Mushrooms...

I ended up photographing mushrooms in the kitchen. Why? Well, for one, fellow Hull blogger Basil Dray over on Treemendous highlighted how cute little mushrooms can be (although, that was in the wild, not when they're about to be slaughtered on my chopping board). And for two, I'm in the middle of an unhealthy preoccupation with all those programmes about food on the telly right now. I mean, heck, should I really have been watching the frankly trashy Ready, Steady, Cook instead of writing a new play? Having just come out of the other end of Celebrity Master Chef (disappointed with Hardeep, there. Not just because he's not a very funny 'comedian' but that his natural sense of mixing flavours and ingredients just deserted him when it came to the crunch in the final) I'm now totally smitten with the US version of Hell's Kitchen. Somehow, Gordon Ramsay has assembled the most inept cooks and silliest, nay, brain dead Americans to compete for the million dollar restaurant prize. The other week we lost Tom, a lardy gent with a Wiseguy New Joisey accent who could slot straight into the cast of Goodfellas. Disappointingly, he didn't ram a red hot fish slice up Ramsay on his exit. This week the lesbian undertones of favourite-to-win Heather and the somewhat butch Rachel became overtones, although their after-service flirting came to an abrupt halt when Rachel was given the boot. Still, as the Fox publicity has it, "The heat is on and the “steaks” are high." Groan. What on earth is a high steak anyway? So, yeah, mushrooms. They are nice and I had my camera. I thought I'd have a bash at photographing food. Ramsay would probably scream, "What the fuck are you doing? Fuck off out of the kitchen." I like Gordon, he's become a hero of mine, although his motivational techiniques leave a tad to be desired. But surely there's a programme going begging, isn't there, where Ramsay is put into situations in which he is the inept one that can't cope with the pressure and some nasty fucker shouts at him non-stop? And another in which he is forced to live for six months on fast food, supermarket own-brand pasties and pies and Pot Noodles.

Listening: Scott Matthews - Passing Stranger.

Tags: Gordon Ramsay, Hell's Kitchen, mushrooms