Tag Archives: cooking

TV, Julia and Chopping Onions

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Not so long ago I published a post called A Kind of Foodie Sort of Blog Post. It was about cookery and food and brought me in quite a few new readers as well as some new subscribers. A lot of those subscribers were food bloggers and to a certain extent they must be feeling a little short changed with their new subscription as I haven’t written much on the food and drink subject since. Anyway, at least they have had some different content for a change, stuff about 60s and 70s TV shows, classic films and secondhand books and so on. A change is a good as a rest as they say. Anyway, perhaps it’s time to redress the balance and thank those new readers for their support with another foodie sort of blog.

I’ve not been at my best this week. I tested positive for Covid 19 and at one point I felt so bad I thought I might have picked up Covid 20 and 21 as well. I’m feeling much better now and another positive lately has been in the bread making department. A few weeks ago, I made a loaf of bread without the assistance of my bread maker. I’d read somewhere that it’s best to make a wholemeal loaf using a combination of white and wholemeal flour. I found a recipe in one of my numerous cookery books which called for 500g of flour so I thought I’d use 250g of each. As it happened, I only had a little wholemeal flour so I made up the shortfall with white. I added my yeast and salt and olive oil, mixed it up and gave the result a good kneading and left it to prove for thirty minutes.

It rose quite well so I gave it a second kneading and then found I didn’t have a tin in which to bake it. After a rather frantic search I came across one of my mother’s old cake tins and used that. My bread later came out of the oven looking wonderful and tasted just as good. I do love warm bread with a good lashing of butter. Now you might be thinking well done, he’s managed to make himself a loaf of bread, bravo! Yes, I was feeling pretty pleased with myself but could I reproduce that feat, could I make another?

Only yesterday I made another loaf using a 50-50 white and wholewheat flour mix. It wasn’t quite as good as the first one so I reckon in future I might use a 40-60 mix, even so, I’m already looking forward to the next loaf. Also, the thing is, once you have some great bread you need something equally as good to have with it, great cheese or pâté or great soup even. Perhaps it’s time to take a look in my cookbooks or see what my favourite TV chefs have to offer on the small screen.

Talking about TV chefs I want to talk about a TV show, a current TV show. Yes, not from the 1960’s or 70’s like I usually write about but an actual current mainstream TV show. It’s Julia, the story of American TV chef Julia Child.

These days a lot of new TV shows always seem to be on some TV channel that I don’t have access to, Disney+ or Netflix for instance but happily, Julia is currently showing on Sky Showcase which, thanks to Liz’s Sky subscription I can actually get to see.

Those of us in the UK are probably not that familiar with Julia Child. In the 1950’s she lived in Paris with her diplomat husband where she embarked on a training course to be a French chef. She learned all the tricks and techniques of French cookery and she was so keen about it, she decided to write a cookery book called Mastering The Art of French Cooking which she hoped would bring the excellence of French cuisine into the American home.

The TV series picks up Julia later living back in the USA when she gets invited onto a local TV show to talk about her book and rather than just talk about cookery she took into the interview room a hot plate, a pan and some eggs and proceeded to cook the interviewer an omelette.

Julia is played by Sarah Lancashire, a British TV veteran. She started her career in TV soap Coronation St where she played the dizzy Raquel. She played the character for five years but then left to do other things as she apparently tired of the relentless fame of being a TV soap star. Since then, she has starred in many other TV productions and series. In 2000 she signed a ‘golden handcuffs’ deal binding her exclusively to the TV channel ITV. The deal was worth 1.3 million pounds and made Sarah the highest paid UK actress at the time.

It’s hard to say why I like Julia so much. Lancashire is excellent as Julia as is David Hyde Pierce who you might remember from the US sitcom Frasier where he played Frasier’s brother Niles. It appears to be a faithful reconstruction of 1950s America. It’s gently humorous and it’s interesting to see the dynamics of TV production in the 1950s, what the TV executives of the time thought would and would not work and also how the idea of a TV chef came about. There are no car chases and explosions but instead there is plenty of food.

I’m not a great cook myself but I do like watching food programmes, especially those that highlight the skills of a particular chef and how we, the great food eating, TV watching public can try to emulate them.

Now this isn’t the first time Julia has been portrayed on the screen. In 2009 Nora Ephron wrote and directed the film Julie and Julia. It was based on two books, My Life in France, an autobiography by Julia Child and a memoir by Julie Powell based on her blog, in which she decided to cook all 524 recipes in Julia’s cookbook, in a 365-day period. Meryl Streep played Julia Child in the film and I’d be hard pushed to name another film based on a blog, if indeed there are any. Meryl’s version of Julia Child was quite unsurprisingly very similar to Sarah’s and I’d be hard pushed to say which I prefer.

