It’s not moisturizer. It’s fuel for your face.

It’s not for making your skin all soft and lovely. It’s a ‘facial recovery accelerator’. And like all beauty products for men, it has an aeroplane on it.

Thai-ish coconut curry

I’ve never been able to make a decent Thai curry. A few years back I spent what felt like hours chopping chilis and ginger and pounding lemongrass into a workable curry paste, only to be rewarded with a bowl of thai-ish soup that was frankly a little bland. Since then I’ve tried a few different jarred preparations, but they’ve been disappointing, too, flavourful but too salty. Of course, it’s not you, thai curry, it’s me.

But now Wendy has found a recipe for thai-ish coconut curry that I am equal to. Technically it’s not a curry, since there is no curry paste. And I say ‘thai-ish’ because it’s probably not authentically Thai. Let’s just say it reminds me of Thai green curry. In fact, let’s just say it has coconut and lime. As far as I’m concerned, that makes it thai. Sorry, people from thailand, but thats all you are to me. Coconut and lime. Most importantly, this is a recipe that any idiot can make, and it just happens to be sharp, silky and spicy delicious.

The recipe is based on ‘quick-braised vegetables, Thai-style,’ from Mark Bittman’s How to eat everything vegetarian. (But Wendy made a few adjustments, so don’t blame Bittman).

Thai-ish Coconut Curry

2 or 3 tbsp vegetable oil

1 onion, halved and sliced

a few cloves of garlic, finely chopped

1 chili (of whatever style or heat you prefer), finely chopped

a few lime leaves, chopped (optional)

1 lime, zest and juice

Coconut milk (440ml, two cups, one standard can)

1 tbsp light soy sauce

2 tbsp fish sauce

1 chinese eggplant (aubergine), quartered lengthwise and cut into half-inch pieces

A large handful of baby bok choi

A dozen prawns

(These last three ingredients are interchangeable – we’ve also used broccoli, mushrooms and tofu. In fact, you don’t even have to use three – two, four, five, one. Go crazy!)

Heat the oil in a pan over a medium-high heat. Add the onion and cook for five minutes or so, stirring from time to time to stop it sticking, until it softens. Add the garlic, chiles, lime zest and lime leaves (if you have them), along with the egg plant. Maybe bring the heat down a little, keep stirring, and cook for about ten minutes – you want the vegetable to soften a little without burning.

Add the coconut milk, and simmer until it reduces by half (this is important). Add the soy sauce, the fish sauce and the lime juice. This is the base of the dish. Now you just add the vegetables and any tofu or prawns or whatever else you wish. In this case, add the bok choi and cook with a lid for five minutes or so, until it wilts. Add the prawns for just a couple of minutes until they cook through. Adjust for seasoning (but with the fish and soy sauce, it probably won’t need more salt). Then serve hot, over rice or noodles.

I give you… The ‘Hombre’

I should begin by saying that Foundation makes the best vegetarian food in Vancouver. It has a view of the mountains. And bearded hipster waiters. I’ll overlook the platitudes on ‘freedom’ from the great, good and mediocre of politics and philosophy that are stencilled all over the walls because the food is revelatory and, well, where else can you read C Wright Mills’ damning verdict on the power elite while eating a plate of nachos? Not at the public library across the street, because they don’t let you bring food or drink unless it’s in a sippy cup.

The menu at Foundation is confusing, because it gives oblique descriptions of the kind of vegetarian sandwich, burger, chile, or salad that you’re not likely to have encountered before. ‘Beef and pickles’ would easy to follow, but when I ordered the ‘nooch-wich’ I had no idea what the skinny bearded waiter was going slide under my nose. I also had no idea how long it he was going to take to deliver it – he was clean shaven when I arrived. Boom boom!

