CHEF SANDWICH

Down And Out In Padstow And London Pt 2

2012-01-27T11:02:00.000-08:00

Whenever the subject of eBooks comes up in the media, it inevitably leads to another drawn-out, weary discussion about the future of the traditional publishing industry, and whether the rise of Kindles, iPads and other eReaders will lead to the death of printed books.

The short and long answer is, of course, no. But it's amazing how many people are paid to write 2,000 words to say it. There will always be folk who prefer the feel, smell, and tea cup stains of printed books. The dog-eared pages, the scribbles in the margin, the ability to store it in the bookcase and return to it like a lost friend at a later date. Or just the ability to store it in the bookcase with hundreds of other weighty tomes to make visitors think you're far better read than you really are.

You will hear statistics quoted about how four million Kindle Fires were sold in the US over Christmas, and how some indie authors are now selling 1,000 eBooks for every printed book they sell, and how many big name writers are turning their backs on publishing houses and all their middle men to take the far more profitable route of self-publishing.

Look on Twitter, and there's always some celebrity twatting about how they've just got themselves a Kindle, or why does it only want to connect with the US store, and is this normal? And fans are like sheep after all, so for every sleb that buys one, there are probably a hundred people who'll rush out and do the same.

But you don't hear so much about the underlying reasons for this change. Just a lot of hand-rubbing, gloating, and stat-quoting from geeks who seem to be allergic to paper for some reason. I used to work for a boss at an online news service who was the same about newspapers.

"This isn't a newspaper!" he would snap whenever his editorial judgement was questioned. We used to wonder whether his Dad had beaten him with rolled-up newspapers when he was a kid.

A friend of mine came to visit me in Cambodia before Christmas - before I began grappling with the formatting gremlins of publishing my own eBook, Down And Out In Padstow And London. He left me with a paperback, The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt, he'd bought to read on the plane.

It was a fantastic read, and I'd highly recommend it to anyone who's looking for a road trip-style novel featuring two hired killers set in cowboy times, somewhere between the California Gold Rush and the introduction of toothpaste.

But the thing that struck me most was the price - £12.99 for a paperback! I'd only been away for a year, what had happened? Surely they were £8 or £9 at most when I went away? Thirteen quid for a novel is a hell of a luxury for many people in these belt-tightening times.

The author's making little on it, so is the publishing house - which is why so many are haemorrhaging cash these days. It's all down to the increasing scarcity of the world's precious resources. It costs a small fortune to produce and distribute a paperback these days - the electricity, the diesel, the paper, the ink - not to mention paying off everyone else in the supply chain suffering similar rising costs.

EBooks on the other hand cost virtually nothing to produce and deliver, and are so ecologically friendly (if you forget about the puppies that have been drowned in hydroelectric dams to create them) they make you feel wonderful and saintly when you buy one.

If you consider that the whole point of books is to spread knowledge and entertain, then the rise of eBooks can only be a good thing - however much you miss the dusty, fusty, library smell of a 'real' book. Because you can get two or three for the same price, and in some cases with all the 'Indian curry secrets' and diet books selling for pennies on Amazon, should you ever want them - about 20.

Knowing that most regular authors get a quid or two for each paperback they sell, I priced my Kindle book accordingly, which means after Amazon have taken their generous cut, I can sell mine for the price of half a lager to make the same return, whereas I'll have to sell the printed version for £7 or £8, or the price of half a lager in Reykjavik.

As I say, the relative cheapness of eBooks can only be a good thing. If you looked at the news yesterday and saw Nick Clegg jumping up and down like mop-haired, cheese-botherer Alex James at a KFC processing plant about how great it was that McDonald's was creating 2,500 new jobs for young people in the UK, then you can see where the new jobs and wages are coming from.

Not skilled, well-paid sectors, but burger flipping and being forced to say "welcome to McDonald's" every few seconds. And as they'll be on a salary little more than minimum wage, how many of the next generation will be prepared to spend two hours' pay and more on a paperback?

But it's not just the price of eBooks - it's their transportability. I've been travelling around SE Asia for the past year or so hauling around a small collection of books - five at most is usually all I can cram into my laptop bag, and there's never any room in my rucksack.

I always keep my Far Flung Floyd book for old times, I can't bear to part with that. But when I've read them all, I trade them in for a fraction of the price I bought them for at the many second hand book shops they've got out here in Cambodia, and then buy several more.

But I can't tell you how many times I've wanted to return to an old book now filling the shelves in Phnom Penh or Siem Reap. But using a Kindle or other eReader means you can carry around half the British Library for the weight of, well, a Kindle. I just wish they sold them here.

Anyway, as I was finally getting round to saying, I'm very pleased with the feedback and sales of my eBook so far. But I was surprised just how many people said they would rather wait for the printed version.

So I realise you need to do both, and hopefully it should be available on Amazon et al in a couple of weeks. (Other people said they hadn't got a Kindle and wanted to know how else they could read it. There is a free Kindle reader app you can download for your computer, CLICK HERE - it was very quick and easy, and worked pretty well on my knackered laptop.)

The recommendations I've had for my book on Twitter and the online reviews on Amazon have been far better than I ever hoped. One of the most entertaining things has been checking the hourly-updated sales figures on Amazon's Kindle bestseller charts. After a flurry of good reviews last week, my book hit number nine in the Food and Drink chart. Number nine! Way above Nigella, Delia, and the two hairy bastards, and even higher than the Unofficial Harry Potter Cookbook.

But counting chickens and all that, when I just checked it had slipped out of the top 40 to number 43. Anyway, I know it's a shameless plug, but without a marketing or PR budget, I need every bit of help and luck I can get. So below are the reviews and Twitter recommendations I've had so far in case you're flirting with the idea of reading it. And if you have read it, and liked it, please leave a review on its Amazon page.

Book blurb:

"Reading 'Down and Out in Padstow and London' is a serious test for any food writer. Not only has Alex Watts done what all of us say we would like to do, tested his mettle in a professional kitchen, he also writes about his experiences so well that you spend as much time being jealous of his writing skills as you do of his experiences. It's an annoyingly enjoyable read." - Simon Majumdar, author of two food/travel memoirs, Eat My Globe and Eating For Britain.

Twitter Comments:

"Two chapters in to Alex Watts' book & bloody LOVING it. Engaging, laugh-out-loud funny, incredibly readable. & TWO QUID!" - @chrispople

"It's a fab read. The Fat Duck chapters are class." - @Mcmoop

"If you claim to be a foodie you MUST buy this book." - @CorkGourmetGuy

"Just rattled through Down And Out in Padstow and London by Alex Watts in no time at all, what a great book." - @leejamesburns

"It's brilliant, a fine piece of work. If you've ever wanted to peer into a professional kitchen I can't recommend it highly enough." - @acidadam

"Fantastic read - the English Kitchen Confidential!" - @cabbagemechanic

"A great eBook to buy about serving your time (literally!) as a trainee chef." - @OkBayBach

"Great read." - @rankamateur

"Don't start reading it if you have things to do:)" - @NorthernSnippet

"Great book...couldn't put it down, read it non-stop on a train and finished it in one day." - @chunkymunki

"Really enjoyed your book. Thanks and good luck! As a closet wannabe chef it really hit the mark :) Good on you for taking the plunge!" - @el-duder

"Jolly good read, feel free to do one more." - @esbens

There are also nine reviews here on its Amazon page...

In the fairness of balance, it is only right for me to mention the negatives as well. I've had two so far. The first being that the book is quite short (70,000 words), and the second was a tweet from Glasgow-born award-winning journalist and screenwriter Audrey Gillan, who described Rick Stein's executive chef's Glaswegian accent as "pure murdurr - nae Glaswegians speak like that - evur".

I've just checked again, and it's now number 47 - one place behind Farting The Beans by Clarissa Dickson Wright, but nine above Stein's My Kitchen Table: 100 Fish And Seafood Recipes.

Oh well, small acorns and all that, but if the book does ever get anywhere, they could always use Brad Pitt for the Scotch part.

MORE: Down And Out In Padstow And London Pt 1

Pitching Confidential: How Not To Get A Food Book Published

To buy my book, CLICK HERE.

Antony Worrall Thompson’s Cruise Ship Cooking Demo Axed After Shoplifting Arrest

2012-01-26T08:06:00.000-08:00

Troubled celebrity chef Antony Worrall Thompson's cooking demonstrations on a luxury cruise ship have been given the chop following his arrest for shoplifting.

AWT was due to deliver his culinary tricks of the trade (first steal 1kg of onions...) on the MSC Splendida for its cruise in February, but the line-up was changed “with regret” following the news this month that he’d been caught stealing at Tesco in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire.

The recession-hit cook will instead be replaced by celebrity chef Paul Rankin for the seven-night cruise visiting Barcelona, Valletta, La Goulette, Civitavecchia, and Marseille.

“In the wake of the coverage which appeared in the media and Mr Thompson’s own public announcement of his desire to seek appropriate treatment for his condition, we felt that his presence on board was no longer tenable at this particular time,” said a spokesman at MSC Cruises.

The firm said Rankin - who appears on Ready Steady Cook and Ten Mile Menu, and won Northern Ireland’s first Michelin Star - will “showcase some of his best loved dishes – and a selection unique to MSC”.

It said Rankin (above), 52, was a “passionate supporter of local produce, so much so that in 2002 he launched The Rankin Selection, a range of traditional foods now stocked in supermarkets throughout the UK.”

Not sure if they’re stocked at Tesco in Henley, but AWT didn’t nick any when he failed to pay for items at the self-service checkouts FIVE times in 16 days over the Christmas period.

Some goods were scanned and paid for while others, including blocks of cheese from the deli and bottles of wine, were sneaked into bags without going through the till.

Suspicious staff set up a hidden camera in the self-checkout area to catch the wily 60-year-old and prove he had not simply forgotten to pay.

Wozza - who is a fund-raiser for the Tories - was stopped by security guards in front of shoppers as he tried to leave the shop on January 6.

He was arrested on suspicion of theft and given a caution at a local police station after admitting the offences.

The cook is now receiving counselling to try to figure out why he stole the items, and has come up with a basketful of excuses from his abuse at boarding school to aliens invading.

He said after his arrest: “I am so sorry for all my recent stupid and irresponsible actions; I am of course devastated for my family and friends, whom I've let down and will seek the treatment that is clearly needed.

“I am not the first, and I certainly won't be the last person to do something without rhyme or reason - what went through my head, only time will tell.”

My new book on training to be a chef, including stints at Rick Stein's and the Fat Duck, is available on Amazon CLICK HERE

"Reading this book is a serious test for any food writer. Not only has Alex Watts done what all of us say we would like to do, tested his mettle in a professional kitchen, he also writes about his experiences so well that you spend as much time being jealous of his writing skills as you do of his experiences. It's an annoyingly enjoyable read." - Simon Majumdar

Haven't got a Kindle? You can download a free Kindle reader app to read it on your computer. CLICK HERE.

'World's Most Expensive Hot Dog' Goes On Sale For $100

2012-01-24T07:12:00.000-08:00

It’s difficult to get noticed these days in the increasingly competitive world of catering. But it always helps if you can come up with some sort of gimmick to separate you from the chaff, especially in the cut throat world of fast food and painfully fashionable food trucks.

Burgers have been done to death, even though the London food literati never seem to tire of twatting about them. But hot dogs? Well, there’s still some mileage to be had out of the good old dog isn’t there - that great American sporting tradition of stuffing your face with ice cold beer and something pink and meat-like in a roll?

At least, one restaurant owner in Vancouver, Canada, hopes so after launching what he claims is the world’s most expensive hot dog - at a ridiculous price of $100 (£67).

So just what do you put in a hot dog to command such a ludicrous price tag? Truffles? Foie gras? Caviar? Sea cucumbers poached in Armagnac? Endangered, satellite-tracked southern river terrapin? How about flesh from the world’s last bluefin tuna?

No, they’ve all been done to death.

The current purveyor of the world’s most expensive hot dog is US celebrity chef Stephen Bruce, according to the Guinness Book of World Records. His $69 Haute Dog served at Serendipity 3 restaurant in New York comprises a beef sausage grilled in white truffle oil, and served on a pretzel roll with duck foie gras, and caramelised Vidalia onions.

But Dougie Dog owner Dougie Luv says his foot-long "mouth-wateringly delicious" Dragon Dog is the first sausage in a bap to sell for three figures.

