Disingenuous Smirking - Again

Last night I went out to watch the second leg of the Champions League semi-final between Real Madrid and Barcelona. The pub we went to was nearly empty - I guess none of the regulars expected to have anything to celebrate, so they stayed at home with a cup of cocoa.

Personally, I was expecting a goal-fest for Barca, but it was not to be. In the absence of the loudmouthed José Mourinho (currently RM's manager, banished from the stadium for this game because of disgraceful behaviour in the previous one), Real Madrid seemed to be off the leash and able to play as much attacking footie as Barcelona let them. Indeed, they scored the first goal of the game, but the ref disallowed it for reasons that are still somewhat unclear.

Both teams plodded on in the pouring rain, and the sight of RM's sub Adeboyar literally leaping onto the backs of Barcelona players rather than attempting to play the ball in the normal manner was not a gratifying one, especially as it went unpunished (and therefore we must conclude this type of behaviour is approved of by those corrupt old bastards at FIFA).

The more I watch modern football, the less I like it. There can be moments of brilliance, sequences of passing and sometimes scoring that almost bring tears to the eyes. But more often than not, it's brutality, shameless diving and writhing, and an over-abundance of hair-gel. The fans pay huge amounts of money to watch this drivel (I could have watched last week's instalment at the Bernabéu, had I been prepared to pay €100 for a ticket with a face value of €230). The fans deserve better.

I'm rambling. The game finished at 1-1, meaning Barcelona go through to the final at Wembley against Man U on 28th May. That is not a match to miss.

Crap Football

After last night's 2-0 loss to Barcelona in the Champion's League Semi-Final 1st leg, über-brat and crap actor Cristiano Ronaldo had this to say in a press conference:

"Messi?" he replied, when asked about the Argentinian's two goals. "It's easier against 10 men. I would like to play against 10 men too, like he does. It is no excuse but they always play against ten men.

"I don't understand why this always happens. I couldn't talk to the referee because if I had I would have got a card for sure. The ref sent off Pepe: what more can I say? Every year is the same.

"I feel bad for us and for Mourinho – because it always happens to him. Barcelona are a great team but these guys have a lot of power off the pitch too. Chelsea, Inter, Arsenal. It's always the same. Is that a coincidence?"


Well, Cristiano, it might be that your team always gets a player sent off because you are dirty cheating bastards. Had I been the referee, I'd have sent many more Real Madrid players off in that game. You yourself would always be sent off within the first five minutes for disingenuous smirking.


Seriously, modern futbol is a crock of shite - grossly overpaid dudes trying to fool the referee into thinking they are dying because an opposing player got within a foot of them, counterbalanced by behaviour that would be considered common assault if it wasn't happening on a footie pitch.

An Interesting Discovery

Having lived in the Middle East, I'm a big fan of hummus, which is pretty much a staple of the diet there. In case you don't know, it's a puree of chick peas (garbanzos) and tahini and a little bit of garlic, lemon juice and olive oil. I have bought hummus once or twice since we moved to Spain, but not been impressed. And I've made it once or twice, but the price of tahini here is incredible - €6 - €8 for a half-litre pot.

I don't know why, but today I had the urge to find out whether tahini was something I could make myself. I'd always thought it was made by some mysterious fermentation process, but a quick trawl of the interwebz proved me (happily) wrong. It is nothing more than ground-up sesame seeds and a bit of olive oil.

I got me a bag of sesame seeds today, so guess what I'm going to make tomorrow!

Moving [Eventually]

They do say that moving house is up there with divorce and the death of a loved one in the stress stakes. And they're not wrong. We've moved twice in Madrid, and now we're onto our third one. Or maybe not. I'd mentioned to my mate the property rental guy that we would be looking to move to a bigger place - at the very least we wanted 2 bedrooms so we could have guests. This was back in September, I think, and almost immediately he came up with an attractive place, not very far from where we are now. Lots of space, 2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, and more or less the same rent we're paying now. We paid one month's rent as a holding deposit, and gave our current landlady one month's notice. She refused to accept the notice, brandishing our original contract which she interprets as meaning 'you can only leave at the end of each complete year'. I personally think this is wrong, but don't have the money, time or inclination to hire a lawyer.

