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Huge Freaky Wetherspoon
Oct. 17th, 2011 11:47 amLast week, my good friend and proper vegetarian foodie ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sara_lou became quite cross when she discovered that committed porker Hugh Fairly Witless was about to jump on the bandwagon and 'do vegetarian'. I have to confess I've always thought of Hugh as a bit of a plonker, but he's grown on me recently with some of his River Cottage recipes and his various campaigns for sustainable and humane farming.
Anyway, unlike Sara, I was quite intrigued and positive about his recent turn. If there's one thing that I tend to agree with Hugh on, it is that you don't have to be a vegetarian to enjoy veggie food... in fact it would do meat-eaters (and pescis like me) a lot of good to have a few more meals each week without the obligatory lump of flesh in it. So I was quite interested to see the start of his 7-part telly prog on channel 4 last night, which is a retrospective on his experimental summer as a vegetarian.
Hmmm. Well.... I'm sorry to say that my verdict on ep 1 was not that great. I really don't think he did the veggie cause any favours.
The main problems with it were...
1. He isn't really very good at veggie cooking. Most of what he made looked a bit meh - like the sort of handwoven veggie food that people don't really eat any more. What would have been really cool would be to get in an expert like Yotam Ottolenghi to cook for him for 6 months and show us bods at home loads of exciting flavours and ideas.
2. All of the food being shown is summer food... in a season when the weather outside is crispy and brrr. Who on earth is going to have their head turned by a carrot salad right now? The programme should have been shown in the summer - either that or he should be making hearty tagines full of spices and umami and autumnal goodness.
3. The restaurant contest was daft . Fancy trying to make polenta compete with a lump of lamb on puy lentils with lots of green salsa.
I'll still watch the rest of it though. Hope the food gets a bit better each week....
In other square-eyed news - Kirsty returns on Wednesday! She's gone the whole hog now and joined the WI. There's no point fighting it, I shall be watching and heckling EVERY SINGLE EPISODE!
sara_lou became quite cross when she discovered that committed porker Hugh Fairly Witless was about to jump on the bandwagon and 'do vegetarian'. I have to confess I've always thought of Hugh as a bit of a plonker, but he's grown on me recently with some of his River Cottage recipes and his various campaigns for sustainable and humane farming. Anyway, unlike Sara, I was quite intrigued and positive about his recent turn. If there's one thing that I tend to agree with Hugh on, it is that you don't have to be a vegetarian to enjoy veggie food... in fact it would do meat-eaters (and pescis like me) a lot of good to have a few more meals each week without the obligatory lump of flesh in it. So I was quite interested to see the start of his 7-part telly prog on channel 4 last night, which is a retrospective on his experimental summer as a vegetarian.
Hmmm. Well.... I'm sorry to say that my verdict on ep 1 was not that great. I really don't think he did the veggie cause any favours.
The main problems with it were...
1. He isn't really very good at veggie cooking. Most of what he made looked a bit meh - like the sort of handwoven veggie food that people don't really eat any more. What would have been really cool would be to get in an expert like Yotam Ottolenghi to cook for him for 6 months and show us bods at home loads of exciting flavours and ideas.
2. All of the food being shown is summer food... in a season when the weather outside is crispy and brrr. Who on earth is going to have their head turned by a carrot salad right now? The programme should have been shown in the summer - either that or he should be making hearty tagines full of spices and umami and autumnal goodness.
3. The restaurant contest was daft . Fancy trying to make polenta compete with a lump of lamb on puy lentils with lots of green salsa.
I'll still watch the rest of it though. Hope the food gets a bit better each week....
In other square-eyed news - Kirsty returns on Wednesday! She's gone the whole hog now and joined the WI. There's no point fighting it, I shall be watching and heckling EVERY SINGLE EPISODE!
