Carrots with attitude

Now I don’t know what led them down this track but researchers at the Agricultural Research Service in the US have come up with a new scam to get you to eat your veggies – fashionable coloured carrots available in a palette of totally unexpected colours including yellow, dark orange, bright red and even purple.The flashy colours of these carrots will dress up any dull meal but of course more than that is required to justify that these Frankenfarm creations have a place in our daily diets and so the official spiel is that the yellow carrots promote good eye health, the red ones claim to guard against heart attacks and some cancers, if you want something to shake up the free radicals in your system then check out the purple carrots and as for the dark orange, well the dark orange are really pretty aren’t they?
Pretty stupid if you ask me! Every health promoting pigment artificially introduced into these carrots is readily available in other vegetables such as tomatoes and beetroots. If I want 75% more beta carotene in my diet then I’ll eat more normal carrots. I’m actually quite happy with normal carrots – I can see them in the dark by candlelight in romantic restaurants. I know when it’s pulverised into a puree or foam or emulsion and that if it’s purple then it’s got to be beetroot and if we’re going to colour code our carrots will blue ones signify that they’ve been lying around the kitchen for a while and are freezing cold?
The other issue to my mind is exactly what is the consumer looking for in a coloured carrot? There is no source of reference so should the purple one’s be sweet and mild or more strongly flavoured? How about the deep red ?  – carroty or more tomatoey ? We have the technology, we can make them taste of lobster if you want !
Of course, like everything else in the food world, there is nothing new in fashion carrots. Purple and yellow carrots were eaten more than 1,000 years ago in Afghanistan and more or less fell out of favour but now they have been revived and intensively cultivated for a jaded market constantly seeking out the next big taste sensation, the new kiwi fruit or peppedew, the culinary cliche waiting to adorn restaurant plates across the nation and the new darling of food editors and food stylists everywhere.

Sunday Snapshot

New York City, in its continuing fight against obesity, reintroduced a measure to force chain restaurants to display calorie information on their menus or menu boards, after a federal judge struck down a similar measure last month. The new regulation would apply to all restaurants operating in the city that have 15 or more outlets here or across the country.

TV chef Jamie Oliver is following his healthy school meals crusade with a dig at restaurants.He hit out at high street chains as he announced plans to open “affordable” Italian establishments.Oliver claims a lot of restaurant food is too dear and not good enough. He aims to cater for diners grabbing a quick breakfast or lunch or wanting a pre-cinema evening meal – with fresh pasta dishes from £5. “It’s always been a desire of mine to tackle the issue of the quality of high street dining,” he said.

A Thai restaurant’s potent homemade chilli sauce caused a chemical scare in central London, with police shutting streets and firefighters forced to smash down the door. Streets were cordoned off outside the Thai Cottage restaurant in London’s Soho theatre and nightlife district. “It was initially thought to be a chemical problem. Somebody smelled what they thought was chemicals. So we went there, cordoned it off and assisted the fire brigade,” a police spokesman said. The ambulance service dispatched a Hazardous Area Response Team unit. Firefighters dressed in special suits broke down the doors and discovered the source of the smell: chef Chalemchai Tangjariyapoon’s fiery signature nam prik pao chilli sauce. The chef was baffled by the commotion. “I was making a spicy dip with extra-hot chillis that are deliberately burnt. To us, it smells like burnt chilli and it is slightly unusual,”

Delia Smith is ready to quit her role as Norwich’s main director. One of football’s most famous boardroom personalities, Delia boasts £8million in shares. But she is set to hand over the club within the next month to a couple who own a multi-million pound mortgage-lending company. The celebrity TV cook, Norwich’s joint majority shareholder with husband Michael Wynn-Jones, has been looking for outside investment for the last year. Currently filming her latest TV series, she is likely to remain on the Carrow Road club’s board but is keen to take a back seat along with Wynn-Jones.

