Making a beeline

You’ve really got to hand it to the major food retailers they’re constantly looking for a new way to press our emotional buttons. Take Sainsburys in the UK for example who are reaching out to all tree huggers. They’ve already set up their new eco-store in Dursley, Gloucestershire in the midst of one of the UK’s main fruit and vegetable growing regions although I’m not sure about the logic of trying to cut down on foodmiles by getting closer to the source of supply but at the same time encouraging your target market to increase their carbon footprint by driving in their thousands to your store whilst polluting what was previously peaceful countryside that’s one for the treehuggers to figure out!
Anyway in an effort perhaps to occupy their minds with more pleasant thoughts Sainsbury’s recently announced plans to install bee hotels on land around the store. Their beekeeping efforts are aimed at helping to improve crop pollination in the area. Sainsbury's Environment Manager, Jack Cunningham explains: "The rapid decline in bee population has had a severe impact upon the productivity of British crops, so we have decided to take practical steps to help.” Sainsbury's won't be collecting honey from the bees, just facilitating pollination of local crops, gardens and wildflowers. Aren’t they real honeys?

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I could have told you that.

I often wonder exactly for what purpose expensive surveys are undetaken. Is it to gather information and then make informed decisions to improve situations or is it simply to prove a point? I personally think it is often purely to confirm what is blatently obvious in the first place. Take for example a recent survey carried out by Food Watch in England involving 97 hospitals and over 2,000 patients. They came to the staggering conclusion that many hospital patients are leaving their food unfinished because it is so unappetising.
Where do they get the money and time to waste on such a useless exercise ? I could have told them that for crissake and I've never spent a day of my life in hospital. I can't believe that anyone really looks forward to going into hospital, it's not like an evening out at your favourite restaurant after all. Equally I can't believe that anyone enters one of those distinctly odd smelling institutions expecting a gourmet experience. Of course they don't eat the bloody food, it is poorly prepared, extremely low budget, wheeled around endless corridors for hours, served lukewarm, oh and just one other small point - the bloody people are SICK. They're lying on their backs all day long with more tubes in their bodies than there are under the bonnet of a souped up V 8, contemplating just how the hell they ended up there and figuring out how soon they can escape and some idiots are surprised that they find the grey beef unappetising ?

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Size counts

I knew it would come to this one day. Those bozos in their white lab coats, clutching clipboards and buggering about with our mass produced food were bad enough when they were locked away in cavernous factories belching out black smoke and odious fumes across the landscape but then a few idiot chefs just had to give them some measure of credibility by fraternising with them in a quest to build a better foam. We would have been wiser just to leave them in the damp steamy depths where they belonged. Suddenly they bloody well think they're experts on food !
A Yorkshire pudding isn't a Yorkshire pudding if it is less than four inches tall, announces the Royal Society of Chemistry. The Society has ruled on the acceptable dimensions of the Yorkshire pudding and is now issuing the definitive recipe. Just who the hell do they think they are, these puny, little bespectacled nerds ? Mind your own bloody business, get back to your phials and test tubes, your guages and tables, your calculators and powders and potions. What on earth have Yorkshire Puddings got to do with you ? We already know that a Yorkie under 4 inches tall is a pretty poor speciman and we know that instinctively so we don't feel the need to issue a research paper on the subject. These eggheads claim cooking is chemistry in the kitchen and one has to have the correct formula, equipment and procedures. To translate the ingredients into chemical terms, these are carbohydrate + H2O + protein + NaCl + lipids. We say bullshit. Cooking is love, passion, a feeling for the integrity of the ingredients. It is not a chemical experiment, it does not have to turn out exactly the same every time, if that's what you're looking for then go make instant custard powder.....but then I suppose that's exactly what they do.

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Sunday afternoon at the bioscope

Mitchell and Webb give us their take on Ramsay et al in this clip. FeedBlitz subscribers should visit the site to view.

