Kitsch'n'Zinc

The Cape Gourmet Food Show is on at the moment so we have the usual band of gypsies visiting our shores. Culinary missionaries provided by Gourmet God, BBC Food are featured daily in our newspapers, smiling obligingly in the most ridiculous poses for the camera. Most of them stick strictly to the PR line.....how wonderful it is to be here.......how they're looking forward to working with local ingredients and so on, whilst others tell the truth.
Stefan Gates, erstwhile presenter of Full on Food tells the truth. He explains that he has visited Cape Town before and on previous occasions and this trip people seem hell bent of feeding him minute portions of indeterminate foodstuffs and the closest he got to experiencing anything remotely South African was being offered a Smiley, a roasted sheep's head, in one of the townships. I agree with Stefan totally. I don't for one minute advocate that we start serving Smileys in our better restaurants but I do think we should be serving South African food instead of paying lip service to it. Tourists seldom get to enjoy the rich flavours of a Malva Pudding before some idiot decides to add a new twist and serve it deep fried with a lavender emulsion. For crissake let's get our Old South African Cuisine right before we start worrying about a New South African Cuisine.

Chicago hasn't got a great record at this Prohibition lark. First it was liquor and all that happened was a lot of speakeasies and bootleg booze and then a few years ago they decided to have a pop at foie gras in another ill-advised bout of prohibition. Now I don't particularily think foie gras deserves the adulation that it receives and maybe it could be argued that the production methods leave a lot to be desired but to ban it on a city by city basis seems to me to be totally absurd. Anyway Chicago chefs and gourmets can breath easily again since the ban has now been lifted by the city administration.
For nearly two years, foie gras fans in Chicago slipped into "duckeasies" to indulge in their banned delight. Some chefs got around the ban by not selling it but by giving it away for free - not a particularily sound business model - and others such a Chef Didier Durand who as co-founder of Chicago Chefs for Choice led the fight against the foie-gras ban, admitted "We also had a club called Turtle Soup where people were handing (us) turtle business cards and that meant they wanted foie gras," The ban became a cause celebre among those who opposed government intervention in culinary decisions and even Mayor Richard Daley repeatedly called the ban "silly" and said it made Chicago "the laughingstock of the nation" but was, until now, unable to convince council members to repeal the ban.

A chef died last Saturday - nothing unusual in that I guess. What was unusual was that the event only warranted 2 news articles on the net. Another chef opened his big mouth about the use of vegetables out of season and that provoked 190 news articles. Strange old world eh ? Paul Haeberlin left us at 84 years of age and His Gordoness shot off his mouth about bloody asparagus.
Paul Haeberlin, whose restaurant, the Auberge de l’Ill, has long been a shrine to classical French cuisine and has served as a training ground for such renowned chefs as Jean-Georges Vongerichten gained his stars before Gordo was even born. Mr. Haeberlin’s innovative spin on classical French cuisine helped transform his family’s modest restaurant on the Ill River in Alsace into a culinary powerhouse that received its first Michelin star in 1952 and a second star five years later. It was awarded the maximum three stars in 1967 and has held on to them ever since, a streak surpassed by only one other restaurant, Paul Bocuse, near Lyon.
Many of the dishes that won Mr. Haeberlin his stars remain on the menu, notably the saumon soufflé Auberge de l’Ill, a salmon filet beneath a fluffy layer of beaten egg whites flavored with pike and nutmeg in a cream and Riesling sauce, and the redoubtable “truffle under ashes,” a whole Périgord truffle wrapped in foie gras and packed into a pastry case. Most people never heard of him, after all he shunned publicity and refused to come out of his kitchen but he counted among his admirers the Queen Mother; Diana, Princess of Wales; François Mitterrand; Johnny Halliday; and Sir Bobby Charlton. He had passed over the reins of his kitchen to his son Marc but up until last year he still insisted on coming in daily to prepare lunch for the staff. Somehow I can't see motormouth ever doing anything like that.

They're fiendishly clever these bloody Japanese. Not content with turning the entire world into sushi addicts they've now come up with a plan to ensure that fatties everywhere can diet with ease and with not a piece of raw fish in sight. What will be in sight will be the food that you normally eat and all you have to do to make the kilos slide away is to wear a pair of sunglasses.
Now that doesn't seem to be too much of a hardship since many people seem content to dine whilst wearing sunglasses anyway, albeit on top of their heads for some obscure reason. But for this diet to work you must wear the sunglases in a more conventional manner. A Japanese company named Yumetai seems to have given some serious thought to the matter, creating dieter's sunglasses with deep blue lenses that make the food you're eating look, well, disgusting.There's more to it than that - according to Yumetai, there's a scientific explanation behind these sunglasses and the lenses are blue for a very good reason: the color blue acts to calm the brains appetite centre. At the same time, the lenses block rays of red light which tend to stimulate the appetite. Make sense? I don't know but one thing is for sure, there's a good reason why you don't come across any blue food !

A lot of people I know understand the benefits of eating a healthy diet but are just bewildered the moment they enter one of Mr A's Food Emporia. What happens if they pick up the wrong item off the shelves ? Will it be more or less healthy than what they had been eating previously ? And what do all these labels mean ?
Working your way around a supermarket is actually fairly simple. The best advice is to steer clear of the centre because that's where all the noisy food is. What you want is the periphery where you'll generally find fruit and vegetables and fresh produce, fresh meat, fresh fish and bakery. This is all quiet food, the type you should be eating - it doesn't scream out at you, 100% pure apple, it doesn't have to because you can see it's 100% pure apple. By contrast the noisy, processed food has to attract your attention so the labels will try to woo you with promises like " reduced fat ", the question is of course, reduced from what ? Then there's heart smart, low calorie, all natural, vitamin enriched and all the rest of the labels screaming for your attention. Isn't it strange that you never see any of them applied to the apple ?

Beware the dubious hotel buffet is the message in this clip from Mr Bean as he spends a weekend away. FeedBlitz subscribers may have to visit the site to view.

Sadly this week's Dilly Diner is no longer open but it is such a bizarre concept that it it worthy of mention. Sehnsucht,(means longing in German and is sometimes translated as hunger) was the name of a Berlin restaurant for anorexics. Sited in the heart of Berlin's trendy Tiergarten district, where cozy cafés and sprawling "biergartens" nestle alongside elegant eateries, Sehnsucht offered the very thing anorexics avoid -- food
Owner Katja Eichbaum, formerly anorexic, started this project with her father's support as a therapy for her own condition. The chef and several members of staff were anorexic also. The menu, for instance, steered clear of describing dishes, preferring instead to stick with generic, nongastronomic names. So the lobster bisque was called "Hallo," the cappuccino creme dessert named "Seele" ("Soul"), and rack of lamb bore the menu description "Ravenous." Portions were neither gigantic nor minuscule, merely "normal." And there was absolutely no mention of calories anywhere on the menu. One item on the menu consisted simply of a fork, knife, and an empty plate. It was titled ‘Thieves Platter’ and allowed the anorexic diner to steal (or share) from those dining with her.