The Perfect Dirty Kebab: A Recipe Created On Twitter

This is a dish I came up with over the summer in the UK, before I flew back to Cambodia. Well to be fair, Twitter created it. You see I’d got bored of cookbooks, even the ones all boxed up in the attic and lovingly revisited one afternoon before I had to say goodbye to the house again.

And I was pretty flat out of ideas, what with the culture shock of being back in Blighty and all. It had become much more fun looking in the fridge to see what needed using up, and then asking people on Twitter for recipe ideas. That night, it was the mince that was going green at the back of the fridge.

“I have a pound in both weight and price of lamb mince, and zero inspiration. Any recommendations of what to do with it gratefully received,” I wrote.

Unless you’re Egg Wallace with his big, brass bed, throwing requests into the Twitter pond is a bit like fishing, in my experience - mostly you hardly get anything. But I had a good response that night.

Chef Dave Ahern (@CorkGourmetGuy) - who I’d met the day before when he did a cooking demo at Maltby Street Market, near London Bridge, where I was flogging my book  - suggested lamb chilli. Dino J (@Gastro1) recommended keema mutter or lamb kofte. Mikey Davies (@tucksontour) went for koftes with pitta and tzatziki, or lamb burgers, as did Linda Galloway (@daffodilsoup). And Judy Olsen (@judycopywriter) recommended Greek meatballs with lemon sauce, which she remembered making in the 1980s.

There were more calls for kofte, and then pub landlord and kebab aficionado Oisin Rogers (@Mcmoop) suggested an adana kebab, and sent a link to a recipe from New York restaurant Turkuaz. Everything from the onion to the parsley to the red pepper to the garlic was ‘minced’, except the mince which was ‘ground’. Oh, how I love American English.

Mix, squeeze on to skewers, and hope it stays together. But I didn’t like the idea of a tablespoon of coriander seeds, whether lightly crushed or not - the nearest kebab van was miles away, and I was craving something truer to the simple lamb and onion notes of a true, dirty kebab. Oisin wrote back, saying: “I had one made by a mate in Antalya that ONLY used ground pepper and salt. Sumac on the salad, garlic yog and chilli sauce. A*”

I liked the sound of that. I put the pound of lamb mince in a bowl, and added one small grated onion, two finely chopped garlic cloves, salt, pepper, and then trudged out into the dark to pick a handful of fresh coriander, which I chopped up and threw in to disguise the colour of the mince.

I mixed the meaty dough with my hands until it was well blended and then rolled it on a board into a sausage shape. I know some chefs who scoff at the idea, but I’d always been told to roll minced kebabs in flour to help them stay together, so I threw some flour on the board and rolled them out until they looked like saucissons you see hanging from the ceiling of French delis.

I poured a glug of vegetable oil into a frying pan and fried the babs over a fairly gentle heat for 15 minutes or so, rolling them around to ensure they were evenly browned. They looked so good, I got a bit carried away at that point.

I pilfered half a bottle of blended Scotch, with ‘medicine’ written on the bottle, that was hidden at the back of the cupboard, threw some in and flamed it. I’m not quite sure why, it didn’t do anything for its Turkish authenticity. But if you’ve got a well-stocked booze cupboard, then you might flame a few glugs of raki or arak, or perhaps not bother at all.

While the kebabs were frying, I got on with the rest of the meal. I found an old pitta bread that was crumbling slightly in the freezer, and then headed back out into the dark, taking fright again at the will-o-wisp glint of the CDs hanging in the cherry trees to scare away pigeons, and snagged a cabbage from next door’s garden. They’d probably just think the rabbit had escaped again.

I soon had my sliced cabbage, onion, cucumber and tomato together. I had my bottle of delicious African Volcano peri peri sauce from Maltby Street Market at the ready, and then just as it was all going so well, I moved on to the garlic sauce and found the only yoghurt I had was fucking probiotic peach and mango flavour.

So I thought bollocks to the wellingtons, and just covered my kebab with the fiery sauce, just like they used to make them at the legendary Sphinx kebab shop in Brighton. It was a splendid late-night, home-made kebab, and didn’t cry out for the toasted cumin and coriander seeds that many of the tweeted recipes asked for. In fact, it was a lot better without them. But then, that’s the beauty of Twitter.

