FoodCycle’s Green & Pleasant Land dinner

Originally published on The Financial Times: How To Spend It on 05/03/16

Michelin-starred chefs get together to raise money for charity

Whoever came up with the proverb “too many cooks spoil the broth” was clearly unacquainted with the charity FoodCycle – and its Michelin-starred gala events.

Launched in May 2009, the group campaigns against food waste by collecting unwanted supermarket stock – mislabelled, damaged, over-ordered and almost-expired produce – and using it to prepare three-course meals for people who struggle to afford to feed themselves. With 29 volunteer-run projects across the UK, it has already provided more than 125,000 free meals, and is now running its second gala event to help fund its work.

The Green & Pleasant Land dinner at London’s Guildhall on April 21 will bring together seven chefs – including Giorgio Locatelli, Angela Hartnett, Shay Cooper and Cyrus Todiwala – to create a course each, and all proceeds from the £350 tickets will go to the charity. Menus are still being finalised, but the feast will include sambar masala-marinated fish with coconut-fondant potatoes, created by The Modern Pantry’s Anna Hansen, and Gloucester Old Spot porchetta with a Jersey Royal gratin courtesy of Salt Yard’s Ben Tish.

“FoodCycle is so important right now,” says Tish. “In our indulgent, careless times, it is making us understand our food wastage, then using this to help others. It couldn’t be more relevant.”

Hosted by food critic and broadcaster Jay Rayner, whose jazz band, the Jay Rayner Quartet – featuring Rayner on piano and his wife on vocals – will play live on the night, there will also be a silent auction, before the menu is rounded off with Australian chef Skye Gyngell’s almond tart with plum blossom ice cream and honeycomb.

In this case, maybe too many chefs will spoil the guests.

A twist in the tale

A review of “Blackadder’s Christmas Carol”, originally published in Swissair Inflight Magazine, December 2014

Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” is arguably the most familiar festive story in the world. However, over 150 years after he put pen to paper, some of what would become the most familiar names in TV and cinema took his tale and told it their own way. “Blackadder’s Christmas Carol”, co-written in 1988 by future romcom king Richard Curtis – creator of films including “Four Weddings and a Funeral” and “Love Actually” – stars Rowan Atkinson, Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry and “Harry Potter” star Robbie Coltrane.

Atkinson plays Ebenezer Blackadder, who, like Dickens’ Scrooge, is visited by a ghost, but ends up undergoing a rather different change of character after seeing that “bad guys have all the fun”. Laurie appears in two visions the ghost presents to Blackadder, first as a slow-witted upper-class prince – a far cry from the medical genius he’d later portray in “House” – then, with Fry, as an attendant to a futuristic queen. As for the ghost, that’s played by Coltrane, who seems to have kept hold of the costume for his role as Hagrid in “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets”, which is also playing on board.

Flattered that @LitroMagazine wanted to interview me about one of my stories. The interview is here: http://t.co/Vw3ajSOmMw

— Ian Shine (@IanShine) April 13, 2015