Ep 81: David O’Doherty (Bonus Episode)

October 31, 2020 1h 12m

▶️ Listen to episode Download audio (MP3)

Ed and James welcome wonderful comedian David O’Doherty to the dream restaurant for this very special live-streamed episode of Off Menu as part of Unmute: The Online Podcast Festival. Hope you’ve got your microwave plugged in.

Follow David O’Doherty on Twitter and Instagram @phlaimeaux

Buy David O’Doherty’s album ‘Live in his Own Car During a Pandemic’ on Bandcamp

Recorded and edited by Ben Williams for Plosive Productions.

Artwork by Paul Gilbey (photography and design) and Amy Browne (illustrations).

Part of Unmute: The Online Podcast Festival

Follow Unmute on Twitter and Instagram @unmutepodfest

Follow Off Menu on Twitter and Instagram: @offmenuofficial.

And go to our website www.offmenupodcast.co.uk for a list of restaurants recommended on the show.

Watch Ed and James's YouTube series 'Just Puddings'. Watch here.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jump to transcript

Listen and follow along

Speed:

Transcript

James, huge news from the world of off-menu and indeed the world of the world.

Yes.

Ever heard of the Royal Albert Hall?

I have.

We've done live shows there.

And guess what?

We're doing more live shows there next year.

Sure, a lot of them are sold out already.

But we thought, hey, throw these guys a bone.

Let's put on one final Royal Albert Hall show in that run.

The show will be on Monday, the 16th of March.

It's going to be a tasting menu, a returning guest coming back, receiving the menu of another previous guest.

Those shows have been a lot of fun.

We cannot wait to do them live.

Who will we pull out of our little magic bag?

You'll have to come along on the 16th of March to find out.

If I'm correct in thinking, presale tickets go on pre-sale on the 10th of September.

Pre-sale tickets are 10th of September at 10 a.m.

And then the general sale is 12th of September at 10 a.m.

So if you miss out on the pre-sale, don't forget general sale is only two days later.

The day in between is for reflecting.

Get your tickets from royalalberthall.com or offmenupodcast.co.uk.

Let's be real.

Life happens.

Kids spill, pets shed, and accidents are inevitable.

Find a sofa that can keep up at washable sofas.com.

Starting at just $699, our sofas are fully machine washable inside and out.

So you can say goodbye to stains and hello to worry-free living.

Made with liquid and stain-resistant fabrics.

They're kid-proof, pet-friendly, and built for everyday life.

Plus, changeable fabric covers let you refresh your sofa whenever you want.

Neat flexibility?

Our modular design lets you rearrange your sofa anytime to fit your space, whether it's a growing family room or a cozy apartment.

Plus, they're earth-friendly and trusted by over 200,000 happy customers.

It's time to upgrade to a stress-free, mess-proof sofa.

Visit washablefas.com today and save.

That's washable sofas.com.

Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.

Welcome to a very special episode of the Off-Menu Podcast, James.

This is a little edited-down version of a live-streamed episode we did for the Unmute Podcast Festival with a very special guest indeed.

Yes, very exciting.

We had a really good time with our episode.

It was so fantastic and our special guest was none other than David O'Doherty.

O'Doherty.

David O'Doherty came in to talk about his dream meal in his dream restaurant.

We can't wait for you to hear it.

It was a really fun episode.

If you didn't see it happen live, you missed out on some stuff like our faces, some very amusing hand gestures which won't necessarily come across on the uh audio version of the podcast but let me tell you it was great and uh a front cover of a certain book as well which we'll be talking about during the pod and uh you'll have to imagine it with your mind or maybe you can find it online but we had such a good time we did and as always we had a secret ingredient that if david mentioned he would have been kicked out of the restaurant uh

i'm not going to give any spoilers did he get kicked kicked out of the restaurant?

You'll have to listen to find out.

And the special ingredient this week was ghost peppers.

Ghost peppers.

We're nearly at Halloween as we record this.

So we thought it was an appropriate ingredient.

Ghost peppers, I think people say it's the hottest pepper in the world or, you know, nearly.

I think it's not bravado, James.

No one's eating that for flavor, are they?

No, no one's eating it for flavor.

Come on,

it's just a flex to all your friends.

And do you know what?

I'll do it.

Yeah, you do flex, don't you?

You love debomb.

You love flexing.

Yep.

I've got a bottle of de bomb in my fridge, and my nephews are obsessed with it.

Have you used it?

Yeah.

Do you use it for fun, though, or are you just doing it to show off to your nephews?

Mainly to show off to my nephews.

That's what most things that I do in life are, including my career.

Actually, yeah, that's true.

That's lovely.

So, ghost peppers, if they come up on David O'Doherty's menu, then he will be out of the dream restaurant/slash unmute podcast festival stream hopefully he does not so for now this was the off menu menu of

we are live on the internet for the unmute podcast festival welcome to the off menu podcast uh what i'm going to do i've i've written a little intro which is rare for me.

Normally I panic at this point, and I've not written anything sort of like a food-based metaphor introduction.

I'm spinning out this bit as well because I can't even see James.

I don't know where he is.

And the longer I take over this bit,

the funnier it will be.

Although he does seem to be in danger of smothering himself at the moment, which is fairly impressive.

Okay,

here we go.

You can already hear our guest in the background there enjoying what's going on.

So, welcome to the Off Menu Podcast, where we take the carcass of humor, the water of chat, and the herbs of friendship, and apply the heat of the internet to create flavorsome podcast stock.

So, I actually wrote that.

I took some time over that, about three minutes.

So, you'll know what this podcast is.

It's a food podcast.

It's a chat podcast.

It's hosted by myself and James A.

Castor, who is a food genie who can grant all of our guests' food wishes here in the dream restaurant.

He lives in a lamp, and now he's I'm gonna rub I'm gonna rub the lamp.

There you go.

I'm rubbing the lamp.

I'm rubbing the lamp and here comes oh my god.

Hello.

Genie.

Hello James.

Good to see you.

