Dr. Feelgood's Christmas Nut Roast

There is nothing more romantic than spending your first Christmas together as a couple. And there is nothing more romantic than making a vegetarian nut roast for your ehefrau. Things go a bit yumpy though when you put on a Dr. Feelgood album whilst you're cooking and realise that after 2 hours on loop, he has invited himself for Christmas dinner! This blog discusses the tribulations of making a complex nut roast on Christmas day, and how the redemptive power of blues-rock can overcome any culinary vexation.

Dr. Feelgood are a British pub rock band formed in 1971 on Canvey Island, Essex. Known for their raw, high-energy blend of rock and rhythm and blues, they stood out with a no-frills, working-class attitude. The classic lineup featured Lee Brilleaux’s powerful vocals and Wilko Johnson’s sharp, choppy guitar, creating their signature sound. Early albums like Down by the Jetty (1975) and Malpractice (1975) captured their live intensity, while their 1976 live album Stupidity reached number one in the UK. Pioneers of pub rock, Dr. Feelgood helped pave the way for punk with their stripped-back approach. Despite lineup changes and Brilleaux’s early death in 1994, the band continues to perform, keeping their legacy alive.

So what's the connection between Dr. Feelgood and nut roast? Well, practically none at all! The quirky, tenuous relationship comes down to the cultural and countercultural waves from which they originated. Dr. Feelgood's gritty, no-frills blues-rock, came out of the 1970s UK music scene, embodying a raw, working-class energy. Meanwhile, nut roast, equally gritty the way I make it, became a staple in the growing vegetarian movement of the same era, fuelled by environmental awareness, ethical eating, and countercultural rejection of industrial meat production. Both are, in their own ways, symbols of rebellion against the mainstream; Dr. Feelgood shaking up overproduced rock with their stripped-down sound, and nut roast offering a hearty, meat-free alternative to the traditional British roast dinner. They reflect two sides of the same cultural coin: music and food as expressions of identity, resistance, and reinvention in 1970s Britain. Ok?

This is Dr. Feelgood circa 1978, waiting for Belfast's first (and only) all-day nut roast diner to open so they could plot the overthrow of imperialist society by breaking the stranglehold of the meat industry on agriculture. 

I will now attend to my own personal act of rebellion by admitting I sought a vegan recipe on the BBC Good Food website, and after cooking the nut roast, watching it crumble in front of my very eyes, decided from that day forward to include an egg for binding and in future to extol the virtues of eating vegetarian, rather than vegan, nut roast. Screw you BBC for your deception. Below is the modified recipe which includes an egg. If you want to fight and die on the hill of veganism, then I recommend you omit the egg and bring a straw to your Christmas dinner party because that's the only way you'll manage to eat it.

Ingredients

1 onion, finely chopped
2 celery stalks, finely diced
1 leek (about 100g/3½oz trimmed weight), thinly sliced
2 carrots, coarsely grated (approximately 150g/5½oz)
2 garlic cloves, minced
300g/10½oz mixed nuts such as walnuts, hazelnuts, almonds, Brazil nuts or pecans
180g/6oz cooked chestnuts, roughly chopped
75g/2½oz dried cranberries
4 tablespoons cashew butter
1 vegan vegetable stock cube
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, plus extra for greasing
4 tablespoons plant-based milk such as almond or soya
finely grated zest of 1 lemon
20g/¾oz fresh parsley, finely chopped
1 teaspoon sea salt
freshly ground black pepper

Method

Firstly, you will need to cook the chestnuts. Roasting (the oven method) gives them that rich, toasty flavour and slightly crisp shell.

• Soak the chestnuts for 15-30 minutes before roasting.
• Preheat oven to 200°C (400°F).
• Score the shells: Use a sharp knife to cut a small cross or slit on the flat side of each chestnut. This is crucial — it lets steam escape and stops them from exploding.
• Arrange on a baking tray: Place them cut-side up.
• Roast for 20-25 minutes until the shells peel back and the flesh is tender.
• Cradle the roasted nuts in a tea towel for 10 minutes to allow them to steam/ cool
• Peel while warm, as they’re easier to work with when hot.
• Chestnuts are much easier to peel when they’re still warm, so work quickly — and if they cool down too much, you can pop them back into warm water or the oven to loosen the skins again.

