400

What a momentous day this is. Ripe with glory and grandeur!

Forget Barrack Obama’s inauguration as the 44th President of the United States of America.

Forget the news that this is the first Official day of the UK recession.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is my 400th blog post.

Yes. That’s right. 400!

Since this blog’s inception in late 2006 I have continuously and without mercy produced 400 blog posts of varying length and dubious quality, luxuriously peppered them with photographs slyly half-inched from the World Wide Web, and thrown them to you, the blog reading masses, as if they were high class crumbs from my overflowing banqueting table.

Such food for though has passed before your poor fatigued eyes! Subjects such as Nigella Lawson, politics, television, celebrity culture, music, Keeley Hawes, parenthood, Lego, work and even how to wash up a tea mug have all been righteously laid before you like the tenets of a new religion.

And how you have gorged yourselves, you lucky people!

No, no, please don’t bow or scrape, there really is no need.

But it has not all been bouquets and banners! Oh no! There were some – you know who you are – who thought this blog would never amount to anything. Thought it would die, bawling and howling in its infancy, a shrivelled negatively potentialled hybrid of overweening ambition and undergrasping ability. You thought I’d get bored within the first 6 months. You thought I’d get sidetracked by the flash-bang-wallop of hardcore internet porn and the gaudy lure of online Poker. You thought I’d be discovered by the Head of Writing at the BBC who would snap me up like the last green triangle in a tin of Quality Street and beg me, dry-humping my leg as the tears roll down his face, to co-write the next series of Doctor Who and officiate over the next batch of period dramas primed to emerge from the pen of Andrew Davies.... no, no, Steve, you must give up this blog writing malarkey immediately, Hollywood beckons for one such as you, don’t cast your pearls before swine, your seed onto barren ground (you must leave the internet porn alone)... you must step up to the plate, dear boy, scripts must be written, book deals signed, an e-book autobiography with Flash and interactive content must be penned (keyboarded)...

But I said “nay!” And lo I sayeth “nay!” again.

I am going nowhere. This blog shall not be moved. This blog shall stayeth forever. Yay e’en unto perpetuity and the electronic eternity (server functionality excepted). Have no fear that I shall desert you, dear reader. I shall turn my back on all offers of wealth, stardom, critical acclaim and cheap easy sex with breast heavy celebrities who present property shows on Channel 4. I shall keep the Bloggertropolis standard held aloft and rippling in the breeze and my mind purely on the blogging tasks at hand for now and for ever more.

No need to thank me. This is simply what I do. Be confident and assured. Rest easy, dear reader.

I am going nowhere.

Absolutely. Effing. Nowhere.

Whiner Diner

Apologies to my international readers (oh what a thrill to be able to say that) who won’t have seen the relevant programme but I’m greatly enjoying “Big Chef Takes On Little Chef” at the moment.

I don’t usually go overboard on cooking / food TV shows (unless they feature Nigella Lawson’s oscillating bosom as she hand whisks a soufflé) but this particular outing has reeled me in hook, line and sinker.

For those of you that don’t know, celebrity chef of international renown, Heston Blumenthal, has been engaged by the big boss of Little Chef to revitalize the company’s ailing fortunes by souping up (ahem) the old hackneyed menu and injecting a bit of dynamism into their geriatric “business model”.

Hmm.

Apparently, in its heyday, Little Chef was a motorway restaurant of world class reputation.

??!

Yes. I was surprised by this revelation too as, even in my childhood, Little Chef was only ever viewed as a toilet stop of the very last resort on long motorway journeys rather than as a place in which the human body could be effectively nourished – and, to be honest, you had to be faced with some pretty scummy hedgerows and embankments to prefer the dubious environs of the Little Chef latrine to spraying the contents of your bladder over the passing wildlife.

But I digress. The Little Chef boss – a man both improbably vacant and impossibly conniving whose name I have deliberately forgotten (let’s just call him David Brent) – has drafted in Heston to “blue sky think” his company back onto the fast track to fame, fortune and Michelin starred glory. Mr Brent – let’s not think of him as a company director, more of a chilled food entertainer – wants pizzazz; he wants culinary extravaganza, he wants the wild, the wacky and the wonderful. He wants some of the “out there” experimentation that has put Heston’s own restaurant – The Fat Duck – onto the global map. And he wants it all for under £10 a head in a greasy motorway restaurant who’s kitchen equipment doesn’t extend beyond a griddle and a microwave and staff who have no idea how to operate a saucepan (“where’s the effing button to turn it on?”).

