5 Spiced Indonesian Duck Satay

First off, apologies are in order for my stint in absentia, it has been a busy few months that have descended into a violent heat wave which has rendered me naked and on sofa betwixt jobs involving heavy lifting and subsequent excessive showering. You will be pleased to hear the time spent away from Gloopfood and in between jobs has been done so wisely; cooking and eating remaining firmly at the top of the list of vocations. Oh, and of course I have set aside ample time to get royally pissed off with people, below I offer a brief discourse before the main course; Bon appetite.

In March of this year whilst I was sitting at my dining room table at 31 Mysore Road writing the prequel post to this one, which, having had a quick glance appears to be in a similar tonal vein, I heard the postal flap clatter as what I assumed to be yet another menu fell to the floor. Upon closer inspection I observed four letters identical in colour and size addressed to the four housemates, and with them through the letter box a foul smell had oozed, viscous in consistency, a pungent pong riding atop an odious zephyr. I recognised it immediately, it was the unforgettable stench of estate agent.

After literally (I use the word correctly) months of searching for the perfect pad, or at least one that had four bedrooms rather than three and a cupboard, James, Ed, Dom and I found what was to be our home for next twelve months…. or so we thought. Contained within these official looking correspondences was a letter from Barnard Marcus notifying us that the land lord had, against categorical assurances from them that it would definitely be a minimum of twelve months we would be in there, irrespective of the six month break out clause, had decided to invoke said clause and wanted us to vacate the property so he could begin renovations. According to the notice which had been stuffed through our door, the low level employee who did so making it back to the office before the paper hit the floor, gave us exactly eight weeks to move out with all our belongings. Not an easy process when everything in the house belonged to us.

After a hectic property search which took us right down to the wire and as far south at Streatham and Balham, we were fortunate enough to land on our feet and find a house in Battersea a spit ball from the park. Inevitably however we were faced with having to deal with another parasitical sub-human before we could collect our keys and start our new life together, sandwiched between an extremely busy road and the main line into London’s Victoria station.

Sure enough the slimy individual with whom we had our dealings was essentially a criminal, gushing with verbal diarrhoea whenever he opened his mouth, making little to no sense whatsoever, and frankly treating us like we were idiots who were susceptible to his brazen and blindly apparent attempts at flattery. He was in fact totally useless bar picking up a phone and telling us the address of the house, once there we met our land lady who showed us around whilst we suffered his ludicrous ramblings. It will never cease to amaze me how estate agents will so unsubtly try and sugar coat a house that costs £650 per month to rent, it is what it is. When they start walking around oohing and aahing at a place they’ve seen several times before that is by all accounts totally non-descript, it makes me want to stab them in the face, wrap the body up in the cheap and shiny suit they bought from Next in the nineties, and throw it in the Thames.

You would have thought that after giving the green light on the house the process of completing forms and moving in would be fairly painless, you would be wrong. After losing several emails with signed documents that we had completed and returned on time, he then tried to convince my father and guarantor (as I am self-employed and have a somewhat Grecian bank balance they require more than just my word) that he couldn’t issue a tenancy agreement for our house until he had signed the guarantor form, and that we would have to pay our deposit and initial month’s rent before we signed the contract; a figure which amounts to over £6000. Couple this with the fact that Papa Gloop has been a lawyer for over thirty five years, information that the agent of darkness was well aware of, and his attempt at fleecing really does enter the realm of the absurd. After some probing it turned out that the reason he wouldn’t send the relevant contract with our new address on is because he thought we would go straight to the land lady and cut him out, losing him his agency fee. Now I’m certainly no Colombo but surely all this effort to conceal the address of a house we had already visited, a few hundred metres from our old digs, whilst in the knowledge that our new land lady is the deputy mayor of Wandsworth and also lives upstairs, may have been a little futile.

