Gazpacho Soup Day

After almost three decades of avoiding gazpacho soup, yesterday I had it twice - first from the premium brand, and then from this recipe. Yeah, I know I linked to it yesterday, but I'm linking to it again today, damnit, because it was good. A taste sensation unlike any other I have ever experienced, and yes, it does add a whole new dimension to Almodovar movies. And I had the good fortune to have Gazpacho Soup Day on that rarest of all Bruxellois days - a hot one. Definitely hot weather food.

I confess I hesitated both at lunchtime and at dinner to raise the gazpacho to my lips. I've found a way to love most of my old bugabears - eggplant, beetroot, brussel sprout, spinach, cabbage, zucchini. But there's one bugabear that I have no plans to rid myself of - a lifelong hate, a pathological phobia of ketchup, or catsup, or whatever the fuck you call that shit is that looks like blended bloody diarrhoea. The last time I accidentally put it in my mouth was a couple of years ago in Toronto when we went to a fantastic Tamil place in my darling Cabbagetown, Rashnaa - highly recomended. They brought out French's mustard (can't eat that shit either) swirled together with ketchup to dip our appetizers in, but the lighting was romantic, so not noticing the gross I dipped one of my ulunthu vadals - yeeurgh. I still mourn having to spit out a mouthful of ulunthu vadal. Anyways, I don't know why I hate ketchup and French's mustard and (now that I think about it) relish so much. It's not the snotty guinea in me because my clan uses that crap at barbeques. Probably more to do with societal distrust issues - I can't eat anything with a texture that fucking gross and scatologic if some corner-cutting company made it. God knows what they'd have put into it. Ugh. Does. Not. Bear. Thinking. About.

So I hesitated to try the gazpacho both in the afternoon and evening yesterday because it was processed tomato served cold, reminding me vaguely of ketchup or Bloody Marys, which I've always considered a shocking waste of cold crisp vodka taste. But I got over it and I'm glad I did. I recommend the pants off gazpacho in terms of helping you get through the heat of the summer, if you're lucky enough to have any.

Gazpacho Soup Eve

Desperately domestic weekend. One of those weekends where carrying out onerous household tasks feels like spoiling yourself. Maybe it was sparked by getting the first washing machine of my independent life. Before, it's been trips to laundromats or friends' houses or to some sort of communal piece of shit in an apartment complex's basement, but now it's ours and that means I can do the laundry naked. It's used, because we're cheap, we don't need it for the rest of our lives, and I have no wish to add to the world total of lingering white goods, but lovely.

So. Did umpteen loads of laundry, baked bread, scrubbed down the kitchen and bathroom, fleshed out our library from the charity shop (big Graham Greene compilation - presently reading Heart of the Matter and loving it - as well as Little Dorritt and The General in His Labyrinth, as I haven't read any Gabriel Garcia Marquez in years and years.)

And then another bushel of tomatoes from the back-of-the-truck market, which had a three-fold destiny: first, a great sauce cook-off for freezing and consuming over the next week or two, second, a smaller sauce for pasta alla norma for a dinner party, and third, gazpacho.

The pasta alla norma was really good and I adjusted the recipe from the typical slightly, so I'll record it here so I don't forget:

tomato sauce for five people
3 small eggplants
lots of salted bread crumbs
lots of olive oil
3/4 cup ricotta salata
1/2 cup basil

Chop the eggplants into one inch cubes, salt, and leave to drain. Rinse them off after an hour, toss in the breadcrumbs, and roast in a very hot oven on a preheated, olive-oiled dish until the right shade of brown and crispy enough to snack on. Heat the sauce while boiling enough pasta for five people, drain, oil so it doesn't get sticky, and stir roasted eggplants, ricotta salata, and basil into the sauce. Serve.

It's pretty normal besides the roasting of the eggplant, which I liked - not only because it takes less supervision and work than the usual semi-deep-frying, but also because it added a sweetness to the dish that went well with the salty-sourness of ricotta salata. It was also the first time I'd made the dish with ricotta salata, or even tried ricotta salata. It's a strange but charming cheese - sourish, as I mentioned, and with dense, chalky, moist consistency - and it changes the whole character of the dish from your standard rich cheese-and-veg binge to something altogether more interesting. Still bingey though.

