Tumbling down the heap

From my twitter feed: poor old skrill wants to claim a word associated with the trade of other human beings, the branding of their flesh, and lynching. What a sound guy.

The @ response he got is just mental funny, so I included that too. 

Navan McDonalds has rocked the classy vibe for a good fifteen years now

nochorus:

My McDonalds Is From Paris

So I eat in McDonalds like once a week. Usually with my mate Sam who has been a habitual McDonalds eater as long as I’ve known him and always orders the same thing. I can’t remember what his order is cause we’re not a pair of rheumy-eyed octogenarians holding hands and talking to Ira Glass about how we first met on a This American Life episode called Long Ass Marriages Are Always Cute. 

The McDonalds where I live is done up to feel expensive. It’s not new but they hit the whole place with that McDonalds Café vibe as hard as they possibly could. Most of the McDonalds I’ve found myself in in recent years,in Dublin or London, have been the standard issue set-up I recognise from when I was younger. Whenever I’m in the one here, it’s a whole separate set of experiences.

I hear you screaming “BUT HOW SEAN? TELL US HOW?” from your keyboard, which is doubtlessly already flecked with your stress-induced tears and forehead sweat. Well steady yourself, my friend. Imma let you know right quick. 

Half of this Mahogany Donalds experience is really dumb and the other 50% is oddly  gratifying. To whit: McDonalds is always a bit of an emotionally draining experience because of the beams resignation and excitement everyone is feeling. Not that McDonalds is any less of a place to eat than anywhere else that relies on salt and fat but for everyone there in the middle of the day during school holidays it’s either “OH SHIT, I AM SO EXCITED” or “oh shit, I can no longer fight this”. But now this weird intensity is compounded by this weird Principal’s Office/Job Interview You’re Bound To Fail feeling. It can get tense.

However: no one looks at each other. At all. Seriously, way more so than even the usual apathy that pervades in fast food places midday when the only drunk people are functionally drunk people who won’t act out. There’s something about this dark, woody vibe that just calms people all the way down even further.

For whatever reason the McDonalds where I live are forever needing to drop things down to people. In Supermacs, the Irish fast food chain, you can see the apprehension on the person working there’s face before they even come out from behind the counter. Supermacs is bright. It’s 2001:A Space Odyssey bright. When a staff member moves around its like a beacon. Whereas in Mad Men Donalds, the staff just materialise from the muted colours, drop the thing they didn’t have on hand when you ordered it while looking over their head and then they zip back into the mauve ether. It’s kind of better for everyone.

But it also dehumanises them. God knows people that work in the food service industry get enough of that already. Is invisibility a better kind of dehumanisation than the Freely Usable Human Stress Ball position most bright fast food places put their staff in. Oh Shit, Fancyfication Of McDonalds! You really are doing all you can to give credence to that giveth/taketh thing I cleverly established several paragraphs ago. 

The chairs too, are these giant, super-villain leather-esque things that are so large they can’t really fit around the weirdly-small tables they set them around. It turns sitting down while holding trays into a Jacques Tati production, sitting down in them too. I can see a drunk man toppling one of these fuckers on an errant toddler and starting a versus with an exhausted parent before anyone knows what’s going on.

But once you do get yourself situated, oh man. It freezes out the rest of McDonalds even further. The wide, high wings of the chair create a blinker effect and your nose-deep in whatever paper-wrapped objects you demanded, excluding the existence of all else from your mind. That seems to be the approach here: make McDonalds look a whole lot “nicer” (albeit in the most superficial, menswear-blogging, Mad-Men-watching way) and then tricking people into not looking around.

These hypno chairs really work, man. Like the regulation weirdo McDonalds shit was happening: 14 boisterous 10 to 12 year olds steamed in, filled the weirdly low-key kids area, bellowed at each other for 10 minutes and then steamed away again following some telepathic consensus, supervisionless and having eaten nothing. Usually Sam and I would have provided a running commentary on something like this, like one of those charming movies about intensely smug white dudes with nothing to say that people loved in the 90s, but it barely registered. Such is the power of the hypno chair.  

Even McDonald’s newish Mozzarella Sticks (you’ll have to excuse me, I’m a bit of a foodie) underlined the machinations of my local McDonalds’ new look. Like, you’re eating deep-friend cheese but McDonalds is presenting it with this weird veneer where it’s like “Take a break from your globe-trotting adventures, hang up your sword cane and cool your heels while chewing on one of our exotic spiced diary sticks”. All that REAL Restaurant food that consists mainly of butter uses this veneer a lot, Guardian food magazine recipes that have some line to the effect of “then throw a couple of sticks of butter in that shit, cutty”, but it’s a new enough thing for McDonalds, surely? 