Anyway, this visit to Foundation made me realise that a meatless sandwich that wasn’t a ploughman’s could actually hit the spot. A vegetarian sandwich, one W and I could share. What a thought! W loves mexican food, and I love her, so how about this: Toasted rye bread with mashed avocado (with a little salt and lemon), a small pile of black beans, a cushion of alfalfa sprouts, and lashings of chipotle sour cream. I give you … the ‘Hombre’. So named because it’s inspired by Mexican food, but it’s not even remotely authentic – not only do they not eat this in Mexico, my token Mexican friend tells me (repeatedly) that they don’t even say ‘hombre’ in Mexico. That’s more of a Spanish thing, she says, like I care.

No recipe. It’s just a sandwich. The beans are here. The chipotle sour cream is just sour cream and chipotles, whizzed up in a blender. The genius (if I may) is in the combination.

Maturity and Inexperience Required

England’s selectors are a mysterious bunch. In this age of democracy, accountability and transparency they remain a backroom cabal, whose deliberations can only be inferred from gossip, body language, rumour, and over-interpretation of pronouncements that a player is ‘in good nick for his county’, or is the ‘next cab off the rank’. Fans wait on tenterhooks for the merest hint of the direction of the selectors’ judgements, journalists trade on inside dope or a practised ability to read the runes. What goes on in those meetings? It’s hard to say. What counts as a good reason? What is the rationale for the selections? Did Ashley Giles, in a flagrant conflict of interest, promote his Warwickshire batsmen over other candidates? We’ll probably never know. We might as well read tea leaves as second guess the reasoning of the selectors.

Having said that, two features of selection over the last few years have been continuity, and a preference for youth over experience. Yet England have now developed a curiously ineffective combination of youth and test-match experience, and they are crying out for some maturity and craft. The team needs to be refreshed by some old faces.

The investment in youth is probably due in no small part to England’s obsession with building teams in four-year cycles for the home series against Australia. When Matthew Hoggard was dropped in New Zealand early in 2008 after another dismal display of top order batting, it was clear that the selectors had decided that the Ashes in 2009 was too much for the under-rated Yorkshire swinger, and that his long-term replacement, James Anderson, should be given a few years in the side to learn his trade.

Continuity and a fondness for youth is perhaps most striking, however, in the batting line-up. Alastair Cook’s century on debut on a Nagpur featherbed in 2006 saw him inked into the side for the next decade, his clean looks and public school education marking him out as a future captain almost from his first test. Ian Bell was introduced at the age of 22 and was immediately penciled in for 8000 test runs. Talent, potential and hope were the watchwords.

And when persistent failure to fulfill those hopes led to Bell being dropped, Owais Shah and Robert Key, mature players with a taste of international cricket, the former one of our top one-day batsmen, the latter having scored a test-match double hundred, were passed over in favour of Ravi Bopara: young, talented, precocious, young and young. Following Bopara’s failure in Sri Lanka, Shah did get his turn in the West Indies, but you could tell the selectors’ hearts weren’t in it – he was given very little rope indeed. He scored a promising fifty, and twice selflessly risked his wicket in pursuit of quick runs for a declaration, but he scored no hundreds, was apparently not ‘good in the dressing room’, held his bat too tight, and most importantly, had no youth with which to nourish the selectors’ hopes for the future.

The irony now is that several of England’s batsmen have both youth and experience, yet remain callow and fragile. Bell has 49 tests under his belt, Cook 48, and yet neither routinely produce match-changing performances, and both still trade heavily on the hope that their best years are ahead of them. For Australia, by contrast, Shane Watson and Michael Clarke are the only batsmen not yet in their thirties, and their top six, including the 30 year-old new boy Marcus North, has trounced England’s in this series by seven centuries to one.

Among the England batsmen ‘knocking on the door’, in that tedious selectorial cliche, the newly promoted Trott and the perennially overlooked Key have maturity but relatively little test-match practice. Yet maturity is precisely what England need.

However, should England fail to beat Australia this week, and fail again in South Africa this winter, I confidently expect the selectors to reach again for youth, to ‘invest’ in talent for the future (probably for the Ashes in 2013). Key and Shah, to England’s cost as well as their own, will be passed over again for the next youthful hope, maybe Joe Denly or James Hildreth.

