Chef 2019

Made in a small Pyrex kitchen bowl, rather like a summer fruits pudding and without glue, this work is based on an evening I spent watching a cooking programme on the telly with my friend Sue)

Sue and I were watching a cookery programme, which was a very satisfactory pastime when you had a tea towel and a spectacular home made curry sat on your lap. A famous male chef (or peacock) and a female cookery writer (or nice to look at skivvie) had taken on the task of teaching us thicko‘s (the viewers) how to make a pasta bake.

Fuck the food, I thought, this was a game and it didn’t involve chicken thighs! And, according to this geezer, if you rub garlic on the inside of an oven dish before you put the pasta bake in, well it becomes more than a potted spagbol with toasted cheese on top …it becomes MANFOOD. I don’t know many people that would have time for carrying out the sort of crap, that you wouldn’t be able to taste once it was cooked.

I was eating a spectacular piece of curried chicken, that was spectacular but not MANFOOD. Sue would have thrown me out of her house if I had decided to treat the chicken to a half hour sports massage before it was cooked. Suddenly, Sue said,‘I wonder what they are both thinking?…I mean it’s just a fucking pasta bake.’ I chuckled while deciding whether to run my finger round my plate or to use some garlic nan to finish off a particularly fork resistant potion of tadka dal. I chose the nan and answered with my mouth full saying, Well, if you want my opinion, she‘s thinking Do I look good in this skirt?. Sue laughed and her plate wobbled. Then she piped up..…’Yeah! And he’s thinking…Never mind the skirt love, when are you going to put those cherry red lips around me nob!.

‘A man can go seventy years without a piece ass, but he can die in a week without a bowel movement’.

-Charles Bukowski.