Oh Look, I've Still Got a Blog!

Well, I've neglected a few blogs in my time, but this is ridiculous! My last post was April 2016. That's almost a year ago. The problem is, as always, lack of time. And looking at this blog, it needs some serious design work to make it match my other properties - keefcooks.com, my YouTube channel, my KeefCooks Facebook Page, my Patreon page and so on.

So I'm in a bit of a quandary. Should I update the blog design to bring it into line with the other sites? Or scrap it and build something new on keefcooks.com? I actually want to change the content of this anyway - instead of being a normal blog, it'll be a monthly newsletter. That should be easy to put together - it'll be a summary of recipes and videos I've done through the month and maybe some chit-chat about things that are upcoming.

Hmmm, I'll have to get back to you on this.

My Life as a Vegetarian

They say you are what you eat. If that's true, then I'm a bacon butty. Only joking, sometimes I eat sausages. And burgers. And other stuff like that. Y'know, meaty stuff. If you cut me in half, you would see 'carnivore' written all the way through me.

I have tried a vegetarian diet, many moons ago when I was an impoverished student. When I say 'vegetarian' I don't mean hardcore 'healthy' vegetarian, I mean things like egg, chips and beans. With lots of mayo.

But I did spend a year – actually, it might have been just six months, but it certainly felt like a year – sharing a house with two guys who wanted a vegetarian to occupy the third, and by far the tiniest, bedroom. The deal was that we would all contribute to the food budget and take it in turns to do the cooking. So I got the gig, but what they hadn't explained was that the flavour of vegetarianism they practiced was macrobiotic.

That was new to me, but here's a quick rundown of what macrobiotics eat. Grains, fruit and veg, no dairy, no meat, and a weekly fish allowance. And if I remember correctly, members of the nightshade family such as spuds and tomatoes were considered to be the work of the devil. And it goes without saying, you have to balance the Yin and Yang in every meal. And chew everything 50 times before you swallow it.

Hard work doesn't even begin to describe this diet. It was awful.

Things came to a head when I spotted one of the guys from the house outside a MacDonald's furtively eating a Big Mac. I left that house shortly afterwards, headed straight for the meat counter, and haven't looked back since.

So that's macrobiotics, and allegedly if you are a reclusive Japanese monk living on top of a mountain and you follow this diet, you can easily expect to live to be two hundred years old. Imagine, two hundred cold, miserable years without a single cheeseburger. I'll pass thanks.

I have many friends who are vegetarians of one sort or another. In fact my wife would probably be one if I let her in the kitchen. And that's fine, but just as I don't go round trying to make vegetarians eat meat, so I don't welcome attempts to convert me to a vegetarian diet.

Pop star and militant vegetarian Morrissey is fond of saying 'meat is murder'. And I can live with that. You may have my bacon butty when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.

I'm Back!

Wow, I last posted in this blog back in August last year. I really didn't think it had been that long. And the reason for this extended leave of absence? Well, we moved house in September, and again just after Christmas. So, Spain no more, we are in God's Own County, Yorkshire, in a little suburb on the edge of Leeds. And we're loving it! The always-interesting, sometimes challenging weather, the fabulous countryside a mere stone's throw away, the fact that everybody speaks English.

It's all good stuff, and the bonus is that, for me at least, having been away for a couple of decades, it feels like a foreign country, so we're having to learn how everything works all over again.

Anyway, here's the New Year Message I posted on my YouTube channel, and in it you can see the amazing kitchen that I now work in. Enjoy!

New Year, New Kitchen

Body Image

This image has been popping up a lot in my Twitter feed recently (how modern am I?), and I want to scream every time I see it. She might be a very nice person, she might be very healthy and outlive me by centuries. But that is not a body that appeals to me in the slightest. No doubt she'd say the same about mine, but that's not the point and this is my blog. We're talking about body image here, and how the media and marketing tosspots imagine perfection should look, thereby alienating, scaring and generally discombobulating the 99% of people who don't look anything like that.

