Food Glorious Food

A friend recently asked me, for reasons only known to herself, to keep a food diary for a week.  Some sort of research. If you’ve ever wondered what it is that I eat, or even if for some strange reason you haven’t, this is what I gave her at the end of the week.

My Food Diary.

Monday

I didn’t start this till the evening so you are only getting supper for Monday. I had Spicy Medley, a creation of my own, made conveniently out of the things I happened to have in the fridge. For Spicy Medley you will need:

1 large potato

1 shallot

2 cloves of garlic

1 large carrot

Some tender stem broccoli

Half a pack of Quorn Fajita strips

1 green pepper

2 red chilli peppers.

Method – Chop it all up, put it in a frying pan and make it hot.

Serves 1 ½

(I ate the other half as well)

Tuesday

I was lucky to have time for a big breakfast. First of all, a strong coffee which I make by blending espresso and special Whitard’s amaretto coffee. Yum yum. Then I had, sultana bran with semi-skimmed milk, 4 pieces of brown toast (2 marmite, 2 peanut butter – in that order), toffee fudge yoghurt, a banana, and a glass of blood orange and grapefruit juice.

For extra breakfast nutrition I also read Sherlock Holmes: A Study in Scarlet and watched the Queen’s state visit to Ireland on the BBC.

In the afternoon I had a cheeky pint of vimto. Planned to eat at some point too but ran out of time while playing with some drum software.

Then in the evening I went to see Buddy at Richmond Theatre. Bottle of Becks before. Bottle of Becks with Glen Joseph afterwards. It would have been rude not to.

I was rather hungry by the time I got in so while deciding what to cook, I had a nibble of cheese. Extra mature cheddar. Nice. I wanted something quick so I opted for chow mein done microwave style. That’s:

Instant noodles

Quorn

Yellow Pepper

Chilli pepper

Broccoli

Wednesday

On Wednesday I was trapped in my room because my housemate Michelle was making a short film and filming in the kitchen. I got hungry so ate a protein bar I had in my bag. Eventually I snook out and got a Starbucks.

Grande vanilla late

Tomato and mozzarella pasta salad.

Then I went to an amateur production of Singing in the Rain that my other housemate Jennifer had choreographed. The best bit (apart from Jenn’s wonderful choreography) was when the lead actor’s trousers spontaneously fell down. Long live am-dram! Had a really nasty glass of red wine in the interval. It tasted like rusty nails.

On my way home I went shopping to buy stuff to make Pasta Ragù. When I got back I discovered I had bought all the ingredients apart from the pasta! Huge culinary error. I substituted the pasta for Tesco Mediterranean style couscous. So here I give you the recipe for Pasta Ragù Without Pasta. Also, while cooking, I had a very nice glass of 2009 Rioja reserva to make up for the earlier glass of acetic acid.

You will need:

1 shallot

2 cloves garlic

Quorn mince

3 Chestnut mushrooms

1 Green Pepper

1 Red Chilli

Baby plum tomatoes

Tomato purée

½ glass of red wine

Fresh spinach

Wild rocket

Some grated mature cheddar

A packet of Tesco Mediterranean couscous. (Begrudgingly, not a packet of pasta)

Method – Chop it all up, put it in a saucepan, make it hot. Make couscous according to instructions.

Add wine to sauce. (As the recipe only calls for half a glass, I got to drink the extra half.) Garnish with rocket and cheese. It should look like this.

 

I say it should look like that. It really should look like it has some pasta in it.

Thursday

For breakfast I had my usual special coffee, my usual raison bran, but only two slices of toast with marmite because I was greeted in the morning by another housemate, Janine, who had just bought a huge loaf of what she called Special Bread. I had a good chunk with some butter. I think it may have been rye bread with hazelnuts and sultanas. I don’t know for sure, but it did taste special. I then had some fruit juice, and a strawberry fruit corner.

For extra breakfast nutrition I read a very interesting article about unusual beards in The Independent.

I then went for a run. I got nearly all the way around Gunnersbury Park before my shins started hurting. On my return I had a pint of some horrible protein shake. Tastes nasty, but in theory stops me hurting as much the next day.

