Whodunnit Dinners podcast #15 Season 2 Ep 5 Mike Phillips: 80s Fast Food, West London Wimpy and Jerk Chicken

This edition of our Whodunnit Dinners blog is the regular sister event to the main attraction: The Whodunnit Dinners podcast, now proudly in its second season!  The Whodunnit Dinners podcast is essentially a form of two-woman book group for old friends who enjoy murder mysteries, food and like a good chin wag about how the two things intersect. In the podcast we focus mainly on the book; in the blog we give you the recipe information to allow you to make the food, should you so wish!

Who is Mike Phillips? 

In the latest podcast episode released this week, Helen introduced Katie to an author she came across for the first time while idling in one of her local bookshops. Mike Philips is a Guyanese-British writer who immigrated to Britain as a child. He’s won the Silver Dagger award from the Crime Writers' Association and likes to pen his stories with a ‘consciously black British perspective’ about migrants and their lives in their new locations. He has also written non-fiction around Notting Hill and Windrush. After several podcasts focusing on classic murder mysteries in the style of the golden age - including Sherlock Holmes and the Wisdom of Father Brown - she decided it was frankly a much-needed breath of fresh air! 

An Image to Die For

This particular 1995 book, ‘An Image to Die For’ featured, as its main character, the journalist Sam Dean and was set in London TV production and the urban underworld of the 1980s. An Image to Die For has real points of difference from the class stable of Agatha Christie stories set in cosy villages and manor houses: unstable everyday characters with challenging, messy lives, grudges and connections, and authentic dialogue across a wide range of diverse communities. Helen eventually decided to listen to it as an audiobook for a change, and she discusses that experience on the podcast, but it’s also available in paperback. One of Mike Phillips’ Sammy Dean stories was also made into a series for TV, with the main role being taken on by Brian Bovell, who has played across lots of television and was in fact the DJ in Love Actually, for rom-com fans! 

The West London food scene

Sammy Dean is too cool to spend a lot of time cooking or hanging out in posh restaurants, but as part of his detective work, he does share food in some of the local restaurants in West London where he lives. The Edgware Road and its various Asian cuisines come up a lot, and he is particularly enamoured of a Lebanese place, where he spends time chatting to the owner who migrated from Beirut after his wife was killed in the war. However, as Helen was fairly non-specific when she briefed Katie on the food type she needed from West London in 1980s, Katie focused on the Notting Hill district of London and prepared a Caribbean jerk chicken recipe. We hope Sammy Dean would have heartily approved. 

How to make Jerk Chicken 

Ingredients

• 6 french onions

• 3 garlic clove

• 1 inch long piece of ginger, chopped

• 1–3 Scotch bonnet peppers (remove seeds for less heat).

• 1 tbsp ground allspice

• 1 tbsp dried thyme

• 1/2 tsp nutmeg

• ½ tsp cinnamon.

• 2 tbsp soy sauce

• 3 tbsp brown sugar

• Juice of 1 lime

• 6 x skin on chicken thighs

Method

1)    Put all ingredients in your food processor and mix to a coarse marinade

2)    Score and stab your chicken meat

3)    Rub the marinade into the chicken and put in the fridge for minimum 30 mins and up to 4 hours

4)    Grill or oven bake for 30 – 40 mins    (200 degrees Celsius)

Enjoy with rice and squeeze of lime. 

Listen to the Whodunnit Dinners podcast

If you want to hear more about Mike Phillips, his hero Sam Dean or fast food in the 1980s, check out Whodunnit Dinners podcast #15 on Spotify! Or listen on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts