians and North Americans out there) which Dr Fu pops in his mouth after a gruelling day at the surgeon’s table. Medibot’s vocabulary may be limited (Meh-di-bhot!) but he makes up with his jaunty style on the mouth organ. Until Cheesoid, Medibot was my favourite 21st century comedy robot. Now they’ll just have to share. Meh-di-bhot!



MaxiPower (the League of Gentlemen): More Transformer than pure robot, MaxiPower is a crime fighting G-reg Fiat Uno whose ride has been well and truly pimped by idiot-savant Neds to impress his young mate Tristan. Although possessed with a slightly larger dictionary than Medibot (“Hello Neds, let’s solve some crime”) she is generally a bit crap, though she does play the Knight Rider theme quite well. For a while.



Her one and only mission (to stop 'some lads who are going to rob some fags from the cash and carry and sell them to their mates at the power station') ends in disaster when Neds reveals that he wasn’t able to find Tristan’s requested machine gun but has fitted a can of silly string and an ejecting box of paper clips (‘It’s meant to be drawing pins but Mrs Ridley’s ran out…’ explains Neds). Tristan’s doomed ‘aw, fook’ as the flames rise around them is worth your admission price alone.

Honourable Mentions

Smash Robots – more robot/food interfacing with cocky Martian robots mocking the stupidity of humans for eating real potatoes. English humans, to be fair.

Techno Trousers (Wallace and Gromit in The Wrong Trousers, 1993) Mechanised remote control pants plus evil penguin plus Peter Sallis equals ace. You do the maths. (‘It’s the wrong trousers Gromit! And they’ve gone wrong!’)

Twiki (Buck Rogers in the 25th Century) ‘bidi-bidi-bidi’

Metal Mickey – ‘boogie-boogie-boogie’

Tim Brooke-Taylor’s Golden Ticket-seeking computer (Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory) “I am now telling the computer exactly what it can do with a lifetime’s supply of chocolate”

How to Cook: Cheese and Pickled Onion Hedgehog

Today is Neil Armstrong’s 79th birthday. No doubt Mr I-Don’t-Want-To-Talk-To-You will be celebrating on his own in a dark room with a sensible dinner covering all the food groups and a pleasant cup of cocoa before bed.

This is a shame. If Neil was my friend I would have organised a surprise party for him with all manner of frivolous and exciting treats from my culinary repertoire and maybe even a cake with a picture of the moon on it. However, in the hope that Neil’s friends and family might be reading this and thinking of knocking him up something nice as a surprise I’ve prepared another recipe showcasing more of the best of British cooking.

Hérisson au Fromage et Oignon au Vinaigre
(Cheese and Pickled Onion Hedgehog)

Ingredients:
· 400g of mature cheddar cheese (not so mature as to be crumbly)
· 1 small jar of silverskin pickled onions
· 1 large raw potato (washed)
· A pack of cocktail sticks
· Aluminium Foil (Optional - depending on whether you’re making it for an astronaut)

Step 1: Chop cheese into something approximating 2cm cubes. Cheese fiends who ignored my earlier advice about buying cheese that’s too mature will have to stop at this point, eat the crumbly pile of cheese you’ve just created and then go back to the shop to buy something a bit more robust. Everyone else can move to stage two.

Step 2: Take your potato and, with care and respect for its potatoey ways, chop its little bottom off. This will convert your spud from a Weeble into a solid foundation for your art sculpture/ cheesy-oniony comestible.

Step 3: Skewering Time! Yes, you and your cocktail sticks are an improbable golden spaceship driven by Flash Gordon, whilst the cheese and pickled onions are the evil Emperor Ming the Merciless – stabbed right through the middle with a maniacal laugh. Repeat until the Earth is saved or all the onions are gone.

Step 4: the tricky bit. Starting at one end of the spud (so you don’t run out of room) take your cheese and onion-laden poles and push the pointy bit into the potato. This is harder than it looks if your cocktail sticks are pointy at both ends so practice beforehand on a fake potato (perhaps an apple painted brown). Keep on stabbing like Dexter until your potato is covered.

Step 5: Create a surrounding moat with any additional pieces of cheese that you haven’t eaten, then carefully place your completed masterpiece on the party table. Stand back and wait for applause.

Optional Stage for friends or family of noted astronauts: For extra showbiz pizzazz why not pre-wrap you potato in aluminium foil? Not only will it evoke memories of space exploration but you can chuck it on the fire after use and enjoy a nice baked potato long after your guests have gone. (Note too-mature crumbly cheese in this picture and learn from my shame...)


Anyway, happy birthday Mr Armstrong. Enjoy your cocoa, sir.