The following turn of events, even I don’t know how they happened. I somehow ended up being invited to and attending a book launch in Soho for a book called Erotic Poetry for Vegans and Vegetarians. So I had a couple of glasses of something that resembled Champagne but almost certainly wasn’t champagne, while listening to numerous vegetable / phallus analogies. Some humorous, some not so much.

Then I went to the Angel pub on Shaftesbury Avenue and had three pints of bitter and a packet of salt and vinegar crisps with my friends. This was a mistake, for the Angel is a Sam Smith pub and Sam Smith beer makes me feel squiggly. (If you don’t know what squiggly means, just go to a Sam Smith pub. You’ll find out.)

Then I went to the Stockpot in Old Compton Street and had Mushroom and Broccoli Penne in a cream sauce and a glass of house red. Stockpot is the best place in London to get cheap but really good food.

Then I came home and had a big glass of vimto before bed.

Friday

I got up much earlier today, still feeling a little squiggly, to start rehearsals for Dreamboats and Petticoats. Breakfast consisted of coffee, fruit juice, 2 marmite toast, 2 peanut butter toast, a müller vanilla choc ball corner, a banana. Then I had a handful of baby tomatoes – and why not?

When I turned up at rehearsals, in amazingly true to form Bill Kenwright Ltd fashion, they hadn’t actually finished casting the show. So while they continued the auditions to find a guitarist, I had a cup of tea.

I bought my lunch from Marks & Spencer. I got a superfood salad, a coffee style milk drink and a galaxy chocolate bar. What a superfood salad consists of, I will leave you to guess. Suffice to say, if you believe in the holy gospel according to Grazia, superfoods turn you into a superwoman. Sounds good to me. I was slightly more concerned by the coffee style milk drink. The style implies it’s not a coffee milk drink at all. Just a good imitation. I decided it was best just to drink it blindly.

Had a bottle of Becks after work with some of the new cast. They seem nice.

Then ran home when I remembered that I was supposed to be going on a date. Me and the lovely Bella went to Café Piccolo in Chiswick and had garlic bread, then Pizza Giadinera. I’m ashamed to say I didn’t finish my pizza. Shouldn’t have filled up on garlic bread. I ordered a bottle of Syrah but the waiter came back with a bottle of Merlot. Suddenly I decided I actually quite wanted Merlot so that worked out okay. They do very good tiramisu here, but I didn’t finish my main and with the immortal words of my father going round my head, I knew I wasn’t allowed any…

Ginger and lemon tea before bed.

Saturday

Got up a little late so got breakfast when I got to Edgeware Road. Vanilla latte and a croissant from Costa.

I went to Tesco for lunch. If you ever have to get lunch from the Tesco on Edgeware Road on a Saturday Afternoon, just don’t. I have never been to a market in Marrakesh but I would imagine there are similarities. It took half an hour to buy a carton of vegetable soup, a small bottle of apple juice and a small baguette. When I took my soup back to the rehearsal room I found that the microwave had no spin plate inside, so I had to balance it rather precariously on the turning mechanism. It was a risk but it paid off. Hot soup and a baguette. Yum yum.

For dinner I had something I call Mediterranean Potato Thing, for which you will need:

Potato

Quorn fajita strips

Wild Rocket

Fresh Spinach

Pepper

Plum Tomatoes

Chestnut Mushrooms

Shallots

Garlic

Chilli

The pepper I was going to use looked like this:

Deformed pepper

A bit deformed. This didn’t faze me. But upon cutting into it, it was a little bit furry on the inside, which I’m sure peppers aren’t supposed to be. So I had to continue the recipe pepperless.

Method – Same as usual. Chop it up, make it hot, avoiding any member of the Capsicum annuum family with fur on it. Do it right and it looks like this:

Mediterranean Potato Thing

Sunday

Someone promised me a very posh lunch in a fancy restaurant on Sunday. Then it didn’t happen. For lunch I had a cheese ploughman’s sandwich, a latte, a chocolate bar and a ginger bread man. It wasn’t quite the same. I ate all of this in Hyde Park near Speakers’ Corner. Nothing like a bunch of rhetoric to get your appetite going.

