A Paella Recipe. Not 'the' recipe. Just 'a' recipe ...

This is not the sort of thing I usually post about, but there is something about cooking a paella that I really enjoy.

Have a couple of pints (at least) of hot vegetable and/or chicken stock ready. I use Knorr stock granules – easy!

Use a decent large sauté pan. Fry off a load of onions in olive oil, add chopped chorizo sausage, garlic puree and if you like it spicy a half teaspoon of lazy chilli.

Add a good teaspoon each of ground paprika and ground turmeric.

Add diced chicken (chunks of leftover cooked chicken works too) and fry off.

Add paella rice or Arborio risotto rice (Tesco sell their own brand of each) and stir for a couple of minutes to let it absorb some of the flavours.

Add about ½ to ¾ pint of stock and stir on a low heat. As the liquid is absorbed, gradually add more stock. Stir every now and then, but if you have a good pan you don’t need to stir all the time. But do keep an eye on it!

The rice will take 35-45 mins to cook depending on how much is in the pan, how roomy the pan is, etc. Towards the end of the cooking time you can throw in some veg. I’m lazy and use things like frozen peas, mushrooms or peppers.

Keep testing the rice to see how it is cooking. The trick is not to have loads of liquid left in the pan when it is done.

If you want to add raw fish you will need to do so about 10-15 mins before the end, depending on what it is and how big the pieces are. I tend to use something already cooked, like prawns or a Tesco bag of seafood mix which contains ready cooked prawns, mussels and squid. It only needs 3-4 minutes to warm through.

If it is still a bit sloppy, switch off the heat and cover the pan with a newspaper to absorb the steam. This tip was given to me by one of my best twitter mates, but to be honest I haven’t tried it. If you add the stock gradually it should be OK anyway. It’s always a good idea to let paella stand for a few minutes after cooking before you serve.

Enjoy!

An essential accompaniment

Tony takes his teutonic tonic

Happy days

I blogged here about my time at Tübingen University and some of the lovely people I met.  One of them was not so much lovely as interesting.  He was, at that time, about the poshest person I’d ever come across.  I won’t name him in full; I’ll just call him Tony.

Tony actually had 3 first names and a double-barrelled surname, was an ex Westminster public schoolboy, wore a signet ring, lived in a very desirable London postcode, was intelligent and articulate but totally lacking in common sense, and he was as street-unwise as they come.  You’ll find this hard to believe, but he would actually use words like ‘topping’, ‘ripping’ and ‘wizard’ without even a hint of irony (“She’s a wizard with pastry” he once said of a girl who had cooked him dinner).  He even referred to the Germans collectively as ‘Johnnie Kraut’ or ‘JK’ for short.  Sadly, as we suspected even then, and as he himself acknowledged many years later, he was an alcoholic.

We all drank a lot in those days, but within our circle Tony’s boozing was legendary, not so much for the quantity he consumed (he drank no more than we did), as for the behaviour which followed.  While we might get silly and giggly after scooping a few beers, Tony would become ever more manic.  We drank because we wanted to; Tony drank because he had to.  I have no idea what his demons were, but there was something in his home life that wasn’t quite right.  He certainly didn’t seem to think much of his father, who was or had been an army officer.

On a visit to Berlin, we all wrote postcards home.  Not for Tony the traditional ‘Wish you were here’. Instead he wrote his father an incredibly vicious note outlining the alcohol, the drugs and the prostitutes he was enjoying (the latter two being figments of his imagination), and some general accusations about his father having made him an evil person.  We managed to persuade him to tear up the postcard rather than send it.  He did so and then literally sobbed into his beer.

Tony once locked us all in a friend’s room, himself included.  He was feeling lonely and at one in the morning he didn’t want the party to break up.  So he locked the door and threw the key out of the 2nd floor window into the darkness below.  There were no mobile phones in those days, so we had to shout through the window for someone to knock on the caretaker’s door and get us out.  A few nights later he attempted to do it again but this time we physically restrained him.

Look out below!

