Gastronoweek

Food rocks, doesn't it? I love eating and trying new things but, that said, I'd never describe myself as a 'foodie', mainly because I'm not big on cooking. It's not that I can't cook, it's just that there are other things I would rather be doing than spending my time slaving away in the kitchen, especially when you're cooking for one (get the violins out!). Basically, I'm lazy.

However, my attitude towards grub may be about to change after the week I've just had, during which fantastic food was the common thread which tied it all together in one big, tasty, blogworthy package.

First up on Tuesday night was one of the best events I've ever been to. The wonderful people over at Qype* organised a secret supper club, where a bunch of forty or so lucky Qypers got to meet the legendary Jim Haynes from that After Eight advert (yes, he's real, and every word he says is true!). 

Jim has been hosting epic dinner parties at his Paris apartment for decades and reckons that, all in all, he's had around 130,000 round to his place for dinner. Now that's a lot of washing up! Meeting Jim was brilliant; he was a total charmer and he kissed my hand like a proper gent, but what was possibly even more special about the evening was the stuff we got to put in our bellies. 

You see, this was no ordinary evening. To celebrate the presence of the undisputed King of supper clubs, it appropriately took place at the wonderful underground restaurant Fernandez & Leluu. And when I say restaurant, what I actually mean is this lovely couple's living room! Unlike Jim's decades of experience, Simon (Fernandez) and Uyen (Leluu) have only been hosting their supper club in their Hackney abode since last autumn, yet their culinary skills and hospitality has so far generated high praise indeed and now I can't wait to go along to one of their regular sit-down dinners.

I won't even try and describe the brilliance of the food because I'm not a food blogger and I could never do it justice. But I will say that it was all exquisite, including a platter of starters (with the yummiest prawn cocktail dip I've ever tasted), the most tender slices of beef carpaccio, and a sinful pot of posh bread and butter pudding made with criossants. The food is described in delicious detail at Feast on Scraps with some wonderful images on the LondonEater blog. The cocktails were shaken and stirred to boozy perfection, and are summarised with applaudable precision over at Billy's Booze Blog. There are some more great write-ups at One Million Gold Stars, Domestic Sluttery and, of-course, Qype. Yes the bloggers really were out in force at this one! High praise indeed must be given to the clever After Eight PR people, Sian and all the others at Qype, Simon and Uyen and, of-course, Sir Jim, for putting on such a wonderful evening of food, hospitality and good company. And, to top off my Qype love, they even made me Qyper of the Week - chuffed!

My week of gastrono-joy was completed yesterday, when I slipped into a summery dress and headed to the swanky Sanderson hotel for a girly afternoon with a crazy twist; a Mad Hatter's Afternoon Tea! Although the hotel resembles a concrete lump from the outside, inside it's sleek and stylish and we were seated in the hotel's pretty courtyard garden. I'd never 'done' afternoon tea in my life, so had no idea what to expect, but when the waiter brought out our individual vintage cake stands stacked with multicoloured sandwiches, scones, cakes and lollipops, I couldn't help but squeal with childish joy.

There was no requirement for an 'eat me' label, as I tucked in straight away. The sandwiches were delicate, yet packed with flavour. The scones were light and seductively crumbly (although sadly we missed out on the clotted cream as they'd temporarily run out, and the butter substitute was too firm for the delicate scones). The cakes were really exciting to eat, with pink foam oozing from the 'Queen of Hearts' teacake, and crackle crystals making us giggle on the chocolate and raspberry cupcake. We finished our sugar fest with, errr, more sugar, this time in the form of a pineapple candy (it claimed to turn your mouth from hot to cold but I didn't experience this) and, finally, a chocolate a peppermint lolly which burst in your mouth (some great photos here). All this, with an unlimited supply of tea, for twenty quid! 

The hotel had only intended to run the Mad Hatter's Afternoon Tea for a month or so to capitalise on the hype surrounding Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland film, but the popularity of it (it was full when we left) means that it is remaining a permanent fixture at the Sanderson. In which case, I can definitely see myself going back.

*If you've never heard of Qype I'd urge you to check it out. Not only does the site give you access to squillions of user-generated (and very well written) reviews so you can see what other people think of local restaurants, bars and shops, but they also organise loads of cool events for regular reviewers to go along to. So it's like a review website and a social network all rolled into one.

Toad in the coal

Just got back to Bristol to hear a very amusing telly-related tale from the rest of the Dunlop clan. As a family, we are big fans of the classic British dish, toad in the hole. So when BBC1's programme 'Rachel Allen: Home Cooking' had a segment dedicated to cooking this dish this very morning, my mum and brother watched with interest to get some tips.

