Whipping up a new taste sensation

TV posh-nosh-fest Masterchef is back on our screens, but whilst the C-List Celebs battle it out, I’ve been busy coming up with some much better culinary delights.

Inspired (as I often am) by the brilliant advice of my Niecelet Rebecca, I have thrown caution to the wind, and whole-heartedly embraced the idea of alternative flavour-combinations in a way that only the mind of a nine-year-old usually can. Or maybe Heston Blumenthal.

Rebecca concluded that a pizza that only had mango, pineapple, assorted other fruits and a few kinds of meat as toppings wasn’t really complete. The simple answer was chocolate buttons. Suddenly, it’s a taste sensation that would have Greg & John gushing enthusiastically about how Rebecca “has really taken cooking to another level”.

Whilst adding chocolate to just about anything will inevitably make it better, this fusion between sweet shop and pizza parlour got me wondering what I could improve.

In my small, twitter-based, universe it has been controversially established that Butterscotch Angel Delight is actually the true King of desserts from the 1970s (although there are still doubters in both the Chocolate and Strawberry camps who have sworn deadly revenge if I start that argument off again). Since the startling introduction of a make-your-own-ice-cream variety, it has become possible to enjoy the delight of angels in extra chilly form, but it occurred to me recently that, whilst divinely perfect, it was still just possible that the bar could be raised slightly higher still. Dare I take the whisk? Sorry, risk?

Nervously, I prepared a batch (five whole minutes of whisking!) and scoured the kitchen for the perfect addition. And then it struck me – HobNobs. The finest of biscuits, crumbled into the most luxuriously delicious of puddings. The rest of the series of Masterchef is cancelled. I’ve clearly won.

Emboldened by my innate, previously untapped, chefiness, other ideas began to mix themselves together in the oven of my mind. Bacon-flavoured wheaty snack wonder Frazzles, on pizza! No wait... Frazzles breakfast cereal! Everyone likes bacon for breakfast, but what if you can have wheaty goodness, bacon flavour and put skimmed milk on it? No cooking, just a healthy and delicious bowl of wonder. And the best thing is, I don’t even need to mess around inventing it, as Frazzles and milk already exist. Just put the two together!

Suddenly, anything is possible. It doesn’t matter what the rulebook says any more, tear it up and throw it out of the window. Or better still, puree it with some garlic and spread it on toast.

Roast chicken, stuffed with Jelly Babies! Mmmm. How about a beef and apple smoothie? Anyone want marshmallows, on a bed of Branston pickle, with a jus of Bovril, mixed with whiskey? (It would be too hard to pour otherwise, obviously.)

I am the new, less annoying, Jamie, Nigella, Delia and Dr Frankenstein rolled into one, genius level, super... Excuse me – I just need to pop to the loo for a minute...

This post first appeared in my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column in the North West Evening Mail, on the 16th of August 2013. You can view the version the paper published here - it lost about 40 words in the edit.

Good to see that the NWEM have sorted out the Blog page on their website - although I wasn't complaining that my Royal Baby story stayed at the newest one on their main page for a few weeks.

Another idea for this week's column was the tale of a character called Captain Hairy Bumchin, invented by Rebecca, me, and the fact that I do indeed have a hairy chin that looks like a bum if you squeeze it on either side. Not quite sure the discerning readers of Cumbria are quite ready for that. Not yet, anyway. I'm working on it...

(Music on an exceedingly wet day today courtesy of Robbie Willams' "Escapology" album.)

A fisful of change at the shops

A recent day out reminded me how much the retail experience has altered during my lifetime – and it’s not all good. I could stop typing this, and buy a fridge, in a matter of seconds. The shops are shut and it’s 9pm, but I could still place the order and arrange delivery. I haven’t got to wander round a white-goods retail emporium trying to work out which slightly different version of something that keeps my cider cold is better. It’ll be cheaper, too. But in amongst the convenience, endless choice and bargains, we’ve lost some of the personal, human, touches that used to make a trip to the shops something more than just a daily chore. Last weekend, we visited a local coastal town. Amongst the shops selling over-priced imported home accessories (who doesn’t need another roughly-hewn wooden heart, poorly painted and a bargain at £10?) was one that looked different. It’s window allowed you to see in, rather than being plastered with stick-on graphics and special offers calling ...

Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

Shouting in the social media mirror

It was always tricky to fit everything you wanted into the intentionally short character count of Twitter, especially when, like me, you tend to write ridiculously long sentences that keep going on and on, with no discernible end in sight, until you start wondering what the point was in the first place. The maximum length of a text message originally limited a tweet to 140 characters, due to it being a common way to post your ramblings in Twitter’s early days. Ten years later, we’ve largely consigned texting to the tech dustbin, and after a lot of angst, the social media platform’s bigwigs have finally opted to double your ranting capacity to 280. Responses ranged from “You’ve ruined it! Closing my account!” to the far more common “Meh” of modern disinterest. As someone rightly pointed out, just because you have twice as much capacity doesn’t mean you actually have to use it. It is, of course, and excellent opportunity to use the English language correctly and include punctuat...

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