Kitsch'n'Zinc

Sunday afternoon at the bioscope

2009-12-06T10:59:00.001+02:00

Don't you just hate it when people start throwing things at you in a restaurant, I'm not talking about waiters and plates here by the way. Then everyone blames everyone else. Check out this clip from Just a Laugh. FeedBlitz subscribers should visit the site to view.

Dilly Dner of the Week

2009-12-05T20:32:00.000+02:00

The quaintly named "Pea Soup Andersen's" in the little town of Buellton. California, just north of Santa Barbara is this week's Dilly Diner. The name says it all in terms of the diner's signature dish - delicious Split Pea Soup, but it's much more than that, for Pea Soup Andersen's has a spirit of wholesome family warmth which draws people again and again through its doors. In a world where many restaurants only survive for 12 months or less, this Dilly Diner is heading for it's centenary.
It all began on Friday, June 13th, 1924, when Anton Andersen, born in Denmark purchased a piece of the Golden State, California. Anton, who was trained in exclusive restaurants in Europe and New York, put his tuxedo in mothballs and donned a bib apron, soon to become his personal trademark. He and his charming wife, Juliette, opened a tiny restaurant and named it "Andersen's Electric Cafe," in honor of their prized possession, a new electric stove.Juliette was from the east of France and an expert cook, so she prepared many of the recipes; the most popular with the customers was her split pea soup.With the demand for their split pea soup increasing steadily, the Andersen's soon had to locate large suppliers of peas far from their area. Just three years after the first bowl was served, they were amazed to realize they needed to order ONE TON of peas! When Anton faced the problem of what to do with one ton of peas, he solved it by putting them in the window, proclaiming the restaurant, "The Home of Split Pea Soup," Though a ton of peas seemed a staggering amount then, Andersen's today "splits" many tons of peas every month, transforming them into the famed soup. ..averaging thousands of bowls a day!

That Was The Week That Was

2009-12-04T20:19:00.000+02:00

More bad news for His Gordoness this week as he has handed control of Maze and his restaurant at The London in New York back to the hotel, nine months after doing the same at his Prague, Paris and LA restaurants. Gordo has once again relinquished ownership of an overseas property to ease its ongoing debts, which reached £10m in the group’s 2008 accounts. To limit its financial liabilities, GRH has now sold back all owned overseas property while arranging for the restaurants to continue operating under the Gordon Ramsay brand. The only exception will be the group's fourth Maze restaurant at Melbourne's Crown Casino, due to launch early next year, which will continue to be owned by the group. No mention here of his Cape Town restaurant but then maybe we don’t figure in the scheme of things down here at the tip of Africa. Gordo is rapidly becoming a boring old fart!

Speaking of old farts the latest Anglo-Saxon hit on the Parisian literary scene — a work so successful that the capital’s leading English-language bookshop has had to expand its shelf space for it. But l’oeuvre in question is not a book. It is a tin of baked beans — or rather thousands of tins, which have found their way into the W H Smith store in Paris as it seeks to capitalise on rising demand for British food in France. The bookshop set up a small section dedicated to traditional British foodstuffs amid its more conventional fare — novels by the likes of J. K. Rowling and Sebastian Faulks, or newspapers, including The Times — last year. British favourites like jelly babies, custard, Polo mints, Ribena, Walker’s crisps and now Heinz Baked Beans proved so popular that W H Smith had to double the size of the department this summer. But surely baked beans are American?

Meanwhile this week two chefs unveiled their favourite baked bean recipes. In homage to the famous Heinz icon they came up with what I suppose could best be described as 57 ways to leave your lover. Traditionally baked beans are mostly used on toast, jacket potatoes or with a full English breakfast, but a pair of chefs have come up with a host of new ways to eat humble baked beans. Adam Wilcock and Steve Scuffell produced the 57 recipes using baked beans - including a fondue, a soufflé and even a bean smoothie. They started experimenting cooking with the traditional snack after research found more people were eating them in unusual ways. Their bizarre concoctions - which also include Heinz Sushi with Wasabi mayonnaise - have now 'bean' made available online but will next year also feature in a recipe book.
Chef Adam Wilcock says: “Whilst Heinz Beanz have been a staple of dishes such as English breakfasts and a topping for jacket potatoes, it’s great to see that people are getting creative and extending their use to a whole variety of dishes.
"The ’57 Wayz to Eat Heinz Beanz’ list will provide inspiration to add a highly nutritious, convenient and economical food staple to a whole variety of new dishes. Put it on my Xmas wish list.

