A forkful of blah-blah

At the grand old age of forty-blah-blah, I am at last the proud owner of....cutlery. Now please don’t get me wrong, here; I haven’t been eating with my fingers for the past few decades (although it has to be said, there’s nowt wrong with that). But as far as my personal experience goes, cutlery drawers have comprised of a mix’n’match jumble of pronged, curved, dented and semi-blunt instruments collected over years of house moves, donations and acquisitions - until now.

Now it has to be said that I love my current cutlery drawer. I love the battered old tablespoons that I think once belonged to my grandma and the forks with leaves engraved into the handles that most definitely did. I love the knife that fell into my bag (and not in a Scouse way - it literally, honestly did just that) when I was eating at a certain restaurant in Bath (I didn’t know where it had disappeared to until I came home). I love the teaspoon with a picture of a very eccentric cat on the handle, another teaspoon that came home with me from my very first trip to New York (long story) and I the little dessert forks with a diamond shape stamped into the base of the prongs (I used them as a 10 year old, and still use them lots today). But for a woman who hosts a lot of dinner parties, the current cutlery just will not do. While mismatched, reclaimed, or authentically vintage dishes are fine (and just a teensy bit chic), mad cutlery doesn’t always work well. I recently declared that I’d get married again just so I could put cutlery on the gift list. Yesterday, while I sat outside the lovely Chandos Deli on Broadmead bemoaning the horrors of Bristol’s Cabot Circus (of which more later), He saved me the hassle of finding the right dress and making cupcakes for 70 people and cut straight to the chase: we now have - courtesy of the Aladdin’s Cave for stylish bargain hunters that is TK Maxx - a shiny, completely matching 58-piece flatware collection in a lovely box AND a proper pestle and mortar AND a really fab, chrome manual juicer: three items, surely, that no domestic goddess can or should live without? When we got home, there was a huge temptation to set the table for eight. Instead, we put the cutlery in the spare room to be unveiled at the next DP, juiced a dozen oranges and ground their oil out of the pulp and flesh in the pestle and mortar, for use in hundreds of curries-to-come. Hoorah!

Now then: Cabot Circus - oh, what a show indeed (but not in a good way). Oh crikey, it’s just vile - the culmination, I guess, of a whole generation of young adults being force fed a diet of junk TV, Z-list celebrities and food that isn’t really food and now need somewhere to spend the cash they haven’t got and will never have, thanks to places like this: layer upon layer of bland, faceless shops staffed by zombiefied sales people who probably can’t afford most of the over-priced tat on the rails. Alongside a Kurt Geiger outlet, a mini Harvey Nicks and a Mac shop, there’s a huge branch of Primark and a Zara, both of which - stocked as they are with shredded rags and bits of plastic - already look like temporary shelters for the crisis victims who stand in a bleak queue at the tills, desperate for temporary sustenance. In the Mac shop, I broke into a cold sweat as a Coupland-esque ‘droid tried to explain how the ‘no till’ policy works before I ran away to Raymond Blanc’s gaff to chug cold cappuccino served by an exceedingly snooty, disinterested teenager for the grand price of £2.50 per cup. We had a nice dinner at Tampopo though, before which He grabbed those kitchen bargains from TKM (which, funnily enough, is and always has been successfully situated at what used to be called The Galleries but is now called The Mall, at the heart of the ‘old’ Broadmead). But still, our day out in Bristol reminded me why I live in Bath. Okay, rant over, and on to more typical Animal Disco things...

Apart from our day out, I’ve been in for five whole days and evenings in a row, so have therefore been cooking lots - look out for the results of some very successful experiments and revisits here over the coming days. I’ve also been commissioned to write a series of feature - hoorah! - for a broadsheet - hoorah! - all about my foodie memories - hoorah! The Great American Disaster and the Chelsea Kitchen (both on the Kings Road), the first dinner I ever cooked for Him, Sea Urchins in Toronto, an ice cream in Cannes, a hotel dinner in Bastard, Norway, corned beef sandwiches eaten by the trampolines at Southport fair, backstage buffets, Michelin men...all will be revealed soon. For now, whoever and wherever you are, thanks for reading and come back soon; keep it real.