Sainsbury's Local, Tottenham Court Road

That's the kind of ready meal I'm talking about.

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Five red wines under £5

Like many other urban social butterflies, I am sure, this weekend I found myself walking that tightrope between "good guest" and "financially solvent". I had three house parties scheduled, which was very exciting! However, house parties, while cheaper than going to the pub, still carry the etiquette of BYOB.

While some supermarkets have fairly inoffensive own-label booze ranges, the recession has not yet hit deep enough to be able to waltz into a dinner party with a box of Tesco Basics "Australian Red" and a fistful of straws.

But, as I have discovered in my lengthy searches up and down the Sainsbury booze aisle, there are still lots of supermarket wines that are both tasty and affordable. We'll call them "social climbers".

5. Canaletto Pinot Noir (£4.49)

Italian. I am usually not a fan of reds with strong cherry flavors, because of cough syrup flashbacks. But this one has really lively light fruit flavors that keep you from feeling like you're five years old and gagging on a spoon. Fairly easy-drinking. Also, its website is hilariously ESL, describing "soft and gently tannins" and announcing that "Our aim is that each Canaletto wine should be a direct reflection of its terroir".

4. The Little Penguin Shiraz (£4.69)

Australian. Firstly, the name is adorable and the label is super-cute too, which in wine is half the battle. At least, it is the way I do it. Little Penguin Shiraz is a little spicy and dark, and it is one of the few under-£10 wines I've had that is tangy and intense without going overkill on the oak. I would pair it with barbecues and bad ideas.

3. Casillero del Diablo Cabernet Sauvignon (depends)

Spanish. How much do I love Cab Sauvignons? They're so friendly. I think this wine is technically like £7/bottle, but it's one of those ones that is on sale every single time you walk past the supermarket wine aisle, so it might as well be £4.50 or whatever. Anyway, this is a little darker than I like my Cabs, but it's super-fierce and very punchy. It's like the Xena: Warrior Princess of el cheapo reds. Muy bien.

2. South Cab Sauvignon (£4.99)

Chilean. No-nonsense and bright. Okay, this spring I discovered this drink called tinto de verano in Spain, which means "the red wine of summer". It's red wine + (European) lemonade + ice, and it's just this really nice fizzy fruity refreshing drink. But! You can't make it with boring wine, you have to have something zingy and full. Which is what this is! South America is really good for zingy wines.

1. Frontera Cab Sauvignon (3 for £10)

Chilean. This is amaaaazing. It is probably my favorite wine ever at the moment – it's the perfect combination of all my favorite wine aspects (red fruit flavors, round, full, easy-drinking) and regularly costing less than £4/bottle. It is on sale at Sainsbury's for 3 for £10 about every other week, and I buy it every time and bring it to every single dinner party to which I am invited. . Also, it has a screw-top, which is very important if you are (for example) bringing it out to a park or outdoor concert or something. Or if you have reached the point in the evening where operating a bottle opener would not be such a safe idea. Which, with Frontera Cabernet Sauvignon, it is very easy to do.

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Summer recipes for £5 or less

Okay, first let me get this out of the way: Sainsbury's 4-for-92p bitter is, if not heavenly, way drinkable for something that is 23p a can. Sainsbury's whole Basics (read: shit-cheap) range, in fact, is what I will call "surprisingly consumable".

Pan-fried salmon

Salmon: £2.50-3 for two steaks
Garlic: 75p for a few heads (you will have leftovers, score!)
Rice: 80p
(Assumed ingredients: butter, salt, black pepper)
Total: £4.05-4.55

Recommended prep music: New Sounds of Africa (Miriam Makeba)
Accompanying drink: blended margarita

I like my salmon like I like my men: simple, covered in garlic butter, and ready in under 15 minutes. (RIMSHOT.)

1. Start cooking rice so it will be ready when the salmon is done. I assume you know how to cook rice. I'm not very good at it so I won't give you any misdirected tips. I do like to put a little salt in, though.

2. Dump a whole bunch of black pepper on both sides of the salmon. I like to make it look like the inverse of a light pollution map of the eastern US seaboard. Sprinkle salt judiciously.

3. Peel four cloves of garlic.

4. Find a frying pan large enough for the salmon to lie flat. Clear a space on the stove. Turn stove on medium heat and drop a spoonful of butter in.

5. When butter has melted, drop garlic in. Push them around a bit until they are well and truly buttery. I like to life up the pan and shake it a little bit.

6. Gently put in salmon steak. Watch the sides. When they are cooked-pink-looking instead of uncooked-pink-looking about halfway through, flip them. I like to nudge the garlic cloves under the salmon like little woodland creatures seeking shelter under a tree trunk. It makes the flavor sharper.

