Epicurean

One of the most frustrating things about Ireland’s schizophrenic weather is the inability to plan a good barbecue. There are few things better than meat cooked on open coals, accompanied by a cold drink enjoyed outdoors in the sunshine. Unfortunately with our climates proclivity to rain planning such an event can be as rewarding as picking the long shot in the Grand National. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.

Quality steaks are the first key ingredient. These should be picked up at a butcher, not prepacked from a supermarket. I recently bought some fine cuts of sirloin from a butcher off Aungier St. He was able to recommend and advise on which type of meat suited my needs, how long the meat had been hung, which farm it came from and the cow’s star sign. Maybe not that one.

Prepped with a rub of olive oil, salt and pepper, it should be cooked on the rare side of medium rare. When cutting into it the meat, you should be greeted with a beautiful pink color. My dad always wants his steak cooked well done. I try to tell him he is missing out.

When the meat is cooked it should be allowed to sit for a bit to let the flavours settle. It should then be enjoyed with a side salad, cold beer or a nice glass of red wine. 60’s and 70’s soul music (Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Motown) should be playing in the background to give it the perfect summer feel.

Does that make you feel hungry? Do want to run out the back and spark up the steel drum full of charcoal? Are you lusting for food? If the answer to these questions is yes, well then I’m afraid you may be among the thousands of those afflicted with a food porn addiction.

Food porn is a relatively new phenomena but it has spread quicker than facebook and is more addictive than crack. Around the world people cannot get enough of watching celebrity and amateur chefs as they slice, dice, chop and prepare food on TV. Programmes like Masterchef, Come Dine With Me and Hell’s Kitchen regularly have millions of viewers.

They don’t get any actual fulfilment from these programmes. They see beautiful dishes thrown together and are made to feel that they could have it if they wanted. Exotic food, bringing pleasure to people on the screen and making the viewer salivate and desire. It also gives people unrealistic expectations of what food really is.

Most of the time it’s not real. Just like the threesome with top heavy Swedish supermodels from that link you clicked by ‘accident’ is not real. Nobody actually cooks red mullet soup with toasted almonds and basil, or pheasant leg with rabbit saddle and mustard sauce. It’s usually pork chops and chips or a Goodfellas pizza.

The very concept of a chef as a sex symbol or celebrity is something which, ironically, leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Anybody who can think that a foul mouthed arrogant egomaniac such as Gordon Ramsey is attractive clearly needs their head examined and probably has serious daddy issues. They can argue that he is a powerful man in control of a huge empire but he’s still obnoxious.

Anyone who is any doubt that cookery programmes are borderline pornography need look no further than Nigella Lawson. Everything is laced with innuendo and is teased out so seductively that it’s easy to forget she is talking about sticky toffee pudding. Although nothing I can write about Nigella can match this clip.

Dublin played host to the Taste festival this weekend. A gathering of chefs and foodies in the Iveagh Gardens, where people were encouraged to wear their food porn addiction with pride. One of my friends who went said she really wanted to see Gino D’acampo live. He’s a chef. Not a musician or comedian. He’s not even a ventriloquist. You don’t go to see chefs ‘live’ because they cook food they don’t play Smoke on the Water.

The whole event strikes me as being left over from a time when Irish people thought they had money and would happily plonk 90 euro on the table for fancy chips and burgers on a Tuesday night in some restaurant because a spiky haired TV chef stirred a pot of bouillabaisse there once.

Maybe that’s why these programmes are so popular. People can’t afford to dine out so often so there is an increase in dinner parties where the hosts get to pretend they are Jamie Oliver or Hugh Fernley Whittingstall. It’s a cool thing to have your friends over and impress them with your culinary technique.

But you can keep your flash fried goose, sautéed in a unicorns tear (to paraphrase Dylan Moran.) I remember the first time a friend cooked for me. We were both students and the menu was very simple. It was bean and sausage surprise. A bowl of baked beans with two supermarket brand pork sausages sticking out like birthday candles.

The surprise? Hidden in the beans was another sausage.

Jayhaitch in Review 2010- Music(The personal stuff)

Reviewing a year gone by has been done countless times. I don’t really have anything overly original to add to it. Not that that has stopped me posting three separate review pieces with more to come. It has been a great year in music which made it really hard to come up with a blog piece that wasn’t thirty thousand words.

I’ve done a list of albums and songs I’d recommend here, but I want to just talk about a couple things music related that, on a personal level, were a big part of 2010.