What Happens in Vegas

I’ve just been away for three days for a work conference. Being new to the world of lectures and finger food I wasn’t familiar with conference clichés. I was surprised to hear more than one person jokingly refer to the concept of ‘what happens on the conference stays on the conference’ – something you hear more associated with buck’s night and hen’s dos than work junkets. Naïve me... apparently conferences are full of people at it like middle-aged bunnies, revelling in the freedom from spouses and children in work-funded four star hotels.

That said, I have a shocking admission to reveal – one that I should have left on the conference but the guilt is too strong and I have to come clean. I am ashamed dear world, for I have fallen off the cheese wagon.

As with all weak-willed junkies of excess I could of course lay the blame with the fiends who stuck a cheese slice in my egg buttie without telling me until it had melted into the eggie-goodness. I could also state that the chilli prawn pizza I ordered on Friday night did not list cheese as an ingredient on the menu. I could have done that. I could also have lied, dear reader, but this is not the Mint Custard way. So I stand before you and I look you in the pixelated eye and say “Yes. Cheesy goodness has crossed my lips. And it was good. And cheesy. And I’m sorry.”

I shall complete my fromage-free March (after all there’s only 8 days to go) but just like Little Miss Muffet, I’ve learnt a very big lesson. Don’t f*ck with curds and whey.

Cheesy Challenge – Half Time Report

So I’m almost two weeks into my fromage-free March and here’s what I know:

• As with all good addictions, the third day is the hardest. It’s a good job we cleared the fridge or I’d have been off the wagon
• Pizza without cheese still works, as long as you make it yourself. Sour cream and avocado are the bomb on a pizza and so, surprisingly, is balsamic vinegar and mushrooms. La di da me…
• There is no replacement for cheese and tomato toasties after a hang over. You just have to suffer
• People don’t like it when you give things up – even for a short while - and will try all sorts of techniques to make you stop
• Cafes lie about what is in their food. I’ve now bought two ostensibly cheese free salads only to find furtively placed bits of feta looking up at me from under a leaf going ‘you know you want to.’
• Thai noodle salad is lush. It’s like tangy cold spaghetti, which is nicer than I’ve made it sound
• I’m always hungry. Clearly cheese had permeated my system to such an extent that every nook and cranny had been filled to overflowing. These nooks now cry out into the night for their dairy cavity insulation
• Pasta without parmesan is rubbish. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. I’d rather eat that dried parmesan sawdust that smells of sick than go without.
• I declare April to be cheese-only month…
  

Must go, my belly is rumbling again…

Hold the Cheese

I love cheese. Honestly, I really do. Look at my user profile; it’s writ large. Actually, look at my belly; it’s writ even larger. You know those adverts for chocolate where people look vaguely aroused after eating a Flake or the giggling Japanese actress cum food taster on Iron Chef who likes everything and makes sure everyone knows about it? Well I’m a bit like that with all things cheesy.

So as a fromage-ophile of some repute (apparently the proper word is turophile, from the Greek ‘tyros’ for cheese… but that’s a bit boring so I’ll stick to my own made-up words) I’ve taken the somewhat stupid decision not to eat any for a month.

At the risk of sounding like Edmund Blackadder’s puritan aunt and uncle, needlessly denying myself pleasure to atone for years of dairy substance abuse, I should state that I’m undertaking this mostly pointless act for reasons unrelated to Lent. I don’t recall ever giving up anything for Lent – I’m pretty sure that self-denial in all areas isn’t something that would be condoned by any higher presence and was probably just invented by Catholics to create more things to feel guilty about.

No, my cheesy abstinence is more secular in instigation. Mostly I’d like to see if I still possess any self-control whatsoever. I do have a reasonable track record in this area; it’s been three years since I went stopped the ciggies and over six since I last ate meat. However, despite their pleasures, eating meat and smoking both made me feel sick afterwards so they were relatively easy to give up. However, since I can’t actually see my arteries and I have several holes left in my belt, I can’t see any genuine downside to eating cheese so it may prove a harder beast to tame.

I’m also genuinely interested to see what I’ll eat if I can’t eat cheese. When I gave up meat I divided my mealtimes between gorging on Indian food, eating yet more cheese and (especially when eating out) experimenting with seafood. Pescetarian (or fishetarian if you prefer) living saw me raiding the ocean for all manner of exotic creatures, including swordfish, Balmain Bugs, crab, oysters, mussels and of course, fish fingers. Through eating Thai food I also broke my lifelong aversion to broccoli and discovered that I really like all manner of Asian greens. I don’t think I’d ever have gone there if I’d still been eating meat.

Whilst I don’t anticipate any Trainspotting-style cold turkey scenes with me clamouring at a locked fridge in the dead of night whilst cows with rotating udders walk upside on the kitchen ceiling, it’ll be interesting finding out where my cheese denied palate takes me. So remember, even if I turn up at your door screaming for crumbs of Roquefort or some melted Tasty on toast, just say no kids, just say no.