Sometimes….when you are cooking for famous people your too busy in the kitchen to get your hands on memorabilia such as menus, that’s usually snapped up by the wait staff and even the other guests. Luckily this time I did manage to get a signed photo that reads…

“To Kevin Ashton, best wishes from Ronald Reagan”.

Whenever I have rubbed elbows with anyone famous from celebrity chefs all the way to American Presidents, I have always found them to be polite and gracious.
On the other hand my sister-in-law who used to be in the catering “biz” has one or two humorous tails of famous people being rude.

She told me about the American singer Andy Williams stay at The Grand Hotel in Birmingham. He spent several days being as rude as he could to all the staff before getting his comeuppance. You see Mr Williams liked to leave his shoes outside his room at night so the night porter could polish them….then the next morning he would pick them up together with his newspaper off his doorstep. This particular morning however the bedroom suite door blew shut, leaving Andy locked out and worse he was only wearing a hotel bath towel! A fellow guest raised the alarm but due to the rudeness of the singer for the past several days, the staff took over an hour to rescue him.
© Kevin Ashton 2006

When I started writing a newspaper recipe column almost 3 years ago it was an education, a learning process of writing down recipes in a way that made them hopefully user friendly. By that I mean they should be easy to follow, not too complicated and strike a balance because the readers will be a mixture of novice’s and experienced cooks…after all being a good chef does not automatically make you a good recipe writer.

It seems simple enough to write the recipe once you have the quantities…right?

I re-read my recipes and spell check them to hopefully catch most mistakes, never the less being a real working chef sometimes between the cooking and the writing my day can become very long.

I some times ask others to read them prior to publishing if I am trying to explain certain techniques. I prefer non-chefs for this to gauge how well the recipe is understood.

I used to write my recipes in both metric and imperial but then about 18 months ago decided it was time to just use metric and see if I got any adverse feed back
(I did not).

I always write a preamble to entice the reader in, though sometimes in the Birmingham Sunday Mercury these are edited, or even cut out due to lack of space.

I try to write a mixture of recipes to cover all courses, cuisines and seasons of the year.

Though I don’t have an army of assistants like my more famous colleagues, I physically make each dish myself before publishing to ensure that it works.

Avoid using ingredients that are not generally available to the public, what’s the point of me writing a recipe with foie gras for instance if the vast majority of readers can not either source or afford it?

I also tone down the presentation of the finished dish to hopefully make the end result achievable.
Occasionally I get fed back from the readers of my column, which I enjoy very much,
I always make a point of writing a reply thanking them.

At the end of the day writing good easy to understand recipes is my goal. Striving to strike a balance between enough information so the reader understands the process and too much information which can give the impression that the recipe is too complex to attempt.
The Art of Recipe Writing © Kevin Ashton 2006