So we were obliged to stay put until the end on March, when the second year was up (had we been able to find anyone to take over the lease, that would have been fine, but winter is less than great in the rental market). Towards the end of March, I spoke to my buddy about moving, and he went kinda pale - he said there were short-term tenants in the new place until the end of June, but was sure there wouldn't be a problem for us to extend our current lease until then. Well, of course there wouldn't, except we really, really don't want to. We are desperate for that extra space. Long story short, he tried to move the tenants of the new place somewhere else, and it didn't work.

So, end of March approaching, we need to move, and we need our 'holding' deposit back.

Sneak Preview

One week today is St Patrick's Day. I've had this date rattling round in my brain for at least the last month, because, obviously, a special pie will be required for it. And I've thought about what this pie should be, but never actually got round to doing anything about it.

What I thought was, it should be a steak and Guinness pie. Irish stew would have been nice, but the traditional version of that is pretty damn runny and just wouldn't work in a pie - the pastry would dissolve before you got a chance to eat it. No, the good ole steak 'n' Guinness, but with a green pastry shamrock on the top (pretty much the whole planet agrees that a whole pie made out of green pastry would be somewhat unpalatable).

Food colouring is fairly hard to come by in Madrid - the only colour stocked in supermarkets is orange - tartrazine, the stuff that makes kids hyperactive. So I thought I would make my own by boiling up some spinach and peas and freeze-thaw gelatine-filtering it. This takes several days, and when I looked at the result it looked like the wee-wee of someone who isn't very well. I made up some pastry with it anyway, but the result just looked mouldy. Grr.

A trip into town was required, to Manuel Riesgo, the chemicals shop. I got the colouring and a couple of other things to play with in my molecular adventures. When I got home, I opened the container and was fairly disappointed to see this tub of brown powder. I chucked a load into a glass of water, and *kshing!* it was green. Oh boy, how green was it? Greener than all the valleys on the planet, I reckon.

I made up some pastry with it, rolled it very thin and froze it, and then cut out shamrock shapes. Here's the result:



Pretty good, methinks.

Dentist

I've had a growing discomfort in the tooth department for a few weeks now, but tried to ignore it in the hope that it would just go away. Of course, it didn't, and by last Wednesday it had reached the point where lots of Novocaine and some attention from a dentist would be required. I haven't actually been to a dentist in Madrid (*hangs head in shame*), but I remembered a mate telling me he knew a good one out in the burbs who didn't get his pricing policy from Somali pirates.

I called my mate, and he called his dentist and made me an appointment for the following morning. He sent me an email with very clear directions on how to find him ('get the 512 or 513 bus to Móstoles, the fare is €1.50'). I wasn't too perturbed when the bus driver said he didn't go to Móstoles - he told me which buses did, and the alarm bells still didn't go off when the Móstoles bus driver wanted €2 to take me there.

My friend had told to get off at the Mercadona supermarket, and across the road I would see a sign for the dentist, but had to walk round the corner to find the entrance. This I did, and I was feeling quite proud that I was only five minutes late - that's actually early by Spanish standards. But the lady in reception denied all knowledge of me, my appointment, and the dentist I was supposed to see. I wandered round for a bit, and phoned the dentist, whose English is much better than my Spanish. He was confused and told me to go back to the main road and look for Calle Sevilla. I did that, and still couldn't find it, so I pulled out my phone and searched for it on Google maps. It suggested Calle Sevillas in Madrid and Alcorcón. Hmmm. So I called the dentist back and he asked me what was the name of the main street I was on. 'Avenida Alcalde de Móstoles', I said.

I could hear the centimo drop. The dentist told me I should be in Alcorcón where he was and not Móstoles.

Aaaaargh.

So, I jumped on the next bus that came along, asked for a ticket to Madrid and was a little puzzled that it only cost €1. The reason eventually became apparent when we reached the terminus at the far end of Móstoles and everybody got off. The driver told me I now had to go to that bus stop over there to get back to Madrid. And pay another €2, of course.