(somewhere in here) When the rice is done, scoop it out and put it on a plate. I like to nudge it to one side to make room for the salmon.

7. When the salmon is cooked-pink-looking all the way through, use the flipper to put it on the plate and then (my favorite part!) drizzle all the buttery goo and garlic over it, and the rice.

8. Turn off the stove.

Black bean California salad

Black beans: 69p
Banana: 25p
Avocado: £1
Tomato: 50p
Fresh cilantro: £1
Total: £3.44

Recommended prep music: Little Deuce Coupe (The Beach Boys)
Accompanying drink: pina colada

This one is one of my favorites, because it's interesting and fresh, but also really easy.

1. Wash black beans and put them in a salad bowl

2. Shred cilantro and put it in the bowl

3. Dice everything else and put it in the bowl.

4. Find a spoon and gently mix it so it's fairly equally distributed.

See? Easy. And delicious. You can't go wrong with avocado. It's also vegetarian and vegan if you're into that kind of thing.

Beer bratwurst

Bratwurst: £3 for a six-pack
Beer: 92p (see above).
Rolls (if you're going to be fancy): 50p
(Assumed ingredients: olive oil)
Total: £4.42

Recommended prep music: The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle (Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band)
Accompanying drink: beer, duh

1. Put beer in fridge. Wait 20 minutes.

2. Take out a can and drink it.

3. Find a frying pan and a small pot (the smaller and deeper the better, as you will use less beer). Clear spaces on the stove and put them on.

4. Turn frying pan onto high heat and splash a little olive oil in.

5. Pop in the bratwurst and sear them (they should look brownish and smell awesome).

THIS IS A VERY IMPORTANT STEP. Too often have I seen rookie would-be bratwurst brewers skip it, and the result is that all the tasty bratwurst juices leach out when they are boiled in the beer, and it's really sad. YOU HAVE TO SEAR THE JUICES IN OR YOUR BRATWURST WILL BE BORING.

6. Tilt the seared bratwurst into the pot and put it on high heat. Take out two more cans of beer. Pour one into the pot. Start drinking the other.

7. While you drink the beer, the brats will begin boiling. They will be ready in about 10-12 minutes, or when you are about halfway through the second beer. Set it on the counter.

8. If you have rolls you might as well go whole hog and toast them or something.

9. Use a fork to capture the bratwursts and drop them on a plate (in the rolls if you have them I guess).

10. Eat them and finish your beer.

The end! You may have noticed that all the music dates to within about fifteen years of each other, but that is because summer happens between 1955 and 1975, in music, in fashion, and in cars.

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My Five Worst-Ever Recurring Hangovers (And How To Cure Them)

1. RSC Histories Hangover

I had this one yesterday, for the first time in more than a year. Oh, I've missed it. The RSC Histories was this fucking amazing piece of theatre that first happened in 2000-1 and were revived 2006-8. One ensemble of about thirty actors put on all eight of Shakespeare's continuous history plays (covering Richard II, Henry IVs, Henry V, Henry VIs, and Richard III). YOU GUYS IT KICKED ASS. The Henry VI trilogy is my favorite Shakespeare, bar none – it is energetic and vicious and have great women and swords and, man, I love them so much I can't even say.

Yeah, BOOM! ohmygod it kicks ass

When I went to see them in Stratford three years ago, I accidentally falling in with some of the actors at the pub afterward, which is why that is such a brilliant town. We kept in touch and, when the production came to London, went out for rounds a few more times. Friends and actors accumulated, and for two weekends in March 2008 I spent at least 80% of each day in Chalk Farm, either at the theatre watching the shows or at the bar drinking and talking about them.

Primary poison
Gin and tonic (Dirty Duck)
Red wine (theatre bar)

Last experienced
I thought this one was lost forever when the Histories closed last spring, but no! Nick Asbury, one of the actors, wrote a book about the production, happily titled Exit, Pursued by a Badger. He gave a talk and signing at the National last week. Four of us ended up in a terrifying pub below one of the train bridges at Waterloo, talking about York and Lancaster and (I think) Sartre and then realising we were about to miss the last train and sprinting for the station.

Cure
Getting up at 7 am to queue for £5 day tickets to the next show.


2. Pub Music Session Hangover

The hardest to predict. Bank holidays are a pretty good bet, but I can never tell when I walk into an Irish pub with my fiddle if it's going to be a pleasant, relaxed one that finishes up around 11:30, or a mack truck of tunes and endless pints of Guinness that spits us out, gasping, onto the pavement sometime vaguely after dawn.




