Great British Menu

Anyone watching this? Several seasons available on Prime - the sort of geek TV show the British seem to like - hours of serious cooking and judging to empanel a batch of cooks to prepare an annual dinner for the Prince of Wales and Camilla.

I can't stop watching - I keep thinking 'hey, that's a nice touch - maybe I can use that sometime' or he/she should have seen that coming - poor choice of ingredients (or poor treatment of them).

They have regional competitions from all over Britain (incl. N. Ireland) and then do run offs between the winners from the various areas. Sounds boring as heck to most people but I can't stop watching - like catnip to any foodie.

[Jenise]

I have not seen this! Am going to set forth and locate it! Sounds like my kind of food TV (of which nothing else currently running is--I'm out of shows.)

Oh yeah - you should like it. Tweaking recipes (first mentally and then actually by trial) is what we do, right? What's the record number of trial terrines Bob has had to eat on the path to perfection!

[Jenise]

Well, the record number of terrine-related meals went to the Spanish vegetarian terrine I made many years ago to accompany a spendy white Rioja. That terrine was four alternating layers, manchego cheese and asparagus, in which the manchego was supported by a cauliflower puree. I figured out what a great chameleon cauliflower is, in both flavor and substance, long before the rest of the world thought of cauliflower rice and other things--strictly to create a viable manchego cheese layer. But it took a few months to perfect it with gelatin without having a jello consistency. Ditto the pea-asparagus layer. Oh, and then came the gazpacho, which ultimately became a peach gazpacho to work with that white Priorat.

Not far behind it, the rolled thing I called _____ Rigoletto. Can't think of the name but the missing word is a category of rolled Italian meatloafs.

Oh, and then there are the terrines that I never got quite right. Worked quite hard to create a veal-and-lemon terrine to serve with Austrian wines. The results were beautiful and tasty, but the textures were never compelling enough to make it to your house.

[Jenise]

Haven't figured out if we'll get this here or not, but did just discover they're in Season 16. It's been around awhile!

[Jenise]

So we found the Great British Menu last night. Amazon Prime has a bunch of them starting with Season 8. Really fun! Real chefs doing real cooking in the kind of detail I thought Bob would find boring (compared to my endless fascination), but he didn't. Kind of a cross between Top Chef and The Great British Baking Show. Will fill the void nicely, thank you for mentioning it.

Up here we got season 5 and while the others are listed they aren't available (yet). Hope they do become watchable - I enjoy them.

[Jenise]

The seasons appear to be quite long. We watched Episodes 28-30 of Season 8 last night. Different contestants of course, but two different celebrity chef judges who made it clear that one's enjoyment of each contest will have a lot to do with how talkative and openly detailed the chef judge is.