Silly season

2009-12-03T20:15:00.000+02:00

Well the silly season is upon us which far from making this daily blog an easier task, it is actually much more difficult since there is such a plethora of truly ridiculous thoughts to muse on that it's doing in my head. However as my dozen or so regular readers will no doubt dwindle to less than single numbers may I take this opportunity to thank you now for your support throughout the year (I shall wear it with pride) and to wish you all belated greetings for 2008. I am indebted to my good friend Mr S C Rooge for the following politically correct legal waiver.
Please accept without obligation, express or implied, these best wishes for an environmentally safe, socially responsible, low stress, non addictive, and gender neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday as practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice (but with respect for the religious or secular persuasions and/or traditions of others, or for their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all) and further for a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling, and medically uncomplicated onset of the generally accepted calendar year (including, but not limited to, the Christian calendar, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures). The preceding wishes are extended without regard to the race, creed, colour, age, physical ability, religious faith, choice of computer platform, or sexual preference of the wishee(s).

You'll do Yule bird

2009-12-02T20:57:00.000+02:00

Any threat of a potential problem and the answer seems to be to set up a hotline. If there’s one thing we always need it’s another hotline …..a hotline to Zuma….a hotline to the Russians……and now a hotline to Turkey. Turkey? I’m sorry it’s not an actual hotline to Turkey it’s The Turkey Hotline (which probably goes to India) which has been set up by the British Turkey Federation (BTF) to help cooks negotiate any pitfalls they might encounter in roasting their festive bird. A team of eight experts are on hand to offer advice on defrosting, cooking times and carving techniques until 5pm on Christmas Eve. Like all hotlines, on Xmas Day when you really need them they’re closed.
So why does everyone suddenly need this hotline? Surely with the wealth of cooking info shoved into our faces every day even the dullest of us can’t help but be culinary literates? And what about all those ever so helpful TV cooks, haven’t they tackled the issue of the Xmas roast ad nauseum? Well it seems that they’re the dark chappies in the woodpile, so to non PC speak. Confusion over cooking the perfect turkey has been exacerbated by conflicting methods proposed by celebrity chefs such as Nigella Lawson and Delia Smith. Piggy Lawson has insisted that cooking a 6.5kg (14lb 5oz) turkey for only two hours and 45 minutes is perfectly adequate to deliver moist, succulent and tasty meat. Meanwhile, the Ice Maiden Smith suggests that the correct cooking time for the bird, assuming it is stuffed, should be four hours and 50 minutes. I’m sure Gordo’s advice would be “ When it’s white it’s raw and when it’s dark brown it’s f#cked. Yes, yes, yes!” By the way the Food Standards Agency, the government watchdog, offers yet another "safe" cooking time – four hours and 20 minutes. My advice is simply to place your turkey in a low oven, the weight of the bird and the temperature are really irrelevant, and leave it there until the neighbours start complaining about the smell, possibly about the 2 nd or 3 rd of January. In the meantime tuck into something that you really enjoy instead of some dry old pumped up bird.

Dilly about chilli

2009-12-01T20:05:00.001+02:00

I've had enough of it now, all this bloody hero worship of the mighty chilli. I really can't fathom out what it is all about because despite the plethora of chilli products available on the supermarket shelves, the myriad of dishes on the menus in every restaurant from Thai to Tunisian, trendy to passe, fusion to con fusion, I really have no idea what chilli tastes like. Normally you can judge these off centre tastes by deciding whether they taste like chicken or not, which seems to be the universal tasting standard but chilli definitely does not taste like chicken. In fact I'm not sure what you're supposed to taste apart from pain.
You see, on our tongues there is an abundance of pain receptors called vanilloid receptor 1 ( VR 1) which pick up the searing sensation of chilli peppers. Now note there were several very telling words in that sentence....." pain receptors "......." searing sensation ". Not once did I mention taste buds or taste receptors . By the way VR 1's are also situated in other parts of our bodies where you definitely will not find taste buds. If you've ever worked with chillis and forgotten to wash your hands before rubbing your eyes or going to the toilet you'll have experienced what I'm talking about. It's the capsaicin, the pungent ingredient found in chilli peppers which activates VR 1.
They've infiltrated every cuisine from Asian to Eastern, from Mexican to Italian, African to Andalusian. You'll find them in curries and casseroles, sauces and salsas, pastas and sausages, achars, chutneys, relishes, marinades, dressings and even bloody chocolate and what are the magic words used in every recipe " add chilli to taste " ! How the hell can you add chilli to taste, it doesn't have any bloody taste ! It burns. Well it adds a hot taste they say, but there is no such thing as a hot taste......... salt, sour, bitter, sweet and even umami but no hot ! Sure it adds zest, yes maybe a bit of excitement and of course it provides a kick but taste is not something that it adds. So let's put the bloody pepper back in it's place by recognising it as a pain provider not a flavour.