I don’t remember what I had for dinner. I’m sure it was something nice though.

Snow Globe

I wrote a haiku today.  This is it:

Oh hello snow globe

You’re not a Starbucks cup lid

Oh no. Wait. You are

Art Attack

I have recently discovered a couple of truths about myself. The first is that I don’t like clubbing. I have finally come to terms with it and stopped lying to myself and to others. I’m quite happy to be boring. The second is that I really don’t like art films. For 24 years I have convinced myself that a film about Latvian bean farmers was much better than a shoot-em-up-and-blow-things-up-and-make-puns-about-peoples-deaths film with Huge Jackman or an I’m-a-single-woman-but-that’s-okay-but-it’s-not-okay-I’m-going-to-find-a-man-and-change-him film with Pew Grant, I think mainly because it’s fun to be pretentious sometimes. And also, maybe, to impress the sort of girls I’m interested in trying to impress. It always sounds better to say “Oh have you seen the new Nike Kawasaki film? It’s this modern film noir about a convicted rapist who goes back in time to stop him self from becoming a rapist but ends up raping himself. Oh, and did I mention it’s a musical? No? So what was the last film you saw? The new Harry Potter!” Now why didn’t I think of that.

I think my biggest problem with art films is that although often beautifully shot and addressing interesting themes, quite often NOTHING IS HAPPENING. A good film, and indeed a good story, is characterised by this one most important rule – Things happen. And if those things are interesting, so much the better. Last night I watched a film. I won’t tell you what it was but I will tell you it was a well known film, by a well known director, about a well known musician, from a well known grunge band. And there were some very interesting parts in this feature length film. The problem was that between the interesting parts were long stretches of nothing happening. Literally nothing happening. A 5 minutes scene of a man lying down, a 2 minute scene of a bush blowing in the wind, 3 minutes of a man sitting by a fire. I would have loved to have been at the shoot. As the director shouted “Action!” I would have waited only seconds before screaming “Didn’t you hear the director? He said action. Do something!” Maybe the director didn’t shout action. Maybe he shouted something like “No Action!” Then when he shouts cut at the end of the scene the actor suddenly springs in to life just to show that he hasn’t died. And I would think about this as I’m bundled out by the studio security for having first broke onto the set and then verbally attacking an actor during a scene. (I still think they should have used that take. It would have been more interesting than the final edit. Ahem…)

Even if I’m not enjoying a film I will try to give it my full attention. Then at least I can say I watched it all and am entitled to have an opinion about it. Unfortunately, I’m not totally at liberty to complain about this film. So boring was the film, that at one point I forgot I was watching a film, picked up a green and a red pen laying nearby, and drew on my knee to see if I could create a 1950s B-movie 3D effect. Unfortunately (or possibly fortunately) my knee is already incredibly 3 Dimensional, so my findings were inconclusive. After 5 minutes of experimentation I remembered that I was watching a film. The actor was still lying down. I hadn’t missed anything.

I watched Did You Hear About The Morgans? the other night. Yes, of course I felt dirty after watching it, but things happened. Frequently. Almost continuously. Good film.

Bonus: Rejected ideas for blog topics.

• Why it’s okay for a grown man to suck a lolly but not for two men standing next to each other to suck lollies.
• Why goldilocks deserves an ASBO

I’m a Barbie Girl

They say (and by they I mean The Daily Mail and its readers) that if Barbie was a real person her tiny waist, huge bust and disproportionate head would make it impossible for the poor girl to stand up. What a worrying fact. I decided to find some more facts.

If a Cabbage Patch Kid was a real baby, the size of it’s head would almost certainly kill anything that gave birth to it. Luckily, Cabbage Patch Kids are born out of cabbage patches. The decline of the British agriculture industry is the reason Cabbage Patch Kids are almost completely extinct in this country.

Trolls actually have very tidy hair and it’s a racist stereotype to portray them otherwise. The troll dolls were invented as a piece of Nazi propaganda by the Quisling regime in Norway, who continue to persecute indigenous trolls to this day.

