First published in the UK in 2025 by Blink Publishing

An imprint of Bonnier Books UK

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Hardback – 9781785121715

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All rights reserved. No part of the publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted or circulated in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing of the publisher.

A CIP catalogue of this book is available from the British Library.

Illustrations and design by Jem Ward

Photography by Matt Lincoln

Prop Styling and Art Direction: Matt Lincoln, Jem Ward and George Egg

Senior Editor: Joe Hallsworth

Copy Editor: Rachel Malig

Typesetter: Kate Cromwell

Proofreader: Nicky Gyopari

Indexer: Vanessa Bird

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Text © George Egg, 2025

Illustration, design and layout © Jem Ward, 2025

Photography © Matt Lincoln, 2025

Photography on pages 38, 40, 64, 81, 113, 134, 172, 175, 176, 179, 196, 203 © George Egg, 2025

Photography on page 205, 215 © Jem Ward, 2025

Photography on page 221 © Henry Ward, 2025

Archive photography supplied by various contributors

George Egg has asserted his moral right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Every reasonable effort has been made to trace copyright holders of material reproduced in this book, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers would be glad to hear from them.

www.bonnierbooks.co.uk

The author and publisher will not be liable for any loss or damage in connection with or arising out of the performance or use of methods described and contained in this book.

For Dad. I wish you could have read this.

And for Fred. I’m looking forward to when you can.

Forest Hill, London. October 2020

Kneeling down like I used to when I was ten years old, and in the exact same spot on the living room floor, near the TV and with my back to the windows, I spread out about twenty packets of frozen ready meals, like a mosaic. The late autumn sun hangs low as the day wanes, but the sky is clear and a shaft of light falls across the boxes.

‘Look at all the ready meals I’ve got you. There’s a nice-looking dal, a stroganoff, a chicken and lemon tagine thing, meatballs, cauliflower cheese, these look interesting – they’re loaded fries that you can just stick in the microwave. I’ve got a Chinese curry and egg fried rice. And a couple of fish pies.’

My dad’s eyes, which these days are looking increasingly grey and tired, light up. I’m encouraged. I know he likes fish pies, they’re soft and mild and easy to eat.

‘Would you like one now? I can do it before I go. Won’t take long.’

He smiles. ‘I don’t want one now. Maybe later.’

‘Well, I’ve written everything down here. Look, it’s like a menu. I’ll put the food in the freezer and when the carer comes you can tell him what you want and he can make it for you.’

Dad smiles, like he does, and I hope he’s taking it in. I’ve written down the names of all the different packets in clear block capitals, like he used to write on our perfectly wrapped Christmas presents that would be piled up under the tree in the back-end of the living room where there now lies an ugly hospital bed, something my mum if she were still alive would have hated having in the house, never mind the living room. And it’s little used as he’s taken to sleeping on the sofa, where he’s sitting now.

‘Cup of tea?’ he suggests.

I walk into the kitchen and put the kettle on, and while it comes to the boil I go through the cupboards. He’s got plenty – tins of French onion soup, mushy peas, baked beans, custard, sardines. There’s Bovril, peanut butter and marmalade, Maryland cookies that aren’t out of date, yet, and I saw ice cream in the freezer when I loaded it with all the new stuff.

The kitchen is rich with memories of childhood: standing on a chair watching egg yolks and oil transform into mayonnaise in the bowl of the Kenwood Chef while I hummed a long note trying to match the pitch of the motor, or watching a chicken revolve on the spit of the tank-like Cannon cooker, or at the table making Philippa Biscuits with Mum. It’s a kitchen where in the summer the back doors would open and the barbecue would be lit and I’d have full control of the coals, and my brother Henry and I would think it hilarious to bury a sausage among them until it was so over-cooked it had almost become charcoal itself, before placing it on Dad’s plate and he’d eat it, insisting he liked them done like that. And then my gaze wanders past the kettle and there on the windowsill is our old dinner bell.

I make a pot of tea, bags now where it used to be a cocktail of leaves, pour two cups and return to the living room with them.

Dad’s eyes light up again. ‘Lovely,’ he says.

We sit drinking our teas.

After a few minutes I break the silence. ‘I’ve been making these little films about food on my phone. Want to have a look?’ Dad smiles and I shuffle up so I’m next to him, an action that still feels a bit risky even though the Covid rules have been kind of relaxed now, though I don’t feel as though anyone really knows what’s going on. I get out my phone and we watch a video. I wait for his laughs at the funny bits, but they don’t come, and instead he just smiles throughout in a way that tells me he’s not completely sure what he’s watching. The video ends. ‘Was that a cheese and onion bake?’ he asks. ‘Yes, you like those.’ He nods, and I wonder if I should have got him one on the way over. ‘What’s the video for?’ he asks. ‘I don’t know really, something to do, I suppose. I thought I’d film a few of them and put them online and see what happens.’ He’s a bit confused about everything these days but I persevere. ‘I can’t do shows so I thought I’d do these. Nice to do some food stuff. What do you think?’ He smiles again, but I don’t know what he thinks.

I want to get going as it’s a reasonable drive, so having drunk half of my tea I take the cup back to the kitchen and pour the rest down the sink, and notice how manky everything is starting to look, and I wonder if the carer is doing enough and what’s next.

Then I go back into the living room, remind Dad about the menu and the ready meals, give him a hug and say, ‘I’ll see you soon.’ I make sure I’ve got my mask in case I need to pop into a petrol station on the way back, and I leave.

PROLOGUE

I love to cook gourmet meals, but I also like a bit of junk food, and I know I’m not exceptional. A lot of people who relish cooking at home, or indeed those who cook for their job, also like the occasional bit of convenience or processed sustenance (believe me, I know chefs). Why? Sometimes because it’s easy, sometimes because we’re tired or busy, often because it reminds us of something or somewhere, or somewhen. Or perhaps it’s just because we like the taste. If you’re starting to feel some empathy, as well as the desire for a double cheeseburger, then this is a book for you.

It is a book of recipes and ideas that I trust will appeal as much to the food-fanatic as it will to the culinarily curious. It’s a book for those who love to cook, but it’s also a book for those who think they only want to eat and who don’t yet realise that they actually want to cook too (because I firmly believe that you can’t be one without being the other). Across the pages that follow, you’ll find an accessible crash-course for the undiscovered gourmand, and at the same time a wealth of inspiration for the professional, with a gentle reminder to the seasoned ‘foodie’ that it’s ok to let your hair down, even if people are watching.

And people do watch me, because I’m a comedian who cooks. In fact, the minimal research I’ve done has afforded me the confidence to state that I’m THE comedian who cooks. I don’t think there are any others. Not ones who cook while performing. Not the way I do it. In 2015, after almost two decades of performing more conventional stand-up and only cooking at home in my ‘off’ time, I combined the two and started cooking on stage. While making jokes. In the last decade, I’ve written, self-directed, performed and toured three solo theatre shows about: cooking with hotel room equipment (iron, trouser-press etc.); cooking with power tools (hot air gun, wallpaper stripper); and making meals on the move (car engine, converted laptop). In the shows, I cook, live, using the aforementioned non-culinary appliances, and then at the end of the show the audience tries what I’ve made.

It’s been a perfect marriage because I’m a card-carrying foodie. I cook all the time. I’ll happily wake up in the morning and start making meals and not stop until it’s dark again and the fridge, freezer and larder are bursting with batch-cooked goodies. I’m also a feeder. Nothing gives me more pleasure than presenting someone with a dish I’ve made and seeing them react positively to it with an ‘mmmmm’ and ‘How did you do this?’, ‘What a great idea’ and ‘Can you send me the recipe?’ So what better way to satisfy that appetite than to cook in front of two hundred people watching and licking their lips.

After five years of almost perpetual touring and rarely anything longer than a week between shows, in 2020 Covid happened and the theatres closed. By October I hadn’t performed on stage for eight months. I was either at home in Brighton or, when allowed, travelling to see my dad who was still living in the family house in south east London and not long widowed since my mum had died at the beginning of 2019. The urge to be creative and entertaining, and to carry on sharing my culinary passions with the world, was starting to bubble over, so my son Jem and I started making videos under the banner of ‘Snack Hacker with George Egg’ and posting them on Instagram. Jem filmed, I presented, we came up with ideas together, Jem tasted (usually off-camera), we had a lot of fun and came up with some delicious results. With that we were off, posting videos and fielding the overwhelmingly positive feedback they generated. The appetite I had to ‘feed’ people was being sated by the response. Thank heavens for the instant gratification of a social media audience, eh?

When it comes to food, I’m a militant anti-snob. I’m happy, nay keen, to employ the potentially frowned-upon (salad cream, processed cheese, crabsticks, oven chips, Tunnock’s Tea Cakes) alongside the more expected (garlic, herbs, spices, bread), and then to bring in the potentially exotic (harissa, honey, tahini) in pursuit of interesting flavour combinations. And here and there, where a recipe benefits from it – not just for the sake of it – I may enlist the services of the semi-extravagant (lumpfish caviar, liquorice root powder, Babybel).

In addition to simpler fare, expect some slightly more complex recipes for bigger dinners, often made with surprising ingredients in unconventional ways. Also, the food I had (and just as importantly the food I was denied) when I was growing up has profoundly influenced the meals I crave and ingredients I cook with now I’m in my fifties. Those ingredients will feature. We are all the product of our past, and I trust there are experiences, culinary and otherwise, that I’ve had which will resonate with others.

As the recipes and videos keep coming, the nostalgic stories develop and the back-catalogue grows, so too does the audience. And as the audience continues to grow, the number of requests for a book grow. When he’s not filming me playing with my food, Jem is an illustrator and graphic designer. We share a passion for design, and we’d talked about making a book, but without the backing of a publisher there was the inevitable danger of it never happening – ‘Start Book’ being one of those forever unticked items on the to-do list.

But we got a book deal, and a helpful deadline, coupled with the support and encouragement of a team (agent, editor and publisher) who saw our vision and shared it: in parts a memoir, in others a semi-motivational instruction manual, but mostly a cookbook; a combination of innovative ideas using everyday products frequently ignored by the chef/foodie world; ideas often inspired by nostalgic home recipes and the stories behind them.

One final and important point. This isn’t a book about eating junk food. It’s quite the opposite. It’s about learning and experimenting. It’s about taking control and not accepting what you’ve been given as the be all and end all. It’s about being creative, taking risks and experimenting. It’s about bending and even breaking rules. It’s about trusting your natural culinary instincts and embracing invention and the willingness to fail, and how by doing all these things you can learn and develop and create magic. If you enjoy eating, if you want to play with your food, whether you’re a professional chef, a home cook or even a kitchen-shy greedy-guts, this is a book for you.

CHEESE AND ONION BAKE WITH PICKLED JALAPEÑOS

The first Snack Hacker. The first episode. Made on the fly in slight contravention of lockdown rules at The Open Market in Brighton while Jem filmed me. We ate it, we got the giggles, we didn’t know what we were doing. We’ve both made it countless times since and it was the catalyst for everything that followed.

MAKES 1

1 cheese and onion bake, or similar (hot, so if you need to wait for them to get fresh ones out of the oven, then wait)

8 or 9 pickled jalapeño slices (you can get small portable jars)

1 sachet black pepper (easily acquired from any number of places)

30 seconds

Nibble one edge off the bake so you can open it up like a purse or pocket, being careful of hot steam. Drop in the jalapeños and distribute them evenly throughout. Sprinkle in the black pepper.

ACT ONE

FULL ENGLISH FOR DINNER

Rules are made to be broken, and having a breakfast staple at a non-breakfast time of day is one of my favourite exhibitions of mild anarchy. It upsets some people and I assume that’s what makes it all the more attractive a proposition. But in my case it’s a pretty normal practice, having been introduced to it at an early age.

Mum was a secondary school maths teacher, so when I was growing up she’d get home half an hour or so after my brother and I did, meaning that while my dad ordinarily did the lion’s share of the cooking, or certainly the fancier side, in the week Mum made us dinner. But every so often when she had a parents’ evening or a staff meeting, mid-week dinner duty fell to Dad. There were three standards that I remember most vividly, and while this trio of meals wasn’t the full extent of his Monday to Friday menu (we sometimes had pancakes or pasta or cheese on toast, or Bernard Matthews Hamwiches – oh boy, those were the days), it was the following plates of food that are most etched on my memory: minced beef and onion pie and chips from the chip shop by his work; egg fried rice and curry sauce, which we’d mix together to create a kind of Chinese risotto that could only realistically be eaten with a spoon; and if he had a bit more time and energy to actually cook rather than to just unbox or unwrap, a full English breakfast, for dinner.

Our go-to full English would consist of bacon, with a thick rind that needed removing, to be left on the edge of the plate at the end of the meal curled up like a pig’s tail, while the meaty part of the bacon often contained small pieces of white bone that I’d carefully cut around. I wouldn’t put them in my mouth to gnaw the flesh off them as that would be absolutely disgusting. There was an egg, fried in a generous puddle of oil so that crispy amber frills would form on the perimeter, and the centre, splashed by flicks of hot oil from my dad’s confident spatula action, would fade from deep orangey yellow as a milky film of cooked white formed over the surface of the yolk, giving it the appearance of a villain’s lone cataract. We had sausage, something decent from a butcher near his work, mushrooms (always big flat ones in those days, it seems), which were fried, gills-side down, in the bacon fat. There’d be half a tomato, also fried, which I tended to eat around, being scared of the seeds, and the wobbly jelly-like bit around the seeds, and the mushy red bit, and of course the baggy skin that I’d be terrified would get stuck in my throat and choke me to death. And anyway, I didn’t need tomato as I had it already in the form of ketchup. Sometimes chips, but only sometimes. And finally, perhaps the best bit and something so rarely seen these days… fried bread.

My dad did lots of things for me. He built shelves, took me and my brother swimming every week, cooked endless meals, arranged picnics, brought home cats, baked birthday cakes, gave everyone lifts, and he did a ‘bit of each’.

A ‘bit of each’ was the practice, during the eating of a fry-up, of getting a small portion of every element on the fork at the same time and experiencing, essentially, a miniature full English in one tiny mouthful. The sort of thing you might get as an ironic canape in a Michelin-starred restaurant or from a waiter’s tray at a swanky private view. A ‘bit of each’ made by your dad somehow tastes better than one you attempt to make yourself. Soft items first, like egg (1), and then mushroom (2) with sausage (3), followed by the fried bread (4), the elements getting progressively firmer and more substantial, with last of all the bacon (5), cut slightly wider as a stout and supportive base. The impressive assembly would be passed to me, and my knife used to apply a little ketchup (6) and an extra helping of runny yolk (7) before I raised the fork and sort of angled it into my mouth – side on, with the edge of the tines touching the point where my top and bottom lips met. Then, once safely in, the fork could be slowly swung round ninety degrees until it was projecting out of the front of my head, at which point my lips would close – only just – beyond the egg, which by now had been pushed right to the base of the tines, and the fork withdrawn carefully, leaving my mouth completely oversubscribed and me in a state of pure ecstasy.

Oh, and whatever did happen to fried bread? Over time it fell out of favour, and rarely appeared on breakfast menus after the mid-nineties, to the extent that I and everyone else (in my social circles certainly) seemed to forget about it. Well, I do know what happened to it, or some of it at least.

One day when Meg, my youngest, was seven or eight years old (so this would have been around 2008), she went for a sleepover at her friend Libby’s house. Libby’s family had a big TV and their décor was different from ours. Actually, I understand they had two big TVs spread across two small living rooms – one for the grown-ups and one for the kids. They ate their dinners off their laps in front of the TV. In front of the TVs.

I must make it clear that I’m not in any way saying that there’s anything wrong with a) eating your dinner off your lap, b) eating your dinner in front of the TV, c) having a massive TV, or even two. I’m only pointing out that their way of living just happened to be different from ours and from how I was brought up.

Anyway, our daughter enjoyed her sleepover and wasn’t fazed by the different lifestyle of her schoolfriend’s family, because she’s a better person than I am, and when she came home she was innocently telling us about the house and the lap dinner and the TVs, and she so sweetly said, ‘Oh, and we had an amazing thing that we’ve got to try at home.’ ‘What was it?’ we asked. ‘It’s called. Fried. Bread.’

BREAKFAST SALAD BAG

There are times when a full English is too much. Not many times, but perhaps you’re watching your calorie intake, or you just aren’t that hungry, or you fancy something fresh and crunchy for breakfast or brunch but you still want to experience that ‘bit of each’ sensation. It’s times like that when this is ideal. The decadent breakfast items spread out among bitter leaves to cut through the fat, with the yolk providing a dressing of sorts.

SERVES 2

1 bag interesting salad (something with radicchio in – you want texture and bitterness)

1 bag wild rocket

4 or 5 button mushrooms, thinly sliced

juice of ½ a lemon

cold-pressed rapeseed oil, for dressing

2 ripe tomatoes

pinch of MSG

neutral oil, for shallow-frying

4 rashers smoked streaky bacon

1 slice decent robust bread like a good sourdough

1 thick slice black pudding

2 eggs

curly parsley, finely chopped

20 minutes

Retaining the bags for serving in, mix all the leaves together in a big bowl along with the mushrooms. Squeeze over the lemon juice and trickle over a little cold-pressed rapeseed oil. Season with salt and pepper and toss it all together with your hands before dividing between the two bags.

Chop the tomatoes into different-sized pieces and sprinkle with a little salt and just a tiny pinch of MSG.

Fry the bacon in a little oil over a low heat until nicely crispy before removing it, chopping it into 1cm pieces and putting it somewhere to keep warm, retaining the oil and fat in the pan.

Tear up the bread into rough croutons, break up the black pudding into bite-sized pieces, and pan fry both in the bacon fat, adding a little more oil if the bacon fat gets soaked up too quickly by the bread. When everything is crispy, remove with a slotted spoon and set aside with the bacon.

Poach the eggs* and set aside while you assemble the breakfasts in the bags.

Randomly scatter the tomato pieces over the leaves. Do the same with the bacon, croutons and black pudding, and finally top with a poached egg before seasoning and scattering over plenty of parsley.

*Poaching Eggs

Half fill a small but deep saucepan with water and add a teaspoon of white vinegar (wine or cider). Bring it to a simmer. Pre-crack your eggs a little (I cup the egg in my hand and strike it lightly with a knife) and place the eggs back in the eggbox, crack-side up. Create a fast-moving vortex by stirring the water in a circle with a spoon before quickly, but gently, completing the crack and dropping the eggs into the centre of the vortex as close to the surface of the water as you can. Lower the heat and cook for 2–3 minutes before lifting out with a slotted spoon and resting on a blue cloth (page 27) or a clean, dry tea towel to soak up excess water.

FULL ENGLISH ARANCINI

I don’t usually like baked beans with a fry-up and they weren’t part of a full English growing up. The sauce is too dominant, and if not heated up enough (and therefore reduced down considerably) that sauce floods across the plate and contaminates the other elements, which spoils an otherwise exceptional occasion. Mind you, there are a few situations when I’m happy to have them included. Those environments are: a supermarket café, a youth hostel dining room, and a ferry. Especially the ferry. However, to pass my stringent acceptability test the beans must have been overcooked and then ignored and thus transformed into an almost sculptable orange clay.

You’ll need to make a risotto and let it cool. So plan ahead and perhaps make the risotto the day before you want to make the arancini. It’ll be fine in the fridge overnight.

MAKES 6

4 rashers smoked streaky bacon, chopped

3 good-quality sausages, skinned and the meat torn up

1 tbsp butter

neutral oil (for shallow-frying and more for deep-frying the arancini later)

2 shallots, finely chopped

1 clove garlic, finely chopped

200g risotto rice

1 small glass white wine (about 150ml)

700ml stock (chicken or vegetable, and stock pots or cubes are fine)

2 slices black pudding, roughly chopped

1 x 400g tin baked beans

150g plain flour

150g breadcrumbs (panko, dried orangey-coloured ones or homemade)

4 eggs

brown sauce

tomato ketchup

30 minutes for risotto, 30 minutes to make and cook arancini, and extra resting and cooling time, but well worth it, I promise

EQUIPMENT

A cook’s thermometer. There are methods for gauging the temperature of hot oil with cubes of bread, but i can never get them to work properly.

First make the risotto. Over a medium heat cook the chopped-up bacon and crumbled sausage meat in the butter and a little oil until the meats are broken-up, well-coloured and crispy. Reduce the heat a little and add the shallots for a few minutes. They’ll release a bit of water which will lift any stuck bits off the bottom of the pan. When the shallots have started to go translucent add the garlic for another minute.

Tip in the rice and stir to get coated in the buttery mixture before pouring in the wine. Keep the contents of the pan moving until the wine has bubbled away almost entirely and then reduce the heat to low and start adding the stock one ladle at a time, stirring pretty constantly, until the stock is absorbed before adding more.

Keep doing this, adding stock and stirring to absorb until the rice is just cooked (you want it the wrong side of soft but not so firm that it’s ‘chalky’), about 20–30 minutes. You may have too much stock or you may need to add a little more, it depends on the rice absorbency. If you pick up a blob of risotto on the end of a spoon you want the risotto to fall off after half a second, not pour off like thick soup or remain stuck to the spoon. When it’s got to this stage, fold through the chopped black pudding and transfer the lot to the fridge to firm up (the black pudding is already cooked when you buy it, so it doesn’t need any extra cooking at this stage).

In another pan, cook the beans until they’ve reached the lumpy congealed stodgy stage described above and put those in the fridge too. Both the risotto and the beans will need a few hours to get really firm and sculptable, so cook something else while you’re waiting.

Put the flour in one shallow bowl, the breadcrumbs in another and in a third bowl beat two of the eggs before laying all three bowls in a line: flour, egg, breadcrumbs.

With wet hands, divide the risotto mixture into six and form each portion into a ball. Poke a well into the middle of the ball and fill with a teaspoonful of congealed beans before working the risotto mixture back over the hole, giving your arancini a bean core. Roll first in the flour, then the egg and finally the breadcrumbs. You’ll now have what look like six big scotch eggs.

Deep-fry the arancini in the oil. Make sure you use a deep pan, don’t fill it more than a third of the way as it’ll froth up, and only cook two or three arancini at a time. Bring the oil up to 170°C (340°F) before gently lowering in the balls and cooking for 8–10 minutes, until nice and golden on the outside, then lift out and drain on a blue cloth.

While they’re cooling, get three small bowls and fill one with brown sauce, one with ketchup, and to the third add the egg yolks from the other two eggs (don’t discard the egg white – save it and use it for Brown Bread Ice Cream, page 53). Dip the arancini in each of the sauces as you take bites. You might need a third egg yolk. You probably will as it’s the best dip.

Blue Cloths

Blue J-cloths (or J-type-cloths) look cheffy when you use them in the food-preparation part of the kitchen, which in turn makes you feel cheffy. They’re also actually useful for keeping food items on, both before and after cooking, keeping the air circulating around them so they don’t go soggy or slimy on the bottom, and for draining off excess oil, or water in the case of poached eggs. Not quite as disposable as they seem, these cloths are often (depending on brand) surprisingly tough and will survive a good three or even four trips through the washing machine and tumble dryer. I iron mine at the same time as I iron the tea towels and stack them up in a drawer ready for playing ‘chefs’.

PORRIDGE POT PANCAKES

You’ll likely have one of those little instant porridge pots knocking around, perhaps from the last time you stayed in a budget hotel and didn’t want to fork out an extra tenner for a lousy breakfast, but then you changed your mind and the instant porridge pot ended up coming home with you.

To ensure the oats swell to a reasonable consistency from just the addition of boiling water, they’re semi-ground, so what you’ve got (in addition to sugar and a little salt) is a sort of part-oat-flour part-rolled-oats jumble. Fortuitously, it’s also the perfect portion to make a stack of pancakes for one, and if, when you were at the hotel, you managed to procure a few little pots of honey or golden syrup, or even maple syrup, and some little pats of butter… I mean, you could even make these on an upturned iron, couldn’t you? I’m not saying you should, but you could.

MAKES A STACK OF 5 OR 6 SMALL PANCAKES

1 instant porridge pot (experiment with different flavours, cinnamon is particularly nice)

1 egg

1–2 tbsp evaporated milk

pinch of bicarbonate of soda

butter

syrup (golden, maple or date. Or honey)

10 minutes

Open the porridge pot, crack in the egg and beat together before adding enough evaporated milk to create a batter the consistency of double cream. Add a pinch of bicarbonate of soda and beat that in too.

Over a medium heat, warm up a pan you’re confident a batter isn’t likely to stick to, and add a knob of butter. Swirl that around and when it’s just beginning to foam, spoon in circles of batter which will settle to around the diameter of a drink coaster. Leave them until bubbles start to appear on the top surface (a minute or so) and then flip to cook the other side.

As they cook, stack them on a plate sandwiched between more cold butter and a trickle of syrup until they’re all cooked. Finally, drizzle the whole stack with a little more syrup and a splash more evaporated milk.

INSTANT CINNAMON BUNS

Do you know who Miriam Nice is? If you don’t, then find her online, because she’s a culinary creative powerhouse with a brilliant sense of humour and her Instagram series ‘Will It Cereal?’ is a delight.

Miriam has been the only double-guest so far (at the time of writing) on Snack Hacker, and she told me about a genius idea for making an instant version of cinnamon buns. She’d had a burger party the night before and had woken the next morning feeling a little worse for wear but fancying a cinnamon bun. She couldn’t be bothered with the walk to the shop, and surrounded by unused brioche burger buns from the previous evening’s cooking, she decided to be resourceful instead. Thinking along the same lines as garlic bread, and using a microwave, she came up with this. Genius, instant, gloriously sugary and buttery, and just the thing with a super-strong espresso.

MAKES 1

1 unsliced brioche burger bun

1 tsp softened butter

2 tsp soft brown sugar

½ tsp cinnamon powder

¼ tsp cardamom powder (or the crushed seeds from 3 green cardamoms)

1 Ryvita

(the regular plain ones)

5 minutes

With a pointed serrated knife (like a steak knife), and coming from above, cut a spiral in the bun from top to bottom. In a bowl, cream together the butter, sugar, cinnamon and cardamom. Using a spoon (so as not to accidentally rip into the bread), smear the butter mixture into the cuts of the spiral and all over the top and sides of the bun so it’s evenly covered. Put it on a plate and microwave for 30–40 seconds.

While it’s microwaving, break off a corner of the Ryvita and crumble it up into a rough rubble (saving the rest of the cracker to either make more, or just to eat later on). When the bun comes out of the microwave sizzling and hissing, sprinkle the Ryvita crumbs over the top. Let it cool while you make a coffee, then tuck in.

VARIATION:

As an alternative, cardamom buns can be just as easily assimilated. Swap the quantities for cinnamon and cardamom and proceed as above, but instead of Ryvita, paint the top of the heated bun with marmalade before putting it under a hot grill – or even better, giving it a blast with a blowtorch to caramelise the sugars. You can also sprinkle with smashed white sugar cubes to give the appearance of nib sugar.

McKEDGEREE MUFFIN

The making of my online video series has seen me enjoy the support of some celebrated people from the worlds of both food and comedy, and one of those lending their thoughts and filmed face was Jack Whitehall. Jack told me how he gets a perverse pleasure from tucking in to the more unusual British foods when in the company of Americans, not just to freak them out but also because he actually enjoys eating the likes of black pudding, Spam, kippers, and so on.

Between us, Jack and I devised a way of turning the famous (and pretty flawless) golden arches breakfast staple into something much more old-school UK-centric. Instead of kippers, smoked mackerel in a tin (a deliciously oily, fatty alternative to bacon, which hits all the right notes) is added along with curry powder, cardamom and lemon pickle for heat, complexity and sourness. The bread takes the carb-place ordinarily occupied by the rice, mayonnaise is there for moisture, crispy onions for texture, parsley for freshness. And McD’s curry sauce for the sheer gall.

MAKES 1

1 McDonald’s Egg McMuffin

¼ pot McDonald’s sweet Curry Dip (just ask them when ordering and they’ll likely oblige. Ask for two and then you’ve one ready for next time. see sachets, page 142)

pinch of ground cardamom

pinch of mild curry powder

1 tsp (or 1 sachet) mayonnaise

¼ tsp lemon or lime pickle (just the paste bit, not the chunks)

1 tsp crispy ‘hotdog’ onions*

1 tin (110g usually) smoked mackerel fillets (the hot, not sweet-cured, ones)

a few flat-leaf parsley leaves, ripped up

1 minute

*These onions, which feature frequently in this book, are the precooked oily-but-dry brown crispy ones that get sprinkled over almost every street food dish you buy these days. You can get them in plastic tubs from the north American bit of the supermarket, or in bags from international supermarkets.

Open up the muffin. Spread the curry dip on the bottom bun before replacing the egg. Sprinkle over the cardamom and curry powder. Top with the mayonnaise and lemon or lime pickle, the crispy onions, broken-up mackerel fillets (as much as you can balance on) and finally the parsley. Pop the lid back on and eat immediately.

Toastie-makers

I have an impressive collection of these in a variety of shapes and sizes. I’ve even got some doubles and one quadruple! A clam-shell design to be used over a naked flame, be that a gas hob or even better an open fire, the sandwich is squashed at the edges to form a sealed unit containing a lethal molten core. I call them toastie-makers, but they’re sometimes called jaffle irons, toasting irons, sandwich grills, and probably other things too. A plug-in electric sandwich-maker will do the same thing, but they don’t look as good hanging on the wall.

For most of the sandwich recipes that follow, a robust pan will do the job, too, albeit without the sealed edge. And to answer the most common question – ‘Where can I get one?’ – search for ‘Toas-Tite Sandwich Grill’, or go to French eBay (ebay.fr) and search for ‘Croque Monsieur Ancien’, or have a regular rummage around your local car boot sale, or even better a car boot sale in France when you’re on holiday. Bonne chance.

TUNNOCK’S IN BRIOCHE

MAKES 1

2 Tunnock’s Tea Cakes

2 slices brioche

1 tbsp softened butter

4 minutes

Squash the unwrapped tea cakes between the slices of brioche. You may need to crack the shells of the Tunnock’s and do a bit of squeezing, so be prepared for possible messiness.

Butter the outside of the sandwich and clamp into the toastie-maker. Cook (low heat if you’re using a stove-top clam-shell maker over a gas flame, which is frankly the best option) until golden on the outside. WARNING: Brioche browns quickly!

NUTELLA AND DARK CHOCOLATE

The wholemeal bread and dark chocolate counter the infantilely sweet Nutella nicely. Great with an espresso.

MAKES 1

2 tbsp Nutella

2 slices wholemeal bread

2–3 squares dark chocolate (70% cocoa solids or higher)

1 tbsp softened butter

4 minutes

Spread the Nutella over both slices of bread and sandwich the chocolate in the middle.

Butter the outside of the sandwich and clamp into the toastie-maker. Cook until crispy on the outside, and obviously let it cool a bit before eating.

REINVENTING THE WHEEL

MAKES 1

1 Wagon Wheel biscuit

2 slices brioche

1 tbsp softened butter

4 minutes

Sandwich the unwrapped Wagon Wheel between the slices of brioche.

Butter the outside of the sandwich and clamp into the toastie-maker. Cook until golden on the outside. SAME WARNING: Brioche browns quickly – didn’t you listen the first time?!

EQUIPMENT:

To make all three of these you need either a plug-in toasted sandwich-maker, or better still a stove-top toastie-maker (page 34).

Saying ‘Siblings’

While my mum was a dyed-in-the-wool cockney, Dad spoke ‘nicely’. He wouldn’t dumb down in the company of people with smaller vocabularies – if anything he’d subconsciously (or maybe consciously) get a bit more flowery. Not to be cruel, in fact I imagine he felt he was providing an educational service to the needy. But when you’re eleven and you’ve got friends coming round, that’s the last thing you need. I’d ask, ‘Dad, when Danny comes to play tomorrow, if you want to know if he’s got any brothers or sisters, could you ask him just that? And not use the word “siblings”?’

We had a dinner bell too. An old cowbell which stood on the windowsill in the kitchen, and rather than hollering up the stairs to let us know that food was ready, my mum or dad would ring the bell and we’d come down. For dinner. Not tea.

The bell was fine when it was just us lot at home. But when friends came round it was a source of shame. ‘Could you just call us down for dinner tomorrow?’ I’d ask. Because there was little worse than being mid-play and the bell ringing, and the friend would say, ‘What’s that!?’ and I’d have to say, ‘That means dinner time’, and they’d say, ‘oh my God, have you got a bell?’

When I had kids, we got a bell. And some years ago, one of my children said to me, when a friend was coming round to play, ‘Don’t use the bell!’ It’s Brighton though, so bells and the use of the word ‘siblings’ are much more common. I know they are.

When we moved house and my daughter swapped primary schools, we were being shown round by two of the pupils and they were telling us about the ‘playground buddy system’ and how you’d get paired up with a child from a lower year, and how sometimes, if you’ve got siblings in the school, it might not be them necessarily, and my daughter and I exchanged glances.

On another occasion my son was at a friend’s house, and there was a bell on the side in their kitchen, which he picked up and rang. ‘No, don’t do that!’ said his friend, alarmed. There was the sound of running footsteps on the stairs and suddenly a little brother appeared at the kitchen door, holding a tray.

BARRIE’S LEMONADE

In the summer, my dad would make lemonade, but not in the conventional way. Well, in the eighties the conventional way to make lemonade was to open a two-litre bottle from Safeway. A slightly more flash way was with a Soda Stream. Actual homemade lemonade though? There were recipes involving peeling the zest off lemons and leaving ingredients to steep overnight, but Dad didn’t bother with any of that. When he made lemonade by his rather unconventional method, guests looked on often a little concerned about the blender, a big glass jug that locked onto the top of the Kenwood Chef. The guests were also concerned about the walls and their clothes and the floor… Here’s how he did it, or at least here’s my version of it.

SERVES 2

1 litre cold tap water (if you keep a jug of water in the fridge, even better)

100g white sugar

1 tray of ice cubes (or about 10 cubes from a bag)

1 big lemon (or 2 small ones)

1 tbsp mint jelly

3 minutes

EQUIPMENT:

You WILL need either a good blender or a robust smoothie-maker (like a nutribullet or equivalent). A regular food processor won’t manage it.

Put everything into the blender or smoothie-maker. If it’s too much to do in one go, halve the ingredients and make the lemonade in two batches. Blend until pretty smooth. It’ll seem very violent and aggressive but don’t worry.

Pass the mixture through a fine sieve into a bowl or big jug. You can line the sieve with muslin or a clean tea towel, or a blue cloth (page 27), but personally I like having some bits in the drink as it feels more rustic, which adds something to the experience, so I don’t bother.