For the gazpacho, I used this recipe, because I love soups based on roasted vegetables. The great hurdle in me constructing a gazpacho is that I'd never had gazpacho before so I'm not sure what it's supposed to taste like. But then in a remarkable episode of serendipity, the guests brought a premium brand of gazpacho over for an appetizer this weekend, which should at least give me an idea of what people think it should taste like when I get around to trying it, which for some reason I didn't at the dinner itself.

The gazpacho was inspired, by the way, from the heavy frequency of its mention and consumption in Almodovar movies. We watched another this weekend, Matador, and that starred gazpacho too. I didn't like the movie very much - thought it was a silly excuse to string together some good performances (Antonio Banderas impressive, again, as a neurotic little twitch factory, and Assumpta Serna absolutely perfect as an absolute carnivore) and some really effective images of violence, sex, and death with a childish story and other, cringeworthy performances. But afterwards I decided I'm just not going to appreciate Almodovar as he should be appreciated if I don't eat some fucking gazpacho.

Also, I'm going to write down the process for the bread I made, which turned out better than the last few batches - these things are a process of experimentation and it will take awhile before I find a process that I can settle down with, but this went very well indeed:

700 grammes whole spelt flour
500 grammes white wheat flour + extra
2 packets dry yeast (about two tablespoons)
2 cups hot water
4 tablespoons olive oil
1 heaping tablespoon cane sugar
1 teaspoon chunky salt

Mix 700 spelt, 500 wheat flour, and yeast. Mix water, olive oil, and sugar. And then mix them together with a spoon. When practicable, dump on the counter and knead for 15 minutes on a white-flour covered counter, adding white flour if it seems too sticky - end product must be smooth and stretchy without being sticky. Mix in the salt at this point, as you knead. After 15 minutes put it back in the mixing bowl, cover it with a clean cloth, and let double in size; cut into four pieces, shape them into loaves, and let those double in size in the loafpans; then bake at medium heat until the right colour and the right sort of hollowish sound when you tap them.

For the first time - maybe because I'd used spelt for the first time, or maybe because I usually use fresh yeast instead of dry yeast - the consistency was just right. Next time I'll do largely the same thing but with a loafpan inverse on top of the loafpan with the bread in it, as someone told me that makes the bread get a lovely crispy crust. The F-word thinks we can get the same effect by spraying the oven with a little water before putting the bread in, which sounds like rather less of a balancing act. We'll see.

And as you can see, the recipe above is very, very simple, in terms of ingredients and process, and it made me realize that the only point of a bread machine (which I've never had, so I could be completely wrong about this) is that it saves you the 'trouble' of kneading. But the kneading is my favourite part! What the hell is the point of making bread if you're not going to knead it? It makes the muscles under my tits feel bloody fantastic, not to mention my shoulders and triceps. I suppose most people have busier lives than I do, of course, especially when children come. But my parents had four kids, and one of them always found time to bake bread once a week, and they think bread machines are the height of capitalist domestic corruption - well, they would if they were a half-baked Marxist like me - I think what they actually called them was more of a waste of money.

Remembering when Alcopop Lane was Gin Lane

I'm reading a book illustrating yesterday's conclusion – people ain't and ain't never been no good - England in the Age of Hogarth. England in the age of Hogarth was a shithole, and Derek Jarett explores why extremely engagingly and with the ghoulish, obscure primary-sourcing I'm a pig for, illustrating along the way why those people should not be allowed to purchase alcohol 24/7.

It's reminded me that Victorians were Victorian for good reasons, after seeing their parents and grandparents rot to death of syphilis or gin, and it's reminded me that 'women's liberation' wasn't a misnomer. Also convinced me that the adjective 'beshit' must be resurrected. 'Shitty' is great but it's interchangeable with 'bad' and doesn't express that something looks like it's been covered in literal or figurative shit. In the book, beshit came up in the context of Hogarth not liking the appearance of upper-crust French houses – 'all gilt and beshit'. I'm not fond of the French, but a blast of francophobia from a raving limey is enough to make me want us to all get along. Hogarth was as francophobic as they come.

