Cooking with Booze: The Blog

So, I made a video of me cooking one of the recipes (this one):

I used fresh tomatos because I’d just harvested a bunch from my roof, so the sauce turned out a bit more liquid than it should be, but it was super-tasty.

This is actually my third cooking video (more here), but the first from the book. I’m planning on doing a whole series of them - but I’m hoping that other people will help me out and make some of their own. It would be great to have one (or more!) for every recipe in the book.

How about it?

It’s pretty easy - I’m using a really crappy webcam, and a free OSX programme called Gawker, then I edited it a bit with iMovie, stuck on a tune (in this case, Four Friends And A Microphone by The Black Dog), and uploaded it to Vimeo, which is like YouTube, but nicer.

Go on, have a go, and tag anything you do, anywhere, ‘cookingwithbooze’ so I can find it.

Hello, and welcome to the Cooking With Booze blog. I’m James, the guy who wrote the book. Yeah, I know it says George Harvey Bone on the cover. Let me tell you about that…

I used to be an editor at Snowbooks, a totally sweet little publishing company. In 2006, we won small publisher of the year at the British Book Trade Awards. That’s me on the right, wearing the award as a hat. But that’s not important right now.

While there, I came up with the idea for the book, and though I’m no longer at Snowbooks they said they’d still publish it, so away I went. (Before that, I’d worked for Oddbins for years, which is why I’m so into booze, and no, there’s no way you’re seeing any of the photos from those years.)

The book is written in character, appropriately I think, as an old roué, my alter ego/the voices in my head; although there’s plenty of nods to my real-life friends and relatives. Naming the alter ego came pretty easy as I’m a huge fan of a novelist and playwright called Patrick Hamilton.

Hamilton (1904 - 1962) wrote a series of novels and plays, many of them set in the London demi-monde of the 1930s and 1940s, with a cast of drinkers, prostitutes, and general Soho and Earls Court low-life. They’re pretty bleak and misanthropic, but wonderfully described and blackly funny. Probably the most famous of them is Hangover Square, which tells the story of George Harvey Bone (aha!), a West London loser and boozer, his infatuation with the (to him) gorgeous Netta, a failed actress, and his slow descent into alcoholism and madness. Cheery stuff. Anyway, it’s brilliant. Read it.

So, I’ve brought George back to life, in happier times, to share some of the Bone family cookbook with you. Hope you like it. Let me know what you think.