The Editor's Hospitality Blog

With Halloween only four weeks away, now is probably a good time to start digging out some interesting pumpkin recipes - and where better to start than on Caterersearch's recipe channel?

Among the channel's 1400 recipes, you'll find: pumpkin tortellini, crushed amaretti, mostardadi Cremona by Bruno Loubet; Anthony Flinn's pumpkin and muscovado toffee ravioli with apple and mascarpone mousse and cardamom ice cream; and white chocolate delice, pumpkin and cardamom choux buns, bitter chocolate sorbet by Robert Thompson.

I spent an enjoyable morning and lunch at Mosimann's private dining club in Belgravia today, filming a video Q&A with legendary chef-restaurateur Anton Mosimann for imminent publication on Caterersearch. The club celebrates its twentieth anniversary this year.

Before his arrival, I assumed the role of chef Mosimann, sitting in the great man's seat in order to get camera angles right. Not that passing guests were fooled - the absence of an immaculate silver moustache on my top lip and colourful bow tie around my neck gave the game away.

Anton outlined his culinary philosophy, embodied in his cuisine naturelle cooking style, and recalled the variable standard of food he encountered when he arrived at the Dorchester Hotel as its youngest ever Maitre Chef de Cuisine, in 1975. One particular bugbear of his was the excessive amount of gelatin used. Once, he said, a waiter dropped a smoked salmon terrine that he was carrying down a staircase. "The waiter fell over, the plate smashed, there was broken crockery everywhere, but the terrine just kept on bouncing up and down on the spot".

Today's Evening Standard claims coffee chain Starbucks wastes 23 million litres of water a day through its policy of leaving taps running to avoid staff passing on germs by turning them on and off.

Starbucks executives will find all sorts of useful information in our Green Month channel about saving natural resources - though I must admit it never occurred to us to include "don't run taps all day across your 10,000-strong chain" in any of our 'top tips' list.

I had lunch today in a fancy London restaurant that I shall not name, and was amused to witness goings-on at the adjacent table, where two elderly gents asked the waitress to decant their bottle of burgundy.

She duly returned with a decanter, into which she upturned the bottle to vertical and began to slosh wine. Alarmed, one of the gents grabbed her arm and levelled the bottle, explaining that a little more delicacy might be in order. At this, the waitress tilted the bottle so close to horizontal, that the wine dribbled down it and onto the floor. Her coup de grace was to empty the sediment from their pricey bottle into the decanter, to the horror of the two old boys.

I don't believe for a moment that the poor standard of wine service the men received was the fault of the waitress. Rather, her employers should be ashamed of themselves for expecting guests to pay top whack for good wines, but not being prepared to invest in effective staff training. They could do far worse than to check out Caterersearch's wine channel and seek out our series of wine masterclasses penned by former Gordon Ramsay Holdings executive head sommelier, Ronan Sayburn.

Tonight, Simon Hulstone, chef-patron of the Michelin-starred Elephant restaurant in Torquay has taken home the title of Knorr National Chef of the Year and the £10,000 prize money.

The announcement, made at the dinner at the Sheraton Park Lane hotel, comes after a three-hour cook-off at the Restaurant Show at London's Earls Court earlier today.

Eight chefs competed in the cook-off in which they had to produce a four-course meal from a selection of ingredients from a mystery basket, which included grey mullet, rabbit, pears, apples and blackberries.

Clark Crawley, sous chef from Barclays Wealth in London took second place, followed by David Kennedy, chef-proprietor of the Black Door restaurant, Newcastle upon Tyne in third.

This is Hulstone's fourth attempt at winning the title.

On winning the Knorr National Chef of the Year, Hulstone's dad, chef Roger commented: "It's about f***ing time!"

Nothing like fatherly love... 

Check our our video from the cook off and from the awards ceremony

By Katherine Alano

Males across the hospitality industry will wince at the news of the release of a new multimedia recipe book entitled the Testicles Cookbook. According the Telegraph, the book, which is subtitled Cooking with Balls, features such delights as testicle pizza, testicle ghoulash and white wine testicles. The recipes' descriptions of mincing, slicing and boiling testicles in hot oil are enough to make any man's eyes water.

Author Ljubomir Erovic, dedicates the book to his grandmother "for introducing me to the delicious world of testicles". According to Erovic, the testicles of bulls, pigs, turkeys, and even stallions and ostriches, can all be turned into tasty, testosterone-rich meals.

Chefs who manage to master the art of cooking testicles might wish to enter the World Testicle Cooking Championship, whose URL, ballcup.com, is clearly a product of the Ronseal school of web addressing.

All in all, it's a concept that brings a whole new meaning to meat and two veg.