Thank you for awaking me from my slumber.

Of course.

No expense spared there with the genie special effects.

Welcome.

Yes, that was fun, wasn't it?

Out of the lamp.

And into our lives.

Would you like to explain to the listener what the podcast is?

Here on the Off Menu podcast, we're going to have a special guest in the dream restaurant and ask them their favourite ever starter, main course, dessert, side dish, and drink.

And for this special unmute festival podcast episode of Off Menu, our guest is...

David David O'Docherty.

David O'Docherty.

David O'Docherty, very excited to have him here.

Please, well, actually, James, get back in your lamp, because you need to burst out on the guest.

That's how it works.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

Good lad.

Oh, he's disappeared again.

Please, welcome to the Dream Restaurant, David O'Doherty.

This is lovely.

Whoa!

Welcome, David O'Doherty.

We've been expecting you for some time.

Whenever you do that,

I do imagine you're just a barista.

And you're doing the thing where you're firing air through the...

I wonder if they imagine they are genies sometimes

while they're making the coffee.

They must do.

We're very closely related, Ginas and Baristas.

People don't know that, but we are from the same mythical lore.

We both come from that.

And also, genies always write the person's name on the wish before they hand it over, don't they?

Yeah, well,

some genies are a bit too cocky, actually.

And we might write the name on the wish, but at the start, we won't ever remember.

We won't write anything down.

Where have you gone?

I realized.

What were you aiming for?

Well, I was going to do a riff on waiters that don't write anything down, and then I remembered we were talking about baristas and not waiters, and then I thought, oh, no.

Oh, no, I've had a nightmare.

I'm a waiter in this.

I'm a genie waiter, not a the barista is a separate thing.

And

I've made a mistake.

The thing that genies and baristas have in common is after they've granted you wishes, a lot of the time genies imprint in the top of your head a sort of leaf pattern.

Yes, we do.

We move your head around as we're making the wish,

writing the wish for you, and then send you on your way.

And you have to go and ask other people and go, What did that genie put on my head?

And they're like, It's a shamrock.

Oh, okay, fair enough.

I've got an interesting thing that I need to share with you guys.

Expressly, thank you very much for having me.

And I enjoy listening to this podcast a lot.

And I was listening to it the other day, and I don't know how.

So, so you know, the way after, usually after the starter, there's an ad break.

If you like, you've if you listen back to it, you guys probably don't because you were in it to begin with.

Yes,

sometimes I listen back to it, but James has never heard it.

James doesn't know what this podcast is actually like, no idea how it comes across.

Um, I didn't know I

hadn't heard the theme music until just now on this episode.

And let me tell you, that theme music is a bag of shit.

So, um,

I will have you know that that theme music is very, very free.

Okay, well, point, point made.

In Ireland, the ads are localized for Ireland that play after each course.

And I don't know if it's an algorithmic thing where the ad sort of knows who you are and tries to target you.

But it was the most specific government warning ad I have ever heard.

And it was after the starter course.

I was listening to Ivo Graham's episode.

And so he wanted something posh for his starter.

You know what I mean?

Liquidized poor people or whatever.

And

the ad was from the Irish government

to say,

Christmas is coming.

Please, please, please rethink buying your child a scrambler.

It was, don't buy your child a quad bike or a scrambler for Christmas which is the most specific government warning I have ever heard especially with everything going on you would have thought the government had got bigger fish to fry

was that one of the ones that me and Ed did or one by somebody else

I can't remember the ones that we record but mine if we did it I'd be going oh man Ed I can't wait for Christmas I want to buy little little genie James Jr.

the scrambler no James haven't you heard the Irish government are strongly recommending against it.

What?

The biggest issue we've ever had with the dynamic ad, I don't think we've ever spoken about this before, but it was absolutely amazing.

We'd done an ad for a farm delivery service where you could get proper farm food products delivered to your door.

And it was on an episode with Daisy May Cooper, who was our guest, our wonderful guest, Daisy Mae Cooper.

And it was the first bit of the interview with her.

And then it cut to the ad.

And the ad opened with James going, oh, Ed, I'm just off to milk Daisy.

It's unfortunate.

It was very unfortunate.

Oh, man, we got so many messages going, what the hell are you talking about?

You can't say that about your guests.

Couldn't have happened to another person.

And I'm a family to myself.

Yes.

Well, welcome, David, to the Dream Restaurant.

We're very excited to have you here.

What are you up to there with your hands?

Do you know what that is?

No.

I remember from a school trip.

That's how you milk a cow.

Sorry, the daisy thing.

It's just, you start at the top and you need, because a farmer showed us how to do it, even though milk is obviously now just an evil thing involving robots and sad cows.

He led us to believe this.

He came out with a bucket and he did this along the

nipple.

That farmer was a creep, mate.

I'm sorry that this is how you had to find out that you were abused.

But that farmer was being horrible in front of children.

Was he doing it on his own dick by any chance?

Uh-oh.

My goodness.

And this is how you milk a cow, children.

Jesus Christ.

I should have warned you before coming on this podcast, David, that Ed is a disturbed individual.

It's a lot racier so far.

Racy in terms of

sexy and also racism.

We've had both of those so far.

So carry on.

Where was the racism?

Yeah, just your Irish impersonation.

Oh, so both for Med.

Let's be perfectly clear.

Bof were for Med.

Yes.

I didn't realise I was doing an Irish impersonation,

but I can really lean into it if you want.

Later on, I'll do the wanking Irish farmer.

He'll come up later on, maybe around dessert, and I'll properly put my all into it.

Something to look forward to.

It is racier because it's live.

Benito would have edited a lot of that stuff out.

Oh, there's no way that would have made it in.

David,

are you a foodie?

Do you like your food?

Yeah, I do.

Um I definitely am repelled by a certain decadence.

There's a level of decadence that I enjoy from a meal.

And if you go beyond that, I don't want anything to do with it.

If you try and put a napkin on my lap, you can have the napkin, I'll accept a napkin sitting on the table, but if you try and place it across me, I will just in a straight uppercut, you're going down then.