So what exactly is Hawaiian butterfish?

2009-11-30T20:12:00.000+02:00

Have you heard the one about the marine biologist who walks into a sushi bar and orders some tuna? It’s no joke because he ends up with a fish called escolar, sometimes sold as butterfish, a particularly nasty fish with buttery flesh that can cause bizarre episodes of diarrhoea, accompanied by a waxy intestinal discharge. Well these things happen don’t they, especially in places like the USA ? The sad thing is that it happened 5 times to the same scientists during a brief research project and this in a country that is fairly well regulated in terms of food requirements.
Now I’m not too bothered (he said smugly) because I’ve had enough of bloody sushi, in fact I think I’ll go back to eating prawn cocktails garnished with a sprig of parsley because where we live no-one knows how to spell food regulations never mind enforce them and repeated TV exposes simply reinforce the fact that many local producers have no scruples about putting whatever they feel like onto the market. You less enlightened mortals out there however should be very wary because many local suppliers understanding of product knowledge merely means that they can read what is on the box.
“A piece of tuna sushi has the potential to be an endangered species, a fraud or a health hazard,” wrote the authors of the research paper. “All three of these cases were uncovered in this study.” The team of researchers from Columbia University and the American Museum of Natural History ordered tuna from 31 sushi restaurants and then used genetic tests to determine the species of fishes in those dishes. More than half of those eateries misrepresented, or couldn’t clarify the type of fish they were mongering. Several were selling endangered southern bluefin tuna.
Although their results were shocking the scientists are making good progress in improving on a new species-identification technique, called DNA barcoding. A coalition of labs has been collecting fish, reading their genes and uploading the information to a database called FISH-BOL. Their goal is to build a catalogue of every fish species on earth so that anyone with a handheld DNA reader could definitively identify fish within minutes. Wildlife officials could use that technology to spot-check fish producers and fine people who are selling protected species and chefs might even be able to identify exactly what is going onto that seafood platter.

Sunday afternoon at the bioscope

2009-11-29T15:11:00.002+02:00

Restaurants in small hotels are always a source of amusement and none more so than this highland hostelry as featured on the hit series Little Britain. FeedBlitz subscribers should visit the site to view.

Dilly Diner of the Week

2009-11-28T19:25:00.001+02:00

This week's Dilly Diner is more of a Bozo Boozer but pretty unusual none the less. From the outside it's just like a thousand other red brick British pubs but when you go inside, this unassuming West Midlands local, has a quirky interior which has attracted the attention of newspapers, radio stations and TV crews from all over the world.
Somerset House in Stourbridge has hit the headlines as the pub where you can park your pint, unsupported, on the wall. You literally place your full pint of beer up against the wall and it will stick there, unsupported, until you retrieve it. Naturally the locals in the pub see this as less than a party trick but actually a very useful marketing tool since they can simply park their pint against the wall while they toddle off to relieve themselves of some of the beer which they have just rented.
Sceptics, media people and scientists of course just can't accept things as they are and so they have spent hours and hours trying to figure out this phenomenon.Not content with the regular's perfectly logical explanation that the walls are magic and the pub is spooked, scientists have come up with the weird explanation that the wallpaper glue was responsible. They say that the glue combined with old tobacco smoke and grime was sufficient to suspend the pint of beer unaided. I'm not so sure after all how come it's only pints of beer sticking to the wall and not drunken locals caught like flies in a trap ?

That Was The Week That Was

2009-11-27T19:23:00.000+02:00

We haven’t bothered His Gordoness for some time but this week he really was using the F word as HM Revenue & Customs applied for winding-up petitions for Mr Ramsay's Maze restaurant in Grosvenor Square, London, Plane Food at Heathrow Airport, The Narrow in Narrow Street, London, and the Restaurant Gordon Ramsay in Royal Hospital Road, London.
But the judge dismissed two of the petitions, against the Narrow Street and Hospital Road restaurants, on the grounds that the debts had been paid, and adjourned the other two petitions after hearing that the companies had already made arrangements to pay their debts.
She adjourned the petition against Gordon Ramsay Plane Food Ltd for 14 days, after hearing that time was needed for a cheque to clear, and the petition against Gordon Ramsay (Maze) Ltd for 63 days. Mr Ramsay did not attend court for the brief hearing. Too busy filming no doubt to try and raise some dosh!