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Dilly Diner of the Week

There's quite a few rules and regulations in place at this weeks Dilly Diner, the Spirite Lounge in Montreal, Canada. Some of them are quite straightforward and understandable such as the ban on the use of cell phones in the restaurant where the owner and chef, Rozman, maintains that what he does is culinary theatre and in order for everyone to enjoy the show, the offending cell phones must be switched off. That's fine with me but what about some of his other wacky rules such as the one that dictates that you must eat everything on your plate otherwise he levies a surcharge. And in addition to the $2 penalty, you’re denied dessert. Its mission is raising awareness of world hunger and food waste. Did I mention that this was a vegetarian restaurant ?
Then you've got to be careful with the desserts also, because if you don't finish them there's a further penalty whereby you may be banished from the restaurant for life - pretty harsh eh ? Of course you can understand that it is not to everyone's taste, mild comments of disapproval cite the staff as being cold and rude whereas one reviewer was a little bit more forthright " Have you ever dreamed of being forcefed at knife point by vegan nazis with a moral superiority complex? Well, dream no more... Now you can experience the real thing." Rozman also dispenses with the security blanket that everyone reaches for in a restaurant - the menu. There's no menu because he only cooks one dish at a time however that's not to say there's no choice, you can order different portion sizes which is a bit of a relief considering his rule on clearing your plate.

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That Was The Week That Was

A bad week for His Gordoness as yet another of his longtime lieutenants has quit to “work on other projects”. Another one bites the dust” as they say, as Jason Atherton of maze restaurant resigns but surely not in such quick succession? With Mark Sargeant having tendered his resignation just 4 months ago and Marcus Wareing, who left just under two years ago to open his acclaimed 2-star Michelin restaurant, old campaigners are getting thin on the ground.So who’s is left apart from Angela Hartnett and Stuart Gillies who is set to run the Savoy Grill, which is due to open later this year?


Meanwhile with husband Gordo off fighting culinary campaigns around the globe wife Tana Ramsay put on her glad rags and went off dancing with another man. It wasn’t quite as bad as it seemed as she was a “celebrity” contestant in Dancing on Ice, a sort of Strictly Come Dancing where you were more likely to get a wet backside. Unfortunately she got a few of those and this week she and her partner Stuart Widdell got the axe from the Ice Panel.


On to ice of a different nature as a group of Icelandic chefs this week offered customers a unique gastronomical experience: a gourmet meal cooked over hot lava and served near an ongoing volcanic eruption. When Chef Eiriksson heard about the eruption at the Fimmvorduhals volcano in the middle of the Eyjafjallajokull glacier in southern Iceland he began planning to "cook a delicious dinner at the volcano." On Tuesday, Eiriksson and three colleagues at the gourmet restaurant of Reykjavik luxury hotel Holt drove supplies and "lots of champagne" up to the foot of the mountain in two four-wheel-drive trucks. They set up a make-shift dining area near a lava field with a red carpet, a small table and two bolstered chairs for a couple of restaurant regulars flown up by helicopter. With wind-chill, temperatures at the mountain have in recent days dropped as low as minus 30 degrees Celsius (minus 22 degrees Fahrenheit), and despite the glowing fresh lava around them the diners remained bundled up throughout the meal. On the menu: lobster soup, followed by flaming lobster and monkfish and lava-cooked shallot onions, swafllowed down with Veuve Clicquot champagne.

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Easter Bunnies

I read 2 articles this week about out of the ordinary plants that kinda made me think maybe we’ve got our wires crossed a little bit here. The first was about a hybrid mutated tomato plant that gives a bumper crop of sweeter tomatoes which has been developed by scientists. Of course the bunny huggers were up in arms about this interference with the balance of nature, nasty genetic engineering and some were even invoking the wrath of God and quoting that glorious B movie The Revenge of the Killer Tomatoes.
The other article was about pineberries going on sale in the UK for a short season. Pineberries? Well of course they’re almost like albino strawberries, white and covered in red pips and with the same genetic make-up as the common strawberry but with a flavour and ''extraordinary'' smell closer to that of the pineapple.
The pineberry originated in South America as a wild variety of strawberry but was threatened with extinction until seven years ago when Dutch farmers began growing it commercially. The bunny huggers, it seems, just love them on top of their macrobiotic fat free yoghurt! Now the scientists reckon they can use the knowledge gained from the tomatoes to produce mutant hybrids in corn, rice and soybeans amongst others thus encouraging crops of up to 60% more and as a result attacking the problem of world hunger. The bunny huggers on the other hand are upset that the pineberry will only be in season for 6 weeks.

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