So, there's a middle ground of restaurant that I very much enjoy.

That,

and a sad side note to that is,

well, two sad side notes.

One, so Dublin's on lockdown level five at the moment, so all restaurants are shut.

So, I'm kind of

over-romanticized the idea of restaurants, maybe a little bit in trying to think of what I'd get here.

And secondly, the restaurant that defined my dream restaurant, Well, obviously, this is the dream restaurant, but the closest existing thing to it was a restaurant in Edinburgh called Spoon that I have attended hundreds of times over the years and went out of business last week because of the frickin' bats.

So, yeah, I didn't know that.

Yeah, so sorry.

I've been to Spoon with you many times

and the restaurant.

And

little fun.

A bit of fun.

A little bit of fun.

That is exactly my sort of humor.

Yep.

Good sort of humour there.

For a long time, I was convinced that one of the, I mean, I know exactly what Ed's going to say now off the back of this, but this was legit, Ed.

I was convinced that one of the waiters in Spoon hated me, and I would avoid going in there because I was 100% convinced he hated my guts.

Well.

You think that about every single place I've ever been with you?

You are convinced that a member of staff hates you.

That is your personality.

That's what you're worried about.

It's also a sort of arrogance because you assume that everyone's thinking about you all of the time.

So it's a real, it's a real fine line to tread.

I thought you

was going to mention.

I hate you, obviously.

Well, just to describe the level of decadence that Spoon is, which is the correct level of restaurant

decadentness, is it's chalkboardy, but not, and Art Decoy, but not in a

sort of a cliche mid-century type way.

The staff are friendly, but not obsequious.

You know what I mean?

They don't,

they'll ask you how your show was,

whether you did a show or not.

They just pretend that you did a show.

And

yeah, so I'm talking about dessert in a in a glass.

That's that's the vibe.

You know what I'm talking about, but I hope the thousands of people watching and listening get that too.

They did an excellent cooked breakfast, which was felt like a traditional cooked breakfast but they didn't try and modernize it too much.

It was like a nice version of a traditional cooked breakfast on lovely crockery.

Yeah.

Great crockery.

See I've been for lunch and dinner with David many many times and

what is weird is I can't remember a single thing you've ever ordered David.

I can't remember what food you like whatsoever.

All I can remember from going for meals with you is that every time I've been for a meal with you, if it's just me and you, if there's 10 of us whoever you always have to pay for it you're very keen to pay and this is my impression of you at the end of any meal no no no please let me do this

I mean that certainly does so there was a joke that I used to do for a long time, which was I would pretend that I was going to pay for a thing till the bill came over.

You know what I mean?

Which is like, no, seriously, you guys, I've been doing all right.

And so we'll, yeah, we'll all just go in on that.

It's a variation on that.

That's right.

But because I'm slightly older than you guys, I did feel a responsibility.

Because, you know, I was probably not losing thousands of pounds.

I stopped losing money in Edinburgh and at festivals generally before

you.

you children.

So maybe I did take it upon myself to

pay for everything.

And And particularly now when you're both millionaires and I haven't done a gig since March, I might have to stop that now.

Yes,

we owe you back now.

But what I always liked about it was that

it was never like, I'll pay for this.

We're like, no, let us pay it.

There'd never be you then going, no, no, no, it's fine.

You go straight to, no!

Immediately.

Still all sparkling, David.

Great question.

I think for a long time, I would have...

Okay, so there's three distinct eras of my water choices.

Up to 30, still, still, still.

30s sparkled through my 30s.

But now I've actually gone back.

I've gone back to still again.

And I think

it is,

you know, there's a global shortage of carbon dioxide because it's um I think it's a byproduct of ethanol which they're not making anymore it just seems like future generations may look back at the sheer decadence of carbonated water as just like why it's like ham with fire in it or something it's just now that's a bad example but

fire ham yeah

i i just think it's something that we're we're people aren't going to believe it's like five people driving five liter cars in the 1970s in America.

Future generations will not believe that we squandered the resources of the planet having bullshit like fizzy water.

Do you think when when it comes to that in like 50 years time when like the world's a wasteland that like sparkling water will be a currency in a way?

Oh, maybe it will.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I it'll be um and you you'll be able to hear people drinking it though because of when they open the bottles.

So there'll be like George Orwell type police who just go around listening for the of the tops of the bottles then.

Yeah.

And that is the sound that you make to get someone's attention anyway.

So it kind of sounds like that.

Do you think though

if we repurpose the genie, so with that great release of energy that the genie makes when the genie comes out of the lamp, if we were to plunge the lamp into just a bath of still water, maybe in arriving, the genie would carbonate that water.

So that might be a way we can move to a zero-carbon, quite literally, a zero-carbon future.

I'll be up for that.

I speak on behalf of all genies.

But then I suppose you end up with just a very wet genie, right?

Are you happy with that?

Genie's love to be wet.

Also,

if we're living in a world with genies and we've run out of carbon dioxide, probably a quicker way would be to wish for unlimited carbon dioxide resources.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

that's good.

Rather than rather than getting the lamp every time and plunging it into still water and going, right, that's enough sparkling water for a couple of years.

Now, I'm not an astronomer, uh,

but and I have reason to believe that they're creeps just with the telescopes, you know what I mean?

And they all they all look like rongins, they're they're looking down, and then they at the last minute.

Well,

um,

But I think one of the planets is all carbon dioxide atmosphere.

So maybe we could send water there.

We'll say Venus becomes, you know,

the San Pellegrino planet.

And I'm okay with that, I guess.

So before drink it, I'd be like, is this from Venus?

And then I'd be like, well, I can drink it then.

But if not, yeah, I'm not wasting.

Hummus would be the other one where in my 20s, wasn't much into it.

In my 30s, I got too into it.

And now in my 40s, I've kind of overdone it now, you know?

Is there a fizzy planet?

I didn't know about this.

I didn't know about there being a fizzy planet.

