I would like to think that people come to my parties and invite me to theirs because they love my warm personality and sparkling repartee. But in my heart I know it is because they love my Shrimp Tandoori, for which I receive many invitations requests every year. It has become my signature dish, and it came about by accident.
My sister, The Skinny Cow, is a fabulous cook who lives on a farm in County Wexford, Ireland and loves to entertain. At the drop of a hat, she will throw together a meal for hundreds of guests, then serve them breakfast and lunch the following day because she can’t get rid of them. Just this week, I telephoned her on Sunday afternoon, as she was getting dinner for fourteen people. Thirty guests had been invited to the farm for a buffet lunch on Saturday, which evolved into dinner for twenty on Saturday night, breakfast for seven on Sunday morning, followed by lunch for ten and the dinner she was preparing when I called. She suggested I call back the following Tuesday or, better yet, Wednesday, when she was pretty sure she might finally have the house to herself.
For “large” parties, she sometimes makes Tandoori-flavoured cocktail sausages as an hors d’oeuvre. I love them, but can’t find cocktail sausages, which are bite-sized pork sausages, here in Canada. I was used to serving shrimp sauteed in butter, garlic and dill-weed, but just about every one of my friends and neighbours had cadged the recipe for their own parties, and we were all getting just a teensy bit tired of them. Which is when the proverbial bulb lit above my head and I thought to myself “Self! What about trying shrimp with Tandoori seasoning?” To which myself replied “Not a bad idea, You. Let’s try it.” And the rest, as they say is history.
I have happily passed the recipe around to friends and neighbours, but they just can’t seem to replicate it. That may be because I don’t really understand the recipe myself; it’s a handful of this and a couple of spoonfuls or so of that. But, if you would like to try it for yourself, here are the ingredients and method. You’ll have to decide the measures yourself, according to taste. Let me know how you get on. If you’re a friggin’ genius in the kitchen, like Jan, which I most certainly am not, you might like to try using raw shrimp. If the recipe works, you could become as popular as me.
Shrimp Tandoori
Frozen cooked shrimp, thawed (I use Jumbo Tiger Shrimp. If I were making this in Ireland, I would use prawns)
Sharwood’s Tandoori BBQ Marinade Spice Mix
Juice of one or two limes
Butter
Olive oil
In a large pan or wok, heat the butter and olive oil over moderate heat. When the foam subsides, add Tandoori spice mix and cook for a minute or two. Add the lime juice and stir in well. Throw in the shrimp, toss until covered in the spice/oil mixture and warm through. Pile into a dish and serve with lime wedges. (I often make them on the morning before a party, store in the fridge for an hour or two and serve cold.)
That’s all it takes. I have absolutely no idea how they taste, because I’m allergic to shellfish and will die if I try any. But everybody else seems to like them.
I’m currently reading this wonderful novel by A. S. Byatt, a writer whose reputation has, for many years, been unfairly overshadowed by the popularity of her sister, Margaret Drabble.
I was a devout fan of Drabble’s early fiction, especially A Summer Birdcage, The Garrick Year and The Millstone, but I went off her a bit when she went all heavy, ‘doon t’mine’ Yorkshire in some of her later works. I found The Peppered Moth, her semi-fictional account of her mother’s life, unreadable and never finished it. Then last summer, I picked up a copy of her recent novel The Red Queen, set in 18th-century Korea, and was absolutely enchanted. So I’m thinking I should get back into Drabble again, although I’m not quite sure when I can squeeze in the time. During that mythical shangri-la of retirement, when I will spend every waking hour catching up on my reading? Unlikely, if The First Husband has his way. He’ll be dragging me around the world, insisting I keep moving, lest I perish like the shark!
However, getting back to Byatt: (See what I mean? Overshadowed by her bloody sister again!) She has been gradually moving away from the somewhat showy erudition of her earlier works and, ever since her Booker-winning Possession, has been writing novels I’ve found utterly engrossing.
This one is no exception. In fact, I’m reading it rather more slowly than is my wont (I usually tear through books at a canter, then forget everything I’ve read within a few days, alas) so that I might savour it. This paragraph, at the beginning of Chapter 3, really resonated with me because, although it describes a time near the end of the Victorian era, it reminded me so much of my own childhood.
…the children in this world had their own separate, largely independent lives, as children. They roamed the woods and fields, built hiding-places and climbed trees, hunted, fished, rode ponies and bicycles, with no other company than that of other children. And there were many other children. There were large families, in which relations shifted subtly as new people were born … and in which a child also had a group identity, as ‘one of the older ones’ or ‘one of the younger ones’. The younger ones were often enslaved or ignored by the older ones, and were perennially indignant. The older ones resented being told to take the younger ones along, when they were planning dangerous escapades.
In this age of helicopter parenting, it’s sweet to look back to such innocent times: the warm summer days when our mothers shooed us out the door immediately after breakfast, warning us not to come back until lunchtime. And, since I grew up in 1950s Ireland, there were indeed many other children out there, with the same order ringing in their ears. As a middle child, with two older and two younger than me, I experienced both identities, although not as part of a group. I was first dragged reluctantly along by my brother and sister—seven and five years older respectively—and then I hauled my two younger sisters—five and three years younger—along in my turn.
