Long dormant but still champing at the bit, ready to make mouths water by invoking the myriad and complex flavours of the New World, I'm back and haven't you just missed me?
Moving away from the traditional Pastry Disgrace formula of reviewing restaurants and what they do best, I find it can be equally fun to look under the grubby sofa of the food industry.
So, to fill you in on my absence, I've been working at a summer school, where the food wasn't quite inedible but did disappoint with its monotony and low quality ingredients, often unfortunate traits of large-scale catering on a budget. Saying this, when you're hungry, you eat, right? That's right.
The school had a couple of hot options every day and even had a healthy salad bar available every lunch and dinner time. The bar contained an assortment of greenery, tomatoes, cold meats, and leftovers processed into the likes of potato salad and I think it's safe to say that everyone took advantage of it, if only to break up the monotony of the school-dinner like hot options (lumpy custard-check, weird jelly desserts-check, bad gravy-check). That was, until weird things started showing up in the salad leaves...
The strangest apparition was one lunch time amongst the lettuce when what appeared to be tree leaf, brown, curled, dead and full of gritty mud sat winking at me from amongst the rocket. Thankfully, it didn't go in my mouth but it did remind of some other awful experiences with foreign objects in food that just shouldn't have been there.
One of my favourite stories comes from my brother who swears blind thathe found a whole cow's eyelid, replete with eyelashes, lurking under the pastry of a "Fray Bentos" pie!. Another friend of mind once found a pig's tooth in her Chinese meal. So in that spirit, this week's blog asks: What's the worst thing you've ever found in your food?