The gimmick? It contains a bratwurst infused with 100-year-old Louis XIII cognac, which costs more than $2,000 a bottle, as well as Kobe beef seared in olive and truffle oil, fresh lobster, and a ‘secret’ picante sauce.

Luv said he wanted to come up with something "super tasty and high-end" that stays true to the traditional identity of the hot dog. Oh, and to get into the Guinness Book of Records and attract a whole load of PR, of course.

Just think if the brilliantly-named Joey "Jaws" Chestnut, winner of the World Hot Dog Eating Contest’s mustard-yellow champion's belt for the fifth year running, got hold of them. He’d get through $6,200 worth in 10 minutes. Only in America...

MPs Moan Their Soup Bowls Are Too Small & Their Subsidised Crisps Are 10g Too Light

2012-01-23T11:10:00.000-08:00

I once was fortunate enough to be taken for lunch at the House of Commons’ swanky, subsidised restaurant The Terrace. I was working for a weekly paper at the time and a week before had been invited to a speech Brian MaWhinney was to make to the local Conservative Party.

I went along on that Friday evening, when I should have been in the pub, only to find that MaWhinney had had a change of heart and didn’t want any press there. Apparently, he wanted to give a less guarded speech, and got one of his lackeys to tell us the good news.

But, of course, I couldn’t just leave in case he said anything important, so I had to wait there for hours until he finished and then try to badger the local members into giving me a few snippets. When I approached MaWhinney afterwards, he cut me dead.

“You haven’t got a story,” he barked.

My editor - a deranged woman who once screamed “file copy” down the phone until she was so hoarse and exhausted she fell off her chair - was furious. She called the local Conservative Association, and screamed at them down the phone about why I hadn’t been allowed in the meeting, and threatened to make her reporters Conservative Party members to ensure they got into future events.

The Tories quickly tried to smooth things over, and as some sort of fig leaf, my news editor and I were invited for lunch at the House of Commons by Norman Tebbit's long-time secretary, Beryl Goldsmith. She was splendid company, filled with gossip about the Commons, which was all sadly off the record.

But the thing I remember most was just how good the food was - easily as good as most fine restaurants I’d been in at the time. But it was the cheap prices in Parliament that really blew me away. It was like a soup kitchen for hungry MPs. My salmon with hollandaise sauce was the price of a Big Mac. No wonder the plush restaurant was filled with MPs greedily stuffing their faces, and filling their pockets with sandwiches, so they wouldn’t have to eat on the way home.

Indeed you might think they’d be grateful in this age of austerity that the taxpayer shells out £5.8m a year so our hard-working MPs don’t have to pay the full price for food like the rest of the population.

But far from it. A list of their petty gripes published by the Daily Telegraph today after a freedom of information request shows what a whinging bunch of tossers they really are.

MPs and their aides dining in Parliament’s 28 eateries complained that their beer is too expensive, their chips are not arranged in jenga-style towers, their eggs are too watery, they receive change in coppers rather than whole five pences, and the crisp packets from the vending machine are ten grams too light.

According to a log of dozens of pedantic complaints from the restaurants' suggestions trays, one unknown politician in the Members’ and Strangers’ dining rooms wrote: “’The bucket’ of chips, while attractive to some and no doubt trendy, makes for soggy chips. The tower arrangement is better.”

Another pampered MP said eating in The Terrace restaurant - with its stunning views of the Thames - was a “dismal experience”.

“The room is gloomy with no soft lighting to make it more welcoming. My starter of beetroot and pumpkin salad consisted of one piece of beetroot in a puddle of pumpkin puree and was tasteless. My main course of fish cake was far too dry to eat and both main courses were far too salty,” he said.

Another miserly diner demanded an inquiry into the weight of a packet of Walkers Light ready salted crisps. “The normal weight for a packet of individually bought crisps is 34.5g (38p supermarket price), the packet I purchased from the vending machine was 24.5g (50p).”

Others moaned that the soup bowls were too small, that a tart came with too meagre a serving of couscous, and that a vegetarian dish arrived ‘”dredged in Worcestershire sauce [sic], which is not vegetarian (anchovies)”. Commons staff pointed out that it was, in fact, balsamic vinegar.

Someone else wrote: “Just wondered if you’re doing the scrambled egg in a different way now? Tastes kind of watery – not nice!” And another saw red over the kedgeree. “The boiled egg had been cut into THREE quarters – no sign of the fourth.... Petty and insulting way to save a buck.”

One MP accused staff of making them feel like “second-class citizens” because they had run out of breakfast at 10.30am, and there was fury that beer had hit £2.60 a pint - when it is nearer £4 in most central London pubs.

You might think they’d be grateful, given that they can enjoy pan-fried red mullet with carrot purée and a soft boiled quail’s egg for just £4.15, an artichoke and tomato salad with truffle dressing for £2.05, and braised pork belly with black pudding bonbon and apple salad for £2.70.

A rib eye steak with hand cut chips and béarnaise sauce sets them back a massive £7.80, chocolate and orange torte £2.05, and a selection of fine cheeses only £3.10 - which is almost as cheap as Antony Worrall Thompson gets them for at Tesco.

It’s appalling that they have the temerity to complain at all when many taxpayers are struggling to feed their families, and can’t afford luxuries like fresh fruit, let alone red mullet or rib eye steak.

It’s time these subsidies were axed to set an example - £5.8m might not seem much in the context of the billions the Government needs to shave off the deficit, but it’s the image it portrays of MPs being greedy, penny-pinching, self-important ingrates, especially when people are still furious over the expenses scandal, and are facing sweeping cuts to public services.

Talk about the Westminster gravy train and eating like a Lord, you only have to do the sums to see the injustice. A £5.8m subsidy for 650 MPs works out at nearly £9,000 a year per politician. When you consider they sit for 150 days a year, it works out at £60 per MP per day.

If Cameron and Osborne really want to make cuts the public can stomach, they should look down the corridor at the MPs gorging themselves on steak and halibut at the taxpayer trough. It goes to show how insulated Parliament is from the concerns of the real world.

Masterchef & The Myth Of The Celebrity Chef

2012-01-23T04:09:00.000-08:00

(Pic: Celeb Dirty Laundry)

If you want to see how ridiculous the whole celebrity chef phenomenon has become, then look at the mansion Gordon Ramsay has just picked up the keys to in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles.

Ramsay has suffered a year of woes in the UK, was forced to close several restaurants in his crumbling empire, and proved that he is one of the world’s worst actors when he appeared in a dreadful flop about a chef who moves to the country and finds love.

But his TV career in the States has gone from strength to strength, with Masterchef returning for a third series and a new show Hotel Hell launching on Fox in March.

And the celebrity chef clearly plans to spend a lot more time there after forking out a staggering £4.3m for the five-bedroom family home, near his friends David and Victoria Beckham.

Four million big ones! It just goes to show the ludicrous gulf between a celebrity chef and someone who actually cooks for a living.

I’ve written a lot about the number of young cooks going into the trade because they can’t be footballers or rock stars, and they think cheffing is the next best thing to be famous in.

A whole generation of ultimately-disappointed hopefuls convinced you can just learn the trade and be the next Ramsay or Jamie Oliver. Programmes like Masterchef do nothing to dispel the myth.

As I wrote in my book...

“The whole show was a farce. The prize was a job as a trainee chef at a top London restaurant. They didn’t say how much you’d get, or what the hours were, or what to do when you’re thrown out on the street because you can’t pay the rent.

“Maybe the prize didn’t exist at all. I mean, who the hell would take them up on it? The whole thing was about getting on the telly, and society’s mushrooming obsession with fame. I couldn’t see any of the contestants swapping their cushy jobs for 16 hours a day of back-breaking toil on a wage just enough to keep them alive. Not if there weren’t any cameras about anyway."

Forget Beverly Hills, it’s more likely to be Butlin’s. If you want the reality, then look at the pay packet of a chef in the UK. A lowly commis chef gets about £13,000, whereas an experienced sous chef trousers as much as £28,000 a year - about the average salary in the trade.

It would take the average chef exactly 204 years to save up enough cash to buy Ramsay’s LA mansion - and that’s assuming he never went out, lived on bread and water, and slept in a cardboard box.

Just remember next time you’re watching Masterchef, cooking doesn’t get tougher than this...

The Night The Roux Brothers Had Bread Rolls Hurled At Them

2012-01-21T07:20:00.000-08:00

It is a little known fact, but before the Roux brothers arrived in Britain, people were sitting around in puddles eating mud, completely unaware that ovens even existed, let alone the complexities of the sort of soufflé that would engender begrudging Gallic approval.

No one knew how to cook, animals were eaten raw, and the Government was so concerned about the nation’s eating habits, they flew in the two Frenchmen to save the British people before it was too late.

Or at least, that’s the impression you’d get if you read today’s Daily Mail interview with Michel and Albert Roux, who modestly claim they single-handedly transformed British cuisine, turning the UK into the celebrity chef-obsessed, great food Mecca it is today.

“It was the dark ages,” said Michel, 70, shaking his head in disgust at the memory of the British culinary scene when he moved to London in the late 1960s.

“Nobody was serving decent food. I'm not even talking about good food. You would go to the Lyons Corner House where they would give you bleached bread and vegetables saturated with water. It was inedible. You have no idea what it was like.”

But by first opening Le Gavroche in Chelsea in 1967, then The Waterside Inn at Bray in Berkshire, and several brasseries, the brothers changed all that and showed the British how to eat, apparently.

“The Roux legacy is a lifetime of hard work which transformed food in Britain. We now have a food heritage to be proud of,” boasts Albert's son Michel Roux Jr (pic below) in the interview to plug the Good Food Channel’s new series - called funnily enough The Roux Legacy, and featuring the family's celebrity chef chums and a whole lot of tedious back-slapping.

But it wasn’t all plain sailing. A friend of mine - who’s retired now after making a fortune running racecourse catering firms across the UK - remembers a disastrous night in 1985 when the Roux brothers were pioneering a very modern cooking system known as sous vide.

They catered for a special function at the Royal Albert Hall for 2,500 members of the advertising world using only vac-packed food cooked under pressure, so all they had to do was reheat it just before service, which they claimed would make it very easy in the kitchen.

My friend, who helped run the event, had voiced his concerns beforehand, saying he’d had problems in the past with sous vide, and the Roux brothers were restaurateurs not caterers and were used to knocking out grub for 200 people not 2,000.

But Michel Roux reassured him: “It will be a wonderful way of introducing this cooking system to a lot of people. We are opening a restaurant in the City which will only use sous vide and this dinner will be a showcase for us.”

But the evening couldn’t have gone worse.

Because of the complexities of the new system and all the equipment (no, not just scissors) that needed to be brought in to solve the logistical problems of getting food out at the same time to all seven tiers of the Albert Hall - a place that Albert Roux had half-joked was named after him - the main meal was so late, the guests had polished off most of the wine before it arrived.

“The highlight,” my friend recalls, “was Albert and Michel Roux on the stage at the Albert Hall being jeered and pelted with bread rolls by all the luminaries of the London advertising world.”

Wonder if that will appear in the programme?

MORE: Coq Au Van: In Defence of Gordon Ramsay

Restaurant Crowned By Gordon Ramsay As Best In Britain Goes Bust

2012-01-16T07:35:00.000-08:00

(Pic: Ramsay with Pheasant head chef Jay Scrimshaw, left)

Gordon Ramsay has again confirmed the view that chefs make rubbish food critics after a gastropub he crowned Britain’s best local restaurant went into liquidation.

The Pheasant made it to the final of The F Word three years ago with Ramsay heaping so much praise on the eatery, you’d think he’d just necked a fistful of Prozac and found himself slumped in a trough full of dove-fetched ambrosia.

With his usual wide-arsed bluster straight from the TV producers’ bumper book of overdone-to-the-point-of-cremated sound bites, he ranted and raved over chef-owner Jay Scrimshaw and his trendy nose-to-tail eating.

But his judgement was seriously called into question when restaurant critics then visited the thatched inn in Keyston, Cambridgeshire, and found it more of a turkey than a pheasant.

Far from agreeing with the celebrity chef that it was the best local restaurant in Britain, the Daily Telegraph’s restaurant critic Jasper Gerard questioned whether it was even the best restaurant in the sleepy village of Keyston.

