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I said tht I’d stop
Writing Haiku when format
Became too much of a pain in the ass to adhere to, so this is the last one.

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Madge in Malawi
To buy another baby
For her collection.

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Thank you to Brownie
For the following picture…
Pope’s head up his ass.

{Actually had this pic in the haiku file for a few days, but Brownie beat me to the post….}

Update: 18 May 2010–Dutch Sex Shop to Give Away 2000 Pope Concoms

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Good lord the pigeons, attained from a local (well, Ely) butcher, were much as many of you would suspect…tough, gamy, and too small to make a proper meal from.  Still…they were fresh, plump, and meaty and if I hadn’t fucked up the preparation they would easily have been stupendous.

What we did was take the birds, finish the de-feathering and wash them thouroughly  (the remaining feathers being a call-to-arms!).

Then, they were doused in salt and pepper, stuffed with fresh mint from the window pots, smothered in sliced-and-crushed garlic and a few tabs of butter, then wrapped in foil and baked/roasted at 200 C for 20 minutes breast-down plus 15 breast-up plus 5 to-brown-without-foil.  This turned out to be tooo much as everything was too done.

We know this from the recipes but that wouldn’t have given us the full story and we might easily have mistaken this as our fault, entirely, and not just an amateur fuck up.  No, we had pigeon breasts prepared with wild mushrooms in a restaurant in Siena, Italy back in 2001 a few months before the big terrorist fuck-up in New York (I’ve got a long narrative on that at some point, as it screwed up my interview trip for the best job I ever turned down, and might be directly, as it turns out, responsible for everything that has happened to me since INCLUDING this bit of nonsense).  The restaurant was down in a wine cellar dating back to Rome–before the common era denoted by the start of the Christ myth.  There the meal came to us in courses, with the pigeon breast filleted and fat and tender and almost bloody they-were-so-rare.

The sides were easy to prep simultaneously:

And delicious and we had ordered several other entrees because we were fat americans celecbrating the impending move away from fat-America and son-of-a-bitch I only remember the pigeons and the wine…anyway, the ones today were tough and indelicate, and yet savory and with the getle flavours of a fine pate whilst still retaing the native chewy texture of a game fowl…I really missed the boat by letting them overcookk this time.

The sides were some carmelized onions and garlic with wood mushrooms and rice, then a bit of spanish asparagus.  We had a nice red wine but I can’t be bothered to drag it’s sorry Italian carcass out of the recycle bin.  The star was definitely the overcooked gamefoul.

Speaking of overcooked, we spent the post-feast warmth ordering tickets to see Neil Young and–amongst others–the Pretenders (Chrissy Hind was a writer for the NME back in the day) down in Hyde Park and for George Thoroughgood and the Delaware Destroyers (I last saw them in a biker bar I worked at outside Auburn Alabama–called the Roadhouse–in 1980) at the Corn Exchange in Cambridge.  This is really a good weekend.

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Jay McInerney
Is now a bourgeois parent…
That’s so surprising.

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We are feasting this weekend, to celebrate our stuff coming from Tucson on Monday (or so we expect and I’ve taken the day off to sort the unpacking).  Today’s feast is fish, tomorrow we are doing pigeon, and Monday is still up in the air but I’m leaning toward duck if I can get away to pick one up before then…might turn into pizza night, though.  We’ll see.

This recipe was modified only slightly from a Jamie Oliver flatfish entry.  I really don’t know what to do with these (apart from an awful lot of broiled and stuffed flounder I cooked down south of Atlanta in the late 70′s). Here’s what it is supposed to look like, finished:

After lunch yesterday we wandered through the Cambridge Market and grabbed some asparagus (for tomorrow) at the fruit and veg stand and some lemon sole at the fish monger.  The fish stand here is a lot smaller than the one back in the Bijlmer and the guy is a little weird and this fish cost almost 10 pounds, but I’m looking forward to it and if nothing else, there’s a guy that sets up a fish van out front of the Red Lion every Wednesday morning, for future seafood needs.

Lemon sole is a North Sea speciality, living on the bottom to depths of around 200 meters and weighing up to 2 kg.  Ours is about 3/4 kg (little more than 1.5 pounds) and may not make two servings, but we have loads of stuff backed up.

