This week another blogging first happened. I was tagged. Now I had to ask what this meant as it clearly wasn't going to involve me running around a playground, knackered and out of breath, desperate to make someone else "it" for a change!
In a nutshell, a great friend, Juggle Juggle Toil and Trouble, wrote in her blog seven things about herself. It turns out she too had been tagged to do this by someone else and, to keep the game going, she tagged me. But, being so new to all this, I have no other blogging friends, so now I have to run around a virtual playground on my own until I find someone else to tag!
Anyway, in the spirit of sportsmanship, here are seven things you never knew about Ed.
1. I was most fortunate to have been successful in my bid for Olympic tickets and am taking my wife and the two most excited children on earth to see the opening ceremony!! Now, I just have to persuade my son that he is not afraid of fireworks!!
2. I read someone's rant about tomatoes recently and could not believe how passionate one can get over disliking food, honestly, life's too short, surely? Then I remembered Marmite. No, life is not too short, it is in fact not long enough to contain the toxic diatribe that I can spout about this stuff.
I quote from Marmite's website:-
"Basically, the used brewer's yeast is broken down to release soluble amino acids and proteins. This soluble material is then concentrated and filtered a few times before going through a unique (and top secret) process for flavour development."
Well, cock up number one, someone has screwed the flavour development up! Roadkill would taste better than this! Also, ask yourself why this is a unique process? Because no one else in their right mind would want to stoop so low!! Top secret, just another way of saying they are the only ones to know because no one else wants to!! So, this is a by-product of the brewing process. Fine, brew, make decent beer, stop there, feed the waste to pigs. Please, please, I implore all you brewers out there, stop selling your yeasty-ness to Marmite, charge us an extra couple of pennies on each pint and throw the old yeast away. All you are doing is encouraging the assassination of taste buds!
And, as if the putrid spread isn't enough, those charming chaps at Marmite have created a whole range of basically inedible snacks!! Rice cakes, bread sticks, an extra mature version, matured for four times longer than usual (oh, yip-bleeding-pee!!), chocolate (they really should all be shot for this act of sacrilege alone!), cereal bars and cashews. Everything flavoured with something that most chemical warfare specialists would stay away from because it is just TOO nasty!
I live in a house of two spreads. I eat Bovril, a decent, honest and versatile beefy product. You can be traditional and either have it on hot toast, with lashings of melted butter or drink it, or else put it on a poached egg and even pop it in to stews for added depth of character! My wife on the other hand eats Marmite!! Our children are growing up bi-polar. They must have a genetic mutation because, despite regular lectures on the perils of Marmite, they eat and enjoy both! Clearly they need dealing with before this gets out of hand and they both end up therapy! What would you suggest?
3. I have broken my left wrist and hand four times in over twenty places. Rugby and drinking were large in my formative years and caused the first two. The third was the result of a folding table folding on my wrist! An hour in casualty and back to work for four days straight running a hotel in Henley-on-Thames during the annual Regatta!! The fourth was falling down a flight of stairs whilst working in St. Kitts, stone cold sober I assure you.
4. I have very few regrets, however the one that causes me most angst is having never done A-levels or a college degree. I took 9 GCSE's, ploughed all but one and my school at the time made the suggestion that perhaps learning was not for me! Now I felt that was a tad harsh! I learnt a great deal at school, admittedly not much of it from the curriculum, but being able to light a cigarette in a hurricane is a life skill no book can teach! Looking back on it from a vantage point of having a great job, which I have got through hard graft and not a piece of paper, maybe I should not worry so much, but I fear that my children will not take academic advice from someone with the same qualifications as a lettuce leaf!
5. I have lost 20% of my body weight in 6 months, not quite half the man I used to be, but getting there!!
6. Every time I walk into my kitchen at home, I try to emulate the only real hero I have. I was fortunate enough to work at Le Manoir aux Quat' Saisons when I was first starting out in catering. Over the period I was shown some pointers by Raymond Blanc, a great privilege considering I didn't even work in the kitchen. The man is an absolute genius with flavours and at cooking without recipes. His creativity is immense and it is he I try to be every time I put on an apron and pick up the whisk!
7. I want to own a country pub. I want to cook for random strangers, whose faces I rarely see, gaining satisfaction from the fact that if they paid they bill, I must have done OK. I want to create my own menu and make the dishes myself, not just buy them in. I want to choose a great wine list, offer great value for money, give an experience that people want to repeat every weekend and bring their friends along to share. And most of all, I would love to do it with my wife and children with me!
Please do leave comments and/or an interesting fact about yourself. Have a good rest of your week.
Right, so that's tag done, when do I get to be included in the Blogging version of kiss-chase!
No comments:
Post a Comment