Yeah, yeah.

Next question.

I think there is a planet.

I think Mars has got a CO2 heavy atmosphere.

Is it?

If O'Brien was here, this is exactly the sort of shit that he would know.

When he was on it, he didn't talk about that.

When he did this podcast, he just talked a lot about

what's it called?

Booj.

Boojaba?

Steve Boujet?

What are you talking about, mate?

You're talking about Steve Bouger, eh?

The Irish burrito place.

Oh, Boujum.

Boujum.

There you go.

Boujum.

Yeah, that was all.

That's very weird.

I mean, I see how if you went there once and you were drunk, you might think this is the best place ever.

But it's absolutely fine.

It's absolutely fine.

But,

you know, it'd be like,

I'm trying to think, what's a not particularly exciting chain restaurant?

It'd be like clay, just because it's not, oh, there's a bit in Duff from Guns N' Roses' autobiography about how much he loves Preta Manger.

And

it's like they have this place.

I think he thinks there's only one of it in London.

And

rest of the chapter has been about just banging and whiskey.

And then the next morning, he wakes up and he knows this little place called Prédamonche.

And he goes there, and they have all these sandwiches, and they've cut the sandwiches into triangles.

And, like, they have loads of drinks and great coffee.

And that's it.

You just.

I can imagine if you'd not been to a prep before and you went into a prep for the first time, it would blow your mind.

Yeah, and there's a special sort of disappointment in life that comes when you see your first

branch of what turns out to be a chain, and you're like, this is a one-off.

I remember it happening with a juice place near me in Dublin and being like, whoa, they've gone to all this effort with the chalkboard and all these delicious juices.

And then I noticed there were like 35 more of them around Dublin that day.

Yeah.

And yeah.

And you feel awful about the fact you enjoyed it because you're like, oh, great.

It turns out I'm just a basic consumer.

Pop an absorb bread.

Pop it absorb bread.

David o'dochetty pop it up or bread i even though i don't even know what your water order is i'm seeing the countdown here on the screen and i'm scared

yeah i'm gonna tap was the water uh the bread is uh a bread i'll have bread please but i'm gonna have a strange middle ground of bread which is and this is quite Irish, I want a Guinness treacle

loaf where, firstly, I only want one slice of it and I don't want anyone else at the table to have it because if they have any left over I will steal it then and then I won't be able literally won't be able

I'm gonna have to go and take a shit before the main course basically will be the only hope then and I want one of those loaves where

when they start to tell you the ingredients, there's at least three things in it where you're like, that is like, there's baraka in this, that is ludicrous.

You know, salt, sugar, that sort of stuff that's somehow in a real, it's, it's almost semi-flapjack.

You can have it as a dessert, but I want it as my bread, but I'm not going to eat it till the starter comes.

So I'm just going to stare at it.

I'm going to enjoy looking at it and I'm going to wait for the starter then.

So quite a heavy, you want a heavy bread that sort of packs everything into like, like you've basically got like 1800 calories per cubic centimeter like that sort of heavy bread that could sustain you yeah i mean that would be the idea of it would be you don't need anything else you can basically live on it but i'm then going to eat a whole lot of other i mean the problem with in trying to think of this meal you do kind of think of like pre-execution last meals then in that I might die after this meal because there's so many delicious things.

And who knows?

Like, were they to behead me, it's possible my head would fall off and then just butter would gush out of the socket for 30 seconds.

Lovely.

Where's this bread from?

It's definitely an Irish bread because it's a soda bread.

I have tried to make it and utterly, utterly failed because I think you have to be over 80 to be able to make it properly for it not to stick to the tin.

So you're not using a yeast, you're using a bread soda bicarbonate soda thing and then you're just you know the way like the center of a black hole is just stuff that's just crushed together that's the that's what this bread is yeah and are you putting are you putting butter on it as well or is there enough stuff in there nope i'm putting a heap of butter on it as well as as i said there is no tomorrow and i am i haven't been to a restaurant for absolutely months, and so yeah, I'm getting it all done.

Every course will be a meal, basically.

What sort of butter do you like?

Is there a like a specific dairy that you want it from?

Is there a specific farmer who milked the cow by any chance?

Perhaps you'd like to hear from him.

No, there's no need to hear from him.

No, no, don't need it.

I want,

yes, I want dairy gold, is a Irish butter that's exported around the world that is still a semi-state company.

It's still part of our government, is Dairy Gold.

I'll have the salt, just a little, it's a little bit of salt, not much salt.

In many ways, Ireland is the mirror image of New Zealand.

And so they go on and on about anchor butter.

And they claim to have invented spreadable butter, stuff like that.

Whereas I still think we have the superior mass market export butter.

And I hope someone cuts out that last sentence of mine and has it as the trail for this podcast because it sounds like a discussion of agricultural produce.

Your starter, which is, I mean, we already know that you're having your bread with this starter.

So I'm trying to think about what it could be.

But

I mean, it screamed soup to me.

Yeah, it is a soup, but it's unique among soups in that it's a soup that doesn't repeat.

Ed, you look like you might have guessed what it is.

Either that or you're going to no, no, I was just genuinely impressed that James guessed that you were having soup.

Oh, yeah,

yeah.

I want a chowder, but I certainly don't want tomato-based New York chowder.

I want

a proper

cream chowder,

butter,

milk in it.

We'll put yogurt in there, put a peti fillu in there.

I just want a big old dairy chowder.

And this is the key.

I want absolute carnage.

I want every time I dip the spoon in, I want new dead things to come out.

And I want that to continue to the end.

Like, do you remember earlier on the year, there was those awful forest fires in Australia?

And

the horrific total of animals that died over the course, like something like 35 billion animals died.

Well, I want this soup chowder to be the equivalent of that, but instead of burning to death, they were boiled in dairy.

And I feel that's a life well lived.

Is that too much?

Well, no.

I mean, you know, I'm the only person on this podcast today who's not getting cancelled so far.