Place the mixed nuts and stock cube into a food processor and pulse until the nuts are finely chopped — you want small, even pieces rather than a fine powder. If you don’t have a food processor, you can chop the nuts by hand, aiming for a similar fine consistency.

Preheat the oven to 200C/180C Fan/Gas 6. Grease a 900g/2lb loaf tin with a little olive oil, then line the base with baking paper to help the loaf release easily after baking.

Heat the olive oil in a large frying pan over medium heat. Add the chopped onion, celery, leek, and grated carrot. Cook gently for around 15-20 minutes, stirring regularly, until the vegetables are softened and reduced somewhat. Stir in the garlic and cook for another 30 seconds.

Transfer the cooked vegetables to a large mixing bowl. Add the chopped nuts, chestnuts, cranberries, parsley, lemon zest, plant milk, and salt. Grind in plenty of black pepper. Mix thoroughly and set briefly to one side.

In a separate bowl, stir in the cashew butter (I used peanut butter), almond milk and vegetable stock, as well as the morally troublesome whisked egg, ensuring the ingredients are fully incorporated and adopts a fine paste. This will help the loaf hold together nicely when sliced.

Now mix the paste and vegetables/ nuts from the large mixing bowl, until everything is evenly coated.

Spoon the mixture into the prepared tin, pressing it down firmly with the back of a spoon to compact it well. Cover with foil and bake for 30 minutes.

After 30 minutes, remove the foil and bake for another 20 minutes, or until the top is lightly golden and the loaf is heated through.

Once baked, remove the tin from the oven and leave it to rest for 5 minutes. Run a knife around the edges to loosen, then carefully turn the loaf out onto a serving board or platter. Slice into thick portions and serve warm with vegan gravy or your favourite sides.

Bridget Bate Tichenor (1917-1990)

Bridget Bate Tichenor was a surrealist painter of fantastic art in the school of magic realism and a fashion editor. Born in Paris, she later resettled in Mexico. Bate Tichenor's painting technique was based upon 16th-century Italian tempera formulas that artist Paul Cadmus taught her in New York in 1945. She considered her work to be of a spiritual nature, reflecting ancient occult religions, magic, alchemy, and Mesoamerican mythology in her Italian Renaissance style of painting. The paintings below are mostly from her 1960's work. 

The Duke of Burgundy (2014)

This marvellous romantic drama directed by Peter Strickland is a cinematic masterpiece which, like great wine, is ever-maturing into a classic. Amongst its many delights is the conjuring of a bucolic  atmosphere chiefly mediated by the authenticity of subtle lighting and naturalistic set designs, without a modern contrivance or electronic device in sight. If you were a child of the 70's you might recall something strange happened in that decade. We seemed to go from subtle browns, greens, plums and ochres; earthy colours and materials in the early 70's, to a dehumanised monochrome of formica, metal and plastic a bit like moving house permanently to the Death Star. Accompanying this, a garish explosion of compensatory synthetic pop colours occurred to assault the senses (and aid the advertisers). By the 1980's it seemed the human visual design landscape had been irrevocably transformed, and if a simple natural interieur was desired, it had to be deliberately reverse-engineered, ironically out of wood-effect plastic and synthetic materials. 

The Duke of Burgundy exists in this pre-formica world where objects are naturally-derived materials; wood, stone, candles, wool, grasses, cotton, clay, ceramic, iron. Beyond that, it is a kind of imaginal world which cannot be accurately placed temporally or geographically. Although it is a British-made film, the sets richly evoke that of a pre-1970's rustic French chateaux or Italian mansion, which have a strongly European rather than British flavour. The professional and artistic interests of Cynthia and Evelyn extend to a Victorian descriptive natural history of lepidoptery, without cluttering the subject with modern technical detail. Surrounded by dusty books, brass microscopes, and entomological wall mountings, their research interest is at once a comforting retreat from the outside world, yet also a stagnating academic stricture which typifies their obsessively introspecting psychic existence.  

