The waiting game

At the moment I’m waiting to find out when the interviews will be for the one available studio position in, the now flitting, S&UN prepress.
Barry and myself took a trip into Glasgow on last Wednesday after being invited over to Central Quay to visit the Daily Record building, S&UN Prepress’ new home. It’s more than a little odd going over and being giving the guided tour before you even know if you have a job.
We overestimated the journey time and we found ourselves waiting outside the building in the warm sunshine to go into the large office block on the Central Quay, looking out over the sparkling waters of the Clyde. It was around lunchtime so there were a few people milling about. Some smokers hanging around the corner of the building and some runners enthusiastically jumping out from the office block’s revolving door, people leaving the office on their lunch break to go out for a quick jog up and down the riverside. Barry and myself watched wondering how they managed to fit it all in, in a half hour.
When the time finally reached the fifteen minutes early marker, a reasonable amount of time to be mega early we thought, we went through the revolving door and gained our visitors’ passes from the front desk before heading into the canteen to wait for Kirsty, our host and tour guide. As we sat waiting I couldn’t help but wonder what was going to happen in the coming weeks. Would I be lucky enough to continue with my employment at the newly formed Media Scotland, would I be leaving with a redundancy payment, were there other jobs out there and was the lasagne really worth £3.50? I can make great lasagne but I wouldn’t charge someone £3.50 for a bit.
A canteen in a place of work that actually sells hot food?
I’ve never worked in such a place. The last time I was served a hot meal on a weekday lunchtime by a canteen was probably in Primary school. The meal was always spooned out from the large steel containers by the line of dinner ladies on to those all in one plastic trays, sectioned off in bevelled shapes for each course.
Getting school dinners was always a rare thing for me. School dinners were only a very occasional Friday treat, if treat is the word for it. The chocolate Rice Crispie cake was about as good as it got. Chaz always reserved his piece of Chocolate Crispie cake early morning, chatting up the dinner ladies, probably giving them some sort of sales pitch, even at that age.
Whereas, I was a packed lunch man. A couple of pieces, a packet of crisps and a fun size mars bar if it was Friday. You had to make sure you ate all your pieces though. Mr Stevens, the Janitor, stood over the large bin, eyeing you, and everything you chucked away, up suspiciously, whilst maintaining a constant vigil over the goings on over the whole lunch hall. If you even attempted to chuck half a sandwich away he would launch into a barrage of abuse, his voice echoing throughout the giant room, shaming you before the whole lunch hall and sending you back to your table with your tail between your legs and your unwanted piece that your Mum had apparently spent so much time over making that morning. Nobody was sure how Mr Stevens knew it was your Mum that had made your pieces that morning, not to mention how long it took her. He was always a highly suspicious character himself, if you ask me.
Anyway, in the Glasgow canteen, after a talking with one of the sales girls, who had moved over from the Hamilton building a few weeks before, Kirsty soon turned up and after a short chat gave us the tour of the building, going from the top, second level, where Prepress would now be based, all the way down through the busy floors, to the all important basement car park. There’s even a gym for when you’re wanting to run off some executive stress or pump some iron, handy for when you’ve had too much lasagne in the canteen.
An interesting visit but all slightly uncomfortable considering I have no idea yet on whether I’ll actually be working there or not.

The longest wooden spoon

Christmas pudding in the middle of February. A quick 3 minutes in the microwave and a dollop of vanilla ice cream on top makes a great Sunday night pudding. It's not exactly 'Masterchef' though. More like 'Swedish Chef' looking at the state of the kitchen afterwards.
The Chrimbo pudding has been sitting in our bread bin since Christmas Day now so I thought it was probably about time I broke into it. Not that I wasn’t satisfied with Ka’s wonderful risotto. A dish of rice mixed with butter, stock, peppers, chopped courgettes, onions and fleshed out with some chopped chicken. Delicious.
Better than Margi Clarke’s anyway.
On Saturday morning I switched on the tv whilst slurping down my tea, to see a clip of an old Masterchef, from a few months back, on Saturday Kitchen. The Liverpudlian ‘actress’, Margi Clarke, trying to make risotto. As she cooked she complained she wasn’t used to being judged. Her kids didn’t judge, they just ate, apparently.
It looked horrendous. Her poor kids.
Even the two loud mouthed hosts, John Torode and Gregg Wallace, agreed with me when they tried it for themselves.