Ho hum. Finally I was back in Madrid, got the correct bus, and found the dentist who thought it was pretty funny and managed to fit me in pretty quickly. He took one look at the offending tooth and said he wouldn't mess about with trying to rebuild it, he'd just extract it. I wasn't too unhappy with that - it's a molar near the back of the mouth so it wouldn't leave a visibly gaping hole, and I think several dentists over the years have attempted to fix it without lasting success.

I had to have two shots of anaesthetic, but once it was properly numb the tooth came out with a wiggle and a tug (I had expected much much worse). He gave me a handful of cotton swabs to place on the wound every half hour until the bleeding stopped. I paid the surprisingly reasonable bill (€36 if you're interested) and made my way back to Madrid, feeling very self-conscious at my bloody teeth and total inability to talk, eat or drink properly, but ever so relieved that the pain had magically gone.

Jazztel: tonto or what?

I had a huge amount of buggeration with an ISP called Jazztel after we moved to our new flat almost two years ago. This was because they had been supplying internet ADSL to our previous flat in Chueca, and refused to accept that we would no longer be needing their service once we'd moved. I actually paid them for about three months' worth of service that I never used, and had one hell of a time getting them to stop pretending I was still their client. In the circumstances, I think I was more than generous. And they were just stupid, arrogant SOBs, to the extent that, once we moved to our new place, we would get at least one phone call a day from their sales folks imploring us to switch to them. I don't have the Spanish to say 'I would only sign up with Jazztel again if I was the last person left alive on Earth', and so I would just say 'no thank you' and slam the phone down as hard as I could. I know, I know, most telecoms companies are like this - they all probably make significant amounts of money from ex-customers because those wanting-to-be-ex-customers didn't resign properly (I believe the only acceptable way of terminating a contract with Jazztel is to write 'I quit' on the left-hand side of a Tibetan mule between 1158 and 0002 on the 30th February and posting said mule to Jazztel HQ (somewhere on Planet Jazztel), supplying enough postage so that it arrives no later than midnight on the 30th February the previous year).

Egypt

As if Mubarak's refusal to just go away, and the murder of several protesters yesterday weren't enough, the Egyptian 'government' has ordered mobile phone operators in the country to send this message to all of their subscribers: “The Armed Forces urge Egypt’s loyal men to confront the traitors and the criminals and to protect our families, our honor and our precious Egypt.”


Traitors? Criminals? Come on guys, get a life, will you. Outside of politics would be good, and definitely not in PR. Morons.

The Great Juniper Hunt

A friend of mine is going through a phase of liking gin and tonics - the more exotic, the better. He is enthused by G & Ts served with cucumber, strawberry, and whatever else the creative barperson can think of. But the definitive additive is juniper berries. He'd discovered this before Christmas and (as a dude who knows his way around food shops and markets), I promised to get him some. Well, it wasn't unlike the experience of trying to buy a goose - blank looks, shrugged shoulders, etc. We discovered that the bars that had the berries had been given them by their gin suppliers. So I asked my son to get some in London and smuggle them through Customs. He drew a blank too.

And so the matter was quietly laid to rest, until yesterday. I'd delivered the final batch of pies to The Lock Inn for their Burn's Night Pie Night (a stonking success, by the way), and had a couple of hours to kill before the event started. I got myself a haircut, and then wandered up and down Calle Fuencarral in Malasaña, possibly by most favourite street in Madrid. And I happened upon a newly-opened shop called Tiger. I think this is a Scandiwegian chain, but I've never come across it before. I was enchanted. They have lots of really stupid little stuff, but it's all quite well designed and very cheap (a combination of two of my favourite things). They have toys, gifts, cosmetics and bathroom stuff, toys for geeks, general household stuff and KITCHEN STUFF! I got myself a stupid little battery-operated 'milk foamer' which I think will be good for beating eggs and milk for my pie glaze, and then I saw the rack of herbs and spices. And would you believe it, bags of juniper berries. Only €2!

So my mate finally got his Christmas present.

That Chain Letter Thing

Seabee nominated me to do this. Apparently half the world's population will die* if I don't.

*Timescale not specified.