In the film Amy Adams plays Julie Powell, the blogger who decides to cook all of Julia Child’s recipes, all 524 of them for her blog. She experiences a number of disasters and frustrations but she finally pulls off her task and to her surprise, her blog ends up with a huge amount of followers and becomes a great success. The film also looks at the other Julia’s life in France and the trials and tribulations of learning to be a French chef. I mentioned earlier about the skills of a chef and I do love those moments in TV cookery when the celebrity chef will dazzle the viewer with their incredible chopping skills on an onion or something. For me it’s just chop, chop, chop, gradually getting through the onion. For the experts is one quick superfast ch-ch-ch-chop with an entire onion reduced to slices in seconds and in the film, Meryl Streep as Julia goes on a great chopping spree to hone her chopping skills.

I can completely identify with the disasters and frustrations experienced by blogger Julie as can most amateur cooks. Sometimes I have made a fabulous meal, other times I’ve produced that same meal using the same recipe and it’s been a little tame to say the least. What made the difference between the outstanding chilli from last week and the insipid offering from today? What did I do wrong? Was it the meat or the seasoning? Did I miss an ingredient? Usually, I never manage to work out why my food went wrong which is really annoying.

So, shall I look in my recipe books for a soup recipe to go with my fabulous fresh bread or just make a sandwich? Maybe it’s time to settle down with Julia Child’s book? I was saving it for a holiday read but what the heck, I think it’s time for a cheese sandwich, a cup of tea and a good read.

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Cooks and Cookbooks

Posted on by Steve Higgins

For this week’s blog, I thought I’d try and combine a love of cooking with my love of books. I suppose most people are taught to cook, or at least pick up the rudiments of cookery from their mothers. I hope I’m not being sexist when I say that, then again perhaps some people picked up their cookery expertise from their fathers, if it was dad who was the cook of the house.

My earliest memory of cooking something for myself is making tomato soup. Well, perhaps not actually making it but warming up the contents of a can anyway. My next culinary adventure was boiling an egg. I still like those two particular meals, boiled eggs and tomato soup. I once decided to make treacle toffee after seeing a recipe in a summer edition of a comic I used to read and then completely cocked it up. My mother, usually a pretty gentle lady went completely up the wall after I wasted a bag of sugar and caused a total mess in her kitchen. No further cooking assistance from her was ever forthcoming. Even in later life she was a little coy about revealing her culinary secrets. I once asked her how she made such lovely roast beef and after some prodding she told me that she started off, just like all the books say by putting her beef into a hot oven. Later she reduced the temperature but added some water which would help the roast cook.

Mum was a great cook but had a limited repertoire and things like curry and chilli con carne were things completely outside her realm of understanding.

When I left home when I was about nineteen, I bought my first cook book and it’s one I still have today. The Epicure’s book of Steak and Beef Dishes by Marguerite Patten. I think I bought it in a cheap remainder book shop and it’s full of additional recipes I have cut out of magazines or newspaper supplements. It’s my go to book whenever I make a chilli or a bolognese or even a roast dinner. It contains all the rudiments for my favourite meals.

Jamie Oliver made his TV debut in 1999. He was spotted by a TV producer making a documentary about the River Cafe where he was working at the time. His TV show The Naked Chef followed soon after and his cookbook from the series was a best seller. I’ve got quite a few of his cookbooks in my collection which I always refer to when I get down to some serious cookery. In particular I like his 30 minute and 15 minute meal series. In many ways Jamie speaks to the modern cook, the one who likes to try and use fresh produce and not to be always warming up ready made food. The one who has to juggle working and bringing up a family. Not only that, his TV shows are fresh and fast moving and I love his enthusiasm for food and cooking. I think I mentioned a while ago that I recently made a pizza using home made pizza dough. Where did I get the recipe? From one of Jamie’s books of course. His books are pretty popular but there always seem to be plenty of them in the various secondhand book shops that I frequent.

A long time ago, probably back in the 1980’s, I got hooked on Ken Hom’s Chinese cookery programmes. I liked the way Chinese cookery worked, in fact I liked the whole process of preparation and stir frying. I got myself a wok, seasoned it according to Ken’s instructions and started stir frying. I do love it when you see the Chinese chefs stir frying at very high temperatures on TV cookery shows like Ken’s but getting those very high temperatures in a home kitchen is pretty much impossible. I made some nice meals but nothing ever seemed to taste the way it does from the Chinese take away. Perhaps it’s time to drag that wok out of the storeroom and have another go.