That Was The Week That Was

The English may have lost the World Cup to South Africa last weekend but the occasion did present lots of opportunities for London’s foodies who often have difficulty in securing a table at one of the capital’s top restaurants.The eyes of tens of millions of rugby fans was fixed on television screens but, for thousands of families who could not care less about the pursuit of sporting glory, an unusually hassle-free Saturday night was in store if they take the opportunity to grab seats in restaurants and theatres which would usually be fully booked. There were still tables to be had at Gordon Ramsay’s Savoy Grill in London, Rick Stein’s Seafood Restaurant in Padstow, Cornwall, and Marco Pierre White’s Yew Tree Inn in Highclere, Berkshire. Places were also available at other distinguished eateries, such as The Waterside Inn in Bray, Berkshire, and Le Gavroche and Hakkasan in London.
Meanwhile Mr Pierre White’s new restaurant at Chelsea Football Club is attracting rave reviews. The menu is a long way from pie and gravy featuring ragout of shellfish with herbs, Dover sole a la Nicoise with al dente saffron potatoes and braised pig’s trotter aux morilles pomme mousseline with essence de morille – football stadium food was never like this. I just hope the fans don’t get too used to it and expect to find it at our soccer grounds in 2010 !
Of course the menu at this upmarket establishment includes some very traditional working class British dishes such as haddock and chips and shepherd’s pie but he has come under fire from football fans for selling fish and chips for a staggering £40 a head. Marco Pierre White replied: “We are not taking advantage of anyone. Just because it says fish and chips, does not mean that we are serving the same sort of fish and chips that they would serve in a chip shop. We are buying big fish, which cost real money and I don’t expect Joe Bloggs to realise that.” Ah, the artist is always misunderstood.

The most useful cookbook

I’m normally very wary of what supermarkets say about food. Maybe I’m just a cynic or maybe they’ve got a slightly different agenda to me. Whatever the reason I don’t normally take them as my primary source of reference. That philosophy becomes even more important when they stray into the totally unrelated world of publishing and start pumping out third rate gastro porn magazines expounding their thoughts on food There’s no sense naming the South African ones because generally they’re pretty one dimensional but I have enjoyed Food Illustrated on one or two occasions, which is published by Waitrose in the UK. But all good things come to an end and when they held a survey  to find the most useful cookery book of all time I’m afraid they also drifted off my radar screen.
The most useful cookery book of all time, now there’s a thought to conjure with. Could it be the one written by Apicius in the 1 st century AD, it was certainly the most useful at the time since it was the first cookbook we know of ? What about Le Viandier by Guillaume Tirel, Head Cook of Charles V of France, written in the late 1200’s it dominated the culinary scene for centuries ? Today’s cookbook authors are lucky to dominate our thoughts for minutes ! Then in 1393 Le Mesnagier de Paris, being a set of instructions from a bourgeois mid fifty year old nobleman to his 15 year old orphan bride, took up where Le Viandier left off and was the first of it’s kind cookbook offering advice to young housewives, a format which was to remain common until the 20 th century. Successors which were equally useful were to include Eliza Smith’s The Compleat Housewife, Meg Dodd’s Cook and Housewife’s Manual, Fanny Farmer’s Boston Cook Book and the inimitable Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management which was ground breaking insofar as it was the first cookbook to include the detailed weights of ingredients along with costings, a monumental undertaking at the time. What about Grimod de la Reyniere’s Almanach des Gourmands published in 1803. Grimod was also a trail blazer being the world’s first food journalist and his book was a collection of cooking, history and opinion and was followed about 20 years later by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s Physiology of Taste, also a new type of cookbook, more philosophic and full of literary musings.
I could see that the supermarket chiefs had set themselves a momumental task especially moving on to the last century when grand dining became very popular and cookbooks were produced in greater profusion. There was of course the encyclopaedic Larousse Gastronomique which Waitrose dismissed as ” the most useless cookbook we have ever come across, overrated, stuffy and esoteric ” so now the High Street purveyors of baked beans and candyfloss bread were beginning to show their true colours. Also ignored were three indispensable bibles to professional chefs, Le Repertoire, Herings and Pauli which between them contain more useful culinary knowledge than the total of everything ever published by or likely to be published by every supermarket chain in the world.
There were another 20 or so titles I could pick out of my personal library which I felt could be worthy contenders as most useful cookbook so what was the mighty tome which Waitrose selected ? What beat off stiff competition, what was deemed to be the most indispensible title for the kitchen ? It seems it was ” Roast Chicken and Other Stories” by Simon Hopkinson. Simon who ? Well I suppose we can thank them for small mercies, at least it wasn’t Gordon Ramsay.