Mr Brent’s utopian vision of culinary excellence ran into one or two fundamental obstacles right from the start.

1) The “out there” experimentation at The Fat Duck costs punters approximately £250 a head (to quote an unabashed Heston) which is a little out of the price range of the average Little Chef punter...

2) Heston did what Mr Brent should have done, i.e. some real actual market research which quickly confirmed what was bleeding obvious to everybody from day one: Little Chef customers don’t want to be chowing down on snail porridge or beef hotpot with oysters floating around in it. They want the legendary Olympic Breakfast. They want ice cream that’s cheap and cheerful. They want fish fingers and chips that look like fish fingers and chips. And they want baked beans with everything.

Heston, to his credit, realized immediately that his normal fare would never be acceptable in the kind of establishment that Little Chef epitomizes and reined in his humungously large creative flare to come up with stuff that was far more suitable and appropriate, i.e. ideas that stood a chance of actually being implemented by the socially lobotomized staff on the front line.

Good ingredients, fresh and nutritious, cooked well and served fast. Shazam!

The basics of any successful restaurant business surely?

Mr Brent didn’t seem to get it though. He was disappointed with Heston’s ideas. In fact he rather insultingly told him that “any celebrity chef could have come up with such a menu”. Cheeky get.

I won’t go on. Suffice to say that it is surprisingly addictive viewing: Heston trying to maintain his integrity in the face of political manoeuvring behind closed doors (and frequently off-camera) and soldiering on in the slow-dawning knowledge that the Little Chef upper echelons are merely using him as a marketing ploy without any real commitment to re-branding their product. And Mr Brent’s constant media speak and blue sky malapropisms.

The show highlights where the problem lies with most ailing businesses these days. Forget the Credit Crunch, the fault lies in the fact that they are invariably run by sad little egotists who are accountable to nobody but their own shareholders and who are obstinately out of touch with what their customers really want.

It’s no wonder that so many of them are going to the dogs.

And I have to say, the hedgerows of the M40 are looking better by the minute...

Nigella Revisited

I received something of a shock phone call yesterday afternoon. It seems a hack from the London Standard had found my Nigella Espresso post and wanted me to comment on a recent article in the newspaper that voiced the opinion that Nigella has become so verbose in her descriptions of recipes that her cook books were actually alienating the small percentage of the UK population who have a below average reading ability.

I was glad to oblige and managed to rustle up something quick during the afternoon, Steve Express style. I don’t know yet if it’s going to be used (I’ll keep you posted on that, naturally) but thought I’d post it here for your perusal.

First: a few excerpts from the original article:

“Nigella's recipes are a bit of a mouthful, say literacy experts: ‘Too many adjectives make her instructions difficult to follow’”

“A survey has found that the chef’s verbose style makes it harder for adults with poor literacy skills to follow the instructions.”

“According to the study, [Nigella] uses long sentences, too many adjectives, extra commentary and personal observations.”

“The survey, carried out by the Government's Get On campaign, looked at a variety of recipes from Smith, Lawson, Nigel Slater, Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsay.“

“It found that Slater was the easiest chef to follow, with all his recipes reaching the entry level three standard, or that expected of an 11-year-old.”

“Ramsay said: 'I'd hate to think there might be people who aren't giving cooking and new recipes a go because they are worried about the reading, writing or maths side of things. Brushing up on their literacy could make them a better chef, as well as improving their life.'”

And my pro-Nigella response:

Re: "Nigella's recipes are a bit of a mouthful, say literacy experts"

It's rather amusing to read that a survey has flagged up Nigella Lawson as being too literate for a small percentage of the UK working population and that "too many adjectives" apparently make her recipes difficult to follow.

Too many adjectives? What kind of a criticism is that? Isn't that like saying that Mozart's “The Magic Flute” contains too many notes? Will the removal of all adjectives suddenly render Nigella's cookery books readable by absolutely everybody regardless of their literary skills?

I think not. Poor literacy is as much to do with not understanding syntax, grammar, nouns, participles and verbs as teasing out the meaning of a hundred assorted adjectives though, I'll admit, if you find reading difficult, a wall of purple prose is hardly going to fill you with much enthusiasm.