More bad news this week was the announcement that Mark Sargeant, Gordo’s right hand man, is to to take on a "new challenge" as creative director of pub group, the Swan Collection. Sargeant is to leave Gordon Ramsay Holdings (GRH) next month after 13 years to join the owners of the Swan in West Malling and the Swan at The Globe. The chef, who stepped down as chef de cuisine at Gordon Ramsay at Claridge's in June to focus on Ramsay's publishing and television ventures, will remain working with GRH on these creative projects while he works with the Swan Collection. Ramsay will be reasonably happy with this arrangement since by all accounts Mark has written more Gordon Ramsay cookbooks than Gordon Ramsay. Gordo commented "We're very lucky at Gordon Ramsay Holdings that we're able to grow people through the business — just as we have with Mark." A case of “I knew him when he was only a corporal”.

And Gordon Ramsay’s F Word returned to Channel 4 in the UK with 1.8m viewers – just over half the audience for the finale of last year’s run. The first in a new 12-part run of the food magazine show gave C4 a 7.4% share at 9pm, making it the worst performing terrestrial channel during the 60-minute slot, according to unofficial overnight figures from Attentional. The previous series opened with 2.5m (10.7%) and averaged 3.15m viewers (10.8%), with the final edition attracting 3.1m (14.3%) in July last year. Ramsay, typically thought of as a ratings banker for the channel with a range of formats, also failed to hit the slot average of 2.5m (10.8%). Is the writing on the wall for His Gordoness ?

Marmite mayhem

2009-11-26T20:44:00.000+02:00

The case of the Mysterious Marmite Misappropriater is mystifying police in the UK. A serial Marmite thief has forced a petrol station in Northamptonshire to stop stocking the spread after he repeatedly stole every jar from its shelves. The thief, dubbed 'Mr Marmite', has stolen 18 jars of the £2.79 spread. on four separate occasions worth over £50 from the 24 hour W. Grose Shell Garage in Kingsthorpe.The unidentified man has been captured on CCTV during one of this raids, leaving the store with a carrier bag full of the love-it-or-loathe-it condiment during a month long crime spree.
Station manager Jim Keary, 54, who has run the site for 11 years, has now given up hope of stopping the thief and cancelled his order of Marmite. The thefts always occurred at night, when he could sneak in unnoticed by the two staff members on duty, and even returned for two jars he left behind from one raid the next day. Mr Keary said: ''We can't work out why he was doing it. Maybe he's got a pregnant wife with really strong cravings. He knows what he wants – one night he took all but two jars then he came back for those the next night. ''Someone suggested that they might be hiding drugs in there. The Marmite would hide the smell. ''We have stopped selling Marmite now because of this. What's the point in selling something, if every time you stock it – it gets stolen?''

Beam me up sushi

2009-11-25T20:22:00.001+02:00

I like Japanese restaurants. I like the civil, sophisticated manner in which you are treated as a very important customer. I like the cleanliness, the sense of order, the efficiency, the lack of dreadful background music. I like the attention to detail with the dainty plates of food and their presentation and the lack of superfluous hammers and tongs to eat with. I like the lack of familiarity of the staff, just think when was the last time some Japanese waitress in a beautiful kimono kneeled down beside your table and said " Hi I'm Chiyoko and I'll be your waitress this evening". Yes I like Japanese restaurants but.......I'm sick of bloody sushi!
Yes there was a time when I was addicted, like a rabbit caught in the headlights, along with everyone else but you can't escape the stuff now. Every cocktail party, reception, birthday celebration, Chinese, Greek or Indian restaurant meal is simply not complete unless it features sushi. Me, I'm all sushied out! I'm raring to move on to the next phase of the game - izakaya. Think Japanese pub complete with small plates in the form of tempuras, yakitori skewers, simmered and grilled dishes offering an almost inexhaustible selection to choose from and you've got izakhaya - The House of the Rising tapas. Of course I'm not sold on the idea of quaffing Japanese beer or knocking back sake to loud raucous screams of "Kampai" but I'm sure that the concept would work equally well with a pint of the black stuff or a glass or two of the Cape's finest. So come on you budding restaurateurs out there enough of the "one sushi fits all" and let's move on to some real Japanese food.