He called the decor “rubbish”, slated the service as appalling, and said the warm salad of confit duck tasted like road kill, and was so chewy he wondered whether they’d instead served up the Dunlop tyre that squashed it.

Of course, the TV exposure proved a big boost for a while, which Jay and his wife Taffeta were quick to seize on, even inviting customers to park their private planes in the next-door farm.

But media fairy dust only lasts for a while, and needs word of mouth rather than word of gobshite to fall back, so it’s perhaps no surprise that the two Rosette pub (pic below) closed its doors this week, blaming the tough economic conditions.

The couple said on their Facebook page: “It is with a heavy heart that Jay and I must tell you that The Pheasant at Keyston Ltd has gone into liquidation.

"We have enjoyed every moment of our six-and-a-half years working here and have tried very hard not to let it go under. But unfortunately, due mainly to the current economic state, this has become harder and harder.”

They said the Pheasant will reopen on January 20 as part of Huntsbridge Ltd, which also owns The Old Bridge at Huntingdon.

The firm’s owner John Hoskins told local paper The Hunts Post: “Jay and Taffeta are a very nice young couple. They did very well in Gordon Ramsay’s competition but unfortunately their business has gone into liquidation.

“It is very sad. It is a tough time to run any business and people will be surprised that this has happened. It was well-known and seemed to be successful.”

But to be fair to the couple, the Pheasant is certainly not the first restaurant lauded by Ramsay in his many TV shows to close, and as long as he remains in the media spotlight, it will be far from the last.

His TV mission to rescue ailing eateries on both sides of the Atlantic is more like the kiss of death than a recipe for survival.

At the time the Pheasant was crowned, half of the 20 restaurants taken on by Ramsay for his Kitchen Nightmares USA show had closed, and a further 12 out of 22 eateries in five series of the UK version had either shut or been sold.

The owners of the Black Pearl seafood shack in New York dubbed Ramsay a "jerk" after it closed, and said they hoped naively they would gain from the nationwide publicity.

"The sad fact is, from the beginning, it was clear that the show was a joke," they added. "From the very first day they were initiated, the changes Gordy Ramsay made were ridiculed by the press, hated by our regular customers and were the direct cause of a 50% drop in revenues. We were never able to recover financially."

The harsh truth is a restaurant needs bums on seats and effective cost control rather than the meddling or endorsement of a celebrity chef to succeed.

And you only have to look at Heston Blumenthal’s failed makeover of Little Chef, which has announced it is to close 61 of its 161 outlets and shed up to 600 staff, to see that in full beam.

No doubt the sacrificed wage slaves now heading to the dole queue will be delighted that the millionaire chef will remain on the payroll as a consultant despite the mass redundancies.

MORE: Gordon Ramsay a cut above the rest?

My new book on training to be a chef, including stints at Rick Stein's and the Fat Duck, is available to buy on Amazon for Kindle, iPad, iPhone etc. CLICK HERE to buy for just £2.05, about the price of half a lager.

"It's a bargain and an easy read, I didn't want to put it down." @Mcmoop

"Should be required reading for anyone who has ever dreamed of leaving the monotony of the 9 to 5 rat race to open their own restaurant." Breil Bistro

"A great read and should be a set text if you're considering a change of career, or God forbid, applying to Masterchef." richard

McMouse On Menu: Big Mac Vermin Video

2012-01-16T01:01:00.000-08:00

Two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, on a sesame seed bun. Oh, and a mouse, if you’re unlucky enough to buy a Big Mac from a McDonalds in the US.

A former employee at the West Oak Lane restaurant in Philadelphia has posted a disturbing video of a rodent scurrying around in a bag filled with dozens of McDonalds burger buns.

Karruim Demaio says he pulled out his mobile phone to film the creature in a back room store, and was so appalled by the footage he’s released it as a warning to customers.

“That wasn't the first time. That was about the sixth or seventh time. That's what made me like, I got to get video of this,” he told Fox News.

“I was going back there to get something else and I heard some rustling, so I turned around, and I look, I seen a mouse inside the bread. Not on top of the package, but inside of the package.”

Demaio said the baps were contaminated with droppings on numerous occasions.

“I was working there from October of 2010 to January of this year. There hasn't been a time when we couldn't go in the back and see mouse droppings on the bread,” he added.

He says his boss told staff to brush off the droppings, and serve the baps to customers - a claim denied by the female manager. Fox News said a second employee has confirmed Demaio’s allegations.

Raw Video: Mouse In Bag Of Big Mac Rolls: MyFoxPHILLY.com

Ken Youngblood, owner of the McDonalds franchise, initially said he hadn’t seen the TV station’s news report, but later sent out a statement.

“After viewing the video, we are going to continue to investigate this claim to make certain we have all the facts.

“I want my customers to know that I am taking this matter seriously and will immediately address any issues that may exist. Therefore, if necessary, we will work with the appropriate authorities to get the facts,” he said.

The restaurant has a string of health violations over the last 18 months including live flies found in the food prep area, food not being kept cool enough, and fridges not working properly, according to the Philadelphia Health Department.

MORE: Waiter! There's a snake in my broccoli

MORE: Baked mouse in malt loaf

On The Trail Of The Elusive Coconut Man

2012-01-15T03:21:00.000-08:00

I first heard about the Coconut Man during a late night conversation in a bar with a strange man who claims to be an ex-forces agent, wades through swamps with king cobra serum in a holster on one leg, and viper serum on the other, and has “fired every Goddamn weapon on this earth”.

He’s been living in SE Asia for the past 40 years, helps run a charity clearing land mines, and is a partner in a security firm transporting millions of dollars of payroll cash to factories across Cambodia. Or so he claims. The last time I saw him, he was wearing a grimy bandana and eating cold chicken out of a plastic bag in a supermarket canteen in Phnom Penh.

That night he was lecturing me about how physically strong Khmer men are. He took a swig of beer and put his baseball cap back over his glass. He sounded like Bill Hicks, but more angry.

“This dude can climb trees and rip coconuts open with his fucking teeth man,” he said. “Can you do that? I know I’m Goddamn sure I can’t!”

I told him I didn’t think I could either.

“Damn right, you can’t! The Khmers are the toughest people on Earth! Pound for pound I’d put them up against any other nationality.”

He told me the Coconut Man lived in the jungle, somewhere along the Mekong River - a river that stretches 300 miles across Cambodia. When I pressed him further on the location, he admitted he hadn’t actually seen the Coconut Man, but had read about him sometime ago in one of the Cambodian newspapers.

“Were there pictures?” I asked.

“Damn right there were pictures! The man was ripping coconuts open with his freaking TEETH!”

The next morning, I did a few internet searches, and eventually found a feature about a man called Sai Song, who, according to the copy, lived in Preak Anh Chanh village, near the Kampong Cham border in Kandal Province.

It was hundreds of miles away from where I was, but I thought the story might make a few dollars. I found a Khmer taxi driver, who for some reason called himself Ian, and claimed to know the village. In fact, he said he was born in a village a few miles away. He spoke decent enough English, and said he sometimes works as a driver and translator for foreign journalists visiting the country.

He met me at my hotel in Phnom Penh the next morning and drove me in his old Toyota saloon into the flooded provinces along the Mekong River. We crawled down muddy tracks, built for oxen, with the worn suspension thumping away. But there was no sign of the village, let alone the Coconut Man.

Ian kept getting out to ask for directions. I could make out a few words. Occasionally someone would point up the road, or across rice paddies now flooded to the size of Lake Windermere, but with trees sticking out from the water. There seemed to be a lot of men who could rip open coconuts with their teeth in this part of Cambodia. But no-one had heard of the village.

Eventually I phoned the paper to try to get hold of the reporter who’d written the story. It took her a few minutes to remember the tale, and a few more to admit she’d probably written down the wrong Preak Anh Chanh village, and that it was nowhere near the Kampong Cham border. We headed back towards Phnom Penh, with Ian moaning much of the way about the “waste of gasoline”.

“Near Kampong Cham border!” he kept tutting.

We stopped at more communes, and I was about to suggest we head back to Phnom Penh and forget all about the elusive Coconut Man and his self-proclaimed “special powers” - invisibility clearly being one of them - when three young children fishing in a tiny trench pointed excitedly down the road.

From the slightly terrified look in their eyes, it was obvious we weren’t the only ones who’d heard about the Coconut Man’s incredible feats. We drove down the dirt track and asked more villagers, and they pointed at a wooden house with palm trees growing at the front. An old woman was sitting on the front steps with a baby on her lap. She was apparently the Coconut Man’s mother-in-law.

She pointed behind the house and we walked down an overgrown path, lined with ducks, chickens, and half-wild dogs, and stopped at the last barn. After a few minutes, a hugely muscled rice farmer appeared. It turned out he wasn’t the Coconut Man - he was just here to check us out. I began wondering about what they were growing in the barn. Then the Coconut Man appeared. He was much shyer and smaller than I’d expected, but his arms looked like they’d been made from smelted iron.

He took us out to the front of the house as word quickly spread round the village that a barang with a camera had appeared. Soon there were dozens of villagers crowded round the car waiting for the Coconut Man to work his magic. But Cambodians are a suspicious lot, and none of them were standing too close.

I began filming as he scaled a 40ft tree in just 15 seconds and then climbed back down carrying five heavy coconuts. He then ripped open two coconuts with his teeth – taking barely 40 seconds to remove the fibrous, brown husk of the first. And then just 50 seconds to shell the far tougher, green husk of the second.

His other stunts included flexing his neck muscles out like an angry, hooded cobra and ripping rope apart with his hands. I interviewed him through the taxi driver afterwards, but he was a man of few words.

“I knew when I was 12 that I was strong, and decided to start climbing trees and bringing coconuts down for my family and friends to eat. Then I trained myself to rip them open,” he eventually muttered.

I turned to the rest of the family in hope. Anything to break through his steely silence. His five-year-old daughter Yisoung simply said she was proud of her father. I asked the Coconut Man whether she had special powers too. He gestured at her, and she held her hands to her eyes and turned her eyelids inside out.

There was more silence, and then his wife Seap, 22, appeared from the back of the house. She said she was too scared to watch his stunts.

“I tell him not to do them because I’m afraid he will fall from the tree or break his teeth on the coconuts, but he does not listen to me,” she sighed.

A huddle of villagers were standing well away from the others. They said they were scared he was using “Khmer black magic”. “We worry he may bring evil spirits to the area,” said an old woman.

But when I talked to the monks in the local pagoda, they just laughed. They said his skills come in handy every year for the Pchum Ben festival of the dead, when they get him to climb trees in the grounds of the commune to collect coconuts, which are then left with rice and other foods as offerings to the ghosts of dead ancestors.

I climbed back into the taxi, not knowing whether we had a story or not.

Floyd Movie Not Coming To A Cinema Soon

2012-01-12T01:46:00.000-08:00

Keith Floyd’s former manager says he has no knowledge of plans to make a “major film” about the flamboyant celebrity chef’s life.

In a rather suspect story in the Daily Express this week, it was claimed Welsh actor Rhys Ifans was being lined up to play Floyd in the forthcoming movie.

The paper quoted unnamed producers saying: “Keith’s story is a remarkable one full of highs and lows. He put the modern day celebrity chef on the map and was a real pioneer in terms of making cookery shows such entertainment.

“There’s already strong producer interest and it’s felt Rhys Ifans would capture the essence of Keith perfectly. It’s hoped filming will begin in early 2013.”

But the story looks like it should be taken with several large buckets of salt because no-one has even sounded out Floyd’s former manager Stan Green, who looks after the late celebrity chef’s media and licensing rights.

“Yes I read (the story), we here at the Floyd Estate have no knowledge or have been approached in regard to this item,” he told Chef Sandwich.

Sounds like Ifans - who played comedian Peter Cook to critical acclaim - will be in no rush to polish his cooking and wine-glugging skills.

TV Chef Antony Worrall Thompson Caught Shoplifting From Tesco

2012-01-09T03:23:00.000-08:00

Things have gone from bad to decidedly worse for recession-hit TV cook Antony Worrall Thompson, the man Gordon Ramsay famously dubbed a “squashed Bee Gee”.

The Ready Steady Crook’s star was definitely on the wane after his restaurant empire went into administration in 2009, owing angry creditors thousands of pounds, and making 60 staff redundant.

