Jamie Oliver Tops Sainsbury's Poll Shock

Jamie Oliver has won three gongs in a survey by, um, Sainsbury’s Magazine. It’s even more impressive considering there were only ten categories.

Now, of course, this has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Oliver advertises the supermarket chain on TV.

It was in recognition of all the culinary prowess the fat-tongued cook has shown over the past decade - cooking bangers for taxi drivers, introducing shoppers to alien ingredients like a “nice bit of dill”, ground-breaking forays into the world of pasta bakes and beans on toast, and single-handedly changing a nation’s eating habits by putting the makers of turkey twizzlers out of business.

In the scientific poll, voted on by 800 Sainsbury’s shoppers, Oliver won Food Campaign of the Decade' for Jamie’s School Dinners, and came runner-up in TV Food Show of the Decade for Jamie at Home, and Recipe Writer of the Decade (if it wasn’t for that pesky Delia...)

How he lost out to Heston Blumenthal in the category Chef of the Decade is anyone’s guess. Perhaps he didn’t kill off enough diners? Perhaps he just lacks the headline-grabbing genius of a man who recently horrified a table of celebrity guests by serving up a dormouse lollipop as a festive treat? Perhaps it’s just because he isn’t a chef?

Have you seen Oliver in the Sainsbury’s adverts? When’s he going to give it up? He’s clearly run out of ideas...

“Err, next time you, err, make yourself some breakfast in the morning, try sprinkling a nice bit of, err, paprika on your cornflakes...taste the difference!...even turns the milk pink!...can I go now?”

Anyway, if you’re interested at all, here are Sainsbury’s Magazine’s results in full...

Food campaign of the decade: Jamie’s School Dinners. Runners up: the Government’s 5-a-day campaign, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s Chicken out! campaign for a free-range future.

TV food show of the decade: MasterChef. Runners up: Jamie at Home, Come Dine with Me.

Recipe writer of the decade: Delia Smith. Runner’s up: Jamie Oliver, Nigel Slater.

Chef of the decade: Heston Blumenthal. Runners up: Gordon Ramsay and Raymond Blanc.

Cookbook of the decade: Delia’s how to Cheat at Cooking. Runners up: The RiverCottage Year by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, River Cafe Cookbook Easy by Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers.

Brand of the decade: Green & Black’s. Runners up: Dorset Cereals, Innocent.

Ingredient of the decade: Blueberries. Runners up: cherry tomatoes, chorizo.

Food product of the decade: Innocent. Runners up: Tilda steamed basmati rice pouches, Levi Roots’ Reggae Reggae sauce.

Sainsbury’s product of the decade: Sainsbury’s tomato ketchup. Runners up: Sainsbury’s vanilla dairy ice cream, Sainsbury’s blackcurrant high juice.

Dish of the decade: braised lamb shanks. Runners up: Thai green curry, posh fishcakes.

And lastly, a disturbing prediction of a future decade - not sponsored by Sainsbury's...

Jamie Oliver’s Twitter Account Hacked With Bogus Diet Adverts

Overweight healthy eating guru Jamie Oliver has had his Twitter account hacked with an advert for a diet fad that claims users can lose “23lbs of belly fat in one month”.

The celebrity cook tweeted a series of links to a bogus woman’s health magazine advertising the weight-shedding benefits of something called the Garcinia Cambogia bean diet.

His fans quickly noticed the hack, and minutes later Oliver deleted the messages, which said: “Lose 22lbs. of fffat in 29 days” followed by a link.

Oliver then sent out a tweet to his 3.3 million followers, saying: “Whoa sorry guys looks like i got hacked!! Sorry to all looking in to it now. JOXX”

Others used the opportunity to poke fun at the TV cook, with Luke Lewis writing: “Jamie Oliver's tweets are more lucid than usual this morning.”

An hour later, and without any apparent irony, Oliver then sent out a Twitter message to his fans plugging a new “naughty, filthy” chocolate cake for one of his many restaurant chains.

“Help me guys I'm Just about to put this chocolate cake on a menu for Jamies italian & its a really painfully good naughty filthy elegant chocolate dish what can I call it ???

“It's gotta be simple but a bit slutty any ideas ? I want a naughty play of death by chocolate ... Chocolate ???? Any ideas greatly appreciated and don't hold back I think it deserves to be a big rude love #jamie xxx”.

What a waste of a golden opportunity though, as chef Neil Rankin put it - breaking into Oliver’s Twitter account and just posting spam.

Jamie Oliver's 'Dream School' Backing Of 18-Hour Days For Chefs Is Modern Day Slavery

I have some sympathy with Jamie Oliver when he talks about Britain’s youngsters being work-shy, "wet" children who get their mothers to stick up for them. But what he says about the need to work 18-hour days cooking in restaurants is frankly mediaeval.

He made the comments in an interview in today’s Observer newspaper to launch yet another TV series, this one with the slightly disturbing title Jamie's Dream School, where he invites celebrities (come on, it wouldn’t be a TV programme without them) and academics to try to help 20 school drop-outs.

Oliver describes the problems of recruiting staff for his restaurants, saying he uses “bulletproof, rock-solid Polish and Lithuanians who are tough and work hard” because British youngsters no longer know the meaning of hard work.

"When you're unleashing students into an economy where there's trouble with jobs, the ones who haven't got academic verve, they need to have a basic approach to physical work. You need to be able to knock out seven 18-hour days in a row... I had that experience. By 13, I'd done 15-hour days in my dad's pub," he adds.

What utter tosh. For a start, there is a huge difference between working in a kitchen when your dad’s the owner to working for some bullying head chef you have no hold over. When will chefs stop promoting this ridiculous idea that 18-hour days in kitchens are acceptable? And it is even harder to stomach when it comes from a celebrity chef who doesn’t actually work in his own kitchens, but instead throws himself in front of every passing TV camera, while getting paid a fortune to promote supermarket products.

It reminds me of when I had an interview for the position of commis chef at Gordon Ramsay’s flagship Royal Hospital Road restaurant in London. I went along to Ramsay’s headquarters near Victoria, and was given some forms while I waited for the human resources manager. They took a photocopy of my passport, and eventually the HR woman arrived. She was short and tough-looking, and immediately made me feel ill at ease.

“You know the chefs work 18 hours a day here?” she said almost immediately.

I shrugged and pretended to let the news flush over me. I said that in the run-up to Christmas I’d done a few 18-hour days.

“Well, it’s 18 hours EVERY day here,” she said, studying my reaction.

She told me to think about it and said they were looking for staff at the Boxwood Café in Belgravia as well as Royal Hospital Road. I wasn’t in the least bit surprised. Then she phoned the kitchen and said I could do a trial on the Saturday. I shook her hand and walked out. We hadn’t even talked about money.

