More Osahenye Kainebihere


It seems crazy to me that you can ruin a meal with bad oil. And I mean here oil that has gone bad. I slapped some this evening into the non-stick wok (Lord was I a victim to the Amazon gold box) I bought years back and was greeted by a strange sickly smell of engine oil and walnut.

And the rest is my own fault, no surprise there. Undeterred and into the mire I tossed perfectly fresh ingredients, Italian sausage, green beans, organic tofu, carrots. Some not so fresh: rifling through my cupboards I managaed to pry a jar of rice wine from the pool of Italian honey that had managed to glue it to the shelf.

I wonder how much of a good business it is to sell exotic kitchen products such as middle eastern rosewater and pomegranate molasses to the ignorant masses such as myself. Those of us who are spurred to cook only by glossy cookbooks with pictures of Middle and Far Eastern delicacies which guarantee by their preparation hours of grateful sexual pleasure.

And then once the passion is over (so like fifteen minutes of wordless grunting and a few altercations with the headboard), the ingredients smolder in the pantry for many months or years until another misplaced bout of affection moves you to pour over the writings of Claudia Roden. You work yourself in to a frenzy of expectation and throw open creaky wooden doors to reveal out of date spices. Confronted with the possibility of placing spoilt food in front of the current object of your curiosity you hot tail it to the nearest most overpriced gourmet store and shop like a dog on heat. Which you are.

But oil. I never thought vegetable oil could go off, but I was wrong. If the sell by date is February 2004 I can guarantee you that anything you cook in it will be disgusting, dank and cloying. Like an ex-boyfriend. Or the Pennine Way, when it's pissing down (Thanks Dad). A couple of mouthfulls were all I could manage and I threw the rest of it into the rubbish. So that's why I settled down with a netflix and inhaled a gallon of Chubby Hubby instead. So much more satisfying on the risk reward ratio.