James Hamilton on Culture, Technology and Art
Bottled salad dressing is – if we’re honest – pretty horrible stuff, in the main. Often over-vinegared, full of dry, flavourless bits and grotesquely overpriced. You may reserve a place in your heart, if you wish, for Heinz Salad Cream, but otherwise, get yourself a screwtop jar and make your own according to this simple…
Making your own pasta sauce is essential: the most basic gateway to real cooking that there is. At its simplest, you can make a really wonderful meal out of fresh pasta, made shiny with olive oil and dusted with parmesan. If it’s fresh spinach tortellini, the meal even has a vegetable ingredient to it. But…
Compared to the situation only twenty years ago, getting into cycling on a budget is hard. Much harder, and that’s partly down to changes in fashion. Before the arrival of mountain and hybrid bikes, the cyclist was faced with a straightforward choice for town travelling – a traditional derailleur-geared touring cycle, or the smaller, often…
Salsa verde – here in a version by Nigel Slater – is an easy, flexible and quick sauce that is delicious with pork, or chicken, or fish, or lamb. Try it when you just don’t feel up to tackling one of the French mother sauces, or when you’re having to come up with something bulletproof…
Learning to paint – which is often the reason behind many people initially learning to draw in fact – is a three-stage process. 1. It really does help to know how to draw, to some standard, as you’ll understand from that ideas such as relative lights and darks (values). 2. The next step is to…
When the kitchen is a far cry from the wonderful dine-in palaces one sees on television – or when it’s actually the Garreteer classic of two-ring Baby Belling with small oven – the temptation is to give up on producing top class food. And often, of course, there’s every reason to bail out and buy…
Vinyl, in the end, didn’t die: the older 78rpm record was a different story. But it had the run of the land for the best part of half a century, and in that time became the medium for most of the new music of the twentieth century: most rock singles were timed to fit, not…
Good as some bottled curry sauces are, the satisfaction and control available to anyone willing to put in the effort to produce their own is well worth the while. The cooking smells are compensation enough on their own. Here’s a basic route, and a more involved one. Basic Curry Sauce Take a couple of chopped…
Love again: waking at ten past three (Surely he’s taken her home by now?), The bedroom hot as a bakery, The drink gone dead without showing how To meet tomorrow… (Philip Larkin Love Again September 1979) It goes without saying that home made bread is one of the single best things a Garreteer can…
When it comes to humanizing a small space that isn’t one’s own, it doesn’t take long to realize the difference a houseplant, or two houseplants, can make. The elegant green leaves, so smart against worn, bedsit furniture and cigarette-burned carpets; the fresher air despite poor ventilation and the presence of cooking; the morale-boosting sense of…
It’s not just the price of petrol: the impact of motoring on the fabric of the country since the Second World War has, whatever else it has been, increased the ugliness and dangerousness of our streets and roads. But there is still an aesthetic to the petrol engine, the car, and the road network, and…
In one sense it’s a mystery how something as cheap and reliable as the disposable ballpoint pen has not become a major medium in art. After all, it’s not because the ink is indelible, although it is. It shares that with all inks, and with silverpoint besides. And it’s not because the line is boring,…
