Eva Yerbabuena

Eva Yerbabuena and her Ballet Flamenco company opened the London Flamenco Festival at Sadler's Wells with three performances of her latest production, El Huso de la Memoria (The Spindle of Memory). A native of Granada, despite having been born in Frankfurt, La Yerbabuena is one of the leading flamenco dancers of her generation. Her new production blends traditional flamenco with modern dance styles to create a rather abstract, but captivating performance. It consists of a number of precisely choreographed numbers with different combinations of male and female dancers, with a focus on time, symmetry and rhythmic repetition subtly inspired by West Side Story. These numbers are interspersed with more free-flowing interludes from dancer Aida Badía, performing to saetas, unaccompanied prayers originating in the Easter processions. Eva Yerbabuena dances four numbers, the third of which is by far the highlight of the show, and danced to a soleá (an improvised combination of three- or four-verse stanzas over a 12-beat metre). The musical accompaniment is provided by four male singers, two guitars, flute/soprano saxophone, and percussion.

This type of more artsy, large-production performance will probably not appeal so much to those preferring the more intimate, low-key setting of traditional flamenco haunts, but it's a fair compromise to see the more established dancers who have graduated from the tablao. Of course, I wanted to see Isabel Bayón on Wednesday, but it's sold out already. The clip below is from one of Yerbabuena's performances at the 2006 Bienal de Flamenco in Seville, with singer Miguel Poveda, courtesy of traza

Smash don't mash...

Steamed haddock with ginger, garlic and spring onion, and smashed potatoes with Boursin

So I have to thank indiagirl for this one, since it was she who suggested the whole Boursin thing, which on the face of it doesn't seem that appealing. But trust me, this is a great way of making something from bland boiled potatoes.

Marinate the haddock with some light soy sauce, oil, balsamic vinegar, Shaoxing rice wine (or dry sherry), garlic, pepper and finely chopped ginger for at least 20 minutes. Sprinkle some chopped spring onion and steam in a bamboo steamer or other method of your choice for about 5 minutes. For the potatoes, boil them in salted water until soft (I'm told I should use red-skinned potatoes for best effect, but I don't think I offended anyone by using white-skinned ones...). Drain and smash (not, I hasten to add, mash - indiagirl didn't specify how one should smash potatoes, so I just squashed them with the back of a wooden spatula, but there are probably more fun techniques, like pelting them against the wall or something). Add a generous helping of garlic and herb Boursin and mix into the smashed potatoes.

Hot Fuzz Scandal

Hot Fuzz
Edgar Wright (Dir.), Simon Pegg, Nick Frost

Notes on a Scandal
Richard Eyre (Dir.), Judi Dench, Cate Blanchett

From the makers of Shaun of the Dead comes Hot Fuzz, which is by far the funniest movie I've seen in a long time, actually not much of a surprise, given that comedies don't tend to appeal to me much. But what sets Hot Fuzz apart is some great writing, which innocently introduces random bits of character observation that later serve to set up gag after gag. The story involves PC Nicholas Angel, whose exemplary record as a police officer in the Metropolitan Police Force leads his superiors to assign him to a remote village in the middle of Gloucestershire so as to prevent the rest of the force looking bad. Angel soon finds out that policing in rural Gloucestershire is rather different from the adrenaline-charged crime-fighting of London and soon becomes the butt of jokes from the local police force for his paranoid intent on investigating a spate of seemingly accidental deaths. The rest I can't describe, because it's just too insane and it would give too much away, so you'll just have to watch it yourselves. The cast includes a whole bunch of cameos from the likes of Timothy Dalton (as manager of local Somerfield, Sissy Skinner...), Jim Broadbent, Steve Coogan, Edward Woodward and Bill Nighy.

Bill Nighy provides the link to Notes on a Scandal, playing the loyal, older husband to Cate Blanchett's bourgeois art teacher. Based on a novel by Zoe Heller, the story follows a young art teacher, whose ineptness at instilling discipline in her students facilitates her friendship with Judi Dench's old-school history teacher. From Dench's narratives of her diary entries, we learn that her interest in the young art teacher is not without an ulterior motive, but is instead an obsessive and manipulative ploy. When she discovers that Blanchett is having an affair with one of her students, she believes she has what she needs to split up the young teacher's marriage and make her the lasting companion she has been looking for to relieve her loneliness. Despite a superficially mundane plot, the movie is made compelling by outstanding performances from Dench and Blanchett, who convincingly portray their characters' obsessions, driven respectively by fear of boredom and fear of loneliness. Dench's portrayal is particularly unsettling, and you'll leave the film thinking twice about striking up a conversation with that nice elderly lady in Hampstead Heath.

