Battered

I have never been a huge fan of battered fish, unless prepared flawlessly by angry looking Japanese Sushi chefs with a lifetime of training (in the form of tempura).

My recent sojourns into this greasy pier-side world have dampened my view even more.

The batter normally presents itself in an impressive way, rolling hills of orangy crunch promising a wonderland of soft, succulent, whiter than white fish beneath. This gross misrepresentation of the facts leads to lashings of unqualified anticipation.

Breaking the normally limp seal you find a chasm that would raise the eyebrow of even the most seasoned potholer, challenging the new found 'Titan' in Derbyshire. Bravely entering this dark void where perhaps only Gandalf has ventured, the fillet is finally discovered. This turns out to be a slip of mostly slimy unwashed overcooked skin, alot like the hide of a Balrog with a penchant for holidays in the Spanish costas.

Heston Blumenthal (the scientific chef) has the answer to all of these woes.

To improve the crunch of the batter, without over cooking the fish, bubbles are the answer. If you are feeling extravagant Champagne in the mix would do the trick. The more practical option is lager, but this lacks the 'pzazz' don't you think?
The fish should be muscular, and therefore male, as the male fish spend most of their time swimming around trying to impress female fish.

I always seem to chance upon timid sober females. Perhaps we should be given a choice of sex and Moet in our local chip shop?

Danger Mouse

Still on the topic of mice, they are to be the food tasters for athletes at the Beijing Olympics. After all, they have had plenty of practice in miscellaneous kitchens around the world.

Chopsticks will be quite a challenge as will the fizzing effects of too many comparatively large prawn crackers. It might be hard to distinguish when a mouse has a resulting upset stomach due to their tiny 'bb gun pellet' like turds. You will need a myopic professor of mouse muck to analyse the samples.

The covering of fur will amply hide any green tinge in the complexion due to general food driven malaise, and there is an unbreachable language barrier when they want to express how they are feeling. I suppose instant death is the only real way the mouse can inform us if food is off, and short of rotten oysters I am hard pushed to think of anything.

Imagine the fall out back here, a slovenly restaurant with hygiene problems arguing that the all too prevalent chef's furry friends are just in training for the Olympics.

Six Million Dollar Mice

It seems that mice make the exploits of Lee Majors seem quite ordinary, albeit with organic style bionics this time.

The latest mouse miracle has to do with red wine.

Thanks to the stressed disposition of our friends the vines, the unhappy grapes produce a chemical under the skin called resveratrol. This appears in red wine in spades.

Resveratrol extract was fed to lethargic, lardy couch potato mice who ate Big Mac Meals for breakfast. Amazingly it was shown that despite the still rotund appearance of the creatures, their insides were as fresh and fat free as their thin cousins who ate salad all day between exercise obsessions.

If applicable to us humans, it looks like you might be able to be very big on the outside, and beautiful on the inside, the source of your next gargantuan meal, not its implications, your only worry.

The classic fast food question could become 'would you like wine with that'. After all drinking Pinot out of a paper cup is already demonstrated very well by Miles in 'Sideways'.