The longest wooden spoon

Christmas pudding in the middle of February. A quick 3 minutes in the microwave and a dollop of vanilla ice cream on top makes a great Sunday night pudding. It's not exactly 'Masterchef' though. More like 'Swedish Chef' looking at the state of the kitchen afterwards.
The Chrimbo pudding has been sitting in our bread bin since Christmas Day now so I thought it was probably about time I broke into it. Not that I wasn’t satisfied with Ka’s wonderful risotto. A dish of rice mixed with butter, stock, peppers, chopped courgettes, onions and fleshed out with some chopped chicken. Delicious.
Better than Margi Clarke’s anyway.
On Saturday morning I switched on the tv whilst slurping down my tea, to see a clip of an old Masterchef, from a few months back, on Saturday Kitchen. The Liverpudlian ‘actress’, Margi Clarke, trying to make risotto. As she cooked she complained she wasn’t used to being judged. Her kids didn’t judge, they just ate, apparently.
It looked horrendous. Her poor kids.
Even the two loud mouthed hosts, John Torode and Gregg Wallace, agreed with me when they tried it for themselves.

Saturday Kitchen, the live morning tv cooking show, hosted by chef, James Martin, plays ten minute clips of old cookery programmes which could age from twenty years to twenty days of age. One minute you’re getting a clip from last month’s Masterchef, the next minute you’re seeing Keith Floyd downing another glass of wine whilst rocking about in a steam filled, claustrophobic little kitchen, on an old fishing boat in the middle of the eighties.
All this while James Martin kicks back and puts his feet up, sipping his wine at eleven in the morning, back in the television studio that is Saturday Kitchen with his celebrity guest who just happens to be appearing in the West End at the moment. When the old clips end and the cameras do get turned back on again, James Martin even gets other people to do all the cooking. In one section of the show two other guest chefs knock up a disgusting looking pile of raw egg and call them omelettes, following which Martin puts them up on the leaderboard, like some kitchen orientated version of the Test track challenge in Top Gear. Instead of an entertaining montage of a car racing around the barrel cordoned lap, struggling to stay on all four tyres as it slides round the corners, you have a steaming pile of yellow gloop destroying whatever reputation the guest chefs may have had before.
“I could make a better omelette than that guy!”
I’m always telling Ka as I drink my Saturday morning tea.
It can’t take much to get a Michelin star these days if that passes for an omelette. You wouldn’t touch them with a barge pole, or, in this case, the longest wooden spoon in your cutlery drawer.
Michelin, funnily enough, being a make of tyre as well. A tyre that would easily make a similar horrible pile of gloop by running over something on a road somewhere.
I wonder if James Martin would have a taste of that with his wee fork, before scribbling down a time with his big felt pen on his wee cardboard frying pans?
After a day’s jaunt in town, Saturday night was even better. We sat on the couch and watched tv all night.
Okay, not just the usual tv, it was The Sopranos, possibly the greatest drama series to have ever came out of America. But we were still couch potatoes.
I demolished a whole bag of Mackies Crisps whilst watching, Tony’s liking for heading straight for the fridge and the constant talking over the large and varied amounts of pasta dishes on the many dinner tables making me, ever so slightly, peckish as I watched.

There must be a plate of food in at least half of the scenes in each episode of the mobster drama.
Today, whilst cruising around the web, I discovered that there’s even a cookbook for sale, supposedly written by Artie himself, the restaurant owner, and childhood friend of Tony’s. Not only that, but there’s a book entitled “Entertaining with the Sopranos” supposedly written by Carmela Soprano, the wife. This title is full of recipes and tips on how to be the perfect host and the perfect dinner party. Paulie Walnuts even makes a contribution on how to host the perfect ‘surprise party’.
I’d imagine Paulie Walnuts would be great at knocking up a couple of Omelettes and Carmela would be a dab hand at the risotto. When it comes to the wine though I think Keith Floyd may just have had the upper hand.