“Trust in your calling, make sure your calling’s true
Think of others, the others think of you
Silly rule, golden words make practice, practice makes perfect
Perfect is a fault, and fault lines change
I believe
My humor’s wearing thin and change is what I believe in
I believe
My shirt is wearing thin and change is what I believe in”
Buck/Mills/Berry/Stipe
At the weekends I enjoy cooking dinner. I am both a creature of habit , and an embracer of chaos. We almost always have steak with a divine whiskey and cream based sauce, mushrooms, onions in batter, asparagus, and potato cakes, on Saturday. And on Sunday we have a roast chicken with roast potatoes, marrowfat peas, honey drizzled carrots, baked broccoli, and a divine sauce. Both of these I can do very well and receive compliments for from visitors and guests. I don’t know why I made a distinction there between visitors and guests…there must be some subconscious notion of one being more welcome than the other. Anyway, in both dishes, it is the gravy/sauce that makes them special.
“What’s the difference between sauce and gravy ?”
Well up until the previous paragraph where I mentioned both and asked myself the same question and then looked it up, I didn’t know either. Apparently a sauce is a liquid, cream or semi-solid food served with or used in the making another food and isn’t usually eaten on it’s own. Gravy is a sauce made with meat juices. Fancy that.
The difference with my sauce/gravy is that I would happily consume them on their own, and usually here , no matter how much I make, there is a fight for the last of it.
My steak sauce is made by deglazing the pan after cooking the steaks with whiskey, usually Powers, then adding beef stock, letting it bubble down to a nice thickness, letting it cool, and then adding double cream. Just before serving I add in any extra juices that have come from the resting steaks and heat it all up again.
The chicken gravy is made from the trivet of onion, carrots, celery and garlic that the chicken has been roasting on, with whiskey, flour, and chicken stock, bubbling away until it achieves divinity.
I take generous and frequent tasting samples as I make them.
Both meet the definition of a gravy, but I always refer to the steak one as a sauce. Steak and gravy sounds weird, or is that just me ?
Our Jake is back home for a bit and sadly, is now a vegan. This is not sad in itself, in fact it’s quite admirable, but he can’t have my divine sauces/gravies. Last Sunday , in an effort of inclusion, I tried to make him a gravy to go with his ‘I Can’t Believe It’s Not Chicken’ chicken. I used bouillon , added some flour to thicken it, added whiskey for taste, some plant cream and….it looked awful. I took some of the honey glazed carrots and baked broccoli and peas and added them in and blitzed them, and it tasted much better but now a spoon could stand upright in it. I spent half an hour adding water , then reducing it and finally served it in a soup bowl beside his plate and said he could use it as a sauce/gravy/soup. He laughed and consumed most of it. He’s very polite.
This was the second time that he’s been home that he has suffered my kitchen experiments. Last week I decided to try making Mary Berry’s Potato Salad. I happened to have all of the ingredients, except radishes, but I don’t like radishes anyway, so was happy out. It did ask to use the juice of a whole lemon, but I decided not to use that at all.
Many moons ago when my Soulmate and I had our first home together in Clane and I started cooking, we invited our neighbours Paddy and Barbera over for dinner one Saturday night and I decided to cook a new recipe I’d seen in that morning’s Irish Times for porkchops. I went and got all of the ingredients and an hour before our guests were due started to make it. I came across a new word in my cooking journey, namely ‘marinate’. The very first line in the cooking instructions said that you should marinate the pork chops overnight in the lemon juices. Paddy and Barbara were due in an hour. I added extra lemon juice to the bowl I had the chops in and made dozens of puncture marks in each chop to allow to juice to really soak in. Then while cooking I kept adding more lemon juice to the pan. It all looked fantastic.
Paddy and Barbara arrived on time and we had a drink at the table while I steamed the vegetables, and then served everyone. I can still see the cartoonish expression on my Soulmate’s, Paddy’s , and Barbara’s faces as their lips seem to wrinkle inwards when they bit into the porkchops. They all coughed at the same time. We ordered a Chinese takeaway.
That’s why my Soulmate makes sure whenever we are having guests to dinner that I either stick to one of the three dishes that are foolproof, or that if I am trying anything new, I have a practice run the week before. Which makes sense, but is no fun.
So that’s why I decided not to use the juice of the lemon in Mary Berry’s Potato Salad. This was a mistake. It was only as we started eating it and all got that kick in the back of the throat from the Dijon mustard that Jake , diplomatically, said “ This is lovely, but a bit of lemon juice might have taken the sting out of the mustard.”
“There was lemon juice on the recipe , but I decided not to use it.”
“Why, there are three lemons there in the fruit bowl ?” My Soulmate asked.
“Because of that pork chop event !”
