Irish Boxty Pancakes

Boxty on the griddle,
Boxty in the pan,
If you can't make boxty,
You’ll never get your man

I have fond childhood memories of boxty. There are variations on the recipe for boxty and you will find that the word can be used for very different things. In my experience it is a thin pancake made from potatoes and flour and fried on a pan.

I have also seen recipes where it is baked in an oven into a cake. I’ve never tried that myself. In some areas apparently the thin pancake is called Rasp. According to The Hiberno-English Dictionary a rasp was a tin can which was opened out and had holes punched into it and was then used to grate the potatoes. The name of the tool came to be applied to the pancake.

Some - in fact most - recipes that I have seen include mashed as well as grated raw potatoes in the ingredients. The minority recipe, and the one that I remember from growing up, is made from raw potatoes only:

Get:
1 part grated, raw potatoes
1 part plain flour

Then:
Mix the two together and add in an egg and milk until you get a nice liquid consistency and then fry it both sides.

It’s a simple recipe although the grating takes some preparation. From reading about it on the web it seems to be associated with Halloween as a kind of celebratory food. But from what I remember it was simply just a way of using up the last of the old potatoes.

Boxty is believed to have originated during the Great Hunger as a way of making unedible potatoes edible by mixing them with whatever was available, hence the variety of recipes.

For all of its origins as a cheap type of peasant food I have happy memories of boxty nights. In hindsight those were probably the nights when there wasn’t money for anything else but I didn’t care; I just loved boxty.

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Good ol' Spag Bol

Spaghetti Bolognese had done many things for me over the years. It has been the main string to my culinary bow. I could always say I knew how to cook because I was able to make Spaghetti Bolognese. It has kept me alive and allowed me to vary my diet away from my usual staple foods of Chinese take-away, pizza and cereal.

I've tried boiling eggs but they've cracked. I can boil potatoes but at some stage, either before or after, you have to peel them and prepare other ingredients before you can say you've cooked a meal.

Spaghetti Bolognese is easy to do. I learned how to make it when I was at university. Admittedly I wasn't at university for very long but then again it doesn't take long to learn how to make Spag Bol.

The advantages of it as a food source for students are pretty simple: it's pretty simple. It's easy to cook. It's cheap. It's tasty. It makes a change from eating take-aways every night, even when you can afford them.

I can remember learning to cook Spag Bol one evening shortly after starting college. I was living in a house with six other students. It was the beginning of the college year so we all started off with good resolutions. A cooking and cleaning roster had been drawn up and on this particular night I and another guy were rostered to cook.

I had grown up with a doting mother so I had never had to fend for myself before. Therefore the magic in the kitchen was all down to the other guy, whose mother obviously didn't love him as much, and I was the assistant as he browned the mince, boiled the spaghetti and added the sauce. It was like rocket science to me. Incidentally this was the same evening when I found out what the thing you use to turn stuff on the frying pan is called: a spatula.

After gathering these two pieces of knowledge I felt that university had nothing more to teach me and I dropped out shortly afterwards.

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Call Yourself a Taxi Company?

I've been reading the Irish Taxi blog for a couple of months now. It's a blog written by a taxi driver who works nights in Dublin and he updates his blog with interesting stories about his fares and other more general news. It's a good read in its own right but it's also brought back memories of my own time as a base controller, also working nights, in a taxi company in Dublin.

Working in the taxi business, especially at night, is certainly a good job if you like telling interesting anecdotes about what happened you in work the other night. Every week will bring its own honour roll of passengers who meet and exceed your expectations of them to sit in your car and be ferried from location to destination. Often you will remember them for some interesting thing they told you in conversation. Sometimes its some extreme act of stupidity. (On their behalf. It's your anecdote.) Now and again its because they were really, really nice.

Being a taxi driver is also a dangerous job and I had a personal rule from my days as a base controller that if a person was too drunk, obnoxious or aggressive to conduct a civilised phone conversation then they probably wouldn't make very good passengers to have sitting beside you in a car either. In a way I miss the late night arguments over the phone with drunk or high strangers shouting abuse or talking rubbish at me.

A regular call was the call from someone who had lost their wallet/phone/keys in a taxi and were phoning up to see if anyone had handed them in. It wouldn't take long for them to admit that they didn't remember anything about the taxi or the driver, except maybe the car was blue or the driver was called Eddie. They usually wouldn't know if the driver worked with a taxi company at all or if he was independent and would be just ringing up at random in blind hope. Often they wouldn't be even sure if they had lost it in the taxi or somewhere else.

On a couple of occasions they would be lucky and I would be able to recognise the driver they were talking about from their description and the driver would have found what they were looking for but there were hundreds of drivers in our company and thousands of others who didn't belong to any company and phoning up looking for a lost phone or wallet was a complete shot in the dark.

