Sam's Kitchen

Our normal humdrum view from the kitchen window was somewhat obsured by some fluffy white stuff …..

No, this isn’t me – just one of the regulars that happened to have his trunks in his back pocket.

Some poor chap misjudged his bearings whilst tunneling out from the Eurotunnel…. 

Some of our suppliers go to great lengths to ensure we don’t run out of beer (well in this case, cider and wine!)  Sadly he couldn’t quite make it back up without the assistance of the only two staff members that made it in and several shovels!

Now it’s a well known fact that I don’t get out much.  This has nothing to do with not being able to manage the so called steep hill behind us; much to the surprise of the general masses at the top of said hill (also known as the St Margaret’s bay mountain!!) in the nearly 9 years of being here, we’ve never once been stuck at the bottom of it, nor indeed, marooned at the top.  With Nigel coming from Scotland – where they really do have mountains, snow poles and impassable passes and myself a hardy West Country lass, our little Kentish ‘hillet’ has never been more than a mere pimple on an otherwise flat horizon and certainly  isn’t a valid excuse for not attempting to reach a decent beer! 

No, my main problem is the inherent buzzer I have in my head whenever more than 20 strides away from my kitchen/children/computer – please note this is in no particular order as all three can cause just as much angst as the other!  So if I actually manage to escape passed the St Margaret’s Bay Sign at the top without coming out in rash or my head exploding in excitement/anxiety it’s a major achievement. 

Thus it was at Dover Station with an excited sense of escapism (not sure that Dover and escapism are two words generally associated with one another…) I was almost bowled over by the cost of a small bag of minstrels.  69p to be exact for a mere 40 odd grams whilst the larger ‘Family’ pack at 225g was £1.99.  Now for a start I’m beginning to think I need to up my children’s pocket money a touch.  I remember back in the old days being given 10p by my granny for some one penny two penny sweets, well, at a single minstrel working out at about 3.5p each depending on which packet you buy, perhaps 20p for a weeks worth of sweeties isn’t really feasible even for a 4 year old!  Aside from that, I was now faced with a dilemma.  Clearly at £1.99 the fatso bag was a far better deal seeing as by my dodgy long division you get about 5.3 bags in a big one for not much more than the cost of 2 so you’d be mad not to.

The thing is – and again this might be down to me being stuck in my nice cosy kitchen for too long – what makes the small bag so expensive in comparison? It can’t be solely the packaging, transportation and don’t tell me it costs more to market the smaller one coz that’s just silly.  I reckon it’s a stealth tax on the parents of small children, small children and anyone that’s watching their weight!  Hey, I thought avoiding being Porker was current Government advice.  Ok, so perhaps suggesting that there should be a financial incentive to eat smaller packs is going a bit far but you can start to see what I mean….

Anyway, at decision time (the train pulling onto the platform) I succumbed and the big mega bag was purchased on the self understanding that I’d only eat a few and leave the rest for the girls (thereby not having to up the pocket money this week at least!).  Sadly, while puzzling out all of the maths in my head it was at about Tonbridge I realised I’d eaten the lot.  Do you have ANY idea how many calories a single minstrel has……..

Don’t know about you, but I’ve long been the antichrist to the godlike creationary chefs with their squeezie bottles, foam accelerators and aerosol cans – hey if I wanted foam with my meal I’d have ordered a cappuccino and life is way too short for peach dust and apple caviar.  In any case I’ve always thought of myself as a tasty chef rather than a drizzly one.  So this whole current trend to ‘deconstruct’ everything drives me mad.

Take the old black forest gateaux for example.  It was a dark sumptuous sponge laced with kirsch marinated cherries, thick fresh cream and real chocolate until Sarah Lee got hold of it and turned it into the plastic frozen glace fake chocolate face flannel that we all know and hate.  But wait… that was before the deconstructed version…  Now, should you take your sanity into your own hands and dare to order there’s every likelihood you’ll end up with a pool of deconstructed chocolate (eg melted) with a deconstructed marinated cherry (eg a fresh one and an unopened bottle of kirsch – useful should you be short at home), a pile of flour, cocoa powder and a quails egg (cooked of course– we don’t want you suing for salmonella or something nasty again now do we?).

For Christ sake it’s a cake – the clue is in the title Black Forest Gateaux – honest look it up , it means CAKE!   And that’s another thing – some of them have even  deconstructed the name to BFG.  Sorry, but in my household that stands for Big Friendly Giant which when teamed with Black Forest Gateaux gives me nightmares similar to that of my first hearing of Peter and the Wolf.

Ok, so many of you out there will say I’m just jealous being a small unknown little pub restaurant chef with only a few gongs to my name, oh and a girl to boot (Once the face of one of our customers fell when after several meals she finally met me – Oh, I thought you were a proper man chef!), but I’m going to stick by my pans on this one.  There’s nothing wrong with extreme experimental cooking; of course you’re never going to eat it everyday and it’s great for special occasions, but why does it have to be a deconstruction?  Why not just take the responsibly for creating a new dish, admittedly based on flavour combinations that are well proven, rather than trying to say it’s something you clearly don’t want it to be recognised as being anyway?  Is it that as customers we are so out of our depth that if we don’t see some scrap of wording we recognise we just won’t try it.  Sort of a sneaky way of getting us to try out a dish and so educate our taste buds to new unexplored flavours… er sorry no, these are old tried and tasted flavour combinations….  So in fact a sneaky way of getting us to try eating new presentations and revelling in the artistry.  Not unlike munching on a prawn cocktail deconstructed into a sandwich whilst reading Elle Decoration….