So that's good.

you for those comments and Ed for what was an absolutely appallingly racist and uh

it wasn't appallingly racist I didn't even do the accent properly trust me if I'm getting cancelled I'm doing it later yeah that's fair enough

I mean yeah I want all sorts of many times on this podcast we've spoke about the best seafood chowder that I ever had which was in Belfast in a hotel in Belfast and I had it twice in three days I loved it so much and then went back to the hotel the next time I was in Ireland.

And they didn't, well, there was a chowder on the menu, but they changed the staff in the kitchen, and it was nowhere near as good.

And it was heartbreaking.

And I've been looking forward to that chowder the whole tour.

And I already knew that I was going to have a bad gig that night because, for some reason, every single

single time I go on tour, I have the best gig of the tour in Dublin, and I have the worst gig of the tour in Belfast the very next day.

I apologize on behalf of the island,

but I think there must be, you could really cut corners with a chowder because no one's saying you've got to put in, say, the things that make it incredible, which is a little bit of smoked fish, some

shellfish, some mussels, bits and pieces.

You could easily just, which is what happens with crap chowder, where they've, you know,

they've taken out the salmon and replaced it with carrot.

You know what I mean?

And that is, yeah, that's an absolute joke.

And then I've got the brown bread as well with the butter.

While I've been waiting for the bread course to finish, I've just been towering butter onto it.

And yeah, I'm, I'm really, really enjoying it.

I might even take a bit of bread, put it on the spoon and dunk it, which is.

It's putting the McDonald's chips into the caramel sundae, really, isn't it?

Yeah.

Delicious.

Now, when you say you're pulling new dead things out with every bite,

do you know what they're going to be?

Or is this sort of a potluck chowder where there's every sort of animal in it?

Because remember, I'm a genie, David.

So you want to get your wording right.

If you've seen Aladdin and stuff, you don't just say, I want loads of dead things in milk and petty for loop.

Yeah.

And then go, I'm pretty sure that'll be exactly what I want when it comes back to me.

No, things of the sea.

You see, I struggle with being a meat eater, inasmuch as if I thought about it for more than a minute, I would definitely become a vegetarian.

So I've spent the last 15 years, every time the thought comes into my mind, just suppressing it, just listening to loud music, having a cold shower, that sort of thing.

However, the animals of the sea, I mean, I give them a special pass, and by that I mean an awful pass.

And I think it's because as a child, so my granny lived on an island off the west coast, which is where I spent lockdown one with my 82-year-old parents.

And so I would fish off the rocks and you would catch a mackerel.

But because I know we're going to be eating it in a few hours, I wouldn't have a problem with bashing its head off a rock and putting it in a bag.

Whereas I would feel bad about doing that to, say, Ed's farmer character or the cow that he's milking.

Well, the farmer character bashes cows off a rock the whole time.

Yes.

He can't stop bashing off.

Yeah.

Yeah, I want it.

I wanted a chowder like someone's dredged a canal.

That's what I want.

Do you remember taking me to the island you just mentioned, David?

I remember taking you there and I really wanted it to be the greatest experience of your life.

Now, the problem was

there was an orange weather warning, which isn't don't travel, it's seriously think about traveling.

And we had a good think about traveling and we arrived there.

I remember going for a walk at one point where we had to cover up all of our, because the hailstones were sharp, the edges of them.

So you had to cover your whole body.

And even if you had a hood, like a Lord Anthony hood with elastic, the pins and needles, hailstones would go into into the back of your eyeballs so we did a a jigsaw uh for three days that's what i remember but i remember uh three days we were there for three days in in in in the little house and we did this jigsaw puzzle and we're really obsessed with jigsaw puzzle it was the extremely bad storm for the entire three days and on the third day i i think you said i'm sorry but like

I can't have it that you come to Accle and you don't see the beach.

You have to see the beach.

So let's go and see the beach.

And we got in the car and we drove to the beach in the storm and it's still really bad.

And we got there.

We were looking at it from the car and you said, we have to just walk on the beach.

We have to.

And we're like, well, we don't have to walk on the beach.

Come on.

We'll just go over and touch that rock.

And it was on the other side.

And we remember like this.

feeling all the weather just pushing us back as we're trying to get to the rock at the edge of the beach all of us and looking at the the sea.

I mean, to be fair, I took a photo of the sea because it looked absolutely incredible.

It was quite breathtaking to be on the beach in that storm.

I'm glad that I did it for that view.

Yeah, I remember we tried to just pretend this was normal.

And my overriding image of that,

let's call it a holiday, even though it was a...

It was like something the Navy SEALs have to do to qualify as Navy SEALs, is my ex-girlfriend playing pool in huge motorbike gloves because the pub was so cold.

That's how miserable it was.

Loved it though.

Absolutely loved it.

I'll never forget it.

So we've got that delicious chowder full of dead things.

It's like dredging a canal.

There's going to be a number plate in there.

There's going to be a shopping trolley.

There's going to be some Johnnies.

What an exciting culinary experience it's going to be.

Little known facts, little known fact.

Ed is one of the only people I know who still says Johnnies.

I love it.

Ever wonder why you have insurance for your car or home, but not your digital life?

Meet Webroot Total Protection, your digital bodyguard that is built for real life.

Webroot takes the guessing game out of cybersecurity so you can confidently browse, bank, and be yourself online without the worry of hackers lurking around the corner.

With Webroot Total Protection, you get antivirus that scans six times faster and takes up 33 times less space than the other guys.

Identity protection with up to $1 million in fraud expense reimbursement and 24-7 U.S.-based customer support.

VPN protection that hides your IP address, personal data, and location from hackers.

And cloud backup with unlimited storage that works automatically in the background.

With plans for individuals and families, Webroot makes it easy to live a better digital life.

Go to webroot.com forward slash promo and get 50% off today.

That's webroot.com slash promo.

To get 50% off today, live a better digital life with Webroot because peace of mind shouldn't be optional.

We must get onto this main course.

I can't believe it's 20 minutes left.

