Festival Food

The life of a festival reviewer can take many forms - a regular routine goes out of the window as days can start at 2.00pm and not end until 10 or 11 in the evening. Suffice to say a balanced diet can also suffer. Still, I tell myself that all the exercise I’m doing running from one venue to another is burning off the unprecedented amount of carbohydrates I’m probably consuming this month. Indeed random eating in venue bars and quintessential Edinburgh establishments are all part and parcel of being at the festival. It sits happily alongside using your fringe programme as protection from the rain and consuming all your drinks (including wine) in plastic cups.

The other night we had legendary Negociants’ nachos for dinner after a splendid evening of vintage Edinburgh festival comedy. A while ago I wrote a somewhat literary post about this place and I thought while I’m in the midst of writing a few longer festival related blog posts I’d recycle it so to speak, here. In some ways it is a bit of a continuation of the many Edinburgh insights I’ve come to write on this blog.

Image by Dora Petherbridge

Negociants’ Nachos

Flanking Bristo Square, Negociants gently nurses the art students' quarter, and by day the faint hum of the skater boys in the square are its musical accompaniment. By night the tables and chairs outside are surrounded by artsy student revellers swaddled in paisley print scarves as they usher themselves into its basement nightclub Medina, the throb of the sound system under their feet.

Although overshadowed by McEwan Hall's austerity, its faint bohemian quality still sits well with the burgh's darker Calvinistic history. At the weekend Negociants is open into the witching hour, historically the time when Auld Reekie's less savoury grave digging characters got all their best work done. Tonight, although its cold and faintly wet there's not so much as a shovel in sight. But this bar's interesting mix of clientele surely come with their own stories.

Across from our table there is a tall lady huddled over her laptop. She sips from a perspiring glass of white wine. On her knee rests a Chanel handbag curled over like a resting, gentle lap dog. The scene is almost achingly Parisian if we discount the less subtle nods Negociants' decor makes to its more southern European sisters. The wicker chairs and potted plants, the terracotta hues and chalk boards give off a Latin Tapas feel, while the eclectic mix of magazine covers, black and white photographs of models and movie stars pasted to the ceiling give the look of a funky late night New York haunt.

And it's in this mode that Negociants really comes into its own, for it lends itself well to the shabby funkiness of the last place open in town. A place where the clubbers can come down from their highs over curly fries, powdered with cayenne pepper and washed down with coffee. This is where, safe from the metropolis, the late night writers, insomniacs, the people with nowhere to go and the outsiders can congregate. They can even have fish finger sandwiches if they like.

And if you are a regular you know there's only one thing really worth ordering on the menu. Piled high, greasy and carbohydrate laden, the Nachos fly out the kitchen's hatch to the tune of the bell being tapped to summon the waitress. They are an un-showy creation, but not unlike the establishment they have a charm; the comforting finger food shared between a couple of friends over bottled beer or glasses of totally drinkable, always crisp, white wine.


Dora's fringe snapshot for the day. The colourful lampshades are so pretty.

Image by Dora Petherbridge

A Feminist's First Dinner Party

In a slight twist on a blog which to be fair is quite hard to pin down - thematically at least - for I am not solely interested in one topic, I have decided to post a few pictures of my flat warming dinner from Friday night.

There are several reasons for this exciting turn of events. The most important is this - regular readers (whoever the hell they might be) may have noticed I've been somewhat given to introspection of late. I blame this on the fact that I am getting older, and everyone knows that a direct consequence of getting older is that you become wiser and more philosophical. That's just a fact. And just in case the irony hasn't translated thus far, it is also a fact that with age comes the ability to laugh at one's self. Admittedly I'm still working on this one. But honesty is also another wonderful grown up quality.

Anyway I'm given to anxiety with regards to this blogging lark. Like all good things in life I thoroughly enjoy it when I'm on a roll. When the writing flows its like good wine, just keep pouring the bottle I say. But when your not writing it can feel like creatively speaking, at least, you are on the wagon. Translation being, 'bad times.' But the other night I was talking this through with a fellow feminist friend and I came to the unfortunate conclusion, that one of the reasons why feminism gets a bad rep is because it takes itself too seriously. Now I'm not one to extol the virtues of a happy-go-lucky existence and certainly there is a lot about equality issues which simply just isn't funny, but I am willing to concede that we could all stand to take ourselves a little less seriously. Sometimes.

One of the wonderful things about this blogging business is the amount of time and effort my fellow bloggers invest in their blogs. They really have managed to create spaces where they can explore ideas, food, fashion, frivolity in all its wonderousness. The visual blogs particularly astound me and this has made me acutely aware that I don't illustrate my points often enough. The main reason for this is the old chestnut rearing its ugly head that 'others do these things better'.

But If I continue with that attitude I'll simply never get anything done, no matter how rubbish the outcome. And like I've said before its a process. This is all a process. So in a bid to explore my creativity further I give you a feminist's first dinner party.

Turns out that despite Betty Friedan's best intentions, this feminist at least wanted to be a good hostess because I spent the best part of last week devising, concocting and creating a dinner party befitting of my fabulous friends. I blame Nigella Lawson.

