Home At Last

I just found a little message on Lynn's blog from MB that at long last, after their Homeric Odyssey Mme. and himself have arrived safely home, lugging half of Europe with them.

While they put the kettle on and put their feet up for a well-earned rest I'd just like to say "welcome home" and "thank you for coming all the way up here to visit us all. You are wonderful, generous and loving people and you brightened the lives of everyone who met you."

When are you coming back?

What's Cooking With Dive? Sinigang Redux

I know I started this whole cookery thang off with sinigang, but apparently there is sinigang and sinigang and Joy tried to describe to me how her mum makes it in Manila, so even though this is bound to turn out nothing like Joy's mum's sinigang I'll have a crack at it at least.

One of the major differences between this and our first sinigang is the introduction of gabi. The gabi are those tuberous things at the bottom right and are essential to Joy's mum's sinigang.
Plus we found a wonderful thing in the Pinoy Store: fresh tamarind pulp, prepared and de-seeded. These (the things that look like … er … poodle poo, nestled in the loving embrace of the wibbly-wobbly-worm beans) give considerably less of a "kneading fresh poo" experience than tamarind paste (see the first sinigang post for icky, poo-related mayhem).

Like the first time I posted a sinigang recipe I'll be upsetting my Muslim and Jewish friends and eating a cloven-hoofed cute little organic piggy.
Though this cloven-hoofed business never made any sense to me as the ancestors of all ungulates - pigs, horses, cattle, sheep, deer, antelope, etc. - started off with five toes and only later evolved their more specialised pedicures. I put all of this down to some Hebrew writer around three and a half thousand years ago who was frightened by a pig as a child. Once these stupid rumours and superstitions start there's no telling where they lead. Hey ho. You all know my views on the Abrahamic religions.

Anyhoo … whatever you decide to kill, whether it has a cloven or an uncloven hoof, fins, wiggly fingers, tentacles or leaves, or if it stands there in the kitchen screaming "Mummy, Mummy, No! Put the cleaver down!", chop it up into bite sized pieces and brown it off.
With my squealy little piggy I added some piggy bones and fat to give a more authentic flavour and texture to the dish.

Soften garlic and onions just like the first time (you'd best go back and read that, too if you intend to actually make this dish as there's lots of crap back there that I won't be bothering to repeat this time).
Then chuck in your meat/fish/veggie/child and add a whole load of fresh tomatoes from your garden - or more specifically, from the vast mountain of tomatoes that you seem accidentally to have grown this year after telling yourself "never again" and to which your neighbours sneakily add several tons each night.

Do you get that around your neighbourhood in the late summer? Wake up at midnight and sneak out dressed in black with your wheelbarrow piled high with tomatoes to deposit them on neighbours' doorsteps only to find the street is full of ninja neighbours with wheelbarrows doing exactly the same thing?

So anyhoo …
Add to this about a pint of yummy home-made stock (for many sweary imprecations on this subject see previous cooking posts).
At this point add a couple of chilis, a diced aubergine, a decent sploosh of organic soy, a generous dash of Thai or Vietnamese fish sauce, the gabi and the tamarind juice and - should you be unable to find calamansi in your local market - squeeze one lemon and one lime in there, too.

Preparing the fresh tamarind is much the same as preparing the icky-poo paste; simply put about a mugful of hand-hot water into a bowl and throw in the tamarind, then get down and dirty with your fingers, squashing and squishing and generally having the kind of fun you remember having when you were three.
Squeeze all the wonderful tamarind goodness out of the pulp and then strain the liquid and gloopy poo-mess into the stock.

As for the gabi, Joy apologised to me after I'd made it, having omitted to tell me before that when you peel and chop up gabi they emit an aroma redolent of a student dorm. However, being anosmic, I hadn't noticed and will quite happily continue to prepare gabi without a gasmask on. The texture is worth the pong according to folk with functioning noses.
One thing she DID warn me about - thankfully - is that gabi should only be peeled while wearing gloves unless you really like itching for days afterward.
I hemmed and hawed for a while about wearing some nice elbow-length black lace dress gloves but in the end plumped for rubber Marigolds.