Although The Duke of Burgundy is often described as an erotic thriller, the kink-based relationship of Cynthia and Evelyn is artfully counterpoised to depict a formulaic sense of ennui and frustration, so it is neither truly erotic or thrilling. I can't help thinking this is a kind of anti-erotic feministic riposte to the conventional sexploitation trajectory a film like The Duke of Burgundy would take had it been produced in the 1970's. In the turgidity of the ritualised sexual encounters, the peripherality of the wandering mind and attention becomes enlivened; this only intensifies the artistic focus on lighting, opulent furnishings, the flickering of a candle. Only in this sense is the film sensual. 

In his book "A Year in the Country: Wandering Through Spectral Fields", Stephen Prince describes the intimate relationships in The Duke of Burgundy as possessing a "Kafka-esque sense of unending" and, laughably, a central relationship which resembles the 1979-87 sit-com Terry and June. I would reject Prince's fancifully vacuous stream of consciousness if it wasn't for his wonderfully redeeming phrase that Duke of Burgundy creates "a particular esoteric, luxuriant, golden atmosphere and an almost fairytale-like world." Yeah, I suppose just like Terry and June. 

In his fairytale-like evocation, Price also forgets to mention the almost classically hallucinogenic soundtrack by alt-pop duo Cat's Eyes (comprising Faris Badwan and Rachel Zeffira) which greatly helps to thematically situate the film within a sensibility of dreamy European folk-imbued decadence. The other thing Price fails to pick up on is what I regard to be the principal narrative of the whole movie; and that is the suffocating sense of confinement which accompanies human life. Whether its at the sharp end of the lepidopterist's pin, a specimen being fixed under a microscope, the soulless rigidity of academic life, the tedious ritualised entrainment of sex and relationships (for example how Evelyn becomes confined to a wooden chest to fulfil her sensory deprivation fantasy), The Duke of Burgundy is a stylish but devastating excoriation of the insatiably spurious wants of the post-scarcity human condition and a gently moralising admonishment of living a life which is psychically cut adrift from the libidinal rhythms of nature. 

Shit Aurora Photos

Yo! Last night was a pretty good one for northern lights. I saw them earlier on in the year, but owing to misplaced trust in Nokia's night photo setting, nearly all of my photos turned out as grainy and dark as the bottom of an abandoned asylum sick bucket. Not so last night. I just used my usual portrait setting on the phone and the photos turned out as reassuringly amateurish as I could hope for. I did try using my Canon on timer but owing to my lack of technological aptitude (scrub that, technological interest) the results on my mobile camera were better. The aurora was mostly pink, scarlet and red but with tinges of green and on occasion quite extensive streaks arcing across the sky. It grew over the period of an hour or so and moved about much more than the one earlier in the year, eventually dissipating. Very impressive. Thank you God. 

And photos from earlier in the year are below. The results are grainer but you can see the different colours of the aurora on that occasion:

John Burroughs: The Simple Life

I am bound to praise the simple life, because I have lived it and found it good... I love a small house, plain clothes, simple living. Many persons know the luxury of a skin bath- a plunge in the pool or the wave unhampered by clothing. That is the simple life - direct and immediate contact with things, life with the false wrappings torn away - the fine house, the fine equipage, the expensive habits, all cut off. How free one feels, how good the elements taste, how close one gets to them, how they fit one's body and one's soul! To see the fire that warms you, or better yet, to cut the wood that feeds the fire that warms you; to see the spring where the water bubbles up that slakes your thirst, and to dip your pail into it; to see the beams that are the stay of your four walls, and the timbers that uphold the roof that shelters you; to be in direct and personal contact with the sources of your material life; to want no extras, no shields; to find the universal elements enough; to find the air and the water exhilarating; to be refreshed by a morning walk or an evening saunter; to find a quest of wild berries more satisfying than a gift of tropic fruit; to be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a bird's nest, or over a wild flower in spring - these are some of the rewards of the simple life. 

From: "An Outlook Upon Life" quoted in Our Friend John Burroughs (Clara Barrus, 1914). 

The current of the lives of many persons, I think, is like a muddy stream. They lack the instinct for health, and hence do not know when the vital current is foul. They are never really well ... The dew on the grass, the bloom on the grape, the sheen on the plumage, are suggestions of the health that is within the reach of most of us. 

I would live so that I could get tipsy on a glass of water, or find the spur in a whiff of morning air. 

You and I perish, but something goes out, or may go out, from us that will help forward a higher type of humanity. 

