Yum-Yum

Is it me or…

I don’t know how true this is in reality, but I’ve noticed something, a difference between British websites that post recipes and US sites that post recipes.   Perhaps it might be that I’ve only seen the really BIG sites, the one from the BBC and others from the big name TV chefs.

The US sites will tell you to use a can of this, a can of that and to buy the pastry (if you’re using) from the supermarket.  A load of ingredients will be anything but fresh and will have been processed to within an inch of their lives.

The British sites I’ve seen are, frankly, food porn.   They’re full of stuff the great British middle classes have come to take for granted in their food shows.  Balsamic this, Morrocan that and full of ingredients that nobody where I am currently living has even heard of .

Needless to say, the supermarket plays a large part in sourcing these things too.

On the whole, I’m beginning to find the US sites more useful because they’re more practical and less pretentious.   I can mostly get straightforward ingredients, fresh vegetables, fresh meat and fish (in the winter only for the fish).   I’m more likely to get what I need from my local vegetable walah or the nearby small shops than the supermarket – because the supermarket is 15 or so kilometres away and far more expensive.

Stalls like these are all over Pakistan. The veg is only couple of days old. Very handy and addictive if you’re a foodie.

Even if the recipe talks of tinned foods, I can get the fresh versions so it’s better and cheaper all round for me.

Another point is that anything that talks about using a food processer is out because I don’t have one.  Even if I did, the power supply is unreliable and there are frequent power cuts, sometimes scheduled, often not.  And they can last up to ten hours though more often it’s one or two hours.  So I have to do my cooking the old fashioned way.

All these factors became an issue when I was looking for something new to try because my repertoire as it stands was (is) getting a bit staid.

Chicken Pie, the cooking

I found this recipe on a site which I didn’t pay much attention to but I can’t find right now.  It’s not something I developed myself.

It’s dead easy and came out really well.

The pie filling was dead easy to do.  I only had to fry the onions and begin frying other veggies in butter before adding water and a stock cube.

I didn’t realise the difference frying in butter makes.  I normally use extra virgin olive oil, which I’ve come to love.  Butter brings out something very different in the vegetables a really sweet aspect I didn’t expect.

The chicken itself was a bit harder to do.  Because the recipe calls for cooked chicken,  I boiled it for an hour before using it.

Then I had to begin frying it in butter and add flour & milk.  This is something I’ve never tried before ; I found it comes out as more exotic and exciting than it has a right to be, a creamy, thick mixture which gives the dish a sense of luxury.  Though, I think I could have used a bit more milk than I did.  I found the 125 mls in the recipe to be…I won’t say inadequate but I found it wasn’t enough.  Maybe it’s just me.

Normally, when I do pastry I mix the butter and flour with my hands to prepare the breadcrumb-like mixture.  After adding water or milk (depending on what dish I’m doing) I usually mix it with a fork or a spoon because I really dislike that slimy, nasty seeming mixture on my hands.  However, my pastry never comes out as easy to roll later on.  So this time I did it all by hand.

I think I’ve learned something new here because my pastry has never come out so well.  Mixing it by hand, making it into dough (even though it’s not dough) by hand makes all the difference.  I could do it with a thoroughness I’ve never been able to achieve before.  The results were excellent later on.

I found this to be a great recipe; straightforward, practical, warming and tasty, luxurious even.   It’s become another staple in my recipe list.

Here’s the recipe itself.  Apologies to whoever developed it, I never expected to be writing about it so I didn’t save the link.  Sorry!

Chicken pie

When it’s done, the pie should look something like this…

Ingredients
Serves: 8

• 2 sheets shortcrust pastry
• 60g butter
• 1 small onion, minced
• 2 sticks celery, chopped
• 2 carrots, diced
• salt and pepper to taste
• 2 chicken stock cubes
• 500ml water
• 3 potatoes, peeled and cubed
• 225g cooked chicken, cubed
• 3 tablespoons plain flour
• 125ml full fat milk
• 3 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley
• 1 teaspoon chopped fresh oregano

Method
Prep:20min  ›  Cook:1hr  ›  Ready in:1hr20min

1. Preheat oven to 220 C / Gas 7. Roll out one piece of pastry and place in a 20cm pie dish and set aside.
2. Place 1/2 of the butter in a large frying pan. Add the onion, celery, carrots, salt and pepper. Cook and stir until the vegetables are soft. Stir in the stock cubes and water. Bring mixture to the boil. Stir in the potatoes, and cook until tender but still firm.
3. In a medium saucepan, melt the remaining butter. Stir in the chicken and flour. Add the milk, and heat through. Stir the chicken mixture into the vegetable mixture, and cook until thickened. Add fresh herbs. Pour mixture into the unbaked pastry case. Roll out the top piece of pastry, and place on top of filling. Flute edges, and make 4 slits in the top to let out steam.
4. Bake in the preheated oven for 15 minutes. Reduce oven temperature to 180 C / Gas 4 and continue baking for 20 minutes, or until pastry is golden brown.

