George Foreman 11480 Big Classic Metallic Grill

This is not really anything to do with celebrity chefs - but George Foreman is a celebrity and the grill is for cooking so I'll happily point out that this grill comes highly recommended - (I don't think it got one bad review at Amazon) and Amazon are currently selling it at a £40 reduction and it can come with free delivery.








For some reason the George Foreman brand of grills has provided a rich seam of humour for stand up comedians. Not sure why- but I've got a story about George Foreman that is not incredibly funny but I'll write it anyway.

A friend of mine is a boxing journalist and he was sent to a hotel in Heathrow to interview Foreman who was over here to promote his grills. The deal was that my friend could talk to him about boxing - as long as somewhere in the article the grills were mentioned. But Foreman did not want to talk about boxing, and ignoring questions about his career and Ali and Frazier and so on he unwaveringly stuck to the subject of his grills. So my friend did not get what he wanted, but despite being crest-fallen he asked Foreman if he could have an autograph for his friend (me). Foreman agreed and pulled out a promotional post card for his grill and asked my friend who to make it out to.
"Ian" said my friend
"I-And" said Foreman
"No-Ian" said my friend
"Ellen" said Foreman
"No- Ian. I. A. N." - said my friend
"Oh Ok" said Foreman
...and I received a promotional postcard which read "Lenny - enjoy the grill. George."

Maybe not the funniest story in the world- the fact that Foreman named his six sons George is much funnier, and I've lost the postcard.

Spanish Cuisine and A Cook's Tour Of Spain

Strangely - there is no book tie in with this series - so if you were inspired by what you saw then you'll have to look elsewhere and some of these books might work for you.

From Amazon - The Spanish cookbook that has has the best reviews is 1080 Recipes It's recipes are modern and are simple. The Moro Cookbook also has great reviews. It's recipes are not exclusively Spanish - it includes North African dishes - but I guess that is one of the points of Spanish cooking. The Real Taste of Spain: Recipes Inspired by the Markets of Spain does not have any Amazon reviews - but it is more in the spirit of the TV show.

If you were taken by the idea of the quite posh presenter who does not mind getting a bit grubby then she has published these two books. Cook: Smart, Seasonal Recipes for Hungry People, which has good reviews and The Wild Gourmets: Adventures in Food and Freedom which one reviewer really hated, mainly because he felt that it was little more than a urban middle class fantasy about rural life. Surely that's the point - I really doubt that the good people of Hampsted and Highgate really want to be peasants and foragers.

Much of this show was set in Spain but it also had Tommi Miers making Spanish dishes in her kitchen in the UK and as she was frying her onions and crushing her garlic, in the background, we could see her washing machine. I liked that. I can't remember many cookery shows that show the other things we use the kitchen for. Maybe next week we will get to see her pedal bin. Hope so.

Away from Tommi's kitchen the show's attention was self consciously visceral. We saw dogs killing rabbits, pigs having their throats cut, old Spanish women squeezing the faeces from the dead pigs intestines and sausage meat kneeded by the grubby hands of elderly Spanish peasants (though I don't think the show called them that - it was just went out of its way to make it clear that that's what they were). They even had old blokes and goats.


I guess it's starting to sound like I'm sneering at the show - but I'm not really. (The Guardian does though). I thought that, like all good cookery shows it has a spine of eccentricity running through it, a posh girl getting grubby in the muddy and bloody world of Spanish peasants is as a good a premise for a TV show as any.


And some of the food looked great.

My favourite Spanish restaurant is in North London where I used to live. It is
El Molino - a Tapas bar on the Holloway Road. It was popular with a lot of North London's Spanish community and I would happily recommend it.

So I have.

Finally - the part of the programme that got me most excited were the bits about the ham and I found this company which sells Spanish hams. Though in warning, a whole leg of Jamon de Recebo was very very expensive, though the mejillones and the chorizos were slightly more reasonable.

Jamie Oliver Spit Roast

On last night's Jamie At Home - Jamie Oliver indulged in some full on barbecue food fetishism.

He got particularly animated by an antique spit roaster he had bought - but as he said on the show - you can get modern rotisseries easily enough on the internet.

Here are some that are available from Amazon:




And here is a very odd - but quite funny interview with Jamie Oliver that I think was on Dutch TV:

Polish Cook Books

The BBC 2 series "Recipe For Success" is mildly distracting as far as cookery programmes go - in each episode want to be restauranters are given a chance to run a restaurant and their success or failure is decided by the customers. This sort of stuff has been done elsewhere and like a lot of stuff in this genre there is always the risk of the triumph of the concept over the content.

Which I thought was a shame - in today's episode the hopeful restauranters wanted to open a Polish restaurant. Some of the food looked really fantastic and I would have liked to have seen more about Polish cuisine but the programme, like these shows tend to do, focused on the chaotically run kitchen and the personality clashes.

If you want to find out more about Polish cooking then this is a nice little website.

And Amazon has these books:

Delia Smith's Hand Blender and Mini Chopper

In her new television series Delia recommended two gadgets, a food chopper and a stick blender and according to the Guardian the two models she used were the:

Kenwood CH180 Mini Chopper 300w and the Braun Hand Blender


(I've also included a link to the book of the series)

Unfortunately, and probably because of the popularity of the TV show, it seems that the food chopper is sold out at Amazon and they keep changing their information about if and when it will become available again. The hand blender is also out of stock. So I'll list some of Amazon's alternatives based on those that have had the best reviews.

The three hand blenders below are all currently available at Amazon. The Braun MR400 is, I believe, a very similar model to the one that Delia uses. The Morphy Richards blender is the one I use, and for blending food for my baby daughter when she went onto solids it was perfect (and cheap). The Bamix is right at the top end of the scale, both in quality and price and has had great reviews (and is recommended by Gordon Ramsay no less.)



I've linked to the Haden food chopper because it is cheap and has had a couple of decent reviews at Amazon. The Russell Hobbs is more expensive - but it has had a couple of good reviews (and I'm a sucker for a celebrity chef endorsement). The Cuisinart is not a chopper- it is a food processor - though of course you can use it as a chopper as well as doing so much more besides. It looks really nice as well - but it is rather expensive.



Hope this was useful.

Because this is about Delia's programme I'm going to post these two YouTube retro Delia clips:

The first is Delia interviewing Kate Bush which I found really odd:



and the second is Delia making deep fried mars bars - which would be funnier only if it were true