I’m not sure why we put up with him.  He was difficult to shake off, like a drunken puppy following us around.  But we rather warmed to him over time and eventually he was just accepted as part of the ‘gang’.  We even became protective towards him, which once meant getting involved in a stand off with a bunch of angry Tunisians whom Tony had upset over a game of pool.

Perhaps we stuck with him because he was at times hugely entertaining without even meaning to be.  We were in a friend’s room one night.  Unusually for student accommodation the friend had an en suite shower.  Tony decided we should all have a shower together (mostly because he was very keen on one of the girls in our group). “Great idea Tony” we said, “you get in there and get the water warmed up”.  Off came his clothes and into the shower he went.  Out of the window went his clothes, and we ran off giggling to someone else’s room, which was high up a tower block on the other side of the ‘student village’.  An hour later we were joined by Tony, wearing nothing but a very short bomber jacket tied around his waist.  It hadn’t occurred to him to borrow a pair of trousers and a shirt from the room we’d left him in.  Instead he’d walked around the student village virtually naked until he found us.  “Didn’t anyone see you like that Tony?” “Only a couple of JK in the lift”, he replied, looking hurt.  “I just nodded and said ‘Guten Abend’, but they didn’t do me the courtesy of a reply”.

I lost touch with Tony after Tübingen, but he contacted me out of the blue a couple of years ago.  He’s been living in America since I last saw him, was married but is now divorced and he has a daughter. Best of all he’s been dry for several years.  I hope his demons have left him forever.

Brandenburg Gate, Berlin

Having a ball (or the unkindest cut of all)

Seedless!

There often comes a time when a man is called upon by his wife to do something for her which, left to his own devices, he would much prefer not to do.  Usually this is little more unpleasant than putting out the bins in the rain, or fetching something from the loft, or keeping her company during some horrendous reality TV programme.  But every now and then a man’s mettle is tested to the core, and when it happened to me I’m proud to say I rose to the challenge and was not found wanting. Bruised, battered and sore perhaps, but I pulled through.

Many years ago when our youngest son was still a toddler, we had agreed that our two children were quite sufficient, and although we loved them very much we didn’t want any more.  After some discussion there seemed to be no alternative (or at least not one acceptable to my dear wife) other than a vasectomy for yours truly.  At the time we were living in Germany where I was a MOD civil servant attached to the British Forces, and so the operation was to be conducted by a military surgeon.

Before they would book me in, we were required to have ‘counselling’ by an army doctor.  This was little more than a 5 minute interview in which he pointed out that in the event of us divorcing or losing one of our kids in a traffic accident, I wouldn't be able to start afresh in the baby making department, because the snip was as good as irreversible.

The operation to turn me into what Del Boy Trotter famously called a ‘Jaffa’  was scheduled for a Friday.  This was the usual day for vasectomies, considerately chosen in order to give military personnel two days sick leave over the weekend and have them back in work on Monday. The army is very caring like that!

On the appointed day I presented myself (quite literally as it turned out) at RAF Hospital Wegberg.  Within moments I was undressed and changed into a rather fetching surgical gown which did little to cover up my bare bum.  I was handed a battery operated razor and sent to a cubicle just off the ward for a strategic shave.  The razor echoed loudly and made a hell of a clatter when I accidentally dropped it, buzzing around the tiled floor like some demented giant hornet, so what was already a nervy sort of day felt even worse when I emerged to the curious stares of all the other patients.

The procedure was to be performed under a local anaesthetic.  It’s not much fun lying back with your freshly shaved wedding tackle on display, being injected in a place no needle should ever enter.  The surgeon explained in detail what he was going to do.  Naturally I made a lame joke about the operation making a ‘vas deferens’ to my sex life, but he’d clearly heard them all before. I made one further inane attempt at conversation, asking “is it all shaved OK?”, which to be fair was probably not an easy one for him to answer without sounding a bit weird.

The experience would have been more bearable but for a small group of trainee medics popping in to observe the procedure.  The surgeon asked if I objected to them joining us.  I did actually, but as they'd already walked in to be greeted by the sight of my closely shaven and now numb genitalia, it seemed churlish to refuse.