Saturday Kitchen, the live morning tv cooking show, hosted by chef, James Martin, plays ten minute clips of old cookery programmes which could age from twenty years to twenty days of age. One minute you’re getting a clip from last month’s Masterchef, the next minute you’re seeing Keith Floyd downing another glass of wine whilst rocking about in a steam filled, claustrophobic little kitchen, on an old fishing boat in the middle of the eighties.
All this while James Martin kicks back and puts his feet up, sipping his wine at eleven in the morning, back in the television studio that is Saturday Kitchen with his celebrity guest who just happens to be appearing in the West End at the moment. When the old clips end and the cameras do get turned back on again, James Martin even gets other people to do all the cooking. In one section of the show two other guest chefs knock up a disgusting looking pile of raw egg and call them omelettes, following which Martin puts them up on the leaderboard, like some kitchen orientated version of the Test track challenge in Top Gear. Instead of an entertaining montage of a car racing around the barrel cordoned lap, struggling to stay on all four tyres as it slides round the corners, you have a steaming pile of yellow gloop destroying whatever reputation the guest chefs may have had before.
“I could make a better omelette than that guy!”
I’m always telling Ka as I drink my Saturday morning tea.
It can’t take much to get a Michelin star these days if that passes for an omelette. You wouldn’t touch them with a barge pole, or, in this case, the longest wooden spoon in your cutlery drawer.
Michelin, funnily enough, being a make of tyre as well. A tyre that would easily make a similar horrible pile of gloop by running over something on a road somewhere.
I wonder if James Martin would have a taste of that with his wee fork, before scribbling down a time with his big felt pen on his wee cardboard frying pans?
After a day’s jaunt in town, Saturday night was even better. We sat on the couch and watched tv all night.
Okay, not just the usual tv, it was The Sopranos, possibly the greatest drama series to have ever came out of America. But we were still couch potatoes.
I demolished a whole bag of Mackies Crisps whilst watching, Tony’s liking for heading straight for the fridge and the constant talking over the large and varied amounts of pasta dishes on the many dinner tables making me, ever so slightly, peckish as I watched.

There must be a plate of food in at least half of the scenes in each episode of the mobster drama.
Today, whilst cruising around the web, I discovered that there’s even a cookbook for sale, supposedly written by Artie himself, the restaurant owner, and childhood friend of Tony’s. Not only that, but there’s a book entitled “Entertaining with the Sopranos” supposedly written by Carmela Soprano, the wife. This title is full of recipes and tips on how to be the perfect host and the perfect dinner party. Paulie Walnuts even makes a contribution on how to host the perfect ‘surprise party’.
I’d imagine Paulie Walnuts would be great at knocking up a couple of Omelettes and Carmela would be a dab hand at the risotto. When it comes to the wine though I think Keith Floyd may just have had the upper hand.

Lasagne and inadvertant flirting

This afternoon I made the perfect Bechamel sauce for one of Ka’s lasagnes. It turns out I’m a bit of a dab hand when it comes to the old Bechemel sauce, mixing the flour with the butter and then the peppered milk and bay leaf. The two of us worked perfectly together in the kitchen preparing food for a certain somebody’s birthday gathering tonight. I think we surprised even ourselves as Ka usually ends up firing me out of the kitchen when we start working together over the hobs.
It was Ka’s Mum, Grace’s 60th birthday on Wednesday and, as is traditional in the in–law McGarva household, we went to their local restaurant/pub, Angels in Uddingston for dinner. This time a few of Grace’s friends were invited along to surprise her upon entering for the usual birthday meal. Ka, Colin, Jillian and myself went on down to the restaurant early to ensure the select number of friends invited were seated at the table waiting as Grace and Dougie eventually arrived twenty minutes later. Grace had probably suspected something was afoot when we had left the house early, using the excuse of getting money out the bank, but she certainly did not let on and we all enjoyed another meal in the Uddingston restaurant.
The food was okay and the service was okay. My chicken and rice soup was way too salty and I ordered steak and got a pork chop, which didn’t go particularly well with the pepper sauce I’d ordered to share with Colin who also ordered the same steak. Colin, who had been sitting opposite me at the large corner table at which we all celebrated, and myself also ordered the meal under the mistaken impression, due to my own fault, that bubble and squeak was sausage and mash, which is usually referred to as toad in the hole. So, in effect, I thought I was ordering steak and sausage not pork and cabbage. Along with the pepper sauce we ordered we made a bit of a pigs ear of it (whatever you call a pigs ear).
Upon finishing the delicious combination one of the friendly blonde waitresses came up behind me asking if we were all content and finished with our meals. As we had all been sitting with empty plates for the past fifteen minutes we all nodded politely, myself confirming the emptiness of my plate with a firm nod and vocal ‘yes’. Just as the waitress leant over my shoulder to retrieve my plate I, moving to the side to let her over, gave another, loud, affirmative comment of ‘beautiful’. For a few seconds I carried on smiling normally, not realising at first why the waitress looked slightly taken aback at me with a smile as she meekly took my plate away. I looked up to see Colin, struggling to contain a ball of laughter behind a hand clamped over his mouth. It was then I realised that instead of complimenting the food which had just been consumed, complete with pepper sauce, to others it had possibly, just possibly, seemed that I had been complimenting the waitress, her attributes or her lovely smile, just as she leaned over my shoulder to collect the dirty dishes. Of course, for the remainder of our sitting, this particular blonde waitress was named ‘beautiful’ and Ka and Jillian, following this course of action, christened the male waiter who had been serving us, ‘handsome’, even though they were not quite as blatant as myself when it came to the flirting (which I’d just like to point out, was completely inadvertent on my part).
The night finished with a few quick games of the McGarva tradition of ridiculously unfair and fixed pass the parcel after coffees and tea in Grace and Dougie’s house. The McGarva’s own brand of ridiculously unfair and fixed pass the parcel seemed to confuse a few of Grace’s gathered friends before they even got to unwrap any of the equally confusing parcels which included the usual diverse fair such as a feather duster, an ‘Armstrong and Miller’ book, ‘Camp rock’ pencil cases and a book on Yoga, the back cover blurb describing the physical and mental discipline exactly as how Yoda would describe the Force (a far more worthwhile discipline in my opinion).
With a trip to Paris on the cards, a fantastic photo book, created by Ka and yours truly, and many other great gifts from friends, Grace done pretty well turning sixty. She’s even sorted out her bus pass already so there’s no stopping her. Happy Birthday Grace, and enjoy the lasagne!

