Does anyone know / remember The Libertines song “Music When The Lights Go Out”? The hook line in this piece of indie-pop boy love runs “All the highs and the lows and the to’s and fro’s, they left me dizzy”. That is exactly how I felt when making John Hillerman’s Paella. No doubt about it, this was a tough cook. But oh boy did it pay off!
The Lows
Converted rice? Not available for love or money.
Clams in clam juice ? Nada.
Bottled clam juice? No, nay, never.
Polish Sausage…probably could have bought some but I had chorizo in the freezer which seemed more paella-ish anyway
I made this during the height of the ‘rona lockdown. But I honestly feel that my inability to get hold of these ingredients were not limited to that insane time of food shortages.
So, had this been one of my recipes? I would have ripped it up and we would have never more heard of it. But this was was not my recipe, this was John Hillerman’s Paella recipe that I was testing for Jenny for her Murder She Wrote Cookbook so onward and upward it was.
The To’s and And The Fro’s
I didn’t have converted rice. I didn’t have clam juice. Which meant I could not follow the first step of the recipe.
I had:
Bomba paella rice.
Fresh clams.
Frozen fish stock.
This meant that if I found another recipe that got me through that first step of cooking the rice, then the rest should fall into place like one of those Rube Goldberg machines I have become obsessed with during lockdown.
The recipe I used was this one. I followed all the directions for cooking the rice per that recipe. But then switched back to John Hillerman’s Paella recipe from the step where he says to “saute the chicken in olive oil”.
Here is John’s recipe:
I was literally toing and froing between the two recipes and the pan and the ingredients, making sure everything cooked properly!
The Highs
Have you seen the photos? This dish was lush!!! It was so pretty, so colourful, so full of joy!
It looked gorgeous, smelled like heaven and tasted even better.
John Hillerman’s Paella brought the smell and taste of Spain into a very grey wintery Melbourne day. It was seriously like a ray of sunshine!
I LOVED this!!!! So, so, so good!!!!! The end result made it all worthwhile!!!
Thank you Jenny for the recipe! This is the best paella I have ever made and I will be sure to make it again! When travel opens up and we can spend time together again, this definitely needs to be on our menu! In my imagination, we are sitting in your garden with Mr R and Battenberg Belle and having a lovely long lunch of paella, great conversation, lots of vino, and some great tunes courtesy of Mr Rathbone. Some ’60’s bossa nova maybe?
Oh, also for those of you like me who do not know who John Hillerman was? His best-known role was as the incredibly suave Higgins In Magnum PI but he also appeared in Blazing Saddles, Chinatown (high on my must-see list), Murder She Wrote (obvs), and A Very Brady Sequal among many, many other films and tv shows!
Have a fabulous week friends!
Stay safe, eat paella, watch John Hillerman on the tv and listen to The Libertines!
Sounds like a pretty good way to spend the weekend to me!
I had the shock of my life while doing research for this post. Seriously. More about that later! This was DELICIOUS!!!! The recipe for Tarragon Chicken recipe was sent to me by the lovely Jenny over at Silver Screen Suppers. It will form part of her Murder She Wrote Cookbook and, on taste alone, should be one of the standout recipes of the book!
This is the most delicious comfort food!!! So warm and hearty and tasty and…OMG….I would make this dish every week if I could. Unfortunately, I used the last of our fresh tarragon to make it so, until I can either find some fresh tarragon in the greengrocer or plant some more I will not have it again. It almost makes me want to cry.
I have some dried tarragon in the cupboard but it is really no substitute for fresh!
This is what my tarragon plant looked like before I took all of the good leaves to make this! Poor little thing!
I served my tarragon chicken with garlic bread instead of the suggested rice and it was so good. The combination of the lovely juices from the chicken with mopped up with the crusty, garlicky, buttery bread was perfection!!! I heartily recommend this as an alternative!!!
But now let me tell you what happened when I went to research David Birney!!!!!
Spelling is important!
My main reference for Meredith Baxter is as Elyse Keaton from the very popular tv sitcom Family Ties. The show featured two hippie parents, Baxter and Steven Gross, trying to deal with their ultra-conservative Regan-supporting son Alex, played brilliantly by Michael J. Fox. The show was pitch-perfect. Funny, poignant, clever, sharp…just look at these reviews!!!!!
I also knew that Meredith Baxter came out at some time in the 2000’s. I remember thinking at the time both “You go girl, finally you get to be your true self in public and let the homophobes go fuck themselves” and also “I’m so sad that you didn’t feel that you could do this earlier in your life”.
So, whilst I was aware of Meredith Baxter, David Birney, I knew not at all. So much so that when I first googled him I incorrectly spelled his name as David Birnie and spent a while there thinking that MB had been married to an Australian serial killer!
Turns out he is allegedly a wife-beater so you know, maybe my initial thoughts that he was a dick were not totally unfounded. Let’s not waste any more time on him.