She's drinking a green smoothie, a 'superfood' apparently, blithely ignorant that the only superfood in the world is bacon. I bet she goes on detox programs too, blissfully unaware that the human body already incorporates all the systems needed to keep it safe from toxins and it doesn't even charge you for it.

But back to body image. Huffington Post carried this article recently. A photo of a slightly tubby but happy looking young lady was given to 18 designers (14 of whom were women) in assorted countries. They were asked to modify it to represent their idea of the perfect woman. Heaven help me if I ever go to China. And it's interesting to note that only one of them changed the colour of the white underwear. To red. Italian.

Anyway, horses for courses, one man's meat is another mans poison (KLANG KLANG CLICHE ALERT), but really I want to find out where that woman lives and send her a pie. Possibly full of bacon. I'm sure she'd thank me for it.

keefcooks.com - much improved website

I've been very quiet on the blogging front lately because I've been hard at work building a complete revamp of keefcooks.com. Now it's done, and I'm very pleased with it. It's a serious redesign with several major objectives.

Firstly, to improve the findability of the recipes, both for people and for search engines. Secondly, to improve the experience for viewers on mobile phones. And thirdly, to increase advertising recipe - because if I'm going to keep on doing these recipes and the accompanying videos, I do need some money coming in!

So I tackled the findability issues by scrapping the 7 or 8 categories that I had - it was becoming very limiting anyway, and replacing that with a whole bunch of other groupings - Cuisine/Origin, Meal Course/Type, Main Ingredient, Cooking Method, Cooking Time, Most Recently Added and Most Viewed. And there's also an old-fashioned search box if you want to do it that way.

That taxonomic structure (yes, an SEO expert actually called it that) will help search engines get to the content much easier, and I've used friendly URLs throughout the site so that the clunky old web addresses like keefcooks.com/recipe_detail.php?id=27&t=3 become smart, streamlined and readable, like http://www.keefcooks.com/spaghetti-carbonara-easy-recipe/.

Another behind-the-scenes idea I've implemented is structured data markup. You're probably scratching your head, but what it means is you use a schema that relates to recipes. So first of all, you are directly telling the search engine you're talking about a recipe. Then you tell it the recipe name, cuisine, prep time and cooking time (in a rather arcane ISO format), the ingredients and a summary of the method. In Google search results, some of this info appears as a 'rich snippet' along with a small thumbnail that makes your result stand out from the others and be more likely to be clicked on.

As far as revenue goes, there's really only one option at the moment, and that's Google AdWords. I designed the site specifically to fit Google's standard sizes for adverts. I do also have a PayPal Donate button, which has resulted in precisely 1 donation in the 2 years that I've been running this site. Please feel free to donate as much as you like!

Finally, I spent quite a lot of time building the print version of the recipe details page. If you choose to print out a recipe, you get a nice clean layout without any advertising or menu links (you might have noticed that clicking links on paper doesn't work!). What you do get, however, are 2 QR (Quick Response) codes. If you have a barcode scanner app on your smartphone, you can scan the codes - one of them takes you to the original recipe on the website, the other takes you to the video on YouTube.

So that's the new-look website. Hopefully I've made it super-easy and simple to use. And as any good designer will tell you, making something simple is actually a very hard thing to achieve, and after all that graft, I need a beer. So will someone please hurry up and make a PayPal donation!

Restaurant Review: Tuk Tuk, Madrid

Late last year, business partners Ric and Alan shook up Madrid's rather staid food scene by opening Tuk Tuk (in the trendy Malasaña barrio, Calle Cardenal Cisneros 6), serving Asian street food. It was a bit of a risk - Madrileños are not known for embracing exotic foreign food. While Madrid already had a number of Asian restaurants - lots of Cantonese, several 'Indian' (Bangladeshi, normally), a couple of Thai places - none of them was outstanding and none had the guts to serve authentic recipes. The curse of 'adjusting to suit local tastes' prevails in Madrid.

Tuk Tuk is different - the food is bursting with Asian flavours, served without pretension, and very affordable. The first restaurant became so popular they had to turn away more people than they could serve at weekends. Clearly the demand was there, so a couple of weeks ago they opened a second venue (in the gay Chueca barrio, Calle Barquillo 26) that can accommodate twice as many people as the first Tuk Tuk.