Hokay … Here's where you bring that lot to the boil, stirring away, and then set it to simmer, pop the lid on and wash up all the mess you've made.
Also, this is the time - should you, like me, want to freeze a couple of pints of sinigang broth for use later - to top up the pot with boiling water.
I must confess that this sinigang broth was so delicious that I've not been using it as stock but simply heating it up and drinking it on its own. Maximum intense yum!

Right … having entertained yourself in whatever manner floats your boat for around forty minutes or so, get back in the kitchen and lift that lid.
If you're the kind of person who tastes their broth and then adds salt and pepper you won't need to bother this time. The flavour that hits you is so incredibly intense that it will knock you out of your socks.
This is where Joy would add sugar, but as adding sugar to coffee or tea or anything else makes me gag, I'll be leaving it out of my sinigang. If you want sugar in it, add it at the table.

Also at this point, grab yourself a slotted spoon and fish out the gabi chunks, quickly mash them and add the mashed gabi back in. This will add a wonderful texture and also help to thicken the broth.

Remember those wibbly-wobbly-worm beans? I hope you've already washed them and chopped them into finger-length pieces because this is where you toss them in to the mix and give it a good stir.

Now pop the lid back on and dish up a yummy bowl of jasmine rice from your steamer … What do you mean you forgot the rice? I told you not to make this unless you read the original recipe. It's all back there. Sheesh!

We're not adding Chinese leaf to this version so now it is ready to dish up.
Here's a slightly out of focus bowl of it.
Believe me, there are "taste sensations", then there are "explosive taste sensations", and then there is sinigang.
This stuff is more addictive than crack cocaine … and somewhat tastier, too.
Plus, it is legal.
Go for it!

Sigh …

What a pity our week of vintage car racing ends with the sad death of America's most famous racing driver and race team owner; the man who drove to second place in the toughest race in the world, the LeMans 24 Hour race; the man who has donated over two-hundred and fifty million dollars to charity (and who will keep on giving long after he's gone), and one of the very few men in history who I would truly rate as gorgeous.

He could also act a bit.

I watched Butch and Sundance last night. Today it will be Cool Hand Luke.
It's not given to many to be universally loved and mourned by an entire planet.
Rest in peace, Mister Newman.

Rich has posted a great tribute, by the way.

Goodwood - Roll On 2009

I'll finish up our trip to Goodwood with a few miscellaneous pictures of stuff that caught my eye there this year.

Waiting for the race to start.
This is perfection for Old Dive: a pretty girl in a pretty skirt reclining on the grass beside a motor racing circuit.
The empty wine bottle by her feet suggests a day well spent.

There are always hundreds of vintage bikers at the event. This lot included Triumphs, a beautiful Vincent, Matchless and Ariel bikes. There were vintage hogs over with the jeeps at the US bar and Mods and Rockers mingling surprisingly peacefully at the Rock'n'Roll fairground.

Here's one for the scooter boys.

And of course there is always vintage bike racing, too. Here, the current as well as the past champion superbike riders have a whale of a time riding old TT machines. This year Wayne Gardner beat Niall Mc.Kenzie into second place on an old Matchless. Gloriously noisy fun!

This was the outside of the real ale bar which we frequented. Lots of "chaps" were sporting pipes and I was almost tempted to try a bit of rough shag myself. Empire Nosegay sounded particularly aromatic.

We found this sweet little MG roadster sitting by the fairground. Lovely!

This is only the second ever Zagato bodied Aston Martin DB5 I have met face to face. One of the rarest and most beautiful cars ever lovingly hand-built.

It has a sweet ass, too! And seems to still be capable of attracting a pretty blonde girl's attention.

But this is one of my favourite Goodwood images.
Take a look at the people in the foreground, lining the track rail.
This could have been taken in the forties. Goodwood really is the best fancy dress party on the planet. It's like being inside an old movie. The whole atmosphere is intoxicating.
If anyone wants to join us next year, the tickets will be going on sale in February.
Start planning your costumes now.