By the time I’d reached the front door, I’d made my decision. Even at 18 – the generation Oliver hopes to put right in his slightly Orwellian ‘dream academy’ - the hours would have killed me. I’d have to start work at 8am and finish at 2am. In the six hours between shifts, I’d have to get a night bus home, sleep, wash, feed myself, and then get back into work. I’d probably be lucky to get three hours sleep before I had to do it all again.

I knew I wouldn’t even last a day so I emailed Ramsay’s office and cancelled the trial. It wasn’t that I am work-shy, it’s just that I have a brain, and it seems far too much like modern day slavery to me.

Indeed, it is about time restaurants started looking after their staff better, and worrying about their health. We only have to remember the tragic case of Nathan Laity, who moved up to London from Cornwall to pursue his dream of making it as a top chef.

Nathan, 23, became so exhausted after working 100 hours a week as sous chef at the Tate Modern, he died after contracting tonsillitis. He came down with a sore throat but continued to work 14 hours a day - 98 hours a week - for 27 straight days without any time off.

He died in his sleep, and doctors say his immune system had simply shut down. Is this really the sort of future for Britain’s youth Oliver is proposing?

It’s true there are many work-shy youngsters out there, but 18-hour days are not the way forward. And giving youngsters the idea that by working them they will one day be as rich as Oliver is appalling. The huge majority will simply get burned out and spat out by the restaurant industry, and be on the scrap heap by 30.

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Ready Steady Crook: Fake Chef Faces Jail

A bogus celebrity chef who claimed to have flushed Jamie Oliver’s head down the toilet as a kitchen prank is facing jail after admitting a string of gastro-pub frauds.

Kenny Goldsmith faked his credentials by claiming to have worked with some of the cheffing industry’s biggest names.

And he appeared on UKTV Food after boasting of working with Oliver, Gordon Ramsay and Ken Hom, taking viewers through his "simple but tasty" meal of beef brochettes served with mustard garlic cream.

But he had actually honed his knife skills – not at the foot of the Greats, but in a prison kitchen. And he had never worked with Ramsay and Hom or won a Michelin star. Or for that matter helped train Oliver – or , sadly, bogwashed the Naked Chef star as a "prank".

Oliver and Ramsay were asked to give statements to police during the fraud inquiry - and confirmed they had never met him.

A UKTV spokeswoman said the channel was now washing its hands of the chef following his appearance on Great Food Live.

“As part of that appearance, his recipe was uploaded on to uktvfood.co.uk. We will now remove the recipe from the website (they have),” she said.

His lies were finally exposed after he left a trail of bounced cheques and bad debts, cheating unsuspecting gastropub owners out of a total of £120,000.

At one pub, the St Vincent Arms in Norton Disney, Lincs, he even ran up a £4,000 bill for a helicopter trip to a food festival in London.

He is now behind bars, facing a lengthy jail-term after appearing before Lincoln Crown Court to admit a string of fraud charges.

Goldsmith, 39, cooked up an elaborate story of how his love of fine dining developed at an early age.

It was the usual sleb chef rites-of-passage-guff that the punters lap up. According to his website, his journey was inspired by his grandmother and the "traditional, homely food" she served.

"She was well travelled and had an in-depth knowledge of international cuisine. She shared her passion for good food with Kenny,” it gushed.

"She encouraged him to learn and cook alongside her, and her enthusiasm created a longing that ultimately led him to a career as a chef.”

He also boasted of having been crowned Seafood Chef of the Year in 2000 and said he was the holder of a Michelin star and ran the European Cooking School, based at a French chateau.

In reality, however, he ran a dating agency in Grimsby, Lincs, with his partner Kirsty Emmans.

Goldsmith, from Winterton, near Scunthorpe, admitted 20 charges of fraud and two of theft. Emmans, 38, of Grimsby, admitted 11 fraud charges and one of theft.

Jamie Oliver was unavailable for comment on Goldsmith's claims of having trained him, and his outlandish boast that he’d once flushed his head down a toilet during a bout of horseplay.

He and Emmans will be sentenced later.

...Blimey, a chef with a worse reputation than Gordon Ramsay. But my favourite bit of all is the blurb for Goldsmith’s European Cooking School...

“Can you imagine what it is like to stay in a French Château which is an authentic Fourteenth century castle complete with moat, working drawbridge, arrow-slits and battlements? Can you imagine what it would be like to extend your cooking skills under the tutelage of a top British chef?”

The plug comes with a grinning mugshot of Kenny, his arms crammed full of delicious peppers and garlic presumably foraged from a nearby 14th century market, and is accompanied by his recipe for orange sorbet. Rather appropriate now he’s in the icebox.

Ramsay Losing Head-To-Head With Oliver

Gordon Ramsay may like to boast about his footballing past, but he is certainly being outplayed by Jamie Oliver in their first head-to-head restaurant clash.

Last year, the TV cooks both signed up to launch restaurants at a £500m shopping mall in London. But whereas Oliver’s popular Barbecoa venue is trousering an estimated £140,000 a week, Ramsay’s place opposite is a huge empty building with a concrete floor.

The massive delay is raising questions about the state of Ramsay’s business finances. He had planned to open his all-day open kitchen with a "raw bar" selling soused fish, home-made pastrami and charcuterie early this year. This was pushed back to the spring, and now he may not open until September.

When a journalist from the Evening Standard went to visit the £3m site at One New Change shopping centre, next to St Paul’s Cathedral, he found little sign of activity.

“There were no workers at the venue, which runs the length of one side of the centre, or signs of any fittings except a handful of cheap tables and chairs, dozens of neon strip lights piled in a corner, and a wheelie bin,” he said.

The restaurant – to be named Bread Street Kitchen when it eventually opens – is supposed to have a lift, stairs, a lavish dining room, and an open kitchen with a wood-burning oven and a wood-burning grill; work that experts say would take six months even if it started tomorrow.

Land Securities, the developer of the mall, is reportedly piling pressure on Ramsay to get the work started. The firm is believed to have given the 44-year-old a £1m subsidy to entice him there, in the form of help with re-fit costs and a period of free rent.

A spokeswoman for Ramsay said: "It's all happening but the design has changed quite a bit. There are meetings with Land Securities this week."

Oliver, meanwhile, is coining it in with his 200-seater meat grill (above). Barbecoa has had some bad press from critics, but it has not stopped the tills ringing.

Ramsay and Oliver, 35, are well known for their mutual dislike of each other, so no doubt Oliver will be crowing about the result of their first head-to-head. Ramsay likes to say Oliver is "just a cook" while proclaiming himself to be "a chef". Unless, that is, you believe a chef is someone who works in a kitchen, rather than a brand making TV programmes and hawking cookware.

Ramsay knew he was throwing down the gauntlet when he signed the papers. In an interview with Hot Dinners last October, his right-hand man Stuart Gilles said: “Jamie’s next door and there are other good restaurants around, we thought a lot of people are doing meat, so we’ll do a raw bar.”