We went on a Saturday lunchtime a few days after it opened. The interior follows the design cues of the original Tuk Tuk - black and red, a big photo-mural of an Asian city street, Chinese lanterns and illuminated advertising signs. This location can hold about 60 people on three levels - the ground floor, a mezzanine and a basement. The basement is unusual in that it has natural daylight filtering into it, so it's a lot more pleasant than most basement dining areas.

We've eaten at the original Tuk Tuk several times, so our expectations of the food were pretty high. We were not disappointed. The menu isn't divided into starters and mains, it's divided into Rice Bowls, Thai Curry, Barbecue dishes, Noodles dishes, Noodle Soup, Salads and Soup.

To start, we shared a bowl of Hong Kong Char Sui - marinated Pork loin served with a dome of sticky rice speckled with black seeds (nigella, I think). Then we had Moo Ping - Thai skewers of marinated pork - and Tom Ka Gai, a delicious Thai chicken soup buzzing with the flavours of coconut, lime, lemon grass and only the chef knows what else. It was all superb.

So, give your taste buds a treat and go to Tuk Tuk.

Food Education

When I was at school, cooking ('domestic science') was definitely for girls. Us lads didn't get a look-in, it was woodwork and metalwork for us chaps. And that was okay until I left home to go to Uni, and had to fend for myself, foodwise. I'd never been encouraged to cook at home, although I could manage things like frying an egg, making beans on toast etc. Remember, this was the olden days, the 1970s, when access to information was nowhere near as splendid and easy as it is now. The interwebz did not yet exist, and knowledge was acquired from school or the public library (the cook-book industry was nowhere near as big as it is now, in fact I don't think my mother owned a single cookery book). So I would phone my mother in a panic to find out how to make Yorkshire pudding, for instance.

I mention all this because last week, a new GCSE curriculum was announced in the UK for cooking and nutrition. It will take effect from September 2015, and the contents of it are, frankly, amazing. I would quite like to do the course myself!

Haggis

It was Burn's Night last weekend (25th January). Haggis is compulsory eating on this day of celebrating Scottishness, and this year I decided to make my own, as authentically as possible. That, of course, means hitting the offal in a big way. I thought I might be thwarted at the first hurdle, getting hold of a sheep's pluck. The pluck is the heart, liver and lungs of a sheep, and it turns out to be readily available at the casquería (offal) stalls at my local market. This surprised me, but asadura is a fairly common peasant dish round these parts. What I couldn't get was a sheep's stomach to stuff the filling into, so I had to make do with sausage casing.

Now, if you're in the US, you would have a seriously hard time getting a complete pluck, because your government deems lungs to be unfit for human consumption. I think you could make a reasonable version without the lungs, but don't tell any purists I said that.

Here's my haggis recipe, and here's the video of me making haggis.

So the drill for a formal Burn's Supper involves at least one bagpiper playing 'Scotland the Brave' (you might think there's some bravery involved in making/eating haggis), and the host or Master of Ceremonies reciting Robbie Burns' 'Address to a Haggis'. The haggis is, of course, accompanied by neeps and tatties, and a wee dram or ten.

It's really not difficult to make haggis, although it can take 5-6 hours. And remember, for a chef, every night is burns night.

Why I'll Never Post a Quinoa Recipe

Quinoa is a tiny grain that many nutritional crackpots like to describe as a 'superfood'. Although it only grows in Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador, in recent years it has found its way into Western countries. I've tried it several times, and I have to say I'm not impressed. I mean, it's okay, but the way some people talk about it you would expect the most thrilling food experience of your life.

Here's why I don't use it:

• It only grows in South America, and therefore has to travel halfway around the world to get to me
• Its price has trebled over the last 20 years, putting it out of reach of the people for whom it used to be a staple
• The marketers insist it is pronounce 'keen-wah', but I can never bring myself to say it like that. The name is Spanish, and Spanish is pretty much a phonetic language. So it should be pronounced 'kwin-oh-ah'
• It seems to have little or no flavour - you might as well eat cous-cous

Free-From. Fad?