I remember one call where the customer were really taking a shot in the dark and when I told him that nothing had been handed in he asked for a drivers phone number to see him if he had found anything.

"What driver?" I asked.
"Any driver. I just want to ask him if he found it."
"There are thousands of taxi drivers in Dublin. What's the point of ringing one at random?"
"I just want to try. Just in case."

When I told him that we couldn't give out drivers private phone numbers and that it would have been a waste of time anyway it was almost as if I had told the fella that it was my wallet now and I was keeping it.

Since by law lost property is supposed to be handed into the Carraige Office anyway unless the driver is able to return it himself we would usually just give them the carraige office phone number. From personal experience I knew that getting someone to even answer the phone in the carraige office could be tricky enough but that was another problem.

This came back to me this morning when I was browsing through Irish Taxi and I spotted a link to Dublin Taxi, another blog by another taxi driver working nights in Dublin. From Dublin Taxi's blogroll I followed another link to Blank Top Chronicles which is a blog written from the point of view of the guy in the base room taking the bookings and talking to customers on the phone. This is closer to my experiences and it was great to read the conversations. I often thought that I was the only one who had these conversations which often ended with the immortal lines "call yourself a taxi company?" so it was great to read about someone else going through what I went through. This guy lives and works in Virginia but the conversations with one or two cultural differences could have happened anywhere in the world.

From The Blank Top Chronicles:

"ME: Blank Top, your phone number please?
GUY: Yeah, I took a cab over the weekend and I think I dropped a $100 bill in it, did anybody turn it in?
ME: Did you get the cab number?
GUY: No.
ME: Where did he pick you up from and take you to?
GUY: It was between two bars in Clarendon, I don't really remember.
ME: Let me put you on with lost and found, they might have it.

"So I transfer him. A few minutes later. . .

"ME: Blank Top, your phone number please?
GUY: Yeah, I just talked to you about losing a $100 bill?
ME: Yeah?
GUY: Well your lost and found people said they didn't have it, is there any way you can call your drivers on the radio and ask?
ME: Do you know what company this cab you took was from?
GUY: You know, I'm not really sure.
ME: So then you're basically just calling every company in the phone book asking if anybody found a $100 bill over the weekend.
GUY: Uh, you know, come to think of it, it might have been a $50.
ME: Oh. No, the only thing anybody turned in was a $20 dollar bill.
GUY: Yeah yeah, that was mine.
ME: Okay, great! I'll just need you to confirm to me the serial number.
GUY: Huh?
ME: The serial number on the bill. I mean, you didn't know the cab company you were using, you didn't know the cab number, you didn't know the denomination. For all I know you might be some asshole calling every cab company in the book fishing for a few bucks.
GUY: No, it was definitely a twenty, that's gotta be mine.
ME: Again, I'd just need you to confirm the serial number.
GUY: Who knows the serial number on their bills? I just know it was a twenty.
ME: Do you know what president is on the front?
GUY: Uhhhhhh. . . . shit, it's, um. . . . .
ME: YOU'VE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME! You don't even know what president is on the $20 dollar bill?!
GUY: Man, it's my fucking money asshole, you need to give it back!
ME: Hey, I would if I could, but you can't even identify the cab company, cab number, denomination of the note, serial number, or who's picture is on the front. Put yourself in my shoes: what do you do?
GUY: Uhhhh. . . . Give it back?
ME: Oh, I'm sorry, the answer we were looking for was "keep it". Keep it.
GUY: OH NOW YOUR FUCKING KEEPING IT HUH?
ME: Yeah, that's right. What do you think I should spend it on?
GUY: You got no right to keep that man!
ME: Maybe you're right. Should I give it to charity?
GUY: YOU SHOULD GIVE IT TO ME!
ME: I'll tell you what: How about I just burn it? Then we have nothing to argue about.
GUY: YOU CAN'T BURN IT!!!
ME: Yeah, that seems to be the best thing to do here. (I take my cigarette lighter out of my pocket and flick it next to the phone) Whoa, there we go! Man, these fucking things burn fast. . . . OW! Singed my finger a little there. . . Okay, the bill is gone and we have nothing left to discuss. But hey, while I've got you on the phone, would you like to take a customer satisfaction survey?
GUY: FUCK YOU! (slams phone down)

"For those of you who haven't figured it out yet, no $20 bills were harmed in the filming of this episode, no one actually turned one in.

"Oh, and we have a 'Conversations ending by the caller yelling Fuck You then hanging up' trifecta in play."