Washed the fish and scored the sides down to the bone, revealing a surprisingly rose colour meat.  This would later turn white under the 200 degree C heat, but for now it was admirable.  Chopped some tomatoes, fresh rosemary from the garden, squashed and sliced a few cloves of garlic and sliced some onion and mixed it all together with some salt and pepper then doused this lot with some balsamic vinagrette, a little lemon juice, and some olive oil.  The salad then got spread in a baking dish:

supposed to be salad onions (green onions, scallions)...

Next, I laid the fish over it and mixed some fresh parsley from the window pots, some black olives, and more lemon juice to go on top, then flicked a few tomatoes and onions from beneath up there as well and drizzled more olive oil over the mess.  This got covered while the potatoes blanched in some boiling water:

uncooked it's a very tough flesh

The taters come out after about ten minutes and are drained then shaken about to rough up the surfaces so they form a crust in the oven.  Normally I would put some rosemary on and cover with some minced garlic but it was hailing and pouring rain so I blew it off and just salt and peppered the lot and tossed them in olive oil…usually I would have melted some butter for the stinky fat and extra browning, but I’m feeling a bit lazy today.

We also made some spinach salads to go with the whole lot and I got an orvieto at the grocer to top it off.  Yum.

Presentation was shit, but the flavour kicked ass

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Look away if you must
When carnage like this is nigh.
Hold your loved ones close.

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Jamie had an interview with the Cambridgeshire Council this morning and we met for lunch at the Cow. The part where we were was mostly a pizzaria, but downstairs is sort of a loud, nightclub-ish place.  It has a tourist-trap reputation situated as it is in the midst of The Old Schools and indeed there were a share of them, but mostly folks in for lunch or an early pilsner or lager (this is NOT an ale house).

The pie was very good, surprisingly enough, and we split a chicken-Caesar salad that included dry, some iceberg (yuk) lettuce, a few olives and some bread crusts. The 12″ pizza came with a glass of red wine for 5.95, so I had that with my half and then finished an Amstel pint with the salad.  Yum.

There’s another bar upstairs which was closed until later.  We left to grab some sole and asparagus in the market 50 meters away then off to the bus back to Stretham for our Friday drinks at the local (Red Lion).

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Russians are watching
Pulp Fiction in italian.
A Royale With Cheese?

[I love working in academia.]

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I’ve seen this before
And thought it was just a joke:
Boring engineers.[We just got new phone directories and they have, just this year, deleted this particular entry.]

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Update 21 Oct 2009:  Big surprise, the kitchen is dirty:

http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/cn_news_home/DisplayArticle.asp?ID=457672

===========================original post===========================

I’ve been in a lot of military bars before this one.  I’ve been in a lot of college bars before this one. And, god knows, I’ve been in a lot of bars where people have discovered DNA.  But, the Eagle is kind of special in spite of its best efforts at being a tourist trap.

It was here that Francis Crick and James Watson announced they had discovered the secret of life on 28 February 1953.  The Cavendish Labs, then right around the corner, filled the pub at lunchtime so the rest of Watson and Crick’s colleagues were there.

The back bar has a replica ceiling commemorating the graffiti burnt into the roof by the RAF and US Air Force patrons, but it might as well be wallpaper. The whole interior was refitted in the early 1980s to give the appearance of a much older and longer and more naturally derived feeling of historical accuracy, but in the late afternoon light on a weekday when the only tourists there were, well, me you can really see the artifice.

Too bad about that, as the pub dates back to around 1600.  It has a nice beer garden that backs up onto Corpus Christi College Cambridge and the gate leads into its McCrum Lecture Hall.  The pub was actually reopened by the head of the College after the refurbishment mentioned above. It is a Greene King pub, so I had an Abbot and headed on my way.

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A copy of the
Guardian and a liter
Of milk before work.

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Appended below (23 March 2009):

Original post, 25 Feb 2009:

I walked about the neighborhood near work looking for a lunch place the last Tuesday in January and saw a sign out for steak and chips £4.95.  Popped into the Globe Ale House to find that this is the Monday special, so had a pint of Black Sheep Bitter and a plate of Fish and Chips instead.  Delicious, but I saw the Steak and Chips (and green peas) and it would’ve been a great deal at the regular £9.95.

Small pub and a bit of a dive, but it has a beer garden and appears to have an upstairs.  The large window in front of me aimed at the street where the foot traffic was varied and interesting.  It’s at 21 Hills Road, Cambridge if you plan to visit.

