Recipe: Spicy Potato Wedges

We hosted our first movie night last night. A bunch of friends came around and, in honour of this god-awful heatwave, we turned on the air conditioning and watched A Guide to Recognising Your Saints.

I made a few snacks for us to nibble on during the movie. Some were more of a success than others. The bean and cheese pate? Yeah, I probably won’t be making that one again. By far, the biggest hit of the night were the spicy potato wedges. I know this sounds embarrassing for someone who loves junk food AND loves to cook, but this is the first time I felt like I actually nailed spicy potato wedges. They were spot-on. What’s more embarrassing was how easy they were to make.

A couple of people asked me for the recipe, so here it is.

Spicy Potato Wedges

• 1kg Medium/Large Potatoes
• 1tbsp Olive Oil
• 2 large cloves of garlic, crushed
• 1 tsp paprika
• 1/2 tsp cumin
• salt and pepper

1. Get the oven on hot. I put ours onto fan-assist, 200°.
2. Pour some oil into a roasting tray and put it into the oven to get hot.
3. Cut the potatoes into halves, then cut those halves in half again.
4. Put all the ingredients into a large bowl and combine.
5. Once the oven is hot enough and the oil is moving around that roasting tray, pour in the potatoes.
6. Tossing occasionally, cook for about 25 minutes, or until they’re done to your liking.

I’d show you a photo of what the end result looked like, but honestly, we ate the fuck out of those things. I didn’t have a chance.

Review: Tom Bissell - Extra Lives

If you’re someone who plays videogames, have you ever tried to explain why you like videogames to a non-gamer? Horrible, right? Conversely, if you don’t play videogames, have you ever had a videogame nerd try to explain why he or she likes videogames? Horrible, right? The problem is that videogames are a tough “sell”. Let’s face it, for the most part, videogames are antisocial things that seem to bring out the worst habits in peopleI guess I should point out that it’s not just videogames that bring out the worst qualities in people, some board games do too. I remember playing Trivial Pursuit with my wife who wouldn’t give me a wedge because I had said “Rock and Roll Music” when the answer was “Rock Music” - this will never be forgotten in my house. I scream and shout and swear at the TV all the time when I’m playing games. Even a seemingly “quiet” and slow-paced game like Risk: Factions has me trying to break my controller with my bare hands (something I haven’t actually done since the days of the SNES). My wife often complains about how I remain “twitchy” for hours after playing certain games. In fact, she uses this as a sort of litmus test to see if I’m lying and, instead of working or studying, I’ve actually been shooting fools in Modern Warfare 2.

For someone who has never played videogames before, watching someone behave like a petulant child is hardly going to make them want to see what all the fuss is about.

I think that the best way to “sell” videogames to a non-gamer is by talking about them from an experiential point of view, talking frankly and openly about the experiences a game has provided, rather than trying to describe the whole game in 500 words. This is something that has caught on in the last few years, the idea of New Games Journalism, where dispassionate cookie-cutter descriptions of videogames with a meaningless score tacked on the end (7/10) were replaced with first-person accounts of play, focusing on the emotions evoked by certain experiences within the game. In effect, rather than trying to provide a description of the elephant as a whole, we are shifting our focus to each of the blind men’s experiences because they have experienced this elephant in a closer, more intimate way than any simple overview could provide. In fact, I’m going to say that videogames are one of the few mediums where we can consistently focus on individual experiences. For example, how many people have come across the suicide man in Red Dead Redemption? How many people experienced the exact same story in Mass Effect or Dragon Age?

Tom Bissell’s Extra Lives: Why Videogames Matter is one of the first books that attempt to present a first-person, emotional account of someone’s experiences playing videogames. As I mentioned before, Paste Magazine described it as “the first truly indispensable work of literary nonfiction about society’s most lucrative entertainment medium”. Now, having read it, does it live up to this hype?

