Post Christmas Recipies

A blog post from 2011, “enhanced” in 2012

Well, that time of year has passed again, and here we are, all stuffed full of turkey and poitín, wondering what to do with the leftovers. 

 I have a system to which I have stuck rigidly throughout the years. If the turkey was good and tasty, and all of the guests enjoyed it, I reward it the day after Christmas Day by letting it live, and setting it free to roam the world and seek it’s fortune, walking off down the road with all of its earthly possessions wrapped in a bag on the end of a stick, just like Puss in Boots.

IIncidentally, this is the only paragraph in this article that was not written years in advance of the current movie Puss in Boots, which my wife and I saw yesterday. I think the me of the early 2000s may have been a clairvoyant or something.

QUICK RECIPE: For the perfect hot chicken sandwich: Season with salt, bring to the boil, simmer for three to five minutes, then remove shell and serve on toast.

If, however, the bird was unpalatable, I beat it to within an inch of it’s life, and force it to apologise for embarrassing me in front of my hungry friends and loved ones, after I very kindly gave it a warm home for Christmas. Then I drive it back to the ghettos from whence it came, and kick it out of the car, just like Danny DeVito in “Changing Places”.

I tell it to warn it’s friends never to cross my path, unless they happen to be black cats. I also send it a bill for the sauce that we had to use to disguise it’s taste. You cannot let these birds walk all over you. Otherwise they w-

-I’ve just noticed that the spell checker is suggesting that I not apostrophise the word “it’s”. Well, I must say, that has put me in foul humour. No, not “humor”, you electronic asshole. I live in Europe , where we use proper English. No offence.

Although of course I’m in Ireland , agus ba fhearr liom scriobh as Gailge, mar sin. But I’m willing to concede to those of you who have failed to become proficient in my country’s beautiful ancestral tongue. Anyway, two cats walk into a sandwich bar.

One of them asks the young woman behind the counter for a tongue sandwich, and promptly gets kicked out of the store The other, seeing his chance, asks her out to the cinema. The following day, Neil Armstrong lands on the moon and utters the immortal phrase “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask whether you really want to live in a country so small that right now I can hold it between my forefinger and thumb. Although admittedly I am on the moon, looking at the earth from a great distance, and suffering the hallucinogenic effects of eating lunar cheese in massive quantities. Cheap bastards didn’t pack me a lunchbox. Are we recording yet? These audio-cassette things will never take off. Christ I wish I could have a proper, non-vacuumed shit right now”.

QUICK RECIPE: To prepare tortoise eggs: Salt lightly, place in boiling water, simmer for five minutes, then remove shell and cut open to find perfectly cooked eggs.

And in a way, I suppose that sums up what this season has meant to those of us who start a sentence without having any idea how it’s going to end. And since the next sentence is no longer relevant, it’s been deleted and the rest of this is pretty much filler, and the next bit will seem out of place and irrelevant. Not least because I am drunk to the very bottom or my soul with that rich and wonderful thing that has been brought to me these past few months. Carlsberg. Ten cans for €10 at my local Centra, most bank holiday weekends.

A useful tip for poaching eggs: Placing some balls of white paper in the nest buys you some time to escape unnoticed.

I’ve always liked seeming out of place. Frequently I walk up to drive-through restaurants, just for the sheer hell of it. I usually order the unhealthiest item on the menu, and ironically “power walk” my way home while eating a double cheese thing and cramming French-fried potatoes down my greedy throat.

Okay I’m done.