The snip itself can best be described as stomach churningly uncomfortable but not actually painful. When it was all over I spent the next couple of days lying on my bed back home.  To her credit my wife fussed around me and fetched me food and drinks.  Friends and neighbours all seemed to know at least one person who’d had it done but unlike me, had been out and about playing football with their kids the same day.  All I can say is, they must have had balls of steel.

Years later I took my dog to be neutered.  When I collected him from the vets afterwards, he looked at me with such hurt and disappointment in his eyes.  “I know pooch, I know” I said, “but it’s for the best”.

This might sting a bit, try to relax ...

Hitch Cricket

Tuebingen. Far too pretty a town for a scruffy Herbert like me.

When studying for my German degree I was required to spend a year in Germany in order to become more fluent in the language, and also to immerse myself in German culture and so on.  Most of my fellow students were able to land well paid jobs in German schools as English Language Assistants, but no such luck for me; instead I attended the University of Tübingen about 30 miles from Stuttgart.

Tübingen was very much a university town, where students easily outnumbered the locals.  There were students from all over the world and in time I got to know Tunisians, Venezuelans, Koreans, Americans and of course Germans.  There was plenty of time for socialising, especially once I realised there was no actual requirement to attend lectures, and I decided I could just as easily become fluent in German and get to know the country by hanging out with friends and travelling around Germany, Austria and Switzerland on the cheap.

This makes me sound lazy doesn’t it? Well I was, I admit it, and I had a great time.  I knocked about with some fantastic people and although a couple of them owned cars, our usual method of transport was thumbing a lift.  Hitchhikers were a far more common sight in the early 1980s.  Many of the university buildings were situated in the town, but the majority of students lived in a ‘student village’ on a hill a couple of miles away.  There were plenty of buses but they cost money, so with typical German efficiency, the students had years before created a ‘Tremperstelle’ or hitchhikers’ bus stop.  You simply joined the queue and a succession of cars would pull over, fill up with complete strangers and give you a lift home.  You didn’t even have to stick your thumb out.

We travelled quite some distances too.  If a group of us were going to Munich for example, we’d divide into groups of 2 and arrange to meet up in a bar as and when we made it.  I always felt reasonably safe, but I did find myself on more Autobahn slip roads than I care to remember.  The German police really don’t like you hitching there, but if that’s where you get dropped off there’s not much you can do about it.

A friend and I invented a game of ‘Hitch Cricket’ in which the winning team was not the one that got to the rendezvous first, but the one which covered the greatest number of kilometres with the fewest lifts, thus allowing for variations in routes taken by the different hitching teams.  So, kilometres were runs and lifts were wickets.  We’d ask our driver to tell us how far they’d taken us and compare our scores later at the rendezvous: 150 for 9 was a rubbish score, 170 for 3 was much better.

We went all over the place and often slept rough just to save money.  We went to Munich for a Rolling Stones gig (sleeping in the ‘English Gardens’ that night with the police wandering around with torches looking for vagrants), then on to Salzburg in Austria for a bit of sightseeing (and a proper night’s sleep in a small hotel).  We also did Zurich just for the hell of it (sleeping in yet another park) and variously went to Bonn, Frankfurt and Karlsruhe, where, just in case you ever need to know, the police do not allow you to sleep in the waiting room at the railway station; “but we’re waiting for a train, officer!”

One place we couldn’t hitch to was West Berlin, at that time an island of neon and concrete in the middle of East Germany and accessible on land only by driving along the Berlin Corridor.  This road was crawling with East German police who were forever leaping out of the bushes to photograph your vehicle.  Car drivers were understandably reluctant to take complete strangers across the border with them, so instead we went on an organised coach trip over the Easter period.