Menu anxiety

We live in a wonderful world of creativity where someone, somewhere, is capable of identifying every single obscure condition that the human being could possibly suffer from, real or imagined. A new report just out in the UK claims that 50% of restaurant customers are baffled by fancy terms on restaurant menus and are totally unaware that caramelised shallot tarte tatin is good old onion pie or that steak tartare does not come well done and is actually raw mince. The name given to this growing condition is ” menu anxiety “. Don’t laugh, 15 years ago no-one had a peanut allergy or was lactose intolerant or if they were, we just didn’t have a name for it !
Apparently, rather than display their ignorance and ask the waiter for a translation or explanation of the ingredients, they will simply order the dish they most easily recognise regardless of what they would like to eat on the evening. Common menu hurdles were foie gras, endive and chevre and researchers found that of two menus offered, one in poetic menu language and the other in plain english, people ordered things like steak and creamy potato bake instead of chateaubriand with gratin potatoes.
I don’t think there’s anything new about this ” menu anxiety “, I’m sure that I’ve been suffering from it for many years although with me it tends to manifest itself slightly differently. My ” menu anxiety ” has nothing to do with an understanding of what is written on the menu, that bit’s relatively easy – no, what makes me anxious is, after having read the menu and placed the order, I start thinking to myself ” Now what the hell are they going to bring me ?”

Fruit or Veg ?

So what’s the difference between fruit and veg ? Why is it that some products we consider to be vegetables, for example tomatoes, are in fact fruit and some that we consider to be fruits eg rhubarb, are in fact vegetables ? And more importantly who the hell cares ?
A tested definition of a fruit is the ripened seed bearing part of a plant when fleshy and edible. So the fruit is any fleshy material covering a seed or seeds so therefore eggplants, tomatoes, cucumber, marrows, pumpkins and butternut are all fruits. Vegetables on the other hand are herbaceous plants cultivated for an edible part such as roots, stems, leaves or flowers placing rhubarb firmly in the realm of vegetables. Now the reason that this is so important is that researchers have recently discovered that fruit fans differ from vegetable lovers so before you start empathising with their results you better really understand where you stand in the fruit and vegetable stakes.
Vegetable lovers favour spicy foods, drink wine with their meals and will cook elaborate dishes for friends. Sweet toothed fruit fans plump for puddings, entertain fewer guests and are less adventurous in the kitchen. I don’t why they spent so much time and money to discover this astounding information but if nothing else comes of it then at least it will keep me amused in the queue at Mr A’s as I check out the basket of the person in front of me – is that a fruit or a vegetable ?……..on balance are there more fruits or more vegetables?………how many bottles of wine are lurking under those floppy spinach leaves ?……..why has this oke only got boerewors ? I reckon it’s going to keep me enthralled for hours.

Living in a chicken world

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 !

Kids in restaurants

I’m all for kids in restaurants, just not the one’s I’m in ! That may sound a bit harsh but I’ve given it a lot of thought and I can’t come up with any logical reason why anyone would want to bring kids into the restaurants where I like to eat. There are plenty of restaurants which cater for the little buggers why not take them there ? Why do parents insist on inflicting their problems on everyone else ? Go to Spur Steakhouse for goodness sake, they love kids, they have balloons and colouring in books and silly service staff who delight in congregating around your table singing Happy Birthday and gazing adoringly at your offspring as they struggle to blow out the candles on what passes as a birthday cake. Here’s the deal – you stay out of my space and I’ll stay out of yours.
Of course there are those enlightened folks who believe that educating the next generation of diners should start early and I wholeheartedly agree. Teach your children good table manners, introduce them to quality cooked food which is healthy and not junk food but do it on your turf, not mine. Don’t come into an adult’s restaurant and ask for the kiddie’s menu because there shouldn’t be one and even worse, don’t ask for a half portion of the fillet steak because what the hell is the chef going to do with the other half ? Wait for another rugrat to come in ? Smart restaurants deserve smart diners not whiners who moan ” But he’ll only eat a few chips and a bit of meat ” If that’s the case then take him to MacDonalds, trhey understand their market totally and will even dish up the tomato ketchup with a smile and not a grimace.

