Again, here is a copy of the MIE blog for this week, you can see that we have been busy...
Is it a) a very small house in a cold and rainy
place
b) a
wee fuzzy creature that lives at the bottom of the garden
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c) a whisky based dessert
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All will become unclear …
As you may know I edited the
killer cookbook for the Million For a
Morgue campaign. I was rather pleased when
I got the programme for the Bloody Scotland Crimefest and saw that as well
as my own event, there was the “Killer Cook Book Cook Off’ based on the TV programme "the Great British Bake Off".
There was to be four crime writers cooking live (and it was to be filmed for TV) plus me running around with a mic. The hotel chef was going to do the Paul
Hollywood bit ... (He’s the chef on the TV)
This is Paul Hollywood, I have no idea what the hotel chef looked like. He was keeping well clear.
What could go wrong?
Well, turns out the hotel
changed hands and nobody checked with the new owners that they were OK with
isolating the fire alarms for the event. And only told us on the Thursday evening ( the
event was due on the Sunday ). The hotel cancelled it. With about 70
tickets sold. And only my name was on the tickets.
Mmmmm …
I don’t really know what happened
next but the hotel seemed to go in the huff. The organisers tried to cancel the tickets and then that wee bit of Scotty recalcitrance came in ... the one thing
you don’t say to me is health and safety …. For a morgue !!!!….
All week I had been doing press interviews
and being photographed in my own kitchen (!!!!) saying ‘’ oh we are very much
keeping it under wraps re who is appearing etc,” basically talking bull pooh.
So I got to work. I baked 70 flapjacks, had
to buy booze for the two cocktails (not
the Grey Goose Vodka, this was supermarket cheapo). Then buy all the ingredients, then go through the non cooking recipes and
think about what we would need to make
them, then serve them ... and … get them to Stirling. I live in Elderslie ( an
hour away by motorway). Then there was the real health and safety issue of keeping
food in hotel room for 48 hours … fresh cream… raspberries…..fromage frais ….salmonella etc.
In the end, we left some stuff in
the car boot. Stuck some stuff in the freezer. Alan ran down
the very steep hill to Marks and Spencer four times on the day to buy ‘more
stuff’. And back up again laden with ‘couldn’t get that stuff but got the
nearest I could get’ stuff. He’s used to running marathons so feel no sympathy.
Wee cheapo shops were a great source of comedy
bloody hands, plastic shot glasses, napkins,
cocktail sticks ... and slowly a planned formed. I woke up in the middle of the night and told the dog that we would not be downhearted. We were going to
do "can’t cook, won’t cook" but change it to "want to cook, not allowed to
cook."
Who needs Paul Hollywood when you
have criminal minds!
Criminal masterminds armed, dangerous, ready to cause liver damage.
All Sunday we spent chopping and cutting and mixing,
the salsa refused to defrost, the flapjacks tray was piled high, the cranachans kept eacaping etc. Five other
authors had moments of insanity and because they are scared of me, ( I was wielding
a large knife) offered to join in. 'Team bald’ Craig and Gordon (who has guest blogged
for MIE) and ‘team blonde’ Alex, Lin and a Californian Scot called Catriona McPherson
( who was then flying out to Bouchercon!)
So ... to set the scene… I walked
on behind a table laden with cocktail shakers… this is then what
happened …
I introduce team bald. They walk
in to the tune The Stripper. Gordon is six feet four and was wearing a tall
chef’s hat. He was wearing a pink diamante apron. Craig was wearing chef whites covered in fake blood. Well that is what
we told the police. They both carried their trays aloft and swaggered.
Team blonde came in, with a swagger, to the tune of ‘I’m too sexy for my apron...’
Mr Urqhart in action, see collie dog under Pat's arm
By the time I had introduced the
girls, the boys were already on the way to making their cocktails. They had the
bottles open. I’ve now seen the photos (at the time I was busy) and they are swigging
the stuff behind my back, mm... the boys were supposed to be making the Margueritas
donated for the book by the anthropologist’s husband. The anthropologist said later that she was
surprised more of the audience didn’t end up in her morgue the way they were
slinging the stuff about, forcing the audience to knock back shorts of almost neat
tequila. Team blonde were more organised. One was dressing her homemade scones and the table with jam and squirty cream as her team mates went to town with Peter James’ writing
martini. As it was made with four quid vodka not his forty quid vodka, it
turned out more like nail varnish remover.
The olives went down well though.
Two slaves from the audience walking
through the crowds with trays of Martini,
shots of Margueritas, (supercharged), Bloody Mary tomatoes,(more vodka but some
vitamin C), 70 flapjacks, and some half frozen salsa that really did look as if it belonged in the morgue. Mr “Urquhart” was a haematologist and
the other was a nice lady called Pat McCollie (see photo and giggle). I think
the collie was donated to a nice wee kid in the audience who asked the only
sensible question. Probably as the grownups were all puggled by then. Pat did a
whip round and we got more than a hundred pounds for the charity as
well.
The green T shirts are crew, muscling in on the event.
Then the boys started on their
Ewert Gren’s sandwich donated by new MIE blogger Anders Rosland. Craig was starting to cut the ham with a
whisk. Gordon’s wife had told me he was so hopeless in the kitchen that he
couldn’t open a can of beans. I thought she was joking. She wasn’t. Catriona
pointed out that the famous McSween haggis people had given her an award for
making her own haggis as “there is no good haggis in California”. Lin was chastising folk in the audience for
olive swilling… that might become yet another national sport.
Catriona persuading the audience to nibble some frozen salsa.
We then tried what I think might
be a world record for cranachan assembly. I have looked back at the video. I had
no idea that so many of the TV crew and the Bloody Scotland PR team had wandered
into the event, and got on stage to lend
a hand. Or get in the way. Or steal something to eat.
We had 50 or 60 glasses on the
front of the stage and we then tried to fill them all up with cranachan….to the
tune of Benny Hill…… never spilled a drop. I hope you enjoy the unofficial photos.
Later Catriona was hiding in the
loo and overheard somebody say the event was the highlight of the festival for
her, she had seen Jo Nesbo but thought we were funnier! Someone came up to me in the car park and said
they had never laughed so much in their life- was it all rehearsed…..( wit? ) It
was a perfect highlight to a great weekend ... oh there was proper stuff like
Lee Child, Val McDermid, Dr David Wilson
and others, but none of them had a supporting cast of cranachan the way we did!
The MIE bloggers have supported
the campaign all the way through. Here is a video link
to a spontaneous interview for the daily record you might like to see, that is a very sharp knife in my hand. Can you tell I’m making it all up as I go along?
Enjoy, Caro 20th September 2013
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