Strange as it may sound, England’s best hope for rejuvenation may be to reach for maturity and inexperience.

Closing Down

Australia’s Aura, England’s Miasma

On the eve of the third ashes test at Edgbaston, the England captain Andrew Strauss gave what in retrospect seems a hubristic hostage to fortune: Australia, he said, had lost their aura.

“The aura came from guys like Warne, McGrath, Hayden and Gilchrist”, Strauss smiled, toasting the success of the fifteen-year English strategy of waiting for Warne and company to retire. “A lot of their players are just starting their Test careers and it feels like you are playing against any other Test team.”

How right he was. Australia are a shadow of the team of even two years ago. They really are not markedly better than any of the other top four Test teams. This, however, is a double-edged sword: England have not beaten any of the top four Test teams, Australia, India, South Africa or Sri Lanka, home or away, for four years. And after their performance at Headingley, they may have to wait a little longer to earn a place at the top table of Test match cricket.

Forget about radiating an aura; England were enveloped by a miasma at Headingley, a soupy pall clouded their minds and they were overtaken by a directionless panic. Within an hour of the start of play, the bristling confidence we were led to expect had melted away. Shoulders slumped. Movements became tentative. Under pressure, the bowlers could not play their game. Justin Langer‘s withering assessment of the team’s individual and collective mental fragility had a ring of truth about it.

However, I don’t really buy the idea that there’s something in the air, a peculiar and mysterious force that acts on English players like kryptonite on superman. We don’t need supernatural explanations. It’s simple. Too few of the players have the temperament to hold on to their technique in the fire of competition.

And here I would put the finger on something like English values, for our cricket culture is captivated by the notion of the gifted amateur, and our selectors consistently value talent over toughness.

Because giftedness is supposed to be apparent to the expert eye at an early age, anybody who is deemed to not have ‘it’ can expect a long and lonely exclusion from team England. When faith in the gifted finally gives way to recognition of modest achievement in reality (I’m looking at you, Ian Bell), attention turns to the new anointed ones.

Those who were blooded at test level, and who then worked, improved, developed their technique, grew in stature and responsibility, are denigrated as the ‘next cab off the rank’ – a phrase that implies privileging seniority over talent – are inevitably passed over in favour of whichever county talent has just scored a hundred.

Thus, when Vaughan made way, the selectors jumped over the two most experienced and able candidates (Shah and Key), who were branded some time ago as either difficult personalities or not having the necessary gifts, and went straight to Bopara, who is widely deemed a special talent. The problem is not with Bopara, but with a process that values giftedness over perseverance, commitment, and skill, as developed through hard work.

If England put more effort into finding the most dogged self-improvers rather than the most gifted ball-timers, we would, I dare to say, have a team who can trouble the best and who could, perhaps, develop an aura of their own.

Keep WADA Out of Cricket – For the Good of the Game

Our beautiful game is in grave danger. In the name of the global war on drugs, a zealous bureaucracy fitted to the very different world of athletics threatens to seize control of cricket. We will ultimately pay for it with the loss of great players for procedural improprieties – WADA, remember, wanted Shane Warne banned for life. If there is a drug problem in cricket, then WADA’s cure is worse than the disease.

Since the BCCI last week rejected the World Anti-Doping Agency’s advances, drugs have been on the mind of cricketers and fans worldwide, and sage commentators like Peter Roebuck and Mike Atherton have weighed in on the side of WADA. What’s the harm, they said, in submitting to international best practice on drug use in sport? Surely the innocent have nothing to fear?

However, I think the innocent have everything to fear. We need to take a step back and ask ourselves, we lovers of cricket: What exactly is the problem? And is the solution going to cause more harm?