I’m sad to say: not really. I found it to be a wildly uneven book. It swings erratically between a genuinely entertaining account of the author’s video gaming experiences, and a boring, dime-a-dozen primer on video games. For example, the chapter providing a blow-by-blow account of the opening minutes of Resident Evil might be interesting to someone who has never played the game before, but as someone who has played that game (and especially that section of that game) more times than he cares to admit, I found that there were very few actual insights in this chapter. I understand the desire to want your book to be as accessible to as many people as possible, but really, it just gets out of hand sometimes. Imagine writing a cookbook and explaining what a “pot” was, or the etymology of “recipe”. That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. Except with videogames.

To make things worse, the author’s literary background (because he’s a real, legitimate, literary author, dontchaknow?) causes the whole thing to occasionally tumble over into the ridiculous. Like Roland Barthes reviewing Pac-Man.

Which is not to say it’s all bad. There are moments of real genius in the book, but he rarely gives us more than just moments. Frequently, Bissell will touch on a topic or offer a profound observation only to drop it in favour of a more casual-friendly read that will appeal to a broader audience. And this is the real shame of the book. There’s a terrific interview with Bissell on the Brainy Gamer podcast. I suppose the pre-defined audience of this podcast allowed him to go into a lot of detail regarding his experience with cocaine and GTA IV and the relationship between the two, why cocaine is the perfect drug to play GTA IV to. It was genuinely interesting and so I was left wondering why he couldn’t have included these thoughts in the actual book he was promoting? It would have made the book a lot more enjoyable for both gamers and non-gamers alike.

(Also, since this is the internet - the perfect place to pick nits - I was a little dismayed by the inconsistency in the book. At the beginning, Bissell talks about the confusion caused by the variety of names people use to talk about videogames: “videogames”, “video games” and “video-games”, and announces that he has settled on “video games”, yet he uses all three throughout the book. Would a little search-and-replace have killed him? I probably wouldn’t have noticed if he hadn’t explicitly addressed the issue of nomenclature himself.)

Although the book is definitely a great start, I feel as if Bissell failed to show us ‘why video games matter’, but instead tried to explain why video games matter to him. Even then, I don’t think he did a great job. For a more engaging and coherent argument on why video games matter, check out the chapter in Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You.

Some things to check out if you want some really great examples of the kind of “New Games Journalism” that I felt Bissell was going for:

• Bow Nigger. Arguably the first example of “New Games Journalism”
• The Idle Thumbs Podcast, who spend much of their time talking about the ridiculous and fun things they get up to in games. They make it sound so appealing, it’s hard not to want to join in and see what the fuss is about.
• Ben Abraham’s Permanent Death in Far Cry 2 is everything I think Bissell’s FC2 chapter wishes it was.
• Alice and Kev - a hilarious and touching exploration of homelessness in The Sims 3
• The Gamer’s Quarter - a terrific series of ‘zines. I’m genuinely sad that they’ve stopped publishing.

We Deal in Lead

I’ve been thinking a lot about Kane, an early wild west game that came out on the Commodore 64 in the mid-80s. Actually, I doubt if it even counts as a “game” by today’s standards. Really it was just four mini-games - shooting birds (or rather, “birdies”), riding a horse to the right, a shoot out, and then riding a horse to the left. The game wasn’t particularly flashy, nor was the narrative wrapper that supposedly connected these mini-games (essentially, the plot of High Noon - “Kane” being the name of Gary Cooper’s character in that movie).

Despite the flaws, I fucking loved that game.

I loved it because I was 10, and this was a game where I could pretend to be a cowboy. And when you’re a ten year old boy, all you want to do is to be a cowboy. For me, the small numbers of actions in the game actually added to the effect. I mean, what the hell else did cowboys do but shoot things and ride horses? That was just me, though. The Spectrum magazine, Crash, criticised the game for the limited amount of things you can do in the game, saying “it would be fun if there were about 10 more sections to battle through”.

Playing through Rock Star’s Red Dead Redemption, I couldn’t help being reminded of Kane - one of the first games I ever played and definitely the first cowboy game I ever played - which then got me thinking about how far videogames have come. If you were to jump in a time machine and show this game to my ten-year old self (on a 60" HD LCD TV, natch), I can guarantee you I would have quite literally shit my pants.