I feel sorry for people with food intolerances, I really do. It must be horrible not to be able to eat a slice of toast, or a really good pie made by me, because it contains gluten. Or to be killed by a peanut.

Last month, the lovely and always-right European Community introduced a new regulation concerning  the provision of allergen information to consumers of unpackaged food products. Meaning any food offered in a café or restaurant, or sold loose in something like a bakery or deli. It is a huge burden on the industry (hands up those who are not surprised), involving staff training, information displayed on websites, menus and menu boards. Guess who's going to pay for this? Yes, you, the consumer. But you can't argue about it - consumers have a right to know whether what they order might kill them, right?

The legislation covers 14 allergens - the usual suspects (gluten, lactose, etc) - plus linseed (lupin), which I've only ever come across as an oil used by painters.

All well and good (ish) - if you know you have an allergy to something, you should be able to find out reasonably easily whether what you're about to buy is safe for you.

But here's a thing. Sales of things like gluten-free bread are rising rapidly. Non-coeliacs are buying this stuff because they believe it might be better for them. Other 'free-from' products are also seeing growth in sales.

And here's another thing. I defriended someone on Facebook a few months ago. She had posted about how she'd just carried out allergy testing on all seven of her kids. How? Simples. The kid holds out his/her left hand and you place the thing you wish to test in it. He/she sticks his/her right arm out horizontally. The tester presses down on the right arm. If there is no resistance and the arm can be pushed down easily, it means the kid is allergic to whatever is in the left hand.

I queried this. Does it work with liquids? 'Sure - just put it in a small glass'. Hmm. Glass is pretty inert, how can the body tell what's inside it? 'It just can'.

So this woman is telling her kids they don't need to eat Brussels sprouts or whatever else they don't like because they have an allergy. And for the rest of their lives, they'll probably believe it, on the basis of an idiot test.

And the poor food vendors will have to deal with this forever.

And the winner is...

The UK's Masterchef Professional has finished, and we have a new Masterchef - Jamie Scott. I must admit I wanted Sven to win, but in the end Jamie was outstanding. They all were, in fact. And new judge Marcus Wareing didn't do badly either.

Lost In translation. Or just lost?

I did a small amount of shopping recently at an international store here in Madrid - they sell foodstuffs from India, China, the Phillipines, South America, and a bit of Brit stuff. I was rewarded for my efforts by a free can of this:

I still haven't plucked up the courage to actually open the can and try it. Quite possibly I never will.

You really do have to wonder what inspires people to name things the way they do. Take this shop on Calle Atocha in Madrid.

'Yuck' has no meaning in Spanish, and there's nothing special about it at all. It's just an 'alimentación' - it sells mostly food in cans that you only buy if you are desperate (so maybe the name isn't totally inappropriate after all).

I think my all time favourite silly name for a product is this one: Pocari Sweat.

It caused great hilarity when its Korean manufacturers launched it into the Middle East market. To my knowledge, nobody has ever found out what a Pocari is, nor, indeed, how you would collect its sweat.

But speaking of hilarity, what on earth possessed these manufacturers to adopt it as a brand name?

Contaminated Chicken - Britain's Latest Food Scare

It seems Britain's highly-industrialised food production industry just can't get it right. In the last few years we've been scandalised (technical term meaning whipped up into a frenzy of indignation by the tabloid press) by salmonella in eggs, mad cow disease, and horsemeat being passed off as beef. Last week, a report by the Food Standards Agency was issued detailing high levels of contamination of supermarket chicken by the campylobacter virus. Apparently, chicken sold by the major supermarket chains has contamination rates ranging from 64% (Tesco) to 78% (Asda).

This is clearly a very serious issue, given that in the UK campylobacter causes about 280,000 cases of sickness each year and about 100 deaths. But the expected sh*tstorm doesn't seem to have happened yet.

