Having jumped at the chance to dress up as David Bowie, I quickly discovered that the only diet readily associated with the Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) star was the one he lived off while making Station to Station: peppers, milk and cocaine.
The immediate problem is that this diet involves peppers, which I can afford but do not like; and cocaine, which I ... cannot afford. So I resolve that the next closest thing to the Station to Station diet is a series of recipes involving milk and peppers, cooked while blasting out Bowie songs in my kitchen. (That last part isn’t so different from a usual week.)
I kick things off with a starter of stuffed peppers, reasoning that milk and cheese are not so different. If you ever want to go to a great deal of effort to put cheese in a pepper while retaining its shape, only to watch as people dismantle it anyway and pronounce it “average”, I can recommend this dish. However, it is about 10 times more effort than a simple cheese board.
My main course does better. I take my chilli recipe – black beans, padrón peppers, garlic, chillies, beef, tinned tomatoes and so on – and add milk. This isn’t as horrible as I feared: if you want to make a chilli with less oomph (instead of sour cream), the addition of some milk while cooking isn’t a bad start.
Less successful is my dessert. I recently bought an ice-cream machine, which had two consequences: the first was that I realised I don’t own nearly enough Tupperware, and the second was a new game I like to call “Will it ice-cream?”, where you go through your spice rack finding out what works in ice-cream. Cinnamon will ice-cream. Ginger will ice-cream. Turmeric, surprisingly enough, will ice-cream.
To make pepper ice-cream, I blitz some peppers in the blender, then combine that with the custard base and leave to cool. I can confirm that peppers will not ice-cream – regardless, probably, of how much cocaine you have taken.
- Stylist: Stephanie Iles.