If Action Man were a real person he would have a smooth bulge of skin where his penis is supposed to be. Why people are less concerned about this, than they are about Barbie’s waist, I will never understand.

If Stretch Armstrong were a real person, he would still be a rubbish super hero and you would still get bored with him after a day.

Hope you enjoyed these “facts”. Please feel free to tell them to friends, use them in your dissertation, or better still, send them in to the Daily Mail.

The Machine Gunners

I’m currently in rehearsals for a play called The Machine Gunners based on the book by Robert Westall which will play at the Polka Theatre.  The theatre asked me to write a blog for their website.  This is it.

Machine Gunners by Chris Coxon

It’s the end of the second week of rehearsals for Machine Gunners at the Polka Theatre and we’ve crossed the halfway point. The first week of rehearsals was spent blocking the basic shape of the piece so this week has been all about going back and adding in the details to create the exciting world of Garmouth town in the winter of 1940.

We started the week in the recording studio, recording some of the pre-recorded voice-overs and radio announcements. Six geordies, the director and sound engineer all pile into a tiny studio on a Monday morning and proceed to shoot down a German Messerschmitt, all via a single microphone. A tight squeeze, but a great start to the week.

The highlight of the week was Wednesday morning, when my flatmate asked me what I was doing at work that day. I took great pleasure in telling her that “Today I’m building a fort!” Not your usual 9 to 5. I may not be 12 any more, but I still get excited by building a fort. I think we all do!

This week has been especially exciting as each day more props start to turn up. Our rehearsal room is starting to look like a bomb hit it. (Which I believe is the point!) Bricks, rubble, shrapnel, sandbags, tin hats, tin cans, tins mugs, gas masks, leather satchels, Flying helmets and machine guns have turned a church hall in Wimbledon into Garmouth’s safest fortress for watching out for Nazis. I just can’t wait to get into the theatre now.

Nothing is certain but Death and Taxis…

I made my first trip to Belfast recently and had a grand old time. (Grand is a word that I felt the need to say a lot while I was in Ireland for some reason, even though I don’t think I heard anyone else use it. I can’t seem to get out of the habit and I’m sure Holden Caulfield would hate me for it.) And I’m sure the first thing you think of when you think of Northern Ireland is taxis. No? Well you should. They are everywhere! I don’t know who is getting in these taxis apart from me. Everyone else seems to drive a taxi! The other thing about taxis in Belfast is that they do what’s known as the Belfast Black Cab Tour which shows you all around the sites of the troubles and the political murals and such. I was strongly advised by my girlfriend, who has been before, to get a black cab tour.

“You have to do a black cab tour while you’re in Belfast”, she said. “When we did it, it was thoroughly depressing. It’s brilliant!” So I did.

On the day before leaving Belfast, having spent most of the last two weeks doing little of any cultural significance (Mainly going to pubs and drinking Smithwick’s beer. Not Guinness. That would be cliché.), my friend Morgan and I made plans to do a black cab tour. I got up early and went round to where she was staying. I decided to walk rather than get a cab. I would be spending the next hour in a cab so a nice stroll over was my plan to start the day. Of course I don’t know Belfast and got lost. When I arrived late, Morgan opened the door to me.

“Ready for the black cab tour?” I said.

“Yes,” said she. “When is the cab picking us up?”

“Oh, was I supposed to sort it out?” Of course I was, and I hadn’t. So we looked in Morgan’s guide book and I rang a few numbers, most of which seemed not to exist any more. Which was odd because the guide book was printed in 2009. I couldn’t work it out. Had all the taxi tour drivers suddenly won the lottery and therefore retired? I thought statistically it was unlikely. Some of them may have married rich partners or inherited a gem mine, but all in all, there must have been some still in business.

Eventually I got through to a friendly sounding man who told me his name was Eamonn. He told me that I was lucky because he had just finished a tour and had a slot free in the next 15 minutes.