So should we stop eating chicken? No. The problem isn't the chicken itself - the virus is killed by cooking. The real problem is cross-contamination that happens when you handle the bird. The virus can spread to your chopping board, your hands, your cook's knife, your kitchen sink if you (inadvisedly) wash the chicken. And from there it can enter your body via the bread you cut with your contaminated knife on your contaminated chopping board. You might get some jam or some mayonnaise on your contaminated fingers, which you sneakily lick off. You might dry the area around your contaminated sink with a dishcloth, and from there you'll contaminate anything that comes into contact with the cloth - cutlery, crockery, etc.

So you see, it really is a mess. Solutions proposed by the supermarkets include: cook-in-the-bag chicken, where you never actually touch the raw flesh; better hygiene in abbatoirs and processing plants, including more frequent changes of overalls and boots; leakproof packaging so that contaminated blood and juice doesn't drip all over everything in your fridge.

It's all a bit scary, isn't it. But what people (and restaurants) need to do is what they should have been doing all along - thoroughly wash anything that comes into contact with raw chicken. If you must dry these things, do not use a cloth - use disposable paper towels. Just proper, basic, kitchen hygiene.

Although why the poultry producers and processors can't just shoot any virus they see before it gets to you is beyond me.

Here endeth the lecture.

Restaurant Review - Hawksmoor, Seven Dials, London

We visited London in September to celebrate our son's second graduation. Part of the plan was lunch at a fancy restaurant. We decided on Hawksmoor, which I'd heard of from its excellent newspaper reviews. The Guardian's Jay Rayner, in particular, is a big fan. There are five or six Hakwsmoor restaurants scattered around London, but to describe it as a chain would give the wrong impression entirely.

We fetched up at the one in Seven Dials, near Covent Garden (11 Langley Street, London WC2H 9JG). If you didn't know it was there, you'd probably miss it. The street frontage is not much more than a pair of dark-coloured doors and with a sign above them. Once inside, you're in a lobby area with a reception desk and a cloakroom. The real action is down the stairs.

The site is part of what used to be the Watney-Combe brewery, and the restaurant and bar are located in a large brick-vaulted cellar with genuine parquet flooring. The chairs are upholstered in dark green leather, and the tables are made of dark wood. It's all very old-school, and the tables are not dressed up with heavy tablecloths and fancy napkins. Everything is warm and welcoming, because this place is really all about the food. Actually, it's all about the steaks, which are constructed from top-quality well-aged beef and come in sizes that include 'bring a friend' and go up to 'as big as your head'.

I apologise for the lack of photos, but I was toting a recently-acquired camera and couldn't get to grips with how to make it take good photos in low light - at least not before the food had gone stone cold.

To start with, I had something I'd want to try for a long time - bone marrow. It's the centre part of a marrowbone sawn lengthways down the middle. The waitress said it was dinosaur bone, but you can't fool me - I know it came from an elephant. It's grilled until the marrow is just on the point of melting, and served with some toasted sourdough bread and a slathering of salsa verde (which I found to be a little bit gritty with salt). Bone marrow is pretty much all buttery fat, and I loved it.

Next up, the main course. A little (250g) rib-eye steak, which came all alone in the middle of the plate. Between us we'd also ordered the triple-cooked chips, beef dripping roasted potatoes and an assortment of home-made sauces - ketchup, stilton hollandaise, bone marrow gravy and a few others. My wife may have ordered a vegetable. Everything was admirable, but that steak was the best I've ever had.

And finally, a decent sticky toffee pudding followed by coffee and salted caramel rolos. The Rolos were amazing. So amazing that when I got back home I had to make them myself - here's my salted caramel rolos recipe.

We didn't drink much - bottle of craft beer to begin with, a glass or two of Tokay with the dessert.

Expect to pay a lot of money for food of this quality. We had the Cheap Person's Lunchtime Express Menu (£24 for two courses), but it still topped out at about £50 per head.

And do you know what? It was worth every penny.

