Living With Frank

Chips (English Style)

This is a follow-up to my previous post (http://iamfranksbitch.tumblr.com/post/37694320728/sloppy-joes) where I introduced Brits to the American classic, Sloppy Joes.

Let’s start off with the most important lesson here. I’m English so “Chips” means Chips, not crisps and not fries. Crisps are what you yankee freaks call chips, we British call chips, chips. In other words, a potato cut into “fingers” and fried or oven cooked. DO NOT confuse these with fries which are those soggy disgusting things fat cunts eat at fast food places… correction, what fat fucks eat in just about any place in the United States of fat bastards.

So now that you understand the difference, this post is for you Americans on one way to make proper chips. If there is an American word for what British call chips (remember, we have fries too, they are different) then please let me know.

You will need:

Potatoes - Large, preferably Maris Pipers (I think you hicks, sorry, Americans, call them Yukon Golds or some such).

Water - Lots. There’s a lot of rinsing and boiling.

A hot oven - No really, the oven I have access to doesn’t get as hot as it says.

Alternatively, a very large pan and lots of vegetable oil if you want to fry them instead. You could use a deep fat fryer with the fancy lid and bollocks but for fuck’s sake, grow a pair and do this properly or not at all.

Ok then, how to make British style chips:

1. Peel potatoes and soak in cold water. Ideally overnight but as long as you’re willing to bother to. At least an hour though. This is get rid of some of the starch.

2. Cut the potatoes into roughly 1cm fingers and again, place in cold water, ideally overnight but at least for an hour. I’ve always done both these steps but you could possibly skip the first step if you’re willing to soak the raw chips for at least 3-4 hours.

3. Add the uncooked chips to a large pan of cold water and bring to boil.

4. Remove chips form boiling water, tip into a colander and rinse under cold water.

5. Heat up a large pan of water (you can add salt if you must but don’t) until it starts to boil. Add 1/3 to 1/2 of the chips to the boiling water and allow it to reach boiling point again. Add the next 1/3 or half and repeat until all the chips are in the boiling water.

6. About a minute or two after all the chips have been placed in the boiling water, tip them into your colander again and rinse in cold water. You can at this stage freeze them for later or freeze them any way as some people prefer the texture of them cooked from frozen. Experiment and see what you prefer.

7. You now have a choice. Oven cook or deep fat fry.

7a. Oven cook: Heat oven to 250-275c / 460f - 500f. Place chips on a baking tray and pour some olive oil over them. Depending on the tray used you might want to spray some PAM on it first to avoid the chips sticking. Cook for about 50 minutes turning them all every 10 minutes until lightly brown on all sides.

7b. Deep fat fry: Being American you know how this works. Heat a fuck off big pan of oil till just before it sets light to your kitchen (about 190c) then add chips. Should be done in about 15-20 minutes.
Oh, again, some experimentation. For extra crunchy chips, cook first at around 130c for half the time then, when they’re needed, heat again at 190c.

8. Serve with appropriate condiments.
Ok, this is another very important point. Only certain condiments are permitted to be added to chips: Ketchup (no High Fructose Corn Syrup please), Brown Sauce (HP or don’t bother), Mayonnaise (Hellmanns or don’t bother) , curry sauce (NOT fucking BBQ you damned hicks), mushy peas, gravy, salt and (malt) vinegar.
The last two items are compulsory, I don’t care what’s wrong with your fucking heart.

Done. The very best way to eat these is either from a three week old (London) Times newspaper, from a cardboard carton covered in mushy peas or in a buttered bread roll. Now, if you opt for the latter please note that it is punishable by death if you line the chips up neatly inside the roll. Grab a handful, throw them in the roll and squish it down so you can fit it into your gob.

Now, never eat fries again. Gob-shites.

Sloppy Joes

I haven’t written a post for a while and thought I should. I’m supposed to use this space to tell you about living with Frank but for various reasons I will one day go into, I’ve been slacking off. So to make up for it (??) I’m going to share with my UK readers (since US already know this) “Sloppy Joes”. In short it’s just minced beef with every condiment you can find eaten in a bun.

Frankie, as you may know, has a culinary arts degree, worked in several restaurants and even ran their own catering business. I have a National Diploma in Electrical Engineering; so obviously I do a lot of the cooking.

1. Home made buns:

2. Minced Beef.
Heat olive oil and butter in pan, sautee some onions and garlic, add minced beef. heat until cooked.

3. Add ketchup, burger mustard, Worcestershire sauce, salt and pepper.

4. When ready, remove rolls from oven:

5. Normally you’d just make a roll sandwich with the minced beef mess but since these rolls were rather large, we had them open faced (until Frankie squashed one enough that it fitted in their gob):

And voila, an American classic. Apart form the home made bit, normally those bloody yanks use shop bought rolls full of High Fructose Corn Syrup and a can of “Manwich” or some other MSG containing crap.

