Dilly Diner of the Week

Imagine boarding a plane without security checks or even tickets and more importantly, there's more than just beef or chicken for dinner. This week's Dilly Diner is set in a dull commercial building in central Taipei, the A380 In-Flight Kitchen looks and functions like an airline in many ways, expect that it serves a regular restaurant menu of Western food, sometimes in plastic trays.
Waitresses dressed as flight attendants take meal orders for filet mignon or waffles, as well as the customary fish and chicken. Staff say "welcome aboard" to customers and issue boarding passes to those who must wait for a table. Of the 84 seats, 20 are "first class" or set aside for groups with advanced bookings, and the place is often overbooked - just like real airplanes!

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That Was The Week That Was

Do TV Chefs make good businessmen? Last week it was Anthony Wibbly Wobbly who was forced to close one of his outlets and this week the sword of Damocles fell on Irish celeb chef Paul Rankin. Rankin, the first Ulster chef to be awarded a Michelin star and the man credited with reviving Ulster's culinary landscape, has been served with bankruptcy papers. He formerly owned a string of leading Belfast restaurants and cafes although recently they have all been sold off and he is now back behind the stoves at his sole remaining restaurant Cayenne in Belfast city centre. He stressed to the press that he was "a million miles" from being declared bankrupt over what he described as a "small debt" which would be "looked at".


Meanwhile across the pond in New York, John Doherty, who was at the Waldorf-Astoria for 30 years, and executive chef for 23 of them, has left. “It was frustrating,” he said. “I couldn’t do anything else, they wanted me in the kitchen all the time." What bizarre concept, expecting the chef to be in the kitchen? He continued to whine "I couldn’t do TV. It was frustrating”. My heart bleeds for you John. He has teamed up with a few investors and they plan to open a restaurant in New York this summer. I hope they don't expect him to roll his sleeves up there!


Surely the daftest idea of the week has got to be the UK government's iniative to order manufacturers to shrink the size of chocolate bars and fizzy drinks. Health Secretary Alan Johnson will tell firms such as Mars, Coca-Cola, Britvic and Nestlé that smaller versions of their products should be available in all garages and corner shops to help stop people piling on weight. I reckon the answer to the problem lies in proper food education from an early age not encouraging people to have 2 choc bars because they are so small inside oversized packaging. Why aren't they considering the carbon footprint of all that unecesary packaging not to mention the extra profits the manufacturers will make by downsizing their products and not their prices.

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Out of touch

It's time reality TV chefs got back in touch with the real world, a view endorsed by the chief of ASDA, one of the UK's major supermarket chains. It's all very well jumping on their high horses and preaching to the shoppers that they should buy organic this and that, seek out free range chickens and eggs and give the odd tree a hug but the harse reality for most families is that most families are worse off than they were a year ago.
ASDA’s Andy Bond says food shows by Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall are out of step with the new, frugal mood of the nation. “That’s why it sticks in my throat a little when highly-paid celebrity chefs make sweeping assumptions about what people can afford, and preach to them about how they should choose to spend their hard-earned money,” says Mr Bond. Hear, hear Mr Bond. The first problem I reckon is a chicken in every one's pot and then we can bloody worry about how these poor dumb animals are raised, let's get our priorities right here, feed the humans and then salve our consciences about battery reared chickens. In a series of TV programmes called the Great British Food Fight, the cheeky Essex chappie, Jamie, who can earn TWO million pounds from a cookery book, lifts the lid on pig rearing and pork production in his Jamie Saves Our Bacon. And Eton-educated Hugh Fairly Dipstick continues his drive to improve chicken welfare in Chickens, Hugh and Tesco Too. Even the mad scientist, the Michelin-starred Heston Blumenthal tries to breathe new life into the Little Chef chain of roadside diners. Andy Bond says “Hugh wants you to pay more for your chicken, after all who can’t afford an extra £1 or so? Jamie wants to save our bacon. And Heston wants Little Chef customers to swap egg and chips for Earl Grey foam on a bed of quail egg couscous. Was I the only one who found Hugh’s manner patronising to the single mum who should pay more for higher welfare chicken?” he asks. I reckon he hit the nail right on the head, wake up and smell the chicken shit.

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One lump or two?

