Crap Cooking on the Telly

Pardon my French!

As I was stumbling through the television channels last night I came across a “cookery” programme called Eating with the Enemy. The theme of the programme is that some amateur “cooks” are supposed to prepare food of restaurant quality and have their efforts assessed by some “experts”.

The host of the programme is James Martin. To my mind, Martin is a very poor cook, although he calls himself a chef. He peppers his words with lovely, nice, my grandmother and so on. For example, I am going to prepare a nice dish of garlic mushrooms using a recipe I got from my grandmother. Lovely! Why should he qualify it by saying nice? After all, we don’t expect crap do we: although invariably that’s what we see. Grossly unhealthy food laced with fat, salt, carbohydrates … rubbish really.

It’s a bit like the signs you’ll see outside the average Pub in England now, Good Food … same applies: we don’t expect bad food do we and wouldn’t pay if they served it!

Anyway, it turns out that Martin is the creative genius behind the main dish these “cooks” have to prepare. Last night he asked them to make a burger. For crying out loud: how many people who go to a proper restaurant, not one of those non restaurants where they serve “fast food”; but a real restaurant, want to eat a burger. You can see what I mean about the quality of the host!

So these “cooks” all nanced around “cooking”. Only one contestant was any good and he was a middle aged Jock. He did well in my opinion. Not like the one who couldn’t even cook a burger all the way through. Then there was the one who rested her burger on a rosti bed. Now, a rosti is shredded or grated potato out of which the liquid is squeezed and then shallow fried until crisp. Note the operative word, CRISP. So this “cook” had also prepared some mushrooms in a white wine sauce. Of course, she poured gallons of sauce all over the burgers and drowned it and the rosti underneath. Meaning there was nothing but soggy rosti.

There was a “cook” who was presented as someone who could prepare excellent choux pastry but for some reason she decided to prepare a dish with shortcrust pastry this time and it was rubbish: she had no idea of what to do. In the middle of her pastry nonsense, Martin shuffled up and showed her a “Chef’s trick” of how to roll out pastry between two sheets of cling film: a tip he got from Gary Rhodes but never admitted to!

I hate to be sizist but one of the “Enemy” was morbidly obese: I missed the start of the programme but I think he is a journalist. He is a good advert for this programme as the food was unbalanced and astonishingly high in fat and calories. However, I really do not think someone who is morbidly obese should be allowed to take part in a food programme.

DW