christopher-hill.com

Food

Christian has a a cool set of photos from WasabiSabi, a Japanese restaurant where they cook your food right in front of you. We went there for Jane's birthday.

Sunday, April 30, 2006 12:48 PM 0 comments

It's funny because he's retarded!

Reading this, you have to wonder at the standard of journalism in the US when having a retarded president is something to have a good chuckle at during at a press dinner, rather than something to be really fucking scared about.

10:48 AM 0 comments

Kitchen Confidential

There's a paragraph in Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential that made me smile as it could have been penned by Briddon:
Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter-faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn. To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace, or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living. Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food. The bodty, these waterheads imagine, is a temple that should not be polluted by animal protein. It's healthier, they insist, though every vegetarian waiter I've worked with is brought down by any rumour of a cold..
The irony is that this rant is contained smack in the middle of a chapter outlining why in a restaurant you should never eat fish on a Monday, never eat Swordfish on any day of the week, have mussels only if you know the chef personally and have seen with your own eyes how they're stored and prepared, avoid Hollandaise sauce like the plague it is likely to contain, and avoid chicken lergely for the very same reasons I became a vegetarian.
Oh, coincidentally in the next chapter he goes on to recommend a book by Jacques Pepin to learn knife skills from. Sensible man.

Thursday, April 27, 2006 5:37 PM 2 comments

The Smartest Guys in the Room

Just noticed in the paper that the film Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is in the cinemas this week. I watched it on DVD a few weeks back and it's really interesting, giving a pretty easy to understand background of the trial that is currently taking place. It's your standard tale of corporate greed; the lying cheating morally bankrupt rich get richer, everyone else gets screwed.
Talking of trials, I've just finished reading the second book in Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy. The book blends real life and fictional characters to tell the story of the mental scars left on people serving on the front line, and those left back in Britain. In particular it focuses on the lives of the war poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. The second book takes place against the backdrop of the Permerton Billing libel trial. There is an author's note at the end of the book explaining in detail the facts of the trial which is suffiently bizarre for me to want to share:
In January 1918 the Imperialist, a newspaper owned and edited by the MP Noel Pemberton Billing, carried an article entitled "The First 47,000". It purported to be written by pemberton Billing himself, but in fact the author was a Captain Harold Spencer, who claimed he had been a British Intelligence agent at the time when he saw and read the Black Book in the cabinet noir of "a certain German Prince". [The Black Book said to contain the names of 47,000 English men and women who were allegedly homosexuals.]
In April this article was followed by a short paragraph entitled "The Cult of the Clitoris", again purporting to be written by Pemberton Billing, and again written by Harold Spencer. This suggested that the list of subscribers to a private performance of Oscar Wilde's Salome might contain many names of the 47,000. Maud Allan, who was to dance the part of Salome, sued Pemberton Billing for libel, since the paragraph clearly implied she was a lesbian.
The trial was presided over by Lord Justice Darling. Pemberton Billing defended himself. Having been identified early in the proceedings as one fo the 47,000, Darling lost control of the court.
The star defence witness was Harold Spencer. In addition to giving free rein to his obsession with women who had hypertophied and diseased clitorises and therefore could be satisifed only by bull elephants, Spencer alleged that many members of the Asquith War Cabinet had been in the pay of the Germans, that Maud Allan was Asquith's wife's lover and a German agent, that many high-ranking officers in the British army were germans, and that person who had the courage and patriotism to point these facts out were marooned on desert islands where they had to subsist on iron rations from submarines.
Lord Alfred Douglas, another defence witness, seized the opportunity of pursuing his personal dispute with Robert Ross, Oscar Wilde's devoted friend and literary executor, identifying him as "the leader of all the sodomites in London."
After six days of chaos in the courtroom and hysteria in the news-papers, Pemberton Billing won the case and was carried shoulder-high through the cheering crowds that had hathered outside the Old Bailey.
Later that year Harold Spencer was certified insane.
Robert Ross died of heart failure, on october 5th, aged forty-nine.
Pemberton Billing went on th have a distinguished parliamentary career.

Saturday, April 22, 2006 5:44 PM 0 comments

blah blah blah

So, been working quite a lot recently so not much time for the old bloggeroony. Tell you what, how about I tell you what other people have been up to.
Coco "Two Stripes" Riley created a cool site a while back that I completely forgot to blog about earlier, where you can quite literally Judge A Book By Its Cover.
Tony Roscoe's Wax Works Quiz, as seen on Des and Mel, will soon also be featured on some new Channel 4 panel show. I've always said that there's not enough panel shows based on Have I Got News For You, so it's good to see Channel 4 really flexing those creative juices.
Rach has started selling really nice hand crafted greetings cards which you can buy on Ebay.
Phil, the country's leading snack authority has finally got round to creating a new review.
That'll do for now.

Thursday, April 20, 2006 10:14 PM 0 comments

Eureka!

