Exclusive Temple Report Number 3 – 26th August, 2002

Food, Glorious Food

By Richard E. Grant

I am about to start filming “Posh Nosh” for the BBC next week, playing a useless wine expert, married to an equally useless chef played by Arrabella Weir from “The Fast Show”. A miniature kitchen-com without canned laughter or studio audience and each episode lasting ten minutes in which “we” cook a recipe and recommend a wine, whilst bickering away at each other in front of an Aga.

I suspect that  celebrity chefs are much the same as DIY shows. You sit and watch “experts” cook or re-decorate everything in thirty minutes flat and then trundle into the kitchen and “cook” beans on toast. Don’t think it prompts anyone to get cooking or decorating any more than “Jurassic Park” turns punters into paleontologists.

Very few people I know actually cook. As my wife and I both cook, we are constantly being asked how the hell we learnt to do so in the first place. To which the answer is a combination of greed and necessity. Plus the fact that  two take-aways in a row cures that  habit pronto and  pre-prepared foods promising a portion for two, barely touches the sides of one stomach lining.

Refusing a freezer means having to buy piles of food on a regular basis and after being away on location filming and eating in restaurants and catered food, the chance to cook and eat at home seems like an exotic prospect after a while. Cooking is also incredibly social and has the added bonus of an appreciative “audience”, grateful that you have done enough roast potatoes and puddings to satisfy the biggest appetites.

Would gladly eat every half hour if I was able and preferably Italian/French food, followed by at least five English puddings, sticky toffee being top of the list. Up until the age of 35 I was capable of uncontrolled gluttony, but what with the body clock changes of middle age and it’s ominous “spread”, sadly self control has had to be faced down, with the result that I increasingly “window shop” when passing patisseries, when what I would like to do is Hoover up everything on each shelf.

So will sign off and go and prepare something salivating as you’ve got me going.

Cheers and chin chin
reg.

p.s. I worked in Tel Aviv in the last century and almost had my appetite killed off once and for all at a private dinner party which had the following menu – boiled eggs covered in mayonnaise and cayenne pepper, followed by chopped liver, bull testicles on a kebab and crème brulee to finish off. I still do not know how I managed to stave off throwing up until I got through the front door.