Monday 16 May 2016

Call that a breakfast? The diabolical Hemsley sisters and their veggie mania.



Jasmine and Melissa  Aren't we thin?


Now the idea of two attractive young sisters presenting a cookery programme in floaty dresses should be ideal for the Legatus.  But I have just been driven to distraction by watching Eating Well With Hemsley + Hemsley which had its second episode today (note the trendy replacement of the ampersand with a plus sign to make them look like an architects firm or a trendy lifestyle brand  -which is obviously what they want to be). "We can't believe we have our own TV show!" gush the girls on their website.  No, we can't believe it either as your on screen style is extremely irritating, as you twitter around like Kiki the Frog from Hector's House


Kiki the Frog shows what happens to you if you eat too many vegetables


Melissa and Jasmine are half Filipina which explains their slightly exotic look and their insistence on cooking everything in ghee (which used to be considered really unhealthy but is now considered healthy, apparently).  Jasmine used to be a model so had to be a professional twiglet but both look seriously underfed.  Their healthy eating blog/TV show/recipe book is also full of meditation/mind-body interface New Age hippy nonsense. They are believers in biodynamic agriculture; a 1920s precursor to organic farming with added metaphysical and spiritual elements which "embraces the mystery of all life processes, including the subtle and energetic realities that are not necessarily easy to measure or justify using current scientific methods." Hopeless bunkum, therefore. If you can't measure it by scientific methods it's just fantasy!  Biodynamics has the planting of crops guided by the moon's position in the constellations of the zodiac. Three constellations are connected to each element, and each element is related to a part of the plant: thus, Earth – root; water – leaf; air – flower; fire – fruit.  Good grief!

Today, they showcased their "healthy" cooked 'full monty' breakfast.




You can tell everything about this horrific concoction by looking at a picture of it.  A full monty?  Perhaps, if you are a twittering, metropolitan, meditating twiglet girl. There should be no green food at breakfast. Ever! Asparagus?  Spinach?  Seriously?  Even worse, it is all baked in the oven!  Baked spinach with baked eggs on top! Argh! Disgusting.  I am sick of people (such as the Old Bat) banging on about how delicious vegetables are.  You know, they're really not! People eat vegetables because they are told they are healthy, they actually have no sense of taste or they are too squeamish to eat meat.  No one really likes them!  Except girls and that is because they are fixated on being thin, as they worry more about what they look like rather than what they do.  Courgettes, broccoli, leafy green vegetables etc. all taste of water with added iron filings.  Swedes, carrots, parsnips etc. taste like wood.  Ugh!




They then made a disgusting bolognese ragu with far too much grated carrot and served it with cold spiralised courgettes.  They seem to be the leading prophets of the incomprehensible spiralised vegetable movement in the UK. They have their own branded spiraliser, of course. I will not be watching them again!




In contrast, I have been enjoying Rick Stein's cooking series, where he goes to a European city for a long weekend.  He has been to Bordeaux, Reykjavik, Berlin and Vienna.  Stein (unlike the twittering Hemsleys) has a very engaging TV style   He doesn't faff about with healthy cooking methods either.   Taste is king.  In fact the amount of butter he uses alarms even me!  He has a fundamental flaw, though, which to me is as incomprehensible as a love of vegetables.  He has an inexplicable fixation on fish.  It is almost a fatal flaw from the point of view of cooking programmes.  So when he visits somewhere like Berlin or Vienna, which are both meat eating centres, ostensibly he goes back to his kitchen to then cook a local dish from the city he has visited.  But in the last two episodes not having had any fish in the city, he then goes home and cooks fish dishes.  I know he has made a career out of being Britain's Mr fish (who on earth voluntarily eats fish in a restaurant?) but really this is cheating!




Shudder!  Fish and vegetables!  I need to cheer himself up now.  This is a proper breakfast, which I had in February at Morrison's supermarket cafe.  Note the complete lack of green! The banana is to take home to the Old Bat, Another worthless foodstuff, bananas taste like slimy, compressed cotton wool. Fruit is for monkeys!