To tip or not to tip

2009-11-24T20:05:00.000+02:00

So you’ve had a bad experience at the restaurant. The staff couldn’t give a toss, the salad was tossed at you and the chef was obviously a tosser. Don’t worry, it happens with amazing regularity, even in Cape Town the self professed culinary capital of South Africa but what are you going to do about it? Speak to the manager ? Don’t be silly, he works office hours! Express your disappointment and inner rage by not leaving a tip – yeah that will work. Just don’t try it in the land of the free.
A couple who refused to leave a tip after allegedly receiving bad service in a Pennsylvania restaurant were arrested by police after being accused of theft. Leslie Pope and John Wagner were handcuffed and hauled away after they failed to leave a restaurant's mandatory 18 per cent gratuity - totalling $16 (£10) - for their party of eight. "Nobody wants to be forced to pay a tip or be arrested for terrible service," said Miss Pope, 22. They claimed they had to wait almost an hour for their meal to arrive and Miss Pope said the service was so shoddy they had to get their own cutlery and napkins. The group said they had to repeatedly ask for drink refills while their waitress smoked outside the pub.
The group paid for the meal, but did not leave a tip. Mr Wagner, 24, said he explained to the manager why he was not leaving a tip.The restaurant called the police, and Miss Pope and Mr Wagner were led away in handcuffs. Police said the pair were charged with theft, as the gratuity was part of the actual bill. They are due to appear in court next month where they plan to contest the theft charges. So I suggest you break a window instead, it’s a lesser offence and more fun.

Living in a chicken world

2009-11-23T20:05:00.000+02:00

I'm tired of living in a chicken world and I really wish someone would do something about it. You know what I mean, it doesn't matter what anything tastes like anymore because we immediately compare it to chicken. Ask any of your friends if they had anything slightly out of the ordinary at a restaurant recently and then ask them to describe the taste, " Well it tasted a bit like chicken ! ". It seems to me that the universal taste bar throughout the gastronomic world is chicken with everything tasting better than or worse than chicken, saltier or sweeter than chicken, more tender or tougher than chicken, richer or milder than chicken, the comparisons are not only endless but mindless since most chicken tastes of bugger all.
Our friends in the wine fraternity take their tasting a little bit more seriously and despite all the flowery language and slurping and spitting at least they do not use chicken as their standard - yes it's got a fruity nose, long on the aftertaste and reminds me a little of coq au vin. No, they have a much more scientific approach with their tasting notes and flavour wheels and it's an idea which has been taken up by other sectors of the liquor industry. Nowadays there are flavour wheels for cider, beer and even whisky which are used as a means of communicating different taste sensations effectively. I only wish that someone in the food industry would apply their minds in the same manner so that anyone who was really interested in what they were eating would be able to pinpoint the different flavours and tell me in simple terms exactly what the experience was like because I'm sick of hearing that everything tastes like bloody chicken !

Sunday afternoon at the bioscope

2009-11-22T16:32:00.000+02:00

You just never know what you're going to get when you visit the Food Court as Jan and Ray from the Catharine Tate Show explain. FeedBlitz subscribers should visit the site to view.

Dilly Diner of the Week

2009-11-21T20:18:00.001+02:00

This week's Dilly Diner is simply called Sausage and you've guessed it, they only serve sausages in all their glory - long, short, fat, thin, straight, curly, savoury, sweet, meat, vegetarian, everything you can think of and then some. It's located in Nottingham, England.
Now I like a good old pork banger from time to time and I've even been persuaded to partake of a few burnt boeries when there was no obvious escape route but the father and son team who have sunk R 5 million into this Palais de Wors have taken the lowly sausage to new heights, some of which I have no desire to conquer.
Squeezed into sausage shaped booths, like a fat Cumberland, you can sample almost every sausage you can imagine - Lincolnshire, Wild Boar and Orange, Venison, Beef and Guinness - all fairly innoccuous so far, but then there's the 3 foot porker, listed on the menu as " Oh Vicar " and the inevitable, " this will get them talking " item, The Jelly Bean and Mars Bar dessert sausage.
The feature which is attracting the most attention however is not the sausages in the the restaurant but rather what happens in the gent's toilet where the lads relieve themselves into a galvenised bucket mounted on a pedestal whilst staring intently at a giant picture of a mountain. The buckets, I hasten to add, are fixed securely to the pedestal and fully plumbed in, so it's not as if someone has to come along every so often to empty them. The design team rather appropriately christened this model of urinal as " Pale Ale"

