The northlondonhippy

Archive for January, 2010

I bet hav­ing a recipe as my top post con­fused a lot of my new vis­i­tors and that was the case until I posted this par­tic­u­larly unplanned foray into shar­ing my thoughts.

This is not a food blog. A recipe is some­thing out of the ordi­nary. Nor­mal ser­vice has now resumed.

As I sit here, typ­ing away, we are around 9 hours from the expected Apple Tablet announce­ment. Its pretty big news so I expect you’ve already heard all about it. Don’t worry, I’m not going to go on about it too much.

I’ve got 2 pre­dic­tions, one is an easy one that’s prob­a­bly true, the other is a long shot.

Pre­dic­tion one: It will be a pre­mium prod­uct with a pre­mium price for early adopters. Yes, I mean it will be very expen­sive, but will be cheaper in a year.

Pre­dic­tion two: It will be called ‘iBook”, which used to be the name of one of their best sell­ing lap­tops. They already own it, so it would be an easy yet inven­tive choice. I am far less cer­tain of this one and will be pleas­antly sur­prised if I am right. I’ll also brag a lot about it too.

I’ve wanted some­thing like what’s expected today for years. Yes, I will buy one as soon as they are avail­able though I am guess­ing it will be like the orig­i­nal iPhone, sold is the USA exclu­sively for 6 months, then launched in the UK. That will be frustrating!

Today isn’t just tablet day. Had my mother still been alive, today would have been her 80th birth­day, but she missed it by around 13 months. I miss her, a lot.

At least Apple were nice enough to sched­ule their announce­ment on the same date as my mother’s birth­day, its a wel­come distraction.

So roll on 18:00gmt, when the big show starts in Cal­i­for­nia. I’ll be online, fol­low­ing the announce­ment live as best I can and I’ll be tweet­ing my impres­sions as well. That is, assum­ing the entire inter­net doesn’t come crash­ing down to a screech­ing halt under the weight of all that Apple Tablet hype.

Oh yes, that’s my last pre­dic­tion, Twit­ter is going to crash like Oceanic Air 815 as soon as Steve Jobs takes the stage. Maybe I should just plan on tweet­ing again tomorrow.

First of all, to avoid any con­fu­sion, there is no such thing as a “hippy crab”. If you go to your local fish­mon­ger demand­ing one, he will look at you like you are crazy.

You’re not crazy, are you?

I don’t nor­mally post recipes, but in the real world, I’m actu­ally a pretty damn good cook. I’ve been cook­ing for decades, hav­ing honed my skills by watch­ing TV chefs over the years and mix­ing and match­ing the tech­niques I’ve picked up along with com­bin­ing inter­est­ing ingre­di­ents. Its like art with food, only hand-eye coor­di­na­tion doesn’t play as big a part.

I’ve seen crab risotto on restau­rant menus, but I’ve never tried it. That doesn’t mean I can’t make a good one. And if I have noth­ing to com­pare it to, then it must be per­fect already.

What fol­lows is my made-up recipe for crab risotto, with help­ful hints along the way. I have cooked risotto many times in the past, so I am not a total beginner.

You’ll need:
– one medium yel­low onion, chopped
– 2 fresh cloves of gar­lic, chopped
– but­ter and olive oil
– 500g Arbo­rio Rice (its meant for risotto)
– 1.5 litres of stock (chicken or veg­etable)
– 20cl white wine (appx one glass)

For fin­ish­ing:
– 100g white crab meat (some­times called lump meat, its already cooked)
– 10g chopped chives
– 10g chopped tar­ragon
– juice of one fresh lemon
– cream or creme fraiche
– 50g freshly grated parme­san cheese
– 50g frozen peas
– 10cl sherry (not cook­ing sherry, the real stuff)

Here’s a photo of the main ingredients:

Hippy Crab Risotto Ingredients

(Miss­ing: Yel­low onion, frozen peas, sherry, but­ter, olive oil)

You need a large sauce pan (or pot if you pre­fer) and you will only need the lid at the very end, so put it to one side.

Put the saucepan on the hob over a low heat and let it warm up a bit. Cover the bot­tom of the pot with a bit of olive oil and a bit of but­ter, basi­cally enough so when you add the onion and gar­lic, its cov­ered and coated with it. You don’t need to use extra vir­gin olive oil, cheaper oil is fine. Extra vir­gin is cold pressed, so its a bit point­less to use when you are going to heat it up. Save it to dress your salad!