We're in big trouble for Benito.

We can run over, can't we, Benito?

Just text us to say we can run over.

Yeah, you can run over.

He's actually texted 10 minutes ago to say you can run over.

I thought the bugle was on next.

I think it's a bit of time until the bugle's on.

I go on the bugle occasionally, so it's topical political stuff, but we could start pretending we were the bugle.

You know what I mean?

And then it would really wreck the whole festival.

Like we need to get a reputation as the bad boys of this festival.

And then we start bugling.

We do Blind Boy later on.

Don't know what else is on.

But I'm pretty sure there isn't a podcast.

We could do them all.

Oh, and it's also, I think, films to be buried with today as well.

So we could do that, I'm sure.

Definitely.

Jaws.

Jaws, please.

Jaws, yeah.

Lovely.

Well done.

Jaws is your main course.

And

I can be Nish because Nish is the special guest on the bugle.

So I can.

Oh, there you go.

That's my impression.

That was going to be my impression of Brett as well, though, for Films to be Buried.

All right.

I'm Brett Colteen.

What films are you going to be buried with, mate?

Oh, oh, what a film.

What a lovely film.

I'll be Saltzman then.

That's it.

It's just that you maintain that tone throughout.

Yep, I could do it.

Very good.

Well, I like that we've been told we can run over, so now what we're doing is wasting all that extra time by doing an impression of the next podcast.

I think we might be the bad boys of the internet.

Yeah.

I bet I haven't looked at Twitter, but I bet that's what people are calling us right now.

What is your main main course, David O'Docherty?

Yeah, my main course is it's a meal that I once made,

okay?

And I don't know how I did it.

So I'm a very instinctive chef.

And by that, I mean I don't have measuring, any measuring things, but I love to have a go.

So I estimate slash guesstimate things.

And then having watched quite a lot of cookery shows over time I've been on Sunday brunch when you're with a really really good chef and they never measure anything they just know when you know you know so I try and use that principle as well but the problem is I don't know

so I just I throw salt in you know what I mean a cool amount like I'll just raise the thing right up the sun and back down again I'll get some leaves and I'll do that hand thing like that just to sort of mush them up as they go in.

You know how you should be doing that, David.

You should be doing it like that.

You can't milk time,

which is actually my family.

That's my family motto as well.

Weirdly, that's exactly what we are doing with this podcast.

So,

this is a meal from three years ago where somehow the planets aligned, and it was one of those iron cookware pots that I will not say the name of, but I bet Ed will.

And then

Le Crusé, I'd love a free one.

Le Cruset, yes, please.

On his Instagram of him like swimming full lengths in a 15-meter Le Crusade.

Shout out to the companies that messaged me on Instagram.

Uh, and I never mentioned James, and then I just get the free stuff.

Uh, Moore Beer, based in Bristol, just sent me a lovely crate of beer.

Thank you very much.

Stop this.

I'm not being part of this.

I am not being part of this.

Le Crusade.

I've heard

people lately ask me if I've got the chunky donkeys.

Some of the people going, hey, James, I bet you're enjoying a pair of chunky donkeys you've got.

I saw Ed's got some.

I'm like, what the hell?

I ain't got no chunky donkeys.

They are sending you chunky donkeys.

I don't want to ask what chunky donkeys are.

So I'm just imagining you're talking about how, because you've been eating too much over lockdown, your buttocks are enormous.

You've got two big old chunky donkeys that you sit on.

My pants have got a couple of big old chunky donkeys in them.

Oh, that reminds me.

I would like to do an ad in this show now, seeing as I am here.

And this will give you an idea of the, I'm actually,

I mean, this is what I'm talking about.

I'm a real have a go hero when it comes to cooking, But my mother, because she is incredible and actually knows how much to put in things,

buys me the most offensively basic cookbooks still.

And it all goes back to this one here, which she bought me when I moved into my first bed sit in 2003.

And I think it's the saddest.

Right?

Now,

so if anyone can't see it, it's a book called Microwave Recipes for One.

But look at the picture.

There's a dinner setting set up just in front of the microwave.

Imagine seeing your own reflection in it.

Imagine watching the food rotate, watching the Franksburgers just rotating.

Also, the really sad thing about that picture is that obviously,

that doesn't work.

If you set up,

you've got the meal in the microwave, and then you set all that up, and then you just...

The door's just going to come and sweep it off

just gonna sweep off all the crockery

imagine you hear the ding and you say dinner is served and then you just open it and the the fog comes out

The genie, that's basically as close as you can get to a genie, is over microwaving a Jal Frazi meal for Wong.

Did you ever cook anything from that book?

No, no, I don't think I did.

I mean, let's see.

I mean, the stuff is pretty salmon with cucumber sauce.

Like, imagine, but how are you going to microwave salmon?

That is absolutely cucumber.

Disgusting.

Yeah.

Yeah, I always think the saddest point in a divorce must be the first time you penetrate the seal of a microwavable meal with a fork.

You know, that really specific, like,

noise then.

And that's, yeah, that's what this book implies.

So what's your, yeah, what's your main course?

it's a large ironware, French-influenced, brightly colored pot.

And

it's chicken and all the veg.

It's that one, right?

And it's, you, you throw it in the oven and you can leave it in for two hours, but you know what?

Leave it in for four.

There'll be even more falling off the bone.

And this is the kind of i'm like you know the way messy leonel messi in football probably the coach doesn't tell him what to do just goes out go out there and do your stuff like i'm like you are using you are wasting that on on me and ed

you know you know messy guys oh i i thought you were referring to uh mr messi from the mr man

he is the so he's the most talented footballer in the there's this this game called football.

How far back do you go?

He's an instinctual player and I am an instinctual chef.

But where he is very good, I am very bad.

So I fire things in.

So we've got the La Cruz.