1. If you blog anonymously, are you happy with this? If you aren't anonymous, do you wish you started out anonymously so that you could be anonymous now?

I began blogging in Dubai at about the same time as Secret Dubai Diary, and also with a bit of a critical edge. I had no illusions that anonymity would offer me any kind of protection if anyone really wanted to track me down, but I was never convinced that free speech was allowed (actually it *is* allowed, as long as it doesn't offend anybody important). Here in Spain, there is much more freedom, and I think my identity is quite well-known. I know it might be sensible to try to hide my identity, given that some of my business clients and associates might be worried by some of my scribblings (although I make it a rule NEVER to write about anybody who puts food on my table), but it's probably too late now.

2. Describe an incident that describes your stubborn side.

I don't think I have a stubborn side, except for doing things that I know are bad for me.

3. What do you see when you really look at yourself in the mirror?

Bits of  bristly chin that I missed with the razor. Frequently very bad hair.

4. What is your favourite summer cold drink?

Beer.

5. When you take time for yourself, what do you do?

Read.

6. Is there something that you still want to accomplish in your life?
Make enough money so I could retire if I felt like it.

7. When you attended school, were you the class clown, the class overachiever, the shy person or always ditching?

I was the brainy kid who could spell 'encyclopaedia'. What's 'ditching'?

8. If you close your eyes and want to visualize a very poignant moment in your life, what do you see.

I don't need to close my eyes, but there are certain places around Madrid that I associate with my Daddy-In-Law that we visited together before he passed away.

9. Is it easy for you to share your true self in your blog, or are you more comfortable writing posts about other people and events?

There's an awful lot of me in my blog - it amazes me that anybody could be interested in reading it.

10. If you had the choice to sit down and read a book or talk on the phone, which would you do and why?

Read a book. I actually hate talking on the phone. It always feels like such an intrusion. And I have an old-school attitude instilled in the days when phone calls were very expensive and companies I worked for wanted to keep the bills down - so if you couldn't say what you needed to say in 3 minutes or less, you were in trouble.


Now I have to nominate 3 other folks, so let's have Jayne With A Why, Sandlander and LeftBanker

Cooking With Molecules

I've mentioned my brief forays into Molecular Gastronomy, but haven't posted any of my stunning successes yet. Mainly because there haven't been any. If you read the blogs of people who dabble in this stuff, it seems the first thing everyone wants to try is Spherification, and I'm no exception. The basic idea is to create blobs of intensely-flavoured liquid encapsulated in a gel skin that melts when you eat it, leaving a 'taste explosion' in your mouth. The classic example of this technique is Ferran Adriá's olive. It looks like an olive, but tastes more olivey than any real olive ever could. It's also possible to make small spheres of your liquid, and they look like caviar.

The basic idea is to add a gelling agent (sodium alginate) to your strongly-flavoured liquid, and then carefully drop spoonfuls or droplets from a syringe into a bath of calcium carbonate dissolved in water. When the alginate meets the CC, it sets into a gel. So a skin is instantly formed on the outside, leaving the inside liquid, well, liquid. You only leave your blobs in the CC for 1-3 minutes (depending on their size) and then you take them out, rinse in cold water, dry on a paper towel and serve (or throw in the bin, in my case).

We had a load of apples and pears left over from Christmas, so I pulped them and then made a consommé of them using the gelatine freeze-thaw method. This technique requires you to melt some bloomed gelatine into your liquid and then freeze it overnight. When it's frozen, you place it in a filter paper (or cheesecloth) inside a strainer over a bowl and leave it in the fridge for 2-3 days until the liquid has melted and dripped through the filter. The gelatine forms a kind of web that grabs hold of all the solids, while allowing the liquid to drip through into the bowl. The resulting liquid is perfectly clear, with all the flavour and colour of the original goop.

I made some 'caviar' of apples and pears, and also some bigger drops, a bit like small grapes. I showed one to MamaDuck, who freaked out a bit and said she would never eat it (so no apple sauce gel blobs for her tonight!). Some of the early attempts looked like tiny fetuses, most of the bigger blobs were malformed with extra mini-blobs or tails stuck to them, but the caviar looked good.