But it appears things are far tougher than people thought for the tubby celebrity chef because he’s now been reduced to stealing cheese and wine from Tesco.

And it wasn’t a one-off, of the Richard Madeley ‘sorry I didn’t realise there was a frozen chicken stuffed down my trousers’ school of shoplifting.

Worrall Thompson was arrested in front of shoppers at the supermarket (pic below) in Reading Road, Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire - after failing to pay for items at the self-service checkouts FIVE times in 16 days.

Some goods were scanned and paid for while others, including blocks of cheese from the deli and bottles of wine, were sneaked into bags without going through the till.

Suspicious staff are reported to have set up a hidden camera in the self-checkout area to catch the wily 60-year-old and prove he had not simply forgotten to pay.

Wozza - who has appeared on shows including the BBC's Ready, Steady, Cook and ITV's Daily Cooks Challenge, and is a fund-raiser for the Tories - was stopped by security guards as he tried to leave the shop on Friday.

He was arrested on suspicion of theft and questioned at a local police station.

In a statement, officers said: "Thames Valley Police arrested a 60-year-old man from High Wycombe following a report of shoplifting offences. The man has been issued with a formal caution for these offences."

The father-of-four had to admit to the shoplifting offences - which are believed to have taken place between December 22 and January 6 - in order to escape with a caution.

Tesco declined to comment describing it as a "police matter".

But it’s criminal that a man of AWT’s wealth (although he’s been forced to downsize from his £2m mansion in Henley for a home in far less salubrious High Wycombe, he still has a range of branded cookware, a country pub called The Greyhound, two grill restaurants in Kew and Windsor, and a delicatessen in Windsor) should be able to duck justice with just a caution while some single mothers struggling to feed their kids are given prison sentences for the same offence.

If it was just a one-off, a moment of madness, or a genuine mistake, you might understand police being lenient. But as he’s a fairly well-known celebrity, they should have made an example of him and at least prosecuted him in the courts to ensure he got a criminal record.

As Peter Cook once said, there’s one law for the rich...in fact there’s several laws for the rich, and very few for the poor.

UPDATE: Worrall Thompson has now apologised for his “stupid and irresponsible behaviour” and said he would get “clearly needed” treatment following the thefts.

In a statement, he said: “I am so sorry for all my recent stupid and irresponsible actions; I am of course devastated for my family and friends, whom I've let down and will seek the treatment that is clearly needed.

“I am not the first, and I certainly won't be the last person to do something without rhyme or reason - what went through my head, only time will tell.

“Of course, I must also apologise sincerely to Tesco, with whom I'm had a long and genuine working relationship, and to all the staff at the Henley branch, many of whom I've got to know over the years.

“Once again, I am so sorry and hopefully in the future I can make amends.”

MORE: Antony Worrall Thompson puts dolphin on menu

Prahok: My Secret Addiction To Cambodia's Infamous Fermented Fish 'Cheese'

2012-01-05T03:14:00.000-08:00

For the past few weeks, I’ve been staying in a guesthouse in Phnom Penh, writing every day in the restaurant downstairs, and trying to get the printed version of my book sorted. It’s a relaxing place, filled with backpackers all tapping away on their computers and updating their Facebook statuses as modern day travellers seem to do now.

It appears a lap-top, iPad, or at the very least a smart phone, are up there on the trusty travellers’ check list with sunscreen, sandals and mosquito repellent, which is very definitely needed in this bug-filled, thatched roof canteen.

Every hour a bus or a packed tuk tuk arrives with more tourists, some old, some young, some hauling monstrous backpacks that a small elephant would turn its trunk up to. Some are on their way north to Laos, some down to the coast to Sihanoukville, some are heading east to Vietnam, or west to Thailand, and some are just killing a day until their plane takes them back to their normal lives again, and the drudgery of a 9 to 5.

It’s like sitting at a crossroads watching the world go by. Other times, I feel like that bloke who lived in a French airport for six years. I feel mildly jealous of their energy and meticulously planned itineraries, but all most of them seem interested in is ticking off places they’ve been to.

None of them stay anywhere long enough to find out what a place is really like. How anyone can “see” India, Thailand, Cambodia and then Laos in two weeks - as celebrity chef Raymond Blanc just did before losing all his luggage and “Zen” on the flight home - is beyond me.

Occasional snatched trinkets of conversation drift over, but mostly I just tap away on my computer in the corner of the room, or offer the odd vehement curse as I try to resolve a formatting issue with my book.

Every day I eat the same two dishes - chicken porridge soup (bo bor sach moan) for breakfast/lunch, and prahok ling for supper (pic below). The owner, a fellow prahok addict, cooked the latter for me one day after I told her I was learning how to cook Cambodian food, and I’ve been ordering it ever since.

I eat so much of it, she even calls me Prahok Ling now, and is threatening to make me up a T-shirt with “I Love Prahok” on the back (which admittedly is a lot more original than the ubiquitous “No Money, No Honey” T-shirts that wide-eyed men of a certain age wear over here). But I can’t stop myself - it really is splendid.

And whenever I think I’m being odd, or noses are wrinkled when my dish laden with prahok arrives, I just look round at the backpackers eating their cheeseburgers and garlic bread, and wonder what the hell is the point of travelling 6,000 miles to eat Western food every day?

Prahok ling is fish paste fried with hand-chopped pork, onion, garlic, egg, and chilli. And it’s so strong there are strict Government laws in place to ensure you only get a small saucer of the stuff, which you eat with boiled jasmine rice and a plate of raw vegetables to take the edge off the extremely pungent taste.

But I’ve always been into bold, salty flavours, and for me it’s absolutely delicious, and is something I’m definitely going to try to replicate when I get back to the UK.

Knowing that prahok will be as rare as rocking horse manure in Blighty, I’ve been trying to figure out how to do this. I bought a couple of tins of anchovies the other day at a criminal price, chopped them up, and fried them in place of the prahok. It was pretty good, but not the same...

But anyway, this is how the guesthouse owner makes hers. She starts by hand-chopping about 500g of pork shoulder until it is minced but still has texture, and then thinly slices two onions, and chops four cloves of garlic, and two red bird eye chillies.

She heats a little oil in a wok and fries the pork for a few minutes until it is browned. She then removes it from the pan and sets it aside. She adds a little more oil to the wok, and then fries the onion for a couple of minutes until soft, and then throws in the garlic and chillies.

She cooks it for another few minutes before adding the pork and a spoonful or two of prahok, and some lime juice to taste. She then stir-fries the brownish mixture for 10 minutes, and sets it aside to cool. She keeps the mixture in a tub in the fridge ready for service.

When an order comes in (i.e. me), she heats a little oil in a wok, and then adds an egg. She stirs away furiously until the yolk has just cooked, and then adds about 100g of the pork and prahok mixture, and one or two whole red chillies, and fries it over a medium flame for three or four minutes (see pic above). She serves it on a saucer with a plate of raw cabbage, aubergines, onion, and cucumber, and a small mound of steamed rice.

I can’t recommend it highly enough. And if I ever do a Cambodian pop-up night when I get back to the UK, or run a barbecued cow (ko dut) street stall (see pic gallery below), or open a cafe doing the odd Khmer special, or indeed pursue any other of my half-baked plans that seem to change daily with the breeze blowing in from the Tonle Sap River, then prahok ling will definitely be on the menu.

TV Cook Rachel Allen Gets Hate Mail For Shooting Pheasants

2012-01-03T01:33:00.000-08:00

TV cook Rachel Allen has received hate mail after posting a picture of herself at a shoot with dead birds draped over the bonnet of her Chelsea Tractor.

The Irish celebrity chef, dressed in a wax jacket, flat cap, and holding a shotgun, smiles as she poses with four shot pheasants on her Audi four-wheel drive.

She posted the photo on her Facebook account with the message: “Enjoyed a great day's shooting in North Cork recently where I managed to get a few birds for our St Stephen's Day lunch.

“I'm going to make game terrine, the recipe for which is below. Wishing you all a merry Christmas and happy New Year!”

But it seems the festive goodwill was in short supply with a number of readers posting furious comments on the 39-year-old's page.

“I hope you have a shooting accident, and the gun is turned on you,” wrote one internet user, who logged in as Caroline Fitzgerald.

Another, Christina Swan-Doyle, blasted: “Hey Rachel, just wondering what’s on the menu tonight? Fox? Or maybe hound? You are a disgrace, absolutely disgusting behaviour. I hope the new year brings you all the karma that your due (sic).”

Annemarie Lucas added: “Ur a disgrace u horrible person..killing animals in that manner stick 2 your cooking im sure that needs improvement..shame on you (sic).”

Some of the comments were far worse, and made hate-filled, defamatory references to her family. But most fans were either indifferent or supported her actions, with 70 people ‘liking’ her photo.

“Well done Rachel Allen...great shooting! Had one bird myself today!” said fan David O’Leary.

Rory Allen, from Ballymaloe House in Shanagarry, Co Cork, Ireland, where Rachel teaches cooking courses, defended her actions, saying it was not unusual for a chef to kill their own food and many people ate game birds.

The row came as a hunt at Ballymaloe was slammed by anti-hunting campaigners, who accused the cooking school of breaking a commitment not to use hounds at their annual New Year's Day event. Mr Allen said that hounds were brought along to the fox hunt without permission, even though an agreement had been made.

"We're very embarrassed about the situation," he told the Irish Independent, adding that foxes were viewed as vermin, and he had lost a number of baby pigs and hens to foxes last year.

MORE: Gastropub chef gets hate mail for putting rook on the menu

Keith Floyd's 'Last Ever' Interview For Sale On eBay

2012-01-02T07:33:00.000-08:00

An unbroadcast video recording said to be the last ever interview with Keith Floyd has gone on sale on eBay.

The 15-minute tape is said to have been taken shortly before the TV chef’s death in September 2009, while he was visiting his friend Jean-Christophe Novelli at his £250 a day cooking academy at Crouchmoor Farm in Hertfordshire.

The seller Tony Eddison says he has the only copy in existence, and the footage has never been broadcast.

He told Chef Sandwich: "I filmed the interview as a favour to JC Novelli whom I was working with at the time. Floyd was due to collaborate in a cooking 'theatre' at JC's academy, but due to ill health this didn't come off. It was a huge buzz to meet my 'hero' in the flesh and chat with him like this."

So far, there have been 14 bids, with the current bid standing at £27. But with four days left until the auction closes, and Eddison claiming he had to relist the item on eBay following interest from overseas bidders, it’s likely the price will go much higher.

The scripted interview is said to contain Floyd’s views on British food, his thoughts on what it takes to be a chef, as well as some trademark anecdotes from the skewed bow tie-wearing roué.

“Floyd although visibly more tired than in his heyday keeps the twinkle in his eye and his zest for life is clear. The tape contains interview and out-takes and lead-ins and is the only master copy in existence, no other copies on any media exist. This interview was not broadcast,” the seller wrote on the item description.

Floyd’s former manager Stan Green, who has been appointed to look after the celebrity chef’s media and licensing rights for his two children Patrick and Poppy, was unavailable for comment.

(Pic: Stan Green Management)

But he may well be interested in the tape and its contents, especially as he’s producing a TV tribute to Floyd with Poppy (above) and her brother Patrick, himself a chef, later this year.

Poppy, an architect who lives in Hong Kong and a wannabe TV presenter, plans to visit the places visited by her late dad, recalling his adventures.

The tribute - provisionally titled Floyd On Floyd (what else?) - is said to have interest from a number of broadcasters. And, if all goes to plan, Poppy, 27, will follow in his footsteps and relive some of the best-known moments from the shows.

Anything to distract from that appalling, car crash TV documentary broadcast by Channel 4 on the night Floyd died.

Khmer Food: In Praise Of Salt And Pepper

2011-12-29T02:37:00.000-08:00

My love affair with salt and pepper began when I was a toddler. The dripping on toast my grandfather used to make with meat jelly and fat from the Sunday roast would have been nothing without the liberal amounts of salt and pepper he sprinkled on top.

And then there were the salt and pepper sandwiches my father got me into - thickly-buttered, white spongy slices from a sandwich loaf fresh from the bakers, filled with nothing more than a generous sprinkling of salt and freshly-ground black pepper. To me, it was a meal fit for a king as we sat in front of a roaring fire and drank cups of strong, brown tea during cold, wintry evenings.