John Cleese's Basil Fawlty-Style Hotel Rant Explodes On Twitter

How do you deal with a real life Fawlty Towers situation if you’ve got an enraged John Cleese as a guest? By sending out endless amounts of apologetic tweets to the comedian’s 1.7 million followers apparently.

It must have seemed a good idea at the time, but as Cleese’s Twitter rant exploded on the internet, they must have wished they’d never started.

Cleese, 72, sent the Hyatt hotel group’s social media monitoring unit into meltdown after flying into a Basil Fawlty-style rage about the constant noise of a drill (no, no - THAT was the burglar alarm...) outside his £330 a night suite.

“Staying at the Hyatt Hotel Perth. There's been noisy drilling next door for five days, and they refuse to stop. Not recommended!” he ranted.

His followers then began retweeting his outburst, obviously appreciating the irony of the star moaning about sub-standard hotel conditions.

One follower added “Fawlty!!”to the ex-Python’s message. Another wrote: “BASIL....BASIL!!!!” And so it started.

Cleese’s tweet began working its way around the world, much to the annoyance of Hyatt, who only found out about the complaint after they were copied in on one of the messages.

The hotel group apologised to the comedian, who’s just begun a 50-night ‘Evening With’ tour of Australia to help pay off the costs of his latest divorce, saying: “Thank you for bringing your concern to our attention so we could address this straight away.

“Apologies for any inconvenience. And do let the hotel management team know if we can assist further.”

Then for some bizarre reason, they began sending out an individual message to every Cleese follower who’d forwarded the rant - presumably hoping that would somehow limit the PR damage.

“Thank you for sharing Mr Cleese's concern. We have addressed this to his satisfaction,” they tweeted over and over again.

They were still doing it when I last checked. You can only have sympathy for the poor PR lackeys who have got to sit there copying and pasting the same message to every sender.

And just when they think it’s gone quiet, Cleese’s tirade gathers momentum in the Twittersphere and they’ve got to send out another batch.

You can imagine them with their gritted teeth and Basil Fawlty-like maniacal smiles.

“Thanks so much!”

“I’m so sorry!”

“Yes, so sorry!”

Who’d work in PR? The urge to write something else must be overwhelming.

MORE: Complaining About Bed Bugs In Hotels

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Can A Menu Be Racist?

A canteen chef in America has found herself at the centre of a race row after serving up a soul food menu in celebration of Black History Month.

Leslie Calhoun’s specialties for staff at the NBC studios included fried chicken, collard greens and black-eyed peas.

The menu was spotted by musician Questlove, who posted a picture to his 1.2 million followers on Twitter, with the words "Hmm, HR?" It went shooting round the Twittersphere, and quickly sparked a food fight between people with clearly far too much time on their hands.

The issue – which seemed to be centered on whether it was racial stereotyping, and therefore racist, to suggest black people eat fried chicken all the time – was greeted with an equal measure of incredulity and consternation.

In one corner, there were the boggle-eyed, foaming-at-the mouth types, jabbing their fingers at how it was all political correctness gone mad. They questioned whether it would be equally racist to put potatoes on the menu for Paddy’s Day, or pizza and lasagne for an Italian night.

One comment began: “I went to Nam to defend this country and look at what has happened. Obama, Tiger Woods, and (Al) Sharpton should all send that chef a personal letter of apology.”

In the other corner, were equally outraged folk, slamming culinary racial stereotyping, especially in such a predominantly white canteen. Seeing middle class media types tucking into their finger-licking chicken and cornbread was tantamount to “blacking up”, one person argued.

Comedian Wanda Sykes entered the fray on the Jay Leno Show, saying, "Hey big chin, what is happening at NBC? Is the whole damn network on medical marijuana?”

Questlove clearly regretted the row he’d started. An hour after he circulated the menu, he tweeted: "i think i need a twitter break. i done started something. and now i must put out fire."

But despite his way with words, the row continued and the sign was taken down, and the only thing people could really agree on was how it would have been much worse if the chef had been white.

NBC’s black chef then defended herself to the New York Post, saying she couldn’t understand why people might find her menu racist, and it was only food “that I eat myself".

She added: "Questlove, who I serve every day and who enjoys my food, requested the neck bone [cooked in] the black-eyed peas and fried chicken, then got off the line, saying, 'This is racist.'