The main problem I have with spherification is getting the right proportion of chemicals in the solutions. The quantities required are quite tiny (like 1.5 grams), and I have no way of accurately measuring such tiny amounts. My digital scales claim to be able to weigh increments of 1g, but really, they don't. So I need to get hold of some scientific scales, but haven't been able to find any yet.

On a related note, I've been getting a fed up with the unreliability of gelatine for the jelly in my pork pies. Sometimes it's difficult to inject enough jelly into the pies, and sometimes the bloody stuff just won't set. I tried an experiment a few months ago where I poured liquid jelly into the pie case before baking, but it just soaked into the pastry and the meat.

So I've been looking at Agar Agar. This substance is extracted from seaweed (so it's suitable for veggies), and has some interesting properties. The ones I'm interested in are the gelling point and the melting point. For a 2% solution of agar agar, these are 38 and 89 degrees C. And the temperature at which minced pork can be declared cooked is 71C, so in theory I could wrap the meat in a sheet of set agar agar jelly and bake it without it melting. Now that would be a super-terrific thing if I could do it. If it worked, I could also put a blob of set jelly inside my albondigas (meatballs) to reduce their density and give a zing of something different in the middle - it doesn't have to be meat-flavoured, even, it could be apple-flavoured. Nom nom.

I'm rambling. Today I went off in search of agar agar. I know I could get this from Manuel Riesgo behind Gran Vía, but I didn't want to go into the centre. I found some powdered agar agar in a local health-food shop, but at €6 a spoonful I thought it was a bit overpriced. But I did notice it came from China and that gave me an idea. There's a street in our barrio that's like a mini Chinatown, so I went up there. The first shop I went to is so jam-packed with stock that there's no room for customers, but I asked them about it and they pointed me at HP Sauce and cans of corned beef (obviously as a gweilo-guiri, what else could I want?). The next one I tried was much better. It was actually big enough to accommodate the massive range of stuff they sell and still leave room for customers. Nice. They did have agar agar, but only in 1-kilo packs about the size of a cushion. I asked them if they had smaller packs, and the guy disappeared upstairs and came back with a 42g pack for €1.40. Marvellous. It's a terrific shop, actually, packed full of mysterious stuff. They have a section at the back that has everything you need to set up a Chinese restaurant - woks by the million, crockery, sizzler plates, cook's clothes, cleavers, knives, chopsticks. And I also noticed they had 1-kilo jars of whole black peppercorns for €6, and stuff like Schezuan pepper salt and other exotica at insanely-low prices. I'll definitely be back there next week.

Anyway, gotta dash, got to play with my agar agar.

Christmas and That

First of all, Happy New Year to you all: let's hope it's a good 'un, despite all evidence to the contrary. And apologies for the lack of posting - the pie biz went insane in December (I must have sold 400-500 mince pies!), and then it was Christmas, and now the web biz has gone crazy. Moan, moan, whinge, whinge.

Our Christmas kicked off about a week early when we had our traditional mince pies, mulled wine and carol singing bash. 30-40 people crammed themselves into our little flat, and a great time was had by all.

The Offspring visited us for a lovely week. His departure from Heathrow on the 22nd was touch and go right until the plane's wheels left the tarmac (you may remember Heathrow Airport's astonishment and total failure to cope with a bit of snow and ice since the previous Saturday).

I treated Offspring to a tour of all the local supermarkets, trying to find Brussels sprouts, but picking up several tons of other stuff on the way. Because he's young and fit, I made him carry all the stuff, and he began eyeing old ladies' shopping trolleys with envy. I said I was willing to buy one (and I really do need one now, with the amount of flour and meat I buy now for the pies), as long as it was tartan-free. Don't get me wrong: tartan looks great on kilts and bagpipes, but for God's sake, why do shopping trolley manufacturers think it looks good on their products? Anyway, we managed to find a plain one in a funky purple, and so it was purchased.

On Christmas Eve we went to the movies to see Little Fockers. I'm not thrilled by the Focker movies - I find the humour a little too crude for my refined and snobbish tastes, but MamaDuck and the Offspring enjoyed it, so that was okay.