Oh, the wisdom that grows on trees, that murmurs in the streams, that floats in the wind, that sings in the birds, that is fragrant in the flowers, that speaks in the storms - the wisdom that one gathers on the shore, or when sauntering in the fields, or in resting under a tree, the wisdom that makes him forget his science, and exacts only his love - how precious it all is!

Naturalism does not see two immeasurable realities, God and Nature, it sees only one, that all is Nature or all is God, just as you prefer ... The universe was not made, it is, and always has been. God is Nature, and Nature is God. 

I shall not be imprisoned in the grave where you are to bury my body. I shall be diffused in great Nature, in the soil, in the air, in the sunshine, in the hearts of those who love me, in all the living and flowing currents of the world, though I may never again in my entirety be embodied in a single human being. My elements and my forces go back into the original sources out of which they came, and these sources are perennial in this vast, wonderful, divine cosmos. 

We are links in an endless cycle of change in which we cannot separate material from what we call the spiritual ... Each of us is an incarnation of the universal mind, as is every beast of the field and jungle, and every fowl of the air, and every insect that creeps and flies; and we can only look upon creation as an end in itself ... [Humanity] is a link in an endless chain of being (Accepting the Universe, 1920).

All quotes above from: Meditations of John Burroughs: Nature is Home. Chris Highland (Ed), Self-published, 2007. 

Cadair Idris without the Cwmshot

Cadair Idris or Cader Idris is a mountain in the Meirionnydd area of Gwynedd, Wales. It lies at the southern end of the Snowdonia National Park near the town of Dolgellau. The peak is composed largely of Ordovician igneous rocks, with classic glacial erosion features such as cwms, moraines, striated rocks, and roches moutonnées. Cadair Idris means 'Idris's Chair', the seat of Idris Gawr (Idris the Giant) after his 7th century battles against the Irish. I had been hoping to do the classic circular walk of Cadair Idris for about 35 years, so I jumped at the chance to do so when it came along. The classic walk is something like this:

The classic circular walk (which we didn't do).

However, because we had two cars, a gentler and more scenic option became possible; one which avoids the horrors of the steep scree of the Minffordd path and has a western approach.  We parked at the Minffordd car park but took the other car up to the chapel at Tyn-y-ddôl and walked up the valley towards Hafotty Gwastadfryn. We then took the path around the desolate amphitheatre of Tyrrau Mawr, accompanied by the whistling wind and wistful bleating of sheep on the hillside. From there we crossed the sodden moor of Rhiw Gweredydd and made for the steep ascent of the Pony Path and on to Cadair Idris summit. But... I got to the foot of the Pony Path ascent and just pancaked, my energy and stamina completely failing me, similar to my Fairfield Half-Horseshoe Fail from Grasmere. Fortunately, this didn't ruin the experience of my walking buddy who was able to press on and retrieve his car by following the ridge at Cadair Idris and descending the Minffordd Path, as planned.  

The walk we did was like an inverted question mark. Seems fitting. 

I was left to retrace my ascent and return to my car. In total I walked 9 miles with an elevation of 2000ft. It took me 7 hours to walk my 9 miles, i.e. a staggeringly couch potatoey 1.28 miles per hour (half walking pace). From the point I turned back at the foot of the Pony Path, the remaining distance to the summit was only 1.2 miles with an additional elevation required of circa 1000ft. The thing is, if you're not up for the final ascent, you can't do it and must return the long way. It seems harsh but its the law of the jungle, or more precisely the mountain. My return journey was glorious. I didn't see a soul on the mountains apart from some friendly sheep. I collapsed several times and just lay there exhausted, in the sun, in the wind. It is said that he who sleeps on the slopes of Cadair Idris alone awakes as either a madman or a poet, and I would hope for both. The whole thing was an elemental exploration of my own fragility and humanity and I wouldn't change it for the world. It is wonderful to fail sometimes. To reach for the summit and find you are grasping (or gasping) very thin air.

One additional aspect to my visit to Cadair Idris was that it was preceded (and followed) by 5 hours of car drive to and from Lincolnshire in an unfamiliar car which I had not driven before, and I had not made a long car journey for about 2 years before that. Circa 450 miles and 10 hours of driving, and 7 hours of mountain walking. Even though I didn't summit I felt like I had run a marathon by the time I got home.