The Recipe
It’s so good.
I did not have to remove my chicken and thicken the sauce, it was thick enough just from cooking. Apart from that, I followed the recipe to the letter and it was fabulous!
Leftovers are also amazing in a jaffle the following day! Sorry for the terrible photo but if you don’t eat that jaffle piping hot, it’s not really a jaffle! I would also LOVE to see that tarragon chicken in a pie.
Look at me…I’m already getting ideas for the next time I make it!
Thanks, Jenny for the recipe! It was truly a winner winner chicken dinner!
Have a great week everyone. Take care and stay safe!
Back in my school days, we had an annual music competition where each House had to arrange and sing a song of their choice to assorted judges, family, staff and fellow schoolmates.
One year the song selected by my House Music Captain for all of us to sing started like this:
Bonnie and Clyde were pretty lookin’ people,
But I can tell you people,
They were the devil’s children.
I had no idea who Bonnie and Clyde before then but wow! Believe me, just those opening lines were enough to send me racing to the Encyclopedia Britannica for more! Pretty people? Of course I wanted to know more. Pretty people who were also evil? My 14-year-old mind was blown. Who knew such a thing even existed!
Why am I telling you all this?
Because a little while ago the lovely Jenny from Silver Screen Suppers asked if I would test out a cocktail recipe for her upcoming cookbook. The cocktail was the Faye Dunaway cocktail, and Faye played Bonnie Parker in the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde.
And oh boy, you want to talk about pretty looking people?
Oh, the glamour!!!!
The Faye Dunaway Cocktail is also pretty glam! It was invented in 2011 by Jonathan Humphrey of the Drake Hotel in Toronto and was inspired by the film Chinatown, which stars Faye Dunaway and Jack Nicholson.
The recipe for the Faye Dunaway cocktail calls for mango juice which I was unable to find. I also do not have a juicer so I puréed a fresh mango. I was a little worried because the mango purée was quite thick but it worked out perfectly. So do not despair if you also cannot find juice. If fresh mango is unavailable frozen would also work perfectly!
The Faye cocktail perfectly balances sweet, spicy and sour flavours in a glorious mix of mango, lime and chilli. It’s sooooo good! I loved it – it reminded me of sunshine and holidays and tropical climes! I made this exactly as per the recipe (which you can find here) because I was testing the recipe for Jenny. However, even though this is divine as is, I can’t help wondering what it might be like if you also brought in a salty element by edging the glass? Salty, sweet hot and sour being the four elements Thai cooks try to bring into balance. Because that is really what the flavours of this cocktail reminded me of…cocktails on a beach in Thailand.
Faye’s birthday is coming up on January 14. I was going to hold off posting this until the day itself. Then I thought it would be much more fun to give you all a chance to buy the ingredients so we could all celebrate her gorgeousness and iconic fashion sense by donning a beret and drinking one of these in her honour!
I will be trying the Salty Faye myself but if anyone makes either version, please let me know what you think!
And speaking of iconic fashion…I had so much fun trying to find the Dinah Shore look a few weeks ago that I thought I would give it another go.
Here is my take on Faye’s Bonnie and Clyde look fashion via my very first post on Polyvore. Because don’t we all need a little bad girl glam every now and again?
Oh, and for anyone who is wondering how our music competition turned out?
The judges said that our singing and arrangement were spot on but that the content was inappropriate for both us to be singing and our audience to be listening to!
If you would like to hear the scurrilous lyrics not fit for the mouths of good God-fearin’ girls (and see some photos of the real Bonnie and Clyde) here’s a YouTube of that song:
Many thanks to Jenny for the opportunity to help with her book (I will let you all know when it is ready to be purchased, it’s going to be awesome!) and for selecting such a fabulous recipe for me to try!
Whilst I love all old cookbooks, there is a special place in my heart for the celebrity cookbook and finding Roberta Ashley’s “Singers and Swingers In The Kitchen” was like finding the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
Subtitled
“The Scene Makers Cookbook Dozens of Nutty Turned On Easy-To-Prepare Recipes From The Grooviest Gourmets Happening”
Singers and Swingers is a collection of recipes from The Rolling Stones, The Byrds, Leonard Nimoy, Barbra Streisand, Liza Minelli and other icons of the ’60’s “that will keep you grooving with the greatest.”
Life really does not get much better than this!
Front Cover – Singers and Swingers in the KitchenBack Cover – Singers and Swingers In The Kitchen
As teenage columnist for This Week Magazine, Ms Ashley often asked bright young things of the day what their favourite foods were. She advises that many of these dishes were:
“Worked out while they were quietly starving or working in a “pass-the-basket” coffee-house. That means that most of these dishes can be cooked on allowance type money…or very little bread as they say”
Which just makes me love it more…star studded AND thrifty is one of my favourite combinations!
And for those readers who may be new to the kitchen, or hesitant cooks, Ms Ashley offers the following words of encouragement.