Pour into glasses and enjoy, or keep it in the fridge. It’ll only be good for a day or two, so best to make it when it’s hot out and you want it right away.

IMPORTANT:

Do please remember that it’s the liquid you’re keeping, not the contents of the sieve. On more than one occasion I’ve put the sieve over the sink and only realised my mistake after it’s too late and the precious liquid has disappeared down the plug hole. I’ve done that with stock too. What a goose.

NOT-DUCK-PANCAKES BACON BAP

Duck is fatty and so is bacon. Hoisin sauce is aniseedy, a bit like brown sauce but with more liquorice flavour. There’s a sweetness there too, along with the vinegar. How about bringing those flavours to the mouth-party and adding them to a classic bacon breakfast roll? Could that work? Here’s my attempt, and yes, I think it works. You can get your breakfast bap from any number of places. You want a soft white roll, buttered, and ideally the bacon should be crispy, but it doesn’t matter too much as long as there’s plenty of flavoursome fat on it.

MAKES 1

4cm piece cucumber

1 spring onion

bacon bap (white, with butter please)

brown sauce (either requested when buying, or bring sachets, but you want a lot of it)

1 tsp sugar-coated/candied fennel seeds

2 minutes

If you’re doing this out and about you could prepare your veg in advance, or you could bring with you the things you need (a small board, a sharp knife, and a good story if you’re pulled over by the police).

Chop the cucumber into thin batons. Slice the spring onion into matchsticks and scrunch in your hand to make them curl up a bit.

Load the bacon bap with lots of brown sauce (unless the shop did that for you when you bought the bap), scatter over the cucumber and the spring onion. Sprinkle the fennel seeds onto the buttered side of the top bun so that they stick. Close it up and tuck in. It’s duck hoisin pancakes and at the same time it isn’t.

CAULIFLOWER CHEESE PASTY

They don’t do a cauliflower cheese pasty in Greggs, yet cauliflower cheese is amazingly delicious and probably one of the most popular dinner dishes in the UK. Greggs should do one. Except it doesn’t matter that they don’t, because with a bit of nous and conviction, and a modest amount of forward-planning, you can turn one of their existing bakes into something even nicer than the sort of cauliflower cheese pasty they’d make if they DID decide to start doing one.

MAKES 2

15–20 hazelnuts

4 tbsp butter

2 slices cauliflower (cut from the middle of the vegetable, about 1cm thick)

2 cheese and onion bakes (hot and fresh from the baker’s, or frozen ones baked at home)

2 tbsp crispy ‘hotdog’ onions

10 minutes

Preheat the oven to 200°C/180°C fan (400°F/gas mark 6).

Place the hazelnuts on a baking tray and bake for 8–9 minutes. Be mindful as they can go from underdone, to perfect, to ruined, in the space of 2 minutes. They want to be pale gold and crisp, not brown. And if they’re nuts with skins still on, then look at the ones where the skins have fallen off and use those as a barometer. When the nuts are done, whip them straight out and let them cool, and if they’re the ones with skins on, tip them onto a clean tea towel, fold half of the towel over them and give them a good rub to get the skins off. Then chop the nuts up roughly.

While the nuts are baking, melt the butter in a shallow pan over a low heat until it starts to foam, then add the cauliflower slices. Season generously and cook until bronzed and golden, then turn over and do the other side. Keep basting with the melted butter, and when a knife slides into the thickest part of the stalk with little resistance (after 7–8 minutes), remove to a plate, pour the melted butter over.

If you’re doing this with shop-bought hot cheese and onion bakes, then slit (or nibble) one edge to gain access to the insides, like a purse or pocket, before cramming in as much cauliflower, chopped nuts and crispy onions as you can before tucking in. If you’re doing a bake-at-home version, when the bakes are cooked, carefully cut off the entire top, and in a slightly more elegant fashion sprinkle some nut rubble and onions onto the soft hot filling (they’ll stick a bit). Neatly add a cauliflower slice, top with the pastry lid and tuck in either with a knife and fork, or hold it with the hands like a hot (and it will be hot) sandwich.

POPCORN CHICKEN À LA HOLSTEIN

If you can get past the inherent weirdness of eating chicken and egg in the same mouthful (I can), then this is quite a sensation. Schnitzel à la Holstein, a deluxe late-nineteenth-century invention that offers a rich variety of textures to a breaded veal cutlet, can be roughly assimilated with popcorn chicken from your favourite high street chicken shop, or equally as well with something from the freezer tossed into the oven while you deal with the eggs and other elements.

SERVES 2 PEOPLE (DEPENDING ON APPETITE)

2 portions hot popcorn chicken (or about 30 pieces from the freezer)

2 tbsp butter

2 tbsp capers, drained

½ lemon

neutral oil, for shallow-frying

2 eggs

8 tinned anchovy fillets

small bunch curly parsley, chopped

5 minutes (or longer if you cook your own popcorn chicken)

If the popcorn chicken has come from the freezer, bake it according to the manufacturer’s instructions and start the eggs 3 minutes before the chicken has finished cooking.

Put the butter in a cold, shallow pan and set it over a low heat. As the heat comes up, keep the butter moving with a spatula as it begins to foam. The foam will stay pale, so move it around and keep a keen eye on the melted butter underneath as it starts to go brown. Lift any browning milk solids off the bottom of the pan – they’re the bits you want. After a few minutes, when it’s just starting to brown, add the capers. They’ll sizzle. Keep frying until they’re crispy. Add a squeeze of lemon and transfer everything to a bowl.

Then wipe the pan, add some neutral oil and fry two eggs*, being sure to keep the yolks runny.

Scatter the popcorn chicken evenly over two plates, top with an egg, lay the anchovy fillets on top, scatter over the capers and spoon over the brown butter. Finish with parsley and more lemon juice.

*Frying Eggs

Use a non-stick pan with a lid. When I say non-stick I mean something that won’t stick, not necessarily a Teflon-coated pan. I favour a well-seasoned cast-iron skillet, or black steel pan, but go with whatever you have that you’re confident the egg won’t adhere to. I like my eggs with crispy frills around the edge. Pour in a little oil and heat it until pretty hot but not smoking before cracking in the egg. Lower the heat a little and as soon as the egg starts to set, season with salt and pepper. As the bottom half of the egg starts to reach the desired degree of cookedness, carefully pour about half an egg cup of water into the pan (don’t chuck it in). It’ll start to steam straight away. Place the lid on top and continue to cook for another 20 seconds, then have a peep. If the egg looks milky on top and is set enough, it’s ready; if not, give it a fraction longer. When it’s done how you like it, carefully lift out and place onto a blue cloth (page 27) to drain some of the oil away.

MALT LOAF PUDDING

I’ve always thought that Malt Loaf would be a great name for a Meatloaf tribute band.

My cousin Benji invented this pudding, and I enjoyed it once at his many years before I bit the bullet and bought a microwave. But I thought about the pudding loads in the intervening years. Very simple. Very good. Tastes like a cross between sticky toffee pudding, cake, fudge, bread. I don’t know. It’s very good anyway, and if you’re not keen on malt loaf ordinarily, well, neither am I. But it tastes different like this.

You know how small children sometimes forget words for things? My daughter Zoe, when she was a toddler, once asked me for some ‘envelope’. I frowned. ‘Some what?’ ‘ENVELOPE!’ she demanded, exasperated. ‘Envelope?’ I questioned. She went to the drawer, opened it and got out the packet of Soreen. ‘Oh, malt loaf!’ I said. She rolled her eyes and gave a lengthy exhale. ‘Yes,’ she said.

SERVES 1 (BUT VERY EASY TO SCALE UP)

1 slice envelope – I mean malt loaf – about 35mm thick

1 tbsp unsalted butter

1 scoop vanilla ice cream

1 minute

Butter one side of the malt loaf slice generously and quite randomly, with some thicker and some thinner areas and some big blobs of butter. Really push it into the slice in places too.

Place the buttered slice in a bowl and microwave uncovered for 20–30 seconds. Pop a very neat scoop of ice cream on top. Don’t burn your mouth.

DINNER PARTIES

The atmosphere would change: main room bulbs would be dimmed, less frequently used task lighting came on, and candles were lit. We had a little over-the-mirror lamp in the bathroom upstairs that was never used at other times, but when it was on and the main ceiling light was off, the bathroom looked so much nicer that I wondered why we didn’t do that all the time. Mum would wear beads that I was less familiar with, and the smell of incense wafted through the house mixing with the smells of the cooking. Classical music was almost exclusively played at home whatever the occasion, or non-occasion, but when it was a dinner party evening a cassette of vaguely more upbeat Yiddish clarinet music would play instead. That was their dinner party music. You might have your own version. I do now.

While Dad cooked most of the meal, Mum would make one of the two puddings she had in her somewhat limited repertoire. The first of them was irredeemably bad, a sort of double-barrelled caterpillar cake fashioned from two packets of Maryland cookies soaked in far too much throat-burning sherry, sandwiched together with over-whipped cream and all covered in more cream and crushed Cadbury’s Flake. I’d eat a big bowl of it, even though it was absolutely awful. You didn’t get used to it either, as I’d find out when helping myself to seconds and then thirds. The other recipe she made, Brown Bread Ice Cream (page 53), was an eighties dinner party classic that had been doing the rounds of their social circle, and until everyone had heard of it, which probably didn’t take very long, it was a dish that would raise eyebrows or furrow brows until people tasted the results. Then eyes would close and heads would nod in approval before the inevitable, ‘You must give me the recipe.’

BROWN BREAD ICE CREAM

It’s bready, it’s toasty, it’s malty, and it tastes a bit like the middle of the Daim cake they sell in Ikea. It also tastes of eighties dinner parties. A great dessert to make if you’re doing something else with egg yolks (Full English Arancini, page 24), since you only need egg whites.

SERVES 4–6

100g wholemeal bread (a standard roll is about right)

80g hazelnuts

65g demerara sugar

3 egg whites

125g caster sugar

550ml double cream

20 minutes

(plus freezing time)

Preheat your grill to medium.

Make the bread into breadcrumbs by pulsing in a food processor or blender. Chop the hazelnuts until they’re a similar size to the breadcrumbs and mix both together with the demerara. Spread out on a baking tray and grill for about 10 minutes, rearranging the rubble frequently until lightly toasted (don’t over-toast things or it’ll be just a bit too overwhelmingly crunchy against the smooth ice cream base). KEEP AN EYE ON IT and don’t let it burn. Let the mixture cool.

In a clean bowl, whisk the egg whites until stiff, and then whisk in the caster sugar a little at a time until you’ve got a nice glossy meringue. In a separate bowl, whip the cream to soft peaks, then fold into the meringue along with the breadcrumb mixture.

Tip the lot into a plastic container and freeze. The whipped egg white and cream will give it stability so it won’t need churning.

Take it out 15–20 minutes before you want to eat it. I put on Yiddish clarinet music to eat to, but you don’t have to.

VARIATION:

In a nod to my mum’s less successful dessert, use Maryland cookies to make the above into ice cream sandwiches.

MICROWAVE SWISS EGGS

Swiss eggs was one of my dad’s go-to dinner party starters in the eighties. Traditionally, the individual ramekins would be placed in a bain-marie and baked in the oven. But here I’ve reimagined it for the microwave, making an ideal snack for one of those nights when it’s nearly bedtime and for whatever reason you’re still a bit hungry. Deeply savoury, comfortingly milky, absurdly easy and very quick. Great with toast for dipping/scooping, but equally enjoyable as a high-fat-low-carb pot of joy eaten with a spoon.

MAKES 1

bread for toasting, sourdough or baguette (optional)

1 clove garlic (optional too, but necessary if you’re having the toasted bread)

1 tbsp butter

3–4 slices hard or semi-hard alpine-style cheese (Gruyère is ideal, but Comté, Morbier, or even something like ashcombe or a mature Gouda)

1 tsp crispy ‘hotdog’ onions

1 egg

2 tsp double cream

2 minutes

page 56

If you’re having bread, deal with that first. Take a slice of sourdough, or two or three circles of sliced baguette, and toast in a dry frying pan until the bread is golden. Then rub one of the toasted sides with garlic before lightly buttering. If it’s a slice of sourdough, then chop into fat fingers and set aside while you make the egg, which will take about a minute.

Butter the inside of a teacup that’ll be happy in the microwave. Take your cheese slices and carefully stick them to the butter to create a thin wall of cheese that extends about halfway up the sides of the cup. Don’t worry if there are gaps as it’ll all melt together shortly anyway. Sprinkle in the onions.

Crack the egg into the cup, being sure not to break the yolk, and if the yolk hasn’t settled perfectly in the middle, try easing it away from the edge with your finger.

Finish with the cream and the smallest pinch of salt you can imagine (as the cheese is pretty salty). You can be generous with the pepper.

Place a saucer, or a piece of folded kitchen paper, on top of the cup (so that if the egg pops, which it might do, it won’t make a mess all over the ceiling of the microwave). Place in the microwave and cook for 30 seconds. Have a look and prod the yolk (which will be semi-hidden under the cream and melting cheese) to check it’s still soft. The cream and cheese will be molten so don’t be mistaken into thinking the egg white isn’t cooked enough; I’ve done that before and put it back in the microwave for too long resulting in – crime of crimes – a hard yolk. The worst. But depending on your microwave’s power, and the positioning of the yolk (and the alignment of the planets etc.), you may need to give it another 10 seconds or so.

When you’re confident it’s done to your liking, remove it and eat straight from the cup, using the toast to dig in and scoop.

CUP SHAKSHUKA

Not strictly shakshuka, but certainly inspired by the North African and Middle Eastern dish that’s become a popular staple of recent British hipster cuisine. Converted into a one-person portion served in the teacup in which it’s cooked, this is an ideal speedy breakfast, or lunch, or dinner, or one of those snacks you might want to enjoy between, before, or after any of those conventional meal-zones. And it’s really worth splashing out on those slightly dearer, finely chopped polpa tomatoes for this.

MAKES 1

¼ frozen garlic briquette* (or a third of a small clove, crushed or grated)

¼ tsp smoked paprika

¼ tsp ground cumin

¼ tsp sugar, white or brown

pinch of chilli flakes

¼ tsp dried mint

3 tbsp tinned polpa tomatoes

1 tsp extra virgin olive oil

1 egg

10–15g feta

a tiny sprig of parsley, coriander, or mint, chopped

½ lemon

2 minutes

page 57

*in the ‘international’ bit of many larger supermarkets you’ll find bags of frozen briquettes of crushed garlic (and ginger, and ginger/garlic mix) that look, unappealingly, like those little yellow cakes of deodorant you sometimes find in urinals. if you can get past the association i’ve now planted in your head, these are incredibly useful.

In a teacup, mix the garlic, smoked paprika, cumin, sugar, chilli flakes, dried mint, tomatoes and olive oil with a little salt and pepper. Cover loosely and microwave for 40 seconds.

As best you can, make a bit of a dip in the tomato mixture and crack the egg in, trying to keep (or corral) the yolk to the middle. Sprinkle over a little more salt and pepper, cover loosely again and microwave for another 30 seconds. As usual with microwaves, the power varies a bit but ideally you want a runny yolk and a barely set white. Undercooked is better than over, since while you gather together the other bits before eating, the egg will continue to cook in the hot tomato mixture.

Crumble over the feta, the chopped soft herbs and a tiny squeeze of lemon.

Enjoy with a spoon, or scoop out the contents of the cup with some bread, toast or ripped-up warm pitta.

LAMB TOASTIE WITH SABRINA’S BIJI’S CHUTNEY

Inspiring chef and good friend Sabrina Gidda told me the most wonderful organic snack-hacking story of her Punjabi grandmother, Iqbal Kaur. Iqbal Kaur used to make lamb kebabs (and many other things), which she sold on the counter of her and her husband’s pub in 1960s Wolverhampton. A first-generation immigrant to the UK, a country yet to be educated in the wondrous ingredients of South Asia, Iqbal Kaur’s larder was stocked with the things she could get her hands on, and to go with the kebabs she’d rustle up a simple version of imli chutney made with tomato sauce, brown sauce and mint sauce. It makes perfect sense since brown sauce is chock full of tamarind; in fact, the original recipe used by Frederick Gibson Garton, the owner of a grocer’s in Nottingham, which later became HP sauce, was actually obtained from India. Add the sweetness of ketchup and the herbaceous freshness of mint and you’ve a perfect accompaniment. I’d urge you to get hold of a copy of Sabrina’s first cookbook, Modern South Asian Kitchen, where you can read in much greater detail the culinary story of her and her family. There’s a host of epic recipes to make, too.

When she guested on the series, to go with the sauce that her biji (granny) invented, Sabrina and I came up with a lamb recipe: a cross between a toastie and a samosa, with raw meat going into the sandwich to be cooked inside the bread much like a pie or a pasty. Providing the flame is kept low enough, the heat penetrates the bread and cooks the lamb before the bread burns.

MAKES 2

1 raw lamb burger (or 150g minced lamb)

1 small onion, ½ finely chopped, the other ½ sliced

1 clove garlic, minced or finely chopped

1 child’s-thumb-sized piece ginger, minced or finely chopped small bunch coriander, roughly chopped

1 green bird’s eye chilli, chopped

1 heaped tsp garam masala

neutral oil, for shallow-frying

2 tbsp frozen peas

2 tsp nigella seeds

2 tbsp softened butter

4 slices white bread

3 tbsp ketchup

3 tbsp brown sauce

1 tbsp mint sauce

15 minutes

EQUIPMENT:

A stove-top toastie-maker (page 34); you could also make the sandwich in a pan over the stove, but a plug-in electric toastie-maker won’t be suitable as you need to control the temperature.

Mix together the lamb burger or lamb mince, finely chopped onion, garlic, ginger, coriander, chilli and garam masala, and season well. Fry a tiny pinch of the mixture in a pan first to check the seasoning and adjust if necessary. Set it aside and in the same pan fry the sliced onion in a little oil until golden, then add the peas for 1 minute before removing from the heat.

Assemble the sandwich with a thin layer of the raw lamb mix topped with cooked onion and peas and then another thin layer of lamb. You should have the right amount to do this for two sandwiches. Butter the outside of the bread and sprinkle the butter with nigella seeds so they stick. Cook low and slow, either in your toastie-maker over a naked flame or in a frying pan, flipping halfway through, until the meat is just cooked. If the heat is low enough, the meat should be cooked once the bread is golden and brown in places.

Let it cool while you make the chutney: simply combine the ketchup, brown sauce and mint sauce together. If it’s very thick you might want to thin it with a splash of water. Eat with the hands, dipping the sandwich in the chutney between bites.

A Wall of Slowly
Revolving Chickens

While my south London classmates were flying off to Spain or Florida, back in the days when parents could take their kids out of school during term time when the flights were cheap without fear of being fined, we mostly went on holiday in the UK. And during the school holidays too because my mum was a school teacher. We did a lot of family youth hostelling which, though embarrassing at the time, was like so many things you thought you didn’t like during childhood, retrospectively brilliant.

For various reasons we weren’t a flying family. A combination of a modest budget and an aversion to anything considered ‘package’, along with Mum’s anxiety about travelling anywhere, meant that the only country outside of the UK that we ever went to was France in the car. I loved going to France and I still do, especially on the ferry.

There’s not much I get more excited about in France than a market. Often more frequently than once a week, every tiny town and village has one. Yet despite their ubiquity and provincial locations, the quality and variety of produce on display rivals even that of Borough Market in London. But as pleasurable as these Gallic bazaars are to peruse, the experience is mildly tainted by the dispiriting feeling that in the UK we don’t even come close.

There were penknife stalls – something very attractive to a thirteen-year-old boy on holiday. Imagine having the opportunity to buy, with ease and without parental guidance, a lethally sharp knife with a locking ring. Combine that with a beach peopled by topless women and that made for a very content prepubescent lad from south London. Aside from easily purchased weapons there was fresh fruit and vegetables, cured meats, cheeses, fish and breads and pastries, but stroll around any French market and you’ll soon happen upon a stall the sight and smell of which will make your saliva glands begin to work hard: A low trailer atop which stands a wall of bright orange electric elements and majestically turning in front of them, row upon row of French hens, dozens of them golden and glistening, blistered skins rippling and popping and dripping onto a tray of yellow pebble-like potatoes lying below bathing in the hot fat. It’s quite something. Almost as interesting as the beach.

I think tinned vegetables are nice (and much-loved in France, just look at the selection on the supermarket shelves). I know they’re not like their fresh friends, but as long as you don’t think of them as the same thing they have their own charm and distinctive flavours. Tinned potatoes are particularly good for many things; speed and efficiency as well as stretching a limited budget, but I think they taste great too. You just have to embrace the difference. I put them in curries (homemade and microwaveable ones), and they’re lovely sliced, lightly-oiled and grilled before being crowned with poached eggs. But they’re best for recreating the aforementioned French spuds that lie there looking up at those majestic rotating chickens.

SPATCHCOCKED CHICKEN AND FRENCH MARKET POTATOES

Food is about flavour and texture, but it’s also about time, location, sound, smell, music, company and so much more, right down to the way it’s served. If you really want to recreate the authentic experience – and you should – you’ll want to go for a rummage in your recycling box. In the French markets these potatoes are generously piled into plastic boxes, and reaching into such a box with your fingers for hot, salty chicken-y potatoes really is better than eating them off a plate with cutlery. So look for something appropriate. (And see page 152 for more on this.)

SERVES 2–4 PEOPLE (DEPENDING ON APPETITE)

1 medium-sized chicken, ideally unwrapped for about 30 minutes

1 tbsp cold pressed rapeseed oil, plus extra to oil the oven shelf and the chicken

½ tsp paprika

1 pot chicken stock concentrate (I use the knorr ones)

¼ tsp paella powder* or turmeric powder

2 x 550g tins new potatoes, drained

50–60 minutes

page 64

EQUIPMENT:

you may want to use a probe thermometer for checking the ‘doneness’ of the chicken but it’s not essential (see next page).

Preheat the grill to 190°C/375°F.

You want the chicken to drip onto the potatoes, just like the chickens in the market, so remove an oven shelf and lightly oil the bars. Keep that shelf out ready for your chicken and put another shelf (or just use the clean grill pan) near the bottom of the oven.

Spatchcock the chicken. Turn it breast-side down with the legs facing towards you and, using a pair of poultry shears or robust scissors, remove the backbone by cutting either side of it from top to bottom (chicken’s bum to parson’s nose), crunching through the ribcage bones. Keep the backbone.

Pull the bird open a bit and feel for the sternum, which you’ll be able to detect inside the now open rib cavity, between the breasts. With a sharp knife, cut a little snick in the middle of the sternum until the chicken opens up a little bit wider. Flip the chicken over and press down on the breast to flatten it further. Finally, tuck the wing tips under the breast to help it hold its shape, but it will be quite floppy.

Lightly rub the chicken with oil, sprinkle both sides with salt, pepper and paprika, and place the chicken, breast-side down (so gruesome horror-film-style opened-up ribcage side facing you) on the oiled bars of the oven shelf.

In a big bowl, beat together the stock pot with 1 tablespoon of oil and a dash of water to create an emulsion that’ll coat things. Add the paella powder (or turmeric) and a generous grind of black pepper, then add the potatoes. Fold everything together to coat evenly, and pour them into a deep tray that’s wider than the chicken (as you want all the chicken cooking-drippings to fall onto the potatoes). Chuck in the backbone too, it’ll add flavour.

Put the tray in the bottom of the oven on the low shelf before sliding the shelf with the chicken into the oven so it’s about 20cm away from the heat source. Grill for about 20 minutes (but keep an eye on it as grill strengths can vary), flip the chicken over and then give the breast side about the same amount of time. When you flip the chicken over you can give the potatoes a jiggle too.

When the chicken is golden and cooked through (if using a probe thermometer, it wants to be just over 75°C/167°F in the thickest part; if you don’t have one then pierce the thickest part of the chicken with a knife, hold it there for a few seconds, withdraw it and touch the tip of the knife to your lip, and if it’s hot, it’s done), remove from the oven and cover loosely with foil, or just leave it uncovered if the kitchen is warm. It’ll stay hot enough. Place the potato tray where the chicken was for 15 minutes while the chicken rests. The potatoes will crisp up and go a bit chewy and the chicken drippings will get sticky.

When everything is done, plonk the chicken onto a sheet of greaseproof paper and tumble the potatoes into your recovered plastic tub. I’d recommend enjoying it all with the following:

a half-decent baguette

a pot of Dijon mustard

a pot of mayonnaise

a bottle of rough red wine (maybe you’ve got some stubby Duralex glasses: now’s the time to get them out)

ALTERNATIVE:

If you’ve neither the time nor the inclination to do the spatchcocked chicken, you can cook the potatoes by themselves, following the instructions above but baking at 200°C/180°C fan (400°F/ gas mark 6) instead of grilling, and buying a pre-cooked rotisserie chicken from the supermarket.

WARNING: Occasionally a potato explodes. I think they sometimes get waterlogged and the pressure inside them builds up with the heat of the oven. So look out for that.

*When we went on holiday to Spain some years ago, I bought a little tub of ‘paella powder’. It’s got a bit of flavour in it but I think it’s mostly colouring, and it really does make a paella look good. It also makes the tinned potatoes look extremely authentically yellow, but as I say, turmeric will work, too, and it’s easier to get your hands on. It’s also easier to get on your hands.

Aside from the ‘French market’ thing, a roast chicken evokes another childhood memory in me, though not the Sunday classic.

In the late seventies, my mildly bohemian parents used to partake in huge communal picnics at Beckenham Place Park in south London with a throng of other families. I was very young at the time, so my memories of the day are informed more by old photos than actual recollection, but one thing I definitely remember is the chicken. We had a tough old Cannon cooker, which sported a powerful gas-fired eye-level grill, and Dad would spear a chicken from bum to neck, plunging lethal-looking spiked anchors into its flesh at either end. He’d spit-roast the chicken so the skin was golden all over and then wrap it in foil along with a huge bunch of thyme from a gnarly bush in the front garden.

That spit-roast chicken with thyme, wrapped in foil, became a picnic standard that outlasted the communal picnics and carried on into my adulthood and beyond the birth of my kids. And that smell when you unwrap the foil is etched on my mind and will be forever.

The spit itself fascinated me too. When you reversed one of the anchors and dropped them both down to the handle end, it looked like something from Hawk the Slayer. Great to wave about or just to hold and stand and look in the mirror.

Try the Spatchcocked Chicken from the previous page. When it’s done to your liking shove some big bunches of thyme around it, wrap it in a double layer of foil, then some newspaper for insulation, stick it in a bag and head off to the woods, or a park, or a beach with your family or friends, or just by yourself if everyone’s busy.

I’m not going to arrogantly claim to be the first person to think of putting pizza toppings on a naan. Nigella Lawson did it in Nigella Express, and I’d imagine a number of others did it before that book was published. Let’s face it, pretty much any bread-type base can be used as a raft for tomatoes and cheese. When I was small, I often made ‘pizza toast’ from a recipe in one of my parents’ little hard-backed Sainsbury’s recipe books: wholemeal toast, tomato purée, fresh tomato slices, grated cheese, dried herbs and a lattice of ham strips. Pop it under the eye-level grill on the Cannon for five minutes until bubbling and… aww, sorry, just give me a moment, will you.

A quick word about shape. For whatever reason, psychologically, a saddle-shaped pizza doesn’t work. It’s weird and it feels like everything’s gone wrong, so please seek out circular, or at the very least oval, naans. My tip: avoid the supermarkets, who seem to have nothing but the ones that look like the face from Munch’s The Scream. Look in your local international food shops. The one near my house sells packs of three puffy but thin circular naans the diameter of LPs for about £1.50 (wonder how that sentence will age). That’s three big pizzas waiting to be topped. What a bargain. And try to find plain ones, or at least garlic ones, but not the coriander type as that seems wrong too.

MARGHERITA

Get the tubes out and get squeezing. Also, forget all that nonsense about having to cook a tomato sauce for your pizza. When tomatoes are tinned they’re cooked in the tins as part of the process, and then when your sauce goes onto your base and into the hot oven it’s getting cooked again. Does it really always need three cooking processes? Sometimes, maybe, if you want something very concentrated, but not today and not for this.

MAKES 2 PIZZAS

1 x 400g tin plum tomatoes

2 tbsp sun-dried tomato purée (or regular tomato purée)

2 tbsp garlic purée

1 tbsp harissa paste

1 tbsp anchovy purée (or a splash of fish sauce, though you can omit it if you want to keep things vegetarian)

3 tbsp olive oil, plus extra for drizzling

½ tsp black pepper

1 tsp dried oregano

2 plain circular naans, about the diameter of an LP (30cm approx.)

2 mozzarella balls

small bunch basil

12 minutes

page 69

EQUIPMENT:

if you have a pizza stone then that’s great, put it in the oven to preheat. if not, put a flat heavy baking tray in the oven instead.

Preheat the oven to 240°C/220°C fan (465°F/gas mark 9).

First make the tomato sauce. Open the tin of tomatoes, lift out the whole fruits and place them in a large bowl, leaving anything particularly watery in the tin. Add the tomato purée, garlic purée, harissa paste, anchovy purée (if using), olive oil, pepper, dried oregano and a big pinch of salt and use your hand to squish it all together until roughly combined. You want some lumps.

Take a naan, spoon over 3 or 4 tablespoons of the sauce, and spread it around, going quite close to the edge. I think too little is better than too much, although I suppose just right is… well, you know what it is.

Tear a mozzarella ball into big pieces, no more than six lumps, and distribute them evenly (but not too neatly) over the sauce. Finally, take about ten basil leaves in one hand, pour a little oil over them and scrunch them together lightly to get oil all over them before scattering randomly over the pizza. This is to stop the basil drying out when it bakes.

Slide the naan onto the pizza stone or baking tray in the oven and cook until the cheese is melted and just starting to colour. If you can get your oven really hot then it should take about 5 minutes, but keep an eye on it. And let it cool before you tuck in. In fact, take it out and build the second one, and by the time that goes in the first should be approaching an edible temperature.

SPICY SNACK SALAMI

A true hack for a pizza topping, the credit for which has to go to the lovely Adam Purnell. Adam goes by the name Shropshire Lad (@shropshire.lad on his socials). He’s a hugely talented BBQ chef, a big guy with an even bigger personality, and was a guest on Snack Hacker when we combined his ready-made topping with my naan base and snacking salamis to come up with a very quick and easy treat. You could vary the snacking salamis of course, and the cheese, but I’m a real advocate of mild Cheddar in this sort of scenario as you want an almost neutral fatty duvet smothering all that acid and spice.

MAKES 2 PIZZAS

4 tbsp hot sauce of your choice

4 tbsp A DIFFERENT hot sauce of your choice

2 plain circular naans, about the diameter of an LP (30cm approx.)

150g spiced tomato juice (Bloody Mary mixer kind of stuff)

2 mozzarella balls

150g mild Cheddar, grated

4 Peperami Firesticks (or another snacking salami)

olive oil for drizzling

1 tsp fennel seeds

12 minutes

page 68

Preheat the oven to 240°C/220°C fan (465°F/gas mark 9).

Splash 2 tablespoons of each of the hot sauces over a pizza base and spread unevenly with the back of a spoon, then slosh over half the tomato juice and spread that out too.

Rip a mozzarella ball into big ungainly chunks and drop them randomly across the base before scattering over the mild Cheddar. If you have a mandoline, then use it to slice two of the salami sticks all over the pizza; if you don’t have one, then just cut them thinly and distribute over the cheese. Finish with a trickle of oil, half the fennel seeds, a pinch of salt and a generous grind of black pepper.

Bake for 5–6 minutes until the cheese is bubbling, and make the second pizza while this one cools to an acceptable temperature.

WELSH RAREBIT

There’s a large Italian immigrant community in Wales dating back to the late nineteenth century and the Italian diaspora, with many cafés, ice cream parlours and fish and chip shops still being run by the same families. During Euro 2020, I was tasked with inventing recipes that combined foods of competing nations for the Elis James and John Robins Show on BBC Radio 5Live, and when Italy played Wales I came up with this tasty fusion. The bitter beer married with the fatty cheese and tempered with a pinch of sugar is sensational. You’ll want to use the sauce for other things too, so you could always make extra and put some on toast.

MAKES 2 PIZZAS

50g butter

50g plain flour

150ml beer (ideally Brains or Double Dragon, if you can get it)

250ml whole milk

2 tsp english mustard (don’t tell the Welsh)

¼ tsp cayenne pepper

Worcestershire sauce

75g mature Cheddar

75g Caerphilly

pinch of sugar (white or brown)

2 plain circular naans, about the diameter of an lP

(30cm approx.)

125g ricotta

olive oil for drizzling

6 slices prosciutto cotto

small bunch basil

20 minutes

page 69

Preheat the oven to 240°C/220°C fan (465°F/gas mark 9).

Make the rarebit sauce first. In a saucepan, over a low heat, melt the butter until just starting to foam, then add the flour, whisking and cooking until it smells biscuity. Continue whisking while you add the beer, a few splashes at a time until it’s incorporated, then add the milk in the same way. Cook until thick, stirring pretty much continuously, then add the mustard, cayenne pepper, a big splash of Worcestershire sauce and a big pinch each of salt and pepper. Turn the heat off and wait for a minute before grating in all the Cheddar and Caerphilly and stirring in until melted. Adding the cheese off the heat will prevent it from going grainy. Beat in a small pinch of sugar to counter the bitterness of the beer. Taste the sauce and if it isn’t salty enough, add a bit more salt. It should be really thick and will get thicker as it cools.

Spoon a generous amount of sauce onto one of the naans, spreading it out with the back of a spoon as you would tomato sauce on a regular pizza. Spoon over six or seven blobs of ricotta, leaving them as blobs. Drizzle a splash of olive oil over half the prosciutto and scrunch it up with your hand to coat it evenly before scattering randomly over the pizza. Do the same with several basil leaves. Grind over some pepper and sprinkle with salt, particularly over the ricotta. Trickle over a little more olive oil.

Bake for about 5–6 minutes until the cheese sauce is bubbling, and make the second pizza while this one cools to an acceptable temperature.

CHICKEN AND LEMON TAGINE-INSPIRED PIE

Comedian Jamie Demetriou used to pimp his pizzas. He was a guest on Snack Hacker and told me how his sister Natasha and he used to add things to their Dr. Oetkers when they were teenagers. He also impressed on me his love of all things citrus, and preserved lemons in particular. That got me thinking: why should anyone stop their pimping at pizzas? Why not look at pies as a blank canvas in the same way? Of course, up to that point I’d been adding things to hot bakery items, but cold, ready-to-put-in-the-oven pies could be fiddled with too, bringing them up a few notches. Here’s the idea I came up with to satisfy Jamie’s love of lemons; by adding a few other flavours to a classic chicken and mushroom pie I pushed it in a Moroccan tagine-inspired direction.