Sunday Snapshot

So what did the average English supporter do while he was waiting for the Rugby World Cup Final to start? Have a bloody braai of course ! They don’t call it a braai, it’s a barbeque,  sounds so much more sophisticated doesn’t it ? And they don’t braai boeries, they have Cumberland sausages, much grander sounding but that’s because few of them dare venture into one of the South African strongholds in South West London to seek out the real thing. Wimbledon alone is home to 45,000 South Africans who all make the pilgrimage to David Lowin’s butchery in Blackheath to pick up the best boeries in London. Poor old David and his staff have been working flat out for the  last week to satisy World Cup fever.
South African Prue Leith, well known foodie and head of the School Food Trust in the UK, came up with a novel way to combat the junk food problem in Britain’s schools.  She advocated this week the locking-in of school children at lunch time to force them to eat healthy grub and not nip out to the local burger joint. A recent report claimed more than 400,000 fewer meals are now being served a day in schools since junk food was restricted last year, following Jamie Oliver’s campaign.

It would be too easy to blame the early exit from the World Cup of the All Blacks to cause some toddlers in New Zealand to be foaming at the mouth but the real reason is a little bit more bizarre. On Wednesday a woman arrived at the Palmerston North centre to find her 14-month-old grandson eating foam that had been spread on his highchair.  The woman asked a teacher whether it was whipped cream, and was told it was shaving foam that staff had spread it on toddlers’ trays to teach them the difference between good and bad food. Maybe these strange eating habits, ingrained at such an early age, were the real cause of the alleged stomach cramps experienced by the All Blacks the last time South Africa won the World Cup.

That Was The Week That Was

Just as it seemed that His Gordoness was coming up smelling of roses after being awarded 2 Michelin stars for his New York restaurant and garnering another award by Zagat the very next day as Newcomer of the Year ,you could be excused for thinking that he was vindicated after receiving poor reviews from the critics………however, in a more sober assessment, the NYTimes observes that the restaurant “was named the top newcomer in Zagat, but got 25 points and was not even in the top 50 for food” (emphasis added). (Or as the NYPost puts it: “If you think Gordon Ramsay’s two Michelin stars are a joke, you can turn to Zagat for comfort; Zagat doesn’t include it in its top 50 ranking for food”.) Two questions arise: 1) Why has Tim Zagat been hyping Ramsay’s result as a success for the sweary one, when any rational analysis of the survey results suggests that, in its own terms, the place is a failure? 2) Why has Michelin gone out on such a limb to bless Gordon Ramsay at the London, when the evidence of both the local critics and many local restaurant-goers is that the restaurant is so far from remarkable? Surely the two guides can’t be hoping to curry favour with Gordo just because he’s become a big deal in the media? Perish the thought.
Another critic at odds with a celeb chef this week was famously outspoken food critic           

Michael Winner who was refused entry to celebrity chef Jean-Christophe Novelli’s new restaurant. Winner had booked a table for lunch at the fiery Frenchman’s gastropub The White Horse, in Harpenden, Herts, but was greeted with a message that he was not welcome. Novelli, the star of reality TV show Hell’s Kitchen, said the writer and film director had in the past upset many of his friends, staff and customers with his “rude and pompous attitude”. Speaking from Andalucia in Spain, Novelli said: “I’ve been waiting a long time for this moment. The chef said he would consider letting Winner have something to eat in the bar of his new restaurant if he apologised to the people he had “hurt” in the past.
Meanwhile Novelli has been posing for one of those charity calendars that have become such a popular and easy way of raising funds. Jean Christophe, who has been voted one of the UK’s sexiest chefs along with Marco Pierre White, has agreed to pose for the 2008 Pet Pawtraits celebrity calendar for the PDSA (the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals), which is this year celebrating its 90th anniversary. Unfortunately for his female fans there will be no nudity in this project as Novelli poses with his pet Dobermans Missy, Obie and Snoopy.

TODAY IS INTERNATIONAL CHEFS DAY

KEEP IT COOKING CHEFS EVERYWHERE