Alex Watts's Blog, page 8

Comedy In Cambodia

A comedy review I wrote for Khmer 440...




It was all arranged at the last minute when comic Aidan Killian – who
some reviewer had dubbed “Ireland’s answer to Bill Hicks” – visited a friend in
Phnom Penh, who got in touch with Khmer 440’s resident poet Ned Kelly, who
phoned Donald Trump, and last night’s Comedy Club Cambodia show was borne.




But timing and the secret of great comedy aside, it was always going to
be a hard gig to pull off, living up to the brilliance of Glenn Wool last
month. And it wasn’t helped by the move of venue from Pontoon to Doors, an
uber-trendy tapas and cocktail bar, north of Wat Phnom, even if it did have the
same banging tunes from DJ Bree.




But it wasn’t just that. Sometimes, like with Wool, you need a weaker
comedian to make the next one look good. And when there’s only one, the
pressure is on and you’ve got to perform – or at least hone your material to
the audience.




Unfortunately, jokes about the bleakness of austerity-hit Ireland seemed
a million miles away from booming Asia. And a comic that ever utters “that
deserves a clap” should never get one. To be fair, he wasn’t given the best
start, plagued by a dodgy sound system that could barely be heard at the back
of the room.




What could be heard at the back of the room was a cacophony of chat that
swept over the audience like a humour-poisoning miasma, and your man had to
keep prompting the crowd into an amusing barrage of “Hey you at the back – shut
the fuck up!”




Continue reading here ...

KFC Chickens 'Fed So Many Illegal Hormones They Are Unable To Walk'

There is a view in Asia that famous fast food brands
from the West are subjected to more rigorous food health standards than their
Asian competitors. There is apparently a trust among consumers instilled by Colonel
Sander’s and Ronald McDonald’s smiling faces, and the premium attached to such
brands.




But this reputation has been damaged by Chinese state
TV reports that chickens served at KFC and McDonald’s restaurants in China have
been fed illegal, toxic drugs and kept under constant lights to make them grow
faster, and thereby provide more profits for their unscrupulous producers.




China Central Television’s investigation, which it
said was based on a year of undercover reporting, alleged that some of KFC's
suppliers in Shandong had given at least 18 kinds of antibiotics to chickens to
keep them healthy. The birds also had lights turned on around the clock to make
them eat constantly, with a chicken growing from 30g to 3.5kg in just 40 days.




A farmer in Gaomi told CCTV he would also mix a
hormone into the feed and the birds would become so fat that some were unable
to walk. Another farmer said they had to change antibiotics periodically after chickens
developed resistance to the drugs.




They said their chickens were bought by the Liuhe
Group, which is based in Qingdao, and reportedly sells 40 tonnes of chicken a
month to KFC's Chinese subsidiary. When the chickens were sent to be
slaughtered, workers would fabricate records about how they were raised before
they were shipped off to KFC’s parent company, Yum Brands, which also owns Pizza
Hut.




KFC said it would co-operate with Chinese authorities
in investigating the reports and would punish its suppliers harshly if they had
fed antiviral drugs and growth hormones to its chickens.




"KFC attaches great importance to the contents
of the media report and will actively co-operate with the relevant government
departments' investigation," KFC said. "If (we) find out that our
suppliers have conducted any illegal activity, (we) will handle it strictly.”




It was an about turn from last month, when a Yum
Brands spokesman dismissed as "untrue" reports that some KFC chickens
in China were being fed toxic additives.




McDonald's said its chicken and raw materials pass
through independent, third-party laboratory tests. "Our chicken products
comply with stringent food quality standards and comply with the relevant government
standards. Please, everyone, don't worry about eating it," a spokesman for
the Golden Arches pleaded.




China has struggled to rein in health violations in
its vast food sector despite repeated pledges to deal with the problem. The
country has been plagued by news reports of fake cooking oil, tainted milk -
and even watermelons that explode from absorbing too much fertiliser.



:: My bestselling food book Down And Out In Padstow And London is available in eBook and paperback .

Cooking Snake In Mondulkiri

An article I wrote for Khmer 440...




I was sitting in a restaurant in Mondulkiri,
listening to backpackers haggling over elephant rides – “That one’s a very bullshit
operation for the elephants…Yeah, but we got offered two bucks cheaper from the
other guy” – when Brendan finally called. “Hey, So Pheakj forgot to wake me
again. Do you fancy going to the waterfall?”