Chef Galton Blackiston was the chap leading the proceedings: "The tip is to leave it in a hot oven for 20 minutes and not look at it once." Fair enough, they thought. However,when they saw the result, they understandably doubted the chef's 'wisdom':

This is definitely, without a shadow of a doubt, burnt, right??!! But Galton didn't reference its charcoal-like state, and neither did the people who had to eat it!

You watch the sillyness for yourself here in the latter half of the show.

Chocolate fon-don't

Having written on many occasions about my love of Masterchef in all its various guises, this weekend I now have a new-found respect for some of the more laughable contestants. As I've previously pointed out, the chocolate fondant is the dish of death on the show. They either leave it in the oven for too long so that it ends up as a plain, old chocolate sponge, or they panic and take it out too soon so it happily collapses into a gooey mess. Given that the programme is called 'Masterchef', you'd have thought that they might be able to get it right. But no.

So this weekend, fellow Masterchef enthusiast - Brother Alex - and I decided to try it out for ourselves. We followed the recipe to the letter, and took out the ramekins from the oven after precisely 12 minutes. They collapsed into gooey messes. But they tasted awesome; surely simply a matter of leaving them in the oven for longer? So tonight, with Alex's lovely girlfriend Holly round for dinner, we were confident that we'd get it right. Wrong! They were still too gooey!

Now I understand why the contestants keep insisting on trying to produce the perfect chocolate fondant, because it is a very tricky pud to master. But, to be completely honest, the gooey bit is so delicious that I'd quite happily eat / drink that without the sponge casing.

(Dried) Pasta-chef

I couldn't let the latest Masterchef final go by without a little mention. Incarnated this quarter as 'Masterchef: The Professionals', we were led to believe that the contestants this time round already knew a little bit about cooking, so they replaced the usual 'cooking doesn't get tougher than this' tagline with 'cooking doesn't get better than this' (umm, I think it probably does, actually, but never mind). In order to demonstrate this new philosophy, for their penultimate culinary challenge the three finalists each had to cook a Michelin star-quality course, to be served to a room filled with such kitchen visionaries that they possessed 40 Michelin stars between them, as was repeated to the audience innumerable times.

Each course had been designed by the crazy-eyed chef Michel Roux Junior. Now I'm sorry if this makes me sound like a bit of a food snob (I'm definitely not a food snob, the most extravagant thing I've ever eaten is probably duck), but the main course and the dessert in particular looked like pretty bog-standard fare. The main course partly consisted of a posh macaroni cheese, made with dried - yes DRIED - pasta, stacked up all fancy and whatnot, but essentially it looked like a slice of pasta bake that had been left in the oven for too long.

The voiceover woman even had to justify why dried pasta was being used in the recipe because it really did look a bit rubbish:

"Steve's using high-quality dried pasta, used in many of the best restaurants in Italy."

The pudding was also laughable, consisting of a bit of chocolate on top of a rice crispie cake. But this wasn't any ordinary rice crispie (sorry, 'puffed rice') cake. No. This was because it had CRACKLE CRYSTALS in it. You know, that crackly stuff which pops on your tongue that you used to eat as a kid. The way Michele talked about it, you'd think no one in the world had ever experienced this "fun" popping sensation before. C'mon Junior, they've used this trick on Come Dine With Me!

Once the first challenge was over and done with, it was on to the final task: cooking their best ever three course meal. One of the contestants made the fatal error of making a chocolate fondant for his pudding. The words 'chocolate fondant' on Masterchef are basically the death knell for the contestant attempting to cook it, because they ALWAYS fail. The normal contestants fail, the celebrities fail and now even the professionals fail. It was only slightly gooey in the middle, whereas a flood of chocolate yumminess should have flowed from the sponge casing when the spoon broke through the threshold. Disappointing. I swear if someone made a YouTube compilation video of all the ruined Masterchef chocolate fondants it would be a very long - and amusing - video indeed.

So another series is over, and another Masterchef winner walks away with the fantastic prize of...oh yeah, there is no prize is there? Oh well. The question is, will John Torode be back for the next series? One can only hope...

For my chewing pleasure

Operation Good Guys was on the telly when I returned home this evening. Ok, so it wasn't actually on the telly, my brother was watching our never-been-opened boxset of the show, which he bought for me a couple of years ago but I've never got around to watching. This was obviously a huge error on my part, as it's bloomin hilarious! Who remembers it? Basically, it was The Office before The Office (first shown in 1997, whereas The Office was first broadcast four years later). It's a mockumentary about an undercover police squad who are supposedly being filmed by a BBC crew for a fly-on-the-wall look at the detectives in action as they attempt to snare the crime lord 'Smiler McCarthy'.