Being the dragger-along was much easier, on me and on my younger sisters. As the dragee, I was terrorised by my older sister, aka The She-devil. As I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned elsewhere in these pages, it was her mission to at least scar me for life, if I couldn’t be drowned, stabbed or pushed under a bus. When my turn in the role of Big Sis came along, I was more likely to be looking for a quiet spot where I could read the books I smuggled out with me, than planning any dangerous escapades, and we soon came to an understanding. So long as they did their level best not to get themselves killed, I would happily leave them to their own devices and we would meet up in time to return home as a single unit. It never occurred to me, of course (and I was supposed to be the one with the brains) that my mother might occasionally have wondered why my sisters always came home in flitters from their adventures, while I was in the same pristine condition as when I left the house.
Let me state, right off the bat, that I’m no Lynne Truss. I don’t roam the land, armed with a magic marker, correcting apostrophes. Not that I haven’t been tempted, mind. I’m sure it is no coincidence that a street-wide banner in our town, proclaiming IT’S A DICKEN’S OF A CHRISTMAS, fell down during a wind storm. Every time I drove under it, I muttered imprecations and wished it evil. Definitely not a coincidence: just the Grammar Gods answering my prayers. Mirabile dictu, when the banner went back up, the offending apostrophe had been removed. (If you don’t know which one I mean, you probably should not be reading this blog!)
I get it that English is a living language and must move with the times. It’s not as if it hasn’t changed over the millennia. After all, who among us can understand a word of Chaucer in the original? (Okay, smartypants, sit down. It was a rhetorical question!) But I cannot and will not accept that writers can just make up spelling as they go. The rules of grammar may be somewhat flexible; remember when a split infinitive made you shuffle uneasily, waiting for lightning to strike? Which reminds me, I have a rather quaint story about that. Back in the days of steam, during a previous life as an executive secretary, I walked into an all-male meeting (carrying a tray of coffee; how else would I gain admission?) just as my boss burst out “We’ll just have to fucking go over it again!” Shock, horror, red faces all around the table. (I did say this was back in the days of steam, right?) Without missing a beat, Yours Truly, unflappable Girl Friday, pipes up, “Mr D, you really must stop splitting your infinitives.”
But I digress. However flexible grammar may be, as far as I’m concerned the rules of spelling – reluctantly excluding strange American habits like subtracting ‘u’ from words like ‘colour’ and adding syllables to words like ‘preventive’ – are immutable. So I’m mad as a wet cat last Monday when I see, in a so-called quality magazine, ’shoe-in’ for ’shoo-in,’ ‘pouring over’ for ‘poring over,’ ‘bellweather’ for ‘bellwether,’ and ‘momento’ for ‘memento.’ Did somebody declare November 30th National Stupid Day and forget to send me the memo?
Disclaimer: No apostrophes were harmed in the making of this post. Any spelling errors are deliberate.
The First Husband and I watched a DVD of this movie last night. In the interests of accuracy, I should clarify that the version we watched was the UK release, which was called The Boat that Rocked. Not sure why they changed the name for the North American release; either the distributors think we’re too stupid to get it, or they believe the word ‘pirate’ has a Pavlovian effect. Whatever. I managed to get a pirated (drool) copy through nefarious channels (Ohai, #1 Son!) of what I believe is the superior version. I’m told the North American release has been edited mercilessly to build up Philip Seymour Hoffman’s role, but he’s not as ubiquitous as the trailer would have us believe.
We quite enjoyed the movie, and absolutely loved the soundtrack, which I was busily downloading from iTunes as we watched. But it was nowhere near the movie it could have been, had the director or producers left out all the stupid girly stuff, and told the real story of pirate radio.
For me, growing up in wholly catlick Ireland in the 1960s, pirate radio was a godsend. Before it came along, the only place you could hear pop music was Radio Luxembourg, which, thanks to something called the Heaviside Layer, didn’t come on the air until after dark. Anyone who was a teenager in the British Isles during that era will remember the names of Barry Aldiss, Don Moss, and Pete Murray, who were some of Luxembourg’s top DJs – a term that didn’t even exist before them. Come to think of it, I seem to remember that the word “teenager” was only just coming into vogue then. Hmm. Suddenly, I’m really feeling my age, for some reason.
Most of us managed to survive with Radio Luxembourg, but we really didn’t know what we were missing, until an Irishman, named Ronan O’Rahilly, launched a radio station that broadcast from an old rust-bucket anchored in the North Sea. Known as Radio Caroline, it burst into my life like a rocket explosion. I was mouldering in boarding school at the time, when I found it by accident on my transistor radio, and I thought I had died and gone to heaven. I spent the next year playing cat and mouse with the nuns, who thought trannies (which meant something completely different back then!) were instruments of the devil – not far behind books, by their weird standards. Hard to believe, but the nuns once wrote to my father to report that I had been caught reading Jane Eyre. They were complaining to the wrong man; he responded by sending me a copy of At Swim Two Birds, which nearly gave the Reverend Mother the vapours. Much to my father’s delight, I might add.
Despite their best efforts, I managed to keep my tranny hidden from the nuns (Holy shades of Colditz, Batman!) for the remainder of my prison boarding school term, and my pals and I rocked on to the music of Radio Caroline. The scenes in the movie, of boarding school kids jiving and twisting in their dormitories to the music of Radio Rock, brought back some hilarious memories for me. As seniors, we slept in single rooms rather than dormitories (which rooms, I kid you not, were called cells!) and we used to crowd into mine every night after Lights Out to listen to Caroline.
Great fun. And my only good memories of boarding school.
This PSA, starring Kiera Knightly, was produced by Women’s Aid in the UK and has been shown in UK cinemas. But it has not yet been seen on television, because the company that censors tv advertising for the British government wants the shots showing Knightly being kicked and beaten to be removed.
I fail to see the point, myself, if the violence is removed. After all, it is the point, right?
I’m currently reading this wonderful 