2012 US Presidential Debate - An Englishman’s View

Today I watched, for the first time, the U.S. Presidential debate in full. I’ve seen bits of previous U.S. presidential debates (“the debate”) from the UK as believe it or not, who becomes the President of the United States is a concern to many outside of America, even to non-Americans.

I thought I’d give a quick run-down of how I thought it came across to a Non-American, trying to be as open minded as I can be.

On the whole I think Romney probably did come out on top. Romney was, in this instance at least, the better speaker always speaking very clearly, obviously well rehearsed (I don’t mean that as a negative) and got his points across very well. Obama didn’t seem to have as much fight in him as previous speeches I’ve seen him give and he didn’t seem to be able to express his points as clearly or as timely as Romney was able to do. Further more, regardless of what is and isn’t true, what you may or may not believe, Romney was the more persuasive. Whilst I disagree with it on principle, I think this alone may have persuaded some undecided voters to drift towards Romney with their vote.

I had to cringe at Obama’s opening answer and felt that whilst it was hear warming and obviously sincere I was just counting the seconds that he was spending not answering the question. Knowing that Obama isn’t the greatest speaker made this all the more painful to watch. There were also several times when I found myself, either verbally or through hand gestures, wishing Obama to stop talking especially after the moderator had to on several times remind him his time was up for that segment. I know from past experience as a lecturer (education) and speaker (for a union) that it isn’t looked favourably when you go over an allotted time restraint.

I’ve said already that I don’t agree that this is reason alone enough to vote for one candidate over another but unfortunately, as was witnessed on Fox after the debate, many Republican supporters are hammering Obama because of it. On both the TV and on Twitter I’ve seen people harping on about how Obama falls over without his teleprompter though one has to laugh at their oh so short memories. I’m pretty sure Bush “W” was worse when left to his own devices and more recently Romney on his visits abroad and the horrendous foot-in-mouth issues he suffered whilst speaking. The Republicans seemed to have forgotten this.

I suppose it is only fair since many people said many of the same things about Romney and Bush but here’s the difference: Obama is just not a good speaker, he pauses a lot, probably for the same reason I sometimes do, to check with myself that I’m using the correct words and he struggles to make his point clearly. Romney speaks much better but when the words spewing out your mouth offend your host and even entire countries or simply make absolutely no sense what so ever (Romney and Bush respectively) it doesn’t matter how clearly you speak them, you still messed up. Personally, I’d rather someone struggled with their speech and told me the truth than effectively told be a lie. But I’m odd like that.

Now that I’ve laboured that point, I’ll move on to the content of the debate (thankfully there wasn’t really much of it, as far as keeping this post short).
We didn’t learn anything we didn’t already know but I want to start with what Obama didn’t say. Many people were expecting Obama to talk about “the 47%”, China and Bain Capital. There was also an ideal opportunity mid debate where Obama could quite legitimately brought up the subjects of gay marriage but also chose not to. Many people, on both sides are critical of Obama for not raising these points but I agree he was right not to. I had already decided that for this debate it didn’t matter what Romney said or didn’t say, didn’t matter what Obama hit him with, it was not going to lose Romney any voters. Nothing at all. Romney was safe as far as those that had already decided to vote for him were concerned. This debate was Obama’s to lose (votes for). I believe that Obama knew this and as such knew it would be pointless and a complete waste of his limited time to do so. I don’t believe Obama would have gained any voters for doing so though I will accept that will have been those Democratic voters that might have been peeved. After seeing how much Obama was struggling with the limited time I now believe this even more so. Also, Romney was most very likely well prepared to retort against this issues and again, would probably have done more harm to Obama’s image at this debate than good.

As far as answering the questions put forward by the moderator, I don’t think either of them (Romney nor Obama) did a great job of providing satisfactory answers. If I had to pick a winner on this point I would probably have to again give it Romney as whilst he was typically evasive and wooly with his answers he came across more … sorry, I’m struggling to find the right word myself now… with more sustenance. Romney rattled of his 5 point plan and defended himself well against what he referred to as untruths (paraphrasing) from Obama. That doesn’t mean I thought Romney’s answers were better (factually) or more detailed, Obama’s were but again, if I was ignorant of both parties policies and previous records, Romney was more persuasive.