Ah, we've got the ironware pot and

we do the searing.

where you put it on the hob with oil in it and sear the chicken like full chicken we're talking here and then the problem is i don't remember what i did i don't remember the order i remember i put various veggies in and potatoes and popped the lid on and put it in the oven for three hours a bit of stock some uh red wine uh a selection handfuls of various things from the herb garden but i don't remember what i did and i don't remember what i put up the chicken's asshole.

I don't remember anything about it.

And I've been chasing that dream for three years now, trying slight variations on it.

And every single time it comes out like

boiled.

You know, like children in the Second World War who had to move out of London and live in the countryside.

It's sort of like the food that they would eat.

That's what it always turns out as, where the carrots are hard, even though they've cooked them for five hours.

And the fucking chicken is just like, you know, someone has just put it in a tumble dryer and let it just fall around on itself for a week.

I love that your approach to cooking, you're from a jazz dynasty.

You take a jazz approach to cooking as well.

Yeah.

Yeah, I

try to, but I am

missing the key element of jazz, which is to be highly musical.

Like, you know, you know the way they say about jazz, it's, it's the the notes you don't play that are more important than the notes you play.

Well, the ingredients you don't use and the ingredients you use, they're all bad from

me.

But I'll still keep going.

I'll still keep trying.

I'll try to chase that dream.

And that is what I would like the genie

to make for me.

Does the dish have a name?

Is it Coco Van?

It must be Coco Van, right?

Yeah, it's yeah, but like, what is Coco Van?

It's

you, you put stock, you put red wine, you can put white wine as well.

I've tried it with that.

Maybe I put in white wine.

And what temperature do you put?

Do you put it in at 170?

Do you put it at 130?

Do you leave it in for four hours?

I don't know.

And I can't.

So it's Coco David is what we'll call it.

Right, Coco.

Amazing.

Absolutely amazing.

Your name is David O.

Docherty, and you call it Cock O'David.

Of yourself.

Absolutely incredible.

Oh, my goodness.

It's already in the sky, right?

Ernie Pie.

Especially as you know that Coco David is the name of the farmer.

Yeah, that's only, you know, that's his name.

Walking around.

A biley little farmer.

Coco David.

So what I'm going to try the next time is I'm going to pull out microwave meals for one, and I'm just going to microwave that chicken for six hours and see what happens.

Yeah, okay, so we'll call it cock o'doherty, but then we'll put a question mark at the end of that because I don't know what the recipe is.

So it's and you have to say it.

You know, the way in

a school oral exam when they made you read from the book and you didn't know what the sentence meant, but you saw a question mark, so you just rose up to it.

So that's the pronunciation.

So so it's like cock o'daugher tea like that that's what the dish is called

your side dish then for this um half memory of a dish that you once created like like a like a meal from the film inception um what uh

what is the side dish gonna be I've thought a lot about this and there's certain things that are delicious.

I've no problem with eating things in the wrong order.

I've no problem with having two starters

a main at a starter as a main, you know what I mean?

Together.

But with this, I'm going to...

So rice paper rolls, I was thinking that because it might be nice to get prawns in, but then we've already had too much carnage of the ocean from the starter.

I'm going to, I mean, this is quite sentimental for the for the off-menu podcast, but I went away in the second week of March.

Uh, there was the bat disease made itself known, and I was meant to be going to Australia.

And so all my gigs in the future were cancelled.

I broke up with my girlfriend and I moved to an island off the west coast with my 82-year-old parents.

And so when we got there, we were in, I mean, I was in a slightly

disheveled, mentally disheveled state.

But my father is a wonderful man and he has a poly tunnel down there.

So he said, we don't know how long this is going to go on, but it'll be fun to watch things grow.

So the first thing we did was bought a load of seeds.

And

I went to the beach and got seaweed and

hosed it down for like two days to wash the sea salt off and then buried that under the ground in the poly tunnel with because of the great nutrients and then went to the person over there who's got chickens and got terrible chicken shit and put that in as well and we planted these seeds and in the end Irish lockdown one lasted from the

St.

Patrick's Day until the first of July.

So I was down there for that, whatever, four month period, three and a half month period.

And in that time, the seeds that we planted fully germinated and we harvested them.

And so by the end, we were eating some spectacularly weird vegetables because the island is so harsh and we definitely got all the nutrients in the soil wrong.

The things grew, but they all grew like horror.

Halloween versions of themselves.

So there's parsnips that look like witches' noses.

There's carrots that looked like parsnips.

There were potatoes that looked like parsnips.

Just this horrible sort of Adam's family basket of vegetables.

But they all tasted incredible.

And there came from

the earth this, I don't know, a slightly,

I mean, resurrective is too strong a word, but a

continual sense of life and rebirth.

Even when during the worst of the pandemic, you would go out and you would look at the, we grew sweet corn and like you can't grow sweet corn in Ireland, but the bush grew up and these big dongs appeared on the end and they have the amazing silk over, you know, the actual,

I think it's called sweet corn silk, the leaves that grow around them.

And so eventually we picked them and we're like, oh my goodness.

And then pull them off and they looked like Frankenstein's dick.

They just looked absolutely, totally wrong on the inside.

But we boiled them for ages and ate them.

And they were all absolutely brilliant.

So from my side, I would like pandemic vegetables grown by me.

and my dad.

Obviously, when you said that

you got the corn and you pulled the silk off and it looked like Frankenstein's dick, obviously the first thing I imagined is Coco David sticking his head around the corner and being like, you're gonna eat that?

You did his voice all wrong there, James.

yeah, yeah, I

definitely ate all of it and it was really great.

I grew when I was I was an amazing entrepreneur when I was a kid and

everyone thought I was gonna be jobs.

I was going to be

that.

So in terms of I was always starting businesses like wash your car for two pounds kind of thing and

typing up business cards and posting them into the,

yeah, I'm sure I, yeah, I set up a detective agency

when I was about 10 and we would find your cat for money.

uh even though we never got any cases and uh part of it was we would find

waste ground and dig it and plant vegetables there.

I would make my mother buy the seeds, and then we would plant them and then go door to door trying to sell radishes

to people on the road.