Gilles, who is due to run the new eatery, added: “We thought about the speed and that it’s (the food’s) got to be fast because it’s the City.”

Obviously the plan didn’t extend to the building work.

The set-back is the latest in a long line of troubles for Ramsay. The News of the World this week said he was facing a sexual discrimination and unfair dismissal claim from accountant Sara Stewart, a former director of one of his firms. Ramsay disputes the claims.

Stewart, 49, will apparently include allegations in her case that she was axed as she was about to blow the whistle on the chef's crisis-hit company.

And there has been a very public bust-up with his father-in-law Chris Hutcheson, who he sacked as chief executive of Gordon Ramsay Holdings about the same time Stewart got the chop.

Stewart and Hutcheson hit the headlines last November when they were snapped walking hand-in-hand, although there was no suggestion they were anything other than friends.

No doubt there will now be questions about whether Ramsay's Bread Street Kitchen has got enough dough.

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Keith Floyd: Stirred But Not Shaken

I wrote on this blog in July about the tragic news that Keith Floyd – one of my all-time heroes, and the man who inspired me to retrain as a chef - has cancer. The response rather surprised me. I had little idea of the level of feeling involved, and from all corners of the world.

The legendary TV cook had touched so many lives, it seemed, inspired so many people to get their hands dirty in the kitchen, and Delia aside, vanquished those dreary, sterile, studio-set cooking shows to hell in a chicken basket.

Of course, Floyd’s stardom led to the rise of twats like James Martin and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, not to mention Jamie Oliver and Gary Rhodes. But it was worth it, wasn’t it? Just for one show of the bow-tied roue on Floyd on Fish?

Well, the old soak doesn’t think so.

He has described how he would like to “napalm the lot of them”, and his battle against cancer has, if anything, intensified that bile.

But it’s not the Valentine Warners and Hairy Bikers who have really got him down.

It’s the genuinely-talented cooks who swapped kitchen life, and all its treasured pressures and camaraderie, for the plastic, pretentious world of television.

Floyd – clearly pained by the monster he has created - seems far more hurt by the celebrities who actually deserve the title ‘chef’, namely Marco Pierre White and his former protégé Gordon Ramsay.

Okay, Ramsay has wealth and fame far beyond what he would have got if he’d stayed in the kitchen, but what has it got him? His reputation is pretty much now in tatters.

Floyd, 65, savages Ramsay with the highest honour kitchen sledging can muster - the very Château d’Yquem of put-downs - and calls him a “c***”.

He claims that the likes of Ramsay and White have been "seduced" by TV glamour, insisting "television is crap", and that the "w*****s" on programmes do not understand the "language" of food.

“Some of them are terrific guys and some of them are absolute arseholes,” he adds. “Marco Pierre White is an extraordinarily good cook, but Gordon Ramsay, who used to be the pastry chef for Marco, has gone on a celebrity zig-zag, which is why I call them c****.”



He makes the comments, appropriately enough, in a Channel 4 documentary to be shown tomorrow (Monday) night called Keith Meets Keith.

The other Keith is that oh-so-hell-raising actor Keith Allen, in comparison to who the scourge of the celebrity chef is but a flea-bite on the arm of a tattooed giant.

Why they got the Sheriff of Nottingham and not Johnny Vegas to present the show, I have no idea. The roly-poly comic seems to genuinely love Floyd, and often sits for hours watching re-runs with a can in his hand. “It’s like drinking with an old friend,” he once said.

But Allen it is, and after getting nowhere with Floyd’s former agent Stan Green, he eventually tracks down a frail-looking, walking stick-aided Floyd at his farmhouse in rural France.

Fags and booze are to the fore, and Floyd dismisses the modern generation of TV gastronauts as “a bunch of arseholes”.

“The ill-conceived idea that all these w*****s who turn up on TV are chefs is a failure to understand the language. People who cook are cooks, a chef is a head of a restaurant kitchen,” he says.

Although Floyd only mentions Ramsay, pictures are flashed up of the Hairy Bikers, Jamie Oliver and Rick Stein (who his ex-producer David Pritchard formed into a poetry-spilling ‘mini-me’ when Floyd suffered his own zig-zag.)

Floyd tells of his money problems and says his rambling farmhouse in Avignon is being re-possessed by his fourth ex-wife Tess, 42.

Allen, father of pop star Lily Allen, and general all-round gobshite, asks Floyd: “Do you get foxes here?”

Floyd replies: “No, but I’m going to.”

The pair are filmed drunkenly singing, very badly, at a hotel piano, but Floyd is no arse and soon sees Allen for what he is.

The next day over lunch, Floyd tells Allen to “shut up” before being helped away “to go on a sofa”.

Allen, who at another point is called “a prick” by Floyd, said of the wine-glugging cook: “He’s mentally as sharp as ever and just as opinionated.”

Since the filming, Floyd has had chemotherapy and five operations. He has also published Stirred But Not Shaken: The Autobiography by Keith Floyd, which is out next month, and deals with how four marriages went down the pan and the money ran out.

At one point in the book, in true Floydian spirit, he deals with the health problems that have blighted him in recent years...

“The banquet was in honour of some long-deceased French chef — although as far as I could see it was nothing more than an excuse for the mother of all piss-ups,” he writes.

“Soup was served, oysters were gulped and a whole lamb was carved by an ancient maître d’ who looked like a cross between Dr Jekyll and the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Sweetmeats and trifles came and went.

“Bon Appetit! Keith Floyd enjoying a meal with a bottle of wine in a typical pose. Bare-knuckle boxing took place, port and whisky flowed as the night turned into dawn and I finally floated along the teak-paneled corridor to my bedroom.

“Later, I don’t know how long afterwards, I reached out a hand to press the bell for a steward.

“My mattress was hard, I needed a glass of water and what with the tubes in my nose, I couldn’t breathe properly. No steward arrived. Just a man in a white jacket with a stethoscope and a briefcase, from which he took a syringe and injected my arm.

“Strange, I thought.

“Morning came — along with a group of people who stood round my bed, talking about me while they pressed their cool fingers over my stomach. ‘How did you enjoy the dinner?’ I asked them, by way of conversation. Silence.

“‘Wasn’t it a great night?’ I said. ‘I mean, there was the port and the boxing, there was the whole baron of lamb, and then there was dawn. How do you manage to have such a place in what appears to me to be a hospital?’

“It was a hospital. ‘Mr Floyd, you have been hallucinating,’ said one of the group. ‘The medication we had to give you in order to keep you alive together with the effects of — how can we say it? — an overindulgence of alcohol. . .’

“It was unreal. The whole banquet thing had been a complete figment of my imagination. ‘You were suffering a nasty case of delirium tremens,’ continued the man, whom I had by now realised was a doctor. ‘DTs, Mr Floyd. We have played our part.

“Now it is for you to play yours. Drink again as you have before and you will die.’ That was a year ago, in the spring of 2008 and I’m thankful to say that somehow or other, I’m still here.”