That Was The Week That Was

2009-11-20T20:35:00.000+02:00

It’s getting close to panto season so our first story of the week is about the goose which lays the golden eggs. Well actually it’s about the old broiler which lays the golden ingots. An unnamed worker was nabbed at a security check-point set up by Browns jewellers at its head office in northern Johannesburg. Police said the man had stuffed an unspecified amount of gold into a roast chicken and was attempting to leave the premises when he was caught. A police spokesman, said the man appeared in court on Monday and was charged with attempted theft , the possession of suspected stolen goods and no doubt poor culinary skills. Didn’t anyone question why there would be a roast chicken in a posh jewellers?

It’s a good job he was only stealing gold as elsewhere in Africa this week a suspected chicken thief was treated more harshly. Angry residents of Nateta village in Kayunga district, in Uganda on Tuesday beheaded a man suspected to be a chicken thief. Buyinza Nyonjo, a resident of Busagazi village in Nazigo, was allegedly caught with the chicken believed to have been stolen from an unidentified owner in the area. The residents tied him up with ropes and chopped off his head using a sharp panga. The district criminal investigations department officer, John Dhabangi, said by the time the Police arrived at the scene, Nyonjo’s body was lying in a pool of blood, his head a metre away. “Residents took off on seeing the Police and we have not yet identified the owner of the alleged stolen chicken,” Dhabangi said. So they’re not yet ahead of the game.

Finally some more people with ruffled feathers over chicken this week were residents in Brooklyn New York. The Buffalo Wild Wings restaurant ran a 40 cent special on chicken wings and local teenagers flew in from everywhere. Unfortunately with all the excitement guns were fired and 3 teenagers ended up being shot. Local council member Letitia James had this to say “I question the marketing and management of this event, and ask that restaurants and mall management seriously re-evaluate security procedures for highly attended promotions such as the one held yesterday evening. It is my hope, and those of the community that the injured teens have a speedy recovery.” For once nobody blamed the chicken!

Is the fish fresh?

2009-11-19T20:35:00.000+02:00

What is wrong with the bloody Chinese? Not content with eating all manner of strange animals their latest culinary adventure is totally bizarre. It is not the first time that the Chinese have been criticised for their extreme eating habits. Reports have claimed some restaurants offer monkey's brains. Other dishes include rats, dogs, snakes, lizards and baby mice but it seems to me that the yellow peril are seriously deficient in grey matter! It’s reported that the latest Youtube hit is a video of a fish being eaten alive in a restaurant in China. If you need to see it it for yourself than find the link yourself cos’ I have no wish to further glorify this extreme pastime.In order to keep the carp alive, chefs cook its body but wrap its head in a wet cloth to keep it breathing, before covering it in sauce and serving in on a plate.
Stephen Fry was moved to pass comment on these strange eating habits and immediately raised the ire of the Chinese Government. A spokesman at the Chinese embassy in London responded: “I don’t think it is fair to accuse other cultures of having certain negative habits and traditions. We have our traditions, as the Spanish have bullfighting, and you, until recently, had foxhunting. We did not criticise you or the Spanish for this.” Unfortunately it’s not quite the same thing methinks whilst not endorsing either activity.

Walk the talk

2009-11-18T20:44:00.000+02:00

I reckon the easiest way to avoid confusion, frustration, even rage, is good communication. Keeping everyone informed of just what is happening or is about to happen has got to be the greatest no-brainer of all time but how come so many of our major suppliers just don’t get it? How come they’ve got all the slick slogans that run off the tongue plastered all over their corporate headquarters but they just don’t walk their talk?
It’s irritated and annoyed me for a long time so I’ve given the whole subject some thought and I think I’ve come up with the reason – vocabulary! You see they’re so bloody busy speaking their management-speak that they don’t realise that there are some words missing in our respective vocabularies. For example I don’t use the word “credit note”. I try to get it right the first time and can’t ever recall having to issue a credit note in my entire career. When my supplier screws up the first thing mentioned is a credit note, even before the apology “ Oh don’t worry we’ll send you a credit note” What am I supposed to do with the credit note? Feed an extra few customers? Is it too difficult to understand that I don’t want a credit note, I simply want you to get it right first time and if there is a problem have the balls to phone me and tell me without leaving some poor driver to get the brunt of my frustration.
A word I do use but which seems to be missing from many suppliers' vocabularies is passion. I’m passionate about what I do which is why like most chefs, I work fairly long hours, in trying conditions often with a bunch of neanderthals, and that's just the customers. Almost every supplier I deal with is finished for the day by 4.30pm, 3.30 pm on a Friday and is as passionate about their business as Ossy Osbourne is about 15 th century ecclesiastical artifacts. I've decided to buy my suppliers an Xmas gift this year. It will be the Oxford Dictionary with certain pages flagged and words underlined and with it I'll enclose an Xmas card explaining that I've decided to communicate in English with them for the next 12 months and that this may help them to understand what I mean when I use complicated words like service, quality, delivery time, reasonably priced, response and motherf#cker!