“That was nothing to do with a lemon, that was you being a lemon and not simply reading the recipe before you started, and then simply following it !”
For perhaps the first time in my life I had no reply. This was due to the fact that my Soulmate was quite correct…and there was so much Dijon mustard residue coating my tonsils that I was struggling to breathe.
A little thing , one small and seemingly insignificant ingredient can make all of the difference.
A song popped up for me this week, ‘Amen ,Brother’, by The Winstons. I’d never heard of them before, but the song sounded so familiar. It’s an instrumental song, but the title also struck a chord. It reminded me of Liam Stirrat. I worked with Liam, God rest him, when I was 18 and working in the warehouse in Mullan Mill , which was a shoe factory then. Liam was the top salesman in the country and he took me out to see his customers a number of times so that I could do holiday cover for him whenever he too his summer break. I’ve written about him before, I’ll put it in the P.S., he made a big difference to my life, taught me a trade, told me that anyone can sell anything to anyone, once. The mark of a great salesman is being able to go back and sell to them again. Only sell something to a customer that you are sure that he can sell in turn, and you’ll have a customer for life. That advice always stuck with me.
Liam always called his customers ‘Brother’, which I thought was odd, but lovely. Wherever we went in the country he’d ask the customer about their family, naming their children, he’d talk about the local GAA club, knowing the most recent match results. I marveled at his manner with customers. Over dinner one evening I asked him where the ‘Brother’ greeting came from and he said that he’d heard it in a Western movie years ago, might have been John Wayne, and he thought it sounded friendly and cool…and also filled in when he couldn’t remember the customers name.
I loved that.
The ‘Amen Brother’ song sounded so familiar because the 6 second drum solo in it has been sampled in over 1,600 other songs, including David Bowie’s ‘Little Wonder’ , NWA’s ‘Straight Outta Compton’, and the theme tune for Futurama among many others. The Winstons recorded ‘Amen Brother’ in 1969 as a B side in twenty minutes and needed to stretch out, so everyone got a solo.
I’ve always been a Dr. Who fan, and my favourite Doctor is Tom Baker. He was once asked if , being possibly, the biggest television celebrity in England at the time, he felt disappointed that he hadn’t been knighted or received an honour. He replied that years after his television fame had faded he was stopped on Oxford St. in London by a man in his 30’s who said “Are you Tom Baker ?”. The man went on to explain that he’d been brought up in a boy’s home which had been tough and that it was Saturday night watching him in Dr. Who that gave him hope, kept him going. Tom Baker was about to say something, but the man , tears in his eyes, shook his head, gave him a thumbs up sign and walked on. Tom said “Such a common thing , isn’t it, but suddenly backed up with an expression on his face through his tears that was a knighthood. It was a knighthood. Just a thumbs up, meaning it was great, and thanks. It’s incredible, isn’t it ? J ust a gesture.”
I love that.
And I love you ,, Brother !
We’re all someone’s lemon, thumbs up, drum solo.
We’re all a tiny ingredient in someone else’s recipe.
Seemingly insignificant. Crucially important.
Toodles,
Paul
P.S This is ‘I Believe’ by REM
P.P.S This is ‘I Hate Nashville’ about friends, which I told in Nashville
I Hate Nashville
My name is Paul Bond, I’m from Monaghan, in Ireland, the True Centre Of The Universe, and I hate Nashville.
I should point out that up until today, I’d never been to Nashville, but I’ve always hated it anyway.
This deeply ingrained hatred does not stem from any religious, political, or historical reason.
No. This deeply ingrained hatred of Nashville stems from the fact that Monaghan, the true centre of the Universe, and my home, is 14 miles from Castleblayney, commonly referred to as Ireland’s Nashville.
Admittedly Castleblayney is referred to as Ireland’s Nashville almost exclusively by people from Castleblaney, but it has led to strange anomalies occurring, disturbances in the Universe, and fractures in the Continuum, the most egregious of which is the unnatural marriage of Country Music and Irish Music, which again, people from Castleblayney refer to as Country& Irish, but which I refer to as Cowshite.
Please don’t get me wrong, I have a huge appreciation and love of music of all genres…except jazz, I just don’t get a group of talented musicians getting on stage together and all deciding to play different songs at the same time. Even country music has a place in my record collection. Yes, its’s a small place, mostly occupied by Johnny Cash, Lyle Lovett, and Emylou Harris.
But there is a HUGE difference to listening to Johnny Cash singing a song he wrote about a place he’s been, people he’s met , and a situation he caused, suffered from, or saved, and a guy from Castleblayney singing about waltzing a night in Kentucky, when you know that he’d never been further than Cavan, and the closest he’d come to a Harvest Moon, was a pub by that name in Ballybay.
