#piemob

There is a new anarchistic culinary passtime going down in Manchester. Piemobs are impromptu twitter-organised outings to eat pie of a Friday lunchtime. Preferably with mash, peas and gravy.

Cup in the northern quarter gets a bit of a bad rep on the intertubes for lacklustre, disorganised and unfriendly service however they do do Pieminister pies which while not exactly made on the premises are always very passable. Sadly as a mob it was a bit of a mess as a number of people bailed out leaving only three of us.



A couple of weeks later a second sitting was organised at the Bay Horse, just a few doors down Thomas Street from Cup. This time our mob counted thirteen and the pub was even warned of our impending arrival by one of the twitterers. However come 1pm their pie selection had got rather limited. There was some kind of thai-fish pie and a vegetable pie. They may have been home made but neither were really up to the mark particularly when the blackboard had various interesting sounding gamey pie items on it which were not available to us. The food all came out very haphazardly, pies followed later by gravy followed by peas followed (once we'd pretty much eaten all the pies) by chips. The peas were really the only saving grace being minty and made of gently mushed garden peas rather than processed-to-death marrowfat ones.

The bar seriously needs raising here - so if anyone has any particularly good sources of pie in central Manchester please do leave a suggestion in the comments, or call it on Twitter using the #piemob hashtag. If we don't get any good ones we might have to abandon it all and have #falafelmob instead.

The Governor's House - AVOID

Yesterday I suggested we might go out to some kind of little festival type thing in Chorlton but instead we went for a rather poor pub lunch at the Governor's House in Cheadle Hulme. The food was seriously rubbish with horrendously overdone steak, nasty sauce with the children's spaghetti and meatballs (soundly rejected in favour of stolen chips) and was really not worth the cash. If we weren't hungry and they hadn't made us pay up front it would have been a walk-out job. Don't even bother going there.

Rice

So yesterday evening wile feeling somewhat upset over things a quick and not overly expensive source of food needed to be found. In Piccadilly Gardens there is this big stupid concrete wall by the tram stop with a Cafe Nero and a place called Rice tucked under it. It's a fast and furious oriental-food-in-a-little-box type of place and really takes fast food to a different level. It's clean and open and you can watch as the guys whack your food in a wok. Rice also does noodles which is what I had, with beef and little mangetout in it, picked randomly off the list. Definitely recommended. They do need to do something about the door at one end of the place as it was slightly ajar, lacking a handle to close it with and letting in the arctic gales.

Following that, some drinks with a friend, discussion into some of the whys and wherefores of life. After she went I walked a few yards and saw another friend at a very very stupid gig. All in all a most positive night.

Journey to the centre of Earth

Yet another tucked away hidden gem of the northern quarter is the Earth vegetarian café. It shares a rather amazing old warehouse building with the Buddhist centre - and given the large golden Buddharupa at the end of the dining area probably shares a little more than just a building.



So why am I here today. I’m in the throes of paranoia. Basically I’ve got something on the go relationship-interest-wise, with someone who is stunningly beautiful and cute and clearly pretty nicely warped. But for now it’s just that. A bit of interest. And I’ve got to stop kidding myself that anything will necessarily come of it - or on the other side talking myself down into thinking that I’ve already fucked it all up by sending silly messages or just generally being a nutbag looser. Where we are at at the moment was some kind of loose arrangement for a date tomorrow but no response to my last missive and suggestions re what to do. Thus paranoid.

So here goes the next phase of my mid life crisis. The self-doubt phase. The thing is I suppose I’ve never really done dating per-se. Is there something about me that makes people not want to communicate with me? Am I upsetting people and they are being too lilly livered to let me know? Am I just a douchebag? Am I actually so marvellous that I’m intimidatingly marvellous? Or am I just one of those most dangerous of creatures: a marvellous douchebag.

