Cooking With Dog Takes The Biscuit

Shoo just showed me this on YouTube and we found it so engrossing I thought it deserved some extra exposure. Take a look.



Isn't it just perfect? The miniature poodle, the narrator's bizzarre accent - I love the way he just about manages to translate everything except "naruto maki" (it's a kind of sausage made of fish paste) which just gets left as is. If you watch more episodes it's also fun to track the pooch's absurd hairstyles...

Jokes aside, it actually gives a great insight into a Japanese staple and a load of clever techniques and tricks. Cooking the spinach from the roots, for example, and slicing the egg in two with string. Although if you followed this recipe you wouldn't be able to enjoy your bowl of ramen until about a day after you started preparing it. And in my experience ramen is something you decide to eat on the spur of the moment (usually at around 3am after a night's drinking). Which explains why most Japanese people would get it from a dedicated shop rather than make it at home. Ferocious competition, secrecy and pride surround the making of ramen in those noodle bars.

It got me thinking of Tampopo, a movie I watched a long time ago; it's a 'ramen western', focusing on the efforts of a ramen-chef's widow to take the helm of the failing shop she's inherited. She has help from a truck driver-slash-cowboy who rides on into town to help her out. You can see a great scene from it here, where a ronin (masterless samurai) teaches the correct way to eat ramen, in a priceless parody of zen ceremony:



What about you - found any other weird and wacky cooking videos out there? Or do you have a favourite food-related movie?