SERVES 1

1 oven-ready chicken and mushroom pie (Pukka or similar)

2 small preserved lemons

6 pitted green olives

1 tsp fennel seeds

1 egg

small bunch dill or some fennel fronds

lemon wedge

5 minutes (plus pie-cooking time)

Preheat the oven to whatever temperature is suggested on the packaging of the pie.

Cut each preserved lemon into eight pieces. Halve or quarter the olives depending on how big they are. Toast the fennel seeds in a dry pan until they smell fragrant, then roughly bash them up in a pestle and mortar, or just leave them unbashed if, like me, you enjoy some texture. In a small bowl, beat the egg with a fork.

With a serrated knife, cut horizontally where the pie lid joins its base so you can remove the top and gain access to the pie’s innards. Randomly stuff lemon chunks, olive pieces, fennel seeds (reserving a pinch) and black pepper into the pie, distributing them evenly throughout. When you’ve crammed in what feels like enough extra stuff, egg wash the rim where the lid was joined and replace the pastry top. Egg wash the top itself and sprinkle with fennel seeds.

Bake as per the pie instructions. When it comes out of the oven let it cool a little and sprinkle with torn-up dill or fennel fronds, and when you cut it open squeeze over a little fresh lemon juice.

VARIATION:

As you’d imagine, this technique works with lots of pies. Pukka occasionally do a chicken Balti edition, and the addition of tiny raw cauliflower florets, pickled onions and toasted cumin seeds is amazing, while minced beef and onion is superb with added blue cheese pieces and aniseeds on top. However, inspired by the Victorian practice of beef and oyster pie, I tried adding tinned smoked oysters to an all-steak pie and it made me want to puke, so be warned.

Mate is traditionally drunk in South America as a beverage in its own right, being prepared (just mate leaves and hot water) in a hollowed-out gourd with a straw stuck in it (the straw having a fine mesh at the bottom end to filter the leaves out). It’s shared as part of a social ceremony, and of course without milk or sugar. But when we were kids my dad occasionally bought mate and mixed it with the traditional black loose leaves that we usually had, a preparation completely untraditional and a practice that I can’t seem to find evidence of other people doing. The mate itself is interesting-looking, with the appearance of cracked dried green leaves with bits of stem and a fair amount of green dust, and when brewed with regular black tea it imparts a smoky flavour unlike anything else – sort of going in the direction of Earl Grey but drier and dustier and less perfumed. You can get big bags of mate from most wholefood shops. And it’s very high in caffeine so might offer the required first-thing-in-the-morning boost if you wanted a change from coffee.

By the way, the word is pronounced to rhyme with pâté, however it’s not spelled that way in Spanish or Portuguese (in fact ‘maté’ in Spanish means ‘I killed’), but I’m just pointing it out as it looks like it should be pronounced ‘mate’, as in ‘Hello mate, sorry I’m late, how long did you wait?’ etc. But it shouldn’t.

PHILIPPA BISCUITS

To go with my tea, I’d like a biscuit. A Philippa biscuit. So-called because ever since I can remember, when visiting my aunt and uncle (Philippa and John), they had a batch of them, freshly made, in an old, reassuringly familiar, bashed-up tin. It’s a recipe that I too baked frequently when I was a little boy. They’re dead easy, and while similarly oaty and slightly worthy-tasting, they’re less heavy than flapjacks. The bicarbonate of soda and self-raising flour gives them an airy lightness, so you can have a few more of them without feeling too much guilt. I think they’re actually called Anzac biscuits, but Philippa called them Crockers cookies, and in my family we call them Philippa biscuits. I add fennel seeds to the original recipe, which lends an interesting grown-up flavour to the proceedings, but you can omit them if they’re not your thing.

MAKES 16

70g rolled oats

70g desiccated coconut

70g wholemeal self-raising flour

60g demerara sugar

2 tsp fennel seeds

pinch of salt

120g butter

1½ tbsp golden syrup

½ tsp bicarbonate of soda

20 minutes

page 74

Preheat the oven to 190°C/170°C fan (375°F/gas mark 5) and line a couple of baking trays with baking parchment.

Mix the oats, coconut, flour, demerara sugar, fennel seeds and salt together in a bowl. Then melt the butter with the syrup and 1½ tablespoons of water and once it’s all liquid add the bicarbonate of soda and stir together. It’ll froth up. Straight away, pour it onto the dry ingredients and mix everything together. Divide the warm mixture into 16 ping-pong-ball-sized spheres and place them on the baking trays, leaving a large gap around each one as they’ll spread out in the oven.

Bake for 13–14 minutes, then leave them to cool on the trays for 5–10 minutes because if you try lifting them straight away they’ll fall apart. Once the wait is over, put them onto a cooling rack, and as soon as your tea (maybe with mate) is ready, you can tuck into both.

VARIATION:

You can play around with the basic recipe, adding different seeds or nuts or spices. Try omitting the fennel and instead adding 1 teaspoon of powdered ginger and two or three balls of stem ginger in syrup chopped up into little dice.

CEREAL KILLA’ LOAF

I did a run of gigs in Hong Kong once, and in the hotel, to appease their international clientele, they served a choice of breakfasts from around the world. Their European option included cereal, which was milked in advance so the cornflakes were lovely and soft by the time you got to eat them, though my fellow British performers who’d gone for that option weren’t best pleased. I thought ‘when in Rome’ (although it was Kowloon, not Rome) and went for the Chinese breakfast. Unfamiliar, but nice. You’ve got to embrace new experiences.

For this recipe, a bowl of pre-milked cereal, untouched and forgotten about, the cereal soaking up the milk to form a slurry of pale brown quicksand you could stand a teaspoon up in, is exactly what you want. And please marvel at how so few ingredients create such a shockingly good loaf that’s delicious sliced thickly, buttered and topped with some itchy mature Cheddar.

MAKES 1 LOAF

100g All Bran or Shreddies (try other cereals to see how they work)

100g white caster sugar

150g dried fruit (sultanas, raisins, or from a bag of mixed dried fruit)

300ml whole milk

butter for greasing (optional)

100g plain flour

1 tsp baking powder

60–70 mins (plus cereal-soaking time)

EQUIPMENT:

A 450g loaf tin that’s either non-stick or well lined with baking parchment.

Preheat the oven to 180°C/160°C fan (350°F/gas mark 4).

Pour the cereal, sugar, dried fruit and milk into a big bowl, give it a stir and then WALK AWAY AND GET ON WITH SOMETHING ELSE, as you want all that milk to get soaked up. Leave it for at least an hour, or even overnight (you could do this just before you go to bed to make the loaf first thing in the morning).

Generously butter your loaf tin. Or line it with baking parchment.

Once the cereal mix has turned to mush, add the flour and the baking powder and fold together until combined into a sloppy batter. Spoon the batter into the loaf tin and bake for about 60 minutes.

Turn it out. Let it cool. Slice it up.

THE IMPORTANCE OF PACKAGING

My brother Henry and I were a bit obsessed with fast food when we were kids. I imagine it was because this kind of food was frowned upon by our parents, who were way ahead when it came to looking down on McJunk. We weren’t completely denied it though, and I’d been enough times to know what they had there and what I liked (chips yes, hamburger yes, cheeseburger yes, quarter pounder with cheese definitely yes, Big Mac sometimes, gherkin no, not yet, but give me time). A McDonald’s birthday party was a pretty standard affair during my primary school days, and I still vividly remember being eight or nine and stood in the ‘party area’ of Catford McDonald’s being asked by someone’s mum, ‘Would you like a hamburger or a cheeseburger?’ and replying, ‘Cheeseburger’, while in my head thinking ‘That’s not even going to touch the sides.’

Whenever we got the opportunity to try and recreate a McDinner at home, my brother and I did so as best we could and with limited ingredients: big fat frozen burgers from Safeway that turned almost spherical when you grilled them, hefty buns from the baker’s, Colman’s English Mustard rather than French’s, Cheddar cheese rather than the rarely-present-in-our-fridge processed stuff. They were still good though, and our youthful metabolism meant we could easily put away two each and then run straight into the back garden to play. While those burgers brought us tremendous joy, the one thing we wanted more than anything else was the right packaging. We’d ask Mum and Dad if there was any way we could get hold of some hinged polystyrene boxes; even better, orange ones with McDonald’s Quarter Pounder written on them. I’d seen a family do exactly that on a regional TV news programme and I was sure there must be a way. Never happened though.

I’ve not changed. I still like ‘playing shops’, and packaging is hugely important for many reasons: aesthetics for a start – find the right paper and a burger or sandwich feels much more like something you want to eat. It also makes it look more like something from somewhere other than home, and that lends it an exoticism. I’ve watched films from the US and on many occasions have been more focused on the noodle boxes than the plot, thinking, ‘Why can’t we have those here?’ Nostalgia comes into play too: wrap homemade fish and chips in actual newspaper and it’s akin to dressing up in a period costume. But on top of all of this, the act of wrapping something changes its physical make-up, especially in the case of something hot. In the enclosed environment of a greaseproof paper parcel steam can’t escape and the cheese in a cheeseburger will melt and meld with meat and bun; sandwich fillings will fuse together and seep into bread; the contents of wraps will start to get to know each other. It’s a fine art and not always successful, as anyone who’s unsheathed a wet clingfilmed tomato and pâté sandwich on a summer school trip will attest, but think ahead, get your timings and materials right, and your wrapping can be truly transformative.

Greaseproof Paper

More difficult to get hold of these days as it appears to have been replaced by the more slippery (and considerably more expensive) baking parchment.

PLEASE DISPOSE OF LITTER RESPONSIBLY

But you can certainly find it in large cash & carry shops, both on rolls and in large packets of individual sheets. Great for wrapping most hot foods and sandwiches, allowing a perfect balance of containment (for cheese-melding) and breathability (to avoid the aforementioned sandwich-sweats).

Baking Parchment

Does a pretty similar job to greaseproof paper but at a greater price. It’s also very slippery, being siliconised on both sides, and without the aid of an elastic band to hold everything together sandwich-wrappings have an annoying tendency to spring open.

Waxed Paper

The sort of stuff you get when you buy cheese from somewhere expensive. Very nice to use as it folds beautifully and the folds stay in place. Feels great and looks the business. Problematically, it comes on very short rolls for a premium price, but I made a pleasing discovery: you can buy huge rolls of waxed kraft paper that works just as well, although the rolls, which tend to be about 90cm wide, will need cutting down to size. At 100m long, one roll ought to last you a lifetime. The stuff I’ve found is actually intended for wrapping greasy automotive parts, so I imagine it’s not ‘food grade’, but then I’m just as happy wrapping things in newspaper too and that’s not food grade either, so I’ll take the risk*.

Newspaper

Again, not food grade, but they wrapped fish and chips in it in the past (of course I appreciate that this doesn’t in any way mean it was the right thing to do, as I understand they also used to send kids up chimneys and set fire to women who owned cats). Using it will generate a feeling of goodliness that you’re not actually buying anything new and instead are making use of something that would otherwise end up in the recycling. And if you want to have fun, you can even source foreign newspapers to wrap the appropriate food items in: an oily cheese-topped focaccia wrapped in La Repubblica; a jambon-beurre wrapped in Le Monde; or a tumble of fries and currywurst (page 145) in a cone made out of Die Zeit.

Boxes and Trays

If you know you’re going to use a lot over time, then perhaps it’s worth getting hold of a cash & carry card so you can purchase in bulk. You’ll surely know someone with one (if you don’t, they’re pretty easy to get hold of, just go in there with some headed paper, and confidence). The aisles of a wholesale shop are an absolute treasure-trove for the packaging-fancier, offering as they do a huge selection of ready-to assemble burger, pizza and noodle boxes, soup cups (great for homemade ice cream), paper bags, coffee cups, the list goes on.

*I probably ought to drop in a disclaimer here for my own protection and would advise that you make your own investigations into the appropriacy of non-food-grade wrapping materials before embarking.

MOCKDONALDS

A vegetarian recreation of one of the best sandwiches you can buy – the Sausage and Egg McMuffin. I’m replacing the sausage with a thick slice of vegetarian haggis, and as soon as it’s assembled I’m turning my attention to the most important part of the exercise: the wrapping.

MAKES 2

neutral oil, for shallow-frying

2 English muffins, split

2 thick slices vegetarian haggis (Macsween is ideal, but others are available)

2 eggs

2 slices processed cheese

15 minutes

EQUIPMENT:

1 circular cookie cutter about the same diameter as the muffin, and 2 sheets of paper to wrap them in (page 78).

I’m lucky enough to have a small cast-iron plancha on my cooker, but if you don’t, a large well-seasoned frying pan will do, although you want something that you’re confident the eggs won’t stick to. If you’ve got enough surface area for eight circles at once then do it all together, but if not, go bread first followed by filling (or use two pans).

Lightly oil the cut sides of the muffin and get those onto the hot surface first to get a bit of colour – be bold; in this instance too much is better than not enough. (I had a McDonald’s breakfast in Calais once when I was early for a ferry and I marvelled at how much better made it was than the ones in the UK – more char on the muffin, the egg yolk jammy rather than powdery. I suppose a case of generations-long instinct meant they just knew what they were doing.) When your bread is toasted, take it off the heat and stand the pieces up like you’re starting to build a castle of playing cards to maintain the crispness.

Add a little oil to the pan and lay the haggis slices in the pan. They can be very delicate and easily fall apart when hot so be really gentle with them.

Rub a little oil on the inside of your cookie cutter, place it in the pan and crack an egg into the centre. Season the unset egg with salt and plenty of pepper and as soon as it’s set around the edges slip the cookie cutter off (a bit of egg white will likely spill out but don’t worry about that, either leave it as a crispy extra or flip it onto the uncooked egg with a knife). Repeat the process with egg number 2.

Now is probably the right time to turn the haggis slices over, and when you’re confident the eggs are cooked through about halfway, turn those over to cook from the other side, without breaking those precious yolks.

While the eggs are finishing, use a spatula to press down on the haggis slices, spreading them out a little until they’re the diameter of the muffins. You might not need to do this if the muffins are small.

Build the sandwich. Turn the heat off but leave the pan on the hob. Go bottom muffin, haggis, slice of processed cheese, egg, top muffin.

Now it’s time to wrap, so place the muffin into the centre of your paper laid lengthways. Bring the furthest away edge and the closest edge together like you’re creating a sling, holding the ends of the two edges like you’ve got paws (1) and start folding it away from you, rolling and folding until you meet the top of the muffin (2). Then bring your hands left and right, folding the respective paper ends (I want to say ‘wings’?) into points (3) before pushing them together underneath the muffin (4). Then place the parcel back into the pan. Put a lid or a cloche on top and do a bit of washing up or pour yourself a coffee or tea, but leave it for about 2 minutes so everything gets to know everything else. You want that cheese to melt and stick to the paper in places. You’ll know what I mean when you unwrap and eat it.

MILKSHAKE QUARTET

Imagine if you could make milkshakes that were as nice as . . . Hold on, I’ll start again. Imagine if you could make milkshakes that were nicer, and more interesting, than the ones in the big fast-food places. And without having to have a freezer crammed full of ice cream. Here are the three classics (and an alcohol-enhanced wild card), which are all a bit more interesting than the familiar standards, and all very easy, and all very Snack Hacker.

The method is the same for each of them, but here are the respective ingredients lists. And if using custard, put the tin in the fridge for a few hours to get the contents nice and cold.

MAKES 1 OF EACH

STRAWBERRY

200ml cold whole milk

2 tbsp strawberry jam (the good stuff)

4 tbsp mascarpone

¼ tsp rose water

CHOCOLATE

200ml cold whole milk

½ tin custard (cold from the fridge)

1 tsp cocoa powder

¼ tsp roasted hazelnut syrup (like you’d pour in a coffee if you wanted to upset any coffee aficionados; if you don’t have the syrup use a shot of espresso instead)

VANILLA

200ml cold whole milk

½ x 400g tin custard (cold from the fridge)

1 tbsp Horlicks powder

BARLEY CUP COCKTAIL (THIS IS THE WILD CARD)

200ml cold whole milk

1 tbsp Barley cup (or equivalent wholefoods shop decaffeinated coffee substitute)

3 tbsp evaporated milk

1 tbsp condensed milk

50ml Baileys Irish cream (or similar)

2 minutes

For each recipe, simply blend the ingredients together with passion and conviction until thick and creamy and perfectly combined (especially in the case of the jam one) before decanting into an appropriate-sized/shaped glass.

If you’re the right age to remember having Neapolitan ice cream and enjoying mixing the three flavours together in your bowl, then I urge you to make the first three, blend them together, have a sip and it’ll send you straight back.

EQUIPMENT:

a Nutribullet-type powerful blender, or a regular blender, or just an immersion blender.

TAHINI CROISSANTS

There’s a bakery in Brighton that sells almond croissants so heavy with frangipane and syrup they feel like a well-filled and neatly folded nappy. In a good way. This is a play on almond croissants but instead of ground nuts it uses tahini, which has a creaminess and an underlying bitterness that when paired with date syrup is utterly delectable. Ideal made with mini croissants if you can find them: two bites with sips of espresso before, between and after. Perfect wake-up food. They’re just as good made with full-size croissants too. Maybe the big ones are better.

And before anyone pipes up with a ‘What do you mean, leftover croissants?!’ (yawn… and for more on this niggle, head to Too Many Chips, page 178), I don’t think I’m alone in occasionally over-purchasing breakfast pastries, especially when having guests over, meaning that for the next few days the words ‘we should eat those before they go stale’ followed by ‘oh dear these have gone stale’ are uttered. However, these days you’ll find me saying ‘good, the croissants are stale now’ because the following recipe is so damn delicious and a pleasure to make.

MAKES 4

4 slightly stale, day-old all-butter croissants

3 tbsp date syrup

100g butter, softened

100g white sugar (caster or granulated)

2 eggs

100g tahini

3 tbsp plain flour

3 tbsp sesame seeds

icing sugar for dusting

25 minutes

Preheat the oven to 180°C/160°C fan (350°F/gas mark 4).

Split the croissants like you would a burger bap, and leave the cut sides exposed to dry out a little more while you do everything else.

In a small bowl, mix the date syrup with 1 tablespoon of water to make a thin, spoonable liquid. Set aside.

Mix the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy. Beat in the eggs one at a time, followed by the tahini and finally the flour. This is your tahini cream.

Trickle the syrup over the cut sides of the croissants and let it soak in, then spoon 1–2 tablespoons of the tahini cream onto the bottom half of each croissant and place the tops on to make sandwiches. Put the croissant sandwiches onto a baking tray lined with baking parchment and place another tray on top, weighed down with something heavy but not too heavy, a couple of cookbooks perhaps (maybe this book plus the two copies you bought to give away as presents?). Leave for 10 minutes.

When you’re ready to cook them, remove the weighted tray, spread another tablespoonful of tahini cream over the top of each croissant and sprinkle with sesame seeds. Bake for 12–14 minutes until golden. When the croissants come out of the oven they’ll still be floppy, but wait for 10 minutes and they’ll crisp up (just enough time to make an espresso). Dust the croissants generously with icing sugar and they’re ready.

If you’ve any tahini cream left over, it’ll keep in the fridge for a week.

TASTES AND SMELLS

I recall walking into the common room on the first day of sixth form and being hit by a scent exactly the same as that of my nursery (perhaps it was an identical cocktail of cleaning products and furniture). Boom, in my head I was back there – the coat-hooks with pictures next to them so you knew whose was whose (I was a red train), the plastic boxes where the game cards were kept, the carpet where we sat to listen at story-time, and, peppered with Blu Tacked art, the big windows that clouded with condensation as excitable youngsters generated heat and breath inside.

It was at my nursery school that I first experienced a food I’ve loved to this day, the taste and smell of which still brings memories flooding back. Cress. Brilliant stuff. Fast to grow, and easy too. As the summer began and my year at nursery drew to a close we sprouted seeds on damp cotton wool, watched them grow tall over the course of a week, and then, when they were ready to harvest, we cut them down, sandwiched big clumps between slices of cheap white sliced bread slathered in equally cheap yellow margarine, and tucked in. Teeth sank through the pillowy dough and salty fat before meeting the slightest resistance from the vegetation, and then the refreshing, mildly peppery crush as it all came together in our mouths. What an experience. I can taste it now as I write, and I relive those early memories whenever I eat it still. Perfect, but it rather needs something else…

That summer holiday, between nursery and primary school, our family drove to visit my aunt in the Midlands, and on the way we stopped for lunch at another family’s house. I don’t think I’d met them before and, for whatever reason, I don’t think we saw them much after. I recall they had a donkey, which was very exciting, and even better they had a rope swing with a tyre seat. Despite the heavy rain, I insisted on playing on it, but being too small I sank through the centre of the tyre. However, the strongest memory of the visit was a specific part of the lunch, the starter I think – half a hard-boiled egg, cut-side down on a plate, liberally covered in a yellowy-white creamy-textured something, and dusted with a hint of red powder. ‘What’s that?’ I asked my dad. ‘That’s paprika, you’ll like it.’ I tasted it. It didn’t really taste of anything. The rest, the egg and the yellow stuff, they were sensational.

I would have been about three, so I don’t remember anything else from the meal, or what the family looked like, or how many kids they had. I remember the tyre swing, and the donkey, and more than anything else that small plate of food at the start, when I was especially hungry and a bit damp from my time in the garden, and sitting in the car heading north for the second half of the journey, saying, ‘What was that thing we had again?’ and my dad saying, ‘That, that was egg mayonnaise’ and my thinking it was the best thing ever.

Two revelatory experiences in the space of a few months. It was some years later that I learned what happens when you combine the two.

A BETTER EGG AND CRESS SANDWICH

Egg mayonnaise and cress is one of the best sandwiches there is, when it’s done right. Sadly, it rarely is when you get it from the shops. The first problem is ratio. Either there’s not enough egg and mayonnaise filling, or, more charitably, there’s too much bread. Secondly, as is the case with an awful lot of over-the-counter food, it’ll inevitably be under-seasoned, and thirdly, and perhaps most crucially for flavour-dampening, it’s all just too damn cold.

If you want something better you could make your own from fresh, but to have more fun, and to be more Snack Hacker, you need to adapt something else: an Egg McMuffin from you know where. You could do this at your place of work if you’d like to generate a reputation for being a trail-blazer and a maverick, or if you’re like me, you could head to the drive thru in your trusty Volkswagen T4 first thing in the morning and let the wrapped muffin sit on the passenger seat until lunch when it’s time get doctoring. And it’s worth doing, because the finished sandwich tastes great: the nori salt and Marmite dealing with the under-seasoning issue; the waiting time from making the purchase to eating the food solving the temperature problem; and the ratios being so much better.

MAKES 1

1 double egg mcmuffin (just egg and cheese, no meats)

4 tbsp mayonnaise (or several sachets)

1 tsp marmite (or one of those little heart-shaped pots you get in hotel buffets)

pinch of nori salt (page 125)

black pepper (perhaps from a sachet; you could pocket a few when you pick up the muffin)

1 tub cress (or 1 bunch/bag watercress)

5 minutes

(plus muffin-cooling time)

Buy the muffin and let it cool to room temperature (don’t put it in the fridge). Remove from the muffin the now pretty solid egg with cheese doubtless stuck to it, and in a bowl or similar (a takeaway cup works well) roughly chop it up or fork it apart. Mix it with the mayonnaise until you have a consistency you like (I like it pretty mayo-heavy).

Spread a thin layer of Marmite on the cheesy cut sides of the muffin, pile in all or as much of the egg as you can (you might find the act of chopping and mixing with mayonnaise has increased the volume considerably, so if it won’t all go in, don’t worry, you can eat it with a spoon or top up here and there as you take bites).

Sprinkle with nori salt and black pepper and pile on as much cress or watercress as you can feasibly manage before topping with the other muffin half and rewrapping for a few minutes, or just tucking in straight away. Vastly, VASTLY superior to the sandwiches in the packets.

THE BIG MACK(EREL)

A mutual invention that my friend Martyn Odell (@lagomchef online) and I came up with one summer when we were booked to cook at The Big Feastival on Alex James’ farm in the Cotswolds. While this was an idea we’d vaguely mooted previously, we kind of made it up as we went along, using sachets we found on the site for the sauce and mixing them in a paper cup, plus some other ingredients we’d both brought along and bits we pilfered from the kitchen backstage. It was superb. The pork scratchings and caviar, unlikely bedfellows, add wonderful texture and seasoning. The dill and pickled onions make it feel like a burger. The black lime powder adds acid and makes it feel, and look, cheffy.

MAKES 2 BURGERS

1 tbsp red wine vinegar

1 tsp sugar (white or brown)

1 red onion, sliced into half moons

1 little Gem lettuce, shredded

small bunch dill, ripped up into small fronds

5 sachets (or 5 tsp) mayonnaise

2 sachets (or 2 tsp) english mustard

2 sachets (or 2 tsp) tomato ketchup

2 tsp lumpfish caviar

2 unsliced brioche burger buns

2 fresh mackerel, filleted (or 4 fresh mackerel fillets)

neutral oil, for shallow-frying

several pinches of black lime powder (page 162)

1 bag pork scratchings, crushed

10 minutes

EQUIPMENT:

2 sheets of paper to wrap them in (page 78)

In a small bowl, mix the red wine vinegar with the sugar, 2 tablespoons of water and a pinch of salt, and drop in the red onion slices. Give everything a scrunch with your hand and press the onions down into the pickling liquid with a mug or another bowl so they’re squashed and submerged.

In a separate bowl, mix the lettuce with the dill fronds.

Stir the mayonnaise into the mustard, ketchup and caviar. It’ll look really pretty, like a pale pink burger sauce strewn with tiny black beads.

Slice the brioche into three (Big Mac-style). Lightly oil the cut sides, and over a medium to low heat toast all the cut sides of the bread in a dry frying pan. Set them aside.

With a sharp knife, score a series of very shallow cuts across the skin of the mackerel (this will stop it curling up too much in the pan). Lightly oil the fillets and with the heat at medium, lay them skin-side down in the pan and press down lightly on the flesh to keep the skins in contact with the metal. After half a minute, remove your hand and season the flesh sides. When you can see the mackerel is cooked (opaque) just over halfway, flip the fillets over and turn off the heat to let the residual heat finish the cooking. While that’s happening, start assembling.

In the middle of your wrapping paper place the bottom bun, then a mackerel fillet (you may need to break the fillets in half if they’re from a big fish), spoon over some of the sauce, a clump of the pickled onions and a pinch of black lime powder, then the middle bun, a little more sauce, the other fillet, sauce, lettuce and dill mixed together and finally a big pinch of the crushed pork scratchings and more lime powder before crowning with the top section of the bun. Wrap it, leave it a minute, serve it.

FISH FINGER SPAGHETTI

I’d made a spaghetti dish using fancy prawns topped with a crunchy pangrattato (fried crispy breadcrumbs – miniature fried bread essentially). Mrs Egg and I were eating it and making all the right noises when I had the thought that fish fingers might tick the two boxes of seafood and crunchy breadcrumbs at the same time, while simultaneously delivering a roundhouse kick to the target marked Snack Hacker. To keep it simple, I’ve employed the use of my beloved frozen garlic briquettes. However, if you want more of a garlicky injection, I’d make the added effort of slicing up some fresh cloves, because they do have a bit more punch.

SERVES 4

10 frozen fish fingers

8 tbsp olive oil, plus extra for the fish fingers

3 frozen garlic briquettes (or 9 cloves, sliced thinly)

2 fat red chillis, sliced (check that they’re hot ones by nibbling the end)

2 tsp fennel seeds

1 star anise

400g dried spaghetti

2 tsp tomato purée

1 tsp fish sauce

small bunch curly parsley, very finely chopped

1 lemon

20 minutes

Lightly oil the frozen fish fingers and put in the oven for about 5 minutes longer than the packet suggests. You want some colour and crunch to the crumb.

While they’re cooking, get the (well-salted) pasta water boiling and start on the sauce. Put the oil, garlic (briquettes or sliced cloves), chilli, fennel seeds and star anise into a cold shallow pan. When the fish fingers have about 10 minutes to go until they’re ready, put the spaghetti in the water and turn the heat on low underneath the shallow pan. You want the garlic, chilli and spices to fry really low and slow to get as much flavour into the oil as possible without burning the garlic. After 5 minutes or so, when the oil is sizzling and things smell fragrant, add the tomato purée and fish sauce and give it a good mix, then turn off the heat. It’ll stay hot.

Make sure that you don’t overcook the pasta. If it says 10 minutes on the packet, start checking at 8 minutes. At this point scoop out a teacup of pasta water to slacken things down later. As soon as the spaghetti is soft but still exhibits a small amount of resistance in the middle, drain it, add the pasta to the sauce and give everything a good stir to emulsify the oil with the residual water that’s clung to the spaghetti, adding a few splashes of the reserved water as you mix if it needs it.

Chop the fish fingers up quite small before scattering into the pasta, along with almost all of the parsley. The red oils coating the small bits of fish will have the vague appearance of crab meat, and the flecks of orange breadcrumb will look appealing with the green herbs. Very handsome.

Squeeze over the juice from the lemon, season generously with black pepper, and salt too but only if it needs it (you’ve salted the pasta water well, and the fish sauce is very salty). Pile onto plates and sprinkle over the rest of the parsley.

And be careful of the star anise if you didn’t fish it out.

TAKEAWAY THANK YOU!

If we were having a Chinese, it’d usually fall on a weeknight when my dad would drop in to Bo Wah’s in Brockley on the way home from work. Occasionally, due to the combination of an absence of something obvious to cook and pleading from me and my brother, the decision to have a takeaway would be made after he got home. My brother and I would pile onto the back seat of the Renault and the three of us would drive back to Brockley together as day turned to dusk.

Mr Lee, the proprietor of Bo Wah, was obsessed with getting signs made to attract more customers, and the outside of the takeaway was adorned with a selection of huge acrylic notices, some of them as big as the shop-name itself. There were special offers, opening times, and as we pulled up outside, the first thing you’d be greeted with was the largest sign of all, which simply read ‘Welcome In Try Us’. Inside there were the ubiquitous potted succulents by the window, a pile of takeaway menus, a stack of magazines, a row of fixed seats like a coach station waiting room, and an illuminated fish tank with a real miniature octopus that was both fascinating and scary. I wouldn’t get too close.

When you’re eight years old and small for your age, there isn’t anything much taller in the world than the counter of a Chinese takeaway. Thin vertical faux-wooden panels that stretch up and up, eventually stopping at the level of grown-up heads. What was on top was a mystery, but I did know that after a wait spent listening to the clattering of woks and the bubbling of pots, and sniffing the exotic smells of steaming rice and sesame oil wafting in from the kitchen behind, the crest of the man-made mountain would be breached by a white plastic bag containing foil troughs with cardboard lids and a couple of filled polystyrene cups, which we’d take home for our dinner.

If we were having a family takeaway on a Friday or at the weekend there’d be curries and noodles, but our midweek order was very simple and low budget: egg fried rice and curry sauce. We’d have a big pile of rice on our plates, we’d pour on the gloopy orangey-brown sauce flecked with black, mix it together with our forks, spoons, or if we wanted the meal to last longer, chopsticks, and tuck in. As delicious as the meal was, my palate had been seduced some months before when I’d enjoyed a takeaway at a friend’s house and we’d had pork balls with sweet and sour sauce. Afterwards, that was all I could think about and I asked for them frequently, but budget and, I think perhaps more importantly, takeaway-habit meant that we never got them.

What are pork balls? Fatty, porky, somewhat trashy pig chunks sheathed in a crispy batter. So… what about the king of the naughty treats, the battered sausage, chopped-up? It’s not authentic, not remotely, but it’s nice alongside a ‘Chinese risotto’, especially when smothered in sweet and sour sauce. If you really want to be authentic, see if you can get hold of a couple of polystyrene cups to serve the sauces in.

EGG FRIED RICE

There appear to be two approaches to egg fried rice. Egg-in-first and egg-in-last. I always feel that egg-in-last is going to make a claggy mess, with raw egg sticking the rice together, and I want bits of omelette to discover as I eat. I’m an egg-in-first person.

This is my basic, go-to egg fried rice recipe, which I’ll constantly muck about with depending on what’s in my fridge: mushrooms will go in if I’ve got some that need using up, as will prawns, chicken, crab, shredded leftover roast pork, little pieces of finely chopped-up broccoli, and halved cooked Brussel sprouts. You can almost think of it as a South East Asian bubble and squeak. But what follows is the closest in taste and flavour to what I remember having the first time. If you want to experience the ‘Chinese risotto’ I enjoyed in my youth, then pile the finished rice onto a plate, pour over a generous portion of the curry sauce, and roughly (you don’t want a porridge, and it’s always nicer to have a mouthful that’s more rice-heavy followed by another that’s extremely saucy) mix it together. If you want to enjoy a cheat’s version of the pork balls alongside, then make up a batch of the sweet and sour sauce, get yourself a freshly battered sausage, chop it up, scatter it next to the rice and pour sauce over the lot.

SERVES 4
(ENOUGH FOR 2 STANDARD TAKEAWAY CARTONS)

2 tbsp neutral oil, for shallow-frying

2 eggs

60g frozen peas

600g cold cooked white rice (ideally made at least half a day ago)

¼ tsp MSG

1 clove garlic, grated, crushed or finely chopped

1 tsp sesame oil

2–3 tsp dark soy sauce

4 spring onions, chopped into 1cm lengths

ground white pepper

10 minutes

EQUIPMENT:

a wok, or a nice big frying pan that you can move stuff around in without too much fear of it flicking over the edges when you throw the ingredients about.

Get your prepared ingredients ready next to the cooker before you start because you don’t want to be fiddling around and letting things burn. Put the wok or frying pan on the hob and get it smoking hot. When it’s just approaching the point at which you’re worried about how hot it is, carefully pour in the oil (cooking oil not sesame oil), swirl it around a little to coat the centre of the wok and crack in the eggs. They’ll bubble and begin to fry. Straight away, break them up and move them around with a spoon or spatula, chopping and flipping. After a very short time they’ll break up into random shards of cooked omelette-y egg.

Throw in the peas for about 15 seconds, then add the rice, the MSG, garlic, sesame oil, a big pinch of white pepper and about half the soy sauce and keep it moving. The rice will likely be clumped together a bit, so use the back of your spoon to break up the clumps.

When it’s starting to feel like everything is well combined, leave it for 10–15 seconds, then move it around, then leave it again. You want to get a bit of char on the rice here and there as it adds an authentic-tasting flavour.

