On Playing Catch-up*

I went upstairs for a flourescent piss a little while back - the vitamin B6 is starting to come through having taken my usual Solgar supplement this morning, and shows up as a very bright yellow - and caught a glimpse of a scar above my left eyebrow in the mirror beside me. I got this a couple of days back when I managed to splash some oil into my face while tossing a few cubes of butternut squash into the baking tray in the oven. A goodly portion got into my eye, or at the very least just around it as well, all at around 220 or more degrees - the oven was set to max.

I don’t know why, but this set me to thinking about a programme I caught the other day, and which, unusually for me, I have now seen at least a couple of times. The Restaurant is one of countless programme about chefs and restaurants at the moment, but is peculiarly good. Raymond Blanc has selected a number of people, mostly couples, who have long dreamed of setting up a restaurant together. He has given each a restaurant, but each week, sets a challenge and closes another one down. This is one of those reality programmes it is actually interesting to watch as it shows not only the stresses of opening and managing a restaurant, but also the tensions between these various couples, or indeed the strengths of their relationships - one pair of twins seem particularly close.

Last week he set a challenge to a number of couples who, I think, were selected for their poor performance in their previous contests. They were to run a historically themed evening with dishes made of local seasonal produce.

Each challenge has seemed so far to completely phase one or other of the chefs, or one or other of the front house staff. This time it was the turn of one of the chefs, who admitted he had no idea at all of what was seasonal, and even had the gall to defend himself in front of the star chamber of Blanc and his steely cold triumvirate of inspectors, by claiming that there wasn’t really any seasonal veg at that time of year.

Blanc, he said, had grown up with locally-grown seasonal vegetables and produce all around him. His father grew veg. He saw it all around him,. He had grown up with it. He grew up, too, in a culture of food.

In Britain, this is rarely the case. There was very little seasonal variation in the food I ate as a kid, and certainly no sense in growing up in a food culture. Mum learnt a few recipes on a cookery course one time, and has pretty much stuck to those ever since, broadening out to cook rice and ready made sauces in the last few years, with tortilla too from a packet from time to time.

My attempts at cooking are very much attempts to catch up, picking up what I can from books and TV programmes and occasionally attempting something which may be a little beyond me. Trying to get up to speed, I might occasionally make some basic mistake, like in splashing myself with oil the other day trying to rush everthing.

Judging by this spate of television programmes, there must be a whole lot of people out there who feel the same. Our food culture and connection to the produce and native food of our land is in a depressingly poor state and it is understandable if we make these desperate attempts to move forward.

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