Also, watched Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and liked it full as much as the F-word thought I would. What a nonsense story, like all his movies, but what great characters again, and what a fantastic female lead - Carmen Maura, who Almodovar used again as the mum in Volver. Actresses must cue up to work with him, although it's a true truism that European cinema has better roles for women with agelines than American cinema does. Angela Molina as Clara in Carne Tremula was great as well, as the battered flamenco dancer – forgot to mention that – she's got some damn good lines, and delivery too. He's using her again in Broken Hugs, it seems.

Funny in Women to see Antonio Banderas playing a stuttering nerd with charming subtlety. All the evidence points to him being a good actor, which is amazing after years of seeing him ham it up in execrable American movies. But while Almodovar is famous for the great way he films women, and while his films are littered with simple bad men who get real hurt if they hurt women, he's damn good at filming men too. The cutie who played Victor Plaza in Carne Tremula, Liberto Rabal - that scene while he was in jail staring at Bardem and Neri hugging on television with his chubby suckable lower lip glistening and his eyes smouldering to 'Sufre como yo' . . . oh, convinced tingle. And it would have been so easy to have Bardem's character movie-of-the-week it, what with the paraplegia, and instead we get cunnilingus and 'great, I'll just keep exploiting your guilt complex.'

But in Talk to Her, Marco (Dario Grandetti), the male lead who wasn't fucking the comatose girl, is probably my favourite male movie character ever. In fact, Talk to Her might be my favourite movie ever. It was just perfect. Women wasn't perfect, but it was lots of fun and I became very fond of most of the characters. And the bad simple man, Ivan, was a laugh - look out for the scene towards the beginning where he walks down a street being charming. But Marco is the absolute winner. So sad.

Paraplegic pussy nuzzling Sunday matinée spectacular

We took it real easy on Sunday after having drank rather more than we'd planned, and I'm not sure there's an easier fit-for-print way to take it real easy than to watch an Almodovar film during breakfast. In this case, Carne Tremula. The F-word wanted to see it again, and I was agreeable because I usually find his movies really soothing, and because I wanted to see Javier Bardem nuzzle pussy. I think he's got the face for it, and before I'd only seen him in that crappy Fargo brothers thing being a sexless asshole without enough screen time, and in Before Night Falls being gay, if picturesquely so.

The only problem with Carne Tremula is that it made me dislike Volver more, because it made it seem like even more of an anomaly. Talk to Her, All About My Mother, Bad Education, and Carne Tremula - I love them all because they take an utterly ridiculous story and do justice to the characters caught in that story, explore people who'd be one-dimensional if most directors took a crack at them. The F-word pointed out that Almodovar movies have something in common with Tarantino's last few movies, in that when you see a man hurt a woman you can be sure you'll see something awful happen to him soon. But while that seems to be an excuse for Tarantino to tug off over a one-dimensional dominatrix archetype, in an Almodovar film everybody keeps being human beings. Volver, though, was just an utterly ridiculous story with no justice to the characters. Sure, it looked really great - his movies always do. But I didn't give a good goddamn about any of the people in it, whereas in his other movies I've seen I give a good goddamn about the whole ensemble.

In Carne Tremula, that good goddamn went all the way from Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem's mum, who had a brief scene together at the opening of the film, through the two male leads and all the way to Francesca Neri, and not only because of the beautiful way Almoodovar shot her. There's one scene towards the beginning of the movie - the second, you feel, when she falls in love with Bardem's character - that makes her look absolutely unearthly in a beautiful way. And Javier Bardem is one of those ridiculous actors who are geniuses. He plays a paraplegic professional basketball player, and whilst pulling off this massively physical stunt still turns in a great emotional performance. There's a line he delivers at one of the painful emotional climaxes - 'Great, I'll just keep exploiting your guilt complex' - that was so good on his part, and so good from the writer too (who I think was also Almodovar) that I had to laugh.

Anyhow, we'll see the rest of Almodovar's films - the F-word thinks I'll like Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, and generally he's right about these things. I'm just hoping the new one he's working on, Broken Hugs, isn't as crappy as Volver.