If you happen to be watching Nigella Express next week (BBC 2, Mondays, 8:30) and want to make it a more drunk and interactive experience, try this game:
1. Line up at least seven shot glasses filled with your poison of choice. When Nigella starts a new recipe, try to take one shot every time she opens a bottle that clearly comes from Marks and Spencer's and dumps the whole thing in a bowl. Don't worry if you can't keep up the first few times! That's a lot of drinking!
2. If Nigella makes a recipe that doesn't have a base of mayonnaise, butter or full-fat cheese, whisk one of your fingertips in your stand mixer. Make coy eye contact with the mixer as you do this.
3. When Nigella returns home from the shops on a public bus (conveniently filled with extras) or gives you cost-cutting tips (like saving exotic-looking food tins from your travels all over the world to use as vases at your next party so that you only need a couple of blooms in each one to make your house festive), thus showing us that she has the "Common Touch", crack open a can of whatever beer was on sale at Londis and give it to your poorest actor friend that you've hired for the evening to be your stand-in. Make him/her drink it all in one go. Laugh alluringly when they spill a bit on their shirt. Bat your eyelashes.
4. When Nigella suggest time-saving techniques like buying prepared produce instead of getting a knife out and doing a teensy tiny amount of preparation yourself, all the while spending about 4 times the amount of money, take a shot glass of sambucca and a fiver. Rip up the fiver and place the bits on top of the shot glass. Light the money/alcohol on fire. Down in one!
5. Every time that Nigella chops something (or uses a knife at all, really), poke one of your eyeballs out with a vintage and kitschy cocktail stick. Sigh at the sensual squelching sound.
6. Hit yourself on the head every time the camera strays below Nigella's waist and you think to yourself, "Sweetie, you've put on a couple, huh?" Have a raging internal debate about the positive ramifications of a woman rejecting societal pressure to be skinny and still being beautiful vs. the health risks of ingesting the amount of saturated fat that Nigella seems to endorse while still eschewing exercise. Tell yourself that at least she has a slim waist so she's not building up the "dangerous" belly fat. Determine whether or not a slight waddle can be sexy. Did Marilyn waddle or wobble? Is there a difference? Hit yourself on the head again. Feel like a failed feminist.
7. Have the person on your right pour a whole glass of wine into your mouth when Nigella checks her fake email, or applies make-up to an already-very-made-up face to prove that because of her casual and effortlessly fabulous recipes she is perfectly relaxed and ready to entertain all of her "friends" who are about to come over to her "house".
8. Close to the end of the episode, heap piles of bread, meat and mayonnaise on the coffee table (bonus points for anything from M&S!). Get everyone watching to make their own "Nigella pretending she's having a midnight snack of the leftovers" snack. The person with the construction closest to Nigella's has to eat everyone else's while taking huge bites, and sometimes chewing (alarmingly and inexplicably given their posh background) with their mouth open. They must then consume all remaining alcohol. Everyone else should shudder slightly, feel mildly revolted and have a less-raging internal debate about the sensuality of indulgently consuming food vs. simply too much information and too much mayonnaise.
That's it!By the end of this you (and your stand-in) should be drunk, short a few fivers, full of mayo, but with all your fingers and eyeballs intact!
(Seriously though, I like Nigella. I think she's a flamboyant and engaging character who has made some good tv shows in the past, and whose cookbooks tend to be pretty interesting. I'll eat her lamb shanks anytime my father cares to put them on my plate. This new series makes me swear at the telly, though. And it's not because it's not her real kitchen but a set, or that she says things that make you wonder what exactly her grip on reality is like, or even that the producers got her to use white emulsion instead of cream because it looks better on film. Whatever. It's TV and that's her character. My problem is that Nigella is super, duper rich and super, duper influential. What people don't need is someone with an absolutely immense amount of wealth and power pretending to know what it's like to need to make food fast. Her recipes are unhealthy, expensive and really, really lazy. And loads of the products she buys already-prepared are going to be pretty hard to source outside of Belgravia. She's not giving people any transferable kitchen skills, she's not giving them economical options, she's not thinking about any of the larger social issues involved with food consumption. She's just opening bottles in soft-focus.
I don't want Nigella to pretend to be a "real" woman anymore. Even with a big ass, she doesn't qualify. She has an insanely privileged life and I would much rather watch a show where she makes crazed banquets and manages to find the rarest and most expensive items to make sumptuous and incredible meals. "Express" is just lazy and boring. It's an easy cash-grab that won't challenge anyone's food habits and suggests that ease is the ultimate goal in the kitchen. Pretty disheartening.
P.S. Funnily enough, the book looks ok. For those versions of the recipes you are required to chop things into small pieces and actually take the pomegranate seeds out yourself instead of buying them in a plastic tub. If I had missed the series and only seen the book, I wouldn't have an issue at all. I would still much rather see a book called "Nigella makes forty meals a day for one hundred days and they all involve gold-leaf in some way or another", but that's just me.)
I made my girlfriend pea and ham soup following your recipe and have had a blow job everyday since. Thank you.
Posted by: Dean | December 07, 2007 at 04:48 PM