By all accounts, drug use is not a major problem in cricket. There are at least three main uses for drugs in cricket. The first is to recover more quickly from injuries. There are a lot of entirely legal techniques and chemical crutches to keep players fit for a punishing international schedule. At this very moment Andrew Flintoff’s veins are coursing with steroids, specifically 17-hydroxy-11-dehydrocorticosterone, better known as cortisone. Mohammed Asif, on the other hand, was banned for using non-permitted drugs to help him recover from injury. I’ll put my cards on the table here: I think players ought to be allowed to use drugs that help them recover from injury. In itself, using cortisone (or whatever) to play through pain doesn’t introduce an unfair advantage, except in as much as it’s unfair for Philip Hughes to have to face Flintoff from around the wicket.

A second kind of drug use is more familiar outside the world of elite sport. I’m talking about recreational drugs, like alcohol, cocaine and marijuana. Ed Giddens, a middling English bowler, got in trouble for taking cocaine. He said someone must have spiked his drink, though of course in some parts of the world it would have been the alcohol that landed him in hot water. Phil Tufnell and Ian Botham actually admitted to smoking pot. In many countries this is against the law, but it couldn’t possibly be described as performance enhancing, unless by ‘performance’ we mean the ability to taste the colour in Pink Floyd. Recreational drugs have brought pleasure to some and destroyed the lives of others, but they aren’t a problem special to cricket.

‘Performance enhancement’ is the third, and, we would assume, most important, use of drugs. It might be confused with the first – masking pain can surely improve performance – but it is usually associated with a different purpose, namely, to build up one’s body in order to run faster, jump higher and lift greater weight. In sports like swimming, cycling, running and other athletic events this is a massive problem because triumph is decided by a stopwatch or a yardstick and the difference between glory and failure can be a millimeter or one hundredth of a second. Twitchier muscles or more highly oxygenated blood confer a clear advantage for the users of certain drugs, who are rightly called cheats. Yet such drugs are utterly irrelevant to the enhancement of cricket performance.

In none of the salient dimensions of the game of cricket – bowling, batting, catching – do medicines enhance performance. The fact that Inzamam-ul-Haq, one of the greatest batsmen ever, couldn’t beat an asthmatic schoolgirl in a bleep test suggests the relative unimportance of muscle mass and oxygenation to the art of batting. No amount of steroids would have made Steve Harmison hit the cut strip on that fateful Brisbane morning in November 2006. It’s not for want of pseudoephedrine that Alistair Cook plays across his front pad. And a pill has yet to be invented that can lend Graeme Smith the effortless beauty of Mahela Jayawardene’s cover drive.

So much for the disease. What about the cure? WADA developed stringent and zealous procedures in the context of athletics, and rightly so. But one size does not fit all. To apply to cricket rules designed for athletics is disproportionate and potentially destructive. The ‘whereabouts’ clause, to which the BCCI objected, means that violations of the procedure of testing become grounds for a ban. That is, by not giving your whereabouts correctly you will be treated as though you have taken banned substances. A great player like Kumar Sangakkara could, in principle, be given a life ban for incorrectly submitting to testing procedures.

A word of warning. If WADA had their way, Shane Warne would have been struck from the game. Think about that. Because an unapproved chemical was found in Warne’s bloodstream, one of the all time great players would have been kept from the stage forever. There was never any suggestion he gained an unfair competitive advantage. He just broke a rule. If you think about it, he broke a lot of rules, and that’s one reason he’ll always be my favourite. But it never was, and could never have been, the case that drugs made him great. If you imagine a 1920s international sports council populated entirely by pious American prohibitionists trying to ban Jack Hobbs for drinking a beer, you might get a sense of what is at stake.

Cricket is our game, and it should be us, not athletics administrators, who make the rules. While the BCCI’s motives may be murky, if they can keep WADA out of cricket, they will be doing the game a great service.

Pasta with Lentils

Oddly for a vegetarian, W is not keen on pasta. It’s nutritionally indistinguishable from white bread, she complains. She is bemused by the way it’s embraced by people who would look down their noses at a supermarket shopping basket full of processed white bread. But this is just a little pasta (vermicelli to be precise), and it’s in a lentil sauce. And to appeal to me, it’s all cooked in one pot.