While Kane was mostly played in static screens, with just four types of activity in the entire gameWell, two, if you want to be persnickety about the qualitative distinctions between riding left instead of right and shooting birds instead of dudes, there’s no shortage of activity in Red Dead Redemption. In my almost 35 hours of playing RDR, I never once felt bored or like I had nothing to do. There were always animals to hunt, outlaws to kill (and loot), horses to lasso and women to hogtie and place in front of a fast-approaching train. I love the amount and variety of possibilities that the game throws at the player. I’ve finished the story and I still have things to do, such as killing grizzly bears with my hunting knife.

What I love most about the Red Dead Redemption is the way it feels like a real, living world. I was always stumbling across little things, micro-stories that felt like they were happening completely independently of me and my actions. For example, while riding around Aurora Basin, hunting for bears, I spotted a man kneeling on the ground. I rode closer and saw that he was kneeling next to the body of a dead woman and bawling his eyes out. As I stood there, watching him cry, he took out a gun and shot himself in the head. I was completely stunned by this. I didn’t know what to do.

(I got off my horse and looted his body.)

I’m not particularly proud of my actions. All I’ll say is that we all have our own ways of dealing with grief and kleptomania is mine. But let’s just think about this: the amount of effort and number of man-hours put into crafting this one tiny, incidental scene in Red Dead Redemption probably outweighs the total amount of effort and number of man-hours put into the entirety of the making of Kane. And this was just a background action, something that would (apparently) happen whether I’d seen it or not. I could have missed it. I could have just as easily chosen to ride past the man without checking it out. It didn’t need to be there, but Rockstar put it in there because it fleshed out this world.

It’s easy to be jaded about these things (and I definitely felt a bit disappointed the second time I came across the suicide-man) but my goodness - we’ve really come a long way. No wonder my ten-year old self would have shit his pants.

Rome Recommendations

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Things to See

St. Peter’s Basilica
Okay, it’s a bit lame and cliched, but this is still a huge part of Roman history that it’s hard to ignore. For me, it still towers above the colosseum as an attraction. Search iTunes for Rick Steves Rome Podcasts - he’s got some audio guides for some of the bigger sights, like St. Peter’s, the Pantheon, the Forum etc. Cheaper (and less lame) than joining a tour.

Pantheon
It was 32 degrees out today. On days like this, it’s fantastic to be able to duck into the Pantheon. I’ve no idea of the science behind it, but somehow this place stays very cool without air conditioning. Plus, you’ll be near Tazza d’Oro, which is one of the better coffee shops in Rome. Try their granita, which is like a coffee slush puppy. Get it with whipped cream and then spend the next few minutes mixing it all together to make a coffee milkshake. You’ll be buzzing for hours.

Musem of the Holy Souls in Purgatory
I only read about this recently on atlasobscura.com, so I haven’t had a chance to check it out yet. It’s a museum of relics that were “burned” by souls in purgatory. It all sounds a bit cheesy, but still pretty interesting. It’s also in/near one of the few (neo-)gothic churches in Rome.

Capuchin Church of the Immaculate Conception - Via Vittorio Veneto, 27
I’ve been to the catacombs in Paris, and I’ve thought “what kind of sick fuck decides to arrange skulls in the shape of a heart?” Then I visited this place and it beats the pants off anything Paris has to offer in terms of dementedness. Bones of more than 4,000 monks have been arranged into a series of scenes and dioramas, where EVERYTHING is made of bones. They even have chandeliers made of bones. Chairs made of bones. Light switches made of bones. Very macabre. If there was ever a goth Disneyland, this is it.

Church of San Clemente, Via Labicana
If you ever want proof that Rome is a “living” history, you should go to visit San Clemente. It’s a twelfth-century church, built on a fourth-century basilica, built on a pagan temple. They’ve all been really well preserved and it’s another fantastic place to duck in to avoid the mid-afternoon heat, especially if you’re already up that area checking out the Colosseum.