Goodwood - Hope For The Elderly

People of Blogville, I give you hope for all of us as we get old.
The man himself - his iconic, open-faced white helmet with earflaps and goggles, his skull rebuilt from metal like something out of Terminator, last weekend celebrating his sixtieth year of competitive motor racing, the world's fastest seventy-nine year old, Sir Stirling Moss.

Here he is at last weekend's Goodwood Revival Meeting, sawing away at the wheel of his 1955 C-Type Jaguar as he fights to control it and drifts slide-ways around the double apex of Lavant Corner at full throttle.

You've seen him in every year's Goodwood Revival post; you've seen him this summer, racing his '59 Aston Martin DB3 up the hill at the Festival of Speed.
You haven't yet seen him sitting and chatting with Phil at Mc.Laren's race headquarters because that photo stands beside Phil's computer but you've seen him scattered across this blog for years.

Here are some Stirling facts:

His dad raced for Ford in the 1924 Indianapolis 500.

His little sister Pat was a great rally driver.

He's been around a bloody long time. To give you some idea of just how long, after successfully racing in various classes for years he was signed up by the Mercedes Benz Grand Prix team in 1955 to partner the legendary Fangio. That very first year he beat Fangio into second place to win the British Grand Prix and he hasn't stopped since.

He has won sixty-six Grands Prix for Mercedes, Maserati, Vanwall, Cooper and our very own Lotus from the mid fifties on into the sixties until a near fatal accident here at this very Goodwood circuit ended his Grand Prix career in '62, leaving him smashed up and paralysed.

But they rebuilt him (his skull now goes clang if he bumps his head) and he continued to race in just about every other category and during his professional career raced in more than 80 different types of car.

Since "retirement" he seems to have stepped up a gear, which is why we find him still tearing up the tarmac at seventy-nine and showing no sign of slowing down yet.

This year at Goodwood, as well as racing all weekend he was celebrating another great Grand Prix driver, Tony Brooks, seen here acknowledging the acclaim of the crowds in his 1952 Connaught A-Type.

Here is quite a rarity: Sir Stirling in a sweet '58 Aston chauffeuring another great racing legend Jack Brabham, who came over from Australia especially for the weekend's celebrations.

Later on that day, in the classic touring cars race, Stirling drove (like a madman) Rowan Atkinson's 1952 Jaguar M.VII.
Yes, Mister Bean is an enthusiastic classic car owner and racer. You can see him in older Goodwood posts monstering the circuit in his Ford Galaxy.

Overseeing the weekend's events is the man who owns the circuit and who has built up the Revival meeting over the past ten years to become the greatest vintage car racing event (and the greatest fancy dress party) on the planet, Lord March himself, here waiting for the start of a parade of classic supercars between two of the competitive races.

Also racing here at the weekend - among many great names such as Jackie Oliver, Bobby Rahal, Patrick Tambay, Christian Horner, Andy Rouse, Tony Dron, Jochen Mass, Martin Brundle, Anthony Reid, Stefan Johannson and celebs like Rowan Atkinson and Pink Floyd's Nick Mason (that was him is his GTO in the earlier post) is notorious curmudgeon and ex. Grand Prix world champion Jackie "I'll never race again" Stewart.

Here's Jackie going back on his word (the board tells us he's already on lap seventeen). Hee hee. A welcome return.

Before I go, I can't resist re-posting that glorious shot of Sir Stirling squeezing past the Aston on the outside of Lavant.
Woohoo!

The average age of competitive racing drivers in this country is forty-five (Sir Stirling is by no means the oldest at seventy-nine - one Argentine Count is still racing here in his nineties). More and more people (women as well as men) are taking up the sport as they get older and their kids leave home.
There's hope for us all yet in our sunset years.

Let's Make A Racket - XXVI

A brief "musical" (HA) interlude in between all of this car porn as it's Thursday and that's what we do on a Thursday around these parts.
Another double-header today. Generous to a fault, that's me. The quality might be crap but you get a lot of it!