We'll have what they're having.......

2009-11-17T20:30:00.000+02:00

Bogota, Colombia is hardly renowned as being at the cutting edge of culinary innovation but some student chefs have managed to attract the attention of the world. Student chefs at the state culinary school in Quindio province have concocted a "love dessert," and the recipe calls for passion fruit ... and Viagra. So if you’re looking to get a rise out of your dinner guests then maybe this is an idea you could use.The four chefs, all male, have taste-tested their dessert and say each portion has about the same effect as one Viagra pill, but with a little less intensity.
"We got the idea four months ago when we were dealing with a nutrition project for older people," Juan Sebastian Gomez said at an international gastronomy fair on Thursday. "It occurred to us that we could use passion fruit, with all its connotations.. and Viagra, and we came up with this dessert," added Gomez, who along with his three colleagues is studying the culinary arts at college. Gomez said the new dessert was tried on a group of volunteers. "It's really an aphrodisiac. By trial and error we found out it works. We gave it to a group without telling them it contained Viagra. A second group was in the know and both experienced heightened libido," he said.The young chef said women have been the most enthusiastic about the dessert."They eat slowly, savouring every little spoonful. They take very small portions and after a few minutes begin to smile and confess that they feel delicious little tickles," he said. "We know it's an innovative idea that might seem crazy to some, but it's having success. Since it contains a medication, it requires delicate handling but we have always had medical and scientific accompaniment." They didn’t say what type of beverage to pair it with, but I would think a stiff drink would work!

You are who you eat

2009-11-16T20:24:00.000+02:00

You’ve got to be very careful what you write in these blogs otherwise people may get the wrong impression. Take Sean for example who cheerfully wrote to me “ I’ve just read an article about some human flesh ending up on a doner kebab stand and immediately thought of your blog” What the hell is the association between cannibals and me? I’m practically a vegetarian for cris'sake. I’ll admit to enjoying the odd nibble on female flesh but I’ve certainly never taken a bite out of one of the fairer sex and as for the not so fair sex I couldn’t imagine them tasting remotely interesting.
It seems three homeless men in the Russian city of Perm ( soon to be renamed Perve) topped a 25 year old man, consumed the juicy parts (whatever they may be) and sold the rest to a pirogi and doner kebab stand where it was offered to customers. I have read other references to underground restaurants serving long pig or human flesh but by definition they are rather secretive and protective of their more adventurous clientele. Obviously no modern restaurant could get away with serving human meat on a regular basis. A couple of years ago a Chinese restaurant in Brussels was closed down after horrified health inspectors found body-parts belonging to several women in the freezer. Police were forced to admit that such things happen more often than is widely suspected and they advised patrons to stay clear of the No 27. But the really interesting thing about the whole subject is just how would we taste? Iberian ham is highly prized because the pigs feed on acorns, grass fed beef is better than corn fed, salt meadow lamb has a distinctly salty flavour and so on. Do Indians taste spicy with a hint of coriander? Frenchmen should be tender having been pickled in red wine but they are so full of venom that I’m sure there would be a bitter aftertaste. Americans would certainly be more fatty than Brits and would the greasy Italians just be too unpalatable? Please note this is only conjecture and I don’t think I’ll go any further down this road lest I get a visit from the pigs...police, I mean police.

Sunday afternoon at the bioscope

2009-11-15T21:06:00.002+02:00

The Two Ronnies at their absolute best. FeedBlitz subscribers should visit the site to view this gem.