Parsnips are pretty much like Unobtainium in Madrid (I have seen them as part of a cocido vegetable mix at Lidl, but that involves, like, going into Lidl). Brussels sprouts were pretty thin on the ground too - a tour of five local supermarkets produced one packet of frozen ones, but then I spotted fresh ones in a fruit and veg shop nearby, so I got some of those too. I don't normally go a bundle on sprouts, but this year I did this recipe from Gordon Ramsay, and they were very good indeed.

I fancied having a goose for Christmas dinner this (last, 2010) year, but it was not to be. Enquiries at poultry stalls in the local market had me wondering if 'oca' meant 'stoat' or 'raccoon', rather than 'goose' as my dictionary told me, such was the bewildered response from the stallholders. Even having a friend enquire of the poulterer he's used for 20 years (and who did once manage to get my friend a goose, although it turns out it was 10 years ago now) drew a blank. So, no goose for us, and I didn't fancy cochinillo (suckling pig), so it was the ever-reliable turkey.

The one I got turned out to be a bit too big for our oven, so I ended up having to roast it without its legs and parson's nose. But the seven of us enjoyed it, and we've been eating the leftovers for the past week. All gone now, thankfully.

As a surprise, I'd bought us all tickets for a circus on Boxing Day. It was the first show of the day, 12 noon. Imagine my joy when I awoke at 5 to 12. I was all for forgetting about it, but MamaDuck woke like a shot, forced tea down us in record time, got us into a taxi and had us strolling into the big top at 12.15, just as the show was starting. And it was very, very good. It's owned by Teresa Rabal - not a name I'd ever heard of, but speaking to a Spanish friend the other day, she's what kids of several generations grew up on (possibly the singing equivalent of John Noakes and Valerie Singleton to Brit kids). A bit of a legend, in other words.

The Offspring left on the 28th, and after we'd seen him off at the airport we got the new 24-hour airport bus service and finished up at Cibeles. We had lunch at the James Joyce pub and when we came out I noticed that the queue for the Belén (Nativity scene) at Nuestra Señora de Communiciones (formerly the main Post Office, now the Municipality HQ) was very short. We joined it, and we were inside in about ten minutes. I'd suspected that this year's Belén would be a small and disappointing affair, what with Spain being bankrupt and that, but it wasn't. It was enormous and splendid - the best I've ever seen. After that we went for a wander in Retiro Park, where we saw a red squirrel wandering around a lawn, and as the sun set we went to look at the marvellous Christmas lights on Calle Serrano.

We had an elaborate plan for New Year's Eve. We were going to wander up to the Plaza de Castilla, from where we might be able to see some fireworks. But at about 11.30 we decided not to do that. So we stayed home and watched it on the telly. I picked out the best 24 grapes that we had (silly Spanish tradition - eat one grape for each bong of the midnight bells and you'll have good luck for the next year), and dug out the cava flutes. One of MamaDuck's brothers Skyped us from the UK at ten to midnight, and stayed with us until New Year arrived in the Canaries (and the UK, of course) an hour later. Great fun, and an unexpected pleasure. We stayed up for an hour or two after that, watching old clips of Spanish stars doing their stuff - one of them was a young Teresa Rabal!

In the following days I tried to do some work, but my heart wasn't in it. The Christmas season in Spain doesn't end until the Magic Kings have been - they come on the evening of 5th Jan and the kids wake up to get their presents on the 6th. We toyed with the idea of taking the stepladder and watching the main parade on the Paseo de la Castellana, but MamaDuck came home from wherever she'd been with the idea that there would be a Cabalgata de los Reyes Magos on Calle Bravo Murillo, a very short walk from where we live. So we went to that one instead (I hadn't realised before, but many of the outlying barrios of Madrid have their own parades) - it was a much smaller affair, but it did mean we actually got some of the sweets that they throw from the floats, and we got to see Teresa Rabal yet again on the Circus's float.

So there ya go. Another magical Madrid festive season, only slightly ruined by the introduction of a smoking ban in all bars and restaurants. Sales of outdoor heaters are rocketing, apparently.

¡Feliz Año a todos!