The Kitchen Is On Fire

When James won his first Oscar for his incredible turn as an aged Bane coming to terms with his saggy body and his life of crime and carnage in Richard Curtis’s wonderful ‘An Old People’s Home Near Watford’, many commented on his stirring acceptance speech. How he dedicated his win to his ‘most incredibly handsome and wise best friend Sam’. How he refused to take the credit for that scene, the one where Bane and Martine McCutcheon make (grey) love on a row boat during a delightful day trip out to Whipsnade Zoo, instead thanking ‘from the bottom of my heart, my sensei of love, Sam’. As honoured listeners to this podcast will know, this was classic James. And there’s plenty more classic James on this week’s episode of The TickyOff.

He’s been playing a weird game in his parent’s garden, delaying his pleasure and styling his hair like Abs from Five. Sam meanwhile doesn’t trust Easter, regularly dresses up like a mummy and wants people to cheer up at funerals, just not while attending his own.

Then Ben Tish arrives like many, not all, but most guests, arrive to TickyOff Towers. Via the door. Ben’s mouth opens and closes, laying eggs of sound all around. His new book ‘Moorish’, the perils of Saturday Kitchen and his early days in cooking with Oliver Peyton, Jason Atherton and Dan Lepard. Other aural oeufs crack wide open and drip sound albumen on his hometown of Skegness, how much he enjoys dressing up like Stevie Nicks and Marcus Wareing acting like a twat.
There’s a lot of these audible eggs and yet somehow there’s also time to ponder on whether or not mountains are worth the hassle, couscous and the trials and tribulations of fast expansion.

This week’s episode is sponsored by the funky jazz sax and slap bass wonders of the world of wine dropwine.co.uk

Direct download: TKIOF-EP182-FEATHERED_OR_LEATHERED.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 11:54am EDT

A number of etchings were recently unearthed in a system of caves many miles beneath the Andean mountain ranges just south of Carlisle, in Peru. At first these strange hieroglyphs baffled the archeologists who had dug them up, with a big digger. They were on the verge of just filling in the big hole they’d dug, with their big digger, and admitting failure. Just in time though someone realised there were two humans who would definitely be able to crack the spooky etching conundrum. Those two human ‘men’? JR and SH, the TKIOF Boyz.
Flown to the site in a very expensive hovercraft, the TickyOff legends quickly deduced that the ancient cave wall vandals had simply written: The Kitchen Is On Fire Is The Best Podcast Ever and Forever. They’d also drawn a big…..element on the wall too. Very immature.
This week’s episode yet again proves the cave-scrapers’s correct. There’s waterpolo, Michel Roux Jr rueing the day, a lot of pie chat and a journey around the entirety of Ripon town centre. James has cooked a weird wellington and may be in line to become a hornblower. Sam will not reveal what he does in his house when his kids are out but he does reveal a tale of a woman with haunted bees in her eye.
Then Owen Barratt from the mighty Monty’s Deli arrives with tales of the toll cooking professionally takes on the body, Kickstarter, beautiful tiles, the wonders of Reading and the joy of pleather.
Owen has also been playing a lot of ‘Farming Simulator’, has some concerns about Thom Yorke and is very much down on lemon thyme.

This week’s episode is sponsored by seventh wonders of the world of wine dropwine.co.uk

Direct download: TKIOF-EP181-AUGUST_AND_EVERYTHING_AFTER.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 7:16am EDT

This week restaurant critic and food writer Tom Parker Bowles is sat in the hottest of seats upon the mighty TickyOff. Imagine an internally heated saddle on a TickyOff shaped horse, that's the vibe and that's why cowboys wear chaps. Heat dispersion.

Things get off to a Brexit-themed start as Tom talks about Brexit. That doesn’t last long however as he then tells all about tabloid stings, death metal versus bagpipes and firing guns off the back of a flatbed truck in Guadalajara.
Also this week, James has crumbs on his lip, is making kombucha and wasn’t allowed to watch the start of ‘Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves’. We learn that Sam loves grouper, Tom finds dolphins sinister and James makes an incredibly niche indie-rock circa 2003 reference.
And if this episode wasn’t stuffed full enough with fat topics like a pod-based cotechino sausage, there’s also fun at a medieval fayre, a haunted tudor mansion, William Sitwell stealing people’s lines on ‘Masterchef’ and…….Sam and James go to a Smeg showroom.

If that isn’t a mountain based Sly Stallone vehicle with a hell of an opening scene, I don’t know what is.

This week’s episode is sponsored by the incredibly gifted archers, whittlers, weavers and wine experts at dropwine.co.uk

Direct download: TKIOF-EP180-FULL_BODY_GOUT.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 4:16am EDT

Recently James and Sam were mildly honoured to be invited to give the commencement speech to the 2019 class at the hallowed Massachusetts Institute Of Technology or MIT as some call it. Gushes of absolutely classic TickyOff mouth sounds were sprayed from the dais directly into the ear openings on the eager students headskulls. It was then the nerdy youngsters chance to be feel truly honoured when they were given the opportunity to offer up some Quickfire questions of their own to James and Sam. Unfortunately the be-robed Ivy Leaguer’s questions were far from the incredible standard required so the TickyOff boys bailed on the entire soiree in disgust. That’s why you haven’t seen any YouTube videos of the shindig alongside other commencement speech classics like the David Foster Wallace one about the fish or the one to Grimsby Polytechnic’s woodworking class of 1976 by turkey legend Bernard Matthews.

Fortunately Sam and James are back from Boston to bring the Quickfire, the Over/Under and the world class audible mouth noises to you, the most loyal and the largest audience in podcasting history.
This week chef and restaurateur Enrique Olvera is here and he’s a stone cold big deal. Pujol in Mexico City rides high on the World’s 50 Best list, Cosme and Atla in NYC are packed and critically acclaimed, he’s got a new book out ‘Tu Casa Mi Casa’ and he knows how to drink large amounts of mezcal without embarrassing himself. Unlike the TickyOff gang.

Enrique offers up a guide to the best restaurants in Mexico City, the five year old mole at Pujol, collaboration, and the pros and cons of a culinary education. There’s also just enough time for the first ever outro to an episode of TKIOF. In this aural appendage, Sam is poor and greedy and James says ‘arena of conflict’. There’s a new chef going great guns at Pidgin and they spill a vast variety of legumes about their upcoming trip to Greece to cook in a haunted monastery.

This week’s episode is sponsored by winged and b’whiskered wine champions of the world dropwine.co.uk.

Direct download: TKIOF-EP179-MILITARY_TERMINOLOGY.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 7:00am EDT

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