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.

We Still Like the Moon

There's lots of space stuff going on to mark the 40th anniversary of the first moon landings and as an avowed lunar-lover I felt it was only right that I cobble together a bit of a list of moon-related things that make me smile, as a kind of poor man's tribute....

We Choose the Moon: Ever with a finger somewhere near where the pulse might be I only found out about this yesterday but it's had me hooked ever since. We Choose the Moon is a real time replaying of all the audio from the Apollo 11 mission, from lift-off through to splashdown. Every exchange between Mission Control and Aldrin, Collins and Armstrong is rebroadcast in a 'as it happened' stylee and both parties transmissions have also been recreated as Tweets on Tw*tter - making it perhaps the first and only time that Tw*tter has been vaguely useful - if only for hard-of-hearing space geeks.

Apollo - Atmospheres and Soundtracks: sublime 1983 ambient album from Brian Eno originally created as the soundtrack to moon landing documentary For All Mankind. I've never seen the movie but the music is superb in its own right. There are noises in amongst the warm synths that recall the engine noises from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Other songs give a genuine sense of weightlessness, a fact not lost on Danny Boyle who memorably used the track Deep Blue Day to soundtrack Ewan McGregor's unlikely toilet swim in Trainspotting. Eno is introducing a live performance of music from the album on 20/21 July at the Science Museum in South Kensington, London. Click here for more details.

We Like the Moon: the spongmonkeys singing their pean to the genius of the moon is still one of my favourite things on the internet six years after it was first posted. We Like the Moon is pre-You Tube genius from Joel Veitch who turns everything he touches into weird, creepy, hilarious gold. His site, rathergood.com is blocked by the firewall at my work as 'Fun and Games' - I feel like writing to IT and saying 'yes, but they're the best goddam fun and games on the internet. Pray, let us play...'

Planet Houston: I love the first two Christopher Reeve Superman movies - an affection I'll articulate in more depth at some later date if you're lucky. However take a moment to enjoy some pure camp comic joy from Superman II as Kryptonian villains Ursa, Non and General Zod run riot on the lunar surface. Oh Terence, what were you thinking...

Audrey singing Moon River: one woman, one guitar, lots of tears from Mint Custard over the years. And all before breakfast.

Others Know Me As Clive... it seems strange to think there was a time when Vince Noir and Howard Moon weren't famous in every student household across the land or their Mighty Boosh logo plastered on t-shirts, mugs or the neatly tattooed wrist of the girl who works in a coffee shop near my old work. That said, let not their current ubiquity nor decreasing returns shade their early glory. Here's a nice compilation of Noel as the Moon, and another showcasing the incomparable jazz funk spirit that is Mr Howard Moon.

In the Shadow of the Moon: beautiful and remarkably poignant 2006 documentary retelling the full story of all the Apollo missions. Told using archive footage and retrospective interviews from all the surviving moonwalkers (apart from the ever reclusive Armstrong) it humanises images that have long since become iconic. Some of the footage of lone astronauts walking across the lunar surface is both breathtaking and awe inspiring and shows just how strange it must have been to look back across the heavens and see the Earth so far away. It also salutes the lives lost throughout the race to the moon including the crew of Apollo 1 who died in a training mission in January 1967. Worth a watch and the bigger the screen the better.

Moon the Loon: fireworks in toilets, cars in swimming pools, televisions out of hotel windows, week long benders with Oliver Reed, smashing up his equipment, ever ready to play the village idiot alone or with friends, a premature drug related death and one of the most attention grabbing drummers in rock history. If it's a rock and roll cliche Keith Moon probably invented it.

Moonlighting: oh what a strange little televisual beast this was. There was far more going on within the doors of the Blue Moon detective agency, workplace of unlikely comrades David Addison (Bruce Willis) and Maddie Hayes (Cybill Shepherd) than my ten year old brain could take in. To me it was funny and quirky and I liked Bruce, but it's only with rewatching that I got to appreciate just how far out there Moonlighting could be. A great show for breaking through the televisual 'fourth wall' in a manner commonly seen in British comedy shows like Monty Python (and latterly A Bit of Fry and Laurie and That Mitchell and Web Look) Moonlighting was smartly written and knowingly acted in a way that allowed it to get away with murder. Check out the Moonlighting entry on Wikipedia for the story behind how even the show's cancellation was turned into a plot line in which Maddie and David were turfed out of the studio lot as their set was dismantled around them. It's hard to imagine a show like this being as popular nowadays. It's even harder to imagine that Bruce Willis ever had that much hair.