He hired two moto drivers and we headed off through
the windswept valleys surrounding the one-horse town of Sen Monorom. Children
waved at us as we crawled past trying to avoid craters in the red dust roads.
We climbed higher, the engine screaming, and arrived in a jungle clearing with
an elephant tethered by one ear to a shack. Just out of reach were 100 green
bananas, and the beast was eyeing them morosely while batting away flies with
his ears.




Brendan looked at the waterfall jump. It was usually
about 10 metres high, but he said the water level was much lower than last
month, not just from the dry season but the dam up river. The Elephant Man
threw a stone into the water indicating where he claimed it was deep enough to
jump. But as he was not jumping himself, I was taking no chances.




We climbed down through the jungle and bathed in the
pool. Something was nibbling away at my feet. I swam to the other side and foam
thundered down around me. The sound was deafening and for a moment I forgot all
about what the locals call “anacondas”. A little boy scampered across the
rocks, picking up beer cans. We climbed back up and the Elephant Man took a
photo of us and printed it out on a contraption hooked up to a car battery.




Continue reading here ...

Chinese Food In Phnom Penh

An article I wrote for Khmer 440...




The worst service I ever had was in London’s
Chinatown. There was a cloudburst and then heavy rain so I scurried into one of
the restaurants. The place was packed, and I was looking round trying to spot a
table, when a furious-looking waiter pounced on me.




“What you waaaannn?”




I noticed people had stopped eating and were looking
at me.




“Table for one,” I said slightly pompously.




The waiter eyed me suspiciously.




“We gorr no table for one! You go down stair!”




Then he was off in his shiny black shoes, scuttling
waiters.




I stood there for a moment, confused. I didn’t like
crowded restaurants at the best of times. The sniggers from nearby tables
faded, and I spotted a staircase leading down. At the bottom, I was met by
another waiter.




“Hi there, how are you doing?” I said.




His hate-filled eyes bored into me. It felt like a
scene from Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence.




“Wery busy!” he spat. “What you waaan?”




He was worse than the last one. People were
listening intently, pretending not to notice.




“Table for one, please.”




“You got no frenn? You go upstair, he give you
table!”




Continue reading here ...

Why Cambodian Food Deserves A Better Press

An article I wrote for Khmer 440...




There has been a lot of talk over the years about
the need to attract more foreign visitors to Cambodia. But there is something
its people could bring a much-needed change to – and that is cooking.




It is often said, sometimes even by Khmers
themselves, that Cambodian food is nothing to write home about. It is supposed
to be not only cack-handed at best, but also poorly imitative of Chinese, Thai,
Indian, and Vietnamese cuisines. And I have asked many expats what they think
of the local food only to be greeted with “not much”.




Now that is a terrible disservice. As anyone who has
travelled overseas much will know, there are a whole host of Khmer delicacies
that are impossible to get abroad. So much so, that the state-owned postal
service says 70% of all parcels sent from here are filled with specialities
like prahok, smoked and dried fish for home-sick Khmers. No doubt the list
could be added to, but here are some of the things that deserve much wider
recognition.




First of all, prahok, a fermented fish paste used in
dips, soups, stir-fries and stews that tastes of blue cheese and is the
backbone of Cambodian cooking. Then there is Kampot pepper – the country’s
first product to be granted Geographical Indication status – which makes a
splendid dip with salt and lime for freshly-boiled crab.




Continue reading here ...

Returning To Cambodia

An article I wrote for Khmer 440...




There was a documentary I saw about Spike Milligan
and the depression that had blighted much of his life. He’d been brought up in
India and moved to England when he was 15. It had a terrible effect on him. He
missed the colours and richness of India and had to readjust to stark, grey
Britain. The cold, the drabness, and the continual reminders of the exotic
world he’d left behind. And that’s how I felt much of the time back in Blighty
after spending 18 months in Cambodia.




“How can you live here now, after spending so much
time in Asia,” someone asked as I arrived. She was right. I had to return, for
better or worse, and sure enough four months later I was back in Phnom Penh.