The real criticism that can be levelled against Nigella then is one of style and I guess you either appreciate her yummy-mummy gastro-gushing or you don't. If you don't then you can always give Nigel Slater a go as, according to the same survey, he is infinitely easier to understand. I'm inferring it's because he uses less adjectives and his cook books are therefore more plainly and simply written. Dull and boring by any other name. Nigella's fans like her because she is so fulsome in her descriptions, because she does go OTT about the colour of cantaloupes and the odour of aubergines. She's sensuous, lush and evocative (which is obviously Nigella's schtick) and her verbal descriptiveness, whilst a sort of taste sensation in itself, actually adds an extra layer to our appreciation of her recipes. Her words enrich our tastebuds as much as the ingredients she uses. But most of all she's entertaining. This is rather an important quality in a TV chef. And it's practically impossible to be entertaining without flinging the odd adjective about...

So why should a small percentage of the population be denied access to this entertainment just because their literary levels fall below that of the national average? Surely the main problem is that 16 per cent of the adult working population have been failed by the Education system? More effort needs to be put into improving these people's literacy levels beyond that of an 11 year old and not in asking our TV personalities and celebrities to dumb down. For Heaven's sake there's enough dumbing down on our TV's as it is. We need to start smarting people up! Isn't it preferable to have our famous TV chefs - normally shrivelling the airwaves with language that would embarrass an East End porn star - actually pushing us to stretch our vocabularies as well as our culinary experiences?

As F word aficionado Gordon Ramsay himself says of people with reading difficulties: "Brushing up on their literacy could make them a better chef, as well as improving their life."

In the ineffable greyness of much of modern life, a bit of purple prose is surely the recipe for success?

Nigella Espresso

Baptitious kitchen chatelaine, Nigella Lawson, kicked off her new “good food fast” cookery TV series last night – “Nigella Express” and not, as I’d hoped, “Nigella Espresso”. Hmm. It seems that my idea for a raunchy bedroom-based dessert focused TV pilot has been turned down flat by the bosses of Channel 4... I can’t understand why. I mean if they’re happy to invest money in Gillian McKeith intimately examining other people’s poo why not fling a few tenners my way to buy a spatula and an industrial barrel of whipped cream?

Anyway, gripes aside, it was good to see the dusky voiced one back on the telly and doing her damnedest to insist that her plainly glamorous life is anything but and is, in fact, as humdrum as that of the rest of us. Hmm. I don’t think so Nigella. My entire family could live in your walk-in pantry and never have to go to the supermarket again. Ever.

But I think that’s part of Nigella’s appeal. The slightly embarrassed and guilty glamour-puss seductress coupled with the “oh I’m so dowdy really” yummy-mummy modesty. That and the cow-eyed looks over the garlic grater and the coquettish lip moistening as she manhandles the biggest sweet potato I’ve ever seen in my life. No wonder Nigella has one of the biggest male fan bases of all the TV chefs.

Apparently she’s horrified by accusations that she deliberately sexes up her cooking performances but I’m sure she’s also clever enough to not mess with a schtick that plainly works. Besides which the sensual element definitely adds an essential layer to the recipes and is an integral part of the Nigella ethos – whether it’s there deliberately or not. Nigella is all about pleasure: the pleasure of food and the pleasure of life. And it would be a sad individual indeed who objected to that.

The main thing though (as has been pointed out by a reader of this blog, Lucy) Nigella is smokin’ hot. At 47 she’s looking damn good. If that’s what big puddings do for you then I’ll take double helpings please.

Talking of which, last night saw Nigella tenderizing a couple of pork chops with a rolling pin. The way she moved was, ahem, mesmerizing to say the least.

Anthony Worrall Thompson – though he could easily emulate the upper body motion – would not have had quite the same effect...

Geeks?

Yesterday, terminal work boredom was relieved somewhat by a lovely email from my gorgeous wifey, Karen. Knowing I have a slight penchant for breakfast TV cleavage queen, Lorraine Kelly, Karen had supplied a link to a feature on MSN Entertainment about “Geek Chic”.

The feature, although not particularly in-depth, called us all to celebrate the oddballs and misfits of the celebrity world – the stars that we are “afraid to admit [we] fancy”. On the face of it this seems a great idea. Anything that bounces people out of the size zero hero-worship that taints modern society has got to be a good thing, right?

And yes, having scanned through the list of misfit celebrities there are plenty that can be termed geeks and misfits: David Gest, Louis Theroux, Jade Goody... I could go on.

