The best laid plans of mice and cooks …

There were plans for Monday night – food plans. The reduction of a small amount of Sunday’s chicken stock, with the addition of a couple of things, including fresh orange juice and zest, and tarragon, which would act as a dressing for some of the cold chicken.

That was going to be served with new potatoes (possibly roasted and crushed with oodles of garlic) and some fine beans that I found on Broadway Market on Saturday – the first English ones of the year.

But it came to pass that, only a short while before my scheduled departure from the office, the word want out that our presence was required in the bar at 5.15pm.

Now, this was, to say the least, unusual, since the staff social club’s bar only opens on Tuesdays to Fridays. What was going on?

You may recall that the bar, in its current incarnation, is nearly at an end, as we ready ourselves to move into a new building, where a café bar will be run in the early evenings, not by volunteer bar staff, but by the same people who run the staff ‘deli’.

Tomorrow night is the final, FINAL hurrah, but since several of the regulars are, even now, en route to a brief sojourn in Sicily (hopefully not to run into any dodgy Godfather types), Monday provided the sole remaining opportunity for a final get together – on the pretext of making presentations to Sam and Ben, the club treasurer and chief bar steward.

That the book club were also meeting to discuss their reading for the past month, while assorted national executive committee members also popped in over the course of the evening ensured it was a lively affair.

But by the time we got home, I was hardly much inclined to much in the way of food prep – buttering two slices of bread, slapping a load of cold chicken in between them and sprinkling with salt (chicken sandwiches absolutely require additional salting) was the height of culinary endeavour.

Tonight, because this is the first of two planned final bashes, I have no concrete plans. We shall just have to see.

But in the meantime, if any of you are curious enough, here is a little pictoral homage to the almost-closed-for-the-last-time bar, as appeared this afternoon on the blog of our club icon, Colin.

It may explain why Cloud Nine will be missed. Or then again, it may not!

The end of an era

Well, last night’s Italian experiment – a dish combining fennel and lambs’ kidneys – didn’t really produce a sense of culinary excitement, so there isn’t really much to report on that front.

If I manage to cook much this evening, it’ll be late and simple: in other words, probably pasta.

The reason for this is that after a little swap to help out a fellow bar steward, I have a shift in the staff bar this evening. Not just any old shift, though: my final full shift before we all move to a bright and shiny new building with a café-bar that will be run by the same people that currently run the ‘deli bar’ here and will running a rather more ambitious food service over the road.

The new kitchens are incredible – I had a chance to look around a couple of weeks ago. And it will certainly give the team vastly improved facilities. Having just a single hob at present is ridiculous.

But I remain sceptical, and not vastly encouraged by scatty little back-slapping comments on a company Facebook page about the new ovens meaning that they can bake bread and cakes: for goodness sake, they cannot currently ensure that the slices in a bag of factory bread are not stale when they get them out to make a sandwich! And they spread pizza bases with marg – a piece of knowledge that makes me tremble in horror every time I recall it!

I feel a kind of guilt complaining about the canteen, because I don’t want to seem to be ‘nasty’ to the staff, who are themselves close to being colleagues.

But that’s actually rather poor, because however well-meaning and pleasant they themselves are, the service that they provide is generally pretty dismal. I did raise much of this in a survey that I mentioned here last year, but have had no feedback on that and have seen no indication of positive change.

And it’s not just me. A colleague observed earlier today that she won’t even have a basic sandwich from there now as they’re so poor, even when made in front of you, while another colleague noted recently that, if one of the staff goes to open a new bag of bread to make him a sandwich, he asks for the third and fourth slices down in order to avoid the stale ones that invariably seem to be at the top.

If things really do not improve, then complaining will have to happen.

But back to my bar shift. I may have an odd hour to do next week when we bid our final farewells to the bar with a couple of big socials, but this is the last time that I will spend three and a half hours (if I have customers!) playing my choice of music.

This is often an eclectic selection, ranging from pop/rock at the beginning of an evening, when I’m more conscious of what the majority will appreciate, to show songs as sobriety recedes and bursts of Wagner, played loud, as an aid to clearing the place at closing time.

For anyone who has not been visiting this part of cyberspace long, here’s a little description of a typical Friday night in the bar. It gives a useful flavour, I think.

So we will miss the place – and have to find ways to put our stamp of bonkerness on to the blank, corporate space that awaits.

In the meantime, tonight I shall blast the air full of a variety of tunes – including some that possibly should be classed as ‘guilty pleasures’. But I shall do so with nary a note of embarrassment – armed with a bottle of proper Czech Budvar close to hand.

Just an ordinary Friday evening

Allow me, if you will, to introduce you to Colin.

Colin works for the same organisation that is currently my number one client, and is the life and soul of the staff sports and social club.

This group runs a bar on the ninth floor of our ten-storey example of concrete brutalism. Volunteers staff the bar from 5-8.30pm, Tuesday to Friday, thus ensuring that the price of booze is kept helpfully low.

A bottle of proper Czech Budvar, for instance, costs just £1.50.

But back to Colin. Let me give you an example of of the man himself at play.

On Friday night, he was one of the first to arrive in what we affectionately call ‘Cloud Nine’. Ben, bar steward for the evening, had gone downstairs to collect a case of wine. So Col, who does his fair share of shifts, nipped behind to serve himself.

There he discovered an open bag of cola sweets, left by a customer earlier in the week after, apparently, having spent two months in her handbag. In the interests of science, these details are important.

Colin joyfully crunched his way through a couple. And then, as other regulars drifted in, came up with an idea. Well, it was a question really – or an idea of how to answer a question.

How long would it take to dissolve a cola cube in a glass of booze?

A shot glass was pulled out and given a nice measure of neat vodka. A bright pink cola cube was dropped into it. Nothing very much happened.

By this stage, Dicky and Tim were enthusiastically joining in too, although Jon looked far less convinced.

There followed lots of boy talk about what might do the trick. Another shot glass had lemonade added to it (well, the chemical excuse for lemonade that shops retail cheaply). The sweet brought forth quite a lot of fizzing and froth, but still determinedly sat at the bottom of the glass stubbornly refusing to dissolve.

At this point, Colin decided that the only way forward was to drop one in his own pint glass of Swedish cider, to sit at the bottom with loads of ice. It still didn’t dissolve, but apparently tasted yummy when he’d quaffed his libation and fished it out from amongst the remaining ice to eat.

The ideas about how to make a cola cube dissolve completely continued. It was suggested that heating the liquid that it was in might do the trick.

Perhaps it would work if you set light to some alcohol containing such a cube? Perhaps – this was a Colin special – you could take a bottle of that never-seen-a-lemon lemonade, put a cube in the bottle and screw the top back on tightly, then put it in the dishwasher and set the machine going so that it would be heated up.

Ben refused to countenance either experiment – the first, because nobody wanted to pay for the booze required, and the second, because he thought the plastic bottle would probably explode in the dishwasher.

But thus was born the social club’s science project – a whacked-out meeting of Brainiac and beer and boys. What better combination could be imagined?