Not the prettiest city in the world. But when you
wander down by the Riverside and take in the breeze and see all segments of
Cambodian life from mad-for-it grandmothers in pyjamas doing aerobics, to the
monks with their alms pots, to the old men in freshly-ironed shirts and
trousers squatting by their mopeds looking for the next ride, to the tuk tuk
driver with ‘Lexus 570’ scrawled on his backboard, to the moon-faced official
barely peering over the wheel of his supercharged Range Rover with its carte
blanche Khmer flag and VIP sticker in the window.




One of only two countries in the world with a
building on its flag, or so I was told by a slurring lawyer the other night.
Afghanistan, if you’re asking. And that must say something. A reminder of the
great empire that built Angkor Wat, and a hope that the good times might come
once again. Just like Greece. It’s this naive hope, the continued smiles and
bright outlook I love most. I escaped from the cold and the dreary faces of
those who have plenty, but grumble about everything. I fled from the obsession
with weather stories, and erosion of common sense and fun, to a country where
most people have nothing but look pleased to have it.




Continue reading here...

Restaurant Apologises For Foul-Mouthed Twitter Rant At Customer

A Dublin restaurant is the latest eatery to find itself at the centre of
a social media row after calling a disgruntled customer an “arsehole” on
Twitter.




Cinnamon, an upmarket cafe and wine bar in Ranelagh, issued a grovelling apology and said
it had disciplined the staff member who sent out the insulting tweets.




The unnamed worker saw red during a particularly busy Sunday service when
blogger Sean Mongey sent out a message on Twitter, saying he had been waiting in
the “pretentious crèche” for 40 minutes and his food still hadn’t arrived.




Cinnamon replied with a snooty: “We don’t have a problem that needs to
be solved we are Dublin’s busiest restaurant on Sunday...Expect delays.”




When the customer threatened to take his business elsewhere, the family-friendly
restaurant replied: “Please do. You’ll be one less person in the Q.”




The staff member then added for good measure: "Here's something
else for you to re tweet. You're an arsehole. Why don't you come in and
introduce yourself to us."




Six hours later, the restaurant deleted the offending tweets and issued
an apology on its Facebook page , offering in a self-effacing style while also appearing
to enjoy the attention, that it would be serving coffees for one euro for the
next week to diners who mentioned “Twittergate” while ordering.




“We wish to formally apologise to the customer, who we accept had a
legitimate complaint,” the statement said. "We are a very busy restaurant
and this past weekend had 50% more customers than a normal weekend and were
overwhelmed by this.




“Staff morale is very important to us and has been severely affected by
this incident. We employ over 50 staff and would not wish to jeopardise their
livelihood."




Seems a bit of a storm in a coffee cup, compared with the foul-mouthed Twitter
rants an unknown blogger was subjected to last week by Claude Bosi and his celebrity
chef chums after complaining about his crab starter at the French cook’s London
restaurant Hibiscus.




Bosi, Tom Kerridge , and Sat Baines dubbed James Isherwood a “cunt”, with
Kerridge adding: “Smash him in, chef Bosi.”




None of them have apologised, as far as I know, so you have to applaud Cinnamon restaurant
for doing so over a much milder mauling. But the way the blogger has relentlessly
milked the story over the past few days it makes you wonder whether they might have had a point.

Ferran Adria And Ridiculous Food Trend No. 137 - Digital Gastronomy

Reading Ferran Adria ’s latest musings on the future
of food, I’m left wondering whether he plans to invent the edible computer.
Because I’ve read his BBC article about trying to “discover the genome of
cuisine”, whatever that is, several times, and I’m still left wondering what
the hell he is talking about.




The celebrity chef, who closed El Bulli , widely
regarded as the best restaurant in the world, last year, says his next recipe
involves a sprinkling of algorithms, a pinch of digital technology, an emulsion
of raw data, and a few generous glugs of innovation to create La Bullipedia
(catchy name) - an online, curated database that, he claims, “will one day
contain every piece of gastronomic knowledge” and change the way people think
about food forever.




Or at least that’s what I think he is saying,
because when you actually cut through the jargon and nerd speak it all reads
like a badly-written press release, typed by someone in the PR office who
should have left half an hour ago.




“Cooking shares many characteristics with the
internet - both are the sum of many parts and both enjoy the rare gift of
limitless potential. Digital technology, when combined with innovation, plays a
key role to unlocking this potential,” he writes.




“I firmly believe that as a chef if you only speak
to other cooks you'll get bored. Bullipedia uses cooking as a language...” etc
etc.