The recipe is from NPR’s Splendid Table, repeated here translated into weights and measures that people outside God’s own America can understand. SI units, people. The French finally got something right. Just kidding. But not really. The metric system means we don’t have use different measures in each of our little villages – or at least it would if the USA would finally grow up and, as you people like to say, play ball.

Pasta with Lentils

600ml water

100g lentils

2 large cloves garlic, crushed

3 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil

200g chopped canned plum tomatoes, with some juice

2 tsp salt

1/4 tsp hot red pepper flakes

200g vermicelli

2 tbsp finely chopped parsley

Method

Bring the water to a boil, then turn head down to medium, add lentils, and cook covered for about 20 minutes, or until nearly (but not entirely) tender – al dente.

Add the garlic, olive oil, tomatoes, salt, pepper and chilli flakes. Cover and continue to simmer briskly for another 10 minutes, or until the lentils are fully tender.

Break the vermicelli into 2-inch pieces and add to the lentils. Cook, covered, at a steady simmer until the pasta is just done, stirring and scraping the bottom of the pan as you go – there will be pot-sticking. If that puts you off, you could cook the pasta separately and add it to the lentils.

When the pasta is done take the pot from the heat, stir in the parsley, cover and let stand for about 5 minutes. Then serve.

Broad Bean, Spring Onion, Lemon and Feta Salad

This salad recipe was in the Guardian recently, and the only thing I did differently, in typical middle class foodie fashion, was buy the broad beans fresh from my gal Caroline at Cork’s Saturday farmer’s market. W shelled them while she watched the Tour de France. We also didn’t bother blanching the beans, but were we to do so I would give them just a minute in boiling water and then plunge into cold water to stop them cooking. There’s barely a dressing to speak of, just half a lemon and a little oil. It’s a very fresh, clean salad, perfect for a warm summer day. Of course, if people in Cork only ate salads on sunny days, they’d barely see a fresh vegetable from one year to the next, so I can report that it is also a perfect salad for a warm, blustery, showery day in mid-July.

Broad Bean, Spring Onion, Lemon and Feta Salad

A few good handfuls of broad beans

4 spring onions, finely sliced

Juice of half a lemon

50g Feta, crumbled

1 tbsp Olive oil

A small bunch of fresh chopped parsley

Method

Just put the beans, sliced spring onions, feta and parsley in a bowl, add the lemon and oil (separately or already mixed – I added them separately because I couldn’t see the point in messing up a jam jar with dressing), season to taste with salt and pepper.

Bittman Salads to Try

Same story with the salad recipes from here. I’ll never remember to look for them when they’re buried in a list of a hundred, so here are the ones that caught my eye.

37. Cube smoked tofu, then brush it with a mixture of honey and orange juice; broil until browned. Toss with chopped cucumbers, radishes and peas or pea shoots; drizzle with soy sauce and lime juice.

41. Halve avocados and scoop out some but not all of their flesh. Roughly chop and toss with black beans, queso fresco, cilantro, chopped tomatillos and lime juice. Serve in the meaty avocado shells.

27. Cook whole, unpeeled eggplant in a dry, hot skillet or on a grill, turning occasionally, until completely collapsed and soft. Chop and toss with toasted pita, toasted pine nuts, cooked white beans and halved cherry tomatoes. Dress with olive oil, lemon juice and lots of black pepper. Or a (non-vegan) yogurt dressing is good, especially one laced with tahini.

43. Grate raw beets (use the food processor to avoid ruining everything within spattering distance) and toss with watercress or arugula. Top with sherry vinaigrette and a little goat cheese. Especially obvious, perhaps, but also especially popular.

54. Slice roasted red peppers (if you must use canned, try to find piquillos) and fresh mozzarella. Toss with cooked white beans, olive oil, red wine vinegar, a chopped shallot and fresh rosemary or parsley.

67. Bread salad for anchovy lovers: Chop together many anchovies, a few capers, lemon juice and olive oil (or anchovy oil). Toss with cubes of toasted bread and chopped tomatoes or halved cherry or grape tomatoes.