To eat/drink

Le Mani in Pasta - Via Dei Genovesi, 37
This is more of an upmarket pasta joint. It’s a little more expensive than the normal places (still ridiculously cheap though), but believe me, if you’ve got something to celebrate, this is worth it. It’s like a once-in-a-while treat for us. Very seafood heavy. When I go there, I usually get the carpaccio of swordfish with truffles, then the fettucine with ricotta and pancetta (if you get this, immediately mix everything up on your plate, trust me) and then if I’m feeling particularly hungry or decadent, I’d get maybe a fillet with green pepper sauce. Also, their desserts are great - the chocolate cake is my favourite, closely followed by their amaro semifreddo.

Da Augusto - Piazza de’ Renzi, 15
Classic Roman trattoria, filled with grumpy waiters. Get there early (8pm) to avoid the lines, because seriously, this is one of my favourite places in Rome. Their stuff is cheap, and tastes great. They don’t always give you a menu, so here’s my advice - get the pasta con cacio e pepe (cheese and pepper) to start (mix it up a bit to get the flavours going), then follow it with either the strachetti e rugola (thin slices of beef with rocket) or, my favourite, the involtini (rolled veal in a tomato sauce). Actually, get two involtini. You’ll thank me later.

Roma Sparita - Piazza di Santa Cecilia
So good, I had to give it a blog post of its own. Currently my favourite restaurant in all of Rome.

Da Enzo - Via dei Vascellari, 29
Another trattoria. Extremely popular with the Romans (again, turn up early to avoid the lines), but to be honest, I’ve never really seen the appeal. They do a fair carbonara, but I could really take or leave this place.

Da I 2 Ciccioni - Vicolo del Cedra, 3
“The Two Fat Lads” - it’s less a restaurant and more just a bunch of tables on the street outside someone’s kitchen, along with their grumpy old dog, Aldo. They do a set menu for a set price (which varies depending on how many courses you can manage). I suppose it could be seen as a little “gimmicky”, but their fagoli are too good to be very cynical about. Recently got written up in the New York Times, which means it’s probably going to be unbearable now.

Dar Poeta - Vicolo del Bologna 45
A pizzeria. Apparently these guys have a “secret” blend of ingredients that they use to make their pizzas. I say it’s a crock of shit because their pizzas are completely unremarkable. BUT, leave plenty of room for their speciality dessert - a Ricotta & Nutella calzone. Terrific stuff.

Fame Nera - Via di San Francesco a Ripa, 29
More of a lunch/snack kind of place. Great sandwiches, but slooooo-o-o-w service. More useful for expats because it’s one of the few places you can get a bacon cheeseburger with actual bacon and ACTUAL cheddar (a rare commodity in this town).

Fior Di Luna - Via della Lungaretta 96
Some ice cream shops talk about how all their stuff is home made and there’s no preservatives. This place takes this to the next level - you can’t even get a cone here, because it’s impossible to make those without preservatives, so it’s just paper cups. This is probably the best place in Trastevere for ice cream. You can still see the bits of vanilla in their vanilla ice cream. We also refer to this as the “creative commons ice cream place” because they’ve got a boner for open source.

Freni e Frizioni - Via del Politeama, 4-6
Probably the closest thing Rome will get to a hipster-type dive bar - a converted garage. But what really sells this place is the sheer buzz of people and the amazing apertivi. Just come along, buy a drink (Beers: 5, RIDICULOUSLY STRONG, ON-YOUR ASS DRUNK cocktails: 7) and help yourself from their buffet of amazing veggie treats. The piazza outside is also a great place to do some street drinking and some people watching. Rumour has it that Vincent Cassel and Monica Bellucci own an apartment above this place, which seems like a pretty good seal of approval.

I Suppli - Via di San Francesco a Ripa (opposite Fame Nera)
Again, a snack kind of place. Their pizza is good (especially the marinara and fungi e quattro formaggi), but the real draw of this place is their suppli. Oh boy. Deep-fried rice balls in a tomato sauce with some mozarella in the middle. My favourite guilty pleasure, and this place does the best I’ve had in Rome.