Just as good were the boiled eggs and soldiers we’d have in the mornings, with a small mound of salt and pepper on the plate. We’d plunge the soldiers into the runny, golden goodness, and then into the two condiments - a simple, but delightful, dip that would leap me forward to eating Khmer food more than three decades later.

Over here, that magical combination is even better because of the abundance of Kampot pepper - the finest pepper in the world, and the country’s first product to get Geographical Indicator status. And if they are generous enough to give you the far superior and costly red pepper, as they do in one or two of the seafront restaurants in Kep’s famous crab market, then it’s out of this world.

But in Cambodia, they add something to the salt and pepper dip that makes it even more splendid - lime juice. It might not have been what I’d wanted with my soldiers in the morning all those years back. But I remember the flavour was always there in the dripping whenever we roasted a chicken because of the lemon quarters stuffed inside, which do incredible things to the succulence and flavour of the meat.

In restaurants here, they usually serve a mix of two thirds freshly-ground black pepper to one third salt, then carefully squeeze in two or three lime quarters and mix it in front of you. It might seem a laughably simple procedure that would scarcely trouble even the most cack-handed cook. But they take it as seriously as a chef de rang would the preparation of crepe suzette, pressed duck, or table-carved rib of beef, squeezing in the ‘correct’ amount of lime juice until there is the right moistness to the sauce.

The dip - called ‘tik marij’ in Khmer - works perfectly with a plate of selected cuts from a whole barbecued calf (ko dut), and even better with freshly-boiled seafood, particularly blue swimmer crabs, which although contain little brown head meat, and virtually no morsels in the claws, more than make up for it with the generously fleshy chine.

It always reminds me of seaside towns in Blighty, where a visit isn’t complete without a tub of whelks, liberally sprinkled with salt, white pepper, and malt vinegar, and eaten during a few bracing turns on the seafront. Over here, the lime juice takes the place of the vinegar. It’s fresher tasting, less acerbic, and far more complimentary to seafood. But I still miss those whelks...

It really is wonderful dipping crab meat into the tik marij and washing it down with ice cold beer. And what a way to spend an afternoon sitting in the crab market, gazing out to sea, and watching those women in their brightly-coloured hats checking their pots just 20 yards or so from the restaurant steps.

The crack of claws and chine, and that sweet meat magnified a hundred times by the pepper grown in the plantations behind the national park, sea salt from the neighbouring salt beds, and limes from the orchards. It’s an oasis where the land meets the sea and offers the very best the pair have in a tryst of gastronomic delight. In Singapore or Thailand, the crab might be smothered in chilli, in Vietnam it could take on an overriding taste of caramel, and in China it would most likely be in an MSG-laden sauce, thickened with cornflour.

But there is something delightfully, and deceptively, simple about Cambodian food - which is why it’s a shame it’s so overlooked. It’s the understanding of balance, simplicity, and the knowledge that fresh, local ingredients have a natural symmetry. And that’s why I love it. Simplicity in food is often dismissed as a lack of sophistication or technique, often engendering a lack of confidence in a country’s cuisine. But it couldn’t be further from the truth, and you’ve only got to look at the food in Italy to see it done to perfection.

Beef Lok Lak

The dish in Cambodia you’ll usually first encounter tik marij is beef lok lak (probably the country’s second most famous meal after its vastly over-rated fish amok). Many recipes call for the beef to be marinated in the sauce ingredients for an hour or two, but in my experience it’s unnecessary given the strength of the flavours, and the fact the salt does little for the tenderness of Khmer steak. Here’s how a friend of mine in a restaurant in Sihanoukville makes hers - simplicity in the extreme, and definitely worth making at home.

She starts by dicing a piece of steak (sirloin, rib-eye or rump work well) into smallish cubes, and then chops up two cloves of garlic. She heats a tiny amount of oil in a pan, and then fries the garlic until it begins to colour, and then throws in the meat to singe slightly.

She adds a sprinkling of sugar and salt to help the caramelisation process, and then cooks the meat for another minute or so. She then pours in a little water, and when it is bubbling, adds a glug of tomato ketchup and a couple of heaped teaspoons of oyster sauce.

She continues stirring, producing a velvety red and brown sauce. She cooks the meat until it is still quite bloody in the middle (about medium-rare) and then takes it off the heat to rest for a couple of minutes.

Meanwhile, she garnishes each plate with lettuce and three thick slices of tomato and onion, and then fries an egg. She mixes salt and pepper in a dish and squeezes in lime juice, and then serves.

Down And Out In Padstow And London

2011-12-21T02:55:00.000-08:00

I wanted to thank you for all the great feedback I had to my post ‘Pitching Confidential: How Not To Get A Food Book Published’ on my failure to get my book about training to be a chef published. There was some brilliant advice and ideas, and I went through them in turn to check them out, and I thought I’d give you an update...

The first major decision I made was to write the book (and future posts on this blog) under my real name Alex Watts, rather than Lennie Nash. When I wrote the book - and much of this blog - I was working as a journalist for Sky News. There were contractual regulations, and rules about what you could write on blogs and other social media, which is why I invented the pseudonym Lennie Nash.

Now I’m freelance, I’m free of those obligations. So I thought it would be less confusing (and require far less explanation in the long run) to write under my real name, which I’d wanted to do in the first place. I’ve kept Lennie as the main character in the book, mainly because it’s a mixture of fiction and non-fiction, and I’ve grown attached to him and it seems fitting somehow.

Going back to your recommendations, I checked out unbound.co.uk - which describes itself as a revolutionary new publishing method where readers choose the books they want to see published. Authors post their work on the site, and readers pledge monetary support in exchange for getting their name printed in the book (not a particularly novel idea - Dickens and Thackeray published a lot of their work by subscription in the 19th century) and when there’s enough funding it gets published.

Sounds brilliant. A sort of democracy in publishing. But the catch is 99% of the authors showcased are well-known writers or TV personalities, which rather defeats the purpose of finding new, quirky books that wouldn’t otherwise get the green light from a publishing industry which seems to have lurched towards all things celebrity.

Unbound say they don’t have enough staff yet to roll it out to ‘new’ writers, but plan to at some point. So unless you’re ex-Python Terry Jones (the first author to be published on Unbound), and already have books, operas, TV shows and the odd film to your name, you haven’t really got a shout.

Unbound said they would only consider authors who already had an agent (oh, why did I part ways with my agent?) or had books published, and could supply their ISBN numbers as proof. But they did recommend trying jottify.com - a website where writers show off their work and get feedback and gifted ‘inkpots’ (don’t ask) from fellow strugglers, sorry scribes.

I put the first chapter of my book up there, and was amazed how easy the publishing system was to use. I got a few comments, and the feedback was good, but it was hard to get noticed unless you bought up scores of ‘inkpots’ (don’t ask) to plug your work and give people a fighting chance of finding it on the site.

Meanwhile, I still looked at traditional, albeit painfully slow, publishing methods. I took your advice to send it off to Anthony Bourdain’s new line of books with Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins, and home to Bukowski, no less, so I wasn’t confident. Bourdain is to publish four or five food books a year written by chefs and other industry insiders, but I haven’t got high hopes, and HarperCollins didn’t get back to me on how to get the manuscript to Bourdain in the first place, and nor did his agent. One for the no hope file, I think.

I also approached another agent to see if they’d take on my book, and got another extremely bleak assessment of the current (and with book sales the way they are, probably future) state of the UK publishing industry, and its continuing obsession with celebrity.

“It sounds as if your previous agent tried his/her best for you with all the right publishers. The marketplace is exceptionally tough at the moment and publishers are really only taking on what they are convinced will be sure-fire hits,” they said. Which was politer than bugger off, at least.

Most of your advice was about getting my book published as an eBook. People said you needed to demonstrate you had a successful, self-published first book, and had generated some sort of following, before a publisher would give you any kind of advance on a second.

It seemed the way forward for now, and Lulu was highly recommended. Then I came to my second major crucial decision - the title. My former agent and her publishing pals hadn’t liked my original, rather depressing title of “Diary Of A Failed Chef” and wanted to go with “Yes, Chef!” arguing that was a common utterance in the book, and a theme the reader would quickly be familiar with.

But I hated it, even more than My Booky Wook. It was hardly the most original title, and sounded like something you’d call a banal TV sitcom set in a quaint manor house kitchen in middle England. I pushed for “Down And Out In Padstow and London” instead, hoping it might give an indication of the attempted humour within, and some indication of what it was about. The agent had offered me a peace pipe, saying she’d send that off to publishers as an alternative title.

But publishing under my own steam meant I could ditch Yes Chef! and go with Down And Out In Padstow And London. I signed up with Lulu, hearing tales about how some writers had managed to publish their eBook in just one day. But I wasn’t so confident, which was just as well really because the process did involve an unbelievable amount of tedious formatting.

However, it wasn’t as much as I’d feared. And after three days of hair-pulling and medicinal whisky-supping, I finally managed to publish an eBook - and will get round to the hard copy version later. Lulu warned that it would take some time before it was accepted on to Amazon etc (and pointed out that over 50% of Lulu’s eBooks are rejected by the online retail giant because of chapter formatting issues).

But mine seemed to work okay after a number of attempts, and I’ll just have to see whether it gets on to Amazon and other retail outlets. But here it is anyway if you fancy reading it - and for just £1.99 ($3). Go on, you’ll get an amazingly warm feeling knowing you’ve kept me in noodles for another day...

CLICK HERE TO BUY ON KINDLE, IPHONE, IPAD etc...

CLICK HERE TO BUY ON LULU...

Here's the book blurb:

Down And Out In Padstow And London is a humorous account of what really happens behind the scenes of both Michelin-starred restaurants and lesser establishments - and the extraordinary, larger-than-life characters who inhabit them. The book begins with Lennie Nash's decision to give up his job as a journalist, aged 40, and a fateful meeting with Rick Stein, when the cheffing door is opened.

There follow stints in the kitchens at Padstow, a failed audition for Masterchef, work as a commis chef under a crazed ex-football hooligan, 16-hour shifts as a kitchen slave in a gastropub, and the rigours of the Fat Duck. Unable to keep up with the younger chefs around him, he gives up the dream and returns to office life, only to find the itch starting again...

The book is aimed at the umpteen armchair chefs and foodies who would love to learn the trade first-hand from the professionals, braving the stress, 16-hour days, and low pay of kitchen life, but are far too sensible to do so.

Shame Of Cambodia's Memorial To Slain War Reporters

2011-12-20T08:03:00.000-08:00

Anyone who knows anything about the Cambodian Government will know they never do anything quickly. But it’s appalling how slow they’ve been honouring the more than three dozen journalists who were killed or went missing during the bloodshed and turmoil of the 1970-75 war.

I wrote a story back in August telling how the Government was to replace the original polystyrene memorial (pic above) that was unveiled in a park outside Phnom Penh's Hotel Le Royal in April 2010 to honour the 37 brave souls who died over the five years it took Pol Pot's murderous forces to capture the capital.

People had pulled chunks off it, exposing patches of white polystyrene, and the flimsy structure was leaning heavily and looked like it would fall down any minute. Some said it was a crying shame erecting such a cheap monument in the first place - especially for a country so filled with stone statues, and the huge numbers of gifted masons out here working for a few dollars a day.

The Government promised a more permanent memorial would take its place - funded by foreign money of course (anyone who’s seen the luxury limos and four-wheel drives ministerial lackeys drive around, and the incredibly sumptuous buildings they work in, will understand the Government needs to watch every penny.)

But the flimsy monument was removed from outside Le Royal - the unofficial headquarters of the foreign media who reported on Cambodia's takeover by the Khmer Rouge - a couple of months ago.

Back in August, Cambodia’s information minister Khieu Kanharith told me a new one with all the names of the dead and missing engraved on it was on its way, adding: “We will finalise the project at the end of this month.”

Perry Deane Young, of the Overseas Press Club of America, said at the time: “The war in Cambodia was one of the most dangerous assignments journalists faced in the twentieth century.

“It was a courageous band of dedicated men and women who risked their lives to tell the story. It is only fitting that those who made the ultimate sacrifice in pursuit of the truth should have a permanent memorial lest we forget.”

But nearly four months later, there is just an empty patch of grass where the last one stood (pic below). And it doesn’t look like being filled anytime soon - not if the Cambodian Government’s priorities are anything to go by.

