Something’s Cooking In The Aga Kitchen

Those who are curious about what I get up in my day-to-day job, or what exactly I mean when I talk about a “demo”, should pop on over to the Aga Cooking channel on YouTube. It is currently host to a clatter of videos with me knocking up seasonal treats and talking about Aga appliances, all the while trying to hide the rough edges of my Northern Irish accent.
 
There’s one each for turkey (yes another one), vegetables, stuffing and all the trimmings. One of my goals is to present techniques and recipes that can be mastered by even the most amateur of home cooks, so hopefully these clips will be useful for those who are trying their hand at tackling Christmas dinner this year.

 

If you have any queries on your christmas dinner, message me!

Happy cooking!

//

James McIntosh

Promote your Page too

Turkeys and Jetlag

I can live with a lot of things (cold snaps in December, congestion charges in London, traffic in London – for that matter, anything related to driving through London), but jetlag is not one of them.
 
I am feeling jetlagged as I write this, so the simple act of typing has transformed into an unfeasibly difficult task, like trying to unknot a tie whilst wearing oven gloves. When I raise my head from the keyboard to the screen, or turn it from the screen to the clock on the wall, vapour trails blur my line of sight. My thoughts are little helium-filled balloons which gently bob up somewhere to the top of my mind where I can’t reach them.
 
I’m just back from The AGA shop Shrewsbury, you see. It’s that time of year again, when I squeeze a turkey into a bucket of ice, squeeze the bucket into my passenger seat, cover it in the seatbelt and whip up and down the length and breadth of England doing Christmas demos for Aga. If you need a refresher course in just how far past the limits of my sanity this pushes me, read last year’s blog here.
 
But James, you may ask, how can you get jetlagged travelling from Shrewsbury? Well, I neglected to tell you that right before I made that drive I had just arrived back from Toronto. Yes, you read that correctly: I flew home from Toronto in the morning, then got in my car late afternoon and trekked up to Shrewsbury. Before flying to Toronto I was in New York, and before that in Northern Ireland, and before that I was in… well, to be honest, I lost track of where I was. During the past year I’ve flown through so many time zones and clocked up so many air miles it would be cheaper and less hassle to set up my own travel company. Whisk Air, I like the sound of that.  You know you fly too much when, after you sit down and buckle yourself in, the BA air hostesses smiles sweetly and says, “Your usual, sir?”
 
Let me explain. First off, I was in Northern Ireland to visit family and present at the Aga Shop, Belfast. I always look forward to going there. The team strike the right balance between friendly and professional, and I know that I can always rely upon them to pick up the right ingredients for the recipes I am deming. A good home economist should never blame his spatula, but there is nothing quite as embarrassing as cooking in front of the people when you don’t have the correct condiments.
 
However, this occasion was slightly special: it was a charity event tied in with Children In Need. They had even provided transport for me. No, not a helicopter or a limousine, but a donkey and cart. You wouldn’t catch Kanye West doing that.

James, Pudsey and the staff of the AGA Shop Belfast with Dennis the Donkey and his driver Robert

 
Secondly, I had to fly to Toronto for a meeting in Aga’s Canadian HQ for their coverage of North America. I can’t go into the specifics about what this meeting entailed, other than it was both stressful and exciting in equal measures. Meetings such as this one can mean the opening of new doors for me, or the flowering of fresh opportunities, so they are always filled with emotional, intellectual and physical pressure. Fortunately, I thrive under these conditions. I always have. But it’s getting to the stage of the year where I could do with a day or two without meetings like this. I am, to use the vernacular, blootered. And jetlagged. And when I get like that I moan a lot. It’s not an attractive quality, I know, so for my own sake – and the sake of my nearest and dearest – I am very much looking forward to the Christmas break when I can unplug my laptop – and my brain – and unwind for a few days.

But Christmas, of course, means demos. And dozens of turkeys. And journeys up and down all the motorways England has to offer.
 
Now, where’s that bucket?

//

James McIntosh

Promote your Page too

The Eye Of The Storm

At the moment, life is just like a huge wave. Some days, when I am full of pep, have enjoyed a good sleep, and stress is not jangling my nerve endings like a set of jailer’s keys, I feel as if I am right top of that wave, coasting on the surf, outwards from the beach, as far as it will take me. At others, it feels as if I am flailing beneath it, floundering under the water as it crashes and booms in my eardrums.

The reason for this strange mixture of emotions, and for my absence from blogging over the past while, is that I am currently caught up in a whirlwind of busyness. Old and new projects are speeding headlong towards the station on which I stand at a rapid rate, and I’m trying to decide which one to get on – or else I’m the controller trying to stop them all from derailing.

I realise that I am speaking mostly in metaphors here – and I have quite probably mixed a few – but I am trying my hardest not to say anything I shouldn’t. These are exciting times, friends, but they are also anxious times. I’ve been working so hard on my brand for so long now that I find it difficult to accept that it is almost coming to fruition. It’s odd to think of myself as a “brand” – to look at my name and realise that it is now just as associated with my cookbooks, cookery demos and website as it is with my childhood, my school days or my time at university. My name no longer belongs to just me.