I do hope he gets better. But even if he doesn’t – what a life!

RIP Keith Floyd: No More Heroes

They say you should never meet your heroes. I learned that very early on in journalism. But even though I had the chance to meet my all-time hero Keith Floyd on a couple of occasions, I shrank away each time.

I wanted him to remain in my thoughts as the bow-tied roué lambasting the cameraman Clive, glass in hand, pan-frying sweetbreads and truffles, and heartily recommending that half the bottle of red should go into the beef 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. Cooking and playing for a Welsh rugby team, then skidding on his studs and scattering food across the floor.

That scene in Padstow, when he pretended to forget the name of a young Rick Stein as the fresh-faced cook, and his eventual usurper, squirmed on camera.

I wanted to remember him making mashed potato with a young Marco Pierre White. Serving a fried beer-mat to a man who’d complained about his schnitzel. Putting all his money on the roulette wheel and drinking into the small hours after a particularly bad night’s service.

I wanted to remember his refreshing, self-deprecating humour when it came to his own cooking talents. The live cookery demonstration when he left the giblet bag inside a roast duck.

But perhaps most of all I miss his infectious love of food, and his humbleness and readiness to accept where he came from - unlike many of the new breed of celebrity chefs spawned from his success.

Quite simply, he was a man who never forgot he was just a cook.

On one early Floyd On Fish show, he opened his box of knives and told viewers: “So you see the importance of my little black box is that it’s actually got the tools of my trade in, and if the worst comes to the worst, and the BBC goes bust, then I can still get a job as a cook anyday.”



I don’t want to remember him as the frail, doddering, aged-beyond-his-years man in last night’s Channel 4 documentary Keith Meets Keith.

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.

I tried to switch over several times, but this 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.

The whole show – not helped in the slightest by the faux sensitivity of Keith Allen and crew – wreaked of mortality. It was like watching the last hours of a dying God.

It was obvious Floyd didn’t have long, and as it turned out, just a few weeks. Minutes before the documentary was aired, the legendary raconteur died from a heart attack while watching TV at his partner Celia Martin’s home in Dorset. He was 65.

Paramedics battled for 45 minutes to save him but he could not be resuscitated, his ghost-writer James Steen said.

Floyd had returned to Britain three weeks ago to start chemotherapy for bowel cancer, and died just before the publication of his latest autobiography Stirred But Not Shaken.

A book launch had been planned at Marco Pierre White's Knightsbridge restaurant Frankies on October 6, and will now go ahead as a celebration of Floyd's life.

A short statement on Floyd's website says: “On Monday, September 14 2009, Keith passed away. He will be greatly missed by many.”

The only faintly watchable bit of last night’s documentary was when Floyd called most of the celebrity chefs who fill our screens “c****”.

Fittingly, the likes of Jamie Oliver and co were quick to pay tribute to the man who had paved the way for their careers.

Oliver said: “Keith was not just one of the best, he was the best television chef. An incredible man who lived life to the full and an inspiration to me and to so many others.”

Antony Worrall Thompson added: “I think all of us modern TV chefs owe a living to him. He kind of spawned us all.

“He turned cookery shows into entertainment. He lived life to the full and didn't care what people thought about him.”



Born to a working class family in Somerset in 1943, Floyd was educated at Wellington School before first becoming a journalist for a local paper in Bristol.

But that didn’t last long, and he decided to join the Forces after watching Zulu and rose to Second Lieutenant in the Royal Tank Regiment.

While in the Army, he played a major role in the kitchen and so-called 'Floyd nights' became the stuff of legend.

After leaving the forces, he flitted between jobs as a barman, dishwasher and cook before opening three restaurants in Bristol.

It was in one of those that he had his TV break, when he met BBC producer David Pritchard, and Floyd on Fish was born.

At its peak, the show was broadcast in 40 countries.

But it was this fame that led to his undoing and the failure of four marriages.

Although clearly a natural in front of the camera, he often reflected that if he hadn’t gone into TV, he’d have been a lot happier, and would probably have still been running a bistro in Bristol.

“There is Keith, who is just a cook and doesn't want to be famous,” he once said.

“He wants to lead a simple life, go out to dinner with his mates, go fishing. Then there is this other person, Floyd or Floydie.

“He is universally popular. People are so obsessed with Floydie that Keith can never lead a quiet life. It is unjust. I don't want to be Floyd. If I've influenced people, then I have. But I've got no idea who Floyd is. Not a clue.”

His fans knew who he was though, and loved him all the more for it.

I can’t tell you how said I am at his passing.

I’ll leave the last line to Floyd’s favourite band The Stranglers...

No more heroes anymore.

What’s Next For Gordon Ramsay? Monkey Tennis?

It shows what a ridiculous, self-perpetuating farce reality TV has become when a satirical programme idea dreamed up by Alan Partridge becomes, err, reality.

In I’m Alan Partridge, Steve Coogan’s failed chat show host frantically tries to sell TV pitches to an unimpressed BBC executive in a bid to get himself back on telly. The gems include Arm Wrestling With Chas & Dave, Inner City Sumo, Cooking In Prison, and Youth Hostelling With Chris Eubank.

In flailing desperation, the Norwich DJ plucks another idea of out of thin air, and suggests “Monkey Tennis?” - a phrase that later came to be used by pundits to describe today’s crop of lowest common denominator TV programmes.

But what a shame he didn’t try to pitch his ideas 14 years later. Because in a move worthy of the well-aired tabloid phrase ‘you couldn’t make it up’, Gordon Ramsay has stolen one of Partridge’s gags by fronting a Channel 4 show about cooking in prison.

If you’ve ever wondered whether there is anything that Ramsay wouldn’t do for money, then the answer is a firm ‘no’ after the celebrity chef arrived at HMP Brixton in south London last week to film the new series, which will air in the autumn.

Channel 4 insiders claim it is actually a serious attempt to shake-up prison food and save the Government cash by teaching inmates to cook.

If it all sounds a bit like Jamie's School Dinners, which saw Jamie Oliver overhaul food in schools, then that’s because it is.

With grub in schools, hospitals, and even submarines all having been “transformed” by celebrity chefs, TV executives were clearly left shamelessly scraping the bottom of the barrel by nicking one of Coogan’s ridiculous ideas for a show.

Ramsay is apparently keen to use his cooking skills to help prisoners' rehabilitation - even though he didn’t bother helping out his own brother Ronald when he got banged up in an Indonesian jail in 2007 after being caught with heroin.

The show is part of the £1m, one-year deal Ramsay signed last April with C4. Perhaps if he gets another contract, he’ll get to front Monkey Tennis. It’s not like they’ll be a shortage of celebrity chefs eager to take part.

MORE: Gordon Ramsay A Cut Above The Rest?