No doubt they are now too busy planning a monument to mark the death of Kim Jong-il, an old-fashioned tyrant who bathed himself in riches while his people starved to death. Perhaps it’s a cause more in keeping with current ideologies?

:: Of the 37 slain journalists and photographers, ten were from Japan, eight from France, seven from the US, four from Cambodia, two from Switzerland, and one each from West Germany, Austria, Netherlands, India, Laos, and Australia.

The most famous was Sean Flynn, son of the film star Errol, who set off from Phnom Penh with fellow US snapper Dana Stone in search of a story. They were never seen again.

Wake Up To A Full Cambodian - Chicken Porridge Soup

2011-12-16T02:07:00.000-08:00

I can never be quite sure why I like this soup so much – but of all the great broths in Cambodia, and there are plenty, chicken porridge soup (bo bor sach moan) is my favourite.

Maybe it’s the heavy use of nutty, browned, but not burnt garlic (a common garnish in Khmer soups), or the herby fragrance of the chopped culantro sprinkled on top? Or the occasional limp crunch of bean sprouts poached in the heat of the broth? Or the pleasing discovery of a little piece of chicken or bone to suck on?

Or is it the soothing lightness of the chicken stock, hinting of lime leaf and lemon grass? Or the julienne strips of fresh ginger that are, like the bean sprouts, stirred in at the end moments before service so they take on an increasingly cooked texture as you finish the soup?

Because this is not a soup to be rushed. It takes time to finish. And as a breakfast, which is when it is traditionally eaten in Cambodia, it’s deliciously filling - and there’s no bacon and eggs in sight.

The great “all day English breakfast” as every cafe and restaurant seems to describe our beloved fry-up out here may leave you feeling stuffed for an hour or two with all that lovely fat and grease and ketchup. But in my experience, it often leaves you craving a second brekkie – especially if sausage sarnies are involved.

But this chicken rice soup keeps you going all day. And that was just as well for a friend of mine recently who was forced to experiment with living on $2 a day for food, which he managed to achieve by eating two bowls of bo bor sach moan every day at the central market in Phnom Penh - after he’d persuaded them to charge him the Khmer price, that is.

But it’s not just the flavours. It’s the love with which it’s made. I honestly thought I’d met the happiest two women in the world in Sihanoukville a few weeks ago. The twins ran a tiny street food stall that served only one dish – you guessed it, chicken porridge soup – and had two small tables that customers would cram round.

They gazed on happily, constantly joking and smiling, as they watched customers queue for a space, and then dive into the condiment trays of ground black pepper, sugar, fish sauce, lime segments, fiery red chillies, and fermented bean paste.

There were no wounded egos or chef tantrums – Khmer food is always served with plenty of condiments to balance the desired sweet, sour, spicy and salty tastes of each diner - because there is little arrogance in the kitchens out here, and no “right” way to flavour a dish. And it comes as a refreshing change if you’ve ever had the misfortune to work with the sort of brazen, dogma-driven robots Michelin-starred restaurants spew out.

But it’s not just the love and the bean sprouts and the zip from the Kampot pepper, and the hit of lemon grass and ginger, and the soothing crunch of gizzards (easily the best part of a hen for my money), and the soapy richness of the cubes of blood pudding, and the wilful perfume of dusky, browned garlic. It’s the gloop. It’s the way the jasmine rice splits and thickens the stock, creating a greyish, cloudy sheen to the liquor.

Like many great dishes, it takes you back to a memory of childhood. For me, it was the chicken and rice dish they served at school. I think they called it “chicken a la king” but it’s so long ago it’s hard to remember. It was chicken cooked in a creamy, yellow sauce that probably came courtesy of a tin of Campbell’s condensed soup - the base of many a casserole in those days. It always came with boiled rice and one or two triangles of fried bread. Fried to the same chestnut brown as the garlic at the street stall, I remember.

There was something splendid about the way you stirred the chicken and rice together to form a moreish mix, the softening fried bread dancing playfully on your tongue. And it’s that sort of texture you get from Cambodia’s famous soup, especially if you buy a baguette to dip into it as I sometimes do.

I’ve seen a dozen different ways of cooking it. But the way they make it at that down town food stall is my favourite. The cooks start the day by putting five or six whole chickens in a huge soup cauldron. They fill it with water, throw in some chopped shallots and garlic, lime leaves and a few bruised lemon grass stalks, and then rake up the charcoal and bring the pot to the boil.

Then they add enough turmeric to turn the liquid a golden yellow. It’s the only place in Cambodia I’ve seen that uses turmeric in porridge soup. The spice is heavily revered by the Khmers for its medicinal properties – particularly in the north, where pregnant women have it rubbed into their bodies to keep their skin tight after they give birth – but generally you only find it in kroeung, a curry paste that forms the base of many Cambodian dishes.

They let the stock simmer away for a couple of hours, topping up with water if necessary, and then season it with salt, fish sauce, sugar, and plenty of pepper. They fish out the chickens and put them in a bucket to cool, ready to be prepped.

Every part of the bird is laid out on a tray, including the yolks taken from the hens' ovaries, which glint like amber pearls and are absolutely wonderful. Diners choose which part of the bird they want, and the breast is shredded and carefully rationed, and laid on top.

In a smaller pot, they cook the rice until it begins to break up, and then put a scoop in each bowl of soup with a handful of blanched bean sprouts and some shredded ginger - to a rough proportion of one third rice to two thirds chicken stock, so the rice doesn’t completely smother the broth. When cooked a la carte, or at home, the rice is boiled in the chicken liquor, but when you’re dealing with vats of the stuff and keeping it hot all day, you have to keep them separate otherwise the rice dissolves and loses its porridge consistency.

Lastly, they make the garlic garnish by finely chopping dozens of cloves, and heating vegetable oil in a frying pan. When the oil begins to spit, they toss in the garlic and stir continuously for 30 seconds or so until it is brown but not burnt. Then they drain off the oil, and sprinkle the garlic on top with chopped culantro (use coriander if you can’t get this) and spring onion greens.

You should really try it, it’s a blinder. And if it’s excellent out here in the stifling heat of Phnom Penh’s markets, it must be even better on a dark, chill morning in wind-swept Britain...

MORE: Pho bo - Vietnam's traditional breakfast

BELOW: Cambodia's other famous breakfast - fried pork with pickles, rice, and, of course, soup...

So Why Are Brits So Obsessed With Scampi?

2011-12-15T02:38:00.000-08:00

Google’s annual Zeitgeist of the popular search terms of the year throws up some interesting quirks about the British, or 'Mid-Atlantic Island Monkeys' as we're becoming increasingly referred to in Germany and France following the EU veto row.

The most intriguing was the 'what is' top 10, which revealed that the UK’s love affair with food doesn’t look like going away anytime soon.

Bizarrely, "what is scampi" was the second most popular search term in the UK – with Google revealing that interest in the shellfish had soared by 80% over the past year.

But experts are at a total loss to explain why the tail of a Nephrops norvegicus, also known as a langoustine, Dublin Bay prawn, or Norwegian lobster (just in case you haven’t Googled it), sparked such a cocktail of interest.

There were no new crisp flavours or other major news stories involving the British pub menu staple which might have caused such a sudden flurry in puzzlement. And the creator of Fingerbobs hadn’t died (not for 10 years anyway), causing a tsunami of Twitter tributes from people who'd never known him.

The only tale that got much attention was a scare story in the Daily Mail (does it do any other types of stories) that scampi and chips could soon be off the menu for millions of horrified pub-goers because of a major decline in fish catches.

The 50% slump was blamed on those dastardly pencil pushers in Euroland, of course, as well as rising fuel costs, bad weather, and an increased demand for whole langoustines from France, Spain, and Italy (who tend not to eat them in the basket, smeared with tartare sauce).

David Jarrad, director of the Shellfish Association of Great Britain, said he had no idea why there had been such a big fascination in scampi. "I'm quite surprised. It has been a traditional pub grub for many decades and it remains the UK's most popular and valuable shellfish by a long way," he added.

Further illustrating the British obsession with what is stuffed into our mouths, the top 10 also featured “what are truffles” in third place, and “what are cookies” in sixth.

Although presumably the latter was referring to cookies of the coding rather than cooking kind.

Top 10 “What Is” Searches

1. What is AV
2. What is scampi
3. What are truffles
4. What are piles
5. What is 4D
6. What are cookies
7. What is copyright
8. What is Zumba
9. What is iCloud
10 What is probate

Pitching Confidential: How Not To Get A Food Book Published

2011-12-13T07:45:00.000-08:00

(Pic: Sign on the wall of a Buddhist temple in Siem Reap)

No-one likes hearing about other people’s successes, so you may enjoy reading the following. After what looked like a very promising start, my book about training to be a chef and doing stages at the Fat Duck and other places, with a few other scribblings not from this blog, has hit a brick wall. The sort of wall marathon runners are supposed to hit at 22 miles or so, but in my case probably far less than that.

At the beginning of this year I got some interest in the book and found an agent, and holed myself up in cheap hotel rooms in SE Asia as I set about finishing off the manuscript, rewriting sections and padding out other areas, and generally redrafting each chapter over and over again until I could no longer bear the sight of it.

Day after day I spent in hotel rooms in Bangkok listening to the noise of the street outside and wondering what people who didn’t spend 16 hours a day bathing in the bluish warmth of the computer screen did with their lives. The fact they had lives in the first place said everything.

But I knew if I stopped it was over, so I just carried on month after month like a crazed hermit until I thought I couldn’t get the book any better. But saying that, by that point, I’d lost all judgement. I had no idea whether the book was any better than when I’d first started. Was it even any better than the blog posts, or the initial scribbles in my beer-stained Moleskins? How could I possibly know? Then the readers appeared. Real readers, not friends with kind words. Chums of my ‘lit ag’, and a few ex BBC Radio 4 types.

The feedback was surprisingly good. There were a few suggestions, and one or two legal concerns about overpaid grocers or perpetually absent celebrity chefs, and I made tweaks to the copy. Then it was printed out, weighing in at about 1lb 2oz, or 70,000 words. It certainly wasn’t War and Peace, but it was as good as I could get it, and it’d been through a few eyes, and then my agent sent it off to a couple of publishers. And then after a month or so of not hearing anything, about eight more.

The first of the “regretful turn-downs” as my agent began to describe them came from Penguin’s quirky, fun books department, Particular Books. They said they had trouble with the narrative arc. I have to confess I had to Google it. I read all about the plot to chapter graphs and ratios, and wondered where Nicholas Nickleby or American Psycho fitted into that.

I think it might have had something to do with the ending. It was too abrupt. I’d known that all along. Or was it the bit when it started going into detail about the food? Would the reader just skip those bits and press on with the story if there was one at all, which I was beginning to doubt. What actually happens in the book anyway? And what about the pressure for a happy ending?

If I’d had my way, the character would have ended up swigging from a vodka bottle in an Asian hotel room - like at the beginning of Apocalypse Now, but madder. Who said misery lit was over? The whole book was about the plight of the modern day slave.

I asked the agent to ask Penguin/Particular Books if they could elaborate, but she said it was against “publishing protocol”, and she didn’t know them well enough to ask as a personal favour. So I just waited for the next reply, which was from Profile Books, and turned out to be very promising, and even went to the committee stage.

I don’t write the following as any kind of boast. Just as a journal of the feedback I received in trying to get the book published. It might help you if you’re in a similar position, or are planning to write a book. And if nothing else, it gives an insight into the current state of the UK publishing industry, its obsession with celebrity, and why more and more writers these days are turning to eBooks, spoken ink, and other self-publishing methods rather than more archaic avenues.

The first reader at Profile was very enthusiastic, describing it as “funny, thought-provoking, well-written, a very easy read and compulsive page turner. An easy turn-around too, I imagine, if you get a lawyer across it.”

But he added: “It'll sell; just not convinced it's a snug fit with Profile. A little light-weight perhaps...”

But even though the head of publishing was also enthusiastic, he said the rest “just didn’t get it”. Perhaps there was nothing to get? I knew I shouldn’t have changed the ending. He said they could only do things if they all agreed, and so regretfully declined.

Here’s what he said: “I love this book. I sympathise greatly with Lennie: not one of the most successful people in England but certainly one of the most appealing. He’s frank about his shortcomings, there’s something appealingly forlorn about him and he’s very funny indeed.