Food, Fads and Fear

Most of my Facebook friends are reasonably sensible people. Of course they are, because I defriend the ones who show signs of being right-wing nutters, gun freaks and fundamentalist Bible-bashers. But now and again, one or two of them will share something from one of the increasing number of 'healthy-eating/living' websites. They usually have irresistibly clickable titles like '10 Foods You Should Never Eat' and 'Top 10 most unhealthy, cancer-causing foods - never eat these again!'

The problem with articles like this is they come from what I call the 'everybody knows' school of writing (I certainly wouldn't call it 'journalism', unless the word 'gutter' was somewhere close by). The stories are packed with assumptions that things like GMOs are automatically bad, that MSG is a toxin, that 'processed' is a synonym for 'nasty stuff'. And that, worst of all, chemicals in your food will kill you.

All of this is presented with little or no evidence to support it, and written in the kind of confrontational language that George W. Bush was so fond of - 'if you're not with us, you're against us'. Not exactly original, but not helpful either.

Processed Food

Unless you only eat raw food, everything you consume has been processed in some way. Any kind of cooking is a process. If you want to talk about this more sensibly, you should perhaps talk about 'industrial processing'. And indeed, some of the processes some foods go through are quite baffling to the layman, but I'm sure that no business would spend time and money on processes that they didn't feel were necessary to produce the kind of product people want to buy. Whether that's a good thing is, of course, a different matter entirely.

Chemicals in Food

Chemicals in food are kind of unavoidable, given that me, you and everything in the universe are made of nothing more or less than chemicals. Natural News fans might imagine there's something healthy called maybe 'plantstuff' that we can eat, but sadly there isn't. It's all chemicals.

Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs)

There seems to be an unfortunate and possibly unbreakable link in many people's minds between 'GMO' and 'Monsanto Corp'. While I'm no fan of Monsanto and their unsavoury business practices, I don't think GMOs are necessarily bad. Genetic Engineering is not much different from the selective breeding of animals and hybridization of plants that has been going on for centuries. The technology is different, obviously - direct manipulation of genes produces a quicker and more accurate result than working through multiple generations of apples, say, to get the one that is exactly what you want. My only quibble is that this process narrows the gene pool and tends to ignore flavour at the expense of things like hardiness, size, disease resistance and yield.
Ban GMOs? First Show us the Victims

Monosodium Glutamate (MSG)

This one really annoys me. Its bad reputation came from one magazine article back in 1982 which coined the term 'Chinese Restaurant Syndrome'. I have met one person in my life who claims that MSG gives him headaches - but he also has a few other food allergies and sensitivities. MSG is derived from seaweed, and I think of it as powdered umami. Umami is the 5th taste, after sweet, salty, sour and bitter - it's a Japanese word that is generally translated as 'deliciousness' or 'savouriness'. It occurs naturally as glutamic acid in many foods - tomatoes, mature cheeses (the white crystals in ancient Parmesan are pure glutamic acid), anchovies, kombu (a seaweed), mushrooms and many other common foodstuffs. By the way, none of the recipes on my website use MSG, and I very rarely use it in cooking. If it's umami you want, you can achieve that using foods that contain glutamic acid.
If MSG is so bad for you, why doesn't everyone in Asia have a headache?

Natural Food is Best

Finally, the most misunderstood and misleading term of all: 'natural'. Stop and think what this means. 'In a state of nature', perhaps. Take it further. You can only live a purely 'natural' life if you wander around naked, take shelter where you can - in a cave, maybe, or up a tree, and eat only the raw food you find around you - a rotten apple here, a dead bird there. But this is to forget the true nature of Nature. It is red in tooth and claw, it is a system of predators and prey. And some of us humans, who think ourselves the most highly evolved and developed creatures on the planet, want to think we can live a decent life without harming any other living creatures.

Of course we do. It's only natural.

Brummie Balti

You may or not know that our beloved European Union has a scheme to protect certain regional and/or traditional food- and drinkstuffs from piracy (and you thought it was all about supporting French farmers and straightening bananas, didn't you). It's called the Protected Food Names scheme, and it comes in three flavours: Protected Designation of Origin (PDO), Protected Geographical Indication (PGI), and Traditional Specialities Guaranteed (TSG). And here's me thinking the EU was all about open markets and free trade. And straighter bananas.

