Gaz Cooks Crap

If, like me, you have a children or childrens, or a broken telly that only shows Channel 5 (shudder), you'll probably have come across an excellently amusing kid's show called Ben & Holly's Little Kingdom. It's by the same people who make Peppa Pig, but is considerably better - mainly because regardless of it being for kids it's one of those shows that starts preposterous and gets progressively more silly and unhinged as time goes on. You know - like Father Ted. Or Question Time. Anyway, one of the characters in B&H LK (which I've just inadvertently realised looks like some sort of special brand of fags when abbreviated) is Nanny Plum, who is renowned as an excellent cook. An excellent cook who, in one episode, makes a load of terrifyingly stodgy recipes. I could explain the plot of the episode in question in detail, but to be honest if you haven't seen it it'd be much easier if you just watched a copy of it that I absolutely haven't...

A few years ago, we decided to try cooking a duck for dinner. And before you dash off to alert the Royal Society for the Prevention of Birds of a potential avian misdemeanour, I don't mean by this that we went out, clonked a passing mallard on the beak and shoved it in the oven. Apart from anything else I've never hunted any sort of animal in my life so wouldn't have the first idea how to trap one (a fireworks-stuffed bread roll tied to a hammer, maybe?). No, this was a shop-bought specimen, and the idea was we were going to do some sort of extra-poncey Sunday roast. However, as you may have spotted from the terms 'try', 'the idea was' and 'absolute shitfest', things didn't exactly go to plan - and if you're wondering where that latter phrase fits in, it's coming up right now: instead, it was an absolute shitfest. You see, everyone knows ducks are quite lardy. Unlike your more land-based eating birds such as chicken, turkey, McNuggets...

Galas are funny things. You only ever seem to get 3 types - luncheons, swimming, and pies. And while you could feasibly eat the latter at the former, you'd probably not want to do the middle one too soon after or you'd be very sick indeed, and no one likes doing lengths around a load of regurgitated eggs. They'd even shut the council pool for that, and there's usually a dead seagull and a miasma of fag butts in the shallow end there - and that's on a good day. Oh, and there's gala bingo as well I suppose, but that's just full of pensioners and hen dos, so they probably wouldn't want pie so much as Werther's originals for the first lot and jugs of novelty cocktails with risque names such as "Crabs on the Beach", "Jogger's Nipple" and "Celebrity Sexy Love Island Iced Tea" for the second. But back to gala pie, which for the uninitiated is basically a pork pie with an egg-based truncheon shoved up it. And let's f...

So picture the scene. You're a busy executive, and spend most of your days selling, I dunno, office carpet or water filters or something equally shit. You get home from the trendy wine bar where you hang out with all the other filofax-toting hipsters after work for a quick break before going clubbing and need a meal, but on no! The Uber to come and pick you up to take you to HOLLYWOOD DREAMZ nightclub will be here in 15 minutes - that means there's not even time for you to cook one of Jamie Oliver's 15-minute meals, and if you don't eat you'll faint on the dancefloor while rocking out to Coldplay and be the laughing stock of the office tomorrow! Well sod that lark, because I'm here to save that fictional day and do the quick even quicker. It's like Usain Bolt vs a Usain Bolt clone (or is it 'an Usain Bolt clone'? Does a/an still work if it's a name?) and the clone happens to have motorbikes for legs and if that wasn't inexplicable enough an...

So here we are, a mere 3 weeks and 2 days or so since my last post. Not so much striking while the iron is hot as striking after the iron has been in the fridge for a fortnight and then kicked into a snowdrift. Nevertheless, I've got hold of the iron now and regardless of temperature I'm striking with it for better or worse. And as it turns out this week, one of those 2 options turns out to be entirely and biliously correct. Cheesecakes, then. Or more accurately, my idiotic idea that I should try to make something that's true to its actual name. Because let's face it, cheesecakes don't taste of cheese, do they? In fact, it tends to be that the less they taste of cheese as opposed to e.g. chocolate, strawberries and...er...New York (to name 3 popular cheesecake flavours), the better. So why not make ones that actually taste of cheese? After all, cheese - albeit mild cheese - is the main ingredient. How wrong can it go to just add more of what it's made of alrea...

Before being too old/too dead to do so, Mick Jagger and David Bowie once sang how summer was here and therefore the time was apparently right for dancing in the street. Which is plainly idiotic - if summer is here, it's hot and therefore the last thing you want to be doing is physical activity outside. Granted, "summer's here and the time is right for gentle exercise (if well hydrated) in an air-conditioned gymnasium" is a bit less catchy, but then I'm not the one flapping about outside sweating profusely just because 2 middle-aged rockers doing a Motown cover gave me some questionable advice about suitable  al fresco activities to do in warm weather. Anyway, instead of hastening the onset of heatstroke, another option of something to do when summer is here is cool off with a lovely cold ice cream. But wait! Ice cream also melts in the sun, and then goes all dribbly and sticky and is a disaster. Now, I'm aware that some people quite like ice cream when it g...

So since I last posted, I thought I was moving house, then I wasn't, then my cooker broke. Hence I've done buggerall for weeks. Hooray! But enough about me - you just want to see someone gagging on something unpleasant without the risk of having to type 'video of someone gagging on something unpleasant' into Google, and then having to run an exceedingly lewd gauntlet before finding what you're after. This week, what with it allegedly being summer (note: as I type this, it is of course pissing down) I didn't fancy cooking much so thought I'd branch out into refreshing, light summery desserts. Only in the case of this blog, the branch I've branched out onto has a terrible case of Dutch Elm disease and is about to fall off. So here, for your rancid entertainment, are some variations on everyone's favourite slightly better than the crappy Ski yoghurts we had as a kid but still not actually THAT great curdled milk product: fruit corners. Ingredients:...