10 Questions about Food 🍲 with Martin [985] | Luke's ENGLISH Podcast - Learn British English with Luke Thompson

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You're listening to Luke's English Podcast.

Hello listeners, welcome back to Luke's English Podcast.

This episode is a conversation with my friend Martin all about food.

Martin has been on this podcast before, in episode 896, in which we rambled about his experiences of teaching English and living in different countries and how difficult it is to order ice cream in the Czech Republic, because the word for ice cream in Czech is really hard for an English person to pronounce.

It's zmrzlina, zmrzlina. which sounds like you're saying an English word backwards.

Zmrzlina, right?

Sounds like a backwards word.

Anyway, we talked about that in episode 896.

So Martin is an English teacher like me and an English man like me.

So obviously we have everything in common with each other.

So the concept for this episode is this.

Martin came up with the idea of this episode.

Basically, he prepares 10 questions on a specific topic.

And then he asks me the questions and I can answer them.

And all the Lepsters that's.

You will be happy to listen to me doing some rambling on a certain topic.

And this is actually very helpful.

Thank you, Martin, for coming up with the idea.

Very helpful because I don't really need to do any preparation.

And by choosing a specific topic, it's a good way to bring up vocabulary.

It can work as a form of vocabulary teaching, as various words and phrases on this particular theme will come up naturally during the conversation.

So it can work as a bit like a chapter from an English vocabulary book.

You know those English vocab books, like for example, English Vocabulary in Use, right?

What they often have is on one side, there's a text which has loads and loads of words.

It's a text on a certain subject and in that text are presented various vocab items, and then on the other page you've got exercises to help you practice using the vocab that's presented on the other page.

So this episode is a bit like that first page, in which we can present you with useful vocabulary on this subject in context.

The theme for this one is food, so watch out for loads of food-related vocabulary and expressions.

Now, if you're a premium subscriber, you will see that a few days ago...

I published a premium episode which will help you with the food vocab in this conversation.

So the premium episode is a vocab quiz focusing on bits of food-related vocabulary various types of food vocab, the ways that we describe food, ways of cooking food, idioms relating to food and other fixed expressions, a few phrasal verbs and things like that.

So in the premium episode I picked out all of that food-related vocab and created a vocab quiz and recorded that as a way of helping you notice and learn vocab.

And I did it with my wife.

So my wife is my special guest in this premium episode.

And basically I tested her with my vocab quiz.

And also we discuss some of the things that come up in this conversation, including what she thinks as a French person, what she thinks of English food and what she thinks of my English cooking, the way that I cook food, and stuff like that.

So there's a vocab quiz and also a discussion.

OK, here is, in fact, here's a selection of four bits of vocab from the vocab quiz in this premium episode.

I'm talking about

So let me just test you right now.

I'll give you a little sample of what you can expect.

So how do we describe?

What is the phrase that we use to describe, let's say, when you have guests at your house, you're hosting people for a dinner party.

What is the recipe that you always choose?

It's just the one that you automatically will choose.

This is your mm-mm choice.

The one that you just will automatically Well, it's your go-to, your go-to choice.

It's the one that you automatically go to, the one that you automatically choose in a situation like that, like your favourite recipe.

It's your go-to choice.

What do we call food that you eat that makes you feel okay.

Let's say you're feeling a bit down or you're feeling a bit stressed or something like that.

Maybe you've had a long journey and you're feeling very tired.

You just need food that's going to make you feel okay.

It's kind of that.

It's like food that gives you a lovely kind of cuddle or hug.

What kind of food is that?

That is food.

It's comfort food.

That's right.

Comfort food.

What about this?

What do you call someone who prepares food in a kitchen?

What do you call that person?

That seems like an easy question, but watch out.

There's a very common mistake that people make with this one.

So a person who prepares food, a person who cooks food, is called...

A cook, a chef, a chef if you're a professional.

If you're a professional working in a kitchen, in a restaurant, you might be a chef.