But hang on, haven’t we got this already? Isn’t
every bit of culinary knowledge you are ever likely to never need already just
a few clicks away on the internet? No, apparently, according to the Spanish
chef.




“The internet on its own is limited because
information can be found without the need to actually acquire knowledge. We
want people to acquire knowledge through the navigation of information,” he
says.



So by navigating for information, people will
automatically understand it? Is that what he’s saying? Even James Martin ?




He goes on: “We are taking fundamental aspects of
digital technology such as algorithms and data and applying it to food. We are
putting the combined knowledge of El Bulli online where people can adapt and
modify it, and draw inspiration from some of the most innovative recipes ever
created.




“Technology is now helping to provide future
generations of creatives with the tools that they need to be innovative. It is
acting as an enabler, connector and collaborator. I believe that it will now
sit at the heart of gastronomy and be a fundamental driver of innovation in the
industry.




“We have journeyed part of the way to discovering
the genome of cuisine. Digital technology will allow us to take the final step.”




Blimey, I’m confused already. Can’t wait for the
bandwagon jumping from celebrity chefs and other culinary media whores if Bullshitpedia
does become a success. Gregg Wallace leering at MasterChef contestants while
tapping his Rolex: “Now, how you doing your nanobytes?”




We’ve had local, seasonal, molecular gastronomy, small
plates, big plates, sharing plates, heritage meats, foam, ingredient reversals,
deconstruction, sous vide, freshly-foraged weeds, cup cakes, and now this - digital
gastronomy.




Hasn’t cooking suffered enough already? Perhaps
Adria should stick to advertising Pepsi ? That’s an organisation that breeds
innovation through collaboration and creative auditing by tracking the
developments and inventions of other companies.

The Perfect Dirty Kebab: A Recipe Created On Twitter

This is a dish I came up with over the summer in the UK , before I flew
back to Cambodia . Well to be fair, Twitter created it. You see I’d got bored of
cookbooks, even the ones all boxed up in the attic and lovingly revisited one
afternoon before I had to say goodbye to the house again.




And I was pretty flat out of ideas, what with the culture shock of being
back in Blighty and all. It had become much more fun looking in the fridge to
see what needed using up, and then asking people on Twitter for recipe ideas.
That night, it was the mince that was going green at the back of the fridge.




“I have a pound in both weight and price of lamb mince, and zero
inspiration. Any recommendations of what to do with it gratefully received,” I
wrote.




Unless you’re Egg Wallace with his big, brass bed, throwing requests
into the Twitter pond is a bit like fishing, in my experience - mostly you
hardly get anything. But I had a good response that night.




Chef Dave Ahern (@CorkGourmetGuy) - who I’d met the day before when he
did a cooking demo at Maltby Street Market, near London Bridge, where I was
flogging my book  - suggested lamb
chilli. Dino J (@Gastro1) recommended keema mutter or lamb kofte. Mikey Davies
(@tucksontour) went for koftes with pitta and tzatziki, or lamb burgers, as did
Linda Galloway (@daffodilsoup). And Judy Olsen (@judycopywriter) recommended
Greek meatballs with lemon sauce, which she remembered making in the 1980s.




There were more calls for kofte, and then pub landlord and kebab
aficionado Oisin Rogers (@Mcmoop) suggested an adana kebab, and sent a link to
a recipe from New York restaurant Turkuaz. Everything from the onion to the
parsley to the red pepper to the garlic was ‘minced’, except the mince which
was ‘ground’. Oh, how I love American English.




Mix, squeeze on to skewers, and hope it stays together. But I didn’t
like the idea of a tablespoon of coriander seeds, whether lightly crushed or
not - the nearest kebab van was miles away, and I was craving something truer to
the simple lamb and onion notes of a true, dirty kebab. Oisin wrote back,
saying: “I had one made by a mate in Antalya that ONLY used ground pepper and
salt. Sumac on the salad, garlic yog and chilli sauce. A*”




I liked the sound of that. I put the pound of lamb mince in a bowl, and
added one small grated onion, two finely chopped garlic cloves, salt, pepper,
and then trudged out into the dark to pick a handful of fresh coriander, which
I chopped up and threw in to disguise the colour of the mince.