Dilly Diner of the Week

2009-11-14T20:18:00.000+02:00

Talk about life imitating art...... the Two Ronnies once did a sketch about a restaurant which only served rook, rook soup, rook pate, roast rook etc now this week’s Dilly Diner, a restaurant in Østre Bolærne, an archipelago on the outer fringe of the Oslo Fjord, has decided on menu innovation to attract new diners
Manager Rolf Bjarne Sund is not sure if the new additions of crow and seagull to the menu will be a definite hit with visitors, but hopes they will give the rare items a try, newspaper Tønsberg Blad reports.
"It has something to do with the feeling that this (crow) is not a clean bird," Sund admitted. "But it is incredibly good. It tastes like chicken with a hint of game. And it is safe to eat," Sund told the newspaper.
The restaurant has already advertised their 'Christmas buffet with a difference', and the chef has prepared both crow and seagull in a variety of sauces. Sund checked long ago that it was legal to hunt the common birds.
Sund has other plans as well, and needs to double visitors to the island in order to have enough overnight stays and tourist income. Trout fishing, a skating rink and a mountaineering wall are a few of the coming attractions.

That Was The Week That Was

2009-11-13T20:33:00.000+02:00

Heston was hitting the headlines again this week as he revealed plans for his Christmas show. Previously in the news when hundreds of his customers got sick - now Heston Blumenthal is planning to serve up whale vomit. The chef, who made his name with his odd food experiments, will serve up the delicacy on his Channel 4 Christmas special. Whale sick - known as ambergris - costs up to £10,000 per kilo. Heston said: "Pound for pound, ambergris is more expensive than gold." Sperm whales create it to coat sharp food in their stomachs, then expel it into the sea. Heston tested it on a panto's cast in a chocolate milkshake, then made ambergris and caviar for guests. Heston said: "It will be the most expensive Christmas dish ever." The chef will also serve up dormouse bottom and flavoured snow on Heston's Christmas Feast next month. There used to be a joke about mermaid’s tit on toast – it’s not funny anymore!

Staying with the subject of whales the Russians were pressurised this week by environmentalists and Pamela Anderson into doing their bit to save the whales or bits of them anyway. Apparently they have just brought out a perfectly hideous $1.45 million bulletproof SUV with gold trim, a ridiculously expensive Vertu cellphone and three bottles of premium vodka. This bizarre story starts in Russia with a company called Dartz, which recently unveiled the Pombron Monaco Red Diamond Edition SUV. Yes, that’s the official name of this four-ton motorized bank vault. But what really stood out was the whale-penis leather seats. As you can imagine, greenies got more than a bit miffed by the idea.Whatever the case, Dartz has scuttled the exotic material It’s just put out a press release, signed by a fellow by the name of Leonard F. Yankelovich (no title given), with the hilarious all-caps title, “ARMOURED CAR WITHOUT PENIS. LET’S SAVE THE WHALES.” Yes, Leonard, let’s!

Other whales being saved this week inhabit Huntingdon West Virginia where cheeky chappie Jamie Oliver is on the prowl. This town has the dubious honour of being the fattest and most unhealthy town in the USA and therefore perfect fodder for Jamie’s latest culinary crusade all filmed in glorious technicolour for gastro-voyeurs. The format is all too familiar with the chef on the white charger changing the dietary habits of a lifetime in 45 minutes punctuated by 3 commercial breaks. Spectacular results guaranteed until the cameras are packed away and the smoke and mirrors show heads of into the sunset seeking out some more reality.

An apple a month

2009-11-12T19:31:00.001+02:00

I’m not convinced that this is such a great idea – an apple that doesn’t rot! I’m sure by the time it gets into your local Mr A’s fine emporium it will have a more user friendly name than RS103-130 but will you reach out to pick up an apple that can stay fresh for months at a time? Researchers at Australia’s Queensland Primary Industries and Fisheries have been developing this rare cross-breed for the past 20 years, and have finally, by incorporating a gene from a black-spot resistant Asiatic apple, been able to maintain the fruit’s longevity.
The team behind RS103-130 says the product is not lacking in taste. Note that this is not the same as saying that it tastes fantastic. Why mess with a good thing, you ask? The thinking behind RS103-130 is two-fold. First, it will save producers money they would have spent on preventative sprays. Secondly, it will make storing the apples more energy-efficient and since there’s a huge environmental cost in running the cold stores to keep the apples fresh if you had a variety that required less cold storing, that would be valuable. Today the apple, tomorrow the fish or steak, pretty soon one of life’s last great pleasures will disappear - clearing out the fridge on a Monday morning!