After many false starts and dead ends, I've finally come up with a worth while recipe for celery. This day will be talked about for literally years. When people speak the name Chris Hill, they will instantly recall me as the man that found a use for celery, and will celebrate me as the leading celery alchemist of recent times. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Celery Strudel:
- Put a slice of brown bread and a handful of walnuts in a food processor, and blend till fine.
- Soften a chopped onion in a saute pan.
- Add a gaggle of chopped celery and mix with the onion.
- Add half a tin of chopped tomatoes and stir.
- Add a couple of blocks of cooking chocolate (i.e. about 10 grams worth).
- Leave that lot to simmer gently.
- Gently melt some butter in a pan.
- Lay out a sheet of filo pastry and brush with metled butter.
- Sprinkle onto the sheet a generous amount of the walnut/breadcrumb mix.
- Lay another sheet of filo pastry on top, brush with butter and sprinkle with the crumbs.
- In all, you'll want up to 8 layers of pastry/crumbs.
- Spoon the tomato/celery/onion/chocolate mix along the middle of the pastry, and then roll into a long flat tube.
- Brush with the melted butter.
- Cook at 180 degrees for something like 25 minutes.
- Serve.
- Go "Well, I was sceptical, especially when he mentioned chocolate, but this really works."

Sunday, April 09, 2006 9:23 PM 4 comments

Magpie Mine - Derbyshire

I just found a few photos on my hard drive I'd forgotten about, so I've process and uploaded. This is a photo blog after all!

6:24 PM 0 comments

This made me laugh

If Tony was a proper blogger rather than a complete part timer, he would have mentioned this on his own site. But he didn't, so I will.
He says he was in HMV yesterday and there was a woman at the counter arguing with the bloke there. She had bought 2 DVDs which were buy one get one free, and she was trying to return "the one she paid for" and get her money back, and keep the free one. She couldn't accept that this was not the kind of transaction HMV wanted to get involved in. As a good will gesture they offered half her money back, but she refused, adamant that she should be able to get a full refund on one DVD and keep the other "free" DVD.
It reminded me of that Adam & Joe sketch where they went into a rough Spar type shop in a rough district of a rough city, and started eating all the bits of the food that were 10% extra free and when challenged by the rough owners kept going "but it's free" and carried on opening food despite the imminent beating. That made me laugh too. I like to laugh.

Friday, April 07, 2006 12:25 PM 2 comments

Directions

1.Start at London Heathrow Airport.
2.Catch flight from London Heathrow to Dallas Fort Worth Airport.
3.Hire car at Dallas Fort Worth Airport.
4.Start going toward the "Airport Exit" on "International Parkway South" follow for 0.2 miles.
5.Bear left onto the highway toward "Terminal East Parking" - follow for 0.3miles
6.Bear left onto "International Parkway North" toward "North Airport Exit" -follow for 2.9 miles
7.Take the "Highway 114 west" exit toward "Fort Worth" - follow for 29.2 miles
8.Then continue on "US287 north" - follow for 91.1 miles
9."US287 north" becomes "Interstate-44 east" - follow for 0.7 miles
10.Take left fork onto "US-287 north" toward "Vernon" - follow for 104.0 miles
11."US 287 north" becomes "Avenue F (US-287)" - follow for 2.8 miles
12.Continue to follow "US287 north" - follow for 104.9 miles
13.Take left ramp onto "Interstate 40 west" toward "Dumas" - follow for 7.8 miles
14.Take "Exit 70" onto "US 60 east" toward "Dumas" - follow for 0.5 miles
15.Take the "Buchanan Street" exit toward "Dumas/Pampa" - follow for 1.7 miles
16.Turn right onto "Old Route 66 (Interstate 40)" - follow for 0.1 miles
17.Arrive at the centre of town.
There, that's the way to Ama-fucking-rillo, so can everyone stop singing it now please. Christ.

Thursday, April 06, 2006 1:38 PM 2 comments

Tesco Vegetarian

The items that Tesco label as vegetarian may contain fish. This is because Tesco have decided that because a lot of "vegetarians" such as myself are actually lacto ovo pesco vegetarians (i.e. we eat fish, dairy and eggs) it doesn't matter. Who the fuck are Tesco to re-define what vegetarianism is and deliberatly mislead people into unknowingly abandon their particular ethical concerns? Tossers.

Wednesday, April 05, 2006 12:35 PM 3 comments

Note to self...

If you ever find yourself in the position of wanting to murder someone, the best thing to do is to run them over on a pedestrian crossing and then drive off. You'll only get a few months in jail, piece of piss. Oh mind you, you would be banned from driving for a whopping four years, that's a long time to wait before being able to kill somebody else.

12:27 PM 0 comments

Serre Photos

I've uploaded a batch of photos from my Somme trip, all taken around the area of Serre.

Edit - I've now uploaded the rest of my photos.

Sunday, April 02, 2006 5:39 PM 2 comments