I mixed the meaty dough with my hands until it was well blended and
then rolled it on a board into a sausage shape. I know some chefs who scoff at
the idea, but I’d always been told to roll minced kebabs in flour to help them
stay together, so I threw some flour on the board and rolled them out until
they looked like saucissons you see hanging from the ceiling of French delis.










I poured a glug of vegetable oil into a frying pan and fried the babs
over a fairly gentle heat for 15 minutes or so, rolling them around to ensure
they were evenly browned. They looked so good, I got a bit carried away at that
point.




I pilfered half a bottle of blended Scotch, with ‘medicine’ written on
the bottle, that was hidden at the back of the cupboard, threw some in and
flamed it. I’m not quite sure why, it didn’t do anything for its Turkish authenticity.
But if you’ve got a well-stocked booze cupboard, then you might flame a few
glugs of raki or arak, or perhaps not bother at all.




While the kebabs were frying, I got on with the rest of the meal. I
found an old pitta bread that was crumbling slightly in the freezer, and then
headed back out into the dark, taking fright again at the will-o-wisp glint of
the CDs hanging in the cherry trees to scare away pigeons, and snagged a
cabbage from next door’s garden. They’d probably just think the rabbit had
escaped again.




I soon had my sliced cabbage, onion, cucumber and tomato together. I had
my bottle of delicious African Volcano peri peri sauce from Maltby Street Market
at the ready, and then just as it was all going so well, I moved on to the
garlic sauce and found the only yoghurt I had was fucking probiotic peach and
mango flavour.




So I thought bollocks to the wellingtons, and just covered my kebab with
the fiery sauce, just like they used to make them at the legendary Sphinx kebab
shop in Brighton. It was a splendid late-night, home-made kebab, and didn’t cry
out for the toasted cumin and coriander seeds that many of the tweeted recipes
asked for. In fact, it was a lot better without them. But then, that’s the
beauty of Twitter.

Heston Blumenthal Finally Jumps The Shark

Heston Blumenthal has been touring the UK for his
latest TV programmes, taking part in increasingly ridiculous stunts in the
chase for ratings, and ultimately more exposure for his brand, which now
stretches to everything from airline grub to supermarket meals to hawking spectacles
for Vision Express.




But the celebrity chef ’s latest culinary trick of
sucking on tampons seems a tad on the ludicrously trite side even by his own standards.
Clearly revelling in his nerdy image, he comes across as a hot-breathed schoolboy
who’s found his way into the women’s’ changing rooms, as he talks excitedly about
how stuffing his mouth with a tampon to remove saliva helps improve the taste
of food.




"If you drain the moisture in your mouth you
experience richness, creaminess and sweetness more intensely," he told The
Guardian. "If you have a spoonful of ice-cream then put a tampon on the
tongue for a couple of minutes, when you eat the ice-cream again the taste will
be richer."




He says he was put on to the idea in a Dutch food lab
by oral physiologist Don Prince. Before long the pair were "playing around
with different tampons".




Why he finds tampon munching a useful experiment is
anyone’s guess because tampons won’t be featuring at any of his eateries he
never cooks at. You won’t see diners at Dinner or the Fat Duck with pieces of
string dangling from their mouths, like mouse-eating lizard people from V, iPod
headphones clamped to their ears as they listen to the sound of toilets
flushing.




Back at his lab above his prep room at the Fat Duck,
he’s already been tinkering with yoghurt and tampons for an “interactive
presentation”. He glosses over why he uses tampons rather than any other equally
absorbent material, or one of those mini vacuum cleaners dentists use to suck
saliva from your mouth. But then that’s because tampons are far more of a
gimmick, and there wouldn’t be nearly as much publicity if he just used a wad
of kitchen roll.




He’s been described as either one of the world’s
most talented, innovative chefs or one of the biggest confidence tricksters of
his generation - with some who have eaten the Fat Duck tasting menu left
wondering whether the joke is really on the customer. But the way his
gastronomic stunts have been going of late, he’s beginning to resemble one of
those creepy TV magicians.




What will he do for his next trick? Starve himself for
a month in a glass box, suspended over the Thames, to see how nice a doner
kebab tastes at the end of it? As for the tampons, as an Aussie friend pointed
out on Twitter: “How on earth is Waitrose going to market this one...” Heston from
Waitrose tampon palate cleansers? What’s next a bin bag, and an amyl nitrate-filled
hidden orange pudding in his mouth?