I greatly admire those B&B's whose dining rooms are attached to or are a part of their kitchen. Everything you do is totally open to scrutiny and you have to be not only totally on top of your game but of exemplary behaviour.
Whilst I think in general I could pass the scrutiny bit, I am sure that I would feel an immense amount of added pressure by having an audience.
However I have to admit that exemplary would not be the first word that I would use to describe my behaviour in the kitchen. For when things don't go the way I wish then I have to confess that I lose a little of my civility and perhaps the odd curse may slip through my lips. I am not proud of this but there it is. What is a man to do?
I was pondering the 'open kitchen' layout of a B&B and how it is probably for the best that my guests don't have to hear such profanities on a Sunday morning when I was reminded of an episode of "The Hotel Inspector". The hotel in question was run by a family whom seemed to disagree about everything and they could often be heard by their guests with some really random comments wafting into the dining area.
This got me thinking about things you would not want to hear being said in the kitchen as you await your breakfast. Here is a list of 20 that would fill me with unease....
1. "AAAAAAATCHOOOOOOOOOOO!"
2. "It's OK, it landed the right way up."
3. THUD. "Ha, GOT IT!" "Bugger.... where did it go?"
4. "Tiddles! Get off that worktop NOW."
5. "What do you think it is?"
"I'm not really sure but I think I can get it out."
6. "Do me a favour and have a smell of this."
7. "Scrape it off over the sink..... It'll be fine."
8. "Is that a current or a fly?"
9. "Did you wash out the bleach from their teapot before you made their tea luv?"
10. "Wow! Earwax is almost exactly the same colour as egg yolk."
11. "Darling is this the olive oil or the sample you've gotta take down the doctors?"
12. "Are those floating bits meant to be there?"
13. "I can see the words 'Use By' but the rest is just a complete mystery I'm afraid..."
14. "Quick the blood is dripping over everything".
15. "What's the 3 second rule?"
16. "Well I'm not going to tell them.... you're in charge, you do it!"
17. "Is this last weeks bacon or this weeks?"
18. "I told you... I don't know how long the fridge was switched off."
19. "Stop the cat and get that sausage back!"
20. "Remind me again did you say that it's all right to serve it if it smells funny but looks OK or if it smells OK but just looks funny... I can never remember."
Happy dining.
Monday, 15 September 2014
Tuesday, 9 September 2014
I nose what's good and I nose what's bad....
On Sunday it was August and still summer and then I woke up on Monday to find it was the 1st of September and Autumn had turned up on the doorstep without a by your leave. The dew covered the lawn with it's glistening pearls only broken by the fallen cob nuts littering the ground.
That old familiar scent of dampness hung in the air and I knew that summer was done.
It is an astounding thing the sense of smell isn't it? It is the ability to remember specific smells that I find most amazing. Autumn has that very specific damp, slightly musty smell and I feel sure that if you were blindfolded and taken in the Tardis to somewhere in Autumn that you would know instantly that it was so. My life is littered with memory points stored by their smell and I am frequently transported back to them in a nano second of picking up a scent that duplicates one of them.
For instant whenever I toast white bread (not brown or Granary, just white and it must be under the grill not in a toaster) I immediately picture the small staff refreshment room in the little Fine Fare Supermarket that I managed in the Goring road in Worthing. Despite being over 30 years ago it conjurers up a clear image of that room with the window to the right, the little inadequately sized table up against the opposite wall and the massively over sized Cheeseplant which somehow had survived to grow the full width of one wall and straddling across half of another. We had owned many Cheeseplants but they had never survived more than a few months at home. On the back wall was the kitchen work surface with a kettle, some cups often left in the sink with diluted bleach in them to get rid of the stains and a couple of loaves of bread donated by the business so staff could have some toast at morning break time. It is that specific smell from that particular grill in that room which my memory involuntarily jumps to and all of the above appears in my mind for the briefest of moments as if I were looking at a photograph of the scene, really powerful.
