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The two recipes that I have published so far have both been easy and linguine-based. This recipe is neither. It even features a part which seems like the line about how to boil and egg, “first create the universe”. But once you have this recipe down it will go well for you – honest!

The first thing that you need to do for this recipe, technically, is make a roast chicken (luckily we are going to talk about that in the following weeks – lucky you) and then from the leftovers of the roast chicken, boil up some chicken stock, then leave it to cool and freeze some of the stock in ice-cube bags or trays to make ice cubes of chicken stock.

Chicken stock is just one of the ingredients here. I know this sounds like an absolute faff and I’m sure that you can make this dish with shop bought chicken stock but… For loads of recipes you simply don’t need as much chicken stock as a chicken stock cube makes. Obviously if you are making a stew, risotto or a soup or something then it’s quite the right amount, but for things like this, you just want a couple of ice-cubes worth. It’s honestly worth it, even though I know you don’t believe me. The other advantage is that you can control the amount of salt, which can be very high in shop-bought stock.

Serves 2 or 3 depending on how hungry you are.

Ingredients

2 ice cubes of chicken stock (or alternative)
2 tablespoons of light soy sauce
1 tablespoon of ketchup manis (or Hoi Sin)
1 teaspoon of Chinese 5 spice
1 teaspoon of Rice Vinegar
1 teaspoon of Mirin
1 squirt of tomato paste
1 clove garlic (crushed)
1 teaspoon of sugar
1/5 teaspoon of Chilli flakes

5 Sichuan peppercorns
1 tablespoon of dark soy sauce (approx. that much, I’ll explain in the method)
Cornflower
2 tablespoons of vegetable oil (I use shop bought stir fry oil which normally has ginger, garlic and sesame in it)
2 turkey breasts

300g Green beans (French beans)
1 red pepper
2 nests of medium noodles

Combine all of that first batch of ingredients into a bowl and stir it all together. Don’t worry about waiting for the ice cubes to fully melt or anything.

Stick a pan of water on to boil for the noodles and beans (use two pans if you care, but the ingredients won’t), and chop the veg and put it to one side. I like peppers in chunks, and green beans with the ends off but it doesn’t matter much. I chop the veg first to stop me having to use two boards as we’ll be chopping the meat in a bit (store the veg in the bowls you are going to serve in, or the colander you are going to drain the noodles in, they are going to be cooked in different ways so easiest not to store them together).

Place the Sichuan peppercorns in a dry wok and warm them for about a minute. Put them in a pestle and mortar and grind them up.

Now chop the turkey into similarly sized chunks. They should look like medium meatball sizes. Pour the dark soy over the turkey on the board. This should indicate how much to put on. You want to cover the turkey with this sticky black sauce but you don’t want much more than the amount that you need to cover it. Use a fork to make sure it’s covered.

Put some cornflower in a Pyrex dish or mixing bowl. What does “some” mean in this context? Well you want the turkey to be well covered. So take a guess based on how much turkey you have in front of you, you can always add more. By putting this in the dish you are trying to stop creating too much additional soy cornflower gloop that doesn’t have any turkey in the middle. Grind some black pepper into the cornflower and also pour in the sichuan peppercorns you ground up earlier. Pop the turkey into the bowl too and mix with a fork until well covered. You want a good coverage of cornflower so add more and add more soy if you didn’t estimate enough of either.

Ok. Now we are ready for some cooking. How exciting. I’m going to base this running order on an estimate that your noodles take 3 minutes to cook. Adjust if they don’t.

Set a timer for 11 minutes
Pour the oil in the wok and turn it up to the highest heat

Timer says 9 minutes to go
THE OIL IS GOING TO BE REALLY HOT. DO NOT BURN YOURSELF!!! HANDS BACK AND USE IMPLEMENTS!!!
Place the turkey in the oil, space the turkey out as much as possible so it isn’t touching (easier in a flat bottomed wok) try not to turn them as you are spacing them out. You are trying to cook one side. Try to not get too much non-turkey covering cornflower into the wok.
Turn the wok down to 3/4 heat.

Timer says 6 minutes to go
Put the beans in the boiling water.
Turn the turkey pieces over one by one (if you can).
Turn boiling water down to 3/4 heat.

Timer says 4 minutes to go
Put the peppers on top of the turkey. Don’t stir.

Timer says 3 minutes to go
Put the noodles in boiling water.
Add the sauce mixture to the wok and stir, pulling the turkey off the bottom if it’s stuck.
Watch the temperature here because you want the sauce to start to bubble by the end of the process, and you may have just put some ice in the wok so turn up the heat if necessary. But don’t boil everything either. It is probably best if for the last 20 to 30 seconds it is pretty close to boiling though to allow the sauce to reduce a little.

Timer done
Drain the noodles and the beans and mix them into the wok covering everything in the sauce.
Serve.

I haven’t got a recorded message on my mobile phone voicemail; I just have the standard lady giving the standard message. And I was asked the other day if I’d ever had a personalised message.