Cook it all for 1–2 minutes depending on how hot you can get your wok. When it looks ready, have a taste and add more soy sauce if you think it needs it (you might not need masses if your rice was well seasoned when you cooked it). Finally, throw in the spring onions, give it a final stir and spoon the rice out of the wok and into a serving dish, or even more ideally into some foil cartons.

ALMOST INSTANT SWEET AND SOUR SAUCE

This isn’t by any means an authentic Chinese takeaway sweet and sour sauce. But it’s so quick, looks the business and tastes great poured over a chopped-up battered sausage from a chippy.

MAKES ENOUGH FOR 2 POLYSTYRENE COFFEE CUPS

200g pineapple juice (from a carton or a bottle)

125g soft brown sugar

80ml red wine vinegar

3 tbsp tomato ketchup

1 tbsp cornflour (mixed with 1.5 tbsp cold water to make a slurry)

½ tsp beetroot powder (optional, but it makes it look just right; you could also use a few drops of red food colouring)

5 minutes

Put everything into a small saucepan and whisk gently while bringing it up to a simmer. It will thicken as it boils. Let it cook for a minute or two and then decant into another container to cool. I think it’s best just slightly warm.

CURRY SAUCE FOR ‘CHINESE RISOTTO’

As with the Almost Instant Sweet and Sour Sauce recipe, this isn’t an authentic Chinese takeaway curry sauce, which would involve a lot more work, ingredients, knowledge and experience, but it does make something that tastes good and reminds me of the curry sauce we used to get in polystyrene cups to pour over our egg fried rice in the eighties. You’ll need Chinese curry sauce concentrate (Goldfish do a good one, Wing Yip do a good one; it’s pretty easy stuff to get hold of and you’ll find it in most large supermarkets as well as international shops). Using it is a total cheat of course, and frankly the concentrate alone would make a reasonably decent assimilation with nothing more than water added, but I like a bit of texture and a bit of whole spice in the form of the cumin and fennel seeds. And I like cooking, so I’d rather do it this way.

MAKES ENOUGH FOR 2 POLYSTYRENE COFFEE CUPS

1 small onion, finely chopped

2 tbsp vegetable oil 1 tsp cumin seeds

1 tsp fennel seeds

½ frozen garlic briquette (or 1 clove garlic, crushed)

½ frozen ginger briquette (or 1 tsp grated fresh ginger)

pinch of chilli flakes or chilli powder

4 tbsp Chinese curry sauce concentrate

500ml water

1 tsp soy sauce

1 tsp brown sugar

½ tsp fish sauce

10 minutes

In a medium-sized saucepan over a low heat, fry the onions in the oil until they become soft and translucent. Then add the cumin and fennel seeds, the garlic and ginger briquettes and the chilli flakes or powder. Keep frying for 2–3 minutes until everything feels well-cooked but not brown.

Add the curry sauce concentrate. It’ll be extremely thick and pretty solid but press it into the onions, break it all up a bit and then add the water a few splashes at a time, working the concentrate into the water to form first a very thick paste and then a thinner paste as more water is added. It’ll seem much too thin but keep stirring and as it comes up to a simmer it’ll thicken. You may want to add a little extra water if you prefer your sauce more pourable.

When it’s combined and viscous, add the soy sauce, sugar, fish sauce and a generous grind of black pepper. Give it a stir, let it cook for a couple more minutes and then turn off the heat. It’s ready. It’ll also keep well in the fridge for a week and will heat up very easily in the microwave.

PRAWN TOAST TOASTIE

US comedian Arj Barker has a routine about how, when first visiting the UK, he was in Boots the chemist and was thrown by the fact that they sold food too, saying how he didn’t like the idea of getting his lunch from somewhere that also sells ‘butt cream’. But sell food they do, and their meal deal has become a go-to standard. While I realise the words ‘reduced shellfish’ won’t inspire confidence in everyone, I first made this snack when I saw a prawn sandwich sporting an eye-catching fluorescent label in the Boots fridge one afternoon. Having already planned a South-East-Asian-inspired dinner that night, the idea for this struck me. I’ve realised since that considering Boots also sell relief for diarrhoea, stomach cramps and other symptoms of an upset tummy, maybe they’ve an incentive to generate more sales by leaving their prawn sandwiches out in the sun for a few hours. Let’s hope they’re not that cynical, and as this is a nice dish I think it’s worth the risk. If you’re really worried, don’t buy the sandwiches that are close to their use-by date.

MAKES 1 (OR 4 SMALL ONES IF YOU CUT IT INTO QUARTERS)

1 shop-bought prawn mayonnaise sandwich

1 sachet wasabi

1 plastic fish of soy sauce (about ½ tsp)

1 sachet pickled ginger

2 tsp butter, softened

2 tbsp white sesame seeds 1 tsp sesame oil

5 minutes

EQUIPMENT:

You can make this sandwich one of three ways: 1) In a frying pan, for which you’ll need a reasonably non-stick shallow pan of any kind; 2) In a plug-in toasted sandwich-maker; 3) In a stove-top toastie-maker (page 34).

Open the sandwich up and spread the wasabi liberally over the buttered side of the bread. Squeeze the soy sauce over the prawns and scatter over the ginger, ripping it up if need be.

Reassemble the sandwich and butter the outside of the bread. Sprinkle the sesame seeds over the butter so they stick, top and bottom (this might get a bit messy but you can use the sandwich to dab and collect any stray sesame seeds that bounce off). Trickle a little sesame oil over the outside of the sandwich before clamping in the toastie-maker and cooking until the outside is golden and sizzling and the inside is way too hot to eat straight away. If you’re using a frying pan, just cook over a low heat on both sides.

Great by itself or dipped into pretty much any sloppy South-East-Asian-inspired dish.

Walking Holidays and Microwaved Burgers

Microwavable burgers are a strong contender for ‘most shameful’ when it comes to convenience food items, but I like them. If you can get past the fact that they’re doubtless chock-full of flavourings, sugars and what must surely be a ton of preservatives to keep the meat content from coming back to life in another form, then you might be surprised to find that they’re actually, well, quite good. But as someone who likes to cook, I’m not always attracted by the convenience. In the case of microwavable burgers, it’s all about the nostalgia.

In our mid-to late teens, Henry and I organised a number of walking holidays with a group of other boys. We bought Ordnance Survey maps and plotted routes, working out the distances between hostels with a ruler and a calculator. We didn’t always take gradients or the surprisingly deceptive wiggle of coastal paths into consideration, and on occasion would reach our stay for the night as darkness fell, utterly exhausted and with blistered feet, but with just enough energy to boil a pan of pasta and warm through a jar of Dolmio. After four or five days’ hiking we’d eventually stagger up the slope of some rural railway station, haul our rucksacks onto the train and collapse in our seats as we thundered back to London and the promise of hot baths and some TV.

It became something of a tradition that on those train rides home we would indulge in a very particular treat: a trip to the buffet car where we’d buy an over-priced can of bitter (despite the fact that we were underage, good times) and a microwaved burger. The British Rail quarter pounder of the late eighties was, it has to be said, an absolute disgrace. Unlike these days where microwave burger instructions suggest you zap the patty separately while you pop the bun in a toaster to generate some degree of similarity to the fresh product it’s attempting to ape, as the train rattled and clattered down the tracks, the burger, bun, cheese and sauce, fully assembled in its polystyrene box, would be placed in the microwave and cooked to within an inch of its life. This resulted in a lethally hot assembly comprising a wrinkly, steamed-wet top bun, boiling ketchup, processed cheese that had completely fused to the leathery meat, and a very dry bottom bun exhibiting an unusually cardboard-like hardness. Shocking stuff but my goodness it was sensational.

The first bite found your teeth conducting the heat directly into your skull, to the extent that an immediate sip of Stones Best was needed to cool the contents of your mouth down, the cocktail of beer and burger dancing around in your gob, one softening the other until it reached an acceptable temperature for swallowing. On some occasions not quite enough bitter would have been taken or time elapsed and the premature gulp would result in a puck of lava-hot semi-masticated stodge getting trapped somewhere just behind the lungs and burning through them into your heart and ribs. As lessons were learned and patience observed, things would cool down enough to be eaten with less caution until the final few mouthfuls were washed down with the last of the can. Shortly after, thoughts of getting another one would be entertained and often justified by the prospect of the long journey ahead.

We grew up. The walking holidays with friends stopped happening and I never seemed to find myself in a position where a microwaved burger felt like either a sensible or even an attractive option. That was until decades later when I took a show to the Edinburgh Festival. I was returning to my digs the first night, exhausted from a long day travelling, lugging props about, setting everything up for a technical rehearsal before packing it down again, and trudging up the hill to my flat I paused at a Sainsbury’s Local for a few cans and something to eat. After twenty years of married life, bringing up kids and being relatively responsible, there was something about the whole Edinburgh experience that made me feel like a student again. I bought a Rustlers burger. I hadn’t had one before and I was intrigued as well as knackered, and was thus attracted to the idea of something that required no preparation beyond opening and closing a microwave door and pressing a couple of buttons. I didn’t have a microwave at home either, so that gave the whole enterprise even more allure.

After the inevitable four flights of stairs that precede the opening of an Edinburgh Festival performer’s rental property front door, I sleep-walked into the hall, kicked off my shoes, dropped my things in my room, and stumbled into the kitchen where I proceeded to assemble the burger and bung it in the microwave for the time recommended on the packet. I hadn’t read the instructions properly so wasn’t aware of the suggested separation of bun from burger and toasting it elsewhere while the patty was nuked. I opened a can and poured, and as the last of the beer fell into the glass and the head frothed over the top and onto the table, the microwave pinged and my ‘dinner’ was ready.

As happened once to the food critic Anton Ego, the first bite sent me back thirty years in an instant. I was fifteen again and back on the train, tired but elated. It was like meeting up with a long-missed friend who you see again after decades apart and everything feels just the same as it used to.

INSIDE OUT MUSHROOM AND BEER DOUBLE SWISS

If you’re my age you might remember the days when Wimpy ruled the high street. They were everywhere and, nice as it would be to look back through rose-coloured spectacles, let’s face it, they weren’t very good. But in 1989 things changed and they all became Burger Kings. What a time to be alive. In those early years they had a burger called the Double Mushroom Swiss, and though I don’t remember exactly what was in it I recall being fascinated by it given that it was so much more exotic than anything their overbearing rival was currently offering up.

You can make this with a microwavable burger if you like (and I like), or you could do it with a probably much nicer and better-for-everyone locally made butcher’s burger, but then that wouldn’t be quite so anarchic, would it?

MAKES 1

1 shallot, sliced

3 or 4 button or chestnut mushrooms, sliced

butter, for frying

½ clove garlic, crushed

a sprig of thyme, leaves removed

100ml chicken stock

50ml bitter

1 tbsp crème fraîche or double cream

pinch of brown sugar

1 microwavable double burger (save the sauce for something else – in fact it can go in your sachet box, page 142)

1 tsp dijon mustard

1 tbsp mayonnaise

2 slices raclette cheese

the cheese slice that inevitably came with your microwavable burger (or just a slice of processed cheese if you’ve been unlucky and weren’t provided with one)

10 minutes

First make your mushroom filling. Over a medium heat, fry the shallots and mushrooms in a little butter for a few minutes until they start to get some colour, then add the crushed garlic and thyme for a few more minutes. Add the stock and beer and let it bubble down and reduce by half before adding the crème fraîche and a little sugar. Continue to reduce until the sauce is thick, about 5–6 minutes, before transferring to a separate container to cool. Wipe out the pan with a cloth as you’ll be using it again shortly.

Microwave the two burger patties according to the instructions on the packet. While they’re cooking, mix the mustard and mayonnaise together in a small bowl.

Build the burger. Invert the bottom bun so the cut surface is facing downwards. Spread a little of the mayonnaise and mustard mixture on the bottom of the bottom bun (now the top of the bottom bun and which will be inside the sandwich), add a slice of Raclette, top with a burger followed by the cheese that came with it. Pile on the mushroom mixture, top with the second burger, the other slice of Raclette, more mayonnaise mix, and finally the top bun, but again inverted so the seeded top is inside and the cut surface is outermost.

Set the pan back over a low heat and add a little butter. Introduce the assembled burger and lightly press down on the top with another pan or a weight of some kind, until that cut side is toasted. Turn it over and do the same with the top. You’ll end up with what looks more like a tall circular toasted sandwich with two burgers in the middle and lots of cheese and mushroom mixture oozing out of the sides. Brace yourself.

An Iron

Burger presses are all the rage now, but I, in keeping with being a performer who cooks on stage with electric clothes irons, have acquired an old-fashioned heat-up-on-the-stove type one for home cooking. You’ll find them in antique shops and junk markets and all over eBay of course, and they’re perfect for weighing down a toasted sandwich, ensuring a steak comes into contact with as much hot pan surface as possible, or, with your upper body weight against it, for smashing smash burgers and feeling/looking cool.

CHEESY CUP NOODLE WITH EGG YOLK

In the middle of my plate of spaghetti was half an egg shell containing a raw egg yolk. Looked impressive, but what madness was this? We were on a family holiday in France and we’d all ordered carbonara in a restaurant – or rather I imagine my parents ordered it for me. While I wasn’t sure about the raw egg, my dad reassured me that it was fine; that the warm pasta would cook it a bit and that anyway my favourite part of a fry-up was the runny egg yolk, and runny egg yolks are, essentially, raw, because if they were cooked they’d be firm. Following their lead, I tipped the yolk onto the pasta and stirred it in. I’ve served carbonara like that every time since and it never fails to impress a guest.

Here’s a fun way to turn a cup noodle into something cheesy and unctuous and eyebrow-raising (to some). It’s worked with varying degrees of success using different types of cup noodle, but all nice in different ways. I’d recommend experimenting with the brands that are out there.

MAKES 1

1 cup noodle (see above, however in this instance it’s a soba one, chilli flavour)

3 tbsp evaporated milk

3 slices processed cheese

20g Parmesan, grated

1 egg (ideally one with a really golden yolk)

5 minutes

EQUIPMENT:

A microwave, however you could transfer the contents of the cup to a pan and warm things through if you’re sans-microwave, as i was for a long time.

Remove the sauce sachet and pour boiling water into the cup noodle. Let it steep for two thirds of the suggested time (if it says 3 minutes, then give it 2), then pour away most of the water but don’t be too thorough. You want some left, about 2 or 3 tablespoons.

The flavour sachets can be quite strong and you want to end up with something milky and comforting. So add half the sachet to the cup noodle (you could always add a bit more if you feel it needs extra oomph), along with the evaporated milk, processed cheese, half the grated Parmesan and a generous grind of black pepper. Give it a rough stir and microwave, loosely covered, for 1 minute.

While it’s microwaving, carefully crack the egg, separate the white from the yolk (save the white for a cocktail, or for Brown Bread Ice Cream, page 53) and place it in one half of the shell.

Give the noodles a good mix, place the egg yolk in its little half-shell cradle on top, and serve, inviting your diner (or yourself) to tip the yolk into the noodles and mix in along with the rest of the Parmesan.

ROLO DESSERT WITH SMOKED SALT

It’s always seemed strange to me that specially written songs sung by unknown artists should be selected for the Eurovision Song Contest when we already have chart-topping hits by established stars that are evidently winners already. Similarly, special occasions like Christmases, birthdays and thank-yous find boxes of chocolates being bought, but your Thorntons, Milk Trays, Quality Streets et al are rarely better than actual chocolate bars. Surely a chopped-up Snickers trumps any of the above? And if you want individual portions then there’s Munchies, Cadbury’s Eclairs and Rolos.

When I was growing up, we had the familiar chocolate bars, in one size. But then in 1989 Mars Ice Cream appeared and minds were blown. Over the years since, these giants of the confectionery world have re- and re-re-invented themselves with different sizes and representations, some successful and others less so. The King Size Mars (84g) came and went, a victim I believe of attempts to tackle increasing obesity, but it was replaced by the Mars Duo (85g, in the form of two 42.5g bars, one for you and one for a friend, yeah right). Chocolate-bar-branded pudding pots are currently in vogue, and before they go the way of the Mars Delight, Cadbury’s Fuse and Wispa Mint (blurghhhhh), I’d recommend you get yourself a few packs of Rolo Desserts and do the following with them.

SERVES 2

1 packet of 2 Rolo Desserts (NOT Rolo Mousse)

2 pinches of smoked salt (Maldon and Cornish Sea Salt are both great)

30 seconds

The packet advice says keep in the fridge. Ignore that and freeze the desserts. Bring them out 5 minutes before you want to eat them to let them soften just a little. Remove the foil lids and sprinkle with a little smoked salt. That’s it.

INTERVAL

The interval will last for seven condiment recipes.

BOVRIL AND TARRAGON BUTTER

You can use this on the Bovril, Butter and Pickled Onion Pancakes (page 157), but it’s equally as good on steak, chicken, pork and vegetables. It’s great on toast too. Obviously. You can follow the recipe below to make your own homemade butter (which is so much fun and a great way to preserve cream that you find reduced in the supermarket because it’s about to pass its ‘use by’) or you can buy unsalted butter instead.

MAKES ABOUT 250G

500ml double cream (or 250g unsalted butter)

small bunch tarragon, leaves picked

4 tsp Bovril

10 minutes (or less if you’re not making your own butter)

page 126

To make the butter, pour the cream into the bowl of the stand-mixer and whisk. Keep watching it. It will whip to lovely peaks, then it will over whip, then it will get grainy, then it will weirdly start to drip water, and then suddenly it will clump together in a yellow lump that clings to the whisk, leaving a thin, milky, watery liquid in the bowl. During this process, you may need to occasionally turn the mixer off and move things back down to the middle of the bowl with a spatula.

Once you’ve churned the butter, with clean, cold hands squeeze as much moisture out as you can before bathing the butter in cold water, squeezing and reshaping it. Change the water and repeat the process until the water runs clear. And save the buttermilk (the liquid left behind in your stand-mixer), which you can use instead of milk for pancakes (page 154) or for marinating chicken for frying. At this stage your butter can be salted (½ tsp per 100g) and will keep in the fridge for a good week or so (or longer if you’ve really rinsed it well) and it will freeze for months. But if you’re making the above Bovril and Tarragon Butter DON’T SALT IT.

Wash and finely chop the tarragon and then beat the Bovril and tarragon into the soft butter. Spoon the butter mixture into the middle of a sheet of baking parchment or waxed paper, roll the paper around it and twist the ends to make a long sausage. Refrigerate until firm and then slice into discs and freeze in a bag ready for using one disc at a time.

EQUIPMENT:

If you’re making your own butter, you’ll need an electric stand-mixer with a whisk attachment.

TAHINI SAUCE

I adore tahini sauce, and credit for introducing me to it has to go to Matt Lincoln, the man responsible for the photos in this book. It’s perfect for dressing a couple of grilled aubergines, or to drizzle over barbecued lamb kebabs. or indeed the audaciously reshaped Kofta-Style Veggie Meatballs in Pittas (page 194) – and my goodness you’re going to want to. In fact, pour it on anything.

And a word of warning – when you add water or lemon juice to the tahini it’ll turn into a stiff paste like old paint, as if something has gone wrong. It hasn’t. It thickens because of carbohydrate binding. Tahini is essentially an emulsion of carbohydrate and fat, and when water is first added, some of the carbohydrate is attracted to the water which causes clumping. As you add more water it will start to reassuringly slacken.

MAKES ABOUT 200G (ENOUGH FOR A CLEAN PESTO JAR)

100g tahini

2 cloves garlic, grated, crushed or very finely chopped

juice of 1 lemon

100ml cold water

¼ tsp cayenne pepper

½ tsp salt

pinch of sugar, white or brown (optional)

black pepper

3 minutes

page 126

In a modest-sized bowl, beat the tahini and the garlic together with a spoon. Trickle in the lemon juice and beat again (don’t worry! See above!). Start adding the water, just a couple of spoonfuls, and mix again. Keep adding and mixing as it gets stiffer and stiffer before it reaches the pinnacle and can’t thicken any longer, after which it’ll start to thin out again. The amount of water specified should eventually give you a nice thin sauce, the consistency of single cream.

When it’s thin and smooth and creamy, stir in the cayenne, salt and a little black pepper. Give it a taste and if it’s too bitter for your palate (I like it quite bitter) you can add a tiny pinch of sugar. It’ll keep for a week in the fridge.

EASY GREEN CHILLI SAUCE

This almost-instant hot green sauce is fresh and zingy and superb when drizzled over meats or vegetables. It’s so good on cheese on toast, too. Be warned though, it’s really hot.

MAKES ENOUGH FOR 4 PEOPLE HAVING 1 MEAL

small bunch coriander (the small supermarket bags are a perfect size)

2 tbsp sliced pickled jalapeños plus 1 tbsp brine from the jalapeño jar

4 tbsp cold water

2 tbsp olive oil

juice of ½ lemon

1 tsp sugar, white or brown

big pinch of salt

2 minutes

page 126

Blend everything together until you have a thin yet slightly chunky bright green sauce. Keeps in the fridge for a couple of days, but if you don’t think you’re likely to use it all then freeze it in an ice cube tray and defrost cubes as needed.

EQUIPMENT:

A Nutribullet-type powerful blender a regular blender or an immersion blender

FURIKAKE 1 (EASY)

You can find any number of variations on furikake if you peruse the aisles of a South East Asian supermarket. Generally used as a condiment to brighten up plain cooked rice, I find it’s a wonderful enhancer for many things, from charred broccoli to fish fingers and chips (it’s really good on fish fingers and chips). Usually made from a mixture of toasted sesame seeds, seaweed, salt and sugar, you’ll also find it with bonito flakes, dried vegetables, freeze-dried salmon, dehydrated miso and even more obscure additions – I’ve got a jar where the first ingredient on the list is milk! With such a variety out there, I’d urge you to start with the following recipe and experiment with additions of your own.

MAKES ENOUGH FOR 1 SMALL JAM JAR

4 tbsp white sesame seeds

3 tbsp black sesame seeds

3 sheets nori seaweed

1 tsp flaky salt

1 tsp demerara sugar

¼ tsp cayenne pepper

black pepper

5 minutes

page 127

Toast the sesame seeds in a dry frying pan over a medium heat. I’ve found that toasting black sesame seeds by themselves is a nightmare as you can’t see when they’re done and you run the risk of burning them. By toasting the black and white ones together you’ll know when the black ones are toasted by looking at the white ones. Keep them moving and when the white ones take on a bit of colour and smell nice and flavoursome, tip the lot into a wide, dry bowl to cool.

If you’ve used some of your nori for sushi and you’ve an open packet, despite your best efforts to keep it airtight there’s every chance it will have gone a bit floppy and chewy. If it has, don’t fear. Light a flame on your cooker (assuming you’ve got a gas hob) and very quickly (and carefully) waft the sheet over the flame like you’re waving a chequered flag at the end of a motor race. Don’t rush it and don’t linger or it’ll burn and curl up, but keep doing it and after about ten passes, your nori will be brittle and crisp again. You can either crush the nori between your fingers to make it into little flakes or whizz it up in a grinder. Add the nori to the sesame seeds along with the salt, sugar, cayenne pepper and a generous pinch of black pepper. Stir it all together and have a taste. Adjust the seasonings if you want it sweeter or saltier.

Wait until it’s completely cool before spooning into the jar (making sure the jar is bone dry). Add a sachet of silica gel (if you have one) to prevent clumping (page 217).

EQUIPMENT:

An electric spice grinder or a clean electric coffee grinder.

FURIKAKE 2 (REALLY EASY)

No toasting required here and no sugar needed as the manufacturing process of the Sesame Snaps has ticked both of those boxes for you.

MAKES ENOUGH FOR 1 SMALL JAM JAR

2 packets Sesame Snaps (or similar sesame and sugar snacks),

4 sheets nori seaweed

½ tsp salt

¼ tsp cayenne pepper

black pepper

2 minutes

page 127

Break the Sesame Snaps into a pestle and mortar and roughly bash them up until they resemble a mixture of small chunks, sesame dust and crushed sugar. If you don’t have a pestle and mortar, a bowl and the end of a rolling pin will do the same job. Crumble in the nori sheets, having re-crisped them if required (page 122). Add the salt, cayenne pepper and a big pinch of black pepper. Taste and adjust the seasoning if needed.

Spoon into the jar (making sure the jar is bone dry). Add a sachet of silica gel (if you have one) to prevent clumping (page 217).

LIQUORICE SALT

I’m a card-carrying liquorice fan, and this rich and sweet anise-flavoured salt mix will enhance pork, beef and chicken. It’s also essential to sprinkle over the cream to accompany the Marmalade and Aniseed Cake (page 208). Look, it’s good for savoury and sweet things, which makes it even cooler.

MAKES ENOUGH FOR MONTHS OF SPRINKLING

¼ tsp aniseeds

3 tbsp sea salt flakes

1 heaped tsp liquorice root powder

1 heaped tsp demerara sugar

10 minutes

page 127

Preheat the oven to 200°C/180°C fan (400°F/gas mark 6).

First grind the aniseeds into a coarse powder with a grinder or pestle and mortar. Mix the salt, liquorice root powder and aniseed powder together (but not the sugar yet) and spread out on a baking tray. Bake for 7 minutes, then sprinkle over the sugar, return to the oven and bake for a further 2 minutes.

Bring the tray out and stir and fold the mixture onto itself as it cools. You want the sugar to stick to the other ingredients but not clump together too much. When it’s cooled a little but is still warm, give it a gentle crunch between your fingertips, a bit like making pastry, to crush anything that’s clumped before leaving it to go completely cold.

Store in an airtight jar with a sachet of silica gel (if you have one) to prevent clumping (page 217).

EQUIPMENT:

An electric spice grinder, a clean electric coffee grinder, or a pestle and mortar.

NORI SALT

This waves a deep savoury umami wand over anything it’s sprinkled over. I use it on the Better Egg and Cress Sandwich (page 88)

MAKES ENOUGH FOR MONTHS OF SPRINKLING

3 tsp sea salt (flaky or crystals, but decent salt)

6 sheets nori seaweed

30 seconds

page 127

Put all the ingredients in the grinding device and pulse-grind until you have a medium-grit powder. Store in an airtight jar with a sachet of silica gel (if you have one) to prevent clumping (page 217).

EQUIPMENT:

An electric spice grinder, a clean electric coffee grinder or even a Nutribullet-type powerful blender, though if you’re using one of these you may need to up the quantities so it doesn’t get lost underneath the blades.

Bovril and Tarragon Butter (page 119)

Left: Tahini Sauce (page 120) Right: Easy Green Chilli Sauce (page 121)

Left: Furikaki 1 (Easy) (page 122) Right: Furikaki 2 (Really Easy) (page 123)

Left: Liquorice Salt (page 124) Right: Nori Salt (page 125)

ACT TWO

ARCHAOS

There are meals that change your life. Things that when you eventually try them, everything is different. In his memoir Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain talks about trying oysters for the first time and how that experience altered everything. Food and drink can do that of course, and so can theatre.

In 1990 my best friend Leo and I saw a show which, at the risk of sounding hyperbolic, completely changed my life. We were both seventeen and had heard about a French circus called Archaos who’d set up camp on Clapham Common in south London and who were performing a show which was unlike any circus show you might have seen or heard of previously. No live animals, lots of machines, fire, chainsaws, loud music, nudity; a surreal Mad Max-like environment where cars drove around the circus ring before snapping in half, spilling the occupants out into the spotlights to perform their turns. It was a wild cross between a theatre show, a nightclub and a piece of performance art with an impressively renegade attitude towards health and safety. Performers had huge corrugated-iron shields strapped to their backs, endless fires flickered, and air was thick with smells of engine diesel and sweat and beer. At the start of the show a gaudily made-up woman in a negligee, hair in rollers, cigarette in mouth, walked around the perimeter of the ring, an aerosol can of air-freshener in each hand, spraying them into the sky. That cocktail of Glade and burning paraffin from the huge heaters they had in the corners of the tent to stop the audience freezing will stay with me forever. When the show was over and the band played on (a wild blend of French ska, gypsy-punk, klezmer and heavy metal), and the audience left their seats and danced on the stage, I didn’t want to leave. I was dazed. I was changed. And I went back and saw the show again two more times.

The next summer Leo and I followed the circus to Scotland, where they were performing at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe with a new show, and it was there that we ventured backstage and made friends with some of the performers, nurturing connections which meant that when the circus came back to London that winter with a show called Metal Clown, this time to a patch of waste ground next to the power station in Battersea, we got jobs. Leo was a steward and managed to get a small performing spot. At the beginning of the show a carnival of vehicles and performers paraded through the cathederal-like dome of the tent from one set of doors to the other, and Leo, having built an extra-tall bicycle from two frames welded on top of each other, and wearing a crash helmet that was set on fire, cycled through the tent along with everyone else.

I cooked. Crêpes chiefly. The catering was run by a French couple from a stall set up in the bar tent just outside the main tent. It was hard work and non-stop but the combination of cooking, which I already loved doing, and feeling I was part of the greatest show on earth was unforgettable, even if it was a bit intimidating hanging around with French punks, junkies and weirdos.

When the show left town I started performing more seriously, firstly with Leo and then as a solo act. Street entertaining led to stand-up comedy, but always with props, magic, fire; always something a bit dangerous or left field. For a while, as my show’s finale, I used to strip naked and hang all my clothes on a coat hanger that was pierced through my left ear so that my hanging clothes preserved some of my modesty, until I turned around and walked off stage when everyone in the audience could enjoy a view of my bare backside.

Archaos disbanded in time but I befriended people who were part of it, performing with them in other outfits. With a post-Archaos group called Mischief La Bas, my now-wife Nikki and I were involved in a show called The Feast and the year after Feast 2: alternative cabarets where the performers cooked a meal during the day in the theatre kitchen and then, in the interval, the food was served to the audience members who were sat on huge movable picnic tables that could be pushed around the theatre to watch the different stages. It wasn’t until I began doing the live cooking on stage – almost twenty years after the ‘feast’ shows – that I realised how connected it all was.

Everything since Archaos has come in some way from that experience. The shows I’ve created, often without realising it, have been inspired and influenced by the anarchic, surreal, somewhat ridiculous spectacle that I immersed myself in back then. I’d urge you to look them up online. There’s not much, sadly, but you should be able to find a few videos on YouTube.

ARCHAOS CRÊPES

The crêpes we made for the audience to snack on at Archaos were very simple, and not at all gourmet, but they generate something that summons up so much more than just the flavours of a filled pancake. My kids, who didn’t come along until years after the circus, love Archaos Crêpes, so I’m confident that they do taste good and don’t just remind me of a time when everything started to make sense.

MAKES 4

1 tbsp salted butter

4 pre-cooked buckwheat pancakes (page 154)

100g grated medium Cheddar

100g grated Gruyère or Emmental

1 x 400g tin whole plum tomatoes (not fresh, has to be tinned, and cheap tinned might be better)

4 big pinches of dried mixed herbs

black pepper

10 minutes

Over a medium heat, melt a quarter of the butter in a frying pan until it begins to foam a little and then lay in a pancake. Sprinkle over a quarter of each of the cheeses. Using your fingers, lift a tomato out of the tin and gently crush it onto the cheese, being careful not to make it pop and squirt tomato juice all over your top.

Sprinkle over a big pinch of dried herbs and some black pepper. As the cheese starts to melt under the tomato, carefully fold the pancake in half and then in half again. Give it a minute and then, using a spatula or fish slice, lift it out of the pan and onto a plate and put it somewhere warm while you make the other three.

ALTERNATIVES:

If I remember correctly, the savoury options at Archaos included ‘Cheese, Tomato and Ham’, for which you do the above but add a slice or two of cheap ham to the assembly. And ‘Cheese’, for which you do the above and omit the tomato. And ‘Cheese and Ham’, for which, you guessed it, you do the above but swap the tomato for ham. They didn’t offer a plain ‘Tomato’ one, and you know, I don’t think it would work either.

Electric Hot Air Gun

You really don’t need one of these, as a grill will do the same thing, but I use one in my live cooking show and it’s actually an extremely useful tool in a culinary environment. Less fierce than a blow torch (also very useful of course, but much more likely to scorch, burn and sometimes ignite both intentionally and unintentionally), it will toast and brown in a more gentle and controllable way. Ideal for softening and melting cheese on top of a burger, toasting a bit of bread, or just introducing a breath of warmth to something that’s started to cool too quickly. We also used it to melt the cheese for the photo of Frenchish Onionish Soupish (page 136).

Blow Torch

There are dinky little chef ones for doing crème brûlées, but why not buy a proper plumber’s one and feel a bit more Mad Max? I use mine when I need that bit more oomph. If you’re cooking a burger or steak rare, where you’re after maximum char while retaining a bit of pinkness in the middle, this is ideal. You’ll also find it useful for the Cardamom Bun glaze (page 30).

FRENCHISH ONIONISH SOUPISH

A true snack hack. The laborious slow-cooking of a mountain of onions before gradually adding an equally time-hungry stock… forget it. This is ready in seconds and just needs a few packets and jars, a kettle and a hot grill, or some tools (pages 134-5).

SERVES 1

1 thick slice good sourdough

1 (generous) tsp Bovril

½ tsp soft brown sugar

¼ tsp vinegar (wine, cider or malt)

200ml boiling water

3 (heaped) tbsp crispy hot dog onions

¼ tsp cognac (optional, and only if you have it, but it gives it the edge)

1 slice processed cheese

1 (heaped) tbsp grated hard cheese (Gruyère, Emmental or cheddar)

½ tsp olive oil

black pepper

5 minutes

Preheat the grill to as hot as it will go.

Toast the sourdough well (over-toasted is better than under as the almost-burnt bitterness marries so well with the sweet onion). Once toasted, stand it on its side so it doesn’t go wet and chewy. You want it crisp.

In a small heatproof bowl (cereal-bowl-sized, you’re going to be eating from this), mix the Bovril, sugar and vinegar with the boiling water until the Bovril and sugar are dissolved. Spoon in the onions and give them a stir, then add the cognac, if using, and stir again.

Chop the toast into three or four pieces and place on top of the soup. Lay the processed cheese slice over the top, followed by the grated cheese. Trickle over the oil and slide the bowl under the hot grill until the cheese is melted and bubbling, or alternatively use a paint-stripping hot air gun if you’ve got one (page 134). Grind black pepper generously over the top. Eat immediately.

MUSSELS WITH GUINNESS AND GRUYÈRE

What makes Glasgow feel unique? The light perhaps, slightly greyer than in the south; the ground, permanently wet in winter even when it doesn’t rain; the buildings, oppressive reddish-brown, heavy and tall and laid out in a grid like New York City; the background cacophony of Glaswegian accents, which when raised deliver an air of menace, or even worse, potentially unwelcome uber-friendliness for an overwhelmed Englishman who fears that even polite dismissal will instigate a personality U-turn. Glasgow was where I first had this dish, or a version of it at least, made by my friend Stanley Smith, son of the late Ian Smith, who decades ago was the ringmaster at Archaos (page 130).