Some part of me feels like this is a response to Starbucks and Subway, where people assume the stuff being squeezed into food shapes is somehow better for them cause the signs are green and the stuff is expensive. 

This has either been around for ages and I’ve only noticed cause my local McDs where they test shit out in Ireland or else they scrapped the idea and the local lads are holding out. Either way, that’s the first and last time I eat those god-awful fucking mozzarella sticks. Eff that all the way back to the Jamie Oliver-watching bro at McDonalds HQ who came up with that shit. Again, they’ve probably had them for years but I’m a slow man when it comes to this. 

This is an old food piece I wrote for AU magazine. The food is by me, but the lovely picture is by Aoife McElwain, who writes this food blog. 

Hands up who’s afraid to cook fish? For whatever reason, otherwise capable cooks find fish daunting. Many of us know, or even are, the kitchen whizz who times their steak to the split second and dices vegetables in a cool blur of ninja knife action, yet falls to blubbering pieces in the face of simple piece of fish. Which begs the question, why do such people find fish so daunting?

Perhaps it has something to do with the wide range of choice. Unlike say pork, beef, and lamb, where you have a clear idea what you are dealing with, fish has such a variety of species that it can be difficult to know where to start with it, never mind what cooking technique suits a particular type. The perceived messiness and general smelliness of raw fish is surely a concern too. Yet neither of these things should be an issue. A bit of knowledge and some basic rules of thumb (for example, oily fish is not suited to deep frying) should overcome the first concern. As for the second, well, fresh fish should have next to no odour, and furthermore, all that messy gutty stuff is what your cheery local fishmonger is there to do. Your fishmonger will also be delighted to give you advice on how to cook fish. Go on, interact with them, ask some questions, and you’ll make their day, for this is the sort of stuff that makes the world a friendlier place.

The following lemon sole dish is an elegant little variation on fish and chips that provides an easy introduction to cooking fish. Lemon sole is currently in season and very sustainable. The light fish goes deliciously with a lemon mayonnaise, which you can tell your dinner guests is the only lemony thing in their meal as lemon sole does not taste of lemon, and nor is it, curiously enough, sole. It’s flounder.

Lemon Sole Goujons with Lemon Mayonnaise and Spicy Wedges

Serves 2/3

For the goujons and lemon mayonnaise

4 fillets of lemon sole (without skin) sliced into strips

50g plain flour

100g breadcrumbs

2 beaten eggs

¼ teaspoon salt

½ teaspoon ground black pepper

4 tablespoons of mayonaisse

fresh lemon juice to taste (about a teaspoon or so)

For the spicy wedges

1 tablespoon of plain flower

½ teaspoon mild chilli powder or cayenne pepper

2 or 3 large rooster potatoes cut into 8 wedges (with or without jackets depending on your preference)

4 tablespoons vegetable or sunflower oil

Salt and pepper to taste

For the wedges, preheat the oven to 200 celsius, then toss the potatoes with the remaining ingredients in a bowl, making sure they are all completely coated in the spicy oily mixture. Scatter them into a non-stick or oiled roasting dish and bake for about 35 minutes until crisp and cooked through. Once finished, remove to dry on kitchen paper.

When the wedges are almost ready you can start the goujons. First sprinkle the flour on a plate, then mix the breadcrumbs and seasoning together and sprinkle onto another plate, before finally beating the eggs in a separate bowl. Now take the strips of lemon sole and dredge each piece in the flour before dipping it in the egg and finally rolling it in the breadcrumbs until it is coated all over. Heat the oil in a deep frying pan on a medium heat until a breadcrumb sizzles and turns golden when dropped in it. Add the goujons to the pan in separate batches, cooking each batch for approximately 2 to 3 minutes on each side until it is golden. Remove the goujons with a slotted spoon and let them dry on kitchen paper.

Before serving the finished dish, quickly and thoroughly fork the lemon juice through the mayonnaise and serve as a dip. The dish can be finished off with a light salad of your choice, and for a right proper fish and chips experience you might want to sprinkle a little malt vinegar over the goujons and wedges. That’s all there is to it; fabulous fish without the fear.

I am cranking my tumblr back into action for 2k12. I will mostly post drawings on it. Here is a picture I drew of Skrillex and Win Butler when asked to draw a picture of something I don’t like.

Can’t resist reblogging anything skrill

(Source: dumbtweetsatcelebrities)

This is very funny but probably mad old. I found it in a pitchfork resident frequency column about bass in music. 

too funny

(Source: ilolatthis)