Chefs Galore!

Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares is back! I caught the series at the tail end of last season and was totally hooked. What's not to like? Horrible grungy kitchens serving substandard food, hapless restaurant owners running up huge debts and strode in Gordon, like a white knight to their rescue.

Each week, I watched in morbid fascination ~ just waiting for the chef on the receiving end of Gordon vitriolics to stick a knife into Gordon. He swore at them, pulled out his hair, threw food away, swore some more, rubbed his face, swore at the owner, chef, staff, cajoled the chef to cut down the menu, show them whose boss in the kitchen, cheered the staff on and viola, you have the restaurant back on its feet. I love it!

I simply simply adore the cooking shows they have here. Like Ready,Steady, Cook hosted by the irrepressible Ainsley Harriot. two chefs will have two participants working alongside them. With a bag of ingredients (sometimes less than £5-10 of stuff), they whipped out four or five fantastic dishes in about 30 minutes! Fantastic.

The other series I love is by Keith Floyd. He does series where he travel to different countries like Italy and Spain ~ he will cook outdoors most times so that you get an eyeful of both the gorgeous scenery plus the food he is cooking. He did cook in the rain, under an umbrella once in an Italian piazza. He will talked to the cameraman while on the camera "Take a big fat lingering close-up of that" or will speak unscripted dialouge which is often quite funny.

The best of the series is Far Flung Floyd of course since he travelled to South East Asia for this. Sadly, he circumvent Singapore but he made stops in Malaysia, Vietnam, Hong Kong. I especially remember his stop in Malaysia because he cooked rendang in a kampung kitchen and served it to the family. Of course, in front of the mat salleh, the makcik and pakcik were all stiff and formal. The translator who was eating with them had to say in Malay "Sedap ke tak sedap? Kenapa tak cakap apa-apa?" to which the makcik and pakcik automatically said "Sedap..sedap.."

He also talked to another pakcik haji about ayam masak kicap and inevitably asked about how Muslim men can marry up to four. The pakcik said with a straight face "Yes, they can but for me, one already more than enough". Another time, he was demonstrating how to cook sambal crab but somehow he bought rempah curry instead. They only do a re-shoot for the sambal crab which ran during the credits.

In the series where he did HongKong, he did a demo at a small jetty just abutting a few boats. He looked seriously at the camera and said that he had to speak quite loud to drown the arguements the crew is having with one particular boat owner, who demanded payment for them to cook at the jetty.

I am also fascinated by the River Cottage Series by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. He basically moved from the city to the country to see whether he could survive being a smallholder/farmer. You'll see the full whack of country living where he grew his own vegetables and rear his own livestock. Not an inch is wasted which makes very good tv. Not only you see his adventures in being self-sufficient on the farm, you'll see country happenings like jam and cake competition, vegetable growing competition (who has the longer runner bean? that sort of thing).

And who can forget Jamie Oliver's debut as The Naked Chef and his subsequent offerings? He is a phenomenal success now and based on that, there was a Malaysian student chef whom we helped to film a cooking programme ala Jamie Oliver. Let me tell you - filming a cooking show is a lot of hard work so kudos to all the chefs and thank you for making entertaining television.