Guinness is creamy anyway, and not too bitter. When combined with the salty liquor that comes out of the mussels, the cream, and the Gruyère, some melted into the sauce, some sitting on top as a garnish, a divine combination is created. Eat it with bread torn up and dipped in the liquid. Or have it with chips.

SERVES 2

1 small onion or shallot, sliced

1 tbsp butter

2 cloves garlic, sliced

1 kg mussels

200ml Guinness (you can drink the rest while you’re cooking)

150ml double cream

150g Gruyère, grated

small bunch parsley, chopped pinch of brown sugar

black pepper (lots)

10 minutes

Give the mussels a clean, scrape off any hairy ‘beards’ (the stringy bits of rope that protrude from them sometimes), and discard any which are open and don’t close when you give them a tap.

In a heavy-lidded pan, sweat the onion in the butter over a medium heat for a few minutes until softened, before adding the garlic for a further minute. Turn the heat up high and throw in the mussels. Stir them around for 30 seconds, then pour in the Guinness and put the lid on. After a minute or two the mussels will have opened (discard any that haven’t). Take off the lid, pour in the cream, stir everything around again, then dish out the mussels into warmed bowls with a slotted spoon.

Return the pan to the heat and bring it to the boil, reducing the liquid by about half. Turn off the heat and add half the cheese, half the parsley, a pinch of brown sugar, lots of black pepper and a little salt if it needs it (it might not). Give it a stir to soften the cheese before spooning it over the mussels. Add the rest of the parsley and Gruyère as a garnish with lots more black pepper.

SCHUSS

In Koblenz, Germany, there used to be a venue called the Blaue Biwel (Blue Bible apparently, not that the translation works but that’s what I was told): a bar and a café during the day and a little theatre in the evening, and by some absurd twist of circumstance, when I was twenty-one and only a fledgling comedian, I was offered a two-week residency performing every night in The Midnight Show. I would host the show and do some of my own comedy, while the artists who were performing their full theatre show in the early evening would have the opportunity to perform an excerpt at midnight, and hopefully attract a few more potential paying punters from the late-night drinking crowd. For the entertainers, an appearance in the midnight show was optional and unpaid, so not surprisingly it wasn’t as popular an idea as the people running the club might have imagined. For the entire fortnight, nobody else did The Midnight Show except me, and often to a relatively rowdy audience – although this being Germany, they were still pretty polite and well-behaved, just eager, and vocally so. I did my schtick starting on the stroke of twelve and finished around twenty to one when I’d retire to the bar for some free food and a drink.

My go-to meal was a chilli con carne made with big, soft hunks of slow-cooked meat served in a small hollowed-out loaf of German rye bread. My drink of choice was Schuss, a kind of shandy combining a local beer with a sweeter mixer, although instead of lemonade a darker, more syrupy malt-based drink was used and in proportions that favoured the beer.

Here’s how I make it with what you can get your hands on in the UK.

MAKES 4

1 x 330ml can or bottle Supermalt

4 x 330ml cans German lager

30 seconds

The drinks must be cold. Divide the Supermalt between four glasses, then top up with lager. Pour at a tilt until you get to the last inch or so, then place the glass upright and increase the height of your pour just enough to generate a tall yellowy-white head of foam. If it froths over a little then all the better, as it’s so much more European like that.

SACHETS

Possessing as I do a control-freak-like addiction to altering everything I buy from a food outlet, I love a sachet. You can’t always get them (‘Can I get a couple of those red sauce things with my chips?... I’ve got to pay have I, ok… WAIT, HOW MUCH?!’), so when they’re free you may as well grab a few more than you need.

Once you start looking, you’ll find that ketchup, mayonnaise and brown sauce are just the tip of the iceberg (there’s an obvious joke there that I’m not prepared to make). In many a supermarket café you’ll be presented with tartare sauce, salad cream (white ketchup), mustard and vinegar. Some branches of Pret even have Tabasco but they’re few and far between. I’ve found other hot sauces online though, and more interesting ones too. I once found horseradish in a sachet, but never since, and as my stocks are depleting, the remaining few are becoming increasingly precious.

Buy a box of sushi and you’re looking at wasabi sachets, soy-sauce-filled plastic fish and envelopes of pickled ginger (look at Prawn Toast Toastie, page 105). I’ve got chilli flakes, olive oil, balsamic and shards of Parmesan (all came with a packet of beef carpaccio, which I ate at home, meaning I didn’t need to break into the precious portables), while visiting a hotel buffet you’ll find mini jams, Marmite, honey, peanut butter, Nutella and even maple syrup.

Stroll into a familiar high-street fast-food outlet and things open up further still with curry sauce, sweet and sour, BBQ, sweet chilli, and sour cream and chive. I’m still on the hunt for a sachet of Lea & Perrins, but a well-wisher once kindly sent me some mini bottles of Sheffield’s own Henderson’s Relish. Cup and packet noodles will deliver chilli oils, sweet thickened soy-based syrups, fried crispy onion pieces, dried vegetables to be rehydrated, and powders with more ingredients than I’ve word-count allowance but which can liven up a lot more than just ramen.

Head overseas and not surprisingly things get even more exciting. I’ve got a stack of mini pots of the most over-processed bright orange Queso dip, which I smuggled back from Spain, and sprinkle-bottles of Tajin seasoning from Mexico that fit on your keyring. The Netherlands have provided me with Febo Mosterd, and a variety of sambal chilli sauces, popular in Holland due to the Indonesian influence from colonial times (see Bamischijf, page 147). A trip to New York furnished me with sachets of French’s Mustard, Heinz Yellow Mustard, Gulden’s Spicy Brown Mustard, Louisiana Hot Sauce, Sriracha and individual portions of Smucker’s Grape Jelly. One of my daughters returned from travels in Japan last month with salad dressing sachets, bizarre pots of sweet bean paste and margarine (in the same container but with two separate chambers to be squirted out simultaneously, a bit like a sauce version of Araldite), and, treasure of treasures, sachets of Kewpie.

And don’t, in all the excitement, forget to maintain a healthy stockpile of salt and pepper.

CURRYWURST

In the nineties, when I was starting out as a performer, Europe offered a rich seam of festivals to mine, and having a show that was largely visual meant that my success rate when applying to perform was pretty good. For a number of years I’d head off on the ferry several times each summer with the promise of eager audiences, interesting international acts to make friends with, and open-armed hospitality.

The first time I went to Berlin I had currywurst, a street-food snack available everywhere. And I loved it: the salty sausage with the skin that snapped when you bit it, the sweet and mildly spiced ketchup, the dusting of curry powder. But most of all I grinned at the machine into which the stall-holder dropped the steaming sausage to be chopped automatically into mouthful-sized pieces.

I know you can buy curry ketchup in the UK now, but not as easily as you can get the regular stuff. You couldn’t find it at all in the nineties, and it’s still nice to have a solution up your sleeve that will guarantee you, if not the real deal, then certainly a gesture towards it. To be authentic it should be served in a shallow tray, so have a rummage in the recycling and look for one of those cardboard troughs that half-decent vine cherry tomatoes come in (and read more about this on page 79).

SERVES 1

1 hot saveloy from a chip shop

2 pots McDonalds’ curry sauce

2 sachets tomato ketchup

½ tsp mild curry powder (Bolst’s is my go-to brand for this)

1 very small bread roll (for authenticity, the smaller the better)

30 seconds

EQUIPMENT:

Scissors. A cardboard tray of some kind, pilfered from the recycling. and when you buy your saveloy, ask for a chip fork.

This recipe uses a chip-shop saveloy, by far the most comical of the sausages, and something that always reminds me of Richard Scarry’s illustrations.

With your scissors, snip the saveloy into 1-inch pieces directly into the cardboard tray. Mix together the curry sauce and the tomato ketchup and dollop randomly over the saveloy chunks. Sprinkle the bright mustard-yellow curry powder over the top of everything. Place the bread roll at one end of the tray.

Using the chip fork to stab and scoff the pieces of sausage, eat outside, in the dark, maybe in the rain, with German techno playing on your headphones. Eat, or leave, the bread.

BAMISCHIJF (DEEP-FRIED POT NOODLE)

The Netherlands is a snack-lover’s kingdom. Can’t imagine why. When I first visited in the mid-nineties, shops and petrol stations in every town had walls of heated metal cabinets containing an array of mystery deep-fried goodies sitting on little cardboard trays. You put your coins in a slot and opened the drawer to extract your snack. Everything was written in Dutch, so you didn’t know if the crunchy breaded shapes, stout cylinders, irregular cuboids, stadiums of revolution (google that one), would contain cheese, meat or something else.

An Indonesian-influenced dish harking back to Dutch colonial times, Bamischijf is a slab of breaded deep-fried curried noodles, quite a surprise when you’re expecting something cheesy or meaty but gosh it hits the spot. You can’t find them anywhere in the UK (even when Lidl does a Dutch week), so here’s my take using an emergency teen-years energy supplier: the Pot Noodle. The peanut butter adds an Indonesian satay flavour, and the Sesame Snap a Chinese-inspired bitter-sweet touch.

MAKES 3

1 Bombay Bad Boy Pot Noodle

1 tbsp peanut butter

1 Sesame Snap (or similar sesame and sugar snack), roughly crushed

60g plain flour

1 egg

100g breadcrumbs (for authenticity, ideally the luminous golden fine dried breadcrumbs that come in a cardboard tube, but homemade or panko will do)

neutral oil, for deep-frying

20 minutes (plus Pot Noodle cooling/setting time)

EQUIPMENT:

A cook’s thermometer. There are methods for gauging the temperature of hot oil with cubes of bread, but I can never get them to work properly.

Make the Pot Noodle as per the instructions, but use less boiling water than normal, pouring to about 1cm below the fill line. Add the peanut butter and the Sesame Snap pieces and give it a good mix. After the suggested 4 minutes swelling and mixing time, press the top of the mixture down with the back of a spoon to get it as flat and compacted as possible. Cover (I use the foil lid pushed down to touch the surface of the noodles) and refrigerate until cooled to a solid cylinder (actually, it’s not a cylinder, it’s a truncated cone), which will take a few hours.

Once cooled, the noodles should pop out of the pot in one lump. The pot may require inverting and squeezing from the sides, and sometimes I pierce a hole in the bottom to let some air in (like one of those crème caramels from the supermarket). Slice into three equal-sized discs.

Put the flour in one shallow bowl, the beaten egg in a second and the breadcrumbs in a third. Coat the discs first in the flour, then the egg and finally in the breadcrumbs. You’ll now have what look like three cheap chip-shop fishcakes.

Deep-fry the discs in the oil. Make sure you use a deep pan, don’t fill it more than a third full, as it’ll froth as well as being naturally displaced by the discs when they go in, and only cook one or two at a time. Bring the oil up to 170°C (340°F), and fry for about 5 minutes, or until golden, then lift out and drain on a blue cloth (page 27). Eat them with sriracha and ideally a cold beer with a big frothy head.

STROGANOFF STEAK BAKE

I like stroganoff so much that to enhance the experience when I make one at home I put on Russian music while I cook and eat. Do the same. Either go for something properly austere like the Russian National Anthem, or for something a little lighter search for Easy USSR Vols 1 and 2 by Vyacheslav Mescherin. You’ll have to use YouTube as the albums aren’t on any music streaming platforms that I can find. Or if you want something with balls, and mad balls at that, look up the band Leningrad on Spotify and play the album called Пляж наш (The Beach Is Ours).

If you don’t have the time or inclination to make a proper stroganoff, and why would you always, you can make a very nice nod towards it with a few choice ingredients and a couple of hot steak bakes (or similar). Eat with shots of cold vodka. And, as stated above, play the right music.

MAKES 2

2 steak bakes (or similar), either hot and fresh from the baker’s or frozen ones baked at home

6 tsp soured cream

4 tsp Dijon mustard

2 big pinches of smoked paprika

2 tiny pinches of brown sugar

small bunch dill, chopped or ripped up

8 cornichons, chopped

2 shots very cold (ideally frozen) vodka

black pepper

2 minutes

If you’re doing this with shop-bought hot steak bakes, then slit (or nibble) one edge to gain access to the insides, like a purse or pocket, before spooning the following into each: half the soured cream, mustard and paprika, a tiny pinch of sugar and lots of black pepper. Distribute it roughly around the insides by massaging the outside (maybe you do yours and your friend does theirs so it doesn’t feel too unhygienic). Then reopen up and sprinkle in lots of dill and cornichons.

Bite the bakes. Sip the vodka. Enjoy the music. Nostrovia.

BAKED BEAN DAL

I’ve been making a bastardised version of a Madhur Jaffrey chana dal recipe for decades. The original was in a book we had at home when I was small, though I don’t remember enjoying the dish as a child. I was surprisingly fussy until I reached my teens. But it was a staple for my own distinctly unfussy kids when they were growing up, enjoyed with South Asian dishes, but also often paired with the likes of fish fingers and salad.

Comedian Romesh Ranganathan was a welcome guest on Snack Hacker, and he told me about going to university and his mum, Shanthi Ranganathan, inventing a simple baked bean curry that he could make in halls when she wasn’t sending him food packages. He challenged me to invent something using the ubiquitous breakfast staple and I came up with this. Despite tasting very dal-like, the flavour of baked beans still pushes through in a reassuring way. You do need to be generous with the butter, but I promise you’ll thank me for it. And if there’s any left it’s amazing cold. It sets like a paté and is superb spread on toast.

SERVES 4 AS A SIDE DISH OR 2 AS A MAIN

2 x 400g tins baked beans

3 slices fresh ginger (about the thickness of a pound coin)

1 tsp turmeric powder

2 hot green finger chillies

50g ghee or butter (or a vegan equivalent)

8 cloves garlic, sliced into matchsticks

2 tsp cumin seeds

1 tsp cayenne pepper or hot chilli powder

1 tsp garam masala

½ tsp brown sugar

small bunch coriander, roughly chopped

15 minutes

Semi-rinse the beans. You need to lose a little bit of their sauce but not all of it as it’s nice to retain some of the familiar flavour, so pour the beans into a sieve and run the cold tap over them for just a second as you give them a quick swirl, then dump the beans and whatever water and sauce has clung to them straight into a deep saucepan. Add the ginger, turmeric and one of the chillis whole (they look great as well as creating potential jeopardy later on), but no salt as the beans will be pretty well seasoned.

Set the pan over a medium heat and as the contents start to warm, semi-mash the beans with a potato masher. You want them busted but not pureéd. Set the heat to low, put a lid on and let them heat through for 10 minutes, giving them a stir every now and then to stop them sticking. They’ll start to dry a bit as moisture evaporates, so don’t be afraid to add a generous splash of water (about 100ml) if they do. Have a taste and if it’s not salty enough, add some.

While the beans are cooking, put the ghee, butter or vegan equivalent in a cold shallow pan, add the garlic and the cumin seeds and set over a low heat so the fat melts and the garlic starts to sizzle. Keep an eye on it as while golden garlic is delicious, burnt garlic will ruin everything. As soon as the garlic is pale gold and smelling good, take the pan off the heat, add the cayenne or chilli powder, give the pan one stir and pour the contents into the beans. Sprinkle over the garam masala and the sugar. Turn the heat off and give the whole pan a very rudimentary mix. You want those oily, buttery pools in places rather than an amalgamated mass. It’s much more appetising. Finally, scatter over the coriander and the other chilli, roughly chopped.

Recycled Containers

Repurposing the otherwise recycled – or worse, discarded – is something to be proud of. And I love attempting to recreate an enjoyable and nostalgic experience. As such, I keep an eye out for cardboard vine tomato trays that can be reused as troughs for Currywurst (page 145), or plastic mushroom punnets that can accommodate French Market Potatoes (page 62). I also like a mishmash of containers for my spices, coffee, tea, leftovers, and so on, rather than a neat matching set. So much more interesting-looking. You can label them with one of those retro embossing label-makers, or use green tape and a Sharpie like they do in The Bear. And if you want a more portable collection of your dry store favourites then go to car boot sales and keep an eye out for empty 35mm film canisters (page 7). They’re ideal and they’re what I use in my camper van.

PANCAKES AND EDINBURGH

I’ve performed a number of times at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, where each August thousands of shows are put on every day for three and a half weeks. It’s a completely unique experience. You can be the most seasoned stand-up comedian, but up there you’re just one of a seemingly never-ending crowd of performers trying to create an entertaining, moving, poignant, funny, relevant hour every day for those choosing to watch. For nearly a whole month. It’s exhausting and exhilarating and it can be life-changing, though more frequently theatre-makers, clowns and comedians get to the end of the run and think, ‘Why did I put myself through that?’, then eleven months later, they’re back again.

My shows are technical – there’s equipment, sound cues, lighting and music to think about, and cooking on stage adds a raft of other complications. I have to remember ingredients, make sure they’re all lined up and prepared, and I have to think about what I’m doing with my hands while I’m talking, and attempt to be entertaining while preparing a recipe, and all the time making it look easy. It’s a task. Last time I did a run there I finished my first show and it was ok, but there were problems that needed ironing out. My daughter called me that evening and asked, ‘How was the show?’, so I started telling her: ‘It was alright, but my timing was out, and I forgot the powdered cardamom, and I didn’t remember the joke about—’ She cut across me: ‘Don’t worry, Dad. The first show’s like the first pancake.’

How smart is that?

BUCKWHEAT PANCAKES

Extremely versatile, utterly beautiful and unfailingly popular. Enjoy them hot or cold, sweet or savoury.

MAKES 12–16
(DEPENDING ON PAN SIZE)

100g plain flour

100g buckwheat flour

pinch of salt

2 eggs

400ml whole milk

25g butter, melted, and more for cooking

130–180ml cold water

neutral oil, for shallow-frying

45 minutes (about 3 minutes per pancake)

EQUIPMENT:

You need a good pan. I don’t mean an expensive pan, just a pan you know won’t stick. It could be a cheap non-stick one from the swedish furniture giant, or a fancy one you were seduced into buying by targeted advertising on social media (don’t be ashamed, they know what you want), or it could be, as it is in my case, a well-seasoned black steel omelette pan.

Put the flours in a bowl with the salt and whisk to break up any lumps. Make a well in the centre and drop in the eggs. Start to gently whisk, adding about half the milk, a little at a time, until you have a thickish cream, then carry on adding the milk until it’s all incorporated. Add the melted butter. You need to thin the batter now, so start to whisk in the water a few dribbles at a time until the mixture reaches the consistency of thin cream. Different flours absorb water at different rates, so it’s inexact and you’re going to have to use some instinct. You won’t use all the water straight away but you will need to continue to add some as the level of the batter goes down, since it gets more viscous as you use it due to (I assume) evaporation and solids falling to the bottom of the bowl. When the batter hits the pan, water evaporates in little bubbles and you get pretty holes near the edge, making the pancake look like a doily and giving you the most delicate lacy crispness. When you’re there consistency-wise (or you feel like you are), it’s time to start cooking. I don’t bother with any of that resting-the-batter business.

Get the pan medium-hot. Add a little butter and move it around until melted. Trickle in the smallest amount of oil as well and wipe the contents around the pan surface with a blue cloth until lightly coated. Immediately ladle in some batter, enough that you have to do some deep tilting and rotating actions with the pan to get total coverage. If covering the whole pan is too easy, you used too much. But don’t worry, you can have another go in a minute. If there’s too little, just top it up with a trickle more in the places where it’s needed.

Now wait for a minute or two, occasionally teasing up the edge with a palette knife to see if it’s cooked enough to move. You may need to ease the knife underneath the pancake to free it, but that depends on your pan and the heat. When it’s free and you can make it shuffle a little with a slight shake of the pan, you can either flip it (cool) or get a palette knife underneath and delicately turn it over (fine).

Cook the other side for slightly less time and then slide it out and onto a plate and cover with a tea towel. The pancakes will be delicate and will easily tear, so leave them alone; they’ll gain structure and integrity as they cool. Get on with the next one. As you make your pancakes the batter will thicken, so every time you finish one add a trickle more water and whisk it in to maintain the consistency.

The pancakes will keep really well for a week, wrapped or kept in a plastic box in the fridge. Reheating is easy: just put them in a warm, lightly buttered pan for a minute or two. And remember, it doesn’t matter if you muck up the first one, that’s kind of expected.

BOVRIL, BUTTER AND PICKLED ONION PANCAKES

I come from a Bovril family. Getting out the red-lidded jar elicits the same questions from non-Bovril-fancying company, ‘I thought that was a drink’ or ‘Is this nice?’, and doubt hangs in the air. Don’t mistake me, I love Marmite, but I think Bovril is better – rounder, smoother, less aggressive and, well, meatier. On toast it’s weird enough, but imagine having a school friend round and your dad putting it on pancakes. Almost as embarrassing as having a dinner bell.

MAKES 4

50g unsalted butter, softened (plus more for cooking)

2 generous tsp Bovril

4 pickled onions or shallots in a sweet pickle

4 pre-cooked buckwheat pancakes (page 154)

small bunch curly parsley, chopped

10 minutes

Beat the softened butter and Bovril together in a bowl until it’s an even-coloured light brown and very soft and spreadable (there’s a recipe for Bovril and Tarragon Butter on page 119 and that’s a fab alternative). Slice the pickled onions thinly.

Spread the Bovril butter over the surface of the pancakes and sprinkle over the onion slices, saving a few as a garnish.

In a frying pan over a medium heat, melt a little plain butter until it begins to foam before laying in a pancake Bovril-buttered-side up. When it starts melting, slide the pancake out and onto a plate, roll it into a sausage and cut into quaffable pieces. Scatter over some more pickled onion slices and parsley, and repeat with the remaining pancakes.

BLACKCURRANT AND LIQUORICE PANCAKES

Blackcurrant and liquorice, like the sweets. I know, I was pleased too.

MAKES 4

4 pre-cooked buckwheat pancakes (page 154)

about 20g butter

4 tbsp blackcurrant jam (blackberry, dark cherry or wild blueberry are also good)

1 bar soft liquorice (Panda brand is ideal)

icing sugar for dusting

10 minutes

Melt a little butter (about 5g) in a pan and lay the pancake in to warm through for about 30 seconds, then spoon over 1 tablespoon of the jam and spread it across the surface. As the heat comes through, the jam will begin to bubble and the edges of the pancake will start to crisp up a bit.

As one would with Parmesan, use a really sharp Microplane-type grater to shave a generous ‘snow’ of liquorice over the jam, then fold the pancake into quarters. Slide it onto a plate, dust with icing sugar and shave over even more liquorice. Repeat with the remaining pancakes.

WÜNDERBÜRGER

Prior to the introduction of the giant fast-food ordering screens that have somewhat tragically reduced the already limited contact we have with our fellow humans, I would attempt (with varying degrees of success) to do my customising face-to-face, over the counter, with a tide of increasingly frustrated and irritated folk swelling behind me. And not just over the counter. I recall one occasion at the drive-thru at Gatwick Airport late one night when, hungry and fuelled by post-show adrenaline, I indignantly pleaded for an extra patty in my double cheeseburger, insisting that only last week the manager had been happy to oblige and that I would of course, as I had done on that previous occasion, pay the extra. They told me that the rules had changed and they ‘weren’t able to do it’. ‘It’s not that you aren’t able to do it, it’s that you’re choosing not to do it. They put a man on the moon. Please don’t tell me you can’t place an extra patty on top of the other two because it’s not a can’t situation, it’s a won’t!’

I’ve mellowed. But maybe that exchange got back to the powers that be and you’ve got me to thank for the now (I believe) permanently present Triple Cheeseburger option.

While it’s definitely a pity that we’re in the throes of an age where we interact less, the big screens are a godsend for the shy snack hacker, as customisations can be made without a raise of the eyebrow when you propose ketchup be omitted. You’ll need to do the reassembly outside of the burger vendor, or inside if you’re brave enough. And you’ll need to pre-arm yourself with an ingredient, but it just means sticking a jar in your bag or pocket, so no biggie.

MAKES 1

2 tbsp sauerkraut with caraway seeds

30 seconds

Order a BIG burger. A cheeseburger. It can be from the obvious place, but there are many other options open to you (including making your own, which is what I did for the picture opposite).

Customise the burger by omitting the ketchup and adding extra mustard x 2, extra mayonnaise x 2 (you want this thing sloppy) and extra gherkin.

Once you’ve got your customised and probably quite heavy parcel, take it somewhere private, unwrap it, remove the top bun and pile a couple of spoonfuls of caraway sauerkraut on top of the burgers and sauce.

Lean over the paper wrapping and tuck in. It’s a big messy stack, so be ready to adjust the assembly accordingly as the filling begins its inevitable lurch out the other side.

MOTORWAY SERVICE STATION MULLED WINE

‘This is doing my head in. The sodding road closures and diversions have added two hours onto the journey so far and we’re not even halfway, which means that even if we keep to time from now on, we’re not going to get into London until half one in the morning. I’m staring down the barrel of a two-hour stroll around Victoria Station with all the other losers ’til I can get the first train back tomorrow. I’ve realised I actually hope there ARE more delays as at least while I’m on the coach I’ve got a seat. And it’s Christmas sodding Eve tomorrow. Why the hell did I take the Megabus? I need a drink. What’s this? Services?’

1) At home, have a look where the teas and coffees are kept as there’ll inevitably be a number of half-filled boxes of random ‘herbal infusions’ containing the likes of cinnamon, vanilla, clove, liquorice, dried berries and leaves, and other attractive-sounding-but-frequently-disappointing ingredients. Pocket a few of the bags.

2) Motorway services have microwaves, because people who have babies sometimes have baby food and they want to warm the baby food up. Sometimes the microwaves have labels on them saying ‘only for baby food’, but nobody ever checks what you’re putting in them.

3) If you go to one of the coffee outlets at a motorway services, smile at the person serving and ask, ‘Could I just get another cup please?’ They’ll assume you’ve already bought a coffee and been served by someone else and they’ll give you a cup.

MAKES 1 CUP

1 small bottle red wine (easily available at one of the supermarket outlets)

1 or 2 random herbal tea bags with interesting wintry ingredients (cinnamon, berries, cloves, vanilla, etc.)

4 or 5 sachets brown sugar (again, easily found at a motorway services)

1 satsuma (optional)

2 minutes

EQUIPMENT:

An empty cup and a microwave.

Pour the wine into the cup. Microwave for about 30 seconds to warm it. Add the bag or bags, the sugar sachets and, if you have a satsuma, the juice from half the satsuma. Give it a good stir and then microwave for another 45–60 seconds – you want it hot but not boiling.

Stir to dissolve the sugar, drop in the other satsuma half, put the lid on the cup, return to the coach, find your seat, put on your headphones, play some calming classical music, sip your mulled wine, head home for Christmas.

BLACK LIME SNOWBALL

Advocaat was my tipple of choice as a pre-teen. It was the drink I was allowed at Christmas, served to me in a little liqueur glass to be sipped while gazing fondly at the heavily decorated tree or while circling things in the extra fat Radio Times. So, while we’re enjoying this little burst of festive activity, what about an ingenious twist on this classic cocktail.

MAKES 1

1 black lime (enough for many drinks, and for the Big Mack(erel), page 92)

50ml Advocaat

ice

100ml lemonade

2 minutes (or 30 seconds if you’ve already ground your black limes)

EQUIPMENT:

Clean electric coffee grinder, or a Nutribullet-type smoothie-maker

First make a black lime powder by grinding the whole lime (or even a few of them as it keeps in a sealed jar forever) in the grinder or smoothie-maker until you have a fine black powder. Taste a bit, it’s intensely limey and sour.

Pour the Advocaat into an ice-filled glass, followed carefully by the lemonade, and stir the two gently to mix, retaining the fizz, before using a tea strainer to dust the top of the foam with a generous layer of black lime powder.

Old Electric Coffee Grinder

Car boot sales will throw these up on a regular basis. Often frighteningly dangerous, lacking modern safety features that stop you blending your fingers to a paste, and now eschewed by the enlightened coffee aficionado who knows that a burr grinder is the only way to go when it comes to beans, these are great for grinding spices and turning nuts, seeds and a host of other dry ingredients into flours and powders.

Cooperative

When I was nineteen, I left London to go to university in Brighton. My brother Henry had moved out two years earlier, so it was just me and my parents, and as much as I loved them I was ready to go. I never moved home again.

For the first few years I lived in a housing cooperative. A friend back in London had grown up living in one and the communal, left-leaning set-up appealed to me almost as much as the cheap rent. The summer before moving, I’d come down to look around the town and get a feel for it, and I saw an interesting-looking block of flats near the seafront, which somehow stood out: a bit scruffy, coloured lights visible through the windows, lots of plants, boho people sat on the steps outside smoking roll-ups. Pre-internet days meant that investigating the Brighton cooperative scene wasn’t easy, and rather than just logging on and googling, it required phone calls and actual letters in the actual post, but with a little diligence I managed to find a cooperative that seemed suitable. I had to attend a few meetings and show willing with regards to, well, being cooperative, before I was in a position where I could apply for a vacancy, and it wasn’t until my interview at one of the numerous properties the cooperative owned that I realised it was the same block I’d spotted on that initial Brighton recce some months earlier.

The block, originally built for a Buddhist community, was divided into large open-plan dwellings accommodating groups of up to seven people, each with a small cell-sized bedroom directly off the main living area. So very communal. Mine was vegetarian, sometimes strictly policed and sometimes less depending on who was resident. I had a strip torn off me once for bringing in Worcestershire sauce (anchovy featured some way down the ingredients list), but at other times a Peperami would be ignored if eaten discreetly. Sometimes a bite would be offered and accepted as a silence tax, two people bound by mutual disobedience.

My flat was one of the big ones, with seven of us resident, and a communal cooking rota meant that each night of the week one of us would make dinner for the others. A lot of tofu was marinated, a lot of seeds were sprouted, beans puréed and TVP rehydrated. My years living there nurtured my enjoyment of that kind of hippy fare as well as fuelling a desire to rebel and tuck into cured meats, BBQ, McDonald’s and all manner of other processed junk.

Nestled among books on the legalities of squatting, how to protest safely, Levellers LPs and the ubiquitous Cranks cookbooks and Rose Elliot bibles was a pair of books by American food writer Mollie Katzen; The Moosewood Cookbook and The Enchanted Broccoli Forest. Beautifully hand-written and author-illustrated, they were enthralling and, despite my desire to eat burgers, there was something hugely appealing about the recipes. I’ve still got my copies of the books and I still make the peanut sauce with broccoli, or at least my version of it, regularly.

CHARRED BROCCOLI WITH PEANUT BUTTER SAUCE AND DATE SYRUP

Credit to Mollie Katzen for the inspiration. For Mollie’s version with tofu and boiled broccoli, get yourself a copy of The Enchanted Broccoli Forest. Here’s how I do something similar.

SERVES 4 AS A SIDE DISH

400g tenderstem® broccoli (pretty standard bag size, leave it in the bag)

a little neutral oil

100g crunchy peanut butter (something where the ingredients’ list just reads ‘peanuts’)

2 cloves garlic, grated, crushed or very finely chopped

4 tsp malt vinegar

½ tsp cayenne pepper

1–2 tsp date syrup (and a bit more for drizzling)

2 tsp soy sauce

75ml very hot water

black pepper

12 minutes

Put a heavy frying pan over the heat and get it hot. While it’s heating up, open the broccoli bags but don’t take the vegetables out, instead pour a little slick of oil into the bags over the broccoli and, through the bag, give it a good massage to get it nice and oily without having to make a mess of your hands. Then tip the broccoli from the bag into the pan. It’ll hiss and sizzle. You can NOW discard the bag. Sprinkle a little salt over the broccoli and place another pan on top to weigh it down so it’s flattened against the hot pan and gets well charred.

While it’s cooking, make the sauce. Mix the peanut butter, garlic, vinegar, cayenne, date syrup, soy sauce and water together until smooth. If the water is really hot, after a little vigorous stirring it should all come together and be the perfect eating temperature.

After it’s cooked for about 2 minutes, check on the broccoli and turn it over to char the other side, weighing it down again for another minute or two. You want it with bite but not too crunchy and raw. Test a stem with a sharp knife and if it slides in with relative ease, it’s ready.

Remove the broccoli to a serving plate, drizzle over the peanut sauce in an artistic fashion, trickle over a little more date syrup (but not much as it’s very sweet), and grind over lots of black pepper. This is also very nice in a wholemeal roll (maybe you’ve some left over from making Brown Bread Ice Cream, page 53).

PACKED LUNCH PIZZA

Wholefood shops are great, aren’t they? My favourite thing about them is they’re the perfect place to go to see how much food is going to cost in the future.

There’s a wholefood shop in Brighton that sells a ‘healthy’ (?) tray-baked pizza. It hits the right notes when you want kind-of junk food but still want to feel good about what’s going in your body. This is my take on it. When cold, it’s firm enough to wrap and stick in a bag, hence the name. It’s also an ideal way to use up ageing vegetables. I don’t have a strict recipe for the toppings, because it differs depending on what needs using up, so take the below as a guide. It’s essentially lots of vegetables and not much cheese on a wholesome bread base.

Oh, and finally, it’s a wholemeal dough, so it simply has to be rectangular. Don’t know why but a circle just isn’t right.

MAKES 1 BIG SLAB, ENOUGH FOR 4–6 PEOPLE

300g strong wholemeal flour (plus more for rolling out)

1 tsp fine salt

180ml warm water

1 tsp dried yeast

1 tsp brown sugar

200g chopped tinned tomatoes

1 tbsp olive oil (plus more for drizzling)

2 tbsp tomato purée

fresh vegetables (onion, garlic, peppers, mushrooms, courgettes, broccoli, tomatoes, asparagus, fennel… any combination, sliced or chopped – vary your cutting style for textural and aesthetic interest)

100g cheese (any cheese, Cheddar of course, but bits of whatever you have hanging around could make things more interesting)

a handful of mixed things from jars (olives, capers, pickled chillis…)

1 tbsp dried herbs (oregano, herbes de provence, mixed herbs – any, or none)

fresh herbs (basil, parsley, dill, thyme, rosemary – and, or none)

40 minutes (plus rising time)

EQUIPMENT:

a flat rectangular baking tray, about 30 x 40cm.

Mix the flour with the salt, make a well in the middle, pour in the water and sprinkle over the yeast and sugar. Roughly mix some of the flour into the water to form a slurry, wait about 5 minutes for the yeast to soften and hydrate, then mix it all together. Knead until soft, smooth and reasonably stretchy. It’ll only take about 5 minutes.