Sweat the onions and gar­lic until they are soft, ten­der and a bit translucent.

sweat­ing the onions and garlic

While the onions and gar­lic are cook­ing, mix up your 1.5 litres of stock. I use Swiss Bouil­lon Veg­etable Stock, but you can use any­thing one that you like. You can do this in a sec­ond saucepan, but my method is to mix 500mls at a time in a pyrex mea­sur­ing jug and an elec­tric kettle.

Swiss Bouil­lon

You can’t just use any rice for risotto, Arbo­rio is the best. The rea­son is the high starch con­tent, which is what makes it thicken.

Gallo Organic Arbo­rio Rice

Once the onions and gar­lic are soft, turn the heat up high and add the 500g of Arbo­rio Rice to the pot, stir­ring con­tin­u­ously, so it doesn’t burn, for around 2 min­utes. You want the rice to be infused with the flavours and oil.

fry­ing the rice for 2 minutes

After 2 min­utes, lower the heat and then can begin to add your hot stock. The nor­mal advice is to ladle it in grad­u­ally from a sec­ond pot, and as the rice absorbs it, add a bit more, but I don’t do it that way. Instead I add the stock a 1/3 at a time, in 500ml incre­ments. The heat should be on lower, so the stock simmers.

stock added to rice

Whether you add the stock in a lit­tle at a time, or in stages, its impor­tant you keep on stir­ring. Also add the 20cl of white wine. From here, it will take about 20 min­utes for the rice to cook and for the tex­ture to become creamy and sauce-like.

Once the rice is cooked, give it a lit­tle taste to see if it has the cor­rect con­sis­tency. If it is still too firm, cook it longer, but the rice should not become too mushy either. Al dente is what I am look­ing for, it should have a lit­tle bite, but not be too hard or soft. You’ll know it when you taste it. That’s the basis for all risotto recipes, from here you can mix in what you like.

Now, time to add the addi­tional ingre­di­ents to fin­ish the dish. Add the crab meat and stir it in, fol­lowed by the lemon juice. The fresh white crab meat is the one lux­ury ingre­di­ent and I’ve used Cor­nish because I know it is sweet and very tasty. You could eas­ily used tinned, or a mix of brown and white meat.

Fresh white crab meat

Once its all mixed through, add the frozen peas, they will quickly defrost and heat up. Then add the juice of one fresh lemon and the sherry and mix them in.

Time for the fresh herbs, toss the tar­ragon and chives into the pot and stir them in too. You can chop the tar­ragon with a sharp knife, but its rec­om­mended you use a pair of kitchen scis­sors to cut the chives.

Fresh herbs

Finally, add a large spoon­ful of the creme fraiche and a the grated parme­san cheese and stir some more. Put the lid on the pot, switch off the heat and let it sit for a few min­utes, so every­thing is at a nice even tem­per­a­ture. Give it a final taste, to check the sea­son­ing. I’d add freshly ground black pep­per at this stage, and salt only if I thought it really needed it. With the cheese, crab and stock, the salt will prob­a­bly be OK, I don’t use much salt when I cook, so its up to you.

The dish is now fin­ished and ready to serve, you can hold back some chives and grated cheese to gar­nish the top once its on the plate.

The fin­ished risotto, ready to be served

Serve it with a fresh green salad and warm crusty bread. Yummm.

Hippy Crab Risotto is served!

And that my friends and hip­py­fans is Hippy Crab Risotto. If you cook it up your­self, email me and let me know how you make out! Enjoy!

Yes­ter­day, leg­is­la­tors in the US state of Cal­i­for­nia took the first real step towards a fully legalised, reg­u­lated and taxed cannabis mar­ket. Ear­lier this week, the US state of New Jer­sey legalised cannabis for med­ical use.

All over Amer­ica, atti­tudes and laws are chang­ing and chang­ing fast.

What are we doing wrong here in the United Kingdom?

Lots, by the look of it. How is it pos­si­ble that we are falling behind Amer­ica on this very impor­tant issue?

A few years ago, the sit­u­a­tion was reversed. The atti­tude here to weed was relax­ing, Tony Blair and David Blun­kett down­graded cannabis to Class C, mak­ing pos­ses­sion a very minor offence. In Amer­ica, so much as a seed or a used hash pipe was enough in most states to get you a lengthy, manda­tory prison sentence.