If I was a U.S. voter and was prior to the debate undecided who would get my vote I didn’t feel any more persuaded either way by any side. Right up to that is, Romney’s closing where he mentioned the Military and how it was his number one priority. He dais something about a presidents job is to uphold the Constitution of the United States; well sorry Romney, with all due respect, no it is not. A presidents priority is to his people and his country (in my opinion) and you can talk till the cows come home about how you need a military to protect the people but that’s not going to wash with me. $700 Billion is a disgusting amount of money and I can’t see how you’re going to decrease the deficit, cut taxes for everyone and finance 12 million new jobs whilst maintaining that obscene military budget. To be fair I’m not sure how Obama will do it either but that last statement from Romney was offensive to me.

In summary then, neither Romney nor Obama answered questions particularly satisfactorily and Romney did “win” the debate but if I had a vote to give I couldn’t give it to someone that supports wars and that level of military spending.

On a side note, it was interesting if not surprising that after the debate, whilst CNN was interviewing people form both sides, Fox concentrated on Republican supporters and bashing Obama. Nice to see Fox not being ashamed to be so blatantly biased.

I’m a “Libtard”, apparently

This actually stemmed from the response to one of Frankie’s facebook statuses and was directed at them but since it applies to me too, I thought I’d take a stab at a response. In the end, I felt it was something I’d like to share with others, as I often do with my opinions. So here then, unedited, is my facebook response:

“Libtard”? If you mean belief in the freedom and liberty of people then yes, I’m a “libtard”. If you mean belief of freedom of speech and religion (including freedom not to be religious), free trade (of goods and ideas and in turn, opposed to any restrictions), elections and democracy then yes, I’m a “libtard”. If you mean the belief that all people should be free and to have equal rights (you’ll find a perfect example of such left wing “libtard nonsense” in your beloved “Declaration of Independence”, I suggest you read it) then yes, I’m a “libtard”. If you mean a belief that the “gubnant” should not restrict or take away the rights of its people then yes, I’m a “libtard”. If you mean a belief that personal freedoms shouldn’t restrict the people’s freedom (you (Americans) even went to war with each other over that one) then yes, I’m a “libtard”.
But I also have socialistic beliefs (beyond all of the above, what with being British and all). I believe that the government (as the people’s elected governors) should be responsible for providing social services e.g. health care and education and in any other respect, doing what it can to help those are less well off (not through any fault of their own, you know, like single parents who find themselves out of work and struggle to find new employment, as one example of many). If you think those are left wing liberal beliefs then yes, I’m a “libtard” (or are you, like many of your ignorant peers, now going to accuse me of being a communist too?). And I must be a “libtard” because I believe that the government, in its duties to its people and its country, needs funding in order to do these things (or in your case, so that it can send its people to fucking war with a country it has no right to or reason to be involved with) and as such can look to its people in the form of taxes. I further believe that the wealthier minority of a country, those that because of its government, its country and its people have allowed them to become so wealthy, should reward that by paying a higher percentage of taxes (though I’d happily settle for equal percentage at this point).
In summary then yes, I must, according to you, be a “libtard” and if this is what makes me a “libtard” then I’d wear that badge with fucking honour.
Your fucking ignorance is astounding, but far from surprising.

[Additional] There will always be those that through either ignorance or arrogance that will insist on a label and insist on bastardising and distort the meanings behind those labels. There are those that believe socialism means communism or that one be-gets the other. There will always be those that will cherry pick the founding ideals of socialism and liberalism in order to either shrug off the hypocrisy of their own beliefs and / or to attack other people. Today, certainly from I’ve seen so far in America, people’s ideas / beliefs of what it means to be a socialist of liberal are too distorted to allow me to place such a label on myself without the need to then describe at great length why or what those those labels mean to me.
I am a liberal if all that I’ve said above makes me one. I’m also a Socialist if all that I’ve said above makes me one. For what it’s worth, I do believe in everything I said above; I do believe that people should have equality and freedom and liberties but I also believe that we need a selected group of people, a government, to ensure that we continue to enjoy such equality, freedoms and liberties and to protect us from those that attempt to take them away from us. I believe that we, the people, have certain rights but I believe an individuals right should not be to the detriment of another person’s or of the peoples. In order to achieve this balance, we, as individuals have to accept that there are restrictions on our actions to protect the freedoms of others.
I know what I am, politically and socially speaking and I know what others label me as. For the most part, whilst they might mean to insult and belittle me, I accept some of those labels because I’m educated and open minded enough to know what those labels truly mean, at least what they used to mean when people first described those terms. To many Americans I am a socialist. I’ll accept that one. To many Americans I’m therefore a communist but that one I will argue I am not whilst I shake my head at their ignorance. And now it seems if [this] person is typical of many (right wing) American people, I’m also a “libtard”.
Call me what you like, my eyes and my mind are open and for as long as they remain so, I’ll continue to believe in everything I’ve said here.
Shame on you. Shame on you.