"The next thing you know, people were taking pictures of the sign and asking all the other black people in the cafeteria if this was racist. They said that it wasn't."

It might all seem a bit trivial compared to the problems, of say Haiti. But it’s strange how emotive food is to national identity and culture – we are what we eat. And how often it is used in race-based slurs. Sausage-eaters, les rosbifs, limeys, cheese-eating surrender monkeys, spaghetti slurpers etc.

I got a glimpse of it once, when I was staying with friends in California. I was introduced to a German at a dinner party, who joked about how “everything in Britain is boiled”.

“Boiled!” I cried, recoiling in pain, the word much louder than planned.

I don’t why. I’m not particularly nationalistic or proud, but anger rose up inside me from somewhere, and I let rip about how British cooking had undergone a complete transformation in recent years, and there were some brilliant restaurants in Blightie, and besides all they ate in Germany was sausages and potato salad, and why anyone would consider the elegantly-named schweinshaxe a delicacy was beyond me.

Equally, and perhaps understandably, incensed by my disproportionate dissing of the legendary German cuisine, he put his hands to his ears and made a strange bellowing noise, and said all our cows were mad. I was about to turn to the thorny issue of Nazi Europe, when the other dinner guests jumped in.

And it was all over a fairly innocuous comment about the British preference for stews. The German had even winked as he said it. But somehow it had seemed racist, or at least intended to offend, and at the very least irritating.

Dinner Party Rule Number 8: Never discuss politics, religion, or food.

A disappointed Ms Calhoun told how she’d been begging NBC bosses for years to let her make special dishes to celebrate Black History Month, and only got her wish last year. The plan was to have one special meal every Thursday during February.

Apparently, next week, she’s got poodle hot pot for Korean night.

Masterchef Presenter's Tweet Nothings

‘Would you like to jiggle my cabbage?’ It’s hardly the best chat-up line in the world, is it? But it seems to have done the trick for that wily old ingredient expert Gregg Wallace.

The self-proclaimed ‘cooking woman’s crumpet’ has found love again – in the shape of a biology teacher 17 years younger than him. And pundits are already breathlessly exclaiming that this is the first instance of a celebrity romance developing from Twitter.

The two first made contact when Heidi Brown, 27, joined the 2,000 or so bored housewives, students, and other Masterchef fans following his every spoonful. Discussing his famous dessert-driven mutterings like: “I want to take my shirt off and dive in,” and the unforgettable, "it's like a lemon has just picked you up by the ears and given you a big snog." (Maybe that’s how she felt?)

But it was when Egg posted his cabbage comment that he really hit gastronomic gold, prompting a number of saucy responses from fans. "Jiggling cabbage is not a euphemism,” he replied to Brown. “No more than shuffling shallots or sorting celery."

Shuffling shallots? Even Frankie Howerd would have baulked at that one.

The father-of-two then went on to explain to Brown how to sort celery before she asked him whether he knew he’d been described as a “weird crush” in a magazine. He couldn’t get to the keyboard quick enough. "Ever visit London? Give me a call, I'll buy you lunch," he said.

Egg, 44, who uses the name Pudding Face on Twitter, has persuaded her to give up her job in Cumbria and move in with him at his home in Kent. "He and Heidi are very happy," a spokesman for the former grocer told the Sunday Mirror.

But since the Twitter love came out in the tabloids, are the strains already beginning to show? Asked by one follower whether there were paparazzi hiding in the dustbins outside his door, and how his girlfriend was coping with all the attention, twice-married Egg tweeted back: “Calling Heidi, poor kid.”

I can hear the Mrs Merton questions now: “So what first attracted you to the millionaire Gregg Wallace?”

Last February, Egg bragged in a magazine article about how TV fame had helped get him girlfriends half his age.

“Television is very, very good for your love life,” he said. “The girls are getting younger too. I’m seeing one who’s 29, but they have been as young as 21. God that was hell.”

Television doesn’t get tougher than this...

Brown has now protected her Twitter updates, but lists her profile as: “Cumbria 20 something, Northerner, owner of a retired greyhound and a cuddly whippet. Loves Sancerre and all things cured.”

Perhaps that’s why she fell for the lovable old ham?