23 March 2009:

Really was looking forward to the Monday steak special which has since turned into the Monday 1/2 a roast chicken special (the last serving of which was delivered to the table to my right as I walked in).  Got the steak at full price (6.95), anyway, and an ale that seemed a bit foul but I don’t remember the name of.  Tough steak, but cooked nicely with peas, a salad, chips and onion rings.  Good value, but wouldn’t go out of my way a second time.

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Like a bartender
The McDonald’s Staff should say,
“Mate, you’ve had enough.”

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Newspaper reading,
John Martyn listening, and
Vodka lemonade

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I biked into Upware off some farm roads and spotted the sign for the Five Miles From Anywhere No Hurry Inn so felt compelled to hurry for some lunch.  There were a bunch of schoolkids around 9 or 10 years old boarding a bus and apparently they had spent the day at the river park that is part of the Five Miles–the back garden is gigantic and right in a curve of the River Cam.

The menu had pheasant Wellington, fresh river trout, and partridge on it with a warning to watch out for shot in the meal (I assumed this didin’t include the fish plates). But, arriving at 2:35 (they stop serving at 2:30) and interupting the lunch of the barmaid encouraged me to have an ale and a packet of crisps and a look around. My beer choice was a very hoppy blond ale called Polar Star by Buntingford, but I later couldn’t find anything about it on their website. It was really delicious, filled with acidic back notes and reminded me almost of a lambic it had such fruit to it.

This place is kind of remote and deserves the name, for sure, but as you can see from this map it is only 4.7 miles from my place (making it, therefore, somewhere in the range of 0.3 and 9.7 miles from anywhere).  Sounds about right.

It has the look and feel of a ski lodge inside: wooden beams and furnishings, cavernous, big sloping wall of window out onto a deck and the hilly run down to the river.  There are lot’s of tables outside as well but would probably recommend just bringing a blanket out of your canoe and finding a nice spot to enjoy your drinks.  If you stay for food (served all day on Sunday), there’s a fancy-schmansy white-table-cloth dining room, too.  We’ll probably come back to check out the blues band they booked the weekend after Easter.

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Bought a bike in Cambridge for Jamie and started the long journey home.  There’s a bike bridge over the River Cam that dumps you in front of the Green Dragon which was packed, overflowing with custom out onto the green under the bridge.  I didn’t have the inclination to stand in line today, but it is one of the older pubs in town and definitely on the short list to go.  Down Water Street before the start of the riverside bike path (part of the #11 National Bike Road by the way),  I spotted the Penny Ferry.

Around back there was one car parked and one old guy sitting at a picnic table talking on a cell phone.  I locked up and heard him say, “I gotta go, gotta customer,” as I headed into the abandoned beach bar.

“What ales are on the pumps?” I have learned to ask so I don’t miss out.

“Nought.  I am just opening for the summer and they have to settle another day or two.  You’re potentially my first customer this year.”

“In that case I’ll make it easy.  Give me a Fosters and some pork scratchings.”

It was cool outside.  That is to say, really hip, with tables right on the water and a sunny day with a light breeze and one day till Spring (this was Friday afternoon) and flowers and trees bursting into bloom before your eyes.  The bar guy had Blue Trane by John Coltrane piped out to the decks and all was right with the world, as far as I was concerned.

It was also a cool 52 deg F (11 deg C), so I drank up, crunched through my deep fried pig stomach and headed on up the river path.  Now that the Penny Ferry is open and ready to help out with the drinking public, it should be easier to hit the Dragon next time.

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It was apple juice,
Essentially, but seven
Point five A. B. V.

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You’re not gonna cook…
What shall you have delivered?
Chicken vindaloo!

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Retrieved some post at the Royal Mail depot in Ely and walked up the hill toward the bus.  Stopped, of course, for a pint on the way and found the place reminiscent of the sort of 1950′s movie set version of a 16th century pub. That is, except for the 300 pound (21 stone, 6 pounds) landlord sitting around in some sort of odd surfing attire.

I opted to sit near the local at the far end of the bar, instead, and found him to be very drunk and probably dangerously violent given the right circumstances.  These might include having a better job than him, having a quick–or indeed, any–wit, or being foreign.  Our chat lasted the duration of my pint of Abbot and I retired to the loo out by the very pleasant beer garden, then off to catch the 5:05 bus, narrowly skirting disaster once again.