Predictably, the whole bunch of them are incompetent, but the real dig is at the fact that they're allowed to get away with their shoddiness, and - in one episode - even showcase their idiocy by coordinating an 'undercover squad open day'. But instead of demonstrating their detecting and policing skills, they instead decide to turn it into a cabaret show under the guidance of (the actual) Christopher Biggins. There are loads more celebrity cameos, my personal favourite being an appearance by David Seaman.

The first series is classic. From what I remember it seemed to go downhill in the second series. Indeed, having just read the Wikipedia entry, I remember now that they stupidly decided to introduce canned laughter in the second and third series, completely spoiling the documentary feel, but it's still worth watching to see where The Office may have got some of its inspiration from.

Speaking of small-screen hilarity, I am (of-course) addicted to the latest Masterchef incarnation, which is rather inappropriately called Masterchef: The Professionals. C'mon guys, even I know that you don't make sauce in a griddle pan!


From what I gather so far, this competition is open to people who make a living out of any profession which is - however vaguely - related to cookery. So they could be a catering lecturer in a college, or work in the kitchen of a local pub. I'm guessing these people wouldn't be eligible for standard Masterchef, and certainly not for the 'celebrity' version, so this show caters (see what I did there?!) for everyone in between. And everyone in between appears to be a white chap in their mid-twenties. Nope, the BBC certainly aren't ticking any equality and diversity boxes with this programme. Still, it's as entertaining as ever.

Highlights from the first two shows have been the guy who aimed to make ravioli from scratch, but ended up serving an omelette on top of spaghetti, and Jamie from Wiltshire, who is a walking, taking, real-life thesaurus. Jamie's through to the next round, so I'm looking forward to hearing many more variations on the word 'chuffed' from him in the near future / very soon / shortly.

Laughterchef

Ok, so I know I've banged on about 'Masterchef' before, in particular the raw emotions on display from the celebrity contestants, but now I feel I must expand on my previous diatribe. I swear tonight's episode is one of the ridiculous things I have ever seen on TV (yep, even more ridiculous than 'Jonathan Creek').

Firstly, do they even check to see whether the contestants can actually cook anymore?? A dude on tonight's show concocted a plate of what can only be described as a tin of chickpeas with bacon on top, all floating in what looked to be the the result of a nosebleed.

Needless to say he was torn to pieces by judges John Torode and Gregg Wallace. The efforts of the other competitors were pretty pants too. One contestant couldn't even finish cooking his dish because he chopped the top of his thumb off and had to be rushed to A&E (we were reassured later that he hadn't bled to death, although I think some of the blood may have spurted on to the plate above).


Other amusing attempts at recent cooking by contestants include a well-meaning lady with a nervous giggle who started out by making a risotto, panicked and decided to PUREE it into a 'soup', which resembled concrete, and a guy who served up boiled carrots (complete with a bite taken out of one of them) and potatoes!! Even Gregg today admitted that "anyone who can open a tin is through to the next stage" because the standards were so low.

Secondly, the programme is becoming increasingly formulaic - there now seems to be a 'novice cook', 'experimental cook' and 'traditional cook' in each episode (as well as the 'crap cook'). And, of-course, they all have bags of PASSION, as repeatedly expressed by the husky-voiced voiceover woman who sounds like she could do with a good cough.

I must say, however, that it is hugely entertaining, and I have had some massive belly laughs tonight as a result of the incompetence on display. Experience the hilarity for yourself on iPlayer. I might even enter next year's series and whip up a bowl of Heinz tomato soup, followed by Supernoodles and a Wagon Wheel.

Tears before breadtime

I happened to catch the last five minutes of 'Celebrity Masterchef' the other evening. I have to say, I was utterly shocked by the extreme levels of emotion on display from the c-list cooks. Former Atomic Kitten Liz and the Liverpudlian dude from 'Holby City' literally had tears rolling down their cheeks as they were waiting to hear whether they'd made it through to the final. Thank goodness they both did (along with Andi Peters, who managed to keep the weeping in check), otherwise I think some kind of emotional massacre would have ensued.

Don't get me wrong, it's strangely reassuring that it means so much to them, but I can't help but wonder a) what kind of financial incentive is being dangled in front of their noses in order to provoke such passion and b) why the hell the Atomic Kitten was allowed to compete in the first place since she had supposedly 'never touched an oven' before the show and is therefore not a 'masterchef'. Surely by this logic I should equally be allowed on the show because I am not a celebrity?! Oh yeah, I forgot, I've been in the London Lite...