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Reflections in a lake

I was going through pictures taken over Christmas on my digital camera. Among them were a number of photographs taken of Lough Bo in County Sligo. It was a beautifully still day and the clarity of the reflections of the surrounding land in in the lake was wonderful to observe. The hills and trees were reproduced so clearly in the lake that it was difficult to see where the land ended and the water began.

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No Country for Old Men

My primary reason for watching this film was simply because it was directed by the Coen Brothers. I'm not generally a person who pays attention to who the director or lead actor is, but since Fargo and Raising Arizona I've always paid attention to anything by the Coen Brothers.

No Country for Old Men is a bloodier film than both of these and without the humour. It is a dark and bloody but compelling thriller.

The story revolves around a man who, while out hunting, stumbles across the remains of a drug deal gone wrong; a shoot-out in the middle of a desert with dead and dying people, a large consignment of drugs and a bag of money.

The hunter takes the money but then, in a show of humanity returns to help one of the survivors of the shoot-out. This display of humanity puts his life in danger and he is then forced to go on the run to try and keep the money and save his life and that of his family. He is pursued by a ruthless, vicious murderer who would rather kill somebody than not and the result is lots of killing and suspense.

I found the end of the film more than confusing! I suppose I'm typical of many people who complain about formulaic endings but who don't know how to deal with an ending which isn't clear-cut.

A number of times during the film we see ordinary people being offered blood-stained money by people obviously engaged in some kind of illicit or dubious activity. On every occasion the ordinary person accepts the money and that for me is the main image I carry from the film.

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Reporters Expose Airport Security Lapses By Blowing Up Plane

Reporters Expose Airport Security Lapses By Blowing Up Plane

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Women Kissing

I didn't even know that there was stuff like this on YouTube until I stumbled across this by accident (Honest). It's just a nice video of women kissing. It's not hard core but probably not work friendly either!

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My New Years Resolutions

This year I have decided to make some New Years Resolutions. This is a thing I do some years and other years not but mostly I don't. So far, I have never knowingly kept a single resolution.

My first resolution is actually a repeat of last years resolution. I started off last year full of the intention of learning Polish. This was because of the numbers of Polish and other eastern Europeans who had come to Ireland and weren't able to speak English. I worked at the time as a base controller in a taxi company and a few words of Polish – eg "take the second left and it's the fourth house on the right opposite the Spar shop" – would have been useful when talking to some taxi drivers as much as to the customers.

My learnings in Polish didn't go very far. I fell at almost the first hurdle: the alphabet. There's one of the letters which looks like a 'g' with a 'r' on its tail and sounds like you can't make up your mind whether you're trying to pronounce 'g' or 'o' (or at least in my case I couldn’t anyway) which I still haven't managed to master. I gave up after a month.

I regretted this later on in the year as I found myself in a different job where the need to speak Polish had become more urgent. Most of my workmates, and two of my supervisors, were Polish and while one of the supervisors had decent enough English, the rest hadn't and communication became a painful task of pointing, sign language, smiling, exasperated shrugging and repeating. I hadn't moved location by the way. I was still living in Dublin but I had the benefit of finding out what it was like to be a stranger in a strange land without needing to book any flights.

This was as equally difficult for my workmates as it was for me. Sometimes at work me and one of the Poles would be working together for two or three hours on our own. I had thought for a while that working with Poles would be a good way to learn to speak the language but as it turns out the person you're trying to learn from needs to be able to speak both languages. Trying to learn Polish from a Pole who can't speak English doesn’t work. I found this out from a day working with a Polish theology student who was over here for three months to raise money. He was obviously well educated but since we didn't have a language in common there was no way that I could learn anything from him.

During the year I also added Chinese to the must-learn list. This happened because I got a free download of a teach-yourself-mandarin audiobook. Funnily enough I was doing pretty well at this until laziness set in and I stopped the lessons.


My second resolution is to get new glasses and wear them. This is because I am short-sighted. And also vain. I stopped wearing my glasses regularly a couple of years ago and started carrying them around in my pocket, wiping them out to see what number bus was coming and then putting them back and hoping that nobody noticed. I did this because I think I looked better without them.

A side effect of this is that I try to avoid looking at people. If I see someone that looks vaguely familiar on the other side of the street I have a problem because I can’t be sure if it really is them as everything's blurry. Since I'm more likely not to know them than I am, I look away and hope they didn't see me staring at them. I'm sure over the years this has led to lots of people thinking that I had just snubbed them and was trying to avoid them and to many, many more people thinking that there was a strange man across the street staring at them.

I have now decided that since the difference to my looks is probably pretty marginal I may as well wear them and see where I’m going and who I'm staring at.


So here they are. Those resolutions in full:

- Have another go at learning Polish and Chinese.

- Get new glasses and wear them.

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