The Waste

Television goes through fads and phases all the time.  Only a few years ago we were all watching Big Brother and a whole swathe of other reality shows.  Before that, we were in thrall to the detective dramas of the day. Nowadays, if someone isn’t sobbing their heart out in front of celebrity judges on a talent show, it ain’t worth watching.  However, there has been one constant of TV schedules for as long as I can remember, and that is cooking shows.

So, taking the talent show format and artificially inseminating it with a cooking show, we have been given The Taste.  It’s a bit like The Voice, only with less warbling and more spoons.  The whole premise is that the budding chefs have to create one spoonful of food for the judges.  The judges in question consist of the world’s sexiest crack fiend, Nigella Lawson, an unknown Anthony Bourdain, and a man who is so stereotypically French that he’s almost racist towards himself, Ludo Lefebvre.  Together, they taste the spoons without knowing which chefs are responsible for their creation.  This is supposedly an effort to evoke impartiality in the same manner as The Voice does, only without the need for swivel chairs and a terminal dose of Will.I.Am.

The main problem with the show is quite simply the amount of food that gets wasted.  In order to create these tiny spoonfuls, the chefs are given vast array different foodstuffs, much of which isn’t used.  In order to create a tiny cube of smoked salmon for their spoon, one contestant butchered a whole salmon to get the miniscule blob they required.  A fish had to die for the privilege of getting a sliver of its flesh onto that spoon.  But the wastage didn’t stop there.  Oysters were mercilessly crushed for minute amounts of sauce.  Chickens were debreasted and cut into lego-sized mouthfuls. Even the vegetables didn’t get off lightly as they were sliced into fine pieces for The Taste’s leaking, gastronomic machine.  When a chef was evicted from the show, they had to walk past a gauntlet of freshly stacked fruit in order to reach the exit.

Fuck your pretentious seabass, give me a kebab!

Of course, this problem isn’t just limited to The Taste.  In fact, The Taste probably wastes less than other cookery shows due to Nigella’s raging case of the munchies.  But this leftover problem is endemic to the genre.  Take the Iron Chef, an American show that makes The Taste look quaint in terms of extreme excess.  The competing chefs are given a culinary playground as they are presented with a stack of ingredients that could feed a starving African family for 10 years, or John Goodman for 2 weeks. When you can measure your expendable harvest in galleons, you know you’ve taken things a tad too far.  And that’s before the special ingredient is wheeled out, where a table big enough for The Hairy Bikers to have sex on is piled high with a chosen ingredient, such as an orchard’s worth of apples.

So what can we do our about our decadent Western cookery shows?  We should expect our TV chefs to be a bit more economical.  Perhaps we could force them to cook using leftover ingredients.  Frankly, I like to see Jamie Oliver try and create a healthy, wholesome, 30 minute meal with some of last night’s leftover pizza, an egg that is past it’s sell by date, and a packet of instant noodles.  Either that, or they could just send the leftovers to my house and I’ll make sure they are disposed of correctly.

Cooking Tips: Leek And Potato Soup

You may not realise this from reading Muppets For Justice, but there are a lot of things I'm not very good at.  I'd be the first to admit that I am completely hopeless at a lot of stuff that normal people take for granted.  But I'm not a quitter.  Lately, I've been going through some self improvement to try and alleviate some of these issues.  The most recent thing I've decided to learn is how to cook properly.

Now I’m a bad cook.  I cook like I make love: quick, greasy and unsatisfying.  I can just about handle microwavable food and meal kits, but anything more intricate would result in serious injury.  Due to this, Mrs Addman does most of the cooking around our house.  Being a modern guy, I wanted to take the pressure off of her and take on some of the culinary duties myself.

The first dish I decided to attempt was leek and potato soup.  I mean, how hard can that be?  Surely you only need a leek and potato.  I searched for a recipe and was immediately proved wrong:

• 1 tbsp virgin olive oil
• 1 onion, sliced
• 225g/8oz potatoes, cubed
• 2 medium leeks,sliced
• 1.2 litres/2 pints vegetable stock
• 150ml/5fl oz double cream or crème fraîche
• salt and freshly ground black pepper

An artist's rendition

That doesn't seem so bad, does it?  I thought I’d be able to handle it, so I set about collecting my ingredients.  Most items were quite easy to procure, but my local supermarket didn’t seem to have any virgin olive oil.  As I explained, my culinary skills aren’t exactly amazing, but I knew that the soup wouldn't taste as great without this vital ingredient.  I figured the nearest substitute would be virgin’s blood.

Tesco didn’t have any of that in bottles.  The shelf stackers just laughed at me when I asked them about it, and suggested that I put an advert on the Internet.  Taking their advice, I headed home and pulled on my typing gloves.

I was initially disappointed at the lack of willing sacrifices there are online and it proved more difficult than I'd hoped to find a suitable virgin.  My adverts on Match.com and OKCupid didn't draw in any replies.  Eventually, I posted the following on Craiglist:

“Wanted:  Pure, nubile, young virgin to help me make soup.  Non smoker preferred.”

I received a response from a lovely Mormon lady named Natalie.  She was 18 and informed me that she’d “never been kissed” as she'd been saving herself, which seemed perfect as she would be clean of other people’s germs.  I understand that food hygiene is a big thing these days.

After I’d drained all the blood from her body (I misread the recipe and didn’t realise I only needed a tablespoon’s worth), I set about making my soup.  I cubed my potatoes and put them in a pan.  I added a finely chopped onion and a leek, then poured in my vegetable stock and bought it to a simmer.  10 minutes later I stirred in my crème fraîche, and seasoned with salt and black pepper.  Then I slapped my hands together and shouted “FUCK!  COME ON BIG BOY!” which, as I understand from watching Gordon Ramsey on telly, makes the food cook faster.

*Walks away shaking head* Fuck!  What a shame....

Then I drizzled in the virgin’s blood.  A thick plume of black smoke shot out of the pan, engulfing my kitchen in a dense mist.  This sent my smoke alarm into a panic as I fumbled my way around the kitchen to open a window.

As I fanned the fumes away, I noticed there was someone standing my kitchen.  I saw his feet first.  Well, when I say feet, I mean cloven hooves.  His goatly appendages were attached to a pair of crimson thighs and a forked tail.  The smoke finally parted to reveal his belt of shrunken skulls, and a pair of ram’s horns adorning his head.  It appeared that I had accidentally summoned up a rather substantial demon.

I’m a bit confused at this point.  I’ve watched plenty of Jamie Oliver’s 30 minute meals and I swear I’ve never seen him call upon banished creatures from the dark plane before.  In fact, most cooking shows seem distinctly devil free, if I remember correctly.

The demon says that I have 7 days in which to reap the souls of the unworthy, lest he cleave my body in twain and banish my ethereal form into purgatory.  He refuses to leave the house until the deadline is up, and has spent all day sitting in my favourite chair and watching his soap operas.  Any efforts to move him are simply “wasting precious mortal time”, apparently.

Does anyone know what I did wrong?  I don’t think cooking is something I’ll ever be good at.