Kormacs Big Band @ Electric Picnic. Over the years I have gone to see a lot of friends in various bands in pubs and clubs around the country in front of crowds ranging from seven to about seventy. All extremely talented musicians with enormous passion for making music and being on stage. I enjoyed supporting them because I love being around talented, enthusiastic people but a little part of me always wanted more for them. A big break, a huge crowd, a record deal. Something.

This year I got to see my good friend Sean Kennedy play euphonium on stage at the Electric Picnic in front of thousands of people. As the last band performing on one of the main stages at the first night of the three day festival there was a lot of interest in seeing them in the Little Big Tent. So much so that the security guards decided to stop letting people in and pulled over the barriers to keep a lot of people, me included, out.

The excluded masses were not happy about this in the slightest. One of our number reckoned if he all pushed the barrier and bouncer standing behind it would soon give way. I don’t approve of that kind of thing at all. I did, however, take advantage of it, stepping over the prone guard and into the tent to see my friend perform with Kormac’s Big Band.

I don’t know if he enjoyed it as much as I did, but it was definitely a thrill for me to see a butty o mine playing on what is, in my mind anyway, a huge stage that I had to riot to get into. And from the sounds of things he could be involved in even bigger things next year.

The reformation of Pulp. I’ve already spoken about how happy this news made me here. It is very exciting and hopefully a chance for me to see a band who have always been one of favourites. To see my friends get excited by this news transported me back ten years to when we were young and cool without mortgages, credit cards, kids or hassles.

Seriously, I will steal and sell a child on the black market for ticket to one of their gigs. Or at least work a couple of extra shifts to pay for it.

Stevie Wonder in the O2. When my good friend Martin rang me to tell me of this gig, I was hanging out with another friend and his kids. That was when I first considered kidnapping of minors as a viable way to obtain concert tickets.

Again, I have already blogged about my Stevie love. His music is joyous and uplifting and nothing can ever be too bad when you listen to it. This was the first time he had played in Ireland in something like twenty five years and I was damned if I wasn’t going to be there to enjoy it.



The anxiety I felt as I sat on the ticketmaster website at two minutes to nine the morning they went on sale palpable. One hand on the mouse ready to click refresh, the other clutching my credit card, even though I already had the card details stored under profile. I wasn’t taking any chances. When I successfully acquired I could have danced around the room.

The gig itself was fantastic. He played all the classics and while he was never going to be dancing around the stage he manage to put on an amazing show. He had two drummers and a bongo player for crying out loud. Some people later complained that the sound wasn’t great at the gig. The fact that each song was flowing through my mind and soul meant that I never noticed it.

The Arcade Fire. Before this year, I had seen the Arcade Fire live twice and owned both their albums. That makes it sound like I was a big fan, but to be honest, I wasn’t really sure. I liked some of their stuff, Funeral is a great album but Neon Bible was only ok. When I saw them in the Olympia in 2007 I was decidedly under whelmed.

When there new album, The Suburbs, came out some friends were raving about it, but I was in no real rush to hear it. On top of that, when I saw the price for tickets for the gigs they announced in the O2 my mind was definitely leaning towards writing them off.

Eventually I got around to listening to their latest opus. It was fantastic. Sixteen fantastic songs of boredom, disillusionment and just growing up in American suburbs (The band are ostensibly Canadian but Win and William Butler were born and raised in Middle America.)

Stand out tracks like Ready To Start and Rococo lead the way but the recording never lets up and the even on the back end songs like We Used To Wait and Sprawl(Flatland) make it easily one of the most consistently good albums of recent times. There is no filler here. Without question, Album of the Year

They are probably going to become the biggest band on the planet in the next couple of years and I’ll have to hate and begrudge them, in the same way I do U2 or REM. Not the same way I loathe bands like Kings of Leon and Coldplay. No I do that because they are shite.

The album was so good, it made me want to go to one of the concerts, but ticket prices these days are something that a struggling writer can easily justify spending, what with having to eat and live under a roof. So I would just have content myself with listening to them on my earphones.

That was until I was on the receiving end of one of the most thoughtful, sweet gesture. A very good friend of mine, whose fanaticism about her music is matched only by her kind heart and generous nature, had gotten herself a ticket for the Sunday night gig. Tragically, she lost a close member of her family and could not go for obvious reasons.

At a time when she could be forgiven for ignoring the outside world and forgetting about such trivial things as a rock band, she thought of me. She got her housemate to bring in the ticket to me in work, hours before the gig was due to start, because she wanted me to enjoy it.

It was one of the most touching things I’ve experienced. I struggled not to shed a tear, standing there in Muji. A little later at the gig, I did. They were fantastic live and I knew that it was something my friend would have loved to experienced. I was emotional because she couldn’t and so grateful because I was. I really need to find a way to thank her. I think I’ll start my dedicating my music review of 2010 to her.