Not pictured: seventy more pints settling behind the bar

Primary poison
Draft Guinness

Last experienced
At my Saturday night regular on Kilburn High Road. It was the landlady's 50th birthday, and there was cake. The regulars were filling up the till with drinks for the musicians. It looked like it might fade down around midnight – until a pack of fiddlers from Cricklewood and an itinerant concertina player rolled in. Then it really took off. We finally unpeeled ourselves from the corner table and staggered home around 6 or 6:30, which in early June is a stupidly bright time of day.

Cure
Irn-Bru, which may be Scottish but has all the ingredients necessary to snap a body back up: caffeine, glucose, and quinine to ward off malaria. A full fry-up with as much grease as the pan will take. The trick is to swing by the shop and buy the supplies on your way home, so you don't have to leave the flat the next day.


3. Wealthy Possibly-Evil Friend Visiting Hangover

I have this friend who works for the US in Iraq. I'll call him 'Sebastian Flyte', and hope that will be sufficient to illustrate his personality. I don't know what Sebastian does in Iraq, or who he exactly he reports to, but he makes a lot of money.

Every time he comes to London for holiday, which is about three times a year, we make a date for cocktails. It's very exciting, because I'm moderately impoverished (journalism's dying, we're in a recession, student loans, etc etc). I dress up. Sebastian wears what he usually wears, which is a sharply-creased ensemble that I'm sure is carefully styled for the season, weather and hour of day. We drift around West London drinking things made from gin, champagne or both until neither of us can stand up, and then we wobble toward cabs.



Primary poison
French 75s

Last experienced
The day after Good Friday (is that Holy Saturday?). I woke up fully clothed with no memory of what happened after leaving the bar at 2 am and setting out for the taxi rank across the street. There was a black women's jacket that didn't belong to me on the laundry pile, and one of my wardrobe doors had been ripped off its hinges. (I think what happened was that I started to fall over, clutched at the door to stay upright, and took it with me. No idea about the jacket, however. It was too big for me so I gave it to a charity shop.)

Cure
Before 2pm: Lying very still and whimpering 'Oh, mother' every twenty minutes.
After 2pm: Soda water with a splash of orange juice, and saltine crackers.


4. Shabbat Hangover

"If you call the Sabbath a delight...you will find your joy in the Eternal" (Isaiah 58:13-14)

In the Reform tradition I have found that means two things:

(1) Tasty food
(2) Lots of wine

So you're at home, or at a friend's home, and it's Friday night, it's the end of the week, and it's Shabbat, which is all about feeling nice and consciously not doing work. You're blessing the challah and wine, and relaxing into the weekend, and suddenly you're three bottles down and everyone's laughing and arguing happily and it's almost midnight but there's another bottle around here somewhere, come on.


This might just about do it, if no guests drop by unexpectedly

Primary poison
Kiddush wine

Last experienced
Three weeks ago, a couple in the conversion class I'm taking at my shul invited me to theirs for Friday night dinner. I brought wine. They had wine. They had cooked a lovely dinner. We started talking, tentatively, about the class and some of our classmates, and about five seconds later it was 2:30 am, we were critiquing the personals in the Jerusalem Post, and I was laughing so hard I couldn't breathe.

Cure
Leftover challah, morning service (followed by more kiddush wine).


5. Freedom Hangover

I am an American, and the clock in my heart will always be synchronized with what's going on back home. I stayed up at home to watch Senator Barack Obama accept the Democratic Party's nomination to run for President, at 3am British time. I went to an all-night pub in Shoreditch to watch him win the election at about 4am. And every year I go to the Sports Café in Haymarket to cheer on the Carolina Tarheels in the NCAA college basketball championship.

Primary poison
Jack and Coke

Last experienced
Yeah, the 'Heels were the team to beat in this year's playoffs, but it is still nervewracking to watch those last games. Especially after 2008's humiliating semifinal game against Kansas (ROY WILLIAMS WHAT WERE YOU THINKING LETTING THE CLOCK RUN LIKE THAT). Every American I know in London converges on the Sports Café in March. This year, there was a strong showing from UNC's study-abroad program. When the clock ran out, I heard my first spontaneous eruption of "I'm a Tarheel born, and I'm a Tarheel bred, and when I die I'll be Tarheel dead" in more than three years. Okay, yeah, I cried. And drunk-dialled my parents from Piccadilly Circus, and sang with them some more. Tyler Hansbrough, you'll be missed.

Cure
Krispy Kreme donuts, victory.


GO TO HELL, DUKE!

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