Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Eat drink man woman

"So how would we make our own processed cheese slices?"
- This is the phrase from Hestor Blumenthal that I think, for me summed up the difference of his approach to making a cheeseburger to Nigella Lawson's EXPRESS which I watched last night. Blumnethal used a whole half-hour program to explore how to make the PERFECT cheeseburger including weighing the burger after each bite to check you got a a bit of everything, experimenting with different shapes of bun, making his own processed cheese using the chemical that's used to cure cystitis (YES, he REALLY DID) and making his own ketchup out of tomato concentrate.
It's well-known that Hestor takes cooking a little more serious than most people or in his own words: "If you de-burger does it become too poncey and no longer a burger/" Maybe, yes Hestor!

Nigella, on the other hand, was making food the way I would usually. She didn't know how much of each ingredient she put in (but she made a rough estimate for people watching who NEEDED to get the right amount!). Now, I don't think Nigella got where she is by just winging it the whole time. I'm sure she started, as most of us did, by weighing and measuring but it is pretty cool to see someone cooking on television like a normal person.

It made me think about how we do church sometimes. Do those of us in ministry take it just a little bit too seriously? Yes we might need to give the odd aside to explain something but otherwise keeping it simple is more like the way we "do it at home". Of course, we DO need that underlying understanding. I think doing in worship without understanding why is far worse than going so deep into understanding it all that you end up overcomplicating it (but understanding the complications). Where is the balance?

Do we Blumenthalise our liturgy too often and lose the flavour?
Do we make it too EXPRESS an EXPRESSION?
p.s. One interesting bit of info from Hestor, though - the perfect mouthful is apparently something less than two fingers thick, which means... you can eat a whole waggon wheel but a whole doughnut might be too much!!

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