Another favourite TV chef was Antonio Carluccio who sadly died in 2017. He had a number of shows on the BBC that combined cookery with travel in Italy. I remember one where he stopped a farmhand who was about to open his sandwich box in some field in the Italian countryside. I say box but in fact it was something wrapped in greaseproof paper, some fresh bread, some tomatoes and some Italian cheese. It looked pretty appetising to me. Antonio once explained that one of my favourite meals, spaghetti bolognese, is something that doesn’t exist in Italy but even so, he showed us how to make an Italian ragu with a mix of beef and pork mince. I use pretty much the same recipe for my bolognese these days.

I do love a good curry but I don’t have any curry cookbooks by famous names. Instead I’ve always relied on this slim volume by Naomi Good. It’s straight to the point and using it I’ve always managed to put together a decent curry.  It’s not a curry that falls into any particular category, it’s not a Korma or a Vindaloo, it’s just a basic curry with plenty of spices and usually made with minced beef. Sometimes it comes out pretty hot, sometimes not and I usually finish it off with a good dose of coconut milk. Most of the time I have to confess, I usually return to the basic curry recipe in my very first cookbook.

So what else do I use when I need cooking inspiration? Well, I’ve got a whole lot of bits and pieces of recipes clipped from magazines as I mentioned earlier. Sometimes I just scan through them and have a go at whatever I fancy.

Pages cut from magazines and newspaper supplements

Do you have a favourite cookbook?

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https://youtu.be/JzJA9YIAGls

5 TV Chefs Who Will Change the Way You Cook!

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I do like my food. Like everyone I have my likes and dislikes, for instance, I’m not a great lover of fish although I’ve been known to eat cod, hake, calamari and even mussels. Good food though is more than just ingredients or produce and a good chef is in his own way as much of an artist as a great painter or a poet. I do love watching great TV cookery shows and although I am not a great cook, I have sometimes tried to follow the advice of various TV cooks who have inspired me to make something exciting. The results will not be spoken about here but getting back to those TV chefs, who is your favourite?

Ken Hom.

A few years back when I first lived on my own, I saw one of Ken’s TV shows and began to wonder if I could actually make some tasty Chinese food. I remember going down to the Chinese supermarket in Manchester and picking up various things like sesame oil, lemongrass and of course, my first wok. Chinese cooking is quick and fresh and most of the work is in the preparation because the actual stir frying is a pretty quick process.

I followed all of Ken’s instructions and seasoned my wok and now and again I manage to dish out some reasonable food. I couldn’t quite find the clip of Ken Hom that I wanted to show but below is a recent clip with Ken talking about his food.

While I’m on the subject, wonder what I did with my wok?

Antonio Carlucci.

One of my favourite cuisines is Italian. Some people say pasta is boring but I’ve never really felt that at all. I love pasta, especially spaghetti and my favourite pasta dish is a very simple one spaghetti aglio olio e peperoncino. It’s basically spaghetti with garlic, olive oil and chilli. Simple and tasty and it’s always handy to have some fresh bread nearby to mop up the olive oil. Antonio Carlucci, who sadly died in 2017, made a great series back in the eighties and one of the highlights was where he visited some small Italian village and the locals showed him their authentic versions of pasta or how they made a ragu for instance. I’ve always liked simple rustic cooking and I think that is what is at the heart of Antonio’s food.

If I remember correctly that ragu was something involving tomatoes, onions and garlic, all of my favourite ingredients. I couldn’t find a clip from it on YouTube so here’s one of Antonio in his later years.

Jamie Oliver.

Jamie Oliver is a very modern cook and he seems to cultivate a sort of Jack the lad streetwise fast-talking persona but he really is a great modern chef. In his many TV shows he caters for the modern household where people come home from work after a busy day and inspires them to cook some simple and fresh food instead of just shoving a frozen pizza in the oven.

Jamie made his TV debut in 1999. He was spotted by a TV producer making a documentary about the River Cafe where he was working at the time. His TV show the Naked Chef followed soon after and his cookbook from the series was a best seller. I’ve got quite a few of his cookbooks in my collection which I always refer to when I get down to some serious cookery.

Here’s one of his many YouTube videos showing how to make another of my favourite Italian dishes, Bolognese.

Keith Floyd.

Keith Floyd is the master of the TV cookery programme and his shows from the seventies and eighties were the forerunners of some of today’s TV cookery shows. Floyd visited lots of places, soaked up the local atmosphere, checked out the local dishes and produce and then turned up somewhere, a village square, a beach or even a local restaurant and started cooking. During each monologue to the camera, Keith made sure the cameraman filmed exactly what he wanted him to film, giving a running commentary on the ingredients and the cooking process as well as directions to the cameraman. The supping of wine during the cooking was clearly compulsory. His shows were a mix of travelogue and cooking visiting various far flung places and his impact on the genre is still visible in today’s food programming.