But there are plenty on the list that I think are not geeks or misfits at all. They just don’t adhere to the stick-thin ethos of the media and fashion world. Lorraine Kelly, Fern Britton, Kirstie Allsopp – all highly attractive women (in my opinion) and eminently fanciable. Hubba hubba, etc.

So why does bucking the size zero trend automatically label you a geek? Or even a misfit? Why should I be ashamed to say that I think Lorraine Kelly or Kirstie Allsopp are attractive women? There are countless men (and women) out there who’d be glad to tickle Lorraine Kelly’s fancy on the GMTV sofa or give Kirstie Allsopp a quick look at their basement extension in the privacy of their own home... and they’d be damn proud to brag about it too.

And then it got me thinking about the rest of the list and at what point my opinion diverges from that of the author. Are David Gest, Louis Theroux and Jade Goody geeks just because I don’t fancy them? Or because the person who wrote the feature doesn’t? I mean I don’t fancy Catherine Zeta Jones or Keira Knightley either but does that make them geeks too?

If someone is attractive then they are attractive. End of story. There’s no shame in admitting this. And everybody is attractive to somebody. So who has the right to label somebody else a misfit?

If I get my kicks ogling Supernanny, Jo Frost or moist muffin maker, Nigella Lawson, shaking the bejasus out of a bawling brat or a homemade cocktail, so what? I like what I like. And that doesn't make anybody a misfit or even a non-misfit.

Wow. I actually started this entry with the intention of waxing lyrical about the impressiveness of Kirstie Allsopp’s commodious bosom and her rapier-like high heels but seem to have ascended instead into the higher realm of social comment...

Geez. Does this make me a geek?

Take The Back Rhodes

We’ve been watching a lot of cookery programmes at the moment as we’ve noticed that the boy is fascinated by them. Karen and I both love cooking ourselves so it’s no hardship to immerse ourselves in a spot of Nigella or Gordon every now and then.

One particular show that we’ve been watching has been UKTV Food’s "Rhodes Across India" which features celebrity chef, Gary Rhodes, hobnobbing around India sampling the wares of various street vendors and top Indian chefs.

The food, I admit, looks amazing but Karen and I are constantly irritated by Gary Rhodes’ arrogant and domineering attitude. He might dress it up under a jovial, easy going, I’m-your-best-mate-I-am manner but his condescension towards everyone he meets is plain.

What annoys me most is that he constantly meddles with the recipes that he’s been privy to. It’s like he can’t resist improving them or applying the smarmy Gary Rhodes stamp to them. On one episode we watched recently you could see the Indian chef visibly gritting his teeth in the background as Gary Rhodes totally trashed the simplicity of the original dish and pointlessly westernized it.

The point is: I’m watching this programme to see dishes and food prepared the Indian way. I want to see how the actual street vendors do it – how they prepare recipes that have been passed down to them through countless generations - and I object strongly to every single ingredient and measurement having to be passed through the crass dictatorial filter that is Mr Rhodes!

I don’t want to see Gary Rhodes’ take on Indian food. I just want to see the Indian food as it is!

Whether he realizes it or not, Gary’s attitude brands him a thief rather than a respectful explorer. And that leaves a very bad taste in my mouth.

The British Raj, it seems, is alive and cooking...

X Rated

Being a rainy Monday morning and having submitted to the burden of total and utter boredom, I have been lately musing on the way modern movies are certificated.

When I was a kid it was all very austere and straight forward. “12”, “15” and “18” told you all you needed to know and all the really good films were inevitably rated “X”. Hmm. You know, I never saw enough X rated movies as a kid. I feel heartily deprived.

Nowadays though it’s not enough to simply slap an age label onto a film. No. As a tiresome bonus we also get a load of PC-hogswhallop, soft-soap terminology thrown into the mix for free.

Stuff like:

• “May contain mild violence.”


• “Moderate language.”


• “Occasional sexual references.”

Der? What is moderate language anyway? Ecclesiastical Latin?

Anyway, it made me think how infinitely fuller and more rich our lives would be if such gradings were also applied to television programmes.

• Nigella Bites would be rated as “extreme vegetable peril of a sexual nature”.


• How To Look Good Naked would be “may contain immoderate baps and strong baptitular references.”


• Celebrity Big Brother would be “may contain nuts”


• The Apprentice would simply be “contains twats.”


• Deal Or No Deal would be “gratuitous boredom and beard.”

Hmm...

I’m sure you could think up loads more. But only if you’re bored.