These are the results:

Here's the dining table -

Image by Dora Petherbridge

And here's a close-up

Image by Dora Petherbridge

And now to the important bit - the food. Deciding that I didn't want to make things easy on myself I went with a Thai/Asian theme. Here for starters we're having Japanese carrot salad (which I would like to dedicate a blog to because it was so easy and delicious), tempura prawns (these were a real baptism of fire and I have the oil-splatter burns to prove it!) and chicken satay skewers with peanut dipping sauce.


Image by Alice Turner

And so to the main - Thai Red Prawn Curry with coconut rice. My friend Alice, who is an excellent photographer, photographed the food. But having consumed a jolly amount of red wine, she forgot half-way through the evening that this was her designated job for the night, and so this image is of her dinner half-eaten. Still, that's realism. And in some ways that's feminism.

Image by Alice Turner

I suppose I've blogged about this because I think the little things, the minor triumphs, the well-executed meals, the hilarious jokes over wine, the putting together of a lovely dinner table, which, although not earth-shattering in and of themselves, are still important. Yes there's doom and gloom around at the moment, but not enough to forget that there are good things to be done. Some of these things are worthier than others, but that's just life.

With this in mind I'm now making a concerted effort to emphasise the lighter side of life too. Indeed it will be a feminist's take on frivolity.

To that end I leave you with a foodie related quote from the sharp-witted (and tongued) Lionel Shriver;

'I'm not a subtle person, and I cook the way I write. In the kitchen or at a keyboard, I push flavour towards an absolute limit. Food, like fiction, should leave an after-burn. As a good novel should make you cry, so a good main dish should make your eyes water and your nose run.

In neither books nor cookery is Shriver nice. I would no more concoct a bland, cautious dish with half a teaspoon of rosemary and a "pinch" of cayenne than I would write a novel about a kind lady who knits and her exciting trip to the post office. Although the hands-on physicality and instant gratification of cooking provide a merciful antidote to a mere-words manuscript of two years, both projects hew to the same directives. They both benefit from the drama of the triangle. They should both lead with a dominant theme. And both food and fiction should knock your socks off.'

From an article which can be found here -

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/mar/06/recipe-swap-spicy-pork

Now I'm Annoyed. 'The Delicious Miss Dahl'

Image from The Guardian

Watching 'The Delicious Miss Dahl' the other night my ideologically unsound barometer tipped off the scale. The irritating opening with its cutesy cartoons of Sophie Dahl in her evolution from voluptuous model, to skinny malinky, to annoying sometimes poet/writer and now TV chef, in which her various moods and states of mind are depicted, looked like a promotional video for some sort of mental health charity. One probably catered towards self-indulgence and addictions to Cath Kidston.

The whole thing was an overworked incredibly smug affair, from the trinket laden kitchen - a place surely engineered only for the production of cupcakes and middle class female angst - to the forced coquettishness of Dahl herself, all learned doe-eyedness and embarrassment. You can sense the probably male producer she's talking to just off camera gesticulating at poor Sophie to sex it up with naughty quotes from Dorothy 'four dirty martinis and I'm under the host' Parker. And lord only knows who cooked up the fabulous allusion of buffalo mozzarella to the 'wobbly bit on someone's arm'. I'm literally having to be restrained from grabbing the nearest bingo wing I can find, if only to understand what the hell she was going on about.

The two vital ingredients that surely go into a successful cookery show are the cooking and the eating. Its not rocket science, yet Sophie does hardly any of either. I counted a woeful looking omelet with haddock, peanut butter fudge, some sort of female-looking fish dish, and a chocolate cherry compote thingy, none of which seemed to require much skill. This wouldn't have mattered so much if Dahl had offered up anything I might have actually wanted to cook or if her screen presence had oozed charisma and genuine humour. Instead a trip with Sophie to a bespoke Cheese monger where she 'slinked' mozzarella between her delicately manicured hands, and a mosey around an antique shop (as you do) where she proceeded to talk about down-playing the signing of her first book deal, had me shouting at the TV 'humility MUCH Sophie?'

This is the kind of telly, clearly directed at young impressionable women and some older ones who should know better, that grown women should wholeheartedly oppose. There is a strange paradox at work in a country who's government is so concerned about an impending obesity epidemic and yet its media has an overblown fixation with food. Particularly food and women. This has filtered down so far that what women eat is so ingrained in the cultural psyche, that a few weeks ago I read a scathing critique of cupcakes and vaginoplasty in The Independent. True this is the kind of assessment only possible in a country where food is so plentiful that fairy cakes are considered a food group in their own right and female genital mutilation is thankfully not common practice. Still, cupcakes are the kind of food, along with programmes such as 'The Delicious Miss Dahl' that have bred a new performative lifestyle choice, the appropriation of a role once reserved for 50's housewives and synonymous with drudgery. This is the era of Cath Kidston, gin and cake parties and a phoney femininity doused in rose water and swaddled in ditzy print tea-dresses. And its totally at the expense of substance and an insult to the thinking woman who doesn't enjoy glorified baby food.

And just when you thought cupcakes were bad enough, what's the latest craze to be imported? French Macaroons. Never mind Dorothy Parker under her host. I'm on the floor ...