Tonight for dinner we had Marmite Spaghetti! It actually tasted far nicer than you would imagine. The inspiration for this culinary delight was Nigella Lawson - or at least her latest food porn programme, Nigella Camps It Up - or something like that.
TV cookery programmes can be quite a bit of fun but mainly because the things they knock up are completely off the far side for anyone actually trying to cook it. Heston Blumenthal probably takes this to extremes with his medieval delights of refried dung beetles dipped in liquid nitrogen, cooked by flamethrowers and garnished with radioactive waste. Delia Smith goes to the other extreme of knocking up frozen gunk that would put Kerry Katona to shame. Jamie Oliver looks promising until you see him put up against a professional mass caterer in which case he is reduced to a gibbering wreck. Of course, there is always Gordon Ramsay who has managed to set up several highly successful restaurants despite suffering from chronic coprolalia.
The one thing that seems to unite TV chefs is what I call the Unicorn Milk factor. They have seemingly feasible recipes (well, apart from Heston) that are made completely unattainable by requiring some weird fruit that can only be bought in a Moroccan bazaar; or an exotic spice that is exclusively sold in a backstreet Delhi market stall. For all the use this is to Joe Public it may as well be milk from a mythical creature.
The end result is everyone lives off frozen pizza and cornflakes - with a dash of Unicorn Milk, naturally.
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You've missed agolden opportunity to publish a picture of the delectable Nigella.
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