Fate up against your will: there are of course approximately two and a half billion songs about the moon, so picking one to accompany Audrey Hepburn's moment of beauty is a tough call. I've always had a soft spot for the fifties versions of Blue Moon and whilst I'm not a big fan of the song I like Michael Stipe's Elvis impression when he sings "hey baby" in REM's Man on the Moon. Tides of the Moon by Mercury Rev and Marquee Moon by Television are both ace, whilst there's whole albums worth in Air's Moon Safari, Cat Power's Moon Pix and (lest we forget) Pink Floyd's magnum opus. And yet above them all there is the moment where Echo and the Bunnymen's brilliance straddled both the underground and overground in epic never to be repeated fashion. It may be one of their most famous songs, but whether you hear it on a jukebox, in the background of a movie soundtrack, on a walkman on your way home in the rain or nestled alongside the other gems from Ocean Rain, the Killing Moon is still a work of great beauty.

Ali G interviews Buzz Aldrin: "what do you say to all those conspiracy theorists who ask you 'does the moon really exist?'" Sacha Baron Cohen does his best to wind up an unflappable Buzz Aldrin and both end up winners.

Now must get back to Apollo 11... the crew have just woken up...

How to Cook...Pickled Eggs

Happy Bastille Day everyone - I hope you've all had coffee and croissants for breakfast and a protest march for lunch. In celebration of all things French I've decided to start what will be an irregularly regular series of posts sharing the joys of English cuisine.

Rightly or wrongly we English cop our fair share of abuse for our cooking - or "heating up" as is perhaps more accurate (not least from the French who fondly refer to us as les Rosbifs in the same apparently friendly but quietly patronising way that they are called frogs). Perhaps as a result we've seen Jamie, Nigella, Gordon and a whole celebrity army of British chefs marching around the world, all desperate to prove that there's more to the British than than sunday roasts, fish, chips, curry and crisps.

Well, I'm here to tell you that they're wrong. There may be a few more wagyu beef fillets and ladies fingers in some British shopping baskets but I'm proud to report that the frozen food aisles are still bigger than the fresh fruit aisles in all the UK supermarkets I've ever been in. The British may no longer rule the waves but Captain Birdseye does a fine job in their stead. Despite what you may think, this is a great thing - especially when you can only be arsed to go shopping once a month.

So I plead with you to ignore those attention-grabbing celebrity chefs and their warped international vision of British kitchens and ask you to place your faith in Mint Custard to tell you the truth about the real joys of British food. Let us begin with my favourite - the humble pickled egg.

Celebrated in song by the All Seeing Eye, pickled eggs are the perfect accompaniment to fish and chips and a pint of bitter. You can't get them in Australia (Mrs Custard has gamely tried on my behalf only to be laughed out of many a deli) so your only option is to make them yourself. This is easier than you'd think, as my step by step guide will show...

Oeufs au vinaigre (Pickled Eggs)

You will need:

• Six eggs (from a chicken - none of your posh eggs)
• A bottle of white vinegar
• An old jar of pasta sauce emptied and cleaned with boiling water

1. Boil six eggs for six minutes. This is about the length of Blur's Coffee and TV which has a very cute video about milk so maybe watch it on YouTube instead of using a conventional timer.

2. Peel all your eggs. Set aside, have a cup of tea and allow to cool (the eggs, not the tea - unless it's really very hot indeed in which case let that cool down a bit too).

3. Place eggs in clean jar. Be surprised that they all fit in. I was.

4. Pour white vinegar into jar until eggs are covered / drowned.

5. Put lid on tightly. Really tightly. Then put away in a dark cupboard for a month. This is about the same time as it takes for the moon to orbit the Earth. I wouldn't suggest you spend the whole time looking at the moon, but maybe spare a few minutes thinking about how ace it must have been to be Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin 40 years ago this week and how that even though Neil might have been the first man on the moon and destined to be famous for all eternity, at least Aldrin had Buzz Lightyear named after him and that's much cooler.

I should warn you I got this 'recipe' from my mum over the phone and it's the first time I've tried it. Other peoples' recipes on the net seem to vary and a fair few add salt. I'll keep you posted on my pickling progress in August. It could be terrible...

*****

Eggilogue: Success! - see full story here