Put the ball of dough in a large lightly oiled bowl and cover it with something, like a damp tea towel, a plate or a lid, and leave it somewhere warm to rise for an hour or longer, depending on the temperature of the room. You want it to roughly double in size.

Once it’s risen, preheat the oven to 200°C/180°C fan (400°F/gas mark 6). Oil the baking tray and lightly flour a work surface.

Gently tip your nicely puffy dough onto the work surface and use a rolling pin to roll it out until it’s a flat rectangle slightly larger than the tray. Then place it onto the tray and fiddle with the overlapping edges to create a little wall. Leave it for 30 minutes to puff up a bit more, and while it’s doing that assemble the toppings.

In a large bowl, mix the chopped tomatoes together with the oil and tomato purée. That’s your sauce. Slice and chop your vegetables. Grate your cheese. Open your jars.

Spoon the sauce over the base, taking it right up to the edge. Tumble the chopped vegetables and the herbs (dried and/or fresh) into the bowl the sauce was in, add a little more oil and toss everything together before randomly distributing over the pizza. Add the grated cheese, but not evenly – do it in little clumps here and there so some bits are cheesier than others. Scatter over the things from jars. Sprinkle over lots of black pepper, some salt and drizzle over a little more oil.

Bake in the middle of the oven for 30–40 minutes until the underside of the base looks cooked when you lift it. When it’s done, take it out and let it go completely cold on the baking tray before cutting into big rectangles.

MUSHY PEA HOUMOUS

People like the distinct flavour of mushy peas, don’t they? Some do. Bit of a Marmite-vibe perhaps, although that said, I’ve always thought that while the makers of Marmite have generated the whole love it or hate it thing, I believe that if polled most people would be ambivalent. I certainly am. It’s fine. Though I prefer Bovril.

It’s possible to make a houmous-of-sorts out of pretty much any canned bean or pulse, so why not mushy peas? When paired with smoky toasted cumin and garlic this is a delicious cooling dip. I add malt vinegar to the mix instead of the more traditional lemon, to further enhance those chip-shop vibes. It’s also slightly reminiscent of guacamole, not least because of the colour, and would make a perfectly reasonable and more environmentally and socially worthy alternative to the avocado-based jollop. Very tasty in a taco (page 205).

MAKES 1 BOWLFUL

1 tsp cumin seeds

1 x 300g tin mushy peas

50g tahini

1 clove garlic, grated or crushed

2 tbsp cold pressed rapeseed oil, plus extra for drizzling

1 tbsp malt vinegar

½ tsp salt

5 minutes

EQUIPMENT:

a food processor or blender if you want it smooth and creamy; a fork or masher of some kind if you’re happy with it being coarse.

Toast the cumin seeds in a dry pan until they go fragrant and start to jump about a bit, then crush them roughly in a pestle and mortar or chop roughly with a knife.

If using a food processor, add the peas, tahini, garlic, oil, vinegar, salt and half of the crushed cumin seeds and process until you’ve got a smooth, creamy mixture. If you’re doing it by hand, get to work with a fork or masher to mix everything together.

Transfer to a bowl and dress with a trickle more oil and a dusting of the remaining crushed cumin seeds before enjoying with a portion of chip-shop chips to scoop it up with.

GÖZLEME TOASTIE

I visited Istanbul a number of years ago to perform at their comedy festival, and the food was amazing, but the best gözleme I found wasn’t by the banks of the Bosporus.

At The Open Market in Brighton there used to be a charmingly ramshackle stall run by a friendly Turkish lady called Seda. She had a couple of crêpe-making hot plates and a pile of scratched plastic tubs containing her various fillings (minced lamb, spicy red potatoes, spinach, feta, tons of parsley), which she’d made at home in London before taking the train down to the coast with everything piled into a pull-along shopping basket. For just £3 she would expertly roll dough billowingly thin in front of you with a long rolling pin like a broom handle, and make the most exquisite, delicate, generously filled and frankly enormous gözleme. They came off the hot plate molten and steaming in the centre, when, despite my better judgement, I’d eat mine immediately and often burn the roof of my mouth.

This is a version of her spinach, feta and parsley gözleme, exactly as she’d fill it and finish it with melted butter and dried mint, but reimagined as a toastie.

When Covid happened and everything shut down, Seda inevitably stopped making the trip and, sadly, when things opened up again, she never returned. I hope she’s ok. Seda! Come back!

MAKES 1

butter

2 medium slices white bread

1 small handful of baby spinach leaves (about 25g), ripped up

30g feta, broken up into random lumps

1 small bunch flat-leaf parsley (about 20g), roughly chopped

pinch of crushed chilli flakes

pinch of dried oregano

pinch of dried mint

5 minutes

EQUIPMENT:

A plug-in toasted
sandwich-maker or a stove-top toastie-maker (page 34).

Butter the outside of the bread and place one slice in the warmed toastie-maker. Pile on the spinach (you may need to squeeze and crush it a bit to get it in), feta, parsley (be really generous, it’s all about the parsley) and a big pinch each of chilli flakes, oregano and lots of black pepper (but no salt as the feta is pretty salty). Top with the other bread slice, buttered on the outside, and clamp the toastie-maker closed.

Cook until golden and a little charred. When it’s out of the toastie-maker, rub a little extra butter on the top and sprinkle with a pinch of dried mint (this is what Seda used to do). And don’t burn your mouth. Or do burn your mouth, probably.

WILD GARLIC PESTO LOADED CHIPS

One of the easiest free ingredients to forage, and abundant between late April and early May, wild garlic is well worth hunting for. It’s feather-shaped green leaves reek unmistakably of garlic, and later in the season the little white flowers that bloom are also edible, and look beautiful in salads.

You could make your pesto with a food processor. Nice and easy. Though you could just as easily do it in a pestle and mortar and feel all rustic and wholesome. But best of all, I’d recommend you do it outside, right there in the woods where the wild garlic grows, even if that means lugging equipment around in a rucksack. And it doesn’t have to be a heavy pestle and mortar. I’ve got a rechargeable portable smoothie-maker that plugs into a USB port so you can even keep it powered up in your car. A bit of a gimmick but my goodness it makes a great pesto. And great healthy smoothies too. I’d imagine.

SERVES 2
(DEPENDING ON APPETITE)

75g wild garlic leaves, washed and roughly chopped or ripped up

50g toasted hazelnuts (you can buy bags of pre-toasted ones, which makes it easier)

40g parmesan, plus extra if needed

generous pinch of salt

an equally generous grind of black pepper

grated zest of ½ lemon

splash of malt vinegar (maybe you’ve got a sachet, page 142)

120ml (roughly) cold pressed rapeseed oil

1 portion chip-shop chips

5 minutes

EQUIPMENT:

A food processor or a pestle and mortar, but you can still make a chunkier version with just a knife and a board.

Put everything (apart from the oil and the chips) into your food processor, set it running and trickle in the oil. Taste and correct the seasoning by adding more salt, pepper, acid or cheese until you’ve got balance. If you’re doing it by hand finely chop the ingredients, put in a bowl and mix in the oil as above.

This coarse and hearty paste is perfect on pasta, and it’s equally great smeared on toasted sourdough, or stirred into a soup, or dressing a salad, or folded into a risotto. But we’re going to load chips with it. Find a bench or sit in your car, pile the pesto onto the carbs and tuck in.

VARIATION:

The above recipe is fun to experiment with, using alternatives to the nuts, oils and acids. Here are some other versions to try. Just keep the ratios roughly the same:

Brazil nuts and extra virgin olive oil with red wine vinegar – creamy, slightly earthy.

Cashews and extra virgin olive oil with lemon juice instead of vinegar – creamy and more lemony, weirdly.

Almonds and extra virgin rapeseed oil with lemon juice, red wine vinegar and chilli – half a red chilli gives this a hot hit, with an almost peanut butter flavour from the almonds. Kind-of satay.

WILD GARLIC MAYO DOUBLE CHEESEBURGER

The wholesome and the trashy. Lady and the Tramp. Beauty and the Beast. Darth Vader and the Stormtroopers. Pure Snack Hacker. Utter sacrilege.

MAKES 1

1 small bunch wild garlic leaves, washed and finely shredded

4 tbsp mayonnaise (or 6 or 7 sachets)

2 pinches of sumac (or a squeeze of lemon if you don’t have sumac)

1 customised double cheeseburger (no ketchup, no mustard, no onion)

splash of hot sauce (tabasco is great, but please experiment if you have other ones)

2 minutes

Stir the shredded wild garlic leaves into the mayonnaise along with a pinch of sumac or some lemon juice. Order your customised double cheeseburger (‘no ketchup please, no mustard please, no onion thanks, just the burgers, cheese and gherkins’ – you can do this on the big screens in the nation’s most popular fast-food restaurant, or you can ask at the drive-thru voice-exchange unit, and feel free to use my script or invent your own). Open the burger up and generously pile the wild garlic mayonnaise on top of the patties. Add a pinch more sumac and a big splash of hot sauce.

And obviously you can do the same with a less trashy burger if you prefer. You could even make your own.

TO MANY CHIPS

It’d be a lucrative exercise if I earned a pound every time I mentioned leftovers of something decadent (stale croissants, the dregs of a bottle of wine, uneaten steak) on Instagram and a well-wisher made a pleased-with-themselves comment to the effect of ‘What do you mean leftover chips? Surely there’s no such thing’, the poor sod thinking they’re the only person to think of it. I wish they’d scroll back to look at the older comments first.

There are a lot of certainties in life and here are two of them:

Whatever size your freezer is it will ALWAYS be over-subscribed to the point that sliding the drawer back in generates a spine-tingling scrape of ice on metal on plastic on ice, and the fear of an afternoon unsuccessfully seeking a replacement part online.

Whatever equation you form in your head when buying chips from a chip shop (e.g., ‘There are three of us, and we’re not starving, so let’s get two portions of… erm, medium?’ or ‘I’m starving, I’m going large, watch me!’), you’ll always get it wrong and 99.999% of the time (roughly) it’ll mean you end up with too many. Even if you’re hungry.

An important point to make at this juncture: I’m talking about what you get from a British ‘chippy’. I’m not talking about the far more stringently portioned and frequently unbelievably ungenerous offerings from the mostly American-owned fast-food vendor chains. I bought ‘small fries’ from one of the familiar places recently for a video of me making a version of poutine, and I was over-whelmed by how under-whelming my portion was. I’ve just rewatched the video and paused to count them. There were nineteen and a half chips. Still, the poutine I made was really good and you can find a reimagined version of it later in the book (page 230); despite the stinginess, once combined with everything else, it made a portion that I would comfortably describe as ample.

But I digress! What do I do when, inevitably, I find I’m full while there’s still a surprising weight of chips left in my grease-dotted paper parcel? I often make bubble and squeak. Ordinarily made with leftover roast potatoes, it works just as well with leftover chips – just fry onion and cabbage until softened and then tumble in the chips, frying and chopping until you have a mid-brown mass. Top it with an egg.

And kudos to cookery writer, content creator and all-round imaginative and creative culinary genius Elly Curshen (who goes under the name Elly Pear) for the idea of simply bagging leftover chippy chips, freezing them (if you’ve room in the freezer, go on, you can get it in), and then baking from frozen like you would oven chips. As Elly says, make sure to keep a ziplock bag somewhere on your person when you go to the seaside so you’re ready to bag up your leftovers to bring home.

CHIP TORTILLA

You can make this with real onions and cook them down slowly and that’s superb, of course it is. But this is super-fast and those crispy ‘hotdog’ onions work so well and add a lovely bit of sweetness to the proceedings.

SERVES 2

3 tbsp olive oil

2–3 handfuls of day-old chip-shop chips, roughly chopped up

1 handful of crispy ‘hotdog’ onions

2 cloves garlic, grated

5 eggs

sherry vinegar (ideally, but any vinegar will do)

flaky salt and black pepper

20 minutes (plus cooling time)

EQUIPMENT:

A small well-seasoned or non-stick omelette pan (about 20cm diameter). You’ll also need a lid for the pan (or a plate that’s big enough to cover it), and another plate or board that’s as big or bigger than the pan/lid.

Set the pan over a medium heat, add half the oil and the chip pieces and when it all starts to sizzle, reduce the heat. Stir around for a few minutes and then add the crispy onions and the grated garlic and keep everything moving so as not to burn the garlic. Cook for a couple of minutes.

Crack all the eggs into a large bowl, season with salt and pepper and beat with a fork before pouring the chip and onion mix from the pan into the egg mixture, folding everything together.

Wipe the pan out, add a little more oil and turn up the heat. Just as it starts to smoke, pour in the egg and chip mixture and immediately reduce the heat to as low as it will go. Place a lid on and let the eggs cook through slowly.

After a few minutes, check the mixture. You want the underside golden and not burnt and you want the mixture to be half-cooked, about 10–12 minutes. When you can, lift the edge up a little and if the underside is looking golden, it’s time to flip it. Replace the lid and, with gloved hands or a thick oven cloth, quickly invert everything so that, hopefully, the omelette plops out onto the lid. Remove the pan, and give it a wipe out and a light re-oiling (using a bit of kitchen paper or blue cloth; you just want a thin film of oil on it now). Place a board or plate on top of the omelette and flip again so the omelette is on the plate with the uncooked side upmost. You’ll likely have some wet stuff that’s stuck to the lid, just scrape it off onto the uncooked top of the omelette. Finally, place the pan (careful, it’s still hot) upside down on top of the omelette and invert everything one final time. Remove the plate and the omelette should now be cooked-side-up in the pan, all nice and neat.

Turn the heat off but leave the omelette and pan alone for 3–4 minutes to just cook through before sliding it out onto a cold plate. Ideally, you want the egg barely cooked right at the centre so it’s a little bit gooey – baveuse is the French word for it. This is a Spanish omelette and I don’t know what they’d call that, or in fact if they’d think that’s the right way to do it, but it’s what I do.

Let the omelette cool to room temperature, or even go fridge-cold. Cut into cubes, trickle over some sherry vinegar (or any vinegar, really) and sprinkle with flaky salt. It’ll go very nicely with a salad of bitter leaves and a glass of cold dry sherry. It’ll go just as nicely with some salad cream and a can of lager.

BEER-BATTERED CELEBRATIONS

There’s a joke by comedian Milton Jones that goes: ‘When the boys at school found out I had a potentially fatal peanut allergy, they used to hold me up against a wall and play Russian roulette with a bag of Revels’.

If you’re not a fan of Bounty bars (and from the looks of any nearly finished box of Celebrations, most people aren’t), then this surprisingly refined treat might offer a similar thrill. I’ve had a deep-fried Mars Bar from a chippy, and frankly a whole bar is too much. But shrink the experience down to something you can pop in all in one go, and not only do you feel less guilty or sick afterwards, but the chances of molten caramel escaping down your chin/beard/shirt/uniform/costume are eliminated too. I’d recommend cooking just three or four per person and serving them in the middle of the table, inviting your guests to eat them one at a time and guess what they’ve got. Less easy than it sounds, except in the case of the Bounty, which I think, in this incarnation, might be the best.

SERVES 4 (DEPENDING ON GREEDINESS)

16 Celebrations (ideally a couple each of the 8 chocolate bars)

neutral oil, for deep-frying

100g self-raising flour

pinch of salt

130g cold fizzy beer

10 minutes

EQUIPMENT:

a cook’s thermometer. There are methods for gauging the temperature of hot oil with cubes of bread, but i can never get them to work properly.

Buy a box of Celebrations and immediately empty them into the freezer and they’ll not only always be ready for this recipe, but the chances of you pinching one every time you pass is greatly reduced, because they’ll be frozen solid.

In a deep saucepan, heat the deep-frying oil (making sure it comes no more than a third of the way up the wall of the pan) to 180°C/350°C F, and while it’s coming up to temperature make the batter. Lightly whisk the flour and salt together to get rid of any lumps, add the beer and stir until it just comes together, making sure you work the flour as little as possible and retain the bubbles from the beer. The batter should be the consistency of thick cream. You want it to completely coat the Celebrations so the chocolate can’t escape when it starts to melt.

A few at a time, dip the frozen chocolates into the batter before carefully lowering them into the oil. They’ll only take a couple of minutes. Turn them over every now and then, and when they’re pale gold take them out with a slotted spoon and drain on a blue cloth (page 27). When they’re all done, pile into a bowl and serve immediately.

NOT YAKISOBA PAN

If you haven’t got any of Tim Anderson’s cookbooks then I insist that you put this book down, get online and order one. Better still, go to an actual bookshop and buy a few of them because he’s written several. I’ve got them all and they’re some of my most prized repositories. The writing is funny and warm, and interesting, and the recipes are downright delicious. He’s also got a bit of a Snack Hacker bug himself, as the recipe for Sausage and Egg ‘McDonburi’ on page 147 of his book JapanEasy: Bowls and Bento demonstrates.

Tim was a joyous guest on my series when I took his recipe for the already somewhat sinful carb-on-carb Yakisoba Pan (essentially stir-fried noodles and other tasty bits served in a hotdog bun) and made an even more (and utterly inauthentic) version of it, substituting the stir-fried egg noodles for Indonesian instant mie goreng ones, creating a sauce from sachets, adding crabsticks instead of katsuobushi for fishiness, Korean gim-gui for extra crispy and oily umaminess, and perhaps most sacrilegiously, swapping the much prized Kewpie mayonnaise for the dear-to-my-heart ‘white ketchup’ (salad cream). If you can bring yourself to break all these culinary rules at once, the results taste great.

You might not have, or be able to easily get, every one of the ingredients listed here, but as this recipe has been approached so disgracefully there’s absolutely no need to adhere strictly to my instructions. You’ll be aware by now that I spend a lot of time mucking about and trying things, so feel free to omit and substitute to your heart’s content.

MAKES 1, BUT YOU MIGHT WANT TO DOUBLE-UP AND MAKE 2

1 packet mie goreng instant noodles (Indo Mie Mi Goreng ‘stir-fry’ are my go-to brand, but there are plenty of others to experiment with, just make sure they’re the dry ones, not the soup-type ones)

½ pot McDonald’s curry sauce or similar (leftover curry sauce, for example, page 101)

2 crabsticks, shredded

1 hotdog bun (ideally not a sweet brioche as there’s quite a bit of sugar elsewhere)

1 sheet Korean gim-gui seaweed snack (easy to find in the crisps section of many supermarkets)

1 tsp Furikake (page 122 or page 123)

1 tbsp pickled ginger, the flat pink stuff (gari) or the thicker redder matchsticks (beni shōga)

salad cream

5 minutes

You want the noodles pretty dry. Boil them as per the instructions, though reduce the timing by about 30 seconds so they have plenty of bite. The roll you’re using is soft and it’s nice to have some contrast in the pasta. In a bowl, add the well-drained noodles to the seasoning sachets that come with them, stir in the curry sauce and toss through the shredded crabsticks.

Split the hotdog bun as if you were going to introduce a sausage to it, but instead pile in as many noodles as you can manage without making it look too ungainly. Or alternatively, to make it look impressively ungainly.

Crumble over the gim-gui. Lick your fingers. Rinse and dry your fingers. Sprinkle over the furikake. Lick and rinse your fingers again. Add a layer of pickled ginger and finally zigzag over the salad cream. Don’t bother putting it down, just eat it.

PESHWARI TOASTIE

People eat shop-bought curries. I know I do. Not often, because I like cooking so much, but there’s something undeniably enjoyable about getting a ready meal and shoving it in the microwave. I think that’s the case for a lot of people who enjoy cooking. A bit of a dirty secret. A slightly perverse pleasure.

This is something you can actually make to accompany the curry on those nights, so you don’t feel too soiled by the experience. You could just as easily make one of these to go with a curry that you actually made as well.

MAKES 1

2 green cardamom pods

2 tbsp ground almonds

1 tbsp desiccated coconut

1 tbsp sultanas, chopped

½ tsp soft brown sugar

1 tsp evaporated milk

2 medium slices white bread

2 tsp butter, softened

1 tbsp flaked almonds

a few coriander leaves, ripped up

10 minutes

EQUIPMENT:

a plug-in toasted sandwich-maker or a stove-top toastie-maker (page 34).

Split the cardamom pods, remove the seeds and crush and chop them on a board until you have a sort of powder/rubble. You should have about ¼ tsp, if that.

In a bowl, mix together the ground almonds, desiccated coconut, sultanas, sugar and cardamom powder/rubble until combined. Then add the evaporated milk and mix to a paste.

Using the two slices of bread, create a sandwich of the filling, making sure the paste goes right up to the edges, then butter the outside of the bread. Sprinkle flaked almonds over the buttery outside and clamp the whole thing in the jaws of the toastie-maker to cook. Cook until golden and the almonds are lightly browned.

Once out of the toastie-maker, rub the outside of the sandwich with a little more butter and sprinkle over the ripped-up coriander leaves.

Where the filling has been clamped hard on the edges, it should be chewy and taste almost like a hot Garibaldi biscuit, while the inside should puff up like a buttery naan. Rip it and use it to scoop up the curry. Choose something really spicy to be tempered by the sweetness.

Curry Tip

To liven up a shop-bought curry, add finely diced raw onion. Adding it after the curry has been cooked provides a freshness and a crunch. The heat of the curry tempers the oniony-ness and makes it almost apple-like and sweet. This works for a homemade curry too, obviously.

SPAGHETTI, SAUCE AND VEGGIE MEATBALLS

My adventure with reshaped vegetarian sausages came about when I noticed that the frozen meat-free bangers in my local supermarket were marginally cheaper per gram than the veggie meatballs made by the same people, and I preferred the flavour of the sausages anyway. So don’t accept the shapes. Just because the Linda McCartney mega-machine has decided their sausages are a certain size and take a certain form doesn’t mean you have to. Needless to say, you could do exactly the same thing with meat sausages, just remove the skins, pinch out the mince, and with wet hands to prevent sticking, get reshaping.

For this recipe, put on a white vest, affect an Italian-American Brooklyn drawl, call yourself Toni (or Delores), play some Sicilian music, or some Bernstein, or some Italian opera, throw open the windows to hear the sirens, and the cats meowing and the feisty couples arguing. Immerse yourself.

SERVES 2

6 defrosted Linda McCartney red onion and rosemary sausages (or similar, or meat ones)

2 tbsp olive oil

2 frozen garlic briquettes (or 4 cloves garlic, grated or crushed)

1 tsp fennel seeds

1 x 400g tin chopped tomatoes (the fancier polpa ones are worth splashing out on for this recipe)

2 tsp rose harissa paste

250g dried spaghetti

grated parmesan

small bunch curly parsley, finely chopped

15 minutes

Put a big pan of water on for the pasta and add enough salt that the water tastes as salty as a well-seasoned soup. Chop the sausages into two pieces each and, between wet hands, re-roll them into balls. If you’re using meat sausages, split the skins and discard them before reshaping.

Put the oil into a deep, heavy frying pan and cook the balls over a medium heat until they’re browned all over, then lift them out and set aside, leaving the oil in the pan. Ensuring first that the oil isn’t too hot (so maybe wait a few minutes with the heat off), add the garlic and fennel seeds and cook over a low heat until the garlic is just starting to turn from white to a very pale creamy-gold, then add the tomatoes and the rose harissa paste. Bring to a simmer, season with salt and pepper, place the balls on top of the sauce, lower the heat and place a lid on top while you cook the spaghetti.

Add the spaghetti to the salted boiling water. Make sure you don’t overcook the pasta: if it says 10 minutes on the packet, start checking at 8 minutes. At this point scoop out a teacup of pasta water to slacken things down later. As soon as the spaghetti is soft but still exhibits a small amount of resistance in the middle, drain it and put it back in the pan along with a splash of the pasta water and 3 or 4 tablespoons of the simmering tomato sauce. Mix it all together.

Divide the lightly sauced spaghetti between two big shallow bowls and top with the rest of the tomato sauce and meatballs. Grate over a generous amount of Parmesan, and add some more black pepper and lots of parsley.

SWEDISH-STYLE VEGGIE MEATBALLS WITH CREAM SAUCE AND CHIPS

Eat this while enjoying the fact that you’re not surrounded by a cacophony of families chattering, children screaming, and people discussing whether they’ve bought enough tealights and napkins. In the giant Swedish furniture shop they serve these with lingonberry jam, which you can substitute with any other jam, made a little tarter with the addition of lemon or vinegar. You also need a parsley sprig. And put on some Abba.

SERVES 2

2 big handfuls of oven chips

6 defrosted Linda McCartney red onion and rosemary sausages (or similar, or meat ones)

2 tbsp olive oil

100ml double cream (or a vegan equivalent)

½ tsp Marmite (or Bovril if you’re not taking the vegetarian route)

1 tsp Dijon mustard

½ tsp brown sugar

pinch of black pepper

2 tsp red or purple jam (i used wild blueberry as it’s what i had)

1 squeeze lemon juice (or ½ tsp any vinegar, except balsamic)

mayonnaise

1 small sprig of curly parsley

25 minutes (less if you buy cooked chips)

Cook your oven chips according to the manufacturer’s instructions, until crispy, which probably means ignoring the manufacturer’s instructions and cooking for longer. I also tend to add extra oil and seasoning.

Chop the sausages into three pieces each and, between wet hands, re-roll them into balls. If you’re using meat sausages, split the skins and discard them before reshaping. Put the oil into a deep, heavy frying pan and cook the balls over a medium heat until they’re browned all over and cooked through.

In another small pan, or in a bowl in the microwave, mix together the cream, Marmite (or Bovril), mustard, sugar and a pinch of black pepper and heat until bubbling. In a cup, mix the jam with the lemon juice or vinegar and taste to make sure the balance is right.

When the chips are crispy, pile onto the plate along with the meatballs, drench them in the gravy, add a blob of the jam and a big spoonful of mayonnaise on the side. Carefully place the parsley sprig on the meatballs.

KOFTA-STYLE VEGGIE MEATBALLS IN PITTAS

Rolling the defrosted sausages in toasted seeds and spices adds a whole extra texture and flavour element that elevates these to another level. You can also have a bit more fun with the reshaping. Along with the knockout sauces and the sharp, sour pomegranate molasses, a hearty sandwich experience is assured. If you’re doing this with meat sausages, I’d recommend lamb or beef.

SERVES 2

1 tsp cumin seeds

1 tsp coriander seeds

2 tsp sunflower seeds

4 defrosted Linda McCartney red onion and rosemary sausages (or similar, or meat ones)

2 tbsp olive oil

2 ripe tomatoes, sliced into rounds

pinch of MsG

2 fat white pitta breads

1 portion Tahini sauce (page 120)

1 red onion, sliced into half-moons

1 portion Easy Green Chilli sauce (page 121)

1 tsp pomegranate molasses

small bunch coriander or parsley (if you have some, and you should if you’re making the Easy Green Chilli sauce)

pomegranate seeds (optional)

15 minutes

In a pestle and mortar, bash the cumin and coriander seeds together until lightly cracked and ground, then add the sunflower seeds and give it a modest amount of extra pounding. You want whole seeds in there too for texture, so don’t go berserk. Sprinkle them onto a plate.

Halve the defrosted sausages and, with wet hands, shape each half into a sphere before rolling on the worktop and bringing the ends to a point, like a rugby ball, or if you’re American, a football. Roll them in the seed and spice mixture, coating the outsides and giving them the appearance of animal droppings.

Heat the oil in a deep-frying pan over a medium heat before frying the kofta-shaped lumps until brown and crispy on the outside and cooked through (about 4–5 minutes). They should smell amazingly fragrant. When cooked, set aside and salt generously.

Season the tomatoes with salt and a pinch of MSG. In a toaster or under a grill, warm the pittas. Split them, spoon in the tahini sauce, the veggie koftas, tomatoes and onion, the easy green chilli sauce, a trickle of pomegranate molasses and a few coriander or parsley leaves.

You could add pomegranate seeds, although I wouldn’t because I think they’re horrible and taste like nice fruit mixed with pencil shavings. So there.

Car Boot Sale

While veganism is commonplace now, to the extent that even writing the word ‘vegan’ feels a bit out of touch in a kind of ‘why would you even bother mentioning it?’ or ‘it’s called plant-based now, Grandad!’ way, when I left London in the early nineties, even being a vegetarian was considered a little eccentric. Not in Brighton, though, where we had a glut of veggie restaurants and cafes, where soya milk wasn’t weird, tofu was readily available and we were rather proud of our bohemian credentials. In short, there were doubtless a lot more vegetarians in Brighton than in the more rural areas that surrounded our little red island (which then turned green and still is at the time of writing). I’m not saying that not eating meat means you’re necessarily left-leaning, but I’d bet my double-cheeseburger on it being the case more often than not.

Long before it was redeveloped as much-needed housing, and a less-needed Sainsbury’s and hotel, the rugged waste ground of a car park next to Brighton railway station used to host a hugely popular car boot sale every Sunday morning. The car-booters needed feeding and while we Brightonians were very well served for yoga mats and diabolos, we didn’t have a food van. The one that pitched-up from Haywards Heath (or thereabouts, I’m guessing) was perhaps used to a less plant-fancying clientele, but while they didn’t have any Bean Feast or Sosmix, they did have a can-do attitude and a Snack Hacker approach to culinary creation. Alongside the usual bacon baps and sausage sandwiches, they invented, and sold in abundance, a meat-free option using what they had (bread for toasting, eggs, processed cheese, sauces and onions*) to fuel those eccentric vegetarians, providing they were happy to share a plancher with the animal items (and I think most of them were).

*I’ve talked about these onions before on my Instagram, and while I’ve called them ‘Burger Van Onions’ (which sounds like a Dutch guy), they’ve been referred to in the comments as ‘Football Onions’, ‘Hot Dog Onions’, and perhaps my favourite ‘Fairground Onions’.

CAR BOOT SALE SANDWICH

This snack hits all the right notes on a Sunday morning, particularly if it’s used as a fatty, fried ballast to help deal with the excesses of the Saturday night before. Oh, and a touch that always warmed my cockles, despite the contents of the sandwich being unapologetically trashy, the food van at Brighton car boot sale made theirs on brown bread, not the usual white. They knew their audience.

MAKES 1

1 medium onion, sliced

neutral oil, for shallow-frying

2 medium slices wholemeal bread

1 egg

butter

Dijon mustard

mayonnaise

1 slice processed cheese

10 minutes

In a frying pan, fry the onion in a little oil over a low heat. It’ll take a while. You know what you’re looking for – floppy not crispy, but with a little bit of bite, translucent with amber edges and a caramelised sweetness. When they’re done, put them somewhere warm.

Add the bread slices to the pan. You want something halfway between fried bread and barely done toast, so whatever oil that’s left in there from the onions will be enough. Flip the slices over and toast the other side before taking them out and resting them against each other, like you’re starting to build a castle of playing cards, to stop them going chewy.

Pour a little more oil into the pan, get it hot and crack in your egg. I always season my eggs before they fully set so the salt and pepper sticks to the surface. The speckles look nice too. I’m a big fan of ‘crispy frills’, where the outer perimeter of the egg white has bubbled up and turned into a part chewy part crunchy honeycomb-like glass. That’s the best bit. Well, that and the runny yolk. Although neither of them would be as good without the white… God I love eggs.

While your egg is cooking, start the assembly. Butter the bread and spread one slice with Dijon mustard, the other with mayonnaise. Pile the onions onto the mustard. Take the egg from the pan (giving it a brief stopover on a blue cloth, page 27) and place it on top of the onions. At this point I break the yolk and spread it around a little before seasoning further if needed, and dropping the filthy cheese slice on top. Hot egg, runny yolk and warming cheese will meld together, but only enough to (hopefully) prevent you from getting an unwelcome squirt through your beard and onto your t-shirt. Finally top with the mayonnaise-lined slice and you’re done.

Cut it in half, wrap it (page 79), give it a minute, unwrap it and eat.

FESTIVAL BURGERS

Festivals exhaust you, whether you’re a punter or a performer. The inevitable glut of booze, lack of sleep and erratic meal times, often supplemented by less than ideal snacking, takes its toll and energy levels dip. You need something filling, but if it can furnish you with some raw energy and wholesomeness then that’s all the better.

There used to be a stall at Glastonbury Festival that sold vegetarian burgers in wholemeal buns crammed full of a crunchy, raw, seed-heavy salad and topped with mayonnaise and really hot sauce. We make them at home now. If you want to eat some junk food that leaves you feeling like you’ve looked after yourself, this is just the thing, and so easy to make using burgers from the supermarket freezer aisle. If you wanted to use meat ones it would work just as well. And if you want to experience a similar feel-good sensation, take a look at Packed Lunch Pizza (page 168).

MAKES 4 DOUBLE BURGERS

1 large carrot, peeled and julienned (cut into fine matchsticks) or grated

¼ red cabbage, finely sliced

1 shallot or ½ red onion, finely sliced

1 clove garlic, finely chopped

small bunch flat-leafed parsley, finely chopped

small bunch dill, ripped up into small fronds

extra virgin olive oil, for dressing

splash of vinegar (any vinegar)

2 tbsp pumpkin seeds

2 tbsp sunflower seeds

2 tbsp sesame seeds

1 tbsp poppy seeds

1 tbsp soy sauce

½ tsp sugar (white or brown)

neutral oil, for shallow-frying

4 soft, seedy wholemeal baps, split

8 small frozen veggie burgers (handily, some supermarket own-brand ones come in boxes of 8)

8 slices processed cheese

4 tbsp mayonnaise

4 tsp hot sauce

(I like encona for this)

25 minutes

EQUIPMENT:

4 sheets of paper for wrapping (page 79)

Make your salad. Mix together the carrot, cabbage, shallot or onion, garlic and herbs in a big bowl. Trickle over a little olive oil and a splash of vinegar and mix everything together with your hands.

Over a medium heat, toast the seeds in a dry frying pan and move them around constantly until the pumpkin seeds start to puff up and pop. Turn off the heat, add the soy sauce (it’ll hiss and sizzle) and give it a stir. Sprinkle in the sugar, mix again, and then toss the lot into the bowl with the salad. Taste it to see if the soy has made everything salty enough; if not, add a pinch.

Give the pan a wipe, add a tiny trickle of neutral oil and, again over a medium heat, toast/fry the cut sides of the buns until golden and crispy. Set them aside.

In the same pan at a similarly medium temperature and with a little more oil, cook the burgers from frozen until done. Turn off the heat under the pan and top the burgers with the cheese slices. Load the burgers into the buns – two cheese-topped burgers, masses of the salad, mayonnaise and hot sauce. Wrap them tightly and put them, wrapped, back in the warm pan with a lid or plate on top for 2–3 minutes, just to let everything meld together a little and to encourage some cheese-leakage and paper-stickage so you have some extra pickage to enjoy when you’ve eaten the burger.

