You may have noticed a scarcity of posts ’round these parts of late. Then again, you may not … is there no one to yell at me when I haven’t posted in a while?! Someone step up to the plate!

Truth be told, we’ve been doing a fair bit of travelling recently, compounded with my innate laziness and my status as God Emperor of Procrastination. To make matters worse, we’re taking off again today, and won’t be back ’til the end of next week. Until now I hope that nice New Orleans playlist has kept you busy, and I hope to keep you busy for a while with today’s post as well.

By sheer happenstance I stumbled across what could possibly be The Greatest Cooking Show Ever. It’s a BBC production called “Posh Nosh,” starring the Hon. Simon and Minty Marchmont, who have dedicated their lives to bringing extraordinary food to ordinary people. Here’s Episode 1, “Architect’s Fish and Chips”:

As you might have noticed … it’s a parody. And it’s hysterical. The first episode I saw was number 3, and it had me shrieking. From Minty’s ridiculous terminology (she doesn’t peel vegetables, she “embarrasses” them), the outrageously expensive ingredients they call for, the person to whom Simon’s true affection is directed (it ain’t Minty) and many quotable quotes:

“I know which side my Brad is battered!”

“There’s a famous saying: ‘Like schoolboys, Rieslings are best enjoyed young.'” “Er … school DAYS.” “What? Yes.”

“We make our own stock, but by all means buy stock cubes, if you have no self-esteem.”

They only made eight of them, and the shows are only about 9 minutes each, so you should be able to knock them all out fairly quickly. Our friend Fiona informed us that it was produced as an interstitial between shows, and quickly developed a following of its own — people would tune in for this rather than the shows at either end. Arabella Weir and Richard E. Grant (aka Withnail from “Withnail and I”) are brilliant, and keep an eye on who plays José Luis. According to one of the YouTube commenters (one of the few useful comments I’ve ever seen on that service) there’s an additional level of humor for native Britons. Minty’s accent is distinctively lower-middle class — “all her snobbiness is aspiration from someone who married into it, which Brits find hysterically funny.” It’s funny enough even without that.

Here are links to the other episodes:

Episode 2. Birthday Parties
Episode 3. Paella
Episode 4. Beautiful Food
Episode 5. Bread and Butter Pudding
Episode 6. Leftovers
Episode 7. Sauces
Episode 8. Comfort Food

Join us next week on “Posh Nosh,” when I’ll be disabling a partridge in its own jus.

And now for something completely different …

Idle conversation at work the other day brought up this question: Did Luke Skywalker feel any guilt over the couple million working stiffs he snuffed when he blew up the Death Star? Were the cooks evil too? (RumDood informs us that the movie “Clerks” cleared up this point, but I didn’t see it, so I consider it un-cleared up.)

Big booster of the service industry that I am, what about the cooks on the Death Star? Somebody had to feed Darth Vader, Grand Moff Tarkin and all those hungry cloned stormtroopers. Turns out Eddie Izzard wondered the same thing, and his musings are accompanied by some illustrative animation.

The penne all’arrabiatta would be lovely …

I’ll trickle out at least one more post this week, but I’ll see y’all in a week, quite likely with some drinking stories.