So they would be like, Who's this incredible entrepreneur that will one day change the world with one of his amazing business ideas?

Isn't this the guy who asked if I want if he wanted me to clean his car last week?

And so I got into the veggie game from that.

It's by selling, I used to sell radishes for 3p each.

Wow.

So how are you preparing these

panny dee veg, these corona veg?

I'm popping them all in the unnamed, I think it's called a Dutch oven is the official name of one of those castware pots, I know, which is.

It is.

There's a double meaning for Dutch oven.

Yeah,

which is very unfortunate.

I see why Le Crusse don't call it that then.

Do you want to dutch a

oven?

Then they fart under a duvet and pull it over your head.

Weirdly, they both smell like boiling veg.

So I'm going to bung them in the pot.

And the genie is going to tell me exactly how much stock and salt and

wine to put in with it, the exact right amount of time.

and those veggies.

And ooh, Nelly, that is going to be a hearty, a hearty and delicious meal as well.

Sorry, just I should say, it's not tough, though.

Like, we weren't the tough kids of my area, as in the tough kids, were no way they were breaking into your garden.

And then, like, what have they done?

Have they stolen something from the shed?

No, they seem to have just planted a load of vegetables.

Who are these absolute nerds?

Is your drink homemade also?

Have you and your father been doing a bit of a home brewing?

I, at this point, would be tempted to say a pint of Guinness, but I actually don't think physically I could handle it at this point in the meal.

You know, what is basically

the chowder of the beer world is going to meet the chowder of the ocean down there.

This is a very delicious but very heavy menu so far.

You've got you've essentially got bread that you've described as dark matter.

You've got a creamy chowder.

You've got a massive stew basically for main course.

If you pour a pint of Guinness on this, mate, you're going through the floor.

The Moldahl character just gets dropping people.

No, I'm going to just something light to refresh the palette.

I'll go with a white russian then because

yeah

i mean come on who cares though i was trying to think of a cocktail that actually means something to me and the only one would be i've been out a few times with uh max from the comedy duo max in a van and he is the cocktail correspondent for like one of the glossy magazines and he knows them all and he's really good at when you go to a cocktail bar he and a cocktail is like 11.50 or something he'll be like oh then just give me um so he got me into uh you know bundaberg ginger beer so not ginger ale but the ginger beer the one with the cool lid that's like a can

that with gin in it and he so it's a sort of a cheap ass Singapore sling basically and then you steal lime off the bar and you put that in and

you know if you can steal an olive then say if one person gets what i'm talking about is cocktails on a budget here

and there's a way uh you can have a whole lot of fun for half the price of a named cocktail then so i sorry i was thinking of doing that but of much more significance to me in my,

with my friends is the White Russian, just because it's synonymous with me, with

Nish Kumar's birthday is during the Edinburgh fringe every year.

And I don't know how the tradition started.

He possibly talked about it on this podcast.

We've definitely met, I think we have mentioned, we've mentioned it on this podcast before, that the tradition is on Nish's birthday, everyone drinks white Russians to the extent that the the bar we go to in Edinburgh always runs out of milk.

And I believe you've done this before, David.

You've had to go to the supermarket and buy them more milk.

Ran to Tesco Express and come back with four litres.

Like, how much milk does a bar have, particularly after the coffee ends at six o'clock?

Like, they've probably got half a pint just to keep it going for staff having cups of tea or whatever.

And we are through that

after about 15 minutes then.

And yeah, some severe queasiness that results from that.

That's definitely the case.

But I do, yeah,

I enjoy a white Russian from that point of view.

And then I remember once I'd just done a gig in Sydney at the Enmore Theatre, and it was the last gig of an Australian tour, which is a silly thing to do.

I told the audience we'd all go to a pub up the road, and because that's 1800 people or something,

300 of them went.

It was on like a Tuesday night.

So we all descended on this empty pub

and everyone was buying me pints.

And it was very nice.

And then a man came up to me.

and handed me like what the hell is this it looked like a quadruple bailey's or something and he went uh it's a white russian i'm nish's uncle

yes

i thought nish's uncle was going to pop up at the end of this anecdote.

Yeah.

So I don't think, I'm not even sure if white Russians are a thing in particularly in Sydney at the end of the summer.

So it's possible he'd had to run out to the nearest Tesco Express to buy them a half a pint of milk to make it.

But yeah, what I'm saying is.

And the nearest Tesco Express in Sydney is miles away, I'd say.

They had to really go a long way to get the right kind of milk for the white man.

for your drink, let's not beat around the bush.

You've essentially picked a dessert chowder.

A sweet alcoholic chowder.

Yes, I have.

This meal is going to be an Adidas.

If you remember what Adidas stands for, that's what's going to happen.

All day I dream about sex.

No, after dinner I do a shit.

All right.

me and James immediately just go for the new metal corn version of Adidas, which which is All Day I Dream About Sex.

Yeah, we instantly thought of the song by the new metal band Corn, and we went, What if Korn sing about it'll be that?

Why on earth, Edward?

I mean, why on earth David O'Dockery?

The only corn he likes is in his chowder or once it looked like Frankenstein's dick.

I don't know.

Korn definitely went with All Day I Dream About Sex.

I don't remember the bit in the song where they go, After dinner, I did a shit.

When I was about 10 years old, the first ever cool shoes I got where I requested them from my mother were

Adidas boot runners, like basketball boots and torsion.

They were the torsion bar ones.

And I brought them, went out to the park in them.

Like, you know what you're so proud of the new runners?

You don't even walk on grass.

You're making sure just to stay on cement.

and uh it's they're they're attracting a lot of compliments and then brian mcdonald who was slightly older than us said you know what adidas is short for

and this was the first time i'd heard it he said after dinner i do a shit but he went a step further than that he said they're they're they're shitting boots and it's because when you're sitting down it can put a lot of stress on your ankles so that's why you should wear boot runners while while you're wearing them.

And he literally ruined those shoes.

I went home and I was like, mom, I can't believe you bought me shilling boots.