Music has a beautiful way of connecting with people. It helps form memories, it comforts, it encourages. It speaks to you when you’re lonely. It makes you happy. Sex, driving, exercising, drinking. Its all better with music. Everyone should have music in their life.

Its like that scene in the end of The Commitments when Jimmy Rabbite is being interviewed by an imaginary talk show host. When asked if he has any final words on the story of the band he answers in his Dublin Accent;

“We skipped the light fandango, turned cartwheels cross the floor, I was feeling kinda seasick, til the crowd called out for more.”

“That’s very profound Jimmy. What does it mean?”

“I’m fucked if I know Terry.”

Tunage

So is anyone going to Electric Picnic? I am. I can’t wait.

It’s not for everyone I know. Three days living in a tent, sleeping on the ground. Exposed to the elements. Wind and rain a constant threat.

Mud so thick that you can’t even lift your funky wellies with the pictures of dolly mixtures out of it

Then there is the issue hygiene. You are basically living in a field with thousands of strange people. The queues for the showers are least an hour wait, so most people don’t bother. And I won’t even start on the dubious bathrooms.

So I can appreciate the reluctance of some people to give up their luxuries for a weekend and slum it in the middle of the Irish countryside but have you considered all the things you’re missing out. The camaraderie with 33,500 people who are all there for a good time. The experience of sitting in the middle of a forest at 4a.m chatting to some guy you’ve never met before about how his hand is made of chocolate cake.

There is comedy, movies, spoken word. You can see some stuff ‘ as gailge’ and I think this year there is a cookery stage. What more could you ask for. Oh I almost forgot. The Music.

Really that’s why everyone is there. The Music. And who can blame them. Music is a great unifier. People from all walks of life sharing a musical moment are truly a beautiful thing. Music has the power to inspire. It is emotive and provocative. All the best music should make you feel….something.

There is a scene in Father Ted where Ted manages to turn the life of young Father Kevin (played by Tommy Tiernan) with the power of music. Kevin goes from experiencing ’ the dark night of the soul’ to a new found happiness with the help of one of the all time Funk classics.

That is the thing that makes me most appreciative of music. The ability to change ones demeanour and outlook on life with the power of a simple three minute pop song. The way you can go from fed up, stressed and hung-over, to dancing around the room with just the first couple of bars of a tune. It doesn’t matter what type of song it is really.

I was going through my computer to see what music I have that is guaranteed to make me feel good. I wanted to come up with a play list I could share with you. Initially I had a collection of one hundred, put a smile on my face songs. Far too many for the purposes of this blog.

So I set about reducing that number to something more manageable. I tried to come up with more specific criteria for my mix.

The first thing I did was get rid of songs that made me smile just because of the name. I’m a grown up, I should have good reasons for liking a song. Out went Sexy Coffee Pot by Tony Alvoin and the Belairs. That was shortly followed by Chef’s Chocolate Salty Balls. What can I say…I’m a grown up but I never said I was mature.

Next went the songs that I might be embarrassed for my friends and readers to know about. Songs I know I shouldn’t like but I’ll be darned if I can’t help bobbing my head and singing along when they are played. Goodbye Take That- Shine, Gwen Stefani- Hollaback Girl and Avril Lavigne- Complicated (I just really like singing along to that song for some reason.)

Then it was a case of wading through, arguing, and counter arguing. Justifying why each song was there and why each one deserved to be in the top 20. In the end I came up with a list some thing like this.

Ob La Di Ob La Da- The Beatles I know what your thinking. Of all the great songs The Fab Four produced why go with the Sesame Street one? Firstly you have to remember its songs that make me happy not songs that I necessarily think are the best. I could write a whole other piece on The Saddest or Angriest Songs, but I’m doing joy this week.

Secondly, when I was in primary school, one of the songs we learned was ‘When I’m 64’ by The Beatles. After that I was really taken with their songs that told a little story. Lennon and McCartney have always been able to capture little slices of life usually with great humour. This one is one of my favourites.

One Day Like This- Elbow. This is a fantastic anthem. Something to get you out of your seat, throwing your arms in air, embracing the day and shouting ‘Come on world.’ It’s inspiring and stirring. Just a really good song.

I also like the fact that Elbow have finally started to get the recognition they deserve after years of plugging away as a some what of a cult band. In a time when manufactured pop tripe is more rampant and overgrown than ever, it’s good to see real musicians getting their due.