Ma che siete venuti a fa - Via Benedetta 25
Around the corner from Dar Poeta is this tiny, tiny pub that serves a ton of nice beers. Very popular with students. There’s a downstairs, but no-one ever goes there. They just hang out on the street looking cool. The name translates to “But what have you come to do?” which is slightly ominous.

Pizzeria Ai Marmi - Viale Trastevere 53
This is our local pizzeria. They’re about middle of the road in terms of price, and service, but their pizzas are pretty good. They also do pretty good suppli and baccala (battered salt cod). I’m not exactly raving about this place because they do nothing exceptional, but they’re extremely consistent. And they feel like home now.

Gonfio/Soppieno - Via Borgo Pio, 149
This is a great little sandwich/salad shop halfway up Borgo Pio (the main borgo up bear St. Peter’s). Their prices are reasonable and the food is always fantastic. Their “house” sauce is a bizarre spicy sauce that, strangely for Rome, is actually quite spicy. Great if you want to picnic after a run through St. Peter’s.

Latteria - Via Borgo Pio, 48
Almost across the road from Gonfio is the Latteria. It’s one of the few bars in this area that aren’t actively trying to rip you off at every turn. Great cornetti too. If you’re feeling particularly indulgent, go for the white chocolate.

Venerina - Via Vitelleschi Giovanni, 44
Again, another good bar that isn’t trying to rip you off. This one is slightly better than the Latteria because it’s slightly bigger, has a wider range of food, does the best cornetti in the area, and best of all, isn’t on Borgo Pio, so it’s less likely to be crowded. Also, this was the only bar open in the area through the month of August.

The Perfect Bun - Largo del Teatro Valle, 4
When you need a break from Italian food, this is a great American-style restaurant. Really good burgers, great nachos (with a fantastic homemade salsa), and decently-priced, cold pints (pints! Not 40cl mockeries!) of Carlsberg. Best of all, they do an amazing buffet-style Sunday brunch. It costs about €25, but it’s a lifesaver when you’re hung over and need some serious soakage.

Sweety Rome - Via Milano, 48
With the demise of Josephine’s Bakery (RIP!), there are precious few places to go and get a decent cupcake or carrot cake in Rome. Hooray for Sweety Rome! Great desserts, and another place for a decent buffet-style Sunday brunch. Might want to phone ahead if you fancy the brunch.

One day at a time

Let’s try a little thought experiment, shall we?

Imagine you worked in a shop and that sold both hard liquor and weapons. Let’s not ask why. Now, imagine a man comes in looking depressed and wants to buy a bottle of vodka and a handgun. Would you sell them to him?

Now, let’s imagine you worked in a fast food restaurant. A McDonalds. Or better still, a KFC. Imagine a morbidly obese man comes wheezing in in and orders three Double Downs. Would you sell them to him?

David A. Kessler’s The End of Overeating is a fascinating book. Especially if - like me - you’re overweight. He talks about the science behind food, and what drives us to eat the shit we do. He makes a terrific analogy, a connection I’d never made before. He says that for some people who are wired a certain way, struggling with a food problems can be like an alcoholic trying to come to terms with their own addiction. If you’re trying to kick it, you need to take it one day at a time.

As someone who has struggled with their weight for a long time, this a terrific way of looking at it, and even this one little sentence has had a profound effect on me, in terms of the shite I put into my body. At the same time, it underlines the way in which obesity and food problems in general are seen as ‘socially acceptable’ in a way in which other addictions - drink, drugs - are not. Or rather, they’re not seen as addictions or significant problems at all. Consider the semantic gulf between a “glutton” and an “addict”. One implies “Conscious” while the other implies “subconscious”. “Active” versus “passive”. “Choice” versus “compulsion”.

To highlight this, there’s my wife who is incredibly supportive of me, despite the sometimes incredibly stupid things I do. Her relationship to food is very different compared to mine. She cannot wait until all food comes in pill form and it no longer has any significant role in her life. When she saw I was reading a book called ‘The End of Overeating’, she snorted in derision. For her, reading to lose weight is like dancing about architecture. If you want to lose weight, just eat less, dummy.

That’s what I’m trying to do. But I have to take it one day at a time.