Tag: Gordon Ramsay

Buried Treasure – The Hidden Gems of the Food Network and Why You Can’t Find Them

It’s no secret that I would rather watch UK food shows than anything made in Canada or the US. Chefs like Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jamie Oliver, Valentine Warner and even Gordon Ramsay do a lot of good work for Channel 4 and the BBC when it comes to promoting seasonal, local, sustainable foodways. For years, Greg and I have had no choice but to download these from online file-sharing sites (shhh!!) because they seldom get shown here and there’s few, if any, domestic equivalents.

Except, bit by bit, Food Network Canada has been picking these shows up. Heston Blumenthal’s Big Chef Takes on Little Chef series that ran last year recently got aired here. Likewise his feasts series in which he recreates (with his own twists, of course) historic meals. Jamie Oliver is a big commodity on this side of the pond, so most of his stuff eventually shows up, but sometimes up to a year after its original air date.

This delay is annoying enough, but makes sense – Channel 4 wants to rerun these shows before selling the rights to anyone else. My frustration is that when Food Network Canada finally gets them, they do very little to promote them.

Continue reading “Buried Treasure – The Hidden Gems of the Food Network and Why You Can’t Find Them”

Where Are the Chefs?

foodfight

Today marks the beginning of two weeks of fantastic food-oriented television programming. Gordon Ramsay expands his Kitchen Nightmares series to try and get people to eat at local restaurants; Jamie Oliver takes on the pork industry in an effort to get producers to improve their husbandry standards; Heston Blumenthal has a 3-part series on his reinvention of the UK Little Chef chain of roadside diners; and Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall revisits last year’s Chicken Out campaign to see if his efforts really did encourage people to choose free-range chicken and think about where their food comes from.

Too bad you don’t get to see any of it.

The Great British Food Fight series is an annual event on Channel 4 in Britain, and generally deals with politically-charged issues having to do with food production – this year’s series also includes a show called The True Cost of Cheap Food hosted by Jay Rayner of the Guardian.

Enterprising Canadians who want to see these shows will likely have no trouble finding them available for download online, but everyone else will have to miss out. Which is too bad because many of these shows are dealing with important issues that should be at the forefront of any conversation about where our food comes from, yet those discussions still aren’t really happening here in North America.

Continue reading “Where Are the Chefs?”

Mr. Ramsay Has a Cupcake

Reputation is an odd thing. By making sweepingly asshatted pronouncements (SAP), Chef Gordon Ramsay has gotten himself a reputation for saying really stupidly elitist things that piss people off and show a real lack of common sense. Last week it was his SAP that restaurants should all be fined if they don’t serve seasonal food. As bloggers and mainstream media jumped to point out the hypocrisy (Ramsay owns a restaurant in Dubai – where absolutely nothing served is seasonal or local), Gordon Ramsay Holdings was forced to issue a statement.

Because of this reputation, any similar SAP attributed to Ramsay will be believed.

Today while reading the blog Cupcake Takes the Cake, I came across a post that indicated Ramsay had made a rather inflammatory SAP against everyone’s favourite treat, the cupcake.

The whole cupcake thing has been done to death. I thought we were through the woods, done hearing about how fucking cool and “retro” cupcakes were. I thought we were finished with interviews with the bakery proprietors telling mind-numbing stories about how they found their grandmother’s old recipe box in the attic and dusted one of the recipe cards off and lo! there was a glorious cupcake recipe and they just jazzed it up a bit to make it “cutting-edge” and it is the perfect marriage of great memories and contemporary cuisine.

Continue reading “Mr. Ramsay Has a Cupcake”

I’ll See Your Organic Free-Range Chicken and Raise You a Tin of Lamb Mince

While the name Delia Smith is familiar to me, I’ll have to admit that I’m not especially familiar with her cookbooks. Given the recent fuss about her newest cookbook How To Cheat at Cooking, I sort of assumed she was one of those slack-assed Rachel Ray types with the canned goods and bagged greens, teaching fans how to spread salmonella in three easy steps.

But it turns out that Smith is more well-known for being the UK’s answer to Martha Stewart. She spent years teaching Britons how to cook real food, teaching them basic cookery techniques and classical dishes. How to Cheat at Cooking is apparently a rewrite of her first book published in 1971, but from there, her work was all about cooking with real, fresh ingredients.

Any new book sells better with a wave of press, and there is some speculation that Smith’s recent public comments about Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s campaign against battery chickens might simply be desperate publicity spin. Smith claims that her recipes are designed to feed the poor, especially the chyllldrunnn (who will think of them?), but even poor kids are likely to turn up their noses at some of the stuff in her new book.

Continue reading “I’ll See Your Organic Free-Range Chicken and Raise You a Tin of Lamb Mince”

Slave to the Kitchen

 

You’ve gotta have a lot of respect, and a healthy does of fear, for someone who can make Gordon Ramsay cry. Anyone who has spent hours watching Hell’s Kitchen wondering where the hell Ramsay learned to run a kitchen like THAT can look no further than his teacher and mentor, Marco Pierre White.

The original enfant terrible chef, White tells his tale in an autobiography entitled White Slave. The product of an Italian mother who passed away when he was very young and a perfectionist father who was also a chef, White was driven early on to become the best chef in the UK. He racked up Michelin stars, wives and restaurants.

White Slave details White’s childhood struggling with dyslexia (the book was “ghost” written by James Steen), his early days in the kitchen, his various romances and his philosophy for running a kitchen. He became notorious for kicking out customers who complained about any aspect of their meal, often with a system in which the front of house staff completely cleared the table, including tablecloth, and left the customers sitting there, speechless. His drive and perfectionism were passed on to his proteges such as Ramsay, Mario Batali and others.

Continue reading “Slave to the Kitchen”

Chefs!

I’m working my way through a stack of books received as Christmas presents, and while different both topically and stylistically, all seem to have one underlying theme; They’re all about chefs.

The United States of Arugula – How We Became a Gourmet Nation by David Kamp is less the history of gourmet food as it relates to the home cook, and more the evolution of fine dining in the US. Kamp traces the progression of the modern restaurant from the first Escoffier-trained French chefs brought to the US to the current trend towards Food Network “celebrity” chefs and the debate over their validity in the kitchen. Touching on every 20th century food icon from Julia Child to Alice Waters (about whom Kamp seems to have little good to say), he intertwines the history with the development of the careers of two major food writers, James Beard and Craig Claiborne. The book gets more than a little dishy at times (oh, those crazy kids at Chez Panisse!), but that’s part of its charm.

Continue reading “Chefs!”