Gourmet my Arse!

The word "gourmet" is over-used in the USA. Constant application to items such as burgers, jerky and cat food have stretched the word out, made it frayed and baggy, worn holes in the knees and rendered it useless for carrying meaning.

Today laughing chance brought me stumbling across a section of the salon.com website known as the Surreal Gourmet. A chap called Bob Blumer advocates recipes in which a familiar ingredient is cooked in an unfamiliar appliance and vice versa. Did you know you can poach salmon in a dishwasher?

At first I thought "how ingenious," but in the last few minutes it’s occured to me that it’s as "ingenious" as it is "gourmet". True ingenuity is not using a non-essential electrical appliance to amuse dinner party guests, it’s plastering a dead hedgehog in mud and roasting it in a bonfire, gypsy style. That, and making water flow uphill using a corkscrew tube.