February 21st.
On occasion, you will get an individual that does something far beyond the scope of your own talent that astounds you so much, the only rational thing you can do is to try and stop them from doing it again. This is my first memory of Adam Rowden.
My 5-a-side team, Jurassic Park Rangers, were in the same league as his, the wonderfully named Ross Kemp On 5-a-side. We came off the worst against them on a couple of times, what with them being a team of very skillful individuals who worked well as a cohesive unit. There was one particular guy, a small player with a beard, who enjoyed flair moves quite a bit. As one specific game drew on and the thrashing we were in the midst of receiving grew bigger, I was beginning to get frustrated. And then he pulled out a rainbow kick, also known as a lambretta, Ardiles flick or coup de sombrero. There was only one thing that I could do.
A month or two later, and who should turn up at my 11-a-side team’s training? Thankfully, I don’t think he’s flicked the ball over me since that fateful day, and now we were doing things on my terms at the breakfast table. This was my field. He wouldn’t be flicking any meals over my head, let me tell you.
Mind you, he is another that dabbles in writing. Recently, he and some his friends set up a music blog called And Antarctica which is looking to regularly put out reviews, interviews and other features. He has asked if I would like to contribute, so we spent some time discussing how this would work and what sort of things would work for them. There is already some great content on there and it is certainly worth checking out.
We also had a wee chat about the process of writing and how much of an endeavor it is to write anything of length. Adam has an idea for story, involving woodland animals in the style of The Wind In The Willows, only setting them in some kind of noir-thriller context. It sounds like great fun, but the idea of sitting down and pouring hours into the project is a daunting one. And how much of an idea is needed? For something as long as a novel, do you need to actively plan out the whole thing?
It’s a difficult call to make. I’ve been working on a story of my own for a couple of years now, set in a world of dinosaur pirates threatened by an incoming meteor (which gets more and more depressingly similar to the plot of Final Fantasy VII each day), and although there have been some bits I’ve needed to have a rough plan for, I have found that the best - or at least more fun - way to go has been to plan some plot points but not think too much about the stuff in between. Sort of like a literary join the dots exercise. This approach has given the characters and setting some room to breathe in this first draft and I think it has stopped me from getting bogged down in forcing myself to write through scenes. Having freedom and space when you’re working on a project of this size is important.
Adam is a keen fan of dinosaurs. His favourite is the deinonychus, the inspiration between Jurassic Park's 'raptors. When working at a music festival, he attempted to act out the entirety of Jurassic Park to his fellow campers, only for them all to fall asleep. He has a fine collection of dinosaur stickers in his wallet.
The difficulty of naming things also came up. With my story I have gotten into a pickle with my main protagonist. When I started writing I couldn’t think of a suitable name for him and so I just decided to label him R. to get the ball rolling, planning on returning to him at some point to give him a more appropriate moniker. Unfortunately, he has now become R. It will be tricky amending this problem. Adam has been experiencing similar troubles with naming things with a musical project he has been working on for the past four years or so. The music of Fierce Friend is now out in the wilds of the Internet for perusal. Coming up with song titles and even a band name can be very tricky. The ultimate cop-out, self-titling, only works if you have a band name in the first place. Adam had been puzzling over a track called ‘Sign’ for quite some time. Jeez. That’s not a great name. Let’s hope Fierce Friend can resolve that one, pronto. Who calls a song ‘Sign’?
OK, so perhaps we share quite a number of fields, and in most of which Adam displays a formidable amount of skill. But certainly, the eating of cooked breakfast was the one thing I could claim to specialize in more than him. I mean, he ordered pancakes for heaven’s sake…
And so, the breakfast…
The Mound
2 Eggs, Double Potatoes
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| The Mound - £6 (add tomatoes - extra £2) |
Quick disclaimer: I don’t think there’s anything wrong with pancakes at all. I think they’re great, and it hurts me deeply that I didn’t get to eat any this Shrove Tuesday. That was just me attempting a breakfast journalist rainbow flick…
Anyhow, the breakfast. It had been suggested to me that I visit Cafe and Salvage by Josh from the football team who had started working there. Josh had made some great suggestions in the past, and so this seemed the logical place to begin fastbreaking in 2015.
It was a lovely venue, a cafe with a cosy feel. It had a huge ceiling that gave it space to hang lots of exciting things from the walls and rafters without making the place feel too cluttered. The furniture was comfortable, dogs were allowed in, and upon my arrival I was asked if I would like a drink. Good service and great first impressions.
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| Here is Adam looking very proud about some shelves. |
Unfortunately, although the menu looked good overall, the one thing that it was lacking was a traditional cooked breakfast option, or at least one that fitted my criteria. The closest thing to it was referred to as “The Mound.” I asked what this was exactly, and what was described to me sounded like a classic hash. This would have to do. The waitress said that some vegetables were involved, but I thought it would be best to ask for additional tomatoes, just to be on the safe side and guarantee another component of the canon.
I needn’t have worried though. The hash was packed full with mushrooms, peppers and onions in abundance. The tomatoes weren’t really required to provide extra moisture and texture, and so unless you are a tomato aficionado or have the appetite of an iguanodon, I would suggest skipping these as an extra.
As well as being plentiful, the vegetables in The Mound were delightfully sweet and soft, offering a good counterpoint to the solid base provided by the potatoes and egg, and the bitter sharpness of the rocket. The rocket, incidentally, was a well-deployed innovation and did not feel out of place in the breakfast arena at all.
It was the rocket that provided the crunch to The Mound, given that the potatoes were soft. This was probably the ideal way to handle things on the texture side, as too much crunch from these, comprising the main body of the dish, would have taken away the cohesiveness of the ingredients.
The eggs did their job as well. These were marvelously oozy, dripping gushes of yolk down into the body of the hash, binding the breakfast in a gametic blood pact.
Overall, it was a well-constructed hash. Each ingredient performed its duty well, giving the dish a sense of order and cohesion that pleased me. However, the dish was cohesive on a simple level. The Mound was lacking in a diversity of flavours that many other breakfasts are able to provide.
This may have been remedied by the inclusion of baked beans somehow, offering something a little different to the fleshy vegetables that were already in there. As refreshing as it is to write a review and not include my usual cliché buzzwords like ‘tangy’ and ‘mouthfeel’, beans really do make a difference when it comes to a cooked breakfast.
Cafe and Salvage is a great little cafe. It feels warm and homely, and I was very comfortable during my time in there. The food was also good and I would recommend it. The one caveat to this is that I would recommend it as a place to go for food so long as you didn’t want a cooked breakfast - I question their dedication to the cooked breakfast cause. Of course, if you like pancakes as a cooked breakfast, this a mighty fine place to go.
Function: hearty and filling - 4/5
Adherence to Canon: Alas, no
Taste: tasty and well-cooked, if one-dimensional - 3/5
Value: fairly standard pricing - 3/5
Presentation: smart and exciting, like a secret agent - 4/5
Venue: friendly staff, light, airy and homely - 5/5
Overall: pleasing cafe, just not ideally suited to the cooked breakfast - 3/5
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| Dinosaurs strolling casually through an apocalyptic wasteland. |
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