Rick Stein.

Rick is a direct link to Floyd in many ways. Rick’s first appearance on TV was when Floyd visited his famous fish restaurant in Padstow and later when Floyd’s producer wanted to work with someone new, Rick turned out to be the obvious choice. Rick, together with producer David Pritchard produced a series called Ocean Odyssey which was a big hit and the two went on to make more foodie programmes together. A recent series and one of my favourites was Rick Stein’s Long Weekends. Incidentally, a while back I reviewed Ricks autobiography which is well worth a read if you ever see it on the bookshelves.

Graham Kerr.

I had always thought that Graham Kerr, AKA the Galloping Gourmet was Australian but a quick check over on Wikipedia showed me I was wrong. Kerr was born in London to Scottish parents who were hoteliers and later Kerr moved to New Zealand where he became a culinary advisor to the New Zealand Air Force.

In New Zealand Keith appeared in a highly successful cookery show called Entertaining with Kerr. Later the show moved to Australia and later still Graham and his wife Treena made the move to Canada. There Graham began a new cookery show produced by Treena called the Galloping Gourmet which again was very successful. The title came from Kerr’s fast moving and enthusiastic style in which he literally galloped into the studio.

The format of the show was a film travelogue followed by Graham cooking a dish inspired by his travels live in the studio. I remember watching his shows as a child where he would taste the dish and then give the camera a look of food rapture before running into the audience and grabbing someone to taste his food. I loved it and it’s always been one of my foodie favourites.

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A kind of Foodie Sort of a Blog Post

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Ok. It happens to all bloggers and all writers. Even the greats like Hemingway and Dickens, they too had a moment when the blank paper stared back and them and nothing, just nothing came back.

Of course in the case of both Hemingway and Dickens, whatever moments they had in the course of writing, they overcame them, they wrote and went on to ever greater success, which is why many years later here we are talking about them.

These days one way to beat the blank screen problem is to do a search in your favourite search engine and look for blog prompts. Yes, there are plenty of those blogs around that tell us amateurs how to blog and how to write and just what to write about. I searched and found a post that gave me 189 creative blog post ideas. 189, pity they couldn’t have rounded it off at 190 or even 200 but hey, that’s just me being picky.,

A lot of those 189 blog ideas I have already done, and I had come up with the ideas all by myself with no help from ‘how to’ blogging sites but ideas 151 through to 162 actually got me thinking. They were all about food so without further ado, here’s a few thoughts on food:

Blog idea 156: How did I start cooking?

The first dish I ever made was probably soup. Now I don’t mean that I actually made the soup, after all, I was only about 6 so give me some credit. No what I actually did was I opened a can of tomato soup, warmed it up on the hob, poured it into a dish, got myself a spoon and sat down and ate and felt, well, pretty proud of myself. These days some 56 years later, tomato soup is still one of my favourites. It’s a sort of comfort food I suppose, tasting the same taste from all those years ago is a soothing relaxing feeling, a feel good, comforting feeling. I even choose soup today in restaurants and one of my favourite soups is from our local Italian restaurant here in sunny St Annes, Allegria. They do a lovely tasty minestrone soup with lovely chunks of vegetables in there. One important accompaniment to soup is tasty fresh bread. Which reminds me, I do have my very own bread making machine on top of the cupboard and it’s high time I pulled it down and made some bread.

The first actual cooking I ever did was a boiled egg but I don’t think I ever really did anything more about cooking until I left home and was forced to fend for myself.

Blog post idea 151: share a regional recipe.

Bacon and eggs hot off the Higgins grill!

Well, I’m not sure about that but here is a recipe regional to anyone in the UK, bacon and eggs. Now bacon and eggs is just one of my favourite meals ever and just recently I happen to have started producing a top-notch plate of this dish by digging out my George Foreman fat-free grill. Yes, I bought one years ago just before my divorce and my grill has lain untouched in a box in my mum’s spare room for many a year until on one epic search of my ‘stuff’ -I was actually looking for a VHS video but that’s a whole other blog- I came across my grill.

So here’s what you do. Crank up the grill, this is easy, just plug it in. Open it up and slap on a sausage. (OK that makes it bacon, sausage and eggs!) Give it a chance to get going and make sure (big tip coming up) your little fat collector is in place at the bottom of the grill otherwise your kitchen top is going to get covered in fat. After a while do a visual check on the sausage and when you think it is beginning to look good, slap in a couple of rashers of bacon. At the same time, get the kettle on because that boiling water will come in handy soon.