A slimmer, younger me in front of the Berlin Wall, Easter 1982

West Berlin was fascinating. You hear a lot of old tosh about cities being vibrant or exciting, but this place really did have a unique atmosphere.  We did all the usual touristy things, like posing for photos in front of the Wall, but the real interest for me lay in crossing the border for a mooch around East Berlin.  We did this twice; the first time was on an organised coach trip through Checkpoint Charlie, and it was basically just a bus tour with an East German guide trying to explain away the queues outside all the shops with their empty shelves.  Far more interesting was going across unescorted on foot, which we did the following day and it gave us a glimpse of what the tour guide didn’t show us.

A lot of East Berlin still looked much as it must have done in 1945, with quite a few bomb damaged buildings still waiting to be bulldozed and redeveloped.  The ubiquitous smoky Trabant and the occasional ancient Mercedes were a far cry from the swish cars being driven around the other half of the city, and somehow everything seemed a little grey.  The underground trains were rickety old museum pieces with slatted wooden seats (I got told off by a policeman for taking a photo of one of the carriages – filming the public transport system was ‘verboten’ apparently), and the whole experience was like stepping back in time.

Checkpoint Charlie

Every now and then some shady character would sidle over and offer to buy Western currency from us. We’d been warned about such approaches; it was reputedly a favourite method for the secret police or ‘Stasi’ to entrap Westerners so they could impose heavy fines on them, although this now seems a little far fetched.  We weren’t however tempted to break the law in this way; we already had all the East Marks we could possibly use.  On entering the country you were required to exchange 25 Deutschmarks for 25 East Marks, and you weren’t allowed to take any back with you.  So we spent it on books, coffee, beer (no smoking allowed in many of the bars over there by the way, even 30 years ago) and stale sandwiches, and I even got a horrendous pair of bright red pumps from an incongruous looking department store which only seemed to have foreign shoppers in it.

My lazy approach to my year in Germany seemed to work out OK. I achieved a reasonable fluency in the language and back in the UK the following year I got my degree.  I didn’t return to Germany for nearly a decade, when my job required me to live there for a few happy years.  I was a husband and father by this time, and more to the point, a car owner.  There were fewer hitchhikers by then and to be honest I never stopped for those I did see.  The car was generally full of family and baby paraphernalia, although in truth I was probably just too selfish to pick them up.  Even so, I did sometimes wondered if these youngsters had ever heard of Hitch Cricket, and if they viewed my car speeding past them like a dropped catch.

At tea he was 127 for 6

Learning the hard way

Little Jackie Paper loved that rascal Puff

I mentioned a while back Linky Linky about starting a degree course at Leicester University as a 19 year old.  It was done in a bit of a rush because I’d very recently been thrown out of a different college. Thrown out is perhaps a little dramatic. I’d taken some exams at the end of my first year, failed them spectacularly, and then failed the re-sits later that Summer.

I’d begun a German course at Bangor in North Wales the previous October.  In hindsight I was far too immature to be given so much freedom all of a sudden.  It was only a few weeks after my 18^th birthday and there were a few things going on in my home life which had not put me in a very happy place.  So here I was with a maintenance grant, nobody to nag me for getting drunk and coming in late, and tutors who didn’t seem to care much whether you attended their lectures or not, just so long as you got your assignments in on time.

I was fine with the German.  I’d always been good at it and I liked it.  It was the secondary subjects which I messed up.  I wasn’t uninterested in ‘Linguistics’ or in ‘Education’ (a sort of first year course for people wanting to become teachers), but I just couldn’t motivate myself to make any effort.  I did the bare minimum and when the exams came round I was found out. And then at the re-sits I was found out again because I’d assumed that a miniscule amount of revision back home would see me through.

My parents weren’t too pleased and I can’t say I blame them. They hadn’t enjoyed the same opportunities for a higher education, so they’d always put a big expectation on me and my brothers to go to university.  My Mum had been clever and studious at school but she was made to leave at the earliest opportunity by her parents who needed an extra wage.  For the same reason my Dad left at 14 to work on the railways as a ticket clerk.  He went on to better things later in life, but he did it the hard way.

My oldest brother Steve avoided university by deliberately failing his A levels. My other brother Dave was far more conscientious, a bit of a swot actually, and he sailed through it all.  I wanted to go to university, but unfortunately I just couldn’t get the balance right between doing enough work to get by and going out with all my new mates.