Now I’m not going to mention any names, as Omar at Next Door Properties could probably try and sue me for Defamation of Character. That said he would almost certainly misunderstand the contract, not to mention that if there is anyone he should take legal action against in this area it his himself. I would also like to add whilst on the subject of accountability that this is not an attack on Next Door Properties, rather the individual estate agent whose name I cannot mention for legal reasons . . . . . Although a hunch, personal experience and popular mass opinion would suggest that the rest of the office and indeed every other estate agent nationwide falls into the same bottom dwelling echelon.

The personal experience I speak of was gained in Leeds whilst at university there, where the standard of housing is one notch below Belsen Dachau. I recall one incident when I reported the -5 degree winds blowing through the 20cm hole in my bathroom wall leading to the outside to my land lord, and he came around to fix the problem with some duct tape and the side of a Golden Grahams box, it wasn’t even the more weather hardy Cinnamon pack. One estate agent had so many complaints they could’ve had their own spin off show from Watchdog, and gave their address out to tenants as on a street in the Leeds city centre, yet when the show went to visit them the building simply didn’t exist!

So what to do then? We are what experts are calling ‘The Jilted Generation’. Why is it that Radio 2 and the press keep harping on about how “house prices are going up and isn’t that wonderful”! Wonderful for our parent’s generation and anyone else sitting on a big pile of property investments from the financial boom of the 1980s, but pretty bloody crap for us lot. Especially when the exponential rise in property prices is totally disproportionate to feeble rise in income rates. It’s no wonder than no one can afford to buy without signing their life away to a 70 year mortgage scheme.

“But the interest rates are the lowest they’ve been in years” Mr Osbourne will tell us.

Well poo poo to that, as soon as we’re locked in the chubby baby and his little red suitcase will undoubtedly wade in and hike them back up again, even if he can’t do it directly I am in no doubt he will find a way, then we shall all be in negative equity and paying off deficits rather than into our pension funds, which he would of course steal as well. The government seem to think it’s a shift in society and that we are deciding to rent for longer and have children later, holding onto our youth and life as young professionals, when the simple fact is we can’t afford it. The average age of first time buyers who invest without the help from their parents has risen from 24 to 37 in on generation!

So again I ask the question, what to do then? Do we move abroad? France? 75% taxation, no thanks. Italy? Essentially a third world country. Germany? Well other than their fantastic wine and hilarious stand-up comedy there’s not much attraction. Greece…….

Perhaps a shift in priorities is needed? I leave you with plenty of unanswered questions and a quote from His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

We have bigger houses but smaller families: 
We have more degrees but less sense;
more knowledge but less judgements;
more experts but more problems;
more medicines, but less healthiness.
We've been all the way to the moon and back,
but we have trouble crossing the street
to meet the new neighbour.
We build more computers
to hold more information,
to produce more copies than ever,
but we have less communication.
We have become long on quantity
but short on quality.
These are times of fast foods,
but slow digestion;
tall man, but short character;
steep profits, but shallow relationships.
It is time when there is much in the window
but nothing in the room.

  

Ingredients: (Serves 4)

4 gressingham duck breasts

Chinese 5 spice

Indonesian Satay Sauce, Ketjap Manis (dark brown in colour)

Mixed stir fry vegetables, spring onions, bok choi, carrot shavings

Dark soy sauce

Toasted sesame oil

Chilli oil

Salt & Pepper

Method:

1) Score across the fat of the duck breast and rub the five spice and a couple of tablespoons of the satay sauce into the breasts to coat them, cover and leave to marinade in the fridge for a couple of hours.

2) Chop up the vegetables and set aside.

3) Take the breasts out of the fridge and heat a tablespoon of both the sesame and chilli oils in a frying pan, place the duck in skin side down and cook over a medium heat for 8-10 minutes until the skin is nice, crispy and brown. Flip the breasts over and cook for another 6-8 minutes skin side up.

4)  When done take the duck out of the pan and let it rest on the side, add the vegetables to the pan and fry in the juices of the duck, if there is a bit too much juice then get rid of a bit otherwise you might make the veg a bit soggy. Fry until cooked but with a bit of crunch.

5) While the veg is frying slice the duck up, place the vegetables on a preheated plate and lay the duck out on top. Sprinkle a few spring onions on top and a few drops of Satay sauce.