Another example is the ever so distinctive smell of the road works when I used to live in London back in the 70's. As a kid I walked to school and they seemed to be forever digging some bit of road up which meant digging into the London Clay and that smell is so strong in my mind that I can 'picture it' even now as I write this several hundred miles and 40 years away from it. Whenever I visit London and if I smell it, no matter where I smell it, my mind is transported back to the street in which I grew up.
If I linger a little too long down the Supermarket cake aisle I am reminded of the sweet, sweet smell of the inside of the Mr Kipling and Lyons cake delivery vans. They would pull up to our shop and I would agree the order then myself and the cake van driver would go to the van where he would open the back doors and this strong sugary sweet smell would hit me right in the face every single time.Yet another of those smells that I haven't forgotten.
Probably one of my favourites is the smell of raw bacon in the butchers where I buy my bacon up here. That scent takes me way back to another Fine Fare Supermarket in Leamington Spa. I was in charge of the Delicatessen there and I really loved it. The smell is not just that of the raw smoked bacon but of the bacon first thing in the morning as I set my counter up. The big walk in chiller was closed all night and so the bacon smell built up and when I opened the fridge door first thing in the morning SMACK my nose was treated to an assault of that smoky briny bacon. I am near salivating now at that memory smell.
It is so refined that for instance the smell of diesel soot reminds me of the No.7 Route-master bus whilst the smell of diesel itself flashes up a picture of me standing in the engine compartment of a narrow boat preparing to stuff my hand down the weed hatch.
The list is really big, now I think of it. I was in the village hall gym and as I lay on the parquet floor the smell of the wood mixed with the thin layer of dust took me right back to when I was a cub scout and our meetings in our school hall. It ranges from the new car smell which I hope many of you will associate this phenomenon with through to the sea smell of a Cornish fishing village including the smell of the Off License that I worked in and even the B.O. of a specific member of staff (a sort of stagnant baked beans smell).
They are indeed not always happy memories, hence I do not like the smell of hospitals, or alcohol on peoples breath or cannabis as they pull me back to specific memory points which I'd rather not be reminded of. But none the less you have to marvel at such a powerful sense, it is truly extraordinary.
Where was I?
Oh yes the Summer........
It had shot by this year faster than I can remember, probably because we had been so busy this year. On Friday we had the first single day in which there was no one staying in either the B&B or the Cottage since way back at the beginning of July. Whilst this is clearly good news in regards to the business it is fair to say that it has taken a toll on us both leaving us quite weary and in need of a break which we aim to take later this month.
With the coming of Autumn so follows some yearly tasks one of which is the ordering and storing away of fire wood. Unfortunately the wood store shares a space with the garden store and in the chaos of the summer the whole thing had become an utter mess. So I took an afternoon to have a complete sort out of both in preparation for the delivery of the wood.
In doing so I ended up replacing all of Percy Gandons gardening tools back in their bespoke brackets.
The guy was a perfectionist. None of these generic garden shed tool hooks from B&Q for him, oh no, no he hand crafted each bracket to fit each tool individually and so I find that despite the shears being blunt and the lawn edge clippers ceased up I simply cannot remove them, it would be wrong.
Finally the two areas now clearly defined I was ready for the wood and a few days later I spent four hours moving the wood from the street to the store. Eventually the task was done and so I did what I do.......... I took a photograph of it. A job well done I feel.
Now it is just a matter of bringing in the rest of the harvest including picking all the apples off that apple tree!
That old familiar scent of dampness hung in the air and I knew that summer was done.
It is an astounding thing the sense of smell isn't it? It is the ability to remember specific smells that I find most amazing. Autumn has that very specific damp, slightly musty smell and I feel sure that if you were blindfolded and taken in the Tardis to somewhere in Autumn that you would know instantly that it was so. My life is littered with memory points stored by their smell and I am frequently transported back to them in a nano second of picking up a scent that duplicates one of them.
