September 2008 Archives

We in the West Midlands don't have many unique culinary delicacies, though I guess Glynn Purnell's professed Brummie Fusion food is redressing the balance somewhat.

Traditional local dishes, though, have largely been forgotten - with the exception of faggots, which make an occasional appearance on restaurant menus.

That's something to rejoice because they are wonderful things, especially served with onion gravy.

I ate faggots, onion gravy and mash at the Kitchen Garden Cafe iin Kings Heath on Friday night and left a very happy man indeed.

Any keen and competent cook will tell you that they love working with expensive ingredients, but get an even bigger thrill from turning cheap ingredients into something good.

A fillet steak, for instance, merely needs to be slapped in a hot pan and given the briefest of cooks to emerge tender and tasty. A slice of foie gras likewise.

But there's a greater sense of achievement in transforming something that's overlooked into a nourishing, flavoursome dish.

And that's why I'm chuffed about tonight's dinner.

Like some lonely phantom, I am tonight wandering the upper corridors of my house while, below, wine glasses chink, laughter rings out and food is enjoyed.

My wife has invited two of her old (oops...bad choice of word there) friends from university for dinner and, because I didn't get round to organising anything to do, I'm at home and under strict orders to make myself scarce. In my own house. On Saturday night.

And, to make matters worse, they are eating food that I've cooked: silky, home-made pasta turned into ravioli stuffed with ricotta and spinach and served with a light tomato sauce.

In between fulfilling the onerous duties of their jobs, three colleagues are spending a lot of time chatting about cooking.

The reason: all three have started a cookery course together.

They're taking about filo pastry parcels and red pepper risotto and homemade ravioli and all sorts of other dishes that they're producing at night school.

At one time, of course, domestic science lessons at school would have equipped them with the skills needed to cook. Sadly those days have largely disappeared.

Watching the latest episode of that fabulous television series The Restaurant, I'm not at all sure I'd want to visit an eatery run by any of the contestants.

Certainly not the father and daughter team - though she seems an excellent cook, dad has no front-of-house skills and a stroppy disposition when challenged.

The lifelong friends, too, are mismatched - again, one's a decent cook, though uncommunicative, while the other can't even ensure the punters have cutlery.

None of the other contenders fill me with confidence either. Especially the pair who think Welsh/Chinese fusion is a good idea and the guy who doesn't know when food is under-seasoned.

The old debate about which is the better city - Birmingham or Manchester - has reared its ugly mug again.

What a load of hot air. Brum is clearly the winner.

Manchester doesn't have a single Michelin starred restaurant while Birmingham has Simpson's and - i predict - will have two more starred restaurants - Purnell's and Edmunds - when the fat bloke's new guide is published in the new year.

The standard of curry houses in Manchester is not as high as it is in Birmingham and I've not been impressed by the Chinese meals I've eaten up there either.

Anyone know if signal crayfish - those voracious North American invaders that are depleting stocks of our native species - lurk in our local streams and rivers?

With a licence, it's apparently OK to set nets to capture the creatures, which yield lobster-like meat once they are humanely dispatched.

The posh television chef Valentine Warner - whose plummy style I find irritating - gathered and cooked a batch in his show last night and they looked very good.

Wonder if these beasts lurk in the waterways of this area?

We ran a competition recently - asking readers to submit a romantic recipe to stand the chance of wnning an expensive cooker.

It attracted a huge number of entries from far and wide The standard was generally high and it was a hard task to select a winner.

But a winner has now been chosen and will be revealed in this Thursday's Food + Drink section of the Birmingham Mail together with the winning recipe.

Looking out at the gorgeous autumn sunshine, I shouldn't moan. But I'm going to.

Through summer I cooked and ate summery things - light dishes suited to balmy wather. And, of course, what I really needed as the rain fell and the wind howled was hearty grub.

Now that autumn's here, it seems appropriate to eat stews and mashed spuds and pumpkin and the like. Which is what I'm cooking for lunch.

Idiot. The day is glorious and the dainty dishes of June, July and August would be altogether more suitable. Trouble is, the ingredients for such meals are now out of season.

Why is it that the majority of restaurants find it impossible to cook a steak truly rare?

Time and again I ask for my beef to be cooked in this fashion and time and again it emerges from the kitchen far beyond this state.

Do they imagine that, to us Brits, rare means cooked beyond medium? Can many chefs simply not judge the cooking time required to leave a steak juicily bloody beneath its seared exterior?

Over recent weeks I've twice asked for rare steaks and been disappointed on both occasions.

Not good enough.