Caffeine Fixed

Ahhh coffee. One of the world’s favourite drinks, though I don’t know if it’s more popular than tea.
But here in Pakistan, I do admire the way people have with coffee. They can make a cappuccino without a machine. Which is more than I can do. You mix your dry coffee with a couple of teaspoons of milk and beat hell out of it with a teaspoon until it’s peaky like heavy cream. Add hot water and yum-yum it’s delicious.

I’ve tried to do this myself and met with degrees of failure from horrible to marginal.

The king of coffees or not…this is my favourite

This afternoon I put two teaspoons of ‘Douwe Egberts’ (my coffee of choice)into a cup, mixed with two teaspoons of water, a little sugar and a dash of milk and began beating. It looked like melted chocolate but never thick cream. It even frothed for a moment when I poured in the water.

The flavour was no more than ok-ish. The froth didn’t last and the creamy, velvety consistency in my mouth was missing. My wife enjoyed it but I’m not satisfied. Next time, I’ll put in the coffee and sugar, mix that, add a teaspoon of milk and then beat the life into it. Or maybe I can buy an electric whisk to do the job for me.
I’m not a long time caffeine user. I only discovered the joys of the liquid form drug almost nine years ago. After that, there was no stopping me.

A supremely better coffee than I can make

Plain, cappuccino, mocha, latte…I love them all. But not espresso. Espresso is too intense, too bitter, too nasty for my mind to suck in. Over ten years ago I made the mistake of having a double espresso by accident.

It was a branch of Café Nero in Heathrow Airport. I was there for some time waiting for my Tube (the Underground system) connection to central London. I would kill time by trying this legendary hot drink. When it was my turn to be served I asked for the espresso only to be asked how many shots I wanted. Shots? Shots of what? I didn’t expect this so I asked for two.

I quickly learned why this is served in such a small cup. I drank it, took my time, I had to it was impossible to knock straight back. The bitterness, the pungency overpowered me. I spent the rest of the day trying to undo the flavour assault I’d subjected myself to. It was still on my tongue and in my stomach eleven hours later.

When I joined the rest of humanity in appreciating the finer powers of coffee, I made sure I kept off the rocket fuel espresso. Instead I fell for the more luxurious end of the market – mocha, cappuccino, latte, all full fat of course.

Of course it’s full fat! I’m drooling just looking at this…

Starbucks has no presence in Pakistan or in Lahore that I’m aware of. Instead, the most prevalent coffee chain is ‘Gloria Jean’s’, which I’d never heard of before I arrived here. A night out with friends put me in touch with their ‘Very Vanilla Latte’. What a coffee (albeit with enough sugar and fat to stop an elephant). Wow.
So now I am a confirmed coffee lover but not an addict because when I need to be refreshed, to get my thinking cap working, or just revive me it’s tea I turn to. That said I do love coffee because for me, it’s a great treat, something out of the ordinary, especially when it’s done properly.
So I just have to learn to do it, then don’t I?

Another fine mess they gotten us into…Britain in Afghanistan

Afghan fighters, First Anglo – Afghan War, 1839 – 42. They haven’t changed that much.

So ISAF has wound up its operation in Afghanistan and declared its objectives achieved after 4,500 military deaths, many times that in civilian deaths; billions of dollars worth of destruction and so on and so on. Predictably, the Taliban have also declared victory labeling the foreign intervention a failure.

Just as predictably, commentators of all national origins and political stripes have tried to paint Afghanistan as some kind of black hole into which an army will march and never return. The British in 1839 – 42, (and another twice over) the Russians in the 1980s and now the Americans and British (again) in the 2000s.

I’m not so sure about ‘the graveyard of Empire’ label. Afghanistan highlights something systemic about foreign intervention there; failure of leadership, failure to plan, failure to understand the terrain (physical, cultural, psychological), failure to follow expert knowledge and advice. As cunning, brave, determined and atavistic as the Afghans need to be (and are) to defeat foreign adventures, we also like to ignore how the incompetence and arrogance of foreign militaries contribute to their own defeat.

As a Briton, the two most stunning examples have to be the first and last British contributions to this history.
The First Anglo Afghan War of 1839 – 42 was an unmitigated disaster. Sparked by the refusal to follow expert advice from specialists on the ground, who understood the Afghan ruler, Dost Muhamad, and what was going on in the country.

It followed the usual pattern: seemingly easy initial victories followed by the realization of backing the wrong man, poor leadership, confusion, defeat and humiliation.

A British army chaplain, the Reverand G.R. Gleig summed it up best when he wrote in 1843 that the First Anglo-Afghan War was

“begun for no wise purpose, carried on with a strange mixture of rashness and timidity, [and] brought to a close after suffering and disaster, without much glory attached either to the government which directed, or the great body of troops which waged it.”

The Remnants of an Army. William Brydona, assistant surgeon in the British East India Company Army arrives at Jalalabad, 1842.

