When I go on holiday I like to avail myself of the latest ‘Jack Reacher’ novel by a guy called Lee Childs. They are hilarious. Sometimes I wonder if he isn't actually serious, but I am sure it is just a brilliantly effective parody of the whole action hero genre. Reacher: men want to be him; women want to be with him. One of Reacher’s great skills, together with surviving in life with only one possession (a toothbrush), is his ability to tell the time, exactly, without the benefit of a watch or clock. Reacher always knows what time it is. Obviously, being a man, I want to be him. So I regularly test the clock in my head. This morning I woke from my slumber, reached for my watch, and checked myself. The clock in Green’s head ticked past three minutes to five. The watch says: 06:59. Two hours out and one minute till alarm time. I am nothing like Jack Reacher.
And why would I want to be anyway? The guy changes his underpants once a novel, and even the prolific Childs struggles to turn out more than two a year. There's no way I could live in the same pair of grits for six months at a time, even if it did mean always knowing what the time was. And I’d love to see Jack ‘who cares what the fucking time is anyway’ Reacher tackling organic gardening class in the morning before sitting through an entire theory day in those fucking chairs. He’d be doing roundhouses and stabbing people with his toothbrush halfway through the Tabbouleh recipe that kicks off our Dynamic Vegetarian Cooking lecture.
Now what, for the love of God, is dynamic about it? You know that something is basically a crock of shit when they start embellishing it with pointless adjectives. I am equally mistrustful of acronyms. Lurking menacingly amidst the dynamic vegetation is something called TVP: Textured Vegetable Protein. Mmmm mmmm. The animal in me takes over. I feel the involuntary rush of enzymes in my cheeks as the saliva materialises and collects in tingly pools on the tip of my tongue. Textured Vegetable Protein. Oooh, the sensuality of food. Someone usefully points out that TVP sounds like a sexually transmitted disease. They have a point - it just sounds wrong, doesn't it? “What’s for dinner honey?” “Oh, I don’t know - there’s some TVP in the fridge if you wanna heat that up?“
We are shown an All Purpose Chilli made using the STD. The list of ingredients is longer than the list of books of the Bible. In fact, of all the foodstuffs known to man, there are fewer that don’t make it into the All Purpose Chilli than do. Basically, so long as it never breathed itself and you can reach it from your kitchen before the pan melts, chuck it in. After the STD has been added you put the lid on, get on your knees and pray. Towards the end of the recipe it suggests checking for flavour and offers a couple of suggestions should there not be any. Now I am sorry, but if a recipe requires that many ingredients then you shouldn’t be writing in caveats for it lacking flavour. In fact you shouldn’t be writing recipes.
All Purpose Chilli. You have thirty seconds in which to list all the different uses for chilli - GO!.............How did you get on? Me? I got one - you eat it. Now I can only presume that as this particular dish is inedible, they had to invent some new purposes for it. Having gone to all that trouble, you’d think they’d tell us what they were. Plastering walls? Insulating lofts? Cat food? Rat poison? Insect repellent? Fossil fuel? Rocket fuel? Filling in potholes? Who knows? Maybe it’s the only substance known to man that can make Jack Reacher change his smalls more than twice a year.
The other thing about the STD is that it is made from soya. And soya contains a high proportion of oestrogen. So say Jack Reacher is so damn tough that he can dine out on All Purpose Chilli with Textured Vegetable Protein every night of the week. Within two months he will have grown a pair of tits to rival Dolly Parton's. Women won’t want to be with him, they’ll want to be him. Maybe that’s one of the purposes? If so they should say so on the recipe. Jack Reacher’s Dynamic All Purpose Tit-Growing Chilli for Vegans. Does exactly what it says on the tin.
Great angle...
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