“Give it a try, the recipes are mostly easy ones and remember a year ago, Barbra Streisand couldn’t cook at all”
Adorable!
The recipes in the book are mostly solid, with only the occasional piece of WTFery thrown in. If there is a real problem with the book it is that there is a certain degree of repetition in the recipes. Of the 68 main recipes in the book, minced meat features in 11. These include:
Chili Esperanza by The Mamas and The Papas. They liked to eat this with scrambled eggs…the thought of that makes me gag a little. (Then again, maybe they should have stuck to softer types of foods like chili and scrambled eggs and avoided the types of food that can get stuck in your throat like sandwiches.)
Chili for Chums. This is not name checked but to my mind is actually the best of the lot.
Paul Revere was the lead singer of a band called Paul Revere and the Raiders who liked to dress up in period costume and presumably precede all of their gigs by repeatedly shouting “The British are coming, the British are coming”.
Paul Revere 1967
Ah, those crazy days of the ’60’s. I bet he feels a little silly about wearing that costume now….
Then again, maybe not.
Paul Revere 2007
Returning to the prevalence of ground mince, there are also 3 recipes for Sloppy Joe Type Creations:
Sloppy Joe A La Sam The Sham
A Jones Delight by Jack Jones
Snick Snack Hamburgers by Lesly Gore. Lesly Gore was famous for her song “It’s My Party and I’ll Cry If I Want To”. She must have self catered because these sound repulsive.
Lesly Gore’s Snick Snack Hamburgers
There is an equally revolting concoction called Robb Stew made by one of the three Robb brothers from the band called….you guessed it…The Robbs…They appeared to operate on the principle that if you can’t be original, be consistently unoriginal. Surprisingly, all members of this band were not wiped out by food poisoning in 1968 but 3 of them went on to have illustrious careers in the music industry by founding Robb…I mean…Cherokee Studios in Los Angeles. This studio has produced artists such as The Gogo’s, Aerosmith, Lenny Kravitz, Devo, Public Enemy and Jane’s Addiction to name but a few! Quite possibly this is truly a case of what doesn’t kill you making you stronger.
Robb Stew
There are also 4 instances of minced meat with pasta:
Whilst their recipe does sound delicious, some of those Buckinghams look a little druggy around the eyes if you ask me!
The Buckinghams
Not like these clean living young men from groovy London town!
Rolling Stones 1967
Wow! Look at the young Keith Richards in 1967 (middle row on the right). And look at him now:
Keith Richards 2012
If you ever needed a reason not to take a bucket load of drugs look no further!
The Stone’s recipe is one of the six that contain frankfurters as one of the key ingredients.
Chili Dog Chili by the aforementioned Paul Revere. That man sure did love his chilli!
Golden Joys
Hurry up Casserole
Frankfurter Casserole
Hot Dogs on The Rocks by the Rolling Stones
Frank Pops by The Cyrkle. I have no idea who The Cyrkle were. And if this recipe is anything to go by, I’m not surprised that they have faded into obscurity. Placing battered franks on a stick doesn’t make them more fun, it only adds insult to injury!
The Cyrkle’s Frank Pops
Mind you, the recipe from The Rolling Stones is not up to much either…although…with the right sausage, a proper gourmet one, and proper mash, this could be a perfectly acceptable meal! It can, can’t it? Or have I just been married to an Englishman for too many years?
Hot Dogs on The Rocks
I love a recipe that comes with its own warning! In case you were wondering
“Mick Jagger invented the potatoes and franks; Charlie Watts added the beans”
There is a tone to some of the entries that suggests there may not have been much love lost between Ms Ashley and some of the celebrities. Here is Ashley’s introduction to Liza Minelli’s recipe for Crepes Suzette:
“Liza Minelli is a little girl who’s come a long way despite a terrible handicap”
The part of me that craves gossip and scandal read on with an overly avid “Wow, really? What’s she got?”
The so-called terrible handicap?
Famous parents.
Unless they had different meanings for both the word “terrible” and the word “handicap” back in the late ‘60’s that is a nasty thing to say about someone! Poor old Liza doesn’t even get a proper photo, just a teeny thing on the cover!
Carol Lawrence also gets short shrift (even if she does get a very glamorous photo).
We are told that Carol is:
“Making a rather nice name for herself in Hollywood; not as a star but as a lasagne-maker”
Ouch!
Not really how a Tony Award Winning Actor would want to be known! Mind you, she did go on to write a best-selling cookbook about Italian Cooking so maybe Ashley’s comment is more prescient than catty.
You may have noticed whilst reading this that there have been no pictures of food. That’s because the book doesn’t contain any. This, as with most celebrity cookbooks, is long on celebrity, short on food. That some of the recipes sound super is a bonus. That some of them sound absolutely vile will be the subject of the next post.
In the meantime, put some flowers in your hair, light some incense and groove out to some fabulous sounds of the sixties. It’s what I’ll be doing!