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"I'm loving your book. Very enjoyable. Some great one-liners. "His legs wobbled like a crab on stilts" had me chuckling." - @griptonfactor

"Highly recommended. A great book about changing careers for his love of cooking." @Whatsinmymouth

"Downloaded the book last Sunday and finished it the same day! Great read." - @MTomkinsonChef

"Very funny." - @SkyRuth

"Any of you who have flirted with chefdom, go and immediately download this book from Amazon - Down and Out in Padstow and London. Great read." - @el_duder

"Truly brilliant." - @kcassowary

"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

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

There are also 12 reviews on its Amazon page.

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

Masterchef & The Myth Of The Celebrity Chef

(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...

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

Coq Au Van: In Defence Of Gordon Ramsay

I was about to begin my post, telling you how many of the dishes at the Fat Duck were cooked using the ‘boil-in-the-bag’ sous vide method. I was about to tell you how the vac-packed salmon fillet was dipped in a liquorice gel, which set at around 89C, so it stayed solid when gently poached in the water bath.

I was about to tell you how Heston Blumenthal claims the method helps preserve the natural flavours and colours, and manipulates the chemical make-up of the proteins, starches and fats to create new textures and flavours.

I was about to tell you how the process was championed by masterchefs like Ferran Adriá (who tricks people with his ‘caviar’ – it might look just like osetra, but it is made of squid ink and calcium chloride) and Thomas Keller (who compresses watermelon and poached lobster in a vac-pack machine with exquisite results).

I was about to give you my penny’s worth on how the trendy sous vide method (French for ‘under vacuum’) has had the biggest single effect on professional cooking since Escoffier himself. And I was about to ponder how long it would be before every gadget-crazed foodie has a vac-pack machine gathering dust with the pasta machines and bread makers at the back of the cupboard...

But then I got distracted by The Sun and the Daily Mail, and their hatchet job on Gordon Ramsay. The charge? Using ‘boil-in-the-bag’ food in his three gastropubs and Foxtrot Oscar, his bistro in Chelsea.

With typical ‘rip off Britain’ histrionics, the papers worked themselves into a self-righteous frenzy over how the celebrity chef’s hoodwinked customers are served pre-prepared meals produced by a central supplier, and delivered by Transit van.

The meals – dishes like pork belly, coq au vin (coq au van, geddit!) and braised pig’s cheeks – are then heated up in a pan of boiling water, and passed off as ‘freshly made’. But it doesn’t stop there.The food is sold for up to six times its cost price (Exhibit A, your Honour, a fishcake made in Mr Ramsay’s central prep room - a place near “railway arches and a council estate in Clapham” no less - costs £1.92 to make, and sells for up to £11.25 on the menu).

The reports then hammer home Ramsay’s devilish two-facedness by quoting him from past interviews saying stuff like “my food hell is any ready meal” and examples of him slagging off British roadside restaurants for heating up pre-prepared meals rather than making it fresh there on the premises.

The Mail gives its outrage a stamp of culinary authenticity by getting rent-a-quote food critic Richard Harden to slam Ramsay for his shameless hypocrisy by pointing out how the chef has always stressed the importance of freshly-cooked ingredients. Then others line up – Jamie Oliver, Shaun Hill, Lindsey Bareham – to put the boot in.

A spokesman for Ramsay defends his sous vide cooking, saying: “The central kitchen is a state-of the-art-facility...it just happens to be off-site.” He points out that the food is still “freshly prepared”.

And this, in my humble opinion, is what it is all about.

Given the way The Sun and the Mail presented the story, the reader would be forgiven for assuming Ramsay was buying lasagne ready meals from Tesco, removing them from their plastic trays, and then passing them off as his own. And judging by the readers’ comments many of them did.

But all of this shows a complete lack of understanding of professional cooking, and the need to get meals out quickly to waiting customers. What is freshly prepared anyway? Every kitchen I have ever been in makes much of its food in advance - from the meat jus in top French restaurants, to red sauce in Italian restaurants, to vac-packed lobster portions at The Dorchester, to containers of curry sauce filling up the fridges in Indian restaurants.

There are a few restaurants that make risotto from scratch each time, but these are the exception – even the best restaurants partially cook the rice in advance, then finish it off when the order comes in.

The simple truth is anything that takes a long time to cook is done in advance. When you order slow-roasted pork belly, lamb shank, or braised pig’s cheek, do you really expect a chef to start chopping the mirepoix, frying it off, cooking off the wine and gently stewing the meat for the next three hours?

And why stop there? The bacon in the coq au vin, for instance. Should that not have been cured in the kitchen while you sit there waiting for your meal? And the pig – surely that should have been freshly killed on the premises?

Restaurants like the Fat Duck, Rick Stein's Seafood Restaurant, and Ramsay’s gastropubs use prep rooms because their kitchens are too small. The fact the food was made off the premises is irrelevant – it’s the quality and freshness of the ingredients that count.

Ramsay’s spokesman points out that the ‘ready meals’ are made in a “Gordon Ramsay kitchen run by Gordon Ramsay chefs cooking Gordon Ramsay food”. Food miles and environmental concerns aside, does it really matter that it was cooked on the other side of London?

As I have written about in recent blogs, much of the Fat Duck food is made in a prep room 100 yards or so from the restaurant. Should we not also be attacking Blumenthal over this abominable revelation? Does the fact the food is carried over the road by chefs rather than delivered in refrigerated vans make any difference? Interestingly, Harden is quoted as saying: “There is normally nothing wrong with prep kitchens except I am not sure there has ever been a prep kitchen that gets top class standards." Doesn’t he consider the three-starred Fat Duck top class then? Are those hundreds of chefs and critics who voted it the second best restaurant in the world wrong?

Of course, none of this outrage is about the horrors of ‘boil-in-the-bag’ cooking at all. It’s about the growing witch-hunt against Ramsay, and the ‘build them up then knock them down’ schadenfreude so enjoyed by the British press.

For years the famously litigious cook has managed to side-step press attacks through clever means, which for legal reasons I can’t go into, but now his number appears to be up. He has spread himself too thin, been far too ubiquitous on our screens, and now newspaper editors have decided enough is enough.

Of course, Ramsay’s plight was not helped by one of his assistant managers telling the undercover reporter who broke the story that the food is “definitely” freshly made on the premises. Thus giving legs to the 'expose'.

But the moral justification for the slur – which is so important for amoral tabloids – came after he was exposed in the News of the World for allegedly cheating on his wife, and was then subsequently accused of exaggerating his football career.

With the same relish they greeted the collapse of celebrity chef Antony Worrall Thompson’s overstretched restaurant business, the papers have lovingly imparted every detail of Ramsay’s unravelling empire, from the forced sales of restaurants abroad, to flogging his beloved Ferrari for a £50,000 loss.

But it begs the question are we just watching the spud-faced bully finally getting his comeuppance, or is this part of a broader mood that finally spells the end of the celebrity chef culture?