But I guess it's reassuring to know that that very expensive bottle of fizz you bought came from the Champagne region of France, and you won't be wasting your hard-earned cash on the well-known Tchiampain from China. It seems we are all deemed to be idiots these days, who cannot tell the difference between the salt-packed, Tetra-packed cheese-like substance from Denmark and your actual Greek feta cheese?

All well and good, I suppose, but this story caught my eye recently. The Birmingham Balti Association has applied to the EU Protected Food Names scheme to have its curries given TSG. And the chosen name is 'Birmingham Balti', which is odd, because nobody, but nobody calls it that. It's just 'Balti'.

I should explain what a Balti is at this point, for the benefit of the 7.12 billion or so people who don't live in Birmingham, England. It's a kind of curry, served in a small bowl with handles (and the bowl is called a 'balti', which some commentators say means 'bucket'). The dish was, apparently, invented in Birmingham in the 1980s. So don't be rushing off to the sub-continent and demanding a Balti, they won't have a clue what you are talking about. Or they'll give you a bucket.

Given that Baltis first appeared in 1982, I think the 'Traditional' bit is pushing it. And I'm not at all clear what benefit it offers anybody. Are they going to sue anyone selling something under the name of 'Birmingham Balti'? Are they going to force people to abide by a specific recipe?

Does anybody, actually, care?

Masterchef: the Professionals 2014

So the big Masterchef news over the summer was the departure of the much-loved Michel Roux Jr (fancy still being called 'Junior' when you're in your fifties) in a dispute with the BBC over Roux advertising potatoes.

That left a vacant slot for a high-flying chef/judge, and there were screams of horror, outrage, downright terror when it was announced the new guy would be the devil incarnate himself, Marcus Wareing.

Wareing has appeared as guest judge on Masterchef and other shows, and could always be relied upon to be as mean as possible. I once saw him reduce a grown man to tears. I got the impression that the only person who could cook well enough to please Marcus Wareing was, well, Marcus Wareing.

But he seems to have changed and acquired a pleasant side that can even admit to him liking the odd thing. Although he can still spit out stuff he doesn't like. He could have ruined the show, but no, it's business as usual with endless waves of Masterchef wannabes torturing themselves in their pursuit of perfection, and occasionally humiliating themselves by doing something absolutely bloody stupid.

Great entertainment.

Poundland Comes To Madrid

This post is only peripherally to do with cooking. Except it isn't. As a Brit living in Madrid, yes, I love all the Spaniards and some of their cuisine dearly. But you never forget the things you enjoyed at home (even if it was something the rest of the world hates, which is almost the definition of 'regional speciality'). Everybody from everywhere will ALWAYS be on the lookout for stuff from their homeland.

Until about 2 years ago, we were fortunate in Madrid to have 3 or 4 shops that specialised in Brit stuff. It was pricey, obviously, because the shop owners could only buy in small quantities and had to add on the cost of shipping. I don't know why, exactly, but all of these shops decided to throw in the towel within about three months of each other.

That's the back-story. I haven't been suffering too much because I have a mate who visits the UK at least once a month and can bring back things I need (mostly Oxo cubes and marrowfat peas) in exchange for a pork pie.

I can't say I've ever been in a Poundland store in England, but the concept is they sell well-known brands of household stuff and food in cans and jars, and everything is priced at one pound. I had a perception that there was something a bit grubby about these kinds of stores - it seems all UK High Streets are populated these days by pound shops and charity shops.

But they must be doing well. Poundland has begun expanding into Spain, under the name 'Dealz'. They already have stores in Alicante and Torremolinos. Last week Dealz opened a store not too far from where I live - Calle Bravo Murillo 192, near Estrecho Metro. This afternoon I went to check it out and was very pleasantly surprised. More or less everything is priced at €1.50. What caught my interest wasn't so much the food items (I can get Heinz Baked Beans, HP Sauce and the like for less from other sources). No, what thrilled me was the kitchen equipment section. I've been trying to get tins for baking mince pies in for years. I did manage to find some on my last UK trip, but at £12 a pop thought they were somewhat overpriced. Similarly, cooling racks for baked thingies. And silicon cooking mats. And kitchen scissors. Honestly, I could have spent €100 in Dealz (and probably will in the weeks to come).