Check those rashers and flip them over and then get a pan filled with boiling water from the kettle. This is also a good time to get the teapot warmed. Next step, get that water to a good simmer, give it a stir and drop in your egg.  Check those rashers and sausages, if they are looking good, switch off your grill but just leave everything in there to keep warm. Make the tea. Pour. Serve your eggs and bacon when ready and if you have a tomato handy, slap that in the grill round about the time you dropped the egg  into the water. Serve with fresh bread or toast. Season to taste. Result, perfection on a plate.

Blog Post Idea 162: Share a post about a cooking experience that failed.

Hey I’m writing a blog post here, not a book. How long have you got?

Blog Post 153: Talk about the History of a Dish.

Well, one of my favourite dishes is chilli, or chilli con carne to give it its proper name. It originated in Mexico. Chilli spread to San Antonio in Texas and as the town was a tourist destination the dish spread rapidly through the area. In 1977 it was designated as the official dish of Texas but how it got to the UK I haven’t got a clue.

I started making chilli in the 1980’s and I like to think I make a pretty mean chilli. In fact, I think it’s high time I nipped down the supermarket, picked up the ingredients and got a smokin’ hot chilli cranked up!

When I moved into a new house in a small avenue in Merseyside in the 1990’s all our neighbours were about the same age and all nice and friendly people, or so we thought. My next door neighbour invited us for a barbecue and I noticed that by the barby was a large pan of chilli bubbling away. My neighbour’s wife commented ‘don’t go near that, it’s just the rubbish that Mike cooks!‘ However it turned out I had met a fellow chilli lover and Mike and I regularly swapped chilli recipes and tasted each others new batch of the dish.

Yes, how things changed in that street! We fell out with next door (number 2) because of a crazy incident involving cats. You can read all about it in this post about the Cat Wars where it turned out Stella’s cat was spending far too much time at Mike’s. Mike didn’t like it that we had told Stella (number 8) but actually we told Elaine (number 3) across the road and it was she who had told Stella. Elaine didn’t like it that we had told Mike that she told Stella and that was another friendship out of the window.

One day we went to a barbecue at Shirley’s (number 6). It was not a great affair and they soon ran out of lager. Dan, Shirley’s husband asked for a whip round to get some lagers so I chipped in a fiver. ‘What do you want?’ he asked. ‘Anything but Carling’ I replied as Carling is my least favourite beer. 15 minutes later Dan was back with the lagers. It was a really hot day and I had been keeping the barby going while Dan was away. He handed me a lager in a glass which was strange because up till then we had been drinking out of cans. I took a long slurp of the beer and it was not nice, not nice lager at all. Turns out, Dan had bought a crate of Carling and thought he could fool me with the lager in a glass trick so then he and I got into a dispute as I had specifically requested him not to buy me any Carling. I demanded my fiver back (naturally under the circumstances) and after some heated words we left when Shirley gave me a refund. That was another neighbour we fell out with. No wonder they all later moved away. Pity really because not long after I found this great new chilli recipe that I wanted to tell Mike about.

159. Review a Cook Book

I do have quite a few cook books and I think I really have to thank Ken Hom for my interest in cooking. Back in the 1980’s I became really hooked on his quick stir fry methods of cooking and I bought a wok and started stir frying. In recent years one of my favourite TV chefs is probably Jamie Oliver. OK, sometimes he comes across as a bit of a lad, a bit of a geezer as they say but at the heart of what he does is a love of good food, fresh produce and healthy eating. He produced a great chilli recently on one of his 15 minute meal shows and his cookery programmes, like his books are snappy and vibrant. I own a couple of his books and they are always handy when I want to cook something new or even just for a few tips when I’m in a culinary quandary.

Blog Idea 158. Try Something New (And Write Your Thoughts About It)

Not so long ago, Liz and I stayed in Edinburgh. We weren’t in the centre, we were parked down by the sea front in a spot where motorhomes could park for free. It was well away from the centre of the city and we knew we were in for a walk or a bus ride to get to a restaurant however, just by the parking area was a rather nice restaurant. It appeared to me to be rather focussed on fish, not my favourite food by any means but we decided to give it a try. Liz chose something thoroughly fishy and I had calamari (OK some fishy things are acceptable if not too fishy) and followed it up with a lentil curry. The waiter assured me I would love the dish and it was nice, in fact it tasted more like a chilli than a curry to me. Now I think of it, add a little more chilli and some meat and it would have been perfect!

Blog Idea 190: Plug your book and Sign Off.

Floating in Space is a novel set in Manchester, 1977. Click the links at the top of the page to buy or for more information.