It wasn’t all drinking and late nights.  I joined a ‘Community Action’ group which did worthy things in Bangor; this included the writing and performing of a pantomime based on the song ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’, which we set on the island of Anglesey.  It was full of pirates, witches, corny gags and slapstick silliness, and we took it around hospital children’s wards, a home for young adults with learning difficulties and other such places.

When I went to Leicester the following year things didn’t get off to a great start when my brother was killed in a motorcycle accident.  That made me a little more serious about things, but I was already more aware of what was needed to avoid a repetition of what had happened before.  I wasn’t keen to fail again; even I drew the line at being sent down from two universities.

So while I still partied pretty hard, I at least had the nous to make sure I also did enough work to pass my exams.  I was not exactly a fully mature adult when I eventually got my degree, but I had at least grown up a bit.  Who says students don’t learn anything?

I got there in the end

'Urry up 'Arry



A thing of beauty

The other week I was having lunch in a pub with some work colleagues, when the landlady came over to check that the music wasn’t too loud and that it wasn’t interfering with our conversation.  It wasn’t; indeed I had barely registered that any music was playing at all, but I was nevertheless impressed that she was thoughtful enough to check.  I’d never been asked this before, although I am sufficiently stroppy to have asked in restaurants for music to be turned down.

It got me thinking about pubs generally.  I’ve spent a fair amount of time in them over the years, although my visits are now much less frequent, partly because of pub prices and partly because, frankly, I’ve become something of a couch potato.  I'm usually to be found of an evening in my living room with a glass of wine in my hand, the laptop on my knee and the TV on in the corner.  Ironically I thought I would go to the pub more often since the smoking ban but I haven’t.  Like most ex-smokers I am disgustingly self righteous about the evil weed (except for the odd very drunken occasion when I crave a quick drag), and yet I have hypocritically fond memories of cosy smoke filled pubs.  I’m sure this can be traced to a moment in my very early childhood when I was sent into the bar of a bowling club to fetch a neighbour.  I mentioned it in an earlier blog post Linky Linky

Pubs don’t seem to have juke boxes any more; well I certainly haven’t noticed any in the pubs I occasionally visit.  I suppose they’re quite an expensive way to enjoy a song when you’re already spending over £3 for a pint, and in any case ‘real’ juke boxes rely on vinyl.  In my youth, putting money in a juke box in an unfamiliar pub could have unpleasant consequences.  When I was at university in Leicester I knew of a student who just about escaped with his life when one drunken December evening he selected ‘White Christmas’; this was in a pub packed to the rafters with Rastafarians, although knowing him I'm certain it was in no way intended maliciously.

Perhaps another reason juke boxes have all but disappeared is that we are awash with music nowadays, what with MTV, MP3, greater choice of radio stations and so on, so to pay to hear a single record in a pub must seem ludicrous (although maybe not as ludicrous as ‘Dial-a-Disc’ on the telephone if any of you can remember that!)

Another rarely seen thing in pubs nowadays is the quiz machine. These were all the rage in the 80s and 90s and a useful source of income for me.  The earlier machines had a fairly limited range of multiple choice questions.  They weren’t that difficult in the first place but it didn’t take long for a small group of us to memorise most of the correct answers.  Then it was just a question of emptying the machine before moving on to an identical machine in a pub up the road.  It was never going to make us millionaires but it was enough to buy a few pints and a kebab.

Quiz machines have been replaced by quiz nights.  I like them because they give me a chance to dredge up all the completely useless information I carry about with me.  I once used to ‘play’ for my local pub in a quiz league.  It was a fun way to spend a Sunday evening and gave me an excuse, not that I really needed one, to go to pubs I’d never been in before.  Quizzes can be horribly competitive at the best of times, but the quiz league took this to another level.  There is something quite unsavoury about two middle aged men nearly coming to blows over the spelling of an obscure TV ‘soap’ actor’s name.