So I’ve been thinking about these kind of things. While doing so I ate a plate of mushroom roulade, broccoli, roast spuds and gravy. It was a good fill of food - the roulade thing quite cinnamonny, gravy pretty passable considering lack of meat, the veg very fresh and not over-done. The kicker though was that this and a large freshly squeezed (and admittedly astounding) drink of pear and ginger came to OVER A TENNER. Cripes it’s a canteeny-type place and prices like that make no sense whatsoever. On my way out I realised that the drink was pushing 4 quid and the veg/spud/gravy is considered 3 separate items on top of the dish itself. Harumph.

A saving grace though - the wifi is free and paswordless and the people while a little dozy with the delivery of my juice were very pleasant. All in all not a bad option for lunch - but when bringing vegetarian friends here do remember to select the wealthy ones or go sparingly on the sides. I will now restore the electricity to Buddha’s lighting array which I unplugged on arrival - as I am in a state of Moksha however this offence will not count towards my karma either way.

Saint Petersburg and not getting any...

There was this girl right, who I met in a bar randomly, and I gave her my card and she put it through the washing machine. Then I met her again in a cafe and gave her another card, and then she texted me, and then I deleted all the numbers in my phone and was only able to restore the ones that I'd synced into my computer a few weeks earlier... and then we ran into each other again and then we ended up going on a couple of dates.

The most foody bit of this involved going to Manchester's best attempt at a Russian restaurant, "Saint Petersburg" which is on Sackville Street (down at the UMIST end). Now... this was with a little trepidation as a friend of mine had earlier in the night told us that she had been served an inedible steak there, but not to be put off and based more on the comment "but the Vodka is great and the entertainment really peculiar" we went anyway.

And yes the Vodka was varietous and riotous. Several pages worth in fact, covering any kind of eastern hooch you can imagine, including much to my delight several plum-based varieties and to my date's delight Zubrowka. The entertainment (short of watching the peculiar movements of the waiters) was non existent but then it was a weekday and not very busy at all and clearly not worth them shelling out for midget-dancers.



So we down a few drinks and along comes some food. Actually pretty good food. I had some kind of minced chicken wrapped in cabbage leaves and she had a salmon steak topped with a generous helping of caviar. Oh and there was lots of sour cream involved in both. This was exactly the kind of thing I was hoping for. Given the earlier comments I figured the cabbage/chicken thing would be a safe bet and really I had no complaints other than that I could probably have had a starter too. It was tasty, homely and brought back happy sensations of a previous life beyond the iron curtain. To the slightly riskier option, believe it or not, the fish was moist and tender and cooked just right. And caviar is caviar. Top stuff.

I'm guessing there's a trade-off to be made here: go when it's quiet (or choose carefully) if you want good food, go at the weekend for a crazy riot à la Rasputin.

As to the girl, well had a good time eating and drinking and yakking but a few weeks later despite a couple more meetings we rather came to the simultaneous conclusion that there was not much going on. There was a bit of me wondering if the whole "big red warning sign" above my head was a major issue, and another bit thinking that I was being played games with - both apparently not true. I guess the lesson has to be to (a) go easy on myself, which I wasn't, and (b) just be upfront about how I feel about stuff, which somehow even though it involved sending a rather drunken facebook-message, I was.

So it goes, little to show for it but a full belly but hey I'm not complaining!

Ketchup Replacement

This morning after yet another bad night's sleep I made breakfast for myself. Proper breakfast with posh sausages and fried (home-baked) bread... And in my fridge I found half an orange pepper and quite a lot of stilton and thought I could make them into a sauce.



I chopped up the pepper and stuck it in the pan with the sausages to get all caramelised and when they were looking nice stuck them in the blender with a wodge of the stilton and a bit of boiling water to thin it out. After completing the rest of the breakfast and getting it on a plate I dumped the sauce in the frying pan for a few seconds to heat through (though the pan was pretty hot so quite a bit stuck to the bottom) and poured it over my sausages.

I had fully expected this to be quite quite wrong - but somehow it wasn't. It was like a dreamy tangy ketchup and very tasty indeed, contrasting beautifully with the sausage and giving the eggs a nice lift. I wanted more of it to soak into the bread but alas there was only just enough.

@secretlunch

Oh and by the way I've started twittering... Follow @secretlunch if you dare. Expect extreme randomness and late night drunken cookery moments. That is all.