:: Got an opinion on this...please spare a moment and leave a comment below, go on - it'd be nice to hear from you...

Celebrity Chef Absenteeism Syndrome

In the three weeks I spent at the Fat Duck, I only saw Heston Blumenthal once, and it got me thinking about the whole celebrity chef phenomenon. I knew it was him because of the gleaming BMW M5 parked among the sorry-looking collection of clapped-out cars and rusty bicycles his chefs used to travel back and forth from their endless, sweat and strain shifts.

But any hopes of the culinary genius coming in to shake our hands and thank us for working for free in his restaurant were soon dashed. The closest he got to the prep room was talking on his mobile on the stairs as he took a quick break from filming in the lab.

His human resources manager had explained to me when I started that Heston wouldn’t actually be doing any kitchen work. He had a bad back. I wondered how many of his chefs suffered the same ailment, given the long hours and daily gruel, and I wondered whether he felt guilty knowing his old comrades were working in the cramped inferno, churning out meals in his absence, as he swanned round in five-star hotels on the rubber chicken circuit.

It reminded me of that scene in the Life of Brian when the hapless terrorists - led by John Cleese’s Reg (I’ll call him Heston) - plan a raid on Pilate’s palace...

VOICE-OVER: Heston, our glorious leader and founder of the FD, will be co-ordinating consultant, though he himself will not be taking part in any cheffing action, as he has a bad back.

BRIAN: Aren't you going to come with us?

HESTON: Solidarity, brother.

BRIAN: Oh, yes. Solidarity, Heston.

And it also got me thinking about celebrity chef absenteeism syndrome (CCAS) – a pandemic sweeping the restaurant scene, and probably best illustrated by Gordon Ramsay’s flagship restaurant dropping out of the list of the world's top 100 restaurants having been in 13th place the year before.

I have heard the arguments and listened to the musings, but it still sits uneasily with me. In my view, there is something fake and plastic about a celebrity chef who trades off his name, but is never behind the stove. I got a whiff of it when I did my week at Rick Stein’s Seafood Restaurant – but at least Stein had done his time, and was too old to absorb the stresses and strains of daily kitchen toil.

I know the arguments from the ‘so what?’ brigade and the poison peddled by celebrity chefs’ PRs. Their client has trained a skilled, loyal team who can execute his famed dishes in his absence so allowing him to ensconce himself on breakfast TV sofas, promoting his image, and ensuring a steady stream of bums on seats. And besides that, the money’s good – much better than running a restaurant anyway.

I have heard the incredulity from chest-puffing, pompous food critics (are there any other kinds?) levelled at anyone who has the temerity to question why the great chef is not actually cooking their meal himself. You wouldn’t expect Colonel Sanders to fry your chicken, or Ronald McDonald to flip your burger, would you? And Gordon Ramsay, Rick Stein, Jamie Oliver, Heston Blumenthal et al are just brand names after all...

But I have never quite understood this argument. Sure, Leonardo da Vinci might have had an army of skilled painters doing his canvases, but he still turned up to add the last few brush-strokes, or at least sign his name.

I believe that in any art form or creative process, there are a handful of supernaturally-talented people who possess a level of skill that can’t be taught, and a talent that we mortals will never attain. It is a gift that allowed chefs like Ramsay and Blumenthal to rise above the rank and file, and make their names in food history. It is this talent and creativity that propelled their restaurants to fame, and although it is possible to train up brilliant chefs to cover in their absence, it does not mimic their talent entirely.

Motivation alone is a strong factor, especially given the ludicrously long hours and crap pay. In short, a ghost writer does not put the same level of soul and love into a piece as a writer publishing under his own byline. And it is the same for Ramsay’s chefs. Why do you think his former protégé Marcus Wareing, whose Berkeley Hotel restaurant won a ‘breakthrough’ award and was placed 52nd in the top 100 list, was so keen to leave the fold and emerge blinking in the spotlight from his master’s shadow?

“I’m now knocking on the door and it’s a great privilege,” he said after ousting his old boss. “I hope it’s because people are now seeing me as an individual chef. The restaurant is starting to feel like one with a patron in the kitchen. It has got a sense of place and I believe every great restaurant has to have a heartbeat and a soul.”

And what about creativity? Faithfully churning out the same dishes year after year is surely a killer for any restaurant. Where do the new dishes come from?

Talking of which, Blumenthal’s Fat Duck once again managed to hold on to the number two slot despite being shut for weeks over a suspected norovirus outbreak (at the awards dinner, compere Mark Durden-Smith suggested a way for Blumenthal to topple El Bulli from the top spot, joking: “Perhaps taking some of his mysterious bugs to Spain is the only way to knock the No 1 off its perch.”)

But despite rarely cooking in his cramped kitchen, I think Blumenthal’s continued success rests largely on the fact he has not overstretched himself. He has a team who have been with him for years, and only has the Fat Duck and the Hind’s Head gastropub next door to worry about – although I have heard he is planning to open his first London restaurant, possibly at the Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park. Silly boy. Doesn’t he read the papers?

The same goes for Rick Stein – who I only saw once during my week at his Seafood Restaurant – and then he only popped in to taste a few trial dishes (he didn’t like his executive chef’s Marco-esque pig’s trotters stuffed with lemon sole mousse. But who could blame him? It was far too cheffy, and hardly in keeping with Stein’s brand of home-spun simplicity.)

But again, the famous seafood cook might have his Padstein empire - which has just been added to with a pub in St Merryn (Stein Merryn perhaps in a couple of years?) - but it’s all contained in a small area of Cornwall and therefore far more easily run.

Yet it’s the complete opposite with Ramsay. He has been so busy trying to conquer the world, cloning himself in Hollywood, Dubai and Paris, among other places, that like Alexander the Great, he has failed to see his empire crumbling behind him.

And that is why his flagship Chelsea restaurant no longer makes even the top 100 - and why he has dropped out of the top 2,000 in this weekend’s Sunday Times Rich List after last year being valued at £50m in 1,446 position.

It is, say his many rivals and enemies, because the great chef is no longer behind the stove. Wareing was quick to put the knife in, suggesting that Ramsay's focus on forging an international television career and business empire had cost him his place in the 2009 San Pellegrino world restaurant rankings.

“In today's world a chef is only going to be successful if he's in the kitchen. People want more than a name,” he said.

But he stressed it was bums on seats that mattered, and Ramsay’s restaurants were still well supported. His former mentor, he confidently predicted, would be back. “I can guarantee that – I know that more than anyone,” he said. Was that the glint of a fearful look in his eye?

Indeed initial reports of explosions and seismic tremors in London this week were put down to Ramsay being spotted in his chef's whites visiting staff at Claridge's (which has reportedly suffered from a mouse and cockroach problem – since rectified) and his restaurant in Royal Hospital Road. Was he giving staff his own nose-clamped, glugging dose of Kitchen Nightmares medicine?