Snowflecked brownies

The recent snow has inspired to do some baking, partly because I've been spending days cooped up in a not-so-warm apartment, working from home and staying away from the chaos outside. This recipe is from Nigella, one of those that you only do once a year (usually before Christmas, though!) for fear that doing it any more frequently amounts to making a choice between diabetes or a heart attack. Since the snow's gone, I didn't actually bother with the snowflecks, but here's the recipe anyway:

375g dark chocolate
375g unsalted butter
225g plain flour
350g sugar
6 eggs
250g white chocolate buttons
1tbsp vanilla extract
1tsp salt

375g of dark chocolate is really a ridiculous amount to request in a recipe, because good quality chocolate almost invariably comes in 100g bars. So once you've chopped up 375g, you have 25g left over, and let's be realistic, you're just gonna end up eating it anyway, so you might as well just use up the whole 400g. That's what I do, and the brownies taste all the better for it.... Melt the butter and chocolate in a pan over low heat until smooth, and leave to cool slightly. Meanwhile, beat the eggs, sugar and vanilla extract in a large bowl. Fold into the chocolate mixture and mix thoroughly. Add the flour and fold until all the flour is absorbed. Finally, fold in the white chocolate buttons. Using a spatula, pour onto a deep baking tray lined with greaseproof paper and spread evenly.

Bake in a pre-heated oven at 180C for about 25 minutes. The top should be crisp and speckled, but the centre should be goo-ey. Leave on a rack to cool. Cut up into squares. Serve with some icing sugar, vanilla ice cream and a sprig of mint. Or just eat straight out of the oven... incidentally, brownies make good smoothies. This might sound rather disgusting and, in fact, if you give some thought to what you're actually putting into your smoothie, I agree it sounds less than appealing, but seriously, it's chocolate and fat - how could it not taste good? Just add a little milk, ice cream, maybe even some peanut butter while you're at it, blitz to your desired consistency, and drink. You'll feel your blood turning to cement instantly.......

1. Mix melted butter and chocolate with eggs and sugar

2. Fold in flour

3. Bake at 180C, 25 mins

4. Drool.....

Roast chicken

Having just fed four people, I thought I'd share my thoughts on roast chicken. No doubt everyone has their own way of roasting chicken, so here's mine. The worst thing about a roast chicken is dry, bland breast meat (although I don't usually eat chicken breast anyway), so you have to stuff the thing with something to prevent it from drying. Get your preferred choice of chicken (free-range, corn-fed, or whatever works for you). Wash and pat dry. Stuff with: wedges of lemon, small onion, crushed garlic cloves, your choice of herb (mint or thyme work well), butter. Rub olive oil and salt all over skin.

I served roast potatoes with the chicken. Wash and peel the potatoes, and cut into bite-size chunks. Parboil for 5 minutes, drain and shake in the pan to fluff them up. Spread over the bottom of a deep roasting tin lined with aluminium foil. Halve two small onions, and cut each half into quarters. Crush some garlic cloves. Spread evenly among the potato chunks. Drizzle with olive oil, salt and cumin seeds. Place the rack on the roasting tin and set the chicken on top, breast side up. Cook in a pre-heated at 190C (about 75 mins. for a medium-sized chicken). You shouldn't need to baste it, and the fat and juices will be soaked up by the potatoes, giving them extra flavour.

Et voilà:

Praise for....

This is something that has bemused me for some time. Who writes those testimonials that appear on billboards for third-rate Hollywood movies and on the inside pages of fiction best-sellers? You can tell much about the likely quality of a movie from these helpful one-liners. For example, "Rocky Balboa is the best Rocky movie yet!", is hardly a ringing endorsement, is it? The word "yet" also warns you that it's not outside the realm of possibility that Sylvester Stallone might appear in one further installment, in which it doesn't matter if the guy is blind and in a zimmer frame, he'll still knock the crap out of an opponent 60 years younger after 12 rounds in the ring. Or what does it say about Final Destination 15 that the best the distributors could do was an endorsement of "Thrilling!" from the News of the World, as if, somehow, a thriller shouldn't be expected to be "thrilling".