“Grand” I said, then asked him if he could pick us up from Morgan’s digs, to which he told me that doing that would cost an extra charge for picking up outside of the city centre. He suggested we meet him outside the city hall. I said that would be just grand. He said he would be waiting outside the main gates in 15 minutes in a green taxi then hung up.

“So, what’s the plan? Did you sort it?” said Morgan, in her Vancouver accent. (She’s from Vancouver. If she was just putting on obscure US accents that would be weird.)

“Yup. We have to meet him at city hall in 15 minutes. We’ll know it’s him because his black cab is green.”

“How are we going to get to city hall in 15 minutes?”

“Oh I hadn’t thought of that. I guess we’ll have to get a cab.”

So we walked up the main road, towards town, hoping to flag down a taxi. Suddenly my theory about taxis seems a little unfounded. There’s not a taxi to be seen anywhere.

“Why didn’t you get Eamonn to pick us up? We’re going to have to pay to get into town anyway” offered Morgan. I hadn’t thought of that. I started to panic. It looked like we were going to be late for our black cab tour, (in a green cab) and I didn’t want to be late for Eamonn. On the phone he sounded like the kind of man that wouldn’t be angry if you were late. Just very disappointed, which is worse.

With about 5 minutes to spare, we found a minicab office, went in and ordered a cab to town, which we were promised was “just coming up the road now” for us. 4 minutes later a cab pulled up and took us into town. We were now officially late. About 5 minutes late as we neared city hall. But 5 minutes late isn’t that bad. That’s just casual lateness. Anyone can forgive that. It’s almost expected. Suddenly I asked the cab to pull over and we got out.

“Why did you do that?” asked Morgan, still in her Vancouver accent. (It would be weird if she changed) “We’re not at city hall yet. Why did you stop the car here?”

“Because I don’t want Eamonn to see us getting out of another cab.”

“Why not?”

“Because he might see it as a betrayal. Eamonn is our black cab man. (Even though it’s green.) What would he think if he see us getting out of another car. And that one was black!” We walked round the other side of city hall, and Eamonn saw us arriving on foot about 10 minutes late.

“Sorry we’re late,” I said.

“That’s okay,” said Eamonn, and he didn’t look disappointed at all. In we got, and set off on our black cab tour (even though it was green).

Lost in the Blog

I have been reading the blog style articles written by Danny Wallace in Shortlist magazine. (Which are really rather good. It makes it worth having a publication thrust at your face on a Thursday morning outside the tube station.) And at the top of every article is the headline “Danny Wallace is a man!” On reading this I say to myself “Gosh, this Danny Wallace must be a very wise. For not only does he wear glasses, but he is a man!” And then I suddenly remember that I too am a man. It’s quite easy to forget that sometimes. So my job at the moment as an actor is to look like a 17 year old, but officially I am 23. I check my passport (for it is uncharacteristically easy to find) and I check my date of birth. Yes I’m 23! I check my sex. Yes I’m male! I check my place of birth. Yes, Consett, County Durham! No, wait. Maybe that last one isn’t relevant, but the first two are, therefore I must be a man too! Not a boy, but a man. Wow that was easy! I didn’t have to sit an exam or get a permit or anything. It just happened one day.  Could it be that I’m also qualified to write a blog. Okay, so I don’t have any glasses but I could get some. I’ve heard they are very cheap on ebay. Then I too could be a blogger, just like Danny Wallace.

I sit down to write my blog, then something hits me. Bloggers need something to blog about. Oh no! Maybe there’s more to blogging than being a man and wearing glasses. I was going to need some exciting things to happen to me. It’s at this point I scold my 7 year old self for giving up on the dream of being an international pet detective. Then I remember what I gave up that dream to do. I’m a travelling actor and musician. That’s got to be a good blog read. Such an exciting life travelling to all those interesting places. (This month alone I’ll be visiting Rhyl, Preston and Hull!)

And so, dear reader, you now have the great fortune to come on this journey with me, as I write essays on all manner of the exciting things in life. (I figured that all manner of the exciting things in life was generic enough for me not to run out of things to say.) Now I just need something to write about. I can worry abut the specifics of what that’s going to be later. Cant I?…