“He’s also clearly a rather good cook and fits in well with tricky people. There were bits in the book that were genuinely laugh out loud (lol) and other bits that were more poignant...

“...So I presented the book very enthusiastically to my colleagues and asked them to take it seriously. And here’s why I’m gutted: they didn’t get it. My colleagues refused to share my sense of humour, my confidence in the author or to see its potential...

“...I’m greatly saddened by this. It’s a real pity and I thought it was brilliant. I’m sorry it won’t be us and I know that another publisher will take it on enthusiastically and make a great success of it.”

The next – from Transworld - was even more depressing. They said they “couldn’t just publish it because it’s good”. They said these days you need to be a celebrity, or have your own newspaper column or something, which rather begged the question of why you’d need to approach a publisher in the first place. It also made you wonder where the next Catcher In The Rye would come from. But who needs JD Salinger when you’ve got My Booky Wook?

Here’s what they wrote: “It’s really funny and rather horrifying all at the same time – what an eye-opener. But it would be a hard one for us to do in this day and age when it is soooo difficult to publish a book successfully just because it is ‘good’.

“Unless there is something else going for it (i.e. his own TV series, or radio, or regular column in a paper – anything to give him a public platform) then it is truly hard to get any take-up from what retailers remain out there...”

It was described by my agent as “another very near miss”. She pointed out that every reader had liked it, and we just needed someone to take a punt on it.

Time went by and I didn’t hear anything, and my monthly prods to the agent were answered with a just sit tight or hold your nerve message, and occasional reminders that everyone was on holiday (publishers seem to have about nine a year), or it was the Hay Festival and then four months later the Frankfurt Book Fair. I realised the book publishing world moved at a far more sedate pace than either the journalism or cheffing world I was used to.

More weeks passed, and we still hadn’t heard anything from the remaining publishers, and after a lot of umming and arring and anticipated regret, I wrote to my agent saying I’d try to find another avenue for the book and thanked her for her efforts and wished her all the best for the future.

She’d urged me not to fiddle with the book, but I knew they were right about the ending – if that’s indeed what they meant about the narrative arc, and I knew in my gut it was – and I decided I’d have another tinker with it. A last one for the road, so to speak. A final, cider-fuelled fondle in the bus stop before our separate buses come.

She wrote back with the list of rejections and yet to replies. She’d been kind enough not to tell me that four others (Quercus, Constable/Robinson, Little Brown, Pan/Macmillan) had also given the thumbs down. But there were four more undecideds, or at least yet-to-decides, or noes-but-couldn’t-be-bothered-to-reply. But as they’ve had the book for over half a year now, I’m not overly hopeful.

So here I am back in the hotel room, hitting the 16-hour days until I can’t get it any better again, and looking at new fangled routes like eBooks and so on.

I know none of it’s important. I only have to look away from my screen, and if it’s day time see the streets of Phnom Penh, and the terrible plight of the limbless beggars and street children and prostitutes feeding their yabba addiction until they’re left a walking skeleton in a dress collecting plastic bottles for a few hundred riel to know that my book means absolutely nothing, and that me and it are completely unimportant in this huge, vast world, and what right do I have feeding my ego when there are people out here barely feeding their stomachs?

But I’d like to get it out there all the same. I’ve put too much work into it to do a Gordon Comstock and chuck it in the river. Even if I have to print it myself at one of these presses they’ve got out here churning out fake Lonely Planets for a couple of dollars.

I could give them away to the homeless street hawkers to sell. Even if they flog them for half a dollar, it’s still money in their pockets. I’m joking, or at least I think I am. But seriously, if you’ve got any ideas, I’d love to hear from you. Time to get on with the book...

Ow-zat! Shane Warne Burns Bowling Hand In Deep-Fat Fryer Cooking Accident

2011-12-12T01:14:00.000-08:00

Shane Warne has promised his partner Elizabeth Hurley to give up trying to be a "masterchef" after badly burning his bowling hand in a deep-fat fryer.

The pudgy cricket legend – known for his love of fast food - hurt his hand so badly cooking a pre-training snack in his kitchen there is speculation he may miss the upcoming Cricket Australia's Big Bash League.

He posted a picture of his precious right hand on Twitter (pic below), showing a number of nasty yellow blisters – the sort of cooking war wound that even the most tiresome, macho, ‘SAS kitchen’ chef would be proud of.

It’s not known how he got the injury, but there were reports he’d burned his hand while deep-frying fish fingers for a heavily-mayonnaised sandwich.

Warne – whose life often seems like it’s been scripted by the writers of a cheesy Australian soap opera – twatted: “Not ideal preparation for practice match today – burning the bowling hand. Get better quickly please, any suggestions – HELP.”

Fans flooded him with burn remedies, including lavender, witch hazel, and manuka honey (which I’ve always found works best for burns and cuts, and did wonders to the huge, yellow gobstopper on my thumb when I was thrown a red-hot, metal duck plate.)

Later, Warne, 42, wrote: “Ps no more trying to be a masterchef! Stop and by (sic) a bacon roll on the way to the ground next time – silly Shane!”

He quickly became a figure of fun on Twitter as news of the injury spread. Some speculated he’d been fishing chips out of the fryer before they were ready, some said he might have done it on his hair straighteners or sun bed, and another wag wondered whether he’d actually done it “setting fire to his own farts”.

Still, it could have been a lot worse. Reminds me of the tale a stage chef told me as we were cutting mountains of pistachios in half in the Fat Duck slave compound, sorry prep kitchen.

He said the incident happened when he was working part-time in a burger bar, getting himself through catering college. I doubt whether it was true, but he seemed sincere enough...

“This dude came in for a job,” Eric began. “He was about 17, and had never worked in a kitchen before, and they put him on the fryer. He was wearing this watch – I couldn’t see what it was, but it looked more like one of those expensive German makes or something...

“And I said to him, ‘Buddy, you wanna lose that watch, buddy you DON’T wanna wear that in the kitchen!’ And he says something like, ‘it was given to me by my grandfather’. And then half-way through service, guess what, the watch slips off into the hot fat...and without thinking he puts his arm in to get it out...It was like a reflex man!

“You could see the flesh disappearing on his arm like cooked ham. He said something like ‘hey guys’ and went down like a tonne of fucking mash! Man, that was gruesome! Worst thing I ever saw...”

Keith Floyd's Bitter Regrets Over Channel 4's Car Crash Documentary

2011-12-09T04:15:00.000-08:00

Keith Floyd bitterly regretted taking part in Channel 4’s appalling Keith Meets Keith documentary shortly before his death, his former manager has revealed.

The celebrity chef was desperately ill with bowel cancer when one-trick actor Keith Allen and his film crew doorstepped him at his farmhouse in the south of France and produced a highly unflattering film about his life.

Floyd was impoverished amid an acrimonious divorce with his fourth wife, and felt he couldn’t turn down the undisclosed sum they paid him for taking part.

His long-time manager Stan Green said the TV cook was fully aware he should never have done it.

“I told Keith not to do the programme because I knew he was in no fit state to be on television at the time. He was very ill,” he told Chef Sandwich.

“But they went to him directly, offered him the money and he accepted. He rang me up one day and said, ‘You’re not going to be very happy with me, I’ve been making a television show.’”

Floyd – the man who’d made cooking acceptable and inspired me to train as a chef - died of a heart attack at his friend Celia Martin’s home in Bridport, Dorset, in September 2009 as he sat down to view it.

It was dreadful to watch. From the moment the great cook was shown sleeping on a hotel sofa like some befuddled Chelsea Pensioner, his energy and spirit finally succumbing to a lifetime of fags and booze, it was clear it was going to be uncomfortable viewing. It was like watching the last hours of a dying God.

I remember trying to switch over several times, but it was Keith Floyd...

He might pull through and show his old magic, even a glimmer of it would do. But by the end I felt overwhelmingly sad, and desperately so the next day when I was told he’d died.

I wanted him to remain in my thoughts as the skewed bow tie-wearing roué lambasting Clive the cameraman, glass in hand, pan-frying sweetbreads and truffles, and heartily recommending that half the bottle should go into the daube, and the other half into the cook.

I wanted to remember him in his prime, drunk on the riverbank, hurling stones at a hapless fisherman who’d failed to catch any trout for the show. I wanted to remember him in Padstow, pretending to forget Rick Stein’s name as the fresh-faced cook squirmed on camera.

I wanted to be reminded of him serving a breaded beermat to a customer who’d complained about his Wiener schnitzel, and the live cookery demonstration when he’d left the giblet bag inside a roast duck.

I didn’t want to remember him as the frail, doddering, aged-beyond-his-years man in that dreadful documentary. It was car crash TV and chequebook "journalism" at its worst, and I still don’t know why Channel 4 aired it.

A spokesman for the broadcaster declined to comment or confirm how much the TV chef had been paid for taking part. "We would not comment on any contractual arrangement between us and Keith Floyd," he added.

Being Wined And Steined In Padstow

2011-12-07T07:34:00.000-08:00

Guest post by Dom Bailey

Never look a gift horse in the mouth. Whatever that means. I wouldn't know how to cook one either. But it's that birthday time of year again, and with the kids safely in the hands of in-laws, I was whisked away to Cornwall (well, I had to drive five hours before I was told exactly where we were staying.)

I think Lennie may have mentioned Padstein once or twice and has a few tales to tell about a stage in Stein’s Seafood Restaurant kitchen. But this birthday treat meant I had the chance to sample Rick Stein’s kingdom from the other side of the pass.

The expense came courtesy of a now deceased maiden aunt who enjoyed the good things in life and was a regular at Thornbury Castle. A fitting way to spend the money she'd left my wife (my wife thought) and what's a birthday present if you can't share it?

The £435 winter getaway package included two nights at St Edmunds House - sea view, four poster bed, attic bathroom, free standing bath and Molten Brown shampoo (we are easily impressed) and some good eating to boot.

The deal was a three-course meal at St Petroc's Bistro, breakfast (twice) at the flagship Seafood Restaurant, with a three course meal there in between. Buy your own drinks. Now when something is "all included" or "anything you like" I am suspicious. We looked at the menus - and again - and wondered if it really was anything from the menu.

Could we have a starter and then share the chateaubriand for two at £45? I saw the lunchtime meal deal of three courses for £19, that must be it. "You’re a mini-break booker, sir? This way please wa ha ha haar..."

But no. Just as the Seafood Restaurant does what it says on the tin (33 seafood dishes, only three non-fish options, and only one is a main - it's fish, ok?) the three course option was anything you like. Kids in a sweet shop. But do you go for the most expensive dish just because you can?

"I'm having steak," said my wife. "It's £25." Apparently you do. I realised it had all been worked out and the restaurant knew what the maximum damage would be, but sometimes you can't help feeling a little greedy, over extravagant maybe.

A little taster to start - bruschetta of mackerel escabeche. Fresh, lightly pickled fish with crunchy onion and carrot on a piece of fried bread. A taste of fast receding memories of a Cornish summer.

Starters: my good wife had scallops. Chivey topping and on a bed of seaweed (for decoration only, she discovered.) I went for the wood pigeon salad (pic below). The tender pigeon, on watercress, was nicely peppered - which did remind me of Kampot pepper and the fact that Rick Stein has "done" Cambodia on his travels.

On to the steaks. For a little variety (yes we lean over to taste each other’s food - unless it's scallops, then I get a sharp fork on the knuckles) my wife had sirloin and I had bavette. I'm not really a steak man. Beef, like chicken, is usually the last option from the meat counter, farm shop or menu, unless you're talking koo dut (pic below). There are so many more meats, especially wild ones, to choose from. Textures and tastes from venison and boar for example I believe outrank beef.

But here was a cut I hadn't tried, and beef – 28 day dry-aged Aberdeen Angus - was the only meat from the grill. Bavette, the waitress informed me, is "like the skirt you have in stews". You could only have it medium rare or rare. I like those kinds of instructions on a menu. I admit I was tempted to ask for it well done - just to see what happened. But I behaved.

The bavette bordelaise was served with pommes coq d'or (thin slices of potato cooked in chicken stock with garlic), baby gem lettuce, shallots and a rich, well-seasoned cabernet sauvignon vinegar sauce. The meat wasn't melt in your mouth tender but was full of flavour, and went down a little better with crispy chips sneaked from my wife's 14oz sirloin and chive butter dish than the soft pommes.