Given his expulsion from the Rich List, and how his company was last month forced to renegotiate a multi-million-pound loan after breaching banking covenants, he could perhaps start with the costs.

Clare Smyth, head chef at his flagship restaurant, caused consternation this week when she appeared on Great British Menu (hang on, another chef away from the stove?) She was given the task of frying monkfish at her fellow contestant Danny Millar’s gastropub in Northern Ireland, but soon got into trouble when she had to scrape the fish off the bottom of the pan.

“It’s not what I’m used to,” she bleated afterwards. “I’ve got brand spanking new non-stick frying pans...which we throw away each week.”

Chucking away pans after only a week? Not sure they were the only things being thrown around this week. Oh to have been a (now rectified) cockroach on the wall...

:: Got an opinion on this...please spare a moment and leave a comment below, go on - it'd be nice to hear from you...

Fish And Cheap Publicity For Celebrity Chefs

When Channel 4 launched its Big Fish Fight, I was going to write a blog about how Hugh, Gordon, Heston, and Jamie had as much chance of changing a nation’s eating habits as a chihuahua on a Korean lifeboat. And perhaps I should have done, because however successful their TV mission has been to persuade people not to turn their noses up at unfamiliar fish, how long will it last?

The main obstacle, I figure, is that even though the British are an island race (in fact, I was called an ‘island monkey’ the other day by a disgruntled German) they are on the whole squeamish, extremely fussy and amazingly unadventurous about fish. In fact, Britons tend to eat just three – cod, salmon and tuna (the trio account for a staggering 42% of all fish sales in the UK).

Also, the people watching pretty much fell into the minority who already ate sustainable fish like gurnard, sprats, mussels, dab and flounder, and therefore the message would be lost on the larger – less foodie – audience.

And besides, hadn’t we seen all this before?

Back in the early 80s, when Keith Floyd - the man who unwittingly spawned the celebrity chef phenomenon - did his brilliant Floyd On Fish shows, he tried to change the nation’s eating habits by deploring how vastly underrated species like red mullet and gurnard were and how they had to be flogged to France or put in crab pots because the Brits just wouldn’t eat them. His show got millions of viewers, but little changed.

There were similar messages over the years from other TV chefs, and then Charles Clover’s must-read book on overfishing, and the disastrous state of fish stocks, came out and was largely ignored. End of the Line was later made into a film and received strong backing on the web from Stephen Fry and the like, but still nothing.

But, this time, had I underestimated the appeal of vastly-overhyped TV chefs and the sheep-like, post-X Factor susceptibility of the public?

Did I begrudgingly have to take my hat off to Jammy Oliver and co for their incredible success? It would rub even more salt knowing they are only spouting the message because it is good for their media image (especially Ramsay who has been criticised in the past for putting blue fin tuna on the menu) and would probably plug whale meat if they thought there was a few quid in it.

But wasn't this fish campaign so much more powerful than previous ones? You had to admit everyone was talking about it - why Gordon had petrol poured all over his lovely hair by shark gangsters for God's sake!

The impact was hard to argue with, it seemed. First Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s fishy sermon appeared in The Sun of all places, and therefore reached a far larger audience than just foodies.

And then I got into a black cab, and after a short conversation about what I did for a living, the driver turned to me and said something like (I'd had a bit to drink): “D’you know, I had one of them Mack Baps in my chippy the other day, you know the ones those chefs are banging on about, because they think they’re sustaining or something. Real surprise it was. Thought I was going to have to spit it in the bin. But it was fucking lovely!”

If black cab drivers were talking about the virtues of sustainable fish when they would normally be ranting about how all homosexuals should be shot, then the message had truly got out.

Indeed, Sainsbury’s reported a 167% leap in pollock sales last week, and at Tesco, sales of whiting, sardines, coley, crab and sprats were up between 25% and 45%.

Don Tyler, chairman of the London Fish Merchants' Association, said: “Retailers I have spoken to have had a very, very good week. There’s no doubt that the publicity has led the public to be more adventurous.”

He added: “We were very concerned about the publicity over fish getting thrown over board but the campaign has attracted favourable attention to the trade.”

Steve Herbert, of WJ Herbert & Sons in Wood Green, north London, said: “It’s been a good week. Lots of people have been coming up asking about the TV show. There’s been a hell of a lot more coley sold. That had been dropping off.”

So was everything rosy? Would the sea beds stop being ravaged? Would our grandchildren be able to enjoy fish too (well salmon, cod and tuna at least)? Would sharks get their fins back? No, not really. “We have seen a rise in sales after TV shows before and then it drops away,” Herbert cautioned.

So although the campaign's initial success has to be applauded, it really depends how much of a middle-class fad it proves to be. But whatever the outcome, the praise should go to the crew, not Hugh Long-Name and his media slut chums, who give far less of a damn about fish stocks than their own rising stock. Or as Hermano Primero, one half of the splendid Dos Hermanos food blog, brilliantly put it: "The only reason these wankers get involved is to push their brands...if they really want to help the world, they could start by breeding a bit less."

Another thing that rankles is trying to convince people that some sustainable fish are just as good as the old favourites. I saw a programme the other day where Oliver insisted that pouting “was just as good as cod”. This is nowhere near the truth. If you go down that route, people will try them and go back to the pukka fish, you great lisping twat Jamie!

There ARE some fantastic guilt-free fish like mackerel, crab, mussels, pollock, squid - and the best of the lot for my money, sardines (especially when they are scorched over a fire in Portugal and served with a simple salad, vinegar, sea salt, olive oil, and cold boiled potatoes).

But as for the others, like coley, pouting and whiting and so on, the supermarkets should just play on ignorance and rebrand them as “white fish”. It worked brilliantly when they cut the monstrous heads off angler fish and renamed them monkfish. Although, it didn’t work so well when they rebranded pollock as Colin, but then Colin is a pretty stupid name for a fish.

There is nothing fraudulent about it and people won’t know what it is anyway, as long as it's filleted. They’ve been getting away with it for years in fish and chip shops – a recent Dispatches investigation revealed how widespread it is for businesses to pass off cheap fish like tilapia as far more expensive haddock or cod. And it is even more widespread in the North, where fish and chip shops traditionally serve fish skinless, meaning the species is even less identifiable.

So if people can't tell when they specifically ask for cod, why should they be bothered what the "white fish" is when they are making a fish pie or something? Advertising it as pouting and pretending it's as good as cod isn't going to help anyone.

Call me cynical, but with the fickleness of the public and the long-term success of previous campaigns, the only winners will be the celebrity chefs themselves. And with all the expensive puff involved in Channel 4's taxpayer-funded series, didn't they get a huge amount of brand promotion for very little input? Just how many turkey baisters and fish cookbooks will they sell on the back of that? For them it really was fish and cheap publicity.