I don’t think I’ve ever had one on my mobile, but I certainly did on my landline. There were a series of them from films, and one which just said, “Hi, I’m Ivan Reitman”.

Reitman was the director of Ghostbusters (and a number of other films) and the Ghostbusters directors commentary was a firm favourite in our house – imagine how much spare time we had that we used to rewatch directors commentaries! This was before I met Katherine.

The first line of the commentary was Reitman introducing himself, and somehow it just sounded so funny to our ears that it immediately became our answer phone message.

This was, of course, an absolutely hopeless answering message as nobody, other than us, knew who it was, or what was going on. So people would hang up or worse, leave odd messages thinking they were talking to somebody called Ivan.

Luckily I managed to knock that habit on the head a while ago, but now for some reason I still don’t record my own message. I’m not sure I can say why not, I just haven’t.

The unexamined life is not worth living said Socrates, but perhaps, in this case, some things are best just left?

We were in a holiday home in France, the owners only spoke French, we only spoke English. But that hardly seemed to matter. It was a beautiful house with a wonderful garden and the owners, who lived in the house next door, seemed very friendly.

We didn’t have a situation, at all. The situation, that we didn’t have, was that both sides wanted to be sophisticated without the necessary, as the French would say, je ne sais quois.

I was on the trip with two people who actually can speak fluent French, but both of them are shy. I, however, know just enough French to be truly dangerous. I found myself going to the bakery every morning and ordering the bread for the day. After a few days the ladies in the bakery would shout, in French, “he’s here”. So everyone could come and listen while I butchered their beautiful language. To be fair, as everyone kept saying, at least I was trying. Something that would only encourage me into the situation that I am about to describe.

We were invited to afternoon tea by the house’s owners. They obviously thought that this was the appropriate thing to do for English guests. We walked in to the host’s house and it had a barrel of beer on tap. This was mentioned specifically to me.

We were asked about drinks we might like. I remembered the beer barrel that had just been mentioned (it stuck in my mind somehow). I was the first person to be asked the question, I felt that things were on my side, but no. Everyone else settled for cups of tea or water.

Once people had sat down, we discovered there was cake and macarons to go with our drinks, and the scene was set. We had two fluent French speakers on our side, and me who can just about remember some things from when I learned French at 12 and my mum and my daughter who know about the same amount of French as each other (although my mum has been trying to improve since this incident).

The owner’s entourage spoke only in French, the conversation stalled.

Now, it’s fair to say, that I found the conversation (or lack of it) uncomfortable. This social embarrassment is, to me, the epitome of British character flaws. I found the embarrassment of sitting quietly and potentially not being polite by not making idle chit chat more embarrassing than the only thing I had to offer as an alternative, a story told in French by somebody who can’t really speak French.

For the sake of all that is holy, I will try and explain my fairly ambitious story in English and you will have to imagine how complicated it would be to explain in broken French. Here it is…

I started by explaining that I had been doing a lot of driving on the way there which is unusual for me (pas de typical!). And that I had taken to saying, “le chauffeur est terminée” when we arrived at our destination.

But Katherine corrected me. “Chauffeur” is not the correct French word for driver, it is the word for fireman, but specifically a fireman who keeps a train full of coal, not a fireman who puts out fires which is what we call a fireman.

(Note: Yes, I am trying to explain idiomatic French in French without any way of helping them understand the vagaries of what I’m talking about. Just think how many different contexts of the word fireman, which is two different words in French, they had to follow along with in the previous paragraph.) I continued…

Oddly enough the correct name for a driver of a car, the equivalent of our word chauffeur, not your word fireman, but our word chauffeur, in French is conducteur, which we use in English for a person who collects tickets on a train or bus.

At this point one of the French people in the room said, in perfect English, “that is an excellent story, and I must say that only an English person would have carried on with such a ridiculous story in the face of such obvious obstacles”.

“You can speak English,” I asked?
“Yes,” he replied, “I lived in Portsmouth for 20 years”.

I was about to start by saying, “I’ve been to a lot of weddings”. But then I realised that I have absolutely no grounds for saying this. I have been to more than 20 that I can remember off the top of my head. Is that a lot? I don’t know. They have varied in style quite considerably: I’ve been to humanist weddings, registry office weddings, high church weddings, low church weddings. I’ve been to a Quaker wedding, a wedding of somebody named Baker, and if you know any candlestick makers, tell them I’m happy to attend.

Some of the weddings I have been to have been surprising depersonalised. They seem to be perfectly lovely affairs where all the flowers have been great, the room has been decorated to look like it is out of a magazine, which I suppose it is, and the reality of the day has been almost airbrushed out. Sometimes, even with these more stuffy affairs, a bit of personality will leak out. In my experience, this is often if the couple have known the priest / vicar for a long time. I suppose that this is because they do weddings day in and day out, and otherwise there would be nothing that surprising for them, and they would rather take the captive audience they have and expand their minds.