We already have hundreds of bazaars ('Chinos') in Madrid selling any amount of cheap tat. But the problem is it's identical to the tat that all the others are selling. Dealz is refreshing because what they're selling is completely different from what the Chinos have to offer. I think it will do very well indeed.

The Best Cafe in London?

We were visiting our son in the great metropolis recently. Lunchtime approached, bellies rumbled. He asked if we fancied trying the best cafe in London. It's famous, he said, it gets used as a location in almost any film that requires a 'typical English caff'. The mention of home-made pies clinched it for me, so we trundled off in search of The Regency Cafe (17-19 Regency St, London SW1P 4BY).

It was about 12.45 pm when we got there, and the queue snaked out of the door. We tagged onto the end of it and were pleased to see that it was moving reasonably quickly. The deal here is that you do not take a seat until you've ordered and paid for your food at the counter. We couldn't actually see the counter from the end of the queue, but we could see lots of Formica tables and polypropylene chairs occupied by happy-looking diners (a mix of office workers, builders and tourists) enjoying plates of solid British food. As each order was ready, a booming voice bellowed it out and the recipient would come to collect it. These bellows were coming thick and fast, at least one or two a minute, and people were leaving as soon as they finished eating to make way for the new diners.

The walls are decorated with boxing and football memorabilia and photographs, and beside the counter the days offerings are written on a blackboard. My knees almost turned to jelly when I saw Steak and Kidney Pudding on the menu, and I must have been wearing a stupid grin when it was my turn to order. Did I want my pud with chips, mash or boiled potatoes? Would I like peas, carrots or cabbage with it? Well, boiled potatoes and cabbage are things your mum used to make, not things you usually see in a cafe, so I pounced on them. Wife and son had steak and kidney pie (because my pud was the last one and I ungraciously declined to offer to let it go), and chicken and mushroom pie.

We found seats and waited about ten minutes, sipping our mugs of tea as we did so. The pudding was everything I could have wanted - light suet crust, identifiable chunks of beef and kidney in a thick, rich gravy. The spuds and cabbage were cooked to perfection and arrived plain and unadorned by any fancy herbs or even butter. Everything was sitting in a pool of gravy and if I have one criticism it is that there was some tomato flavour in the gravy that shouldn't have been there.

Is it the best cafe in London? I couldn't say without spending a small fortune and several years in sampling all of them. But I can say the food was great, the service fast and efficient, the place entirely unselfconscious and without a trace of pretension. And the best bit? The price - about £6 per head including a mug of tea. In the centre of London, about 5 minutes from Parliament, this has to be the best value eating in town.

And of course they do the Full English Breakfast thing, and I'll certainly be back to try that.

Reports of the Death of the Blog Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

People have been wittering on about how the blog is dead for 2-3 years now. And it is true that many blogs have suffered a silent and largely unnoticed demise. Looking at the blogroll on my previous blog, I see that many of the blogs I used to follow have not posted anything for over a year. I only did 3 or 4 posts in the last year.

I guess everyone's moved to Facebook, Twitter and other 'social' sites, where a post requires almost no thought, but usually has a lifespan measured in minutes.

I have my excuses for not blogging - I've been busy building my cooking website and the YouTube video channel that goes with it. And also looking after the necessary evil Facebook page. Making the videos takes about ten times longer than writing a blog post, so I haven't exactly been Mr Lazy.

But now I'm back to blogging, because there are things I want to write about food, restaurants, chefs, trends etc, that just don't fit on the website. The blog will also hopefully enhance the KeefCooks presence on the InterWebz, and I live in hope that traffic and advertising revenue will take off.

If you happen to run a food blog, I'd be happy to consider adding it to my blogroll. Just let me know.

Now, please excuse me, I have to go and shoot some food. I mean, make a video.