Cannabis didn’t remain Class C for long, as Gor­don Brown asked the ACMD to review its sta­tus. The ACMD did just that, twice and rec­om­mended that it remain in Class C. That was unac­cept­able to our very des­per­ate and weak, make-believe Prime Min­is­ter and he pushed ahead with restor­ing cannabis to to Class B. Class B increased penal­ties for pos­ses­sion, but had no effect on pro­duc­tion or dis­tri­b­u­tion, the penal­ties are the same for either clas­si­fi­ca­tion. Gor­don wanted to send a “strong mes­sage” that cannabis was a “dan­ger­ous, deadly drug”.

Now, you can ask any teenager if cannabis is lethal and once they stop laugh­ing, they will set you straight. Cannabis is in no way lethal, but our cur­rent gov­ern­ment and rul­ing party don’t have a prob­lem lying to the gen­eral pub­lic about any­thing. These are the same shit­bags that invaded Iraq on the basis of utter fab­ri­ca­tion, so a lit­tle white lie about weed won’t cause any issues with their consciences.

Well, I can tell you right now, its caus­ing major issues with mine!

Amer­ica is mov­ing apace to legalise weed. This is a huge shift in atti­tude and approach from their pre­vi­ous pol­icy of “just say no” and the war on drugs. Its seismic!

Amer­ica is the most liti­gious coun­try in the world, if there were any risks to cannabis, some­one would be get­ting sued for dam­ages, whether its the gov­ern­ment for allow­ing it or the peo­ple who pro­vide it. Amer­ica has accepted that cannabis is not a bad thing, but a ben­e­fi­cial prod­uct that can help mil­lions medically.

C. Everett Koop, for­mer Sur­geon Gen­eral of the United States declared that cannabis was the “most ther­a­peu­ti­cally ben­e­fi­cial sub­stance known to man” years ago, but it is only now that Amer­ica is accept­ing his assess­ment. At least they got there in the end.

We are still so far away from tak­ing a com­mon sense approach that I’m not sure what to do. Gor­don Brown, in his igno­rance and desire to appear strong on drugs, has set the cause back at least a decade. Its time we regain some of our lost ground.

Its not just Amer­ica, many coun­tries have relaxed their drug poli­cies to reflect com­mon sense, the most recent being the Czech Repub­lic. How could the UK be lag­ging behind them?

We’re lag­ging behind almost everyone.

I want to change that. I am going to change that.

I just don’t know how yet.

Every jour­ney starts with a first step and this is mine. My goal for 2010 is to com­bat the igno­rance and stu­pid­ity that is UK drug pol­icy. Its time for all decent, upstand­ing, oth­er­wise law abid­ing res­i­dents of this fine coun­try to stand up and demand that they are not crim­i­nalised for enjoy­ing a smoke.

We can fight the lies, we can fight the igno­rance. We can fight, fight fight until we get what we want, which is a legalised, reg­u­lated and taxed cannabis mar­ket. The time is now!

A year from now, we will be closer to our goal.You have my word on it.

Mar­tin Luther King, the famous and revered Amer­i­can civil rights activist once said, “…there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advo­cate obey­ing just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral respon­si­bil­ity to obey just laws. Con­versely, one has a moral respon­si­bil­ity to dis­obey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augus­tine that, “an unjust law is no law at all.””

Happy New Year fuckers!

I hope you’ve all bought new cal­en­dars and you aren’t still writ­ing 2009 on your cheques.

Do peo­ple still write cheques?

I do, some­times, but that really doesn’t have any­thing to do with any­thing, so I’ll swiftly avoid the diver­sion in that dead end direction.

Instead, I’ve come to share the lat­est news from the land of your favourite north London-based hippy. Its actu­ally kind of big news.

Dig this, I sub­mit­ted “the offi­cial northlon­don­hippy iPhone app” to Apple yes­ter­day, it should be avail­able on the iTunes store very soon for your mobile surf­ing pleasure.

This isn’t one of my lit­tle funny wind-ups, its an hon­est to god, actual app that runs natively on the iPhone and iPod Touch.

How cool is that?

On the hippy’s cool-o-meter, its off the fuck­ing scale of cool­ness into a brand new realm of cool that has yet to be dis­cov­ered by nor­mal folk. Once the app is avail­able, that new realm of cool will be yours for the taking.

The app deliv­ers in an iPhone friendly for­mat, all of my inter­net con­tent. If I pub­lish some­thing, it will mag­i­cally pop up on the app. You will receive my lat­est posts from this web­site, as well as hav­ing easy access to my busy Twit­ter feed. I’ve also included my Twit­Pics and YouTube videos, which are all eas­ily acces­si­ble inside the app.