The best of these are priests who don’t just talk about scripture, and don’t just automatically do the feast at Cana and all that jazz. The best talk about what is actually happening at the wedding, and it’s an interesting concept. The Christian bible talks about marriage (Ephiesians 5, 22-33) and husbands and wives being subject to one another. It, like all areas of the bible, is massively open to interpretation and has been used to suggest husbands should command or even own their wives, despite it clearly saying that they should serve each other.

But what I actually think it is driving at is that in marriage you are making a new thing, a new team which you are both members of. And you are both saying, the team is more important than either of us.

Something you can decide without ever getting married.

Sometimes it’s the priest, sometimes it’s a speech, sometimes it’s the party, sometimes it’s despite all of these things, but sometimes you get the feeling that something is being created at that moment: a new team.

When I was 12, we went to the south of France for our summer holidays. It was an important holiday, or at the very least it was hugely memorable. It might have been the 25-hour journey caused by the French farmers’ blockades, which meant we had to travel through every country on the east of France just to get there. It might have been that this was the holiday that coincided with my learning to read voraciously. I read through every one of those countries and had to be forced to look out of the window at all the lovely countryside we were driving through. There was also the amazing library of books at the place we were staying in which kept me going all the way through the holiday. But there is a moment from that holiday that keeps coming back to me.

One day, Dad and I went to the market to get some food. There was a fish stall where Dad hoped to pick something nice for dinner. Now my father can speak English and Dutch and understand Russian, and he can “sort of” deal with French at a market. At the time, I was learning French at school and so when the fishmonger asked him a particularly difficult question, my father turned to me for help. Did I know the answer? And for that limited moment in time, I did know the answer to the question. The fishmonger was impressed. He asked which languages I was studying, only French? No I said, in French, I was also learning to speak Latin. “Speak Latin”, he was surprised at this, “I only heard of people reading and writing Latin. You must be very smart if you can speak it too.” I laughed and my father asked for a translation. The fishmonger, while I was explaining, got an extra bit of monkfish and wrapped it and gave it to me “to support this excellent brain”.

Unfortunately for me, my French has really suffered, I don’t know the French for Latin or brain anymore. Although when I try and use it I can just about get by. But now I have to pay for my own fish.

We were the first people we knew to get satellite television. There were a number of things that my brother and I were exposed to earlier than the other kids because of this: The Simpsons, ‘infotainment’ and what was called back then the Worldwide Wrestling Federation.

Because we were two brothers, we had to pick different favourites so when we watched we could root for opposing wrestlers and play out our sibling rivalries by proxy. My brother was first to wrestling so he, logically I suppose, decided to side with the good guys leaving me to go for the anti-heroes when I had the chance to pick. I believe my brother’s favourite was the Ultimate Warrior, which, as names go, is pretty much the Ronseal of wrestling. Or rather you hope it is if you are backing him. Imagine the scene down at the betting shop: “Which of these wrestlers shall I bet on, hmmm ‘Sad Henry’, ‘Weak Jim’ or ‘Tired Larry’, or I suppose I could go for the ‘Ultimate Warrior’. Yeah he sounds good”.

I ended up picking the Undertaker and this worked out quite well for me. In 1991, the storyline was that the Ultimate Warrior and the Undertaker were bitter rivals, so I assume that was what solidified it for me, but I have to admit that I was never a very assiduous supporter. I remember distinctly that after not having seen any wrestling for a while, I caught a match featuring the Undertaker in the mid ’90s which suddenly piqued my interest. After a few minutes, I realised something was wrong – it wasn’t the same man playing the Undertaker – wait what? I knew that WWF wrestling was staged, but I hadn’t thought they would just replace people. My understanding had been that what you were watching was a stage performance, but Hulk Hogan was always going to be Hulk Hogan.

That was when I officially stopped paying attention to wrestling. But I never can completely ignore one of my prior interests forever. Every so often the fact that the Undertaker was two people will float up to the surface of my mind and frustrate me, and I will inevitably have to look it up. And wikipedia always tells me that the bloke who played the Undertaker, Mark William Calaway, is the longest serving wrestler in WWF/WWE history, he’s still going at 50, and actually was taking a 7 month sabbatical to heal his back during the time I happened to watch it and see this other guy. And most importantly they weren’t trying to pretend that this other guy really was the undertaker. A character in the plot was, but nobody believed him, he was even referred to by some as the Underfaker. It was all about making a huge entrance when the real Undertaker came back.

So I have misremembered this fact for 20 years, and here’s the odd thing: I think I have looked up this information every couple of years during those 20 and I never remember the correct information. It just won’t stick in my mind. Maybe, finally, by writing this article I will remember it. But who knows?

I was on the phone, cancelling my car insurance.

I was having a lovely conversation with a nice Welsh lad and it was all going well.

At the end of the call he said, “My name’s Dan, for your reference” and I replied, “Thanks very much, Dan for your reference”.

I just couldn’t help myself.

He said, “Oh I see what you’ve done there, very clever”.

I apologised and he said, “not to worry” and told me to have a nice day.

Nina and I decided to make a improv puppet show

About half way through she runs out of ideas and asks what’s next, “You’ve got to come up with some other story” I say.

Story of my life.