Happy New Year!

A little bit of our celebration from yesterday! Best wishes to all my blogging friends, may 2010 be everything you wish for!

Simply take:

One long red pepper

Some goat's cheese or other soft cheese you like

Some herbs - basil or parsley

A small chilli

A small clove of garlic

A few small and sweet tomatoes

Some seasoning

A little extra virgin olive oil

Halve the peppers and remove the seeds. Mix all the remaining ingredients together then spoon into the peppers. If you happen to have just cut a crusty loaf and have a bread board strewn with crumbs then grab a few of those and sprinkle on top.

Bake for approx. 15 minutes in a moderate oven until the pepper is cooked and the mixture gently bubbling. Serve with love, bread and a drizzle of something tasty.

How to get dinner cooked for you

So, here is the promised attempt at food journalism, although the way I ramble sometimes who knows what you will end up with by the end of the post.

If you read my blog regularly, you'll be aware I have been known to wax lyrical about Masterchef and Heston's crazy feasts. Inspiration struck to recreate at home some of the flavour (pun intended!) of these cookery shows as part of an evening's entertainment for friends. I pondered boiling a pig in the bath, disguising potatoes as rocks and deep frying garden pests but rooted instead for the toughest cookery challenge of them all - the Masterchef invention test! Well, dear readers, what a cunning wheeze this was. Why go to all the trouble of cooking a meal for your friends when you can get them to do it for you in the comfort of your own home. Simply fill a basket with tasty ingredients at your local supermarket (or deli if you are posh and live in a town that actually has one), allow your friends open access to your store cupboards and kitchen utensils and let battle to commence. Ideally, with hindsight, I could have installed a few extra hob rings as there was a spot of wrestling stove-side but on the whole the evening was a great success. Top tip for the basket buyers out there - remember to buy things that actually might go well together (e.g. avoiding combinations like steak and custard); don't pick anything that takes too long to cook, make sure you actually have some useful content in your store cupboards (out of date packet soup and four grains of rice at the bottom of the packet is not going to be much use nor inspiration) and provide some suitable ambience. Alcohol naturally springs to mind here but you might also like to consider some musical accompaniment or other 'entertainment' depending on your tastes! When the fight for time at the cooker has been won, you can sit back and enjoy the fruits of your and, more importantly, your friends' labours. The evening was actually tremendous fun, rather tasty and, despite Rachel's protestations that she couldn't actually cook,* we enjoyed a feast fit for a Blumenthal and very sociable it was too.

If it wasn't so late at night (why do I always end up writing these so close to midnight?) I would add a menu of the evening's Tapas delights, but I need my beauty sleep. Watch this space for an update soon!

* Note to self: next time ask for Home Economics 'O' levels as prerequisite

A feast for the imagination

OK, so we've already established that I watch little else on TV except cookery programmes. Who saw Heston's Victorian Feast? It's not often that we come across a genius at work. Heston is the Einstein of the kitchen (minus the crazy hair). For those that missed the programme, suffice it to say it was not one where you sat with notepad jotting down ingredients and instructions ready to follow later. Indeed, the bespectacled one did implore his audience "not to try this at home" as he happily boiled a cow's head, reduced the stock, froze it, centrifuged it, froze it, did some more magical reduction then poured it into a mad hatter's pocket watch mould and covered the resultant jelly with gold leaf. His guests then dipped this into a cup of tea whereupon it dissolved into the stock for his mock turtle soup! It reminded me a little of the April Fool's joke I posted on the intranet at work last year for edible beer bottles. I suggested that the specially created plastic could be melted down for soup stock. My clever ploy of offering some free samples to give away in a competition prompted a shocking number of serious entries! But even my fertile imagination could not have come up with Heston's blooming marvellous dessert. According to Heston's research (who knows what books he read?), the Victorians had a passion for jelly and erotica. It seemed sensible therefore to combine the two and this seemed a perfect excuse for the Chef and his enthusiastic band of helpers to spend a memorable hour or two in a pink sex shop picking the perfect vibrator to make his jelly wobble. Truly television at its best, and I didn't even get to mention the insects injected with tomato sauce served with 'soil and gravel'...

The reason for this post is not just to enthuse about Heston, practice writing about food and critique a television programme. It is to celebrate creativity. Heston is a man who thrives on it, cut him in half (not recommended) and he'll have it written through him. It doesn't matter whether he creates menus, posters, advertisements, films or employee engagement activities. It's about having the nerve to fire up that creativity with inspiration from the most unlikely sources; never being afraid to try something different and, possibly most important, keeping at it until you get the results you're after - it may not be exactly what you set out to do at the start, but it's giving people what they didn't know they wanted - and boy did they want it!

How do you become a food journalist?

I've been exploring what to write about, preparing both my big fantasy novel, my short story and children's book - these are definites, my real challenge and a promise I've made to myself. I've comtemplated corporate issues but suddenly I've been hit by a new inspiration. Food journalism. Me, writing and food - what a delightful menage a trois! Where has this 'flavour' derived from? Watching Masterchef naturally. "Cooking's never been tougher than this!"
I've always loved cooking and never been afraid to either experiment or to tackle technically complex dishes, but this TV series is really teaching me something about the secrets to flavour combining, seasoning, presentation and above all passion. The semi-finalists are bubbling over with the latter. For me, passion is tied into the desire to create - whisking up that memorable dish that lives on in the palate for hours afterwards, but it's also that satisfaction of giving the people you cook for a real treat, making a meal into an occasion, hearing my four year old son describe my kedgeree as "deee-lic-ious" and watch my boyfriend patting his tummy contentedly and begging for more! Funnily enough I watch very little television normally, but this week have overdosed slightly on cookery programmes and my next lesson was concerned with delivery of food. I'm not talking making it look pretty on the plate, but on making the atmosphere of eating the food as enjoyable as the delicacies served. Watching Christopher Biggins on Celebrity come dine with me on Sunday night was a real treat! Now here was a man who knew how to throw a dinner party, we were even given an acting demonstration when he passed off Tesco's trout pate as his own, but frankly it didn't matter. It was about his attention to detail in being the perfect host and making his guests feel, not at home, but out having the time of their lives.

Is this my first piece of food journalism? Is it any good?