How much would you pay for a northlon­don­hippy iPhone app?

Really? I kind of expected that, which is why it will be avail­able to down­load for FREE. That’s a price I’m sure you can afford.

My aim is to make this app the num­ber one northlon­don­hippy iPhone app in the world. I don’t think it will be very hard to do, as it will be the only northlon­don­hippy app avail­able, at least offi­cially. I’m sure all the other kids will be cre­at­ing their own ver­sions to com­pete with mine.

Ah-hem.

I don’t want any of you to think I went off and learned how to write code for an iPhone, because I didn’t. I used a web­site called www.appmakr.com which auto­mated the process to such a degree that even a moron like me could do it. If you need an app made for the iPhone from RSS feeds, you could do a lot worse than try this site out.

I will of course, reserve final judge­ment on App­Makr until I see my fin­ished app on my own iPhone, but so far I am very happy with the ser­vice they pro­vide. You will be too once you are rock­ing my app on your mutha­fuckin’ iPhone.

Keep watch­ing for my announce­ment con­firm­ing that my app is live on iTunes. Until then, you can join me on some ten­ter­hooks as I try to patiently wait for Apple’s approval process peo­ple to what­ever voodoo that they do.

While I am quite pleased about my app, I am less excited about my birth­day this month. Is there a law that says you have to have birth­days? Can we get it repealed?

Some years I am not too both­ered about being another year older, but this year is not one of them.

I sup­pose a lot has to do with the awk­ward­ness of my impend­ing age…forty-fucking-seven. Its an odd num­ber in more ways then one. Mainly, it marks my decent into my “late forties”.

I don’t like the word “late”, it makes me think of death. I think about death enough already, I don’t need stu­pid words tacked on to my age to remind me that the mor­tal coil is get­ting dis­tinctly shorter every year.

My bones tell me, my mus­cles tell me, my world weary expres­sion tells me, all pretty much on a daily basis. I am plumb­ing the depths of mid­dle age.

I’ve been con­tem­plat­ing hav­ing my very own mid-life cri­sis, but I can’t seem to set­tle on what form it will take. On the menu are:

- a grown-up gap year to trek through the Andes
– a hair trans­plant
– 3 months of Swiss shin stretch­ing
– a small, red, con­vert­ible sports car
– a sex­u­ally expe­ri­enced 19 year old girl on the side
– a men­tal breakdown

I reckon to make it a proper mid-life cri­sis, I need to chose at least 3 things off that list, then pur­sue them with gusto.

Trekking any­where is out, because it sounds too much like hard work.

A hair trans­plant just sounds messy and expen­sive and for what? To look like Elton John? No thanks.

If I was going to have my shins stretched, I should have done it 20–30 years ago, but it didn’t exist back then. I don’t think I am going to live long enough to make the pain & suf­fer­ing worth it. You only gain a cou­ple of inches in height any­way, so screw it, I’d still be short.

The lit­tle red con­vert­ible sports car is cliche and I don’t really like red as a colour for a car. Unfor­tu­nately, because of my age, red is the only colour a car dealer will sell me, at least for a 2 door rag­top. I’ve checked, its a car dealer bylaw, right their in their charter.

Does it all make sense now? That’s why you only ever see bald, fat middle-aged guys in red Fer­raris (or Corvettes if you are state­side). And all this time, you thought they were choos­ing the colour. Now you know, its the law.

The nine­teen year old girl seems on the sur­face to be an easy option and if I was a mem­ber of the Rolling Stones they would be queu­ing up at my door, but I’m not, so they’re not. Besides, 19 year olds haven’t lived enough to be inter­est­ing, so unless I can cram a 50 year old’s brain into their 19 year old body, I don’t see much point. And if I am hon­est, the only way I am going to get a hot lit­tle 19 year old is to rent one for an hour. I cer­tainly couldn’t afford the care and feed­ing of one full time and I am a hippy on a bud­get, so this is out too.

A men­tal break­down? Don’t I mainly have them on the inter­net or as it is oth­er­wise known, a run­ning blog.

This web­site is my ther­apy, which I guess makes all of you my shrinks. Every time I ask a ques­tion, you just have to say “well, what do you think?” Go on, its easy and I just saved you seven tedious years of uni­ver­sity and med­ical training.

Email me for your cer­tifi­cate or degree from the Uni­ver­sity of North Lon­don (hippy). That and a pound will get you a ride on a bus.