Bolognese and badgers

On Friday night there was a desperate search for organic beef. We travelled to three different supermarkets, throughout the wilds of Hamilton, seeking organic produce with which to feed Angela, Steven and Morgan who were due to visit on the Sunday. We went to Asda, Morrisons and then finally, Sainsburys where we managed to find some organic beef mince. Asda were useless with only a few organic beef joints which would have struggled to feed three people, and Morrisons had one lone organic chicken on the shelf. At least Sainsburys had one or two shelves devoted to the cause but with such little food available either we had just went in to the supermarkets at the wrong time of day or the organic food market is just not catching on, no matter how much Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall rabbit on. I did manage to make a cracking spaghetti bolognese with the organic meat for the visitation though which, I was told, was my best ever, so maybe there is something to all this organic carry-on after all. Personally I'm not sure it tasted any different to my usual 'conventional' bolognese, it just cost more to make this time round. Ka made the most expensive soup ever. £1.50 for four carrots?! I'd rather buy the non organic, pesticide riddled, insect protected full bag of ten carrots for 70p thank you very much and risk the possibility of Whittingstall knocking angrily on my front door. But then, that's the problem with the general population at the moment - too concerned about the holes in our wallets than the environment and what effects conventional food production is having on it?
Before the Spaghetti cooking we travelled down to Hawick on Saturday to visit Morven, Sean and Leo and see Morven's brother and his band play at the town's annual 'Party on the Pitch'. 'The Honey Budgers', sorry, 'The Honey Badgers' were excellent, though suffered the type error on the day's playlist and the support of a dreadful Elvis tribute act. Luckily we had our picnic lunch to divert our attention while he warbled. We sat on the green eating rolls, sausage rolls, Morven's vola vons and Sean's Mars Bar cake. After the Badgers, the dance outfit QFX took to the stage and the surrounding Hawick locals seemed to get a little overly excited about the beats blasting out over the Cricket grounds. Personally I thought 'The Badgers' were far more deserving for such a reception but there's just no accounting for taste. Shortly after, Ka and myself took our leave ending the day, after the long drive home, falling asleep on the couch with a bottle of champagne. Not sure what we were celebrating exactly but the bottle had been in the fridge for weeks and so Ka and myself decided that it deserved to be drunk!

Good reasons to stay off the pancakes

The sun is out today over bonnie Scotland and I'm actually looking forward to a bit of exercise tonight after last nights excesses.
After dinner last night I ventured into the depths of the kitchen's largest cupboard to find the non stick frying pan. For the first time ever, I was determined to make pancakes. After buying possibly the largest bag of flour on the Somerfield shelf, on our way home, I was horrified to discover we only had three eggs in the fridge. My recipe clearly stated I needed four. Disasterous news. However, opting to carry on regardless, I made up the batter and started producing some damn good looking pancakes of the large thinner variety, rather than the small, fat, chunky ones. The recipe did not seem to suffer too much with the lack of an egg. I even tossed them! That was a bit tricky to get the hang of. My first pancake broke apart on landing back on the pan, a few extraneous parts flying off to various points around me in the kitchen. Making sure I had cleaned up the rogue pancake parts before Ka came back into the kitchen I then showed off my handiwork serving them hot, with jam and ice cream. Fantastic. Afterwards Ka dived straight into the kitchen and reached for her flash. She claims I'm a messy chef which I find pretty slanderous. The way she cleaned the kitchen after I had been cooking you'd think the place had been attacked by the Swedish Chef.
Today is the beginning of Lent and a time of fasting. Probably a good thing as my Uncle Tom has been trying to talk Ka and myself into signing up for the Troon 10k. A distance I have not run in a long time... a good reason to stop eating all the fatty foods if ever there was one!