For instant whenever I toast white bread (not brown or Granary, just white and it must be under the grill not in a toaster) I immediately picture the small staff refreshment room in the little Fine Fare Supermarket that I managed in the Goring road in Worthing. Despite being over 30 years ago it conjurers up a clear image of that room with the window to the right, the little inadequately sized table up against the opposite wall and the massively over sized Cheeseplant which somehow had survived to grow the full width of one wall and straddling across half of another. We had owned many Cheeseplants but they had never survived more than a few months at home. On the back wall was the kitchen work surface with a kettle, some cups often left in the sink with diluted bleach in them to get rid of the stains and a couple of loaves of bread donated by the business so staff could have some toast at morning break time. It is that specific smell from that particular grill in that room which my memory involuntarily jumps to and all of the above appears in my mind for the briefest of moments as if I were looking at a photograph of the scene, really powerful.
Another example is the ever so distinctive smell of the road works when I used to live in London back in the 70's. As a kid I walked to school and they seemed to be forever digging some bit of road up which meant digging into the London Clay and that smell is so strong in my mind that I can 'picture it' even now as I write this several hundred miles and 40 years away from it. Whenever I visit London and if I smell it, no matter where I smell it, my mind is transported back to the street in which I grew up.
If I linger a little too long down the Supermarket cake aisle I am reminded of the sweet, sweet smell of the inside of the Mr Kipling and Lyons cake delivery vans. They would pull up to our shop and I would agree the order then myself and the cake van driver would go to the van where he would open the back doors and this strong sugary sweet smell would hit me right in the face every single time.Yet another of those smells that I haven't forgotten.
Probably one of my favourites is the smell of raw bacon in the butchers where I buy my bacon up here. That scent takes me way back to another Fine Fare Supermarket in Leamington Spa. I was in charge of the Delicatessen there and I really loved it. The smell is not just that of the raw smoked bacon but of the bacon first thing in the morning as I set my counter up. The big walk in chiller was closed all night and so the bacon smell built up and when I opened the fridge door first thing in the morning SMACK my nose was treated to an assault of that smoky briny bacon. I am near salivating now at that memory smell.
It is so refined that for instance the smell of diesel soot reminds me of the No.7 Route-master bus whilst the smell of diesel itself flashes up a picture of me standing in the engine compartment of a narrow boat preparing to stuff my hand down the weed hatch.
The list is really big, now I think of it. I was in the village hall gym and as I lay on the parquet floor the smell of the wood mixed with the thin layer of dust took me right back to when I was a cub scout and our meetings in our school hall. It ranges from the new car smell which I hope many of you will associate this phenomenon with through to the sea smell of a Cornish fishing village including the smell of the Off License that I worked in and even the B.O. of a specific member of staff (a sort of stagnant baked beans smell).
They are indeed not always happy memories, hence I do not like the smell of hospitals, or alcohol on peoples breath or cannabis as they pull me back to specific memory points which I'd rather not be reminded of. But none the less you have to marvel at such a powerful sense, it is truly extraordinary.
Where was I?
Oh yes the Summer........
It had shot by this year faster than I can remember, probably because we had been so busy this year. On Friday we had the first single day in which there was no one staying in either the B&B or the Cottage since way back at the beginning of July. Whilst this is clearly good news in regards to the business it is fair to say that it has taken a toll on us both leaving us quite weary and in need of a break which we aim to take later this month.
With the coming of Autumn so follows some yearly tasks one of which is the ordering and storing away of fire wood. Unfortunately the wood store shares a space with the garden store and in the chaos of the summer the whole thing had become an utter mess. So I took an afternoon to have a complete sort out of both in preparation for the delivery of the wood.
In doing so I ended up replacing all of Percy Gandons gardening tools back in their bespoke brackets.The guy was a perfectionist. None of these generic garden shed tool hooks from B&Q for him, oh no, no he hand crafted each bracket to fit each tool individually and so I find that despite the shears being blunt and the lawn edge clippers ceased up I simply cannot remove them, it would be wrong.
Finally the two areas now clearly defined I was ready for the wood and a few days later I spent four hours moving the wood from the street to the store. Eventually the task was done and so I did what I do.......... I took a photograph of it. A job well done I feel.
Now it is just a matter of bringing in the rest of the harvest including picking all the apples off that apple tree!
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