My first real job was working in a shoe factory in Monaghan in the 1980’s. I worked in the dispatch department, sending out the orders, but a couple of times a year I was taken out on the road by Liam Stirrait, the company’s leading salesman, and introduced to his customers, so that I could cover for him when he took his holidays. Liam was an absolute gentleman, was excellent at his job, loved by his customers, and a fabulous mentor to me. BUT, before he became this excellent, well loved salesman, he had worked as a roadie for Ireland’s largest Country & Irish star, Big Tom McBride.
Liam loved Big Tom.
Liam had an 8-track in his car.
In the 1980’s there were no motorways in Ireland, and the journey from Monaghan to anywhere was long. We listened to a lot of Big Tom !
In particular we could listen to Big Tom’s seminal album, Teardrops in the Snow, 5 times , back to back , travelling on a Monday morning all the way to Cork. During therapy I can list the tracks in order :
Until Someone Proves You Wrong
Old Pals of Yestreday
Fall Guy
Teras On The Windowpane
BeHonest With Me
Don’t Let Your Sweet Love Die
Hey, Mr.Lonesome
Lucille , Now’s The Time
The Honky Tonk Downstairs
What Reasons Do We Have
Breaking Julies Heart
Teardrops In The Snow
The Clones Cyclone
Long Lost River
And the bonus track Sunday’s Child.
Liam knew all the words to every song and crooned along. By the second week I also knew all of the words to every song, but chose not to sing along, I simply rocked back and forth in my seat, hugging myself tightly and emitting a low guttural moan.
One Christmas our boss , who had clearly never travelled in Liam’s car before, asked Liam to organise our Christmas Night Out. This is a long running work related tradition in Ireland where your place of employment organizes and pays for a dinner and drinks at a local hotel, along with lots of other companies, and there is some form of entertainment. People pull crackers, wear silly coloured paper hats, get very drunk, and tell their colleagues and bosses exactly what they think of them.
Liam arranged for all of us to a cabaret where the ‘entertainment’ was Philomema Begley sings a Tribute To Patsy Cline.
There were no fights that night. People just cried into their beer, and went home early.
Proximity to Ireland’s Nashville has scarred me, deeply.
And yet , here I am, in actual Nashville.
Don’t Panic, I haven’t come to burn it down.
Although Monaghan is indeed the True Centre Of The Universe it is rather small, with a population of some 7,000 glorious souls. So when Liam Stirrait and some kind hearted and well intentioned people got together a few years ago and decided to put on a festival, they decided to make it a Country Music Festival.
They closed traffic to the centre of town, put up a large stage, opened mobile bars, and …people came in their droves. The town was packed. You couldn’t get a hotel room for love nor money, some people even camped, in Monaghan ! And we don’t have a campsite. They pitched their tents on a slope opposite our local swimming pool, such was their love
Everyone enjoyed them selves thoroughly ,jiving away, wearing straw cowboy hats, and cowboy boots.
It was AWFUL.
And yet even I couldn’t help but admit that it was a great event for the town and people spoke about Monaghan in terms other than ‘ its that little place with the wee hills between Dublin and Donegal’, now it was also the place with the great wee country music festival.
I was impressed, and admitted as much to Liam.
“Ach sure maybe you’ll go yourself next year ?”
“Maybe I will Liam…”
And I did.
And I have to say that it was absolutely dreadful !
I left after the first performer, a chap called Declan who sang , poorly,about an ‘Old Log Cabin For Sale’. This vexed me for three reasons, namely that I knew for a fact that he lived at home with his mother in a perfectly adequate three bedroomed , semi-detached house, and secondly and more ominously, that as soon as he started singing I knew all the words, and lastly, but worst of all, I actually said to a fella beside me, “Big Tom sang it better…”
I had become the very thing that I despised….
And yet, here I am in Nashville.
I’m in Nashville with two of my best friends from home, AnnaMarie, and Ray. AnnaMarie is a lunatic ultra runner who is here for the Baby Barkley run, and Ray is here because I was very ill last year, and he is constantly coming up with things we must do, and after I was ill I decided to stop saying ‘No’ to his ideas…he also owns the Squealing Pig bar in Monaghan town , where we discuss these plans.
I told him that this event was on and he immediately said “We have to go.”
So here we are.
So I get to ask him to stand up and I ask all of you to join me in saying “Thanks Ray !”.
My friend Liam would get a real kick out of the fact that I’m here in Nashville. Sadly he passed away a few years ago. But I know he’s sitting down there in the back somewhere giggling to himself and saying that he knew I always secretly loved country music. I would protest that it’s just a coincidence, and he would say that there are no coincidences.
He would say that even though I think I hate country music, he knows I smile and think of him anytime I hear a twang of a Big Tom song.
And he’d be right.
So here I am.
There are indeed no coincidences.
Nashville…thank you.