Life is full of little mysteries like why do they put ice in the gent's urinals? I'm directing my queries to the male population because I hope I don't have any female readers who a) know what I'm talking about and/or b) frequent gent's loos.
Your field of vision is somewhat limited in the average bog. It's good manners to stare straight ahead at some imaginary spot on the wall. Glancing to the right or left is definitely frowned upon, especially should your gaze descend upon your neighbour's wedding tackle, so really the only thing the thinking man can do is look down into the urinal itself and wonder why the hell it's always full of bloody ice cubes? One theory is that somehow the cooling effect of the ice on a hot stream of urine prevents unwelcome odours but if that is the case how come ladies loos (I'm led to believe) are ice free zones? Another school of thought is that in extreme drinking circumstances the numerous ice cubes act as a sort of buffer and prevent serious splashback, a distinct possibility as most males tend to hug the urinal rather than be classed as a long distance pisser. There are of course those who delight in a stand off position to intimidate the chap in the next urinal. Intrigued by this mystery i undertook some extensive research which led me to a publication called "The Guide to the Urinal" by Sam Mac and Chris Llennarg who claim that it is an old East African custom of shoveling half a bucket of ice cubes into the urinal. It provides the user with a uniquely pleasing audio-visual experience, which, when well lit, gives off a kaleidoscope of colour and sound. The custom is marvelous in its own right, but is thought to derive from competing hotels showing off their wealth. Two hotels, either side of Victoria Falls, in Zimbabwe and Zambia respectively, both employ this technique. In countries that regularly spend month upon month in sweltering heat, it is clearly thought to be a sign of opulence to be able to utilise ice in this way.

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Delia the dolphin

One of the beauties about writing this blog is that regular readers, if there is such a thing, find material for you. They are skimming through the net and suddenly come across something weird or bizarre and think to themselves "Aha now that's just the sort of rubbish that Brian likes writing about" and so I am indebted to Staci for the following story on dolphins. For everyone else who feels compelled to engage in this dubious practice I have one word of advice - for God's sake get a life!
It seems that Australian scientists have declared dolphins to be the foodies of the ocean, because of their specific and complicated measures to purge cuttlefish of ink and bone. Move over Nemo, you're not as smart as you think. The dolphin displays chef like skills when prepping a cuttlefish for consumption. Once a female dolphin has chased a cuttlefish out into a central location it is then quickly dispatched with a rapid downward thrust and a "loud audible click" as the rigid cuttlebone is broken. The dolphin then raises the body up and strikes it with her nose to bleed dry the poisonous black ink that cuttlefish uses as a defense mechanism. The dolphin then scrapes the body on the sand to clean out the remains, making the cuttlefish ready for consumption. Now I can't see that this is any different from how most predators set about their evening meal and I don't know too many chefs who display this type of behavior in the kitchen but put a human character onto the lovable dolphin and we're all suckers.

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Cheese n' onion

Women are from Venus and men like Mars Bars or something like that I'm led to believe. I'm not so sure cos' I never read the book. I don't do this "New Age" stuff a lot, in fact forcing the odd bit of quiche down my throat is pretty much as far as it gets.Anyway scientists at Firmenich, a company in Geneva that researches flavours and smells for the food and perfume industry, have come up with some other differences between the sexes following extensive research. It seems men are cheese and women are onion!
What they did was to take samples of armpit sweat from 24 men and 25 women after they had spent time in a sauna or 15 minutes on an exercise bike. When the samples were analysed, the team found those from women contained high amounts of an odourless sulphur-containing compound, according to New Scientist magazine. When this mixed with bacteria usually found under the arm, it was transformed into a chemical called thiol, well known for its onion-like smell. Men however sweat in a different way - scientists found high levels of an odourless fatty acid which released a cheesy smell when exposed to enzymes produced by bacteria in the armpits. Now I wouldn't read too much into these results since the subjects were all Swiss and they're a fairly sanitised bunch, even their cheeses are rather mild. But it does raise the opportunity to develop deodorants aimed specifically at men or women and I'm thinking along the lines of brown bread and butter here.
Not all scientists are convinced the experiment can be repeated outside Switzerland however as people have different diets and genes elsewhere in the world. Professor Tim Jacob, who researches the science of smell at Cardiff University, said: “Other factors include what you eat, what you wash with, what you wear and what genes you inherit.” So it seems that in the UK it could be Fish and Chips, in France, Frogs Legs and Reblochon, in the US, Burgers and Tomato Ketchup and in India, Vindaloo and Chutney - I'll leave you to figure out the genders.

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Sunday afternoon at the bioscope

Here's a clip of the original restaurant sketch by the Monty Python team - pure magic! FeedBlitz subscribers should visit the site to view.

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