SCAMPI TACOS WITH GOOSEBERRY SALSA

Invented in the Green Room Café backstage at Glastonbury Festival where they served scampi and chips. Make it at home with a bag of frozen scampi, or alternatively use fish fingers. The gooseberry is sharp and acidic and works so well to make a fresh and lively mouthful. And while you could make fresh tacos, circular slices of milk roll pressed flat make an ideal alternative.

MAKES 6

12 frozen scampi

1 x 300g tin gooseberries in syrup

1 clove garlic, grated or crushed

3–4 spring onions, finely chopped

1 hot green chilli, finely chopped

small bunch coriander, leaves picked and stalks chopped

1 lime

1 large ripe avocado

6 slices milk roll (Warburtons make one that’s just the right size)

1 small white onion, finely chopped

25 minutes

Cook the scampi as per the manufacturer’s instructions.

Make the salsa by draining the gooseberries of the syrup (keep the syrup and a few of the gooseberries back to make Gooseberry Margaritas, page 207). Roughly chop the gooseberries and mix with the garlic, spring onions, chilli, coriander stalks and the juice of half the lime in a bowl to make the salsa.

Slice the avocado and cut the other half of the lime into two wedges. Using a rolling pin, or a wine bottle, press the air out of the slices of milk roll so they’re flat, like tacos!

When the scampi is cooked, build the tacos. Avocado slices first, then pieces of scampi, a generous dollop of the salsa, finely chopped white onion, coriander leaves, and finally a squeeze from the lime wedges.

VARIATION:

As an alternative to the avocado, use Mushy Pea Houmous (page 170) instead.

PINK DRINK

If, like me, you think you enjoy a Negroni, but sometimes wonder if it’s one of those cocktails that you’re actually enduring rather than enjoying, then this is for you. Refreshing, bitter, grown-up – but not quite as grown-up and wince-inducing as the aforementioned – and much bigger and longer and rather more summery.

MAKES 2

masses of ice

100ml Campari

500ml fridge-cold pink grapefruit radler (Schöfferhofer, ideally)

2 wedges of pink grapefruit (optional)

1 minute

EQUIPMENT:

Large, very thin-walled glasses, preferably something you might have a craft beer in.

Half fill the glasses with ice. Pour 50ml Campari into each. Top up with 250ml pink grapefruit radler. Stir to mix, but gently so as not to lose too much carbonation. You can add a wedge of pink grapefruit to garnish should you want to be extra fancy.

VARIATION:

For a slightly less sweet version, try Campari and cold lager, same ratios.

GOOSEBERRY MARGARITA

If you’ve opened a tin of gooseberries to make the salsa for the Scampi Tacos (page 205), you’ll have a number of gooseberries left and some very nice syrup. If you also have the other required ingredients, then make this. I invented it backstage at Glastonbury Festival when I was performing there and it became ‘our drink’ that year. The marmalade (pilfered from the backstage breakfast bar) is much stickier than water and adds another interesting flavour to the party.

MAKES 2 BIG ONES

2 limes

lots of ice

100ml gooseberry syrup (from a tin of gooseberries)

100ml mescal (or white tequila)

50ml triple sec

a little marmalade

tajin seasoning

6 tinned gooseberries

2 minutes

Carefully carve off a couple of long strips of lime zest from one of the limes and twist the strips around a thin stick (or in the first instance when I invented it at Glastonbury Festival, a clean tent peg). Hold for a minute, slide the twisted strips off, and you’ve got a couple of very pretty spiral-shaped garnishes. Set aside.

In a cocktail shaker, or just a big, clean jar with a lid, put lots of ice, the gooseberry syrup, mescal or tequila, triple sec and the juice from both the limes. Put the lid on and give it a really good shake.

Paint the rims of two glasses with a thin film of marmalade and then dust the now sticky rims with Tajin seasoning (if you don’t have any Tajin, just use salt, or even better smoked salt, but the best thing is to go and get yourself some Tajin seasoning because it’s great stuff and you’ll start sprinkling it on everything).

Strain the drink into the glasses before dropping in three of the little tinned gooseberries and garnishing with the lime twists.

Drink the drink. Then eat the gooseberries. Then repeat.

MARMALADE AND ANISEED CAKE

Earthy and worthy with wholemeal flour, and with ground sunflower seeds bringing a reassuring fattiness to the mix, sweet citrussy orange is mixed with bitter marmalade and brought to life with aniseeds and liquorice root powder (available online and essential for making Liquorice Salt, page 124). All of which make this cake an absolute knockout; a place somewhere between a not-too wince-inducing Negroni and a seventies Harvey Wallbanger cocktail.

MAKES 1 SMALL CAKE

4 tbsp dark, rich marmalade

40g sunflower seeds

100g butter

100g caster sugar

2 eggs

80g wholemeal self-raising flour

zest and juice of 1 orange

1 tsp liquorice root powder

1 tsp aniseeds

300ml double cream

1 tbsp icing sugar

½ tsp vanilla extract

liquorice salt (page 124)

60–70 minutes

EQUIPMENT:

a 450g loaf tin that’s either non-stick or well lined with baking parchment, and a Nutribullet-type powerful blender or clean coffee grinder.

Preheat the oven to 190°C/170°C fan (375°F/gas mark 5).

In a small pan over a low heat (or in a microwave), warm the marmalade until it runs thin before pouring through a sieve into a bowl, separating (and keeping both) the peel and the syrup. Chop the peel roughly.

Whizz the sunflower seeds in a blender or coffee grinder until they turn into a coarse flour/powder and set aside.

Cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in the eggs, one at a time. If the mixture curdles, don’t worry, just add a spoonful of the flour and beat that in too. Add the rest of the flour, the ground sunflower seeds, the zest of the orange (finely chopped), the roughly chopped marmalade peel, the liquorice root powder, the aniseeds and a pinch of salt. Fold it all together with half the orange juice until you’ve got a batter with a dropping consistency. Tip into the loaf tin and bake in the middle of the oven for 40–50 minutes until a skewer inserted comes out clean. The cake should rise and crack down the middle.

During the last 5 minutes of cooking time, put the now rindless marmalade syrup into a small pan along with the remaining orange juice and warm together until thin and runny. When the cake comes out of the oven, keep it in the tin and poke holes randomly in the top in about twenty places (don’t go too crazy or you’ll compromise the structure), then drizzle over the syrup. Let it cool completely in the tin.

While the cake cools, make a Chantilly cream by lightly whipping the double cream with the icing sugar and vanilla. As soon as it threatens to thicken, stop whipping. You want it floppy. When the cake is cold, carefully tip it out for cutting into thick slices. Serve with a big spoonful of the Chantilly cream and sprinkle the cream with a pinch of liquorice salt.

SWEET SOY SARDINES (COOKED IN THE TIN)

I’m frequently seduced by the idea of tins of fish and tend to buy them more frequently than I eat them, meaning I’ve always got a teetering stack in the larder, and in the camper van. Here’s a delightful snack that’s as good piled onto a slice of toast as it is eaten straight from the tin; a method which has the advantage of creating very little washing up afterwards.

SERVES 1 AS A LIGHT SNACK

1 tin boneless sardine fillets in oil (one of the wider, slightly shallower tins, usually about 95–100g)

½ tsp soy sauce

½ tsp mirin

1 tsp sesame oil

½ banana shallot, thinly sliced

½ tsp Furikake (page 122 or page 123)

1 soft white roll (optional)

5 minutes

page 212/213

Preheat the grill as hot as it will go.

Semi-peel the lid off the tin and drain away most of the oil (pour it into a jar and use it for a dressing, or for cooking with if you’re making something with oily fish, like a puttanesca). Remove the lid completely and trickle the soy and mirin evenly over the fish, followed by half the sesame oil.

Scatter the shallots over the top of the fish, followed by the rest of the sesame oil and, using your fingertips, lightly massage the oil and shallots together so they’re evenly coated.

Slide the tin under the grill so it’s about 3 inches from the heat source and cook for 4 minutes, or until everything’s bubbling and the shallots have gone dark and crispy. Remove the tin very carefully as the oils will be much less viscous than when they went in. Sprinkle with the furikake.

You’ll definitely want to get every drop of juice/sauce/residue from the corners of the tin after you’ve finished the fish, and something doughy and malleable will serve as the perfect mop, which is when the optional white roll comes in handy.

EVERYTHING I LIKE ABOUT NEW YORK

Everything about America is cool. At least that was the impression given to a teen brought up on a diet of seductive Levi’s adverts. I’d spend my weekends sifting through the rails at Flip! in Covent Garden, looking for a pair of 501s with just the right amount of distress, and after that I’d browse the Converse All Stars and wish they were as cheap as I’d heard they were in the USA from school friends who’d been. For anyone growing up in Great Britain in the eighties, American culture was hugely alluring, but spending summers confined to UK-based holidays with the occasional trip to France, it wasn’t until I was in my late forties that I first visited New York City. It proved to be everything I’d hoped it would, with its clattering subway cars, steaming grates and eccentric inhabitants, a film-set backdrop, a real-life Sesame Street rendered by Maurice Sendak. I’ve been back twice since.

My first visit in 2018 saw me enjoy a host of culinary wonders, but the morning I was due to head home, I visited Black Seed, a hip young bakery where I purchased the New York phenomenon that is the Everything Bagel, in this instance filled with the perhaps even more famous Big-Apple-born invention, chopped cheese. Wow! I was in a rush for the airport, it was early and I didn’t have an appetite yet, but I was thinking ahead and it wasn’t until my luggage had been checked that I drew breath and sat down on a bench at JFK, opened the parcel and tucked in. The filling of juicy but charred minced beef mingling with caramelised onion and filthy American cheese, which time, residual heat and gravity had encouraged to melt through the meat, past the tomato and lettuce, now wilted but dressed in a beefy condensation, and into the air pockets of the toasted bread, was sensational. But the outside was even more of a revelation. It wasn’t just the deeply savoury combination of toasted seeds and garlic, but the crispy texture and the look too: the black and warm buff of the sesames next to the cool blue of the poppy with golden garlic and onion flecks relaxing amidst highlights of bone-white salt.

My second visit in early spring of 2020, just before Covid hit, when the sight of passengers masking-up seemed strangely alarmist and vaguely sinister, found me enjoying the same sandwich a second time, and just as much. It also got me searching for more ‘everything’ things. There were loaves and croissants, pretzels and hot dog buns, and of course pots of the seasoning itself to create your own DIY inventions. I bought some in Trader Joe’s, but it didn’t last long, so, between that and my third visit, I taught myself how to make it and I keep the refilled jar at the ready in my larder always.

It was during my third visit in 2023, by now fully immersed in my online Snack Hacker project, that I met up with chef, teacher and fellow content creator Erica Wides (Erica goes under the name @thechefsmartypants on Instagram), and it was she who taught me about EBS dust. When she gets to the bottom of a drum of the seasoning, the flavour starts to get a little too salty as inevitably the smaller particles work their way down. So she grinds what’s left into a powder to create a whole new ingredient; great for sprinkling on poached eggs, cooked chicken, salads and perfect shaken liberally over unsalted crisps. Shall we say potato chips? It feels appropriate, doesn’t it. Potato chips.

EVERYTHING BAGEL SEASONING

You can put this on any number of things. A pinch is amazing on a poached egg, or a fried egg mid-fry so the seasoning sticks. If you’re making homemade bread, try a generous sprinkling over the top before baking, and if you’re not, then try shaking it over the outside of a buttered sandwich before toasting (page 218).

MAKES ENOUGH TO FILL A RECYCLED PESTO JAR

3 tbsp white sesame seeds

1 tbsp black sesame seeds

1 tbsp sea salt flakes (like Maldon or Cornish Sea Salt)

1 tbsp garlic granules

1 tbsp onion granules

½ tbsp poppy seeds

10 minutes

Toast the white and black sesame seeds together in a dry frying pan over a low heat. Keep the seeds moving and as soon as the white seeds are starting to get a bit of a suntan and you can hear the occasional ‘click’ and ‘pop’, they’re toasted enough. Take it too far and they’ll be bitter, so tip them immediately into a cold, dry bowl.

Add all the other ingredients, lightly crushing the salt flakes between your fingers so everything is a similar size. Mix together and let cool and as soon as everything’s cold, transfer to a clean and bone-dry jar (I use my much-treasured Trader Joe’s jar, now starting to yellow and scuff but I don’t mind) along with a sachet of silica gel if you have one.

Silica Gel Packs

Whenever you buy and finish a packet of nori sheets, remove and keep the little packet of silica gel. Pop the packet in the jar with your finished furikake, everything bagel seasoning or flavoured salt, and it’ll keep it dry and stop it clumping together.

CHOPPED CHEESE TOASTIE WITH EVERYTHING CRUST

If you can’t find Everything Bagels in the UK (they are out there but they’re not common, and the ones I’ve found are lacking and somehow don’t have the punch of those in NYC), a toastie crusted in homemade Everything Bagel Seasoning is a good alternative. It might even be better. This is an outrageous concoction as the fat from the beef and cheese seeps into the bread from the inside while the butter seeps in from the outside, leaving you with something resembling a sandwich constructed from fried bread. As long as you don’t have it too often, you’ll be ok. Also, it does have salad in it, which counters the naughtiness, albeit little more than psychologically.

MAKES 2 BIG AND VERY FILLING SANDWICHES

1 tbsp oil

1 onion, roughly chopped

2 raw quarter pounder burger patties

4 large slices good sourdough, buttered on one side

3 tbsp Everything bagel Seasoning (page 217)

50g medium Cheddar, roughly chopped (see title)

½ Little gem lettuce, roughly chopped

1 medium tomato, roughly chopped

2 slices processed cheese

15 minutes

EQUIPMENT:

A large frying pan. Even better, a large cast-iron skillet. And another pan to press the sandwiches down. And a sheet of baking parchment about the same size as the pan.

Set the skillet or frying pan over a medium heat and pour in the oil. When it’s warm, fry the onions until they go translucent, then push them to one side. Take the burger patties one at a time in your hands and squash/pick/crumble them into the pan in random pieces. You want things somewhere between lumps of burger, squashed shards and crumbled mince. It doesn’t especially matter, but the more surface area you’ve got, the more crispy pieces you’ll get and the more opportunity you’ll have for mingling burger, onion and cheese in an outrageous fashion. Season with salt and pepper and when the burger starts to take on some colour, mix the onion in with it, chop and move it around for a few minutes, and then spoon it out of the pan and into a bowl. Turn off the heat.

Wipe out the pan with a cloth, or give it a rinse and a rough dry. You’ll be using it again immediately so you don’t need to be too thorough, but you want to get rid of the oil that the burger has left behind otherwise things will get TOO greasy. Put it back on the hob over a very low heat.

Sprinkle the buttered sides of the bread generously with the Everything Bagel Seasoning and pat it down so it sticks as best it can. Then lay two of the slices in the pan, butter/seasoning side down. Scatter the Cheddar cheese evenly over the slices and spoon over the burger and onion mixture. Bits will fall off and into the pan but just pick them up and pop them back on. You‘ll still lose some bits as you cook but they’ll just go crispy and you’ll get extra tasty morsels to nibble while you’re cooking. Pile on the lettuce and tomato and finish with the two processed cheese slices torn and laid over to cover everything as uniformly as possible. These slices will act as a blanket that will bond everything else together while offering themselves in sacrifice as a mild, cheesy, milky glue. Finally, top with the other two bread slices with the butter and seasoning upmost.

Lay the sheet of baking parchment over the top and place the other weighing-down pan on top to press the sandwiches against the bottom pan.

Wait patiently. It depends on pan temperature but you’re looking at 3–4 minutes. When things begin to smell caramelised, toasty and golden (can things smell golden? There’s only one way to find out), remove the baking parchment and carefully turn over the sandwiches. If they’re a tempting-looking bronze with toasted seeds, a sweet garlic smell and a crispy golden outer, then you’ve timed it right. If not, then give them a little longer. Reapply the baking parchment, press again, and when the ‘B’ side is done, remove them from the pan to a cooling rack to let it all CALM DOWN A BIT, developing and maintaining a crunch on the underside as well as the top.

Wrap them if you’re not eating immediately, or stack them if you are.

THE BIG APPLE APPLE AND SAUSAGE MUFFIN

Invented on a bench at Union Square Farmers’ Market during my third visit to Manhattan, with a bastardised McMuffin from the golden arches. I was amazed by how scruffy the New York franchises were, but then maybe it’s because they’ve been there longer. I digress. The customisation button at the US McDonald’s had the option of extra butter on the muffin, which we don’t have in the UK (at least not at the time of writing). With that box ticked, and some leftover apple sauce from Zabar’s, mustard sachets (page 142) and fresh crunchy apple from one of the market stalls – damn, it was good!

MAKES 2

2 good-quality butcher’s sausages

neutral oil, for shallow frying

2 English muffins, halved

butter

2 tsp English mustard

2 tsp sweet german mustard

1 crisp eating apple

2 tbsp apple purée (the dark reddish/brown stuff, not the pale yellow sweetened stuff)

5 minutes

EQUIPMENT:

2 sheets of paper for wrapping (page 78)

Split the sausage skins and discard them before flattening the sausage meat into thin discs. You’ll need to sort of massage the meat a bit and try to get it to stick to itself, which can be tricky, but wet your hands to make it easier. Make the discs larger than the diameter of the muffins because the meat will shrink, then fry them on both sides in a little oil over a medium to low heat.

Toast the cut sides of the muffins, butter them generously, and spread the top half with the two mustards. Slice the apple into thin discs. Personally, I like to keep the core and seeds in there. They’re good for you.

Build the sandwiches. Bottom muffin half, sausage, apple purée, sliced apple and finally the top muffin half with the mustard on it. Wrap (pages 80-81), wait, unwrap and eat.

MOCK-LOBSTER ROLL WITH BROWN BUTTER AND FENNEL SLAW

Here’s a more affordable take on the classic New England lobster roll, made with crabsticks, or other surimi shapes (like those big pretend prawns). If you wanted to be a bit fancy this would work just as well with cooked prawns, or langoustine, or crab meat, or even actual lobster, but this is a bit more me.

MAKES 2

100g unsalted butter

1 stick celery, thinly sliced

1 large gherkin, finely diced

1 small shallot, finely diced

½ large fennel bulb, thinly shredded

4–5 tbsp mayonnaise (good stuff from a jar)

1 tsp tomato ketchup

ground white pepper

1 lemon, halved

16 seafood sticks (or other surimi shapes)

2 pinches of nori Salt (page 125)

2 pinches of cayenne pepper

2 soft white hotdog/submarine rolls (not brioche ones, they’re too sweet for this)

a few fennel fronds (pick them off the top of the fennel bulb)

10 minutes

Put the butter in a cold, shallow stainless-steel pan and set it over a low heat. As the heat comes up keep the butter moving while it melts and begins to foam. The foam will stay pale, so move it around to keep a keen eye on the underneath as it starts to go brown. Lift any browning milk solids off the bottom of the pan – they’re the bits you want. When it’s mid-brown and smells of hazelnuts, pour it out of the pan and into a cold container, being sure to scrape all the brown bits out too. Let it cool a little. This will be too much brown butter, but once you’ve made it you’ll want spare for putting on fish or chicken or any number of other things, and it will keep fine in the fridge for a few days.

In a bowl, combine the celery, gherkin, shallot, shredded fennel, mayonnaise, ketchup, a big pinch each of salt and ground white pepper, and most of the juice of the lemon (don’t fully squeeze both lemon halves as you’ll want a few drops more to finish).

Prepare the seafood sticks by unsheathing them from their gossamer-thin sleeves and randomly chopping or ripping the sticks into medium-sized pieces. Put them in a bowl, spoon over some of the warm brown butter, season with a pinch of the nori salt and another of cayenne pepper and fold together with a spoon.

If your roll is a batch-cooked one with torn flat sides, then great. If it’s a roll with round sides, then shave a thin slice off each side to expose the crumb. Smear the sides with brown butter. Place the rolls flat side down into a medium-hot frying pan and toast both cut sides so they get golden and crispy.

Build the rolls. Cut a slit along the length of the roll. Spoon in a layer of the slaw, top with the seafood stick mixture and then a little more slaw. Trickle over a bit of the warm brown butter, a squeeze of lemon and a pinch more of the cayenne and the nori salt before finishing with the fennel fronds.

Peak Middle Class

I know this isn’t something that’s going to apply to everyone, and it might even get a few people riled up thinking about particulates and air quality, and rightly so. But the fact is that some people, me included, have got wood-burning stoves. I bet people who aren’t middle class do too. But this isn’t a book about politics, at least not with a capital ‘p’. It’s a book about food, and about being resourceful and imaginative and creative. It’s about thinking outside the box and experimenting.

On the reasonably rare occasions when I light my stove, I find myself going to bed while the embers are still smouldering. One night I was looking at the orange glow and thinking about campfires and my dad talking about putting potatoes wrapped in foil in the embers so that when you crawled out of your tent in the morning you’d have something to eat, or at least an ingredient to cook with (cold baked potato is one of my favourite starting points – cut into fat wedges, lightly oiled, salted and rebaked in the oven is just heavenly. Flesh like edible wax). I thought about there being heat, useful heat, perhaps even interesting smoky heat, just disappearing up the chimney while I slept. Why not use it?

I bunged in a couple of potatoes and went to bed, and in the morning, just like with the campfire idea that my dad talked about but never did, I had two smoky ready-to-eat potatoes. I entertained the idea of slicing them and crisping them up in a pan and frying a couple of eggs and maybe a little bacon too, but I ended up just cutting them in two, sandwiching an ‘is that cheese?’-sized slice of cold salty butter between the halves and eating them at pace over the countertop.

I’ve since cooked lots of other things in the stove, mostly vegetables but on one occasion a salt-baked bream. I thought I’d let the stove cool enough when I put the fish in, but I clearly hadn’t as when I broke off the salt crust in the morning the bream was so over-cooked it was almost a powder. It’s an inexact science and you’ll find some things get ruined and others just don’t cook enough, but those fails are worth it for when you take out your prize and marvel at how perfectly it’s done, with caramelised edges and that unmistakable smoky hint. It’s also fun when (as I so often do) you forget you’ve done it and lighting the stove the next evening you say ‘What’s this?’ before exclaiming ‘The beetroot!’

The following recipe uses the dying heat of a wood-burning stove to cook with, which I realise will exclude a number of you, but I hope you enjoy reading about the invention and get inspired by it, or maybe you have friends who’ve got a wood-burner who you can pass these ideas on to, if that’s their vibe (it isn’t everyone’s), or you’ll find a stove in an Airbnb when you’re on holiday somewhere and give this a go. Or there’s always a campfire. And if none of the above apply, you can easily recreate the heat you need and just bake the ingredients in a low oven for an hour or two. As I say, it’s inexact, so don’t stress.

If you are using a wood-burner to cook:

DISCLAIMER – I confess I have no idea about the health implications of cooking in a wood-burning stove. I’m aware that all burning of food, even just the act of making a piece of toast, may create carcinogens, and we’d all live for longer if we rationed ourselves with a strict calorie-controlled bowl of gently steamed vegetable porridge containing exactly the right amount of protein and vitamins and fats and so on, but where’s the fun in that? Live a little. I’m assuming that as long as the stove is burning clean wood then it’s no different from cooking in the embers of a campfire, and I am certain that the whole exercise has to be good for the soul.

OTHER THINGS TO COOK IN THE STOVE OVERNIGHT:

Potatoes, of course. Put them straight in whole, or lightly oil and salt and wrap loosely in foil. Big ones are ideal, but I’ve also had great success with a whole bag of new potatoes tumbled into a foil parcel, cooked, then chopped up for a potato salad. Or use the cooked potato instead of leftover chips for the tortilla (page 180).

Whole onions, skin and all. Once cooked, you can discard the burnt outers leaving you with a silky sweet interior. Great blended into a houmous. Try adding some to the Mushy Pea Houmous (page 170).

Squash and pumpkins. Whole if they fit, or wedges dressed with herbs, spices, seasoning and a little oil and wrapped loosely in foil. Once cooked, they’re great squashed onto toasted sourdough and dressed with furikake (page 122).

Beetroot are fantastic, and the smokiness marries beautifully with the sweetness of the vegetable. Again, they’re great either straight onto the coals or foil wrapped, but don’t peel them. The skins will come off much more easily after they’re cooked. Amazing chopped into wedges and served with cool goat’s cheese and the honeycomb centre of a Crunchie chocolate bar. Seriously.

PEANUT BUTTER BABA GANOUSH

ENOUGH FOR 2 PEOPLE TO SHARE

2 aubergines

1 clove garlic

1 tbsp peanut butter (crunchy or smooth)

juice of 1 lemon

a small handful of soft herbs (parsley, coriander, a little mint, they’re all good), chopped

5 minutes (plus overnight slow cooking of the aubergine)

The night before you want to make the dish, have a fire, a nice roaring one with decent seasoned wood. Don’t use firelighters or anything with chemicals – start the fire with kindling or those ‘natural’ firelighters that look like twisted wood-shavings – and about an hour before bedtime, stop putting wood on and let things begin to die down. The next instruction is really just based on instinct, as so many factors (the draw of the fire, the ambient heat of the day, the size of the stove, the length of time it usually takes for it to go out completely etc.) will affect the outcome. You just have to open the door, look at the embers and say to yourself, ‘Is this going to work?’ and perhaps also, ‘If these aubergines are completely incinerated, does it really matter?’ If your answers are something like ‘Yes, I think so’ and ‘No, not really’, then shift some of the embers to the side of the chamber, pop your aubergines into the stove, shovel/scrape some of the embers over the top of them, shut the door and go to bed. Try to get to sleep, but I must warn you that you will be excited and it won’t be easy.

Bound downstairs the next morning to see what you’ve got, which will hopefully be two charred, baggy, ash-dotted aubergines. They’ll be very delicate and you really don’t want to lose any of the juice that’s in them, so lift them carefully out and into a bowl.

Once you’re safely in your kitchen, get a big pestle and mortar and bash up the garlic in it, or just crush the garlic separately, or finely chop it and put it in a bowl.

Cut a slit gently down the middle of the aubergines and scrape/ scoop/spoon out the fleshy insides before very roughly chopping the flesh. Add that to the garlic along with any juices. Give it all a mix or a bash if you’ve got the pestle in your hand.

Add the peanut butter and the lemon juice and continue to mix before adding the herbs and some salt and pepper. Taste it and adjust the seasoning with more lemon or salt. If it’s too stiff, you can add a little oil or a splash of water. You could do this in a food processor instead, but be mindful of not over-puréeing it as some texture is nice.

It’s very good on toast as an unconventional breakfast, or great later on in the day with lamb, so how about putting it in a doner kebab? It’ll also work beautifully with the Kofta-style Veggie Meatballs (page 194).

TWIGLET BROWNIES

As a child, do you remember the sensation of cramming your mouth full of crisps and chocolate at the same time? I do. This recipe recreates that experience. It also looks great, both in real life as well as on the page. Maybe I’ve invented a Brown Bread Ice Cream (page 53) for the twenty-first century?

Note that this is a prescriptive recipe with very specific non-rounded up/ down measurements. That’s because I’ve tried it a lot of times with my oven (which I think is pretty accurate) and I’ve got it just right. Ovens will vary, however, and your measurements may need adjusting as you cook this time and time again. I’d urge you to cross out and alter the quantities and timings as you need to. Some people don’t feel comfortable defacing books, so to make it easier, I’ve started that for you…

One final note: you need CHEAP dark chocolate for the batter. I’ve tried this with expensive 85% cocoa solids stuff and IT DOESN’T WORK AS WELL. Cheap supermarket chocolate is better in this instance. For the chocolate that isn’t melted into the batter but which is mixed in in chunks, 85% cocoa solids stuff may be better, but I realise this means potentially buying two bars of chocolate, so I don’t. I buy one 100g bar of the cheap stuff, melt 54g into the batter, eat some, and chop some of the rest into chunks.

MAKES 6
MODEST-SIZED SQUARES

54g butter

100g bar of cheap supermarket own-brand dark chocolate (you won’t need it all)

1 egg

72g soft brown sugar

1 tsp vanilla essence

34g Twiglets (to make Twiglet flour) plus another 20–30 Twiglets

1 tbsp cocoa nibs

a handful of pecans, slightly crushed in your fist (oh now he’s all vague with quantities!)

pinch of flaky salt (Maldon or Cornish sea salt)

also look for Nordic Salt or Tubby Tom’s

25 minutes (plus cooling time)

EQUIPMENT:

a 900g loaf tin that’s non-stick or well-lined with baking parchment. a Nutribullet-type powerful blender or clean coffee grinder.

Preheat the oven to 195°C/175°C fan (385°F/gas mark 5/6).

Melt the butter and 54g of chocolate together either in a microwave or in a bowl suspended over a pan of gently simmering water. When the butter is melted enough to start the chocolate melting, take it out of the microwave or off the heat of the stove and let the combined heats do the rest so as not to risk splitting the chocolate.

While the butter and chocolate cool, in another bowl beat or whisk the egg, sugar and vanilla together. Then combine with the chocolate and butter mixture. Everything will cool and thicken a bit.

Grind the 34g of Twiglets into a flour with the blender, smoothie-maker or coffee grinder. Add the Twiglet flour, cocoa nibs, pecans, another 20g of the chocolate chopped into small pieces (you can now eat any chocolate that’s left) and a pinch of flaky salt to the batter and fold together until combined. Pour the mixture into your loaf tin and smooth the top. Arrange the rest of the Twiglets across the top like a raft and bake in the middle of the oven for exactly 19 minutes.

Take it out and let it cool in the tin. Then put it in the fridge to go completely cold before cutting into squares (I cut once down the length in the middle and twice across the width to make a three by two grid).

POUTINE WITH HAGGIS GRAVY AND BABYBEL

It was one of those completely random things. Out of the blue I was asked to devise a menu of canapes and small plates for a Burns Night event in Toronto. The occasion, a PR thing, was celebrating the foods of Scotland and Canada as well as a whisky brand around which the event was devised, so I came up with the following: mini Montreal bagels with whisky cured Scottish salmon, an Aberdeen Angus and Stornoway black pudding scotch egg coated in ketchup-flavoured crisps (popular in Canada apparently), mini porridge pancakes with a blueberry and whisky compote (see Porridge Pot Pancakes, page 29, for something similar but a little more Snack Hacker), fun-sized deep-fried Mars Bars injected with a whisky syrup (have a look at my twist on that, Beer-Battered Celebrations, page 183), and my personal favourite: Poutine with Haggis Gravy and Scottish Blue Cheese.

I designed the dishes and sent them off for approval. A month later I was flown out to Toronto, having never been to North America before, where I met a group of deferential, polite and humble chefs who were cooking my food and who treated me like someone who knew what they were doing. At the event, despite being crippled by imposter syndrome, I talked about the menu, I performed an excerpt from my show, and I drank a lot of free whisky. All very surreal.

The haggis gravy is pretty much what you’d get if you beat whisky sauce and haggis together. On Burns Night you’d have mashed tatties; in this recipe you have chips, which ticks the potato box. Instead of neeps (swede) we’re having… mild cheese, so that’s where we veer off. At the event it was Scottish blue cheese, but it’s not especially easy to get hold of outside of Scotland, and I actually thought the one we chose was a little too salty. I’m opting for something closer to the relatively flavourless cheese curds you get in more traditional Canadian poutine: Babybel, mild and milky and something that softens in the hot haggis gravy very, very nicely.

MAKES 2 GENEROUS PORTIONS

600g oven chips (or 2 big handfuls)

1 small onion, finely chopped

1 tbsp neutral oil

100g haggis

50ml dry vermouth (white wine or cider will work too)

25ml whisky

1 (heaped) tbsp plain flour

500ml chicken stock

3 tbsp crème fraîche

8–10 Babybels, dewaxed and cut into 1cm cubes

25 minutes

Cook the oven chips, either according to the packet instructions or, like I do, by vaguely following the instructions but adding more oil and seasoning and cooking them for a bit longer. As soon as they’re in the oven, make the haggis gravy, which is the important bit that brings everything together.

In a wide pan over a medium heat, cook the onion in the oil until it’s soft and just starting to take on a little colour. Crumble in the haggis. It will start out mushy but as it cooks and breaks up, the moisture will evaporate and the plip-plip will change to a crackle as the oatmeal starts to fry and crisp. Keep it moving and concentrating and getting some colour for 3–4 minutes. When it’s caramelized and crispy here and there, pour in the vermouth (or wine or cider) and the whisky. You can flambee if you’re confident doing so (heat it, keep your head back, ignite it, panic a little, let it burn until the flame disappears while telling everyone else in the kitchen ‘it’s fine’), or just let it boil away until it’s almost all gone, which won’t take more than 30 seconds. Stir in the flour and let that cook for a few minutes before pouring in the stock a little at a time while constantly stirring. It’ll thicken to a nice creamy gravy, but if it feels too thick, you can add a splash of water. Add a big pinch of pepper and maybe salt, but only if you think it needs it (the stock will probably be quite salty). Finally, add the crème fraîche and let it bubble away for a minute before turning off the heat.

When the chips are done, pile them into bowls, scatter over half the Babybel lumps, ladle the gravy generously over the top and add the rest of the Babybel over the gravy. Enjoy with a glass of whisky.

CHIP SANDWICH

What’s a chip? A chip-shop chip? Semi-crispy outside and an interior that’s somewhere between fluffy and fudgy? If you’ve made mashed potato and you’ve got some left over, and if you’ve got crisps too, then try this for a carb-on-carb assault.

A quick word about cutting sandwiches in half. I’ve never experienced quite the backlash I did when I made a video of this recipe and cut the sandwich in half vertically. There was an outcry, with half the mutinous hoard saying I should have done triangles and the other half demanding I cut it horizontally. As far as I’m concerned, a slice of bread only has one line of symmetry, and if you want the two halves to be balanced, then a vertical division is the only way. Told you my mum was a maths teacher.

MAKES 1

4 tbsp cold mashed potato

1 handful of salt & vinegar crisps (Kettle Chips or similar are ideal)

salted butter, softened

2 thick slices white bread

3 minutes

Heat the mashed potato in a microwave (if you don’t have a microwave you can warm it through in a medium oven) until hot. You want to be tossing the sandwich contents around your mouth trying to cool it before swallowing if the experience is to be authentically reproduced. Do the same with the crisps, although you only want those warm, so for a small bowl of crisps about 20–30 seconds ought to do it.

Generously butter both slices of bread. Pile half the crisps onto one of the slices followed by blobs of mashed potato, another layer of warm crisps, and finally the other slice of buttered bread. Press it down and enjoy the crunch, then cut it in half, however you see fit.