The campaign was a misbegotten mess from start to finish. To begin with, the war was unnecessary. Having decided to fight it, the British conducted the war in such a way as to make defeat the only possible outcome.
This gives an astonishing account of how it happened. This is a shorter appraisal, but equally eye opening.

***

No luck second time around. British and allied forces at Kandahar after the 1880 Battle of Kandahar, during the Second Anglo-Afghan War.

Fast forward to the modern era and we can see a similar pattern, as this article in Foreign Policy makes clear.
The attacks on New York and Washington on the 11th September 2001 made action of some kind inevitable. I remember a die-hard liberal friend of mine (and near pacifist) asking ‘what else can they (the US) do?’ Which was a good question.

From the moment the US presence in Afghanistan arrived, they had no interest in nation building. No interest in attempting to solve the problems that had created the Taliban in the first place. They were only interested in driving out the Taliban and hunting down Al-Qaida. In fact, the ‘driving out the Taliban’ bit was outsourced to any Afghan force that would do the fighting.

The result was missed opportunities to round up the leadership of Al-Qaida and the Taliban holed up in the Tora Bora mountains.

This was compounded by a catastrophic misunderstanding of Pakistan. The US never properly got to grips with the fact that Pakistan was riding two horses at once. Taking US money and weapons to hunt down selected Al-Qaida leaders and personnel whilst quietly supporting the return of Taliban proxies to fight in Afghanistan. All the while giving safe haven to these proxies in Quetta and North Waziristan. And sheltering Osama Bin Laden.
Probably the worst blunder was allowing the return to power of the old Mujahedeen warlords who had sparked a vicious civil war, allowing for the creation of the Taliban and its spectacular military victories, in the early 1990s.

The Bush administration never properly tried to solve these problems and remained blissfully ignorant of Pakistan’s double game (as William Dalrymple’s review of Ahmed Rashid’s Descent into Chaos’ makes clear).
So when the new Obama administration recalibrated the US approach with the so called Af-Pak Strategy in 2009 / 10, it was already too late. The accumulated detritus of mistakes: corruption, neglect, ignorance and inaction had created a vortex that gained its own momentum.

There’s also the singular fact that Western militaries were geared toward fighting the wrong war. The Taliban insurgency was never the Soviet Army pouring into the plains of Germany. This analysis of the war against ISIS applies equally to Afghanistan.

Finally, the most remarkable account of military folly comes courtesy of the British once again. In a book review published in the London Review of Books, journalist and novelist James Meek describes something that can only be described as a disaster:

“The British army is back in Warminster and its other bases around the country. Its eight-year venture in southern Afghanistan is over. The extent of the military and political catastrophe it represents is hard to overstate. It was doomed to fail before it began, and fail it did, at a terrible cost in lives and money.
How bad was it? In a way it was worse than a defeat, because to be defeated, an army and its masters must understand the nature of the conflict they are fighting. Britain never did understand, and now we would rather not think about it.”

That gives a flavour of what the review is about.

Simply put, the British didn’t go to Afghanistan in 2001 and beyond to defeat the Taliban, restore order and create a nice place to live for Afghans. They went there for one reason: to impress the Americans.

Let me say that again. The British forces were in Afghanistan to impress the Americans. Everything they did was geared to showing the US that Britain could still cut it as a reliable partner and military power. That’s the British raison d’etre in Afghanistan. They had neither the money nor the manpower to do it, but that didn’t matter. Everything else flowed out of that.

British soldiers in Afghanistan, 2000s. At least the Army got out in one piece, but left it’s pride behind.

In terms of deaths, this disaster wasn’t as bloody (for the British at least) as the first round in 1839 – 42. In terms of treasure, it broke the bank; not least because Britain’s economy in the 2000s could buy considerably less than in the 19th Century.

It isn’t even as if they ever knew what was happening on the ground.

Putting British forces in Helmand province had no historical literacy. Meek’s article shows how the British were distrusted and hated from the start. And the British never understood why.

Meanwhile, Afghans couldn’t believe the British could be as stupid as they appeared; concocting an elaborate conspiracy theory to explain British incompetence. The 19th Century experience had left Afghans with a folk memory of the British as ingenious, cunning devils. A memory that failed to take into account what they saw in front of them.

Here’s James Meek again:

”Helmandis believed deeply in the natural cunning of the British, so much so that the former chief (actual) Taliban commander in Helmand, the late Mullah Dadullah, was known as ‘the lame Englishman’ on account of his one leg and his extreme deviousness. For this reason people found it hard to account for Britain’s conduct in Helmand. There were two possibilities: the less likely was that the British were naive and ignorant. The favourite explanation, widely and sincerely believed, was that, secretly continuing to exercise imperial control over Pakistan, they were working hand in hand with the (actual) Taliban to punish Helmand, and that the Americans were trying to stop them.”

Whatever angle you look at it, this latest ignominious withdrawal from Afghanistan signals another failure of leadership and knowledge. It does not suggest the invincibility of the Afghans in their mountain fastness. Afghan history is more complex than that.