Venison Shank With Dumplings & Venison Empanadas

Guest post by Dom Bailey

There are farm shops and there are farm shops. My closest sells ice cream. Nice ice cream, from the milk of the cows that fertilise the field at the end of my road that serves as a short cut to the pub.

Now ice cream and chutneys might have a certain appeal on the odd lazy Sunday afternoon, but they don't help with the general business of food shopping and feeding the family.

The second closest never seems to be open, and is less like a farm shop and more like a big shed near a motorway junction. They do have goats though. But there is a third and favourite farm shop tucked away near a pub and a children's petting farm.

There are cows in sheds, rickety collies, muddy ducks - everything you'd expect down to the Polish workers. There is fresh chicken, duck, geese and, sometimes, quails’ eggs (10p each!) and the meat of their older brothers and sisters in the fridges. And a whole lot more.

I think I've mentioned the special "never know what you're going to get" element in previous entries. And that is why it is my favourite. You can stock up on the Saturday bacon, the Sunday roast, the kids' sausages and sandwich ham, then grab half a pig's face or veal liver for your culinary experiments.

If you're game, they might just have it. If you actually are game, then you're probably wrapped in cellophane in the fridge. This week's extras were a green-tinged venison shank for £2.96, and some venison mince for £3.60. So what to make?

THE DAYS are getting shorter, the nights are drawing in, and the wood burner is starting to wink at me as jeans replace shorts. The kale and root vegetables are doing nicely in the garden. Damsons are picked, elderflower champagne has been drunk, and the elderberry cordial needs drinking as I keep getting a little disk of mould on the top (any suggestions?)

So it's comfort food time - and shanks fit the bill nicely. As they are a slow cooker, and there's oven space and heat going spare, why not try a little reminder of the summer with a few pasties as well? Well, not actually recreate the noble Cornish pasty, but completely bastardise it for your own amusement.

I'd never make it on to Masterchef. "So what are you cooking for us today?" "Well, that depends what you've got in the cupboards...Oh..." Slow ominous music, a raised eyebrow, the glint of pate, tears etc etc.

I'm more of a Ready Steady Cook man. Tip the bag out, what we gonna cook? Recipes are great and I love cookbooks, but unless it’s a really special occasion, I will go shopping, see what takes my fancy, and then if necessary look up how someone has cooked it and realise I have variants instead of ingredients.

I’ve cooked venison many ways before, but I love the fall-apart unctuousness of a rich venison stew. You can use red wine, port, stout, the imported strong Guinness is a good one. I wanted an autumnal fruitiness too, so here goes...

Marinade the shank:

Half a chopped onion, some garlic, a few juniper berries, a bay leaf, thyme, a couple of cardamom pods, a splash of balsamic vinegar, and a good few glugs of elderberry cordial. But blackcurrant cordial could work. Or plum juice. Or a spoon of quince, medlar, or crab apple jelly. The sweetness and fruitiness is to balance the Guinness that's added later.

Put the meat in a sealable bag with the marinade and into the fridge. If your shank is farm shop bought, there may be shards of bone which pierce the bag, causing the marinade to drip into the hummus and onto a poorly covered blackberry and apple pie on the shelf below. So check first.

After the meat's had a soak, put some chopped celery, onion and carrots with a knob of butter in a casserole dish to soften. Take the shank out, dry it, and brown it in a separate pan before adding it to the veg. Pour the marinade into the casserole then add three-quarters of a can of Guinness. Use the rest to deglaze the browning pan and tip the juices into the dish.

A few mushrooms and a handful of stoned damsons then go in. Put in the oven to slow cook. Check occasionally - tasting the sauce and sweetening with cordial if it is too bitter for your liking. And that's it for a few hours.

So on to the pasties. First brown the mince, surely? Half an onion and some cubed butternut squash. And while that's browning, find a pastry recipe.

It's got to be short crust. There are abominations being sold not far from the Atlantic Highway calling themselves pasties but they are made with puff pastry. I say again, puff pastry. And that's just wrong.

Chuck that down to a hungry miner, and it will have flaked into a tickertape parade down the mineshaft before you can say Oggy Oggy Oggy. I've been caught out a few times. I'm not a pasty fundamentalist. I do quite like the non-traditional fillings - steak and stilton, bacon and leek (Ok, they're the traditional, non-traditional ones) but if you stray further than that - like smoked haddock - then things start to get flaky.

I did have the nerve to mention it once in Padstow - where I had fallen foul of pasty crimes in the past - and got an icy: "We only serve short crust here."

So, short crust pastry. Flour, equal amounts of butter and lard (I used veg fat - no lard to be found in a one-mile radius despite four corner shops), bicarb, salt, egg yolk. Then in cling film and in the fridge.

The internet can be a cruel mistress (don't for heaven's sake Google 'cruel mistress'), I just mean that scrolling around I'm hit with pasty recipe after pasty recipe...and what's the difference between a pasty and an empanada..?

Good question now you mention it internet. Not so good if you're aiming for a pasty and have the meat browning on the hob. Apparently you never cook the ingredients before you put it in the pastry. If you do, it gets all Latin and becomes an empanada.

So these are venison and black kale empanadas...

While the mince is cooking through, having added a spoon of mango chutney, I put some butter and a splash of water and an anchovy in a pan, let things dissolve, and then add the black kale for a few minutes and turn off the heat.

Roll the pastry out to about 5mm thick - or however thick you like your crust. Use an upturned bowl to cut a circle then place some of the mince and kale in the middle.

Pasty making, sorry empanada making, is as individual as it is global. You can fold over and crimp. Pull the sides up to the middle and crimp. Do little folds or plaits down the side, or just replace the pastry with pizza dough and get a calzone. But however you do it, brush egg yolk wash round the edge to help seal the pastry, then stick the two sides together. Then on to a greased and floured baking tray and egg wash for a nice shine.

Then into the over for about half an hour - less than it would have been for a pasty as the middle is already cooked. About half an hour before you want to get the shank out of the oven, you can whip up a few dumplings.

Dumplings sometimes provoke the same reaction as the mention of semolina - memories of suetty, semi-cooked doughy balls from the school canteen lurking amidst a fatty mutton stew.

A nicer version – by His Essexness, Sir Jamie of Oliver – is 250g self-raising flour, 125g butter, seasoning and water. Mix the flour and butter to crumbs (I added some mixed spice, salt and pepper, and a bit of rosemary) before adding a splash of water to bring it to a dough.

Roll into balls, then drop them into the casserole - they will soak up some of the liquid but not be like anything you remember from school. Back in the oven for about half an hour.

The dumplings have puffed up a bit, the venison is dark, rich and falling off the bone, and in a silky, fruity sauce that says autumn.

You may as well taste your other wares while you’re at it - and the pasties, sorry empanadas, have a nice crispy crust and meaty middle with a "Oooh, what's this?" extra of black kale, or cavolo nero as it's called in Padstein. Might go nicely with some chutney and ice cream. And that would mean a stroll to the pub...

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