EDM 139 and TV dinner indigestion.

Last week EDM challenge 139 was to 'draw a handle' which was convenient as I was thinking of doing this anyway. This is called a hachoir for chopping herbs and a bit of an impulse buy. It's great for herbs but anything chunkier like mushrooms or peppers get jammed between the two blades! Funny, I've never seen that happen on TV! It's by Jamie Oliver and came with a dinky little cutting board, like this one at Amazon, but unlike that board, I don't have those handy storage slots. That means it sits on the kitchen draining board until I can find somewhere safe to store it where I won't reach in and take my fingers off!

I've gone off Jamie slightly in recent weeks. I'm very fickle when it comes to celebrity chefs. I first fell for the no nonsense Delia, dumped her for Annabel (great recipes for children!), ditched her for naughty Nigel (still the best) on to Nigella (my heart wasn't really in it and all that flirting with the camera is really getting on my nerves) , then Jamie with a brief fling with Bill (why does he smile after every sentence?) I think maybe Gary is next (if only he'd drop that fake posh accent!). He's a perfectionist and I can't bear sloppy! Jamie's food is great but in his latest series he seems to have taken the rustic, careless look too far. 'Course, it might also have something to do with nearly cracking a tooth on one of his bottled pasta sauces! I doubt Gary Rhodes would have let that hard piece of whateveritwas into anything with his name on it.

Something I noticed about the rise of celebrity chefs, is that every year they use some 'in' ingredients that are probably only available in tiny specialist shops in London's Soho district. In the nineties it was things like Kaffir leaves, sun dried tomatoes, Thai fish sauce and organic chocolate. Lately I keep hearing about smoked pimento powder - we don't even have self-raising flour here! Now that supermarkets in the UK stock so many specialists foods, the chefs have to think of new things to impress us with and Jamie has taken that to extremes. In his latest show, Jamie at Home (which has cleverly latched on to the journaling craze for the opening credits, showing what appears to be his own artwork and sketchbook but is actually digitally produced for the screen) he uses only his own homegrown produce. Where are we going to find those stripey beetroots and carrots, I wonder? Or those spotty tomatoes? Not only that but he uses specially built brick ovens in his very large garden - or should that be country estate? It seems to me the most important thing about any new food craze is that it has to be, at least for now, unobtainable but Jamie is going much further and tempting us with the unattainable.

Anyway, what is really great about this drawing is that I did it in between tea breaks, probably a record for me! The wood is grainy but so too is the shine on the blades which meant it didn't need many pencil strokes to get the texture right. HB and B pencil.