MICROWAVE

Dad came home one day with a microwave, which he’d bought from Chiesmans department store in Lewisham. Open late on Thursdays. It was after dark as we freed it from its packaging and set to poring over the instructions: the paramount importance of making sure there was always something in there to cook, the CAPS ONLY warning of never putting metal inside it (even though the inside of the whole thing was made of metal, I could never understand that), before talk moved on to anecdotal hazards, like DON’T TRY AND COOK A WHOLE EGG IN ITS SHELL, with the ensuing scare-stories of microwave doors flying off their hinges from the explosive force, knocking people off their feet.

The first thing we tried was a mug of milk, which hitherto we’d had to heat up on the stove in a pan which the milk would annoyingly cook onto, meaning soaking and scrubbing afterwards. Not worth it if I wasn’t such a big fan of Horlicks, which the twelve-year-old me was, and the fifty-one-year-old me still is. The space the microwave took up on the countertop was worth it for this alone.

Growing up, I loved the microwave and used it all the time, sometimes with a vague air of sophistication (cooking de-shelled eggs in a buttered cup to make a reasonable assimilation of poached eggs to then be placed on toast, sprinkled with salt, masses of black pepper and tons of finely chopped curly parsley), but often with a reckless abandon (shoving in a frozen beef burger and nuking it until fat and sizzling, completely un-browned of course, more of a mid-grey, but hot and cooked and when disguised with enough ketchup and mustard, perfectly acceptable to a hungry teenager). For the above technique, see also mini 10p cheese and tomato pizzas from Bejam (a precursor to Iceland, google it) and, even more weirdly, mini kievs, whose breadcrumb coating just got hot and wet.

While the microwave formed a large part of culinary life when living at home, for whatever reason I didn’t get one when I grew up and left. Unfounded rumours of the radiation being harmful fuelled by my hippyish cohabitants in the housing cooperative may have influenced my decision in the first instance, but I suspect looking back it was more likely a case of my resisting the constant insistence from Dad that I should have one. I wanted to do things my way, and my way seemed to be working out just fine; my bacon was crispy even if I did have a frying pan to clean afterwards. As Dad got older, his reliance on the microwave increased, as did my fascination with it, doubtless encouraged by my discovery of Rustlers when I was performing in Edinburgh (page 107) as well as Dad’s increasingly Snack Hacker-like approach: cheese on toast where the Cheddar is melted on a tea plate in the microwave before being poured onto the toasted bread and dressed with enough crunchy pepper and Worcestershire sauce, rendering it surprisingly acceptable as an alternative to something that comes from under a hot grill. But the cross-generational resistance prevailed.

In November 2020, the house my parents had lived in needed clearing and decorating, painting over brightly coloured fat-splattered walls with clean, neutralising white. It was a monumental task since Dad had never got round to even starting to sort through my mum’s things after she died the year before he did. But being ‘locked down’ and unable to perform, I had the time to do it and the frozen ready meals I’d bought for him, none of which he’d had a chance to eat, gave me the sustenance I needed during those first few weeks. Especially the fish pies.

Weeks turned to months, during which I spent more time at the house than I had in the intervening decades between leaving home and Dad dying. Spending a full day clearing, painting, sorting, getting distracted by photographs, or letters, or familiar but forgotten objects that sparked so many memories, meant I often didn’t have the energy to cook. The microwave continued to justify its place on the countertop as the bottles, tins, packets, pots, pans and books around it disappeared into boxes or bin bags or found themselves on the pavement outside under a scribbled sign, saying ‘Help yourself’.

FISH PIE PASTY

We live on an island surrounded by incredible and varied seafood, and yet as a nation we’re disappointingly shy of it. So much of what we fish gets sold to countries with more adventurous palates. I can write preachily that we should all be eating more fish, and indeed we should, but I’m as guilty as the next person of opting for other ingredients most of the time, even though whenever I have mussels or mackerel or anything from the water other than cod or haddock, I shake my head, look across the table at Mrs Egg and say, ‘Why don’t we have this more often? It’s so good!’

Our lack of an appetite for seafood is reflected in our snacks. Aside from the obvious battered fare from the British chippy, there are very few options to eat something fast and fishy. McDonald’s have their sole contribution (pun intended), which is about as appealing as a beer mat, but none of the other American burger chains bother. I’m sure they used to. Wasn’t ‘Ocean Catch’ a thing once? Go to the bakeries, chains or otherwise, and there’s nothing piscine going on. Why don’t Greggs or Pukka make a fish pasty?

My dad loved fish pie and towards the end of his life it became a firm favourite, probably because one thing it wasn’t was firm. Soft and creamy and easy to eat, he favoured it made with a generous portion of smoked fish, and if he were making it himself as he did when he was more able, a selection of other interesting additions like mussels or cockles and all topped with mashed potato and cheese. If I’m making a fish pie at home I’ll add tarragon too, with aniseed notes that complement the seafood beautifully.

This is my favourite Snack Hacker invention, so far at least. It tastes like a really good fish pie, with complexity and substance and a cocktail of texture. Dad would have approved.

MAKES 2 (ONE FOR ME AND ONE FOR HIM)

2 cheese and onion bakes, hot and fresh from the baker’s or frozen ones baked at home

1 smoked mackerel fillet, skin removed

2 tbsp pickled cockles

4 crabsticks (or similar surimi shapes)

2 sprigs of tarragon, leaves removed

1 bag Scampi Fries, crushed

5 minutes

Slit (or nibble) one edge of the bakes to gain access to the insides, like a purse or pocket, before cramming in chunks of the smoked mackerel, the cockles, torn-up crabsticks, tarragon leaves, and finally a sprinkling of crushed Scampi Fries. You can add more Scampi Fry crumbs as you work your way down. Alternatively, carefully cut off the entire top of the bakes and, in a slightly more elegant fashion, add the ingredients to the hot filling before topping with an even layer of crushed Scampi Fries, crowning it all with the pastry lid and eating either with a knife and fork in a civilised fashion (no thanks) or held with the hands like a hot sandwich (yes please).

CURTAIN

Alfriston Youth Hostel. August 1982

The somewhat inadequate YHA Member’s Kitchen is crowded with strangers heating up baked beans, toasting bread or grating cheese. There aren’t really enough cooking rings on the stoves for the number of occupants, and it being the summer holidays the hostel is fully booked. My brother Henry and I, having tired of playing ping pong in the Games Room, are sat at one of the tables drawing, and staying out of the way.

There might have been enough room in the kitchen for everyone if they were each using just one pan, but they’re not. My dad, huge smile on his face, baguette in one hand, enormous lettuce in the other, appears to have commandeered more than half the available counter space, three cooking rings, the oven, and way more than his fair share of the fridge. The heady aroma from the mountain of raw garlic he’s chopped for the salad dressing raises the eyebrows of a young couple in walking boots as they squeeze past to the dining area with their spaghetti hoops.

This is something my dad revels in: performatively creating a culinary spectacle and generating plenty of comments from our fellow hostellers. Well, there are comments from other British hostellers, but one of the many interesting things about these holidays is that you’ll find a lot of overseas travellers in the kitchens too, meaning that while the Bedwell family from St Albans might ask questions and take mental notes, the Fourneir family from Saint-Malo are too busy making their ratatouille to be distracted by my dad’s spaghetti bolognaise.

While our parents making an exhibition of themselves occasionally feels a bit embarrassing, we’re used to their behaviour, and as Dad brings the plates and bowls to the table and sits down, we know the food we’re about to enjoy will more than make up for it.

Mum, who five minutes ago popped outside to the Renault, walks back in with a grape juice Tetra Pak and pours two glasses. Our toes curl when we realise that in contravention of the strict YHA ‘no alcohol’ rule she’s decanted a bottle of plonk into the carton instead. In a low whisper, I tell them I’m really worried they’ll get caught, but they both tell me it’s fine.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

There’s not a lot more to tell you that isn’t already printed in the preceding pages, suffice to say that George Egg is difficult to categorise. He straddles the gaps between passionate home cook, recipe inventor, food writer, content creator (horrible phrase but not as bad as ‘influencer’), theatre-maker (though his shows straddle another gap between comedy act and illustrated lecture) and prop-based stand-up comedian.

He has written, produced and performed numerous food-centric comedy shows which have toured the UK, as well as overseas throughout Europe, and as far afield as Canada and New Zealand.

In 2024, by public vote, he won Content Creator of the Year at the Fortnum & Mason’s Food and Drink Awards, despite being pitted against a phalanx of hip young gunslingers less than half his age. So there!

He’s written recipes and articles for delicious. magazine, The Independent and children’s magazine AQUILA. This is his first cookbook.

You can find George on Instagram (@georgeegg), or in Brighton where he lives with his wife and cats.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

While my name might be the one on the cover, this book has been almost exclusively created by myself and two other people.

The first, and the most important, is my son Jem Ward. If you’re familiar with the Snack Hacker videos, you’ll recognise his title animation (the thwacking axe), as well as his filming, since it’s he who is the elusive ‘Camera Person’ under the alias ‘The Ballas’. Jem is also the sole artist behind this beautifully absurd and intentionally chaotic book. Every sketch, painting, collage, graphic, imagined-package, splash, doodle, visual instruction, icon and incredible illustration, both inside and on the cover, has been created by him – and all done by hand. Lucie, thank you so much for lending him. And Jem, I love you.

Matt Lincoln is a funny, very easy-to-work-with and hugely talented photographer. We met at university in the early nineties and have collaborated since on many projects from food blogs to performances. He’s also taken countless portraits of me for my live shows; portraits which always end up on the covers of brochures, so he knows his onions. And he’s someone who understands food, being an exceptionally gifted, naturally instinctive cook. So again… he knows his onions.

Thank you, always-smiling Joe Hallsworth, for having faith in our idea, for commissioning this unconventional project and allowing it to evolve into something even more unusual, and thanks too for your sensitive and trusting editing. Rachel Malig, your copy editing is exceptional and your kind words so encouraging. I’m so glad you too saw Archaos. Kate Cromwell, your speedy pin-sharp typesetting has been transformative. And of course, thanks to the team at Blink for all your many contributions. Ever-anxious about making face-palm-inducing inappropriate slip-ups (coupled with an instinctive urge to be mischievous – a lethal combination) I’m also indebted to Olga Koch and Angela Hui for the helpful translations. Leo, thanks for rummaging around to find those great Archaos photos, weren’t those days and nights amazing?

David Luxton, you’re the best agent, always rolling with the punches and keeping my head in the game even when we were down to the wire (no idea what any of that means). And Emily Rees-Jones, thank you for getting the ball rolling in the first place.

The Snack Hacker videos have enjoyed the support of many friends from the worlds of food and comedy, as well as innumerable fans and followers. Adam Purnell, Doug McMaster, Erica Wides, Fern Freud, Harry Hill, Jack Monroe, Jack Whitehall, John Robins, James Acaster, Jamie Demetriou, Joe Lycett, Lou Sanders, Nick Helm, Mackenzie Crook, Matt Lucas, Miriam Nice, Romesh Ranganathan, Sabrina Gidda, Tim Anderson, Tim Key and Tim Maddams, thanks for lending your faces to the guest episodes. To team Elis James and John Robins, thank you for letting me conjure up snack ideas on your show, and for the innumerable heart-warming plugs and praise. To Craig Charles and BBC 6 Music, and the team at Audio Always, thank you for making me resident Snack Hacker and introducing me to your vast audience, and to Sukey Firth and the team at BBC Radio 4’s Loose Ends for similarly plonking me in front of the world’s most refined ears.

Creative projects are born of inspiration and I’ve enjoyed plenty, so thank you, in no particular order, to the following for your brilliant work be it literary, culinary, theatrical or otherwise: Ian Smith, Circus Archaos, Mollie Katzen, John Wright, Niki Segnit, Tim Anderson, Tim Hayward, Jake Tilson, Tim Key & Emily Juniper, Gennaro Contaldo, Catherine Phipps, Gurdeep Loyal, Miriam Nice, Jack Black, Laura Goodman, Su Scott, Harry Hill, Angela Hui, Adam Savage and of course Anthony Bourdain.

Daughters Zoe and Meg, I love you for being tolerant of my outlandish and sometimes embarrassing ideas, and for carrying on the family tradition of being the best kind of unsnobbish junk-loving gourmands. To Nikki, I love you for your boundless support and encouragement, for listening patiently to so many barely noticeable edits and for dealing with the unending torrent of washing up in those insane photoshoot weeks. And finally, Mum, Dad and Henry, for all the memories of Kilmorie Road that informed so much of what’s written in this book, I love you too.

INDEX

A

ADVOCAAT:

black lime snowball

162

Alfriston Youth Hostel

242–3

ALL BRAN:

cereal killa’ loaf

76

ALMONDS:

peshwari toastie

189

ANCHOVIES:

Margherita naan pizza

67

popcorn chicken à la Holstein

47

Anderson, Tim

184

ANISEED:

liquorice salt

124

marmalade and aniseed cake

208

Anzac biscuits

75

APPLES:

the Big Apple apple and sausage

muffin

220

arancini, full English

24–6

Archaos

130–1, 139

Archaos crêpes

132

AUBERGINES:

peanut butter baba ganoush

226–7

AVOCADOS:

scampi tacos

205

B

baba ganoush, peanut butter

226–7

Babybel, poutine with haggis gravy and

230–1

BACON:

breakfast salad bag

23

full English arancini

24–6

not-duck-pancakes bacon bap

43

bagel seasoning

217

chopped cheese toastie with

everything crust

218–19

BAILEYS IRISH CREAM:

Barley Cup cocktail

82

BAKED BEANS:

baked bean dal

151

full English arancini

24–6

baking parchment

78, 79

bamischijf

147

Barker, Arj

105

Barley Cup cocktail

82

Barrie’s lemonade

40

BEANS:

baked bean dal

151

full English arancini

24–6

The Bear

152

Beckenham Place Park, London

65

BEEF:

stroganoff steak bake

148

BEER:

beer-battered Celebrations

183

inside out mushroom and beer

double Swiss

108

Welsh rarebit naan pizza

71

beetroot, stove baked

225

Bejam

235

a better egg and cress sandwich

88

the Big Apple apple and sausage muffin

220

The Big Feastival

92

the big mack(erel)

92

biscuits, Philippa

75

black lime snowball

162

BLACK PUDDING:

breakfast salad bag

23

full English arancini

24–6

Black Seed

215

blackcurrant and liquorice pancakes

157

Blaue Biwel

140

blow torch

135

blue J-cloths

27

Bo Wah

97

BOMBAY BAD BOY POT NOODLE:

bamischijf

147

Bourdain, Anthony

130

BOVRIL

170

Bovril and tarragon butter

119

Bovril, butter and pickled onion

pancakes

157

boxes

79

BREAD:

breakfast salad bag

23

brown bread ice cream

51, 53

car boot sale sandwich

199

chip sandwich

233

chopped cheese toastie with

everything crust

218–19

currywurst

145

festival burgers

202

Frenchish onionish soupish

136

gözleme toastie

173

lamb toastie with Sabrina’s biji’s

chutney

58

microwave Swiss eggs

54

mock-lobster roll with brown butter

and fennel slaw

223

not yakisoba pan

184–5

Nutella and dark chocolate

37

peshwari toastie

189

scampi tacos with gooseberry salsa

205

BREADCRUMBS:

bamischijf

147

full English arancini

24–6

breakfast salad bag

23

Brighton Open Market

173

BRIOCHE:

the big mack(erel)

92

instant cinnamon buns

30

reinventing the wheel

37

Tunnock’s in brioche

37

BROCCOLI:

charred broccoli with peanut butter

sauce and date syrup

167

brown bread ice cream

51, 53

BROWN SAUCE:

lamb toastie with Sabrina’s biji’s

chutney

58

brownies, Twiglet

229

bubble and squeak

179

BUCKWHEAT PANCAKES

154

Archaos crêpes

132

blackcurrant and liquorice pancakes

157

Bovril, butter and pickled onion

pancakes

157

Burger King

108

burger presses

109

burgers

78

the big mack(erel)

92

chopped cheese toastie with

everything crust

218–19

festival burgers

202

inside out mushroom and beer

double Swiss

108

microwave burgers

106–7

wild garlic mayo double cheeseburger

176

wünderbürger

158

Burns Night

230

BUTTER:

Bovril and tarragon butter

119

Bovril, butter and pickled onion

pancakes

157

mock-lobster roll with brown butter

and fennel slaw

223

C

CABBAGE:

festival burgers

202

CAKES:

cereal killa’ loaf

76

marmalade and aniseed cake

208

Twiglet brownies

229

CAMPARI:

pink drink

206

CAPERS:

packed lunch pizza

168–9

popcorn chicken à la Holstein

47

car boot sale sandwich

199

car boot sales

197

CARDAMOM:

cardamom buns

30

peshwari toastie

189

CARROTS:

festival burgers

202

cauliflower cheese pasty

44

CAVIAR:

the big mack(erel)

92

Celebrations, beer-battered

183

cereal killa’ loaf

76

CHEESE:

Archaos crêpes

132

car boot sale sandwich

199

cheese and ham crêpes

132

cheese crêpes

132

cheese, tomato and ham crêpes

132

cheesy cup noodle with egg yolk

112

chopped cheese toastie with

everything crust

218–19

cup shakshuka

55

festival burgers

202

Frenchish onionish soupish

136

gözleme toastie

173

inside out mushroom and beer

double Swiss

108

Margherita naan pizza

67

microwave Swiss eggs

54

mockdonalds

80–1

packed lunch pizza

168–9

poutine with haggis gravy and

Babybel

230–1

spicy snack salami naan pizza

70

Welsh rarebit naan pizza

71

wild garlic pesto loaded chips

174

CHEESE AND ONION BAKES:

cauliflower cheese pasty

44

cheese and onion bake with pickled jalapeños

16

fish pie pasty

236

cheeseburger, wild garlic mayo double

176

CHICKEN:

chicken and lemon tagine-inspired pie

72

picnic chicken

65

popcorn chicken à la Holstein

47

rotisserie chicken

61

spatchcocked chicken and French

market potatoes

62–3

CHICKEN AND MUSHROOM PIE:

chicken and lemon tagine-inspired pie

72

CHILLI SAUCE:

kofta-style veggie meatballs in pittas

194

CHILLIES:

baked bean dal

151

cheese and onion bake with pickled jalapeños

16

easy green chilli sauce

121

fishfinger spaghetti

95

packed lunch pizza

168–9

Chinese takeaways

97

CHIPS

178–9

chip sandwich

233

chip tortilla

180

poutine with haggis gravy

and Babybel

230–1

Swedish-style veggie meatballs with

cream sauce and chips

193

wild garlic pesto loaded chips

174

CHOCOLATE:

beer-battered Celebrations

183

chocolate milkshake

82

Nutella and dark chocolate

37

Rolo dessert with smoked salt

115

Twiglet brownies

229

chutney, Sabrina’s biji’s

58

cinnamon buns, instant

30

COCKLES:

fish pie pasty

236

cocktail, Barley Cup

82

COCONUT, DESICCATED:

peshwari toastie

189

Philippa biscuits

75

coffee grinders

162

CONDENSED MILK:

Barley Cup cocktail

82

containers, recycled

152

COOKIES:

ice cream sandwiches

53

cooperatives

165

CORIANDER:

easy green chilli sauce

121

CORNICHONS:

stroganoff steak bake

148

CRABSTICKS:

fish pie pasty

236

not yakisoba pan

184–5

CREAM:

Bovril and tarragon butter

119

brown bread ice cream

53

marmalade and aniseed cake

208

mussels with Guinness and Gruyère

139

Swedish-style veggie meatballs with

cream sauce and chips

193

crêpes, Archaos

132

CRESS

86

a better egg and cress sandwich

88

CRISPS:

chip sandwich

233

croissants, tahini

84

CUCUMBER:

not-duck-pancakes bacon bap

43

cup shakshuka

55

CURRY:

curry sauce for ‘Chinese risotto’

101

currywurst

145

livening up shop-bought curries

189

CURRY SAUCE:

currywurst

145

not yakisoba pan

184–5

Curshen, Elly

179

CUSTARD:

chocolate milkshake

82

vanilla milkshake

82

D

dal, baked bean

151

date syrup, charred broccoli with peanut butter sauce and

167

deep-fried pot noodles

147

Demetriou, Jamie

72

Demetriou, Natasha

72

dinner parties

51

Dr. Oetkers

72

DRIED FRUIT:

cereal killa’ loaf

76

DRINKS:

Barley Cup cocktail

82

Barrie’s lemonade

40

black lime snowball

162

chocolate milkshake

82

gooseberry margarita

207

mate

74

milkshake quartet

82

motorway service station mulled wine

161

pink drink

206

Schuss

140

strawberry milkshake

82

vanilla milkshake

82

E

Edinburgh Festival

106–7

Edinburgh Festival Fringe

130–1, 153

EGG MCMUFFIN:

a better egg and cress sandwich

88

McKedgeree muffin

32

EGGS:

breakfast salad bag

23

cheesy cup noodle with egg yolk

112

chip tortilla

180

cup shakshuka

55

egg fried rice

98

egg mayonnaise

86, 88

frying eggs

47

full English arancini

24–6

microwave Swiss eggs

54

mockdonalds

80–1

poaching eggs

23

popcorn chicken à la Holstein

47

Ego, Anton

107

Elis James and John Robins Show (BBC 5Live)

71

Elliot, Rose

165

ENGLISH MUFFINS:

the Big Apple apple and sausage

muffin

220

mockdonalds

80–1

Euro 2020

71

Eurovision Song Contest

115

EVAPORATED MILK:

Barley Cup cocktail

82

cheesy cup noodle with egg yolk

112

porridge pot pancakes

29

EVERYTHING BAGEL SEASONING

217

chopped cheese toastie with

everything crust

218–19

Everything Bagels

215, 218

F

‘The Feast’

131

FENNEL:

fennel slaw

223

FENNEL SEEDS:

Philippa biscuits

75

festival burgers

202

FISH:

the big mack(erel)

92

fish pie pasty

236

fishfinger spaghetti

95

McKedgeree muffin

32

Margherita naan pizza

67

popcorn chicken à la Holstein

47

sweet soy sardines (cooked in the tin)

210

Forest Hill, London

10–13

freezers

178

French markets

61, 62

Frenchish onionish soupish

136

full English arancini

24–6

full English breakfast

20–1

furikake

122–3, 217

G

GARLIC:

baked bean dal

151

fishfinger spaghetti

95

Garton, Frederick Gibson

58

GHERKINS:

mock-lobster roll with brown butter

and fennel slaw

223

Gidda, Sabrina

58

Glasgow

139

Glastonbury Festival

202, 205, 207

gooseberry salsa

205

GOOSEBERRY SYRUP:

gooseberry margarita

207

gözleme toastie

173

GRAPEFRUIT RADLER:

pink drink

206

greaseproof paper

78–9

Green Room Café

205

Greggs

44, 236

grinders, coffee

162

GRUYÈRE:

Archaos crêpes

132

mussels with Guinness and Gruyère

139

Guinness: mussels with Guinness

and Gruyère

139

H

HAGGIS:

mockdonalds

80–1

poutine with haggis gravy and Babybel

230–1

HAM:

cheese and ham crêpes

132

HAZELNUTS:

brown bread ice cream

53

cauliflower cheese pasty

44

wild garlic pesto loaded chips

174

holidays

61, 106–7, 112, 242–3

HORLICKS POWDER:

vanilla milkshake

82

hot air gun

134

HOT SAUCE:

spicy snack salami naan pizza

70

HOTDOG BUNS:

mock-lobster roll with brown butter and fennel slaw

223

not yakisoba pan

184–5

houmous, mushy pea

170

HP sauce

58

I

ice cream, brown bread

51, 53

inside out mushroom and beer

double Swiss

108

irons

109

J

Jaffrey, Madhur

151

JALAPEÑOS:

cheese and onion bake with pickled jalapeños

16

easy green chilli sauce

121

James, Alex

92

Jones, Milton

183

K

Katzen, Mollie

165, 167

Kaur, Iqbal

58

KETCHUP:

almost instant sweet and sour sauce

100

currywurst

145

lamb toastie with Sabrina’s biji’s

chutney

58

kofta-style veggie meatballs in pittas

194

L

LAGER:

Schuss

140

lamb toastie with Sabrina’s biji’s chutney

58

Lawson, Nigella

66

Lee, Mr

97

leftovers

178–9

LEMONADE:

Barrie’s lemonade

40

black lime snowball

162

LEMONS:

Barrie’s lemonade

40

chicken and lemon tagine-inspired pie

72

Leningrad

148

LETTUCE:

the big mack(erel)

92

chopped cheese toastie with

everything crust

218–19

Levi’s

215

LIMES:

gooseberry margarita

207

Lincoln, Matt

120

LINDA MCCARTNEY SAUSAGES

190

kofta-style veggie meatballs in pittas

194

spaghetti, sauce and veggie meatballs

190

Swedish-style veggie meatballs with

cream sauce and chips

193

LIQUORICE:

blackcurrant and liquorice pancakes

157

liquorice salt

124

LUMPFISH CAVIAR:

the big mack(erel)

92

M

McDonald’s

78, 220, 236

MCDONALD’S CURRY SAUCE:

currywurst

145

not yakisoba pan

184–5

MCDONALD’S EGG MCMUFFIN:

a better egg and cress sandwich

88

McKedgeree muffin

32

MACKEREL:

the big mack(erel)

92

fish pie pasty

236

McKedgeree muffin

32

malt loaf pudding

48

Margarita, gooseberry

207

Margherita naan pizza

67

markets

61, 62

marmalade and aniseed cake

208

MARYLAND COOKIES:

ice cream sandwiches

53

MASCARPONE:

strawberry milkshake

82

MAYONNAISE:

a better egg and cress sandwich

88

the big mack(erel)

92

festival burgers

202

mock-lobster roll with brown butter

and fennel slaw

223

wild garlic mayo double cheeseburger

176

MEATBALLS:

kofta-style veggie meatballs in pittas

194

spaghetti, sauce and veggie meatballs

190

Swedish-style veggie meatballs with

cream sauce and chips

193

MESCAL:

gooseberry margarita

207

Mescherin, Vyacheslav

148

MICROWAVES

235

microwave burgers

106–7

microwave Swiss eggs

54

‘The Midnight Show’

140

MIE GORENG INSTANT NOODLES:

not yakisoba pan

184–5

MILK:

Barley Cup cocktail

82

buckwheat pancakes

154

milkshake quartet

82

MINT JELLY:

Barrie’s lemonade

40

Mischief La Bas

131

mock-lobster roll with brown butter and fennel slaw

223

mockdonalds

80–1

motorway service station mulled wine

161

mulled wine, motorway service station

161

MUSHROOMS:

breakfast salad bag

23

inside out mushroom and beer

double Swiss

108

mushy pea houmous

170

mussels with Guinness and Gruyère

139

MUSTARD:

the Big Apple apple and sausage

muffin

220

the big mack(erel)

92

stroganoff steak bake

148

Welsh rarebit naan pizza

71

N

NAAN PIZZA

66–71

Margherita naan pizza

67

spicy snack salami naan pizza

70

Welsh rarebit naan pizza

71

New York

214–15

newspaper

79

Nice, Miriam

30

NOODLES:

cheesy cup noodle with egg yolk

112

not yakisoba pan

184–5

NORI SEAWEED:

furikake

122–3

nori salt

125

not-duck-pancakes bacon bap

43

not yakisoba pan

184–5

Nutella and dark chocolate

37

O

OATS:

Philippa biscuits

75

Odell, Martyn

92

OLIVES:

chicken and lemon tagine-inspired pie

72

packed lunch pizza

168–9

ONIONS:

Bovril, butter and pickled onion

pancakes

157

Frenchish onionish soupish

136

stove baked onions

225

P

packaging

78–9

packed lunch pizza

168–9

PANCAKES:

blackcurrant and liquorice pancakes

157

Bovril, butter and pickled onion

pancakes

157

buckwheat pancakes

154

porridge pot pancakes

29

PASTA:

cheesy cup noodle with egg yolk

112

fishfinger spaghetti

95

spaghetti, sauce and veggie meatballs

190

PASTIES:

cauliflower cheese pasty

44

fish pie pasty

236

PEANUT BUTTER:

bamischijf

147

charred broccoli with peanut butter

sauce and date syrup

167

peanut butter baba ganoush

226–7

Pear, Elly

179

PEAS:

egg fried rice

98

lamb toastie with Sabrina’s biji’s

chutney

58

mushy pea houmous

170

PECANS:

Twiglet brownies

229

PEPERAMI FIRESTICKS:

spicy snack salami naan pizza

70

peshwari toastie

189

pesto, wild garlic

174

Philippa biscuits

75

PICKLED ONIONS:

Bovril, butter and pickled onion

pancakes

157

picnic chicken

65

pie, chicken and lemon tagine-inspired

72

PINEAPPLE JUICE:

almost instant sweet and sour sauce

100

pink drink

206

pittas, kofta-style veggie meatballs in

194

PIZZA:

naan pizza

66–71

packed lunch pizza

168–9

popcorn chicken à la Holstein

47

PORK SCRATCHINGS:

the big mack(erel)

92

porridge pot pancakes

29

pot noodles, deep-fried

147

POTATOES:

chip sandwich

233

spatchcocked chicken and French

market potatoes

62–3

stove baked potatoes

224, 225

POUTINE

178

poutine with haggis gravy and Babybel

230–1

prawn toast toastie

105

PROSCIUTTO COTTO:

Welsh rarebit naan pizza

71

pumpkin, stove baked

225

PUMPKIN SEEDS:

festival burgers

202

Purnell, Adam

70

R

RAISINS:

cereal killa’ loaf

76

Ranganathan, Romesh

151

Ranganathan, Shanthi

151

RED WINE:

motorway service station mulled wine

161

reinventing the wheel

37

RICE:

egg fried rice

98

full English arancini

24–6

RICOTTA:

Welsh rarebit naan pizza

71

ROCKET:

breakfast salad bag

23

Rolo dessert with smoked salt

115

Rustlers

107, 235

S

Sabrina’s biji’s chutney

58

sachets

142

salad bag, breakfast

23

SALAMI:

spicy snack salami naan pizza

70

salsa, gooseberry

205

SALT:

liquorice salt

124

nori salt

125

Rolo dessert with smoked salt

115

SANDWICHES:

a better egg and cress sandwich

88

car boot sale sandwich

199

chip sandwich

233

chopped cheese toastie with

everything crust

218–19

prawn toast toastie

105

SARDINES:

sweet soy sardines (cooked in the tin)

210

sauce sachets

142

SAUCES:

almost instant sweet and sour sauce

100

curry sauce for ‘Chinese risotto’

101

easy green chilli sauce

121

tahini sauce

120

SAUERKRAUT:

wünderbürger

158

SAUSAGES:

the Big Apple apple and sausage

muffin

220

currywurst

145

full English arancini

24–6

SAUSAGES, VEGETARIAN:

kofta-style veggie meatballs in pittas

194

spaghetti, sauce and veggie

meatballs

190

Swedish-style veggie meatballs with

cream sauce and chips

193

SAVELOY:

currywurst

145

SCAMPI FRIES:

fish pie pasty

236

scampi tacos with gooseberry salsa

205

Schuss

140

SEAFOOD STICKS:

mock-lobster roll with brown butter

and fennel slaw

223

Seda

173

Sendak, Maurice

215

SESAME SEEDS:

everything bagel seasoning

217

festival burgers

202

furikake 1 (easy)

122

prawn toast toastie

105

tahini croissants

84

SESAME SNAPS:

bamischijf

147

furikake 2 (really easy)

123

shakshuka, cup

55

SHREDDIES:

cereal killa’ loaf

76

Shropshire Lad

70

silica gel packs

217

slaw, fennel

223

smells

86

Smith, Ian

139

Smith, Stanley

139

SMOKED MACKEREL:

fish pie pasty

236

McKedgeree muffin

32

soup, Frenchish onionish

136

SOURED CREAM:

stroganoff steak bake

148

SOY SAUCE:

sweet soy sardines (cooked in the tin)

210

SPAGHETTI:

fishfinger spaghetti

95

spaghetti, sauce and veggie meatballs

190

spatchcocked chicken and French

market potatoes

62–3

spicy snack salami naan pizza

70

SPINACH:

gözleme toastie

173

squash, stove baked

225

stove cooking

224–5

strawberry milkshake

82

stroganoff steak bake

148

SULTANAS:

cereal killa’ loaf

76

peshwari toastie

189

SUMAC:

wild garlic mayo double cheeseburger

176

SUNFLOWER SEEDS:

festival burgers

202

marmalade and aniseed cake

208

SUPERMALT:

Schuss

140

Swedish-style veggie meatballs

193

sweet and sour sauce, almost instant

100

sweet soy sardines (cooked in the tin)

210

Swiss eggs, microwave

54

T

tacos, scampi

205

tagine-inspired pie, chicken and lemon

72

TAHINI: MUSHY PEA HOUMOUS

170

tahini croissants

84

tahini sauce

120

takeaways

97

TARRAGON:

Bovril and tarragon butter

119

tastes

86

Tenderstem® broccoli with peanut butter sauce and date syrup, charred

167

toastie makers

34

TOASTIES:

chopped cheese toastie with

everything crust

218–19

gözleme toastie

173

lamb toastie with Sabrina’s biji’s

chutney

58

peshwari toastie

189

prawn toast toastie

105

TOMATO JUICE:

spicy snack salami naan pizza

70

TOMATO KETCHUP:

the big mack(erel)

92

TOMATOES:

Archaos crêpes

132

breakfast salad bag

23

cheese, tomato and ham crêpes

132

chopped cheese toastie with

everything crust

218–19

cup shakshuka

55

kofta-style veggie meatballs in pittas

194

Margherita naan pizza

67

packed lunch pizza

168–9

spaghetti, sauce and veggie meatballs

190

tortilla, chip

180

Trader Joe’s

215

trays

79

TRIPLE SEC:

gooseberry Margarita

207

Tunnock’s in brioche

37

Twiglet brownies

229

V

vanilla milkshake

82

veganism and vegetarianism

197

VEGETABLES:

packed lunch pizza

168–9

tinned vegetables

61

VEGGIE MEATBALLS:

kofta-style veggie meatballs in pittas

194

spaghetti, sauce and veggie meatballs

190

Swedish-style veggie meatballs with cream sauce and chips

193

W

WAGON WHEEL BISCUITS:

reinventing the wheel

37

WASABI:

prawn toast toastie

105

waxed paper

79

Welsh rarebit naan pizza

71

Whitehall, Jack

32

Wides, Erica

215

WILD GARLIC:

wild garlic mayo double cheeseburger

176

wild garlic pesto loaded chips

174

Wimpy

108

wine, motorway service station mulled

161

wünderbürger

158

Y

yerba mate tea

74