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48 rolls of toilet paper arrived from Whogivesacrap.com. Not hoarding - this is just what they send out to me every few months. I am rich beyond my wildest dreams. Please don’t burgle me.
I was excited to be asked on Off Menu (finally) albeit a special lock-down edition for Robin Ince’s excellent Cosmic Shambles initiative. But I made a decision today to not just choose my favourite foods, but to use the magical genie that is James Acaster to create meals that I wish I’d had or unreachable things from my own past or human history that were generally no longer available to me.
I was a bit nervous that this would be a derailing strategy, but I’d already blown my favourite ever main of lobster and mashed potato during a disastrous holiday in Barbados on a RHLSTP. And I thought that being more surreal would delight Acaster and infuriate Gamble so that was enough of a reason to push on.
I won’t spoil the show too much for you if you didn’t see it (you can still watch it -see below- and if the recording quality is good enough it will go out on the Off Menu Podcast feed too. But two of my favourite ever eating experiences - a jacket potato that I used to get on the way home when drunk at University and a pudding invented by my Grandma’s friend Bella, were actually quite hard for me to correctly recall and describe. Bella’s Pudding is genuinely my favourite ever pudding and fills me with happy memories of my grandma and meals with my family, but I can’t actually remember what it was, beyond delicious. It was some kind of set caramel base with a meringue topping (that I didn’t really care for). Was it hot or cold? How was the caramel bit made? Was it solid or mouse-like? I DON’T KNOW. Which led to lots of people suggesting what it might have been. Which I think was offensive to Bella. They were trying to suggest that she hadn’t invented it at all.
I am sure Bella has been dead for many years. I am not sure she was even still alive when my grandma made her recipe in the 70s, but I liked the fact that she was being discussed in front of an audience of several thousand people in 2020.
My mum can probably provide me with more details, (but do we want them?) but subsequent attempts to make the dessert by her and my sister never quite captured Bella’s (or maybe Doris’) genius.
I think it was a funny show in spite of my possible sabotage, though I think I might have confused some of the Off Menu fans with m apparent madness. It was interesting to see how well the tech worked (most of the time) as I am planning to start doing live RHLSTPs from next week. I think there will be increasing craziness in this kind of broadcast as we all try to cope with the mental rigours of incarceration.
You can see me almost sabotaging
Off Menu here.
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