What ever happened to the Gravy?

Dined out last night, in what would be called a first class restaurant. Not for the first time I commented on the quantity of sauce being served. The gravy itself was delectable but it had been applied to the meat dish with a fine paint brush; all very artistic but not what I would call nourishing.
It used to be that a main course dish comprised of plate, generously covered with meat or fish, potatos, rice or pasta, accompanied by a vegetable and complimented with a hefty helping of sauce. Nowadays, the plates have increased in size and shape and colour. I was recently served three small scallops on a gi-normous, black, triangular plate.
As the plates have grown in size, the food served on them has retreated to the middle of the dish and to spare the chef time, the meat, fish or whatever, is placed, pyramid fashion, on top of the potato, rice or pasta. This is then topped up with a minute portion of veg and perhaps a miniscule branch of deep fried parsley or aubergine for decoration. To cover the indecency of the half naked plate, the chef will then scribble a little sauce around the pyramid as if he is a Japanese line artist.
There used to be a piece of porcelain called a sauce boat but as gravy began to dry up like the water along the Nile valley, some gastronome invented the flat sauce spoon, which I suppose was to deter people from licking their plates, but even this wonderful innovation has now disappeared.
I am not complaining about quality because I’ll be the first to admit, that if you are willing to pay the price for it, restaurant food is getting better. But I do appeal to chefs in general to remember we are not all on a diet, and if you happen to be an ethnic English chef, please don’t forget the old staple, meat, potatos and gravy...lots of it.

There's always taxation

En route from Frankfurt to Koblenz and after passing the town of Bingham, for almost 60 minutes the train weaves its way through a valley and along the steeply terraced slopes, following every turn of the Rhine. At every bend of the river you are looking out of the window at history. The fortresses of Marksburg, Castle Ehrenbreitstein, Burg Lahneck, and the Pfalzgrafstein; the Palatine Count’s Rock, built around 1327, on a mid-river island, are only a few of the many ruins visible on the hills across the river. I’ve made this journey many times and I never tire of the magnificence of it and rightly so have UNESCO inscribed this area of the Upper Middle Rhine, as a World Heritage site.

I was aboard again today, enjoying a glass of Pils and the wintery afternoon view and flipping through God and Mammon, Protestants, Money, and the Market, 1790 – 1860’. I say flipping through because I don’t normally read text books but a colleague had pressed it upon me as I was leaving Frankfurt.
I was half reading and half watching the ruins pass by and thinking about the past owners of these castles, which were all built of greed. How would they have reacted to our present world financial crisis? Probably they would have increased the tax on the boats passing up and down the river.

Unpleastant task for today

Today I must travel to Frankfurt to perform the unhappy duty of closing down our European office. I’m not at all looking forward to it, considering the friendships I have made in this city over the past two years. I doubt that we are the first international company – certainly won’t be the last – who in 2009 have been or will be, forced to terminate a rental contact in this the European Financial Capitol.

I slept extremely well and woke up this morning in a rather elated mood. Obviously the true depth of my precarious future hasn’t yet sunk in but I’m sure that in the next few days reality will take over. Until then I had better enjoy this present and an indescribable feeling of freedom. It is though a heavy, sodden blanket has been removed from over my head, exposing the warmth of a summer Sunday.