He doesn’t actually bish, bash or bosh anything, but, make no mistake – Jamie Oliver is back! This time, he is presenting Jamie’s Quick & Easy Food (Channel 4, Monday) – four speedy dishes (“Cool hacks! Cheeky snacks!”), using five ingredients each (in “killer combos!”), in 30 minutes, including the ad break. He exhausts and energises you in equal measure.
First up! Sizzling seared scallops! Smashed potatoes and peas! Mint – love it! Fried morsels of black pudding sprinkled over the top! Beautiful! It was, too. I mean, I could have cut out a step or two – don’t bother with the mint, and scallops are horrible fish-rubber – but then I can cut a step or two out of heating soup. (In case you’re wondering: don’t bother. If you’re only having soup, you can manage without.) But onward! To egg and mango flatbread. Boil eggs. Chuck flour, yoghurt, salt and olive oil together to make flatbread dough, roll it out, fry it and bung more yoghurt, mango chutney, sliced egg and chilli on top. Coming from anyone else, I wouldn’t countenance this as a feasible proposition, but of course Jamie’s great gift is to bring even handmade-flatbreads-while-your-eggs-boil within the reach of mere mortals. You believe him, you believe in him, and you should. I’ve tried it and it works.
But onward! To rib-eye steak with mushrooms, rosemary (“It’s best mates with mushrooms and steak!”), garlic and tinned cannellini beans. Just cook them, basically. They go lovely together. I’m going to do that, too. Without the beans or the mushrooms – yuck! – but maybe … yes ... maybe with the potato and pea mash from the other thing? Can I do that? And so Jamie’s mission – to stop the great British public being such mindless dicks about food, the philosophy if not quite the slogan on which he has built his multimillion-pound empire – advances a little further.
But onward! To almond pastry puffery! Grind some almonds (or buy them! Jamie doesn’t mind as long as you know they’re not as flavoursome!), whizz them up with egg and cream – that’s frangipane. Seal it inside two circles of puff pastry (bought! He really doesn’t mind!) like a giant ravioli! Sprinkle icing sugar over it, bake it for 15 minutes, then reach through the screen to cram it down your throat, because it looks so crisply yet meltingly delicious.
“Five ingredients!” he beams. “And a little bit of love!” And the distilled essence of someone else’s talent, of course. But that’s what cooks do – they share the love, and the rest of us can hope to break our 14-day streak of spag bol as a result.
From the gloriously simple satisfactions of the five-ingredient meal to the gloriously complex and even more satisfying meal that was last night’s Storyville: Silk Road – Drugs, Death and the Dark Web (BBC4). It told the story of the multi-agency investigation that eventually brought down the massive online illegal-drug marketplace and the mastermind behind it, Dread Pirate Roberts, aka 29-year-old Ross Ulbricht.
The documentary threaded testimony from Ulbricht’s girlfriend and roommates, who knew him as a clever, charismatic, libertarian-leaning, peaceable young man through the story of the operation that identified him as, in essence, a drug lord – and one they eventually suspected of ordering the murders of six people involved with the site’s transaction. It was a tale of painstaking work in an overwhelmingly new field that ended after two long, frustrating years with his capture in Glen Park library. “He was sitting in a corner where the wifi was felt to be particularly good,” remembers librarian Kate Brown.
How much longer and frustrating the investigation would have been without IRS special agent Gary Alford was a question the film – which clearly also depended on the cooperation of the larger players involved, the FBI and Homeland Security – rather skated over.
Alford went back to basics and Googled any mentions of Silk Road dated before it hit the headlines in 2011. He found an email address for Ulbricht. The rest of the team dismissed this. It couldn’t be that easy.
Ultimately, it was. The evidence, the rest of the team gradually gathered (Alford chased down travel records, YouTube clips and alternative avatars of Ulbricht) all ended up pointing in that direction. After the arrest, an undercover officer emailed him: “Gary, you were right.” “That was a great moment,” said Alford. “I had done my job ... well.” Bish. Bash. Bosh.