All this talk of pubs has made me quite nostalgic. And thirsty. Fancy a pint? We should just about make last orders.

"Put another dime in the jukebox baby ..."

Tying the knot

There was a time in my 20s when I seemed to be forever going to weddings.  I suppose that’s pretty standard for many of us.  At that age one or other of your friends is always getting hitched.  After that you hit a spate of christenings, and without wanting to be morose I dare say the next thing will be attending funerals, but, as the government keeps telling us, we’re all living longer these days so there’s still plenty of time!

I always liked going to weddings back then.  I don’t mean for sentimental reasons, and certainly not through any interest in what the bride was wearing.  I just liked the whole ritual of meeting up with your mates and their families, catching up on their news (I’m talking pre-interweb here), and necking a couple of stiff G&Ts before the service (pints of beer are far too bladder filling; I still associate drinking gin with weddings).  I even liked the singing in church, not through any love of hymns but because out of tune singing always makes me laugh.  Most of all I enjoyed the wedding reception.

For many of us, when we were in our 20s and still single or without kids, the reception was the mother of all piss ups.   With the occasional free bar and perhaps an undercurrent of inter-family rivalry, there was also untold opportunity for a memorable or embarrassing incident.  I once saw a very posh, rotund Hyacinth Bouquet-like character who, having enjoyed several glasses of champagne, was being sick on the dance floor.  I know there should be nothing in the least bit funny about that, but I nearly wet myself to see her on her hands and knees in a voluminous floral frock and an enormous hat hanging from the back of her head, coughing and retching  like a dog.  I bet I’m not the only guest who remembers that particular day for no other reason.  Similarly, when my old school friend Francis married Billie, I remember the occasion not for the quaintness of the church, nor for the splendour of the bridal gown, but for the speech given by the bride’s father.

You may have seen an old sketch in which Rowan Atkinson stands up at a reception and assassinates the character of his new son in law.  Francis’s new father in law did something similar.  The cutting sarcasm was not quite in Atkinson’s league, but from an entertainment perspective this had the advantage of being totally authentic, and what’s more the guy was completely sober, so it was a deliberate, pre-meditated act.

Obviously I’m paraphrasing here after so many years, but he started off with a lengthy summary of Billie’s academic achievements, telling us how gifted a musician she was and about their lofty expectations for her future, before saying “So you can imagine our disappointment when she announced she was going to marry Francis”.  Up to this point most people had adopted the traditional approach of pretending to listen to the speech but allowing their minds to wander towards eying up the bridesmaids or whatever, but now everyone sat up and took notice. “We had hoped she would marry a man with a proper profession, someone who could at least hold down a job.  Not a teacher who is giving up his employment, apparently to start some sort of farm.  How does he intend to support her?  The whole thing is doomed to failure.  Well, don’t expect me to put my hand in my pocket”.

Francis had indeed just left his teaching job and bought a plot of land with a vague idea of starting a smallholding.  To be fair, we who knew him well were also pretty certain it was doomed to failure, but that’s not really the point.  Francis attempted to defend himself when his turn came to speak, but it just turned into the presentation of a fairly lame business plan, even less convincing than the ones which feature on ‘The Apprentice’.  This all rather diverted attention from his father in law’s spectacular lack of manners and finesse.  The happy couple got divorced a couple of years later.  I don’t think the reception speech had anything to do with it, although it can’t have helped much.  No doubt her father will have felt justified.

My own wedding 24 years ago went pretty much without a hitch, although I did quite literally shout my own speech through sheer nerves.  My only regret is that shortly before the big day I had allowed myself to be talked into getting the world’s worst haircut.  This fact can be forgiven but never forgotten; it haunts me to this day, and all those wedding photos are a constant reminder.  Still, I suppose it could have been worse.  I could have been married in the 1970s which would presumably have involved disastrous permed hair as well as flared trousers, huge jacket lapels and shirt collars, and possibly quite a lot of beige.  I must learn to count my blessings.

Me on my wedding day. If you think the hair wasn't so very bad, trust me it really really was.