Ooh La La- Goldfrapp. Silly words with a catchy tune. Sometimes that’s all you need. Impossible not to sing along with or dance to.

Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick- Ian Dury and the Blockheads. This reminds me of my dad. I remember him singing this when I was younger and thinking it was fantastic. I don’t give my Dad a lot of props on this blog. So this is a dedication to Brendan.

Valerie- Mark Ronson feat. Amy Winehouse. I really like Amy Winehouse. She is a disaster obviously but she has a fantastic voice and her songs have real soul to them. This is not one of her songs. It is a great sing along tune though and it reminds me of a really fun Mark Ronson gig I went to with one of my favourite people in the world.

Let’s Get it On- Marvin Gaye. I would never intentionally put this song on in an effort to woo or seduce a woman. I do however have a tendency to play all my music on random. Which has once or twice in the past led to this Motown classic coming on at an inappropriate moment?

It’s hard to take anything seriously with this playing in the background. Its either so cheesy its sexy or so sexy its cheesy And while I should be mortified by the idea of my lady friend laughing out loud just as I’m to ‘make my move,’ so to speak, it is a memory I hold dear. She knows who she is.

July- Mundy. This song also has leads to strong memories of a lady from my past. No story, I just though it had to go in here.

50 Ways to Leave Your Lover- Paul Simon. This song about a man who just can’t stump up the courage to leave a flailing relationship always makes me smile. Despite his millions and millions of albums sold, sell out concerts worldwide and longevity of career which has to be at least 50 years now, I just don’t think Paul Simon gets all the credit he deserves.

Hey yea! - Outkast. I love Outkast. If I was so inclined I would suggest they mix Dope Rhymes with Phat Beats. Thankfully I’m that way inclined. I will however say there infectious rap-RnB-pop sensibilities do make me want to ‘shake it like a Polaroid picture’ as they suggested in this, their Magnus Opus.

Peaches- The Presidents of the United States of America. The year is 1997. In a damp, dark house on Yellow Road, Co Waterford, three students survive on what can only be described as a ‘pot luck’ diet and a love of IndiePop and Rock music. Peaches represents a time when I was really getting into music. It’s fast, loud, hectic and funny. It sparks fond memories of good times spent with great friends. For the same reasons I’m also selecting- Hobo Humping Slobo Babe- Whale. I loved that video, girl with braces…weirdly sexy.

Ebeneezer Goode- The Shamen. This song with the subliminal message was released when I was secondary school. Everyone in my class thought it was clever and funny because essentially it was promoting ecstasy and it got to Number one in the charts. I’ve never taken ecstasy but I can appreciate a subversive little ditty.

I also remember singing it in the van driven by one of the Christian Brothers on the way back from a football match. And finally the clincher, the video starred Jerry Sadowitz who was the most controversial comedian of the time and someone who I thought was pretty cool.

Darling Nikki- Prince. I had to have a Prince song obviously. It was hard to settle on just one. I think I went for Darling Nikki because I can remember tittering the first time I heard it. Prince at his overtly sexual best.

Common People- Pulp. I think Jarvis Cocker is brilliant. He’s cool, funny, and urbane. If I ever have a dog I’m going to call him Jarvis. I probably wouldn’t call him Damon because Damon Albarn is a bit of a tosser. That doesn’t stop me including Parklife- Blur in the list though.

Back when it was important I was more Oasis than Blur. As time has shown, I got that one wrong. Parklife and Common People are two of the biggest songs from the ‘Britpop’ era. They both, for me anyway, have stood the test time as witty little pop songs, with funny imaginative videos and a certain feelgood 'Je ne sais quoi'.

The Rest of the list I have decided to hand over to Stevie Wonder. Believe me when I tell you, nothing is ever bad when your listening to Stevie.

I could have tried to choose one song of his. I could have picked ‘As’ ahead of ‘Living for the City’ or ‘Isn’t She Lovely’ before Master Blaster(Jammin.) I could have even picked ‘Sir Duke’ before ‘Superstition’ but then what about ‘I Believe When I Fall in Love’ or ‘I wish’ or….you get the idea.

I have endured the most horrendous days in work, hung-over to hell, tired, smelly and cranky. I was able to get through it all with the help of Mr Wonder. Plug in your earphones, close your eyes and shut out the world.

Don’t you worry about a thing because with Stevie to look after you, everything is going to be alright. Uptight. Out of sight even. So there you go. A list of songs that make me happy.

If you want to see the whole list of 100 you can find them here. Just don’t ask me to justify some of them. Maybe you’ll do your own list. It’s only fair. I’ve shown you mine…now show me yours.