Say cheese

What, I wonder, would cause the most unease if, during a dinner party, you revealed that you had purchased an artefact central to that dinner party second hand on eBay? Charity shops, of course, won’t take any kind of food processor or food preparation gear because no matter how well scrubbed, there’s always the danger that listeria bacteria lurks in the blender.

I reckon that a second hand barbeque has to be up there. God knows the grill of mine is ‘seasoned to perfection’, that is, has not been cleaned properly in months, my cleaning routine consisting of sterilising the thing with flame from the gas burners, relying on the gristly globules to burn themselves off and chipping off the worst of the smoking residue with a rusty prong.

But I think that the number one device that would case second-hand fear would be a fondue maker. (Maker? Machine? Heater?) It is that perfect storm of dairy in an unnatural form (melted…ugg), kitch association (if a couple own a fondue kit (Kit! That’s it, it’s a kit!) then it doesn’t automatically mean they also own a sauna and are swingers, but it’s a safe enough assumption), and the ghosts of a thousand sad cheesy meals that might have been cooked using that kit.

It also poses the fundamental question, what sort of person sells their fondue kit, and what sort of person buys it? The solution to the last question is – somebody who has invited you to dinner thinking you are the sort of person who likes fondue. Prey that that is the extent of their gross character misjudgement and that they haven’t assumed you also like ‘foudue’.

Marinade musings

Weatherwise, it's been hot and sultry recently. Over the weekend this was very good as it allowed me to sit in the back garden all day not taking the opportunity to read Tennessee Williams in the sort of soupy, southern atmosphere he manages to evoke even if you're reading him on a freezing railway platform in December but instead listening to Test Match Special, reading the papers, swearing once again never to buy the papers as they just irritate the hell out of me, and alternating refreshing hot drinks (tea) with refreshing cool drinks (cola) before, wired to the eyeballs on caffeine, I decided that it was a respectable hour to switch to alcohol (five o'clock, red wine, it’s acceptable, and there’s an end to it).

The other benefit of the hot weather is being able to use the barbeque on a regular basis. This has resulted in what I am pleased to describe as a well-seasoned grill, what the Food Standards Agency would call a type two health hazard and what the local fox population probably describe as the second most tempting smell in the postcode (the first being the bins of the family a few doors down, but only because they don't use that ultra-spicy marinade that I favour).

Cooking over fire though is, without doubt, the most satisfying of all the culinary arts. Possibly because it taps into a primal urge, possibly because it's associated with good weather and probably because you need a dousing agent on hand at all times and a large glass of red is ideal.

Even vegetables taste good, this is essentially because they have been cooked on a grill that retains the ghost of a thousand meaty dinners. God knows how I'm going to cope when the weather changes but dousing anything green on my plate in gravy has to be an option. Either that or simply crumbling an OXO cube over my salad.

Tibbles ahoy!

Like farting scooterboys and discreet alcoholism, one of the features of suburban life is the feline felon poster. One sees these sad little adverts pinned on trees, announcing that a cat is missing, giving details and a picture. Once I saw a poster for a missing tortoise and was so struck by the sense of adventure the thing must have had that when I got home I was stirred to make a quick survey of the garden.

A couple of months ago the stakes were raised with a mailshot advertising a missing cat, with a picture. Cats never take good pictures. They always have that sly look that makes it hard to guess what they are thinking, although it’s a sure bet it’s either ‘I am about to lick my anus’, ‘I bet you can’t guess which of your shoes I’ve pooped in’, ‘I have nothing but contempt for you’, or simply ‘I am actually a demon from hell in cat form. And I’ve pooped in your shoe.’

Underneath was a mobile ‘phone number to ring if you spotted Mr Tibbles. I thought little of it; the cat had probably either been kidnapped by vivisectionists or was currently adorning the front bumper of a car like a very surprised Garfield doll. I put the poster down with the absent thought that I would send some crank text messages to the mobile while I was drunk and thought no more of it.

Normally, wild visitors to the Macnabbs estate are few. There are nocturnal foxes and during the day there are the plumpest pigeons to be found outside the pages of children’s books. So when I saw a cat skulking around, I remembered the poster. The problem with cats is that they all look alike and the damn thing was always gone before I could make a positive ID or pump up the pressure on the super-soaker.

The other day, there was a break in the clouds and the rain stopped for a short while. This called for a sacrifice of the choicest cuts of meat to the weather gods and so I fired up the barbeque.

One of the many great things about barbequing is that the barbeque grill is one of the few cooking surfaces that is not so much cleaned as occasionally scraped off. This is because the first thing you cook when you fire up a barbeque is the bacteria that have managed to get a foothold there since the last time you cooked. This means that my barbeque, when heated, smells of the ghosts of feasts past. Mainly chicken and fish.

Which is probably what attracted Mr Tibbles. Returning to the barbeque to see if it was ready to cook on yet (gauged by the amount of smoke coming off it – boy scouts camp fire level for fish, Vatican scale for chicken and ‘oh my Christ evacuate the town the chemical works is alight!’ for meat) I saw Mr Tibbles himself taking a close interest. Fearing that I was about to see the phrase ‘scalded cat’ brought to life in front of me, I shooed him off and made the call. ‘Have you got your cat back’?

It turns out that Mr Tibbles has been leading a double life. His owner explained that he was dividing his time between her and another family a dozen or so houses along and that my back garden was part of his cat parcourt route between houses. The owner spoke as one betrayed. I gathered from our short conversation that Mr Tibbles had had quite a lot of money spent on him at the vets and was on a strict macrobiotic diet at home. This is probably what drove him to a life of being tickled and living off tasty kitchen scraps down the road. It appeared that the two families now operated a sort of cat-share but I got the impression the owner was confident that her approach to cat rearing was going to win the permanent affection of Mr Tibbles.

Unlikely, from the way he was sniffing my chicken scented smoke, I’d say that cat has not ruled out the possibility of three dinners a day.