First up, a quickie; just a fun throwaway track. It's Michael and Dive down at the Blues Club way back when. This time we are ruining Robert Johnson's wonderful "Preaching Blues" by boogying it up.
Have we no respect?
No, we have not.



For dessert today, I've dug up something that's purely for my own nostalgic pleasure, rather than anything worth listening to.
This is an out-take from a rehearsal tape of our old lounge-jazz sanity band and when I blew the dust off it and put it in the deck I just had to laugh out loud and cringe at the God-awful Syn-Drum that Dave was playing. Holy crap that dates it so terribly. Whoever thought those were a good idea should have been strung up.

Even more embarrassing, this is us all dragged up for an end of year bash at my parents' old pub, where we used to play for laughs (and beer) as "Angie And The Amateurs" on our nights off from proper gigs. It was great to just let our hair down and play for the fun of it (no doubt this will prompt a nostalgia-fest from mum and yes, mum, I DO have the photo of the trashed remains of Steve at the end of that particularly well-lubricated night).
Angie on the left, then Steve, Old Dive (or rather Young Dive back then) and Dave B.
I was wearing a particularly sluttish sequinned evening gown with garter and sexy red wig. I think it was the beard and hairy legs that made me totally irresistible.

Apologies for the fact that this is a total shambles and that Angie's voice is barely audible, it was a rehearsal so nothing was miked up or mixed properly, just a cassette recorder plonked in the middle of the floor.
The song is Morrissey Mullen's "Stop And Look Around", a title which sounds like one of those crappy BBC kids' science and nature programmes from the sixties … and our version here is about as professional. Hey ho.

This is just the sound of Young Dive having a laugh with his friends. It was the first band Steve and I played in together and we stayed together through countless bands and recording sessions until the end, many decades later.

Gentlemen, Start Your Engines

The Goodwood Revival Meeting is about many things …
It is about re-living, indeed wallowing in the glories of a bygone era.
It celebrates the heroism of the men and women who fought Hitler's war machine to a standstill, many of them flying from this very field and sacrificing their lives for our good.
It celebrates the fifty years of first class competitive motor racing born here on the airfield; the brilliance and daring of the drivers and the fabulous machines the teams developed to race faster and faster every year.
It celebrates the style of those classic decades, the elegance and grace long lost from today's designer ugliness.
It is indeed the biggest fancy dress ball on the planet with tens of thousands of men and women dressed up to the nines in smart suits and fabulous frocks.
All the food is local and organic (and totally glorious).
All the toilets are sparkling clean (with napkins in the ladies') and of more than sufficient quantity.
Every straight and corner has it's own theme; from a 1950s fairground and rock'n'roll bar, through a wartime NAAFI to a Noel Coward era champagne and oysters soirée and all points between.
It is above all a bloody marvellous weekend.

And today we are here to race!

Gentlemen, start your engines!

How sexy is this? A luscious brace of Ferraris from old Enzo's heyday.

And here a pair from the late sixties, the end of the era of style and sophistication that saw the last of the "gentleman racers" before corporate money took over and the romance was lost from racing.

Unlike a lot of so-called "vintage motorsport" this isn't just a spectacular but somewhat toothless eye-candy parade of beautiful historic vehicles, the drivers and teams actually come here to Goodwood to race. To REALLY race!

Priceless historic cars are trashed only to be rebuilt for the next year; world famous names from the history of motor racing get helicoptered off with yet more broken limbs to add to their tally, only to return again to fight for victory. This is down and dirty, good hard racing.
And it is fucking glorious!

Here … having enjoyed his seventy-ninth birthday last week, and this weekend celebrating sixty years as a first class competitive racing driver, is the greatest hero of them all, the incomparable Sir Stirling Moss, driving car number 25 (a 1955 C-Type Jaguar) like a demon and overtaking an Aston Martin DB3 (one of his own old winning cars) on the outside of Lavant corner; a suicidal move for a lesser mortal.
Much more of Stirling later in the series.

Our very own Lotus cars (from Phil's Magical Kingdom) have a long and celebrated history in Grand Prix racing. Here's a gorgeous Lotus Formula One car from the early sixties.