Again, the cause of this soul-searching is that there is, to be vague, a lot going on. And it’s all very exciting. I can’t really elaborate on that – which is akin to giving somebody a brightly-coloured cracker and then telling not allowing them to pull it – but I can tell you that that I’ve been working hard and keeping myself out of trouble. I’ve been doing demos and filming videos and working on some promotion and thinking up new ideas for concepts and books. And, if you would allow me to blow my own trumpet – or rather, play my own entire orchestra – it’s been going pretty well. I’ll be revealing more about what exactly has been shaking in casa McIntosh in the New Year, but until then I’ll be blogging more regularly.

I have to go. The wave is surging again.

//

James McIntosh

Promote your Page too

Frankfurt Book Fair

The poet T. S. Eliot famously said that his life had been measured out with coffee spoons. I, on the other hand, have measured out mine with plane journeys. I’ve flown nearly a dozen times during the past fortnight. Frankly, I’m sick of flying.

However, I’m going to have to lump it because later this week I jet off yet again for the Frankfurt Book Fair. This annual event is, not to put too fine a point on it, a big deal. Lasting five days and attracting more than a quarter of a million visitors, it provides the likes of me with a critical marketing exercise. It’s a vital opportunity for me to secure international publishing rights for my series of cookbooks so the pressure is on.

The James McIntosh Series of Cookbooks

Winning a golden pair of Gourmand awards continues to pay dividends. I am one of a small handful of chefs who have been invited to present at the fair. Chef Wan, who I have mentioned before, will be there, as will Chakall. These names may not be instantly recognisable here in the UK, but they are held in very high esteem on the international stage. To be ranked amongst their number is a true privilege. I know that I talk about this a lot, but I cannot tell you how flattering and humbling it is to be invited to such a prestigious event.

For those of you who are interested, I will be demoing:

• Yellow Tail King Fish with Saffron Aioli (from Mix.)
• Christmas Syllabub with mixed nuts (from Mix.)
• Raspberry and White Chocolate muffins (from Mix.)
• Pork with Mustard and Apple (from Dinner.)
• Orange and Chicory Salad (from Veg.)
• Marmalade cake (from Cake.)

If you are interested in purchasing the rights, best contact Jamie McOuat  +447740631424 or jmcouat@brookes.ac.uk

I’ll update you with more when I’m back!

//

I predict a maggot, I predict a maggot….

Mangosteen straight from the tree, yummy

The idea of being filmed sounds fine until you’re actually being filmed. You can fool yourself into thinking that you have perfect poise and clipped, clear diction, but that’s before you’re standing in front of a team of people brandishing cameras, lights and booms. You’re expected to act naturally, yet at the same time you’re receiving directions to do and say things you might not otherwise do and say. All of a sudden your legs become filled with jellied eels, your tongue swells to three times its regular size, and your arms become strangers, flailing and flapping about like those tall balloons you see outside car showrooms.

I became accustomed to the idea pretty quickly. After a few takes, I started to relax and forget that the cameras, lights and booms were there at all. This was greatly helped by my genial co-presenters,

Dumplings ready to steam

with whom I struck up a relaxed bonhomie after approximately half a day of filming. One of them is a genuine celebrity in China – seriously, I can’t emphasise just how revered he is amongst his abundance of followers. He is mobbed – and I mean mobbed – in the street on a regular basis. It was like witnessing Beatlemania firsthand.

The filming schedule was a strange and varied beast. Some days we kicked off very early in the morning, others we were called just before lunch. I thrive on routine, so it was odd to adapt to the absence of routine – or rather, a higgledy-piggledy routine. Even then it’s amazing how quickly you become acclimatised to a new way of doing things. For example, I had a tour guide who carried my luggage. Now, as far as I see it, I was blessed with two arms and hands, so I am more than capable of lugging about my own bags. He wouldn’t take “no” for an answer, however, and I was scared to offend him. When I travel further afield, I’m constantly wary of breaking that country’s rules of etiquette, so it seemed much simpler to allow my guide to be a glorified bellhop, no matter how embarrassing and awkward I found it.

THE maggot

If I’m honest, I found mealtimes more of a struggle. There were moments when I was tempted to throw etiquette to one side for the good of my stomach. I ate donkey (amongst other things),  (something I suspected only existed in comics, along with Desperate Dan’s cow pie) and jellyfish, neither of which I would recommend or wish to consume again. Chicken, meanwhile, is served with the head still attached – complete with comb. On one memorable occasion, I arrived at a restaurant where I was told we would be served traditional “peasant food”. This turned out to be maggots. Yes, that’s right: maggots. The very same wriggling, twisting larvae with which fishermen bait their lines. I was not – pardon the pun – hooked.

I ate some wonderful food in China, and I ate some truly horrific food. The hardest part was that I could never predict what kind would greet me when I sat down at the dining table. Therefore, each mealtime was preceded by nervous tension and loin-girding as I psyched myself up for eating some unidentifiable foodstuff – sometimes it was better not to be able to tell what was in front of me.

That said, we could all learn a great deal from Chinese hospitality. I was regularly humbled by the warmth and courtesy shown to me by their hosts. And I was forced to remind myself that while I was turning my nose up at the gloop filling my bowl, this was perhaps all they could afford. In fact, on several occasions this was more than they could afford. It pained me to realise how much I craved a McDonalds – there was one outlet on every corner of most towns and cities. I was surrounded by a ancient culture so rich and deep it would take me ten trips to barely scratch its surface, and I was hankering after a plastic, disposable burger. Shame on me.

I could daily feel myself inching out of my own self-imposed comfort zone. This is always a good thing, no matter how many maggots you need to eat to get there.

More to follow…..

//