Day 295 - Marcus Wareing

As readers of this Blog will know, I am interested in food generally and cooking is one of my hobbies.  This means that the recent growth of TV Reality cooking shows are rights up my street. I can remember watching the first Great British Menu series (I think they were cooking for Her Majesty) in which Marcus Wareing won the dessert course with a relatively simple, but delicious looking custard tart.

Since then, we have had many more series of GBM, plus all sorts of MasterChef programmes for celebrities, amateurs and professionals.  We tend to prefer the ones with proper chefs and have very much enjoyed the last few MasterChef Professional series - and had an excellent meal two years ago at Adam Handling's Caxton Hotel table at the time when I left my job at EDF.  I am following the current series and my money is on Mark...

We also very much enjoyed the Australian version of Masterchef but it does go on for a very long time... but has a much sharper competitive edege and also a higher teaching quotient for the viewers, which is great, even if some of thr ingredients are hard to come by.

All of this meant that I was delighted when Janet, my former colleague, suggested that we meet for lunch at Marcus in the Berkley Hotel today.  We had to eat early as she had a meeting to go to at 2 pm, so chose the lunch menu.

Wow: it was delicious - I chose the salt beef and the lamb and sitting here typing this am still savouring the taste.  We decided to cut back on the alcohol so just had one glass of wine as recommended by the sommelier...which was just as well as they charged us £19.50 for what was really a rather meagre serving.  That was the only quibble though...

All of this made preparing supper very easy: Kathryn was out at the flics and a glass of red and some biscuits and cheese went down perfectly... yes, watching MasterChef with Marcus Wareing too...