Books don't escape this sort of disingenuous advertising either. Take Jacques Pépin's autobiography, The Apprentice, which I'm currently reading. It's a great book describing his early years as a trainee chef, going on to cook for Charles de Gaulle, emigrating to New York, almost becoming JFK's personal chef and eventually becoming a TV personality. Yet, the Washington Post seemingly has nothing more helpful to say than "Fascinating", Entertainment Weekly chips in with "Colourful memories", or how about this from the Chicago Tribune: "Well told", as if somehow they're commending this charming Frenchman on his competent command of English grammar. Some others have clearly read the book more carefully and offer far more useful commentary. Anthony Bourdain, ever-enthusiastic, has this to say: "I've been waiting for this book my whole life!... A well-written, funny, sad, informative, and always enchanting account of an incredible career.... An instant classic." And this brings me to Bourdain's own hefty tome, Les Halles Cookbook, which I recently purchased. This, by the way, is an excellent book, replete with classic French recipes accompanied by Bourdain's odd-ball commentary: "So, let's make fries. But do it right. There's no half-ass way to make French fries." You can almost feel him watching over your shoulder. "No, you f*cking idiot! You're supposed to blanche them first!" That's the kind of thing he might say if you didn't give due respect to your fries. The introduction alone is worth the 9.99GBP (reduced...) I paid for it. Yet the front carries this dubious endorsement from Gordon Ramsay: "A workable, usable book with attitude", which in my impression of Gordon Ramsay, translates as: "Yeah, this book is f*cking sh*t! Usable! I use it as a f*cking doorstop! And I don't care what people say about his attitude, I still think he's a f*cking a***hole!" Of course, that might just be me being unkind....

Here's another book I'm reading: The Tapestries, by Kien Nguyen, a novel set in early 20th Century Vietnam. Now, some people are just full of themselves. What the heck is this?

"The Tapestries stirs and bleeds and blushes, fully fleshed. Its every leaf glimmers with sunlit rain, its every anguish burns the eyes. It breathes... No detail escapes Nguyen's watchful eye, no shape or surface slumps into soft focus... The pictures, thousands of them and almost every one jewel-bright, tell the story... Under the swoosh of the story itself lie the backdrops crafted so exquisitely that their silver blades and lanterns gleam long after the drama fades from view."

I get the feeling that whoever it was at the San Francisco Chronicle who wrote this was suffering from a severe case of post-colonial romaticism. Firstly, the place was run by French people; there were probably bakeries selling baguettes to rich white people all over the place. Secondly, the poor guy was sold into slavery to the household of the magistrate who murdered his father. Thirdly, there were probably rats everywhere, and cockroaches, and malaria. And it was hot, and sweaty, and humid.

Dreamt that....

I've been having some very weird, random dreams recently. It started the other day, when I dreamt that I poured soured milk on my coffee. For some reason, this was very distressing. I then dreamt that I had to clean up a vatful of coffee ground sludge off my sink, which I presume was the leftovers from the coffee I poured down the sink the previous night. Anyone an expert on coffee dreams?

Yesterday, though, following dinner with SM at the Gourmet Burger Kitchen in Hampstead, I dreamt that we were having dinner at some other generic establishment, let's call it Franchise X, wherein the following conversation ensued at the end of the meal:

Me: "Excuse me, could we have a glass of tap water, please?"

Waiter: "I'm sorry, sir, we can't serve you tap water."

Me: "What do you mean, you can't serve us tap water?"

Waiter: "I can't just serve you tap water, you have to be eating something."

Me: "But we've just had a whole meal! You want us to have another one so we can get a glass of water?!?"

Waiter: "I'm sorry, sir, but that's our policy."

Me: "Well, how much do you want people to spend in order to get a glass of tap water?? Could I speak to your manager, please?"

Wait 15 minutes...... some guy in pyjamas and a toothbrush comes out of the kitchen and walks towards our table.

Toothbrush guy: "Excuse me, sir, you had a query about something?"

Me: "Are you the manager?"

Toothbrush guy: "We don't actually have managers, it goes against company policy. But I have the requisite skills and qualities for somebody in a managerial position."

A guy in pyjamas and a toothbrush? What the heck is that about? No doubt there are signs of a deep-seated anguish at the state of the service industry in this country. I have, on occasion, been charged 1p for tap water at restaurants, which is, frankly, just insulting. Oh, we know it's a legal requirement, but we're still gonna charge you for the effort of turning on the tap.... But, dude, what do they put in those burgers at GBK??