Desserts. Spanish cheese cake. No contest. There is no base and it is slightly thicker and drier than you might expect, but a great cross somewhere between cake, creaminess and cheese with a baked brown edge of goodness. And that’s before you taste it with the poached pear slices lightly spiced with vanilla. My wife had a sundae - chocolate and vanilla ice-cream with clotted cream that would have seen her well into Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday if we didn't have a booking at the Seafood Restaurant...

We'd done the turf, now the surf was up. On a Monday as well. Sorry Anthony Bourdain. There is almost too much to choose from on the menu. Still three courses to choose, but what to go for? Something expensive, unusual, familiar?

Dover sole, sea bass, fish pie, monkfish vindaloo, crab, the list went on. Bouillabaisse, turbot, brill, fish and chips...or duck. My wife did break from tradition and forgo the scallops, and had crab with Russian salad followed by a rich lobster thermidor (pic above). I just fancied lobster, straight up, no fuss. So steamed lobster it was for me (pic below). "Small or medium lobster sir?" Let me think for a second, yes definitely medium please.

For my starter, I was tempted by the fruits de mer - razor clams, oyster, crab, lobster - a little rock pool on ice. In fact I was tempted by a lot. But oysters are my favourite. So are spicy sausages. And here they were in the same dish.

A bite of creamy fresh oyster, a chunk of sausage - a bit of chilli but not too much paprika - and a slurp of cold white wine. It was a beautiful starter. The lobster was as simple as you can get but what could be better? Steamed, rich meat from the body, lighter, sweet meat from the claws and flecks of red roe. It came with mayonnaise, which I prefer a bit lemonier and left most of it, but the lobster was enough on its own.

For the desserts, the filling lobster certainly ruled out cheeses. But before I had got to the bottom of the list, my wife suggested: "Why don't you have the tarte, then I can have the crème brûlée?" Too stuffed to argue, I had the drum roll pear tarte tatin with scrumpy ice cream. Gooey, syrupy...and my turn to wrap knuckles. The crème brûlée was delicious, apparently. I can only confirm the pistachio biscotti was good.

The restaurant was fairly busy for a Monday. It's a large room with a massive bar whacked in the middle covered in bathroomy tiles - maybe a job lot left over from all the Stein luxury accommodation dotted around town? I thought I'd overdone the pre-meal drinks as the ceiling above the bar seemed to glow neon pink, then green. But no, it was intentional apparently, if a little odd.

Mind you, we were sitting below a painting of a pig in a nurse’s outfit. Looking around the room, it was like some mad curator had thrown up a gallery's leftovers. A huge painting that seemed to show the inside of an Arabian tent with tagines and cushions had a copy of Rick Stein's Mediterranean Escapes peeping out. Another subtle reminder, in case you needed one, of whose gaff it is.

The waiting staff were all friendly and not too overbearing. They must get sick of the "where's Rick?" question, but I'm sure I heard it asked twice. So two nights and four meals later, we had been truly wined and Steined. I don't think our steak and lobster choices would have hit the profits too hard, and I think Aunt Grace would have approved.

:: Dom Bailey is a writer and singer-songwriter. His songs are here at domssongs.blogspot.com.

Witnessing A Public Flogging In Cambodia

2011-11-21T10:55:00.000-08:00

It’s difficult to spend any amount of time in Cambodia, without realising how cheap life is over here. But even with the Khmers’ quirky customs and highly superstitious beliefs, you still see something that hits you for six, and leaves you pondering the mysteries of this shy, spiritual, but at times incredibly brutal people.

It happened to me this week in Sihanoukville when bars emptied and tourists and Khmer staff descended into the street, attracted by the primordial sound of someone or something in pain. There are screams and boozy shrieks all the time on that street. But this was different somehow. They were in a tone that made the hairs stand up on the backs of our necks, and brought a fearful animal instinct into each and everyone one of us.

A boy in his late teens was being viciously beaten by his mother and father. His father was screaming at him and punching him in the face. His mother was whipping his bare legs with a length of knotted rope.

The boy was hysterical, but for some reason barely flinched from the pain, which only spurred his parents on to more vicious assaults. The father kept grabbing him by the neck, screaming hate-filled words into his face, and then delivering spiteful, well-aimed jabs at the boy’s mouth and nose.

The crowd watched in a horrified, confused, but oddly fascinated silence. The boy kept shouting back the same words as he was hit. I asked Alin, the Khmer manager of the bar I was in, what he was saying.

“I don’t know,” she said. “He’s crazy.” She listened again. “He say something like you my mother and father, I cannot fight you...”

The boy stood there shouting and sobbing, holding his arms as far behind his back as the blows would allow. His mother whipped his legs again, leaving more red marks across his thighs. Not to be outdone, her husband throttled the boy and then punched him a few times in the face and stomach in quick succession.

Suddenly a French expat called Eric – who was flying home the next morning after running a restaurant for five years in Cambodia, and had been drinking pastis since 11am - brushed past us.

“I can’t see this,” he said.

He strolled across the road and put himself in front of the boy to protect him. The mother backed off slightly, but the father lunged again. Eric held his arms out to push the man back, and then gently nudged him up the street, shouting at him to stop.

There was movement from the house, and their largest son – a fat, acne-ridden manboy who must have weighed 120kg – sprinted towards the pair. He yelled as he ran towards them. It was like a war cry – high-pitched and filled with hate and evil intent, and a furious urge to restore the family’s loss of face at not being able to inflict more punishment on his younger brother.

He turned slightly, and I could see he was gripping a wooden truncheon, almost the width of a rolling pin. With the boy’s weight behind it, it was heavy enough to cave in a man’s skull and leave brain and foam on the gravel.

The crowd gasped in shock and utter horror at what they feared was about to happen. Well-thumbed phrases about time stopping still and slow motion replays don’t really do justice to terrible, stomach-gripping moments like that. The boy was now just a few yards from the back of Eric’s skull. It would be a horrible, cowardly blow. He raised the club and then stopped suddenly at the last second. The Belgian owner from the bar next door stepped forward, his hands clenched together as if praying.

“Eric, don’t get involved,” he pleaded. “This is Khmer...”

The father and son returned to the boy, who was still being whipped by his mother. Seeing them coming, he made a break for it and was chased into the house by his parents who looked hell-bent on inflicting further injury, but this time without prying eyes. The street fell silent, and the crowds eventually wandered back to their chairs to discuss what they’d seen.

“Only in Cambodia,” one retired English tutor was muttering.

Only the Khmer staff seemed unruffled by it. Alin said he was beaten in the street as a public humiliation so that everyone could see his punishment and to let people know his family had taken action over his undisclosed crimes.

But whatever he’d done, it was a dreadful thing to witness. I felt a sickness in my stomach, and a hollow feeling descended as I thought again about how violent human beings can be to each other. I’ll probably never know what the boy had done to deserve such punishment, and his family refused to discuss it, but his terror as he was being whipped and beaten by his own flesh and blood was awful to see.

Eric sat down at his bar stool, looking shocked and agitated, and slightly annoyed that no-one else had helped him. I don’t think he had any real notion how near he’d come to never leaving Cambodia.

The strength with which the son gripped that club a second before contact, and the madness in his eyes as he sought to restore the family honour, made me realise how easily Eric could have been killed, and the further bloodshed it would have sparked.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of physical punishment, let alone public punishment, there was something vile in the bullying savagery they inflicted on that boy, and the sheer terror they put in his heart. But for some reason it felt less terrible than the violence that so nearly came from stopping it.

If They’d Only Used Pomelos At The Fat Duck

2011-11-18T02:26:00.000-08:00

I bought a huge, grapefruit-like fruit the other day that had thick seeds the size of pumpkin seeds, and thick, leathery skin. It was a pomelo – a fruit that tastes slightly less bitter than the smaller, common grapefruit (which is actually a cross between a pomelo and a sweet orange) but gives up its pearls much more easily.

And it made me think of the stage I did at the Fat Duck a few years ago, and all those pointless hours of slavery, prepping endless grapefruit pearls to garnish the salmon poached in liquorice gel dish (pic below). Even the chefs at the Hinds Head, Heston Blumenthal’s pub next door, knew about the grapefruits. The chore summed up the fastidiousness and downright ludicrousness of three-star Michelin cooking.

You had to carefully peel each fruit, without bruising or cutting the flesh. Then even more carefully, you’d take the white pithy globe and tease it into segments. Then with a paring knife, you’d pick out any pips and carefully peel away the white, and lay the pink flesh on towelling paper to soak up the juice.

Then the real work began. You picked each segment, flicking off tiny, juice-filled pearls on to another piece of towelling. The work was fiddly in the extreme. Even the slightest pressure would burst them. Once we had covered one piece of towelling with grapefruit pearls, we’d begin on another...

But there was none of that as I sat there on the riverbank in Phnom Penh, easily separating the pomelo into segments, and seeing the pearls fall unbroken into the bag, without the need of towelling to soften their fall. I realised that all that torture could have been saved if they’d only used pomelos instead of pink grapefruits from the Waitrose store up the road in Maidenhead.

Even with my rusty shovels, the pearls were falling away into such bundles that it would have caused envy in even the most skilled, starry-eyed Fat Duck chef. One cook could have done a whole day’s worth in an hour, saving his colleagues from hours of unspeakable drudgery.

I began to think about why Blumenthal, in his exploratory, pre-Fat Duck days, hadn’t widened his trawl of world foods, rather than spending every holiday in France eating at Michelin-starred restaurants.

But then, maybe he had. Maybe he knew all about the pomelo and had long discounted any possible alchemy that might come from it. We often used to joke during the long hours cutting thousands of pistachio nuts in half, whether the celebrity chef lay in bed at night devising ever more devilish recipes for his slaves to cook.

I was still experimenting with how easily the unbruised pearls fell away from the casing, and hadn’t really eaten any of the pomelo, when a man in a wheelchair, pushed by an older man, approached me for the second time that morning.

I’d given them some money just 20 minutes earlier, but they obviously didn’t recognise me. I mumbled a few words, patting my pocket, and pointing at them, but the man in the wheelchair just pointed at my pomelo and then his mouth. I handed the fruit over, and they smiled, then slowly headed northwards along the river in search of the next barang.

I wandered over to the plush tourist information centre, which had a plaque outside saying the toilet facilities had been donated by someone called Mr Toilet, whose mission in life had been to improve toilet sanitation across the world, starting with Cambodia presumably, which was probably as good a place to start as any.

The plush lavatories – donated by the late Mr Toilet’s South Korean-based World Toilet Association - certainly were a shiny affair, looking more like something you’d get in an upmarket casino rather than a tourist office. Not that I’d seen toilets in a tourist office before.

Compared with some of the more basic powder rooms I’d come across on my travels through Cambodia, it was certainly a welcome change. But it did seem an odd choice of mission, making sure visiting South Koreans have decent toilets to perch on, given the widespread, grinding poverty in Cambodia, where many villagers struggle to get by on $2 a day. What did they expect travelling to a third world country?

It seemed as absurd as the noticeboard outside the North Korean embassy, adorned with pictures of their Elvis-loving leader Kim Jong II. In one, he was standing in a factory wearing sunglasses, pointing at an egg with a confused look on his face. The caption underneath said: “The leader Kim Jong II provides on-the-spot guidance at the 927 Chicken Farm.”

I wandered back north and soon caught up with the man in the wheelchair, who was sitting in the shade eating my pomelo. I smiled at him but he didn’t recognise me. Buddhists were queuing outside a small shrine near the Royal Palace to receive a blessing from a white-clad monk. Three well-heeled pensioners emerged with small cups of sacred water and headed towards a group of women holding cages full of tiny birds.

They said a few words as they sprinkled the birds with water. The birds clearly thought it was raining, and huddled down on their perches. Then the worshippers opened the cages and let them free in batches, saying a prayer to Buddha as they did so.

One of the pensioners then stood on the riverside and gazed down into the green water. For a moment I thought he might topple. Overcome with emotion, he said another prayer and wiped his brow with the last of the water. Then they handed bundles of riel to the women holding the empty cages and wandered off with their police escort.

I sat there for a while, as the birds slowly returned to their cages ready for the next customers to release, and thought again about the stagiers locked away day after day in that prep room in Bray.