And here are a bunch more.

Yet more Lotus racers from the late fifties.

A priceless and beautiful Ferrari 250 GTO doing what is is supposed to do, not sitting in some collection gathering dust, but blasting around a Grand Prix circuit with pedal to the metal, drifting sideways around the corners with squealing tyres trailing smoke in its wake.

Here's a gorgeous Cobra being chased down by CUT 7, my very favourite E-Type Jaguar. This car wins just about every race it enters and has been doing so since the mid sixties. The NOISE it makes is phenomenal! It slams your ears together in the middle of your skull. Woohoo!

Another Cobra, this time with a Ferrari. Sweet!

A fabulous Aston Martin DB5, one of Goodwood's Course Cars, leading the Healeys, Aston Martin DB3's and C-Type Jaguars round on their green flag lap.

Taking the Lavant double apex corner two abreast at full throttle is pretty insane, as witnessed by all the tyre tracks in the grass behind these two from cars spinning off earlier. Cars tend to drift sideways around here, squeezing one another off into the gravel trap.
Fun!

My favourite Yank (at least my favourite male Yank) is here again this year. The Cobrameister Carroll Shelby.
Here's one of his classic mid-1960s Cobras (the blue and white monster, a 1964, 4.7 litre Shelby Cobra Daytona Coupé … the best Cobra EVER) screaming down the inside of a 1965 Chevy Corvette Stingray with Carlos Monteverde's 1963 E-Type fastback in hot pursuit.
Groovy!

Here's the Cobra on the previous lap. That's the CUT 7 E-Type up ahead, about to rip the pants off the 'Vette and leave it standing when they tear up the long straight after Lavant.
These cars are so damned beautiful I'm welling up just looking at 'em.

As an extra special treat, here's a little vidette from Phil's camera of this self same Cobra about to lap the 'Vette a little later in the race.
Check out the drift on the earlier Cobra. Phreeeeow!





God, I love vintage motor racing!
Much more to come!

Goodwood … Totty

I was going to post car porn today but Phil has requested totty and so totty it shall be.

Are these mechanics watching for cars?

Nope …
The Goodwood Race Queens come out for the start of every race dressed in clothes from different periods over the past fifty years.

Here they are in sixties, Mary Quant mode. Please, please, please bring back the miniskirt!

This photo makes me so happy. A pretty girl in a minidress and sweet and sexy vintage racing cars.

The winner of each race gets a kiss from the lovely Marilyn. A great incentive to race! The guy with the clipboard seems suitably impressed with Marilyn's ass!

Here's an old guy who is SO not getting lucky today! The girl's expression and body language is so reminiscent of my own attempts at dating … sigh …

Was Phil really trying to photograph the bizarre old Czechoslovakian Tatra here … or perhaps a different kind of rear end?
That sure is one sweet bippy!

But this has to be the best photo of the day. Thanks to Phil for this one. Just take a look between the old guy's legs …
I think he's pleased to see her.

I love this skirt. Gorgeous.The shoes are pretty sweet, too. And the luggage. It's nice to see people making an effort.

Here's one from last year that I simply can't resist posting again. I was photographing her lovely polka dot shoes … Honest!

We're not just here for the totty, though (do I hear disappointed groans?); check out this handsome gent's killer socks!

One of the nice things we noticed this year was a lot of the kids were decked out in vintage school uniforms. This little guy was getting chauffered around in a lovely fifties Swan perambulator, Cool!

This guy just tickled me. Somehow the image of Captain Fantastic just doesn't quite fit.The sign perhaps of a misspent youth.

Here's Phil, trying to charm some goodies from the Octane girls. I do love polka dots.

Sweet. A pencil skirt, seamed stockings and "fuck me" shoes.
Nice hat, too.

The Glamcab girls are here every year. If only London cabbies looked so good.
Check out those pins … Yowee!

But you know me …
THIS is true totty. C-Type Jaguar Heaven. Sigh …
Now we've got that out of the way, perhaps tomorrow we can go racing.