But just a person who's cooking food is called a cook and not a cooker.

A cooker is the actual machine that you use to cook the food.

Oven, hob, this thing is the cooker.

So the cooker is the machine and the cook is the person who uses it.

And then the fourth bit of vocab from my quiz is how do you describe someone who it is difficult to give them food because they

There's a lot of things they don't like, a lot of things they don't eat.

Like, no, I don't like mushrooms.

I can't have tomatoes.

I don't like cheese.

Oh, she's a very something person or a very something eater.

She's a very fussy eater or a picky eater.

Fussy or picky.

Okay, so that's just a little selection of some of the vocab in my quiz that you can get if you listen to my premium episode on the subject teacherlukecouk slash premium if you want to sign up to LEP Premium and get my vocab reviews and the other stuff, including this wonderful conversation with my wife.

Yes.

We're going to start this episode in just a moment.

I want to give you a reminder.

Did you listen to the episode with Anna Brooke? with all the paranormal experiences.

I just wanted to give you a reminder that we are running a competition.

Send in your creepy stories.

Have you ever had a strange experience, something unexplained, something maybe supernatural?

It doesn't have to involve ghosts.

It could just be a strange experience that you had that was a bit creepy.

Send us your descriptions.

Describe what happened.

OK, send us your descriptions of creepy experiences that you've had.

You can email them to me luketeacher, at hotmailcom, or leave them in the comments section of the episode with Anna, either on YouTube, Spotify or my website.

The ones that I like, the ones that Anna and I like, I will read them out on the podcast.

And the best one.

According to Anna and me we will be the judges the best one will win a copy of Anna's new book Death by Chocolate.

And what we're looking for is a description that basically fulfills the requirements of the task, something that clearly describes what happened, is clear, well-organized and communicates something mysterious or creepy and gives a slightly mysterious or creepy vibe.

A few errors are okay as long as the text still does the job.

Obvious or blatant use of AI will count against you.

You have until the 30th of April at midnight, your time.

That's the deadline.

LukeTeacher at Hotmail.com or the comments section of that episode with Anna.

Okay, send us your stories.

I really hope we get some stories because I know it's quite a specific requirement.

I wonder how many of you have had weird or creepy experiences.

We will see, I suppose.

But if you're in any doubt, if you're thinking well, I've got that, there's that weird thing that happened to me, but oh, I'm not sure I'll write it.

If you've got any doubt at all, just send it, just write it and send it to me.

OK, I'd love to get your stories right then.

So having said all of that, let's now get started with 10 questions about food with Martin.

I'll speak to you again at the end.

But now, without any further ado, let's get started.

And here we go.

So I thought it would be nice for you to have less of the pressure on you.

I would just ask you some questions on a sort of topic.

So maybe there would be sort of thematically linked, like a vocabulary book.

You could take some vocabulary from there.

And all you need to do is sit back and answer questions.

Okay.

Well, I won't blather on too much.

I might jump in, but...

I think it would be nice for me to maybe throw the questions back to you as well at some point.

Okay.

Well, I haven't thought about the answers.

It might seem so one-sided if it's just you asking me the questions.

No, people want to – yeah.

I mean, when you look at some famous interviewers – they don't really talk about themselves too much, do they?

They don't say, yeah.

And then other people do do that.

I find that quite annoying.

Sometimes I let the man speak.

Interviewers who chip in too much with their own.

Yeah.

Um, comments.

Yeah.

So you want to be one of those interviewers today who, who I want to be Michael Parkinson.

You don't, doesn't ever talk about himself, does he? he just, no, he doesn't know.

He didn't.

People want to listen to what they want to hear.

Luke, Luke Thompson's, Luke's English.

But I mean they get plenty of me as it is.

You know like, like the most, as I'm at the, today is a Tuesday and yesterday's episode that I published was a three and a half hour epic ramble, solo ramble.

So they get plenty of me.

It's not like they're ever thinking let's hear more of luke for a change.

I think they get plenty from me.

But no, i appreciate the gesture martin, that you, you decided that you would help out and that you would, you know, save me from doing a lot of preparation and stuff.

Yeah, 10 questions, nice and short, on a theme.

Do another one and then another 10 questions another time.

This is good.

This is great.

Okay, so what's the theme that you've chosen for this first one?

The opening theme for our first one, hopefully of many, is food.

Because I thought everyone has some relationship with food, don't they?

Yum, yum, yum.

I love food, thankfully.

Because it's quite important, isn't it, in life?

Yeah, yeah.

So my first question is a very domestic question.

Yes.

Who prepares the food?

What's the kind of ratio of food preparation in your house?

So at home, I tend to do the sort of, I do breakfast pretty much every day which is not that much.

But I mean standing in our kitchen at any mealtime when you are the designated sort of food maker is not the most relaxing experience, because you've got three people And we've got like a sort of a kind of a bar thing in the middle of the kitchen.

It's like an open kitchen living room with one of those big, it's quite a high table.

And so there's, like normally like, my wife and daughter sitting on the other side, and then my son, who's two, in his high chair on the right sitting, And they all are basically just.

They've just got all these different demands.

And I'm essentially like a barman, you know, working in my own house.

Yeah.

You know, so we're like, can I have a glass of water, please?

Or it's, can I have a glass of water?

And then I have to say, you've forgotten the magic word, please.

And then like, okay, then I'll do the glass of water.

That's your wife.

Yeah, that's my wife.

And I've got my plate of food but it's literally like one fork bite.

Have my one fork and then I've got to serve someone.

And then I go back to my plate again.

But anyway, so breakfast, I'll do that every day more or less.

And it's just a case of making muffins or crumpets or whatever for everyone and putting butter and honey and then a cup of coffee here.

And then don't throw that on the floor and stuff like that.

So i tend to do breakfast every time and your wife that's my wife, who's always throwing her food on the floor and um, same joke sorry, spilling water.

Um, and then and then, in terms of dinners um, it's me during the week and my wife at the weekend.

Yeah,

So I do a lot.

But then occasionally you know something, something happens and my wife will end up doing a dinner during the week.

You know, sort of like we'll play it by ear.

But most of the time it's me during the week and her at the weekend.

Okay.

And do you think what you make is particularly French or English, or is it sort of internationally recognized, recognizable to most people?

So i think you know, when my wife cooks she will do a french thing, she'll do a beef bourguignon, you know.

Or or a hashi parmentier, or some sort of classic french dish, right?

Yes, you know what those things are, right?

I suppose i know a beef bourguignon, right?

We would call it a beef stew, sort of thing.

Yeah, I never realized, of course, until I went there last year, that Bourguignon is.

Of course it just means from Burgundy.

So I'd never put those two things together in my head before.

And down there because we went to Burgundy.

It's like ordering, I don't know, toast or something.

It's on every menu every day, the most standard thing yeah, and they use they use red wine, I think, in the, you know, while they're cooking it.

So if we call it a beef stew yeah, it's just like beef onions vegetables, a bit of red, what um carrots?

Normally a bit of red wine, and you just let it stew in the pot, in the pot for a long time yeah uh, but my wife will do one of them and she does what was the second one you said, which is basically what we call um shepherd's pie, I think.

Shepherd's pie or cottage pie?

I can never remember the difference between the two.

One of them is lamb, one of them's beef.

You know.

You've got to think shepherd, lamb, right?

So that's how I remember it.

Shepherds have sheep, so shepherd's pie is lamb and cottage pie, because cottages are well known for having cows in them.

So cottage pie is beef then. it's not the lamb one.

That's how I remember it.

Right.

Um, so that, that, that's more or less the same thing, you know, France.

So um, that is essentially uh minced beef and onion and what.

What have you uh cooked as the base, and then on the top, you've got a sort of mashed potato.

You're telling me you can't hear that drilling in the corridor?

Very faint scratching, maybe, but I didn't notice it until you said something.

Okay.

All right.

I shouldn't worry about it then.

So yes, minced beef and then mashed potato on the top.

And I think some grated cheese on the top of that.

And then it's baked in the oven.

Yeah yeah, so obviously in england we call that a cottage pie, but in france they they call it, which sounds so much more sophisticated.

It's the same thing right, but oh, that all sounds delicious.

Um yeah, my link, my link to the next question is things that are not delicious.

As a as a boy, What food did you really dislike?

Was there something you hated as a child?

As a child?

Yeah, there were a few things.

Mostly it was all right because my mum was slash is a pretty good cook, so the food that she would prepare was pretty nice.

But then occasionally there would just be –

You know, you go, what's for dinner?

You know, and then normally it was like oh, you know, we're going to have shepherd's pie or cottage pie or something.

Great.

Toad in the hole, which is an English thing listeners, which is basically sausages and kind of what.

I had to explain Yorkshire pudding.

Weird pastry stuff.

Pancake mix.

Is it?

Batter.

Batter and sausages.

Typically unhealthy English stuff.

That's another.

Maybe one of the questions you've got is something about English food because, on the subject of food the elephant in the room here, Martin here's two English people talking about English food to an international audience.

The elephant in the room is that everyone's going.

Yeah, but English.

It's terrible though, isn't it?

You actually, you know.

Explain your food culture.

That's what they're all thinking.

A toad?

A toad in the hole?

We have a habit of not making things sound very nice, do they?

Or indeed taste very nice.

We don't help ourselves by calling things toad in the hole.

I mean, if that was in another language, that would be, And it would sound amazing and delicious.

But toad in the hole.

A toad listeners is, is like a frog, isn't it?

But it's like well, it's like a really big fat, like cousin of a frog uh, probably poisonous and not something you would.

You would consider it more than the kitchen generally.

Right.

If you wanted to put a curse on someone you hated, then maybe.

But no, you wouldn't just cook that for your children.

I don't know why it's called Toad in the Hole, but it's basically sausages submerged in batter which is then baked in the oven.

It's delicious, but...

Anyway, so what was the question again?

What did I not like as a kid?

The vocabulary we could introduce is, were you a fussy eater?

Because that idea of being fussy is that you don't like lots.

There were lots of things, often very basic things, that you don't like.

So I think if you said I didn't like eating offal, which is like the innards of animals, you know the heart and the lungs, I think that wouldn't be fussy.

I think lots of people are not keen on offal.

Because it tastes awful.

Is there a connection there?

I don't know.

Awful.

Actually, it's awful is the pronunciation, but you know, comedic license is awful.

Yeah.

But um, but no, I think I know.

You know, lots of children are fussy and it means they don't like.

I don't like Onions.

I don't like mushrooms.

I don't like tomatoes.

I don't like apples.

That would be a fussy eater, isn't it?

I wasn't particularly fussy or indeed picky, which is another synonym of that.

I wasn't a particularly fussy eater.

I wasn't very picky.

Um, but I didn't like mushrooms, um, until I was sort of a teenager until I was like 18, 19.

And then suddenly mushrooms.

Wonderful.

So you sort of develop the taste for things.

Um, but it was when I asked my mom what's for dinner and she would sometimes say it's nut roast.

Nut roast was just my worst nightmare.

And it was just awful.

I hated it with a passion.

Just like the whole eating it, eating nut roast was like...

You know, like some sort of awful torture that I had to be subjected to occasionally, just randomly, just random torture.

Your evening would just turn into a horrible nightmare because your mum has made a nut roast.

These days, nut roast, delicious.

I love a nut roast.

But back then, it was just the worst thing. to have to eat.

I mean, a nut roast is kind of like a sort of a loaf which is made with i don't know what nuts, a lot of nuts and and fruit and not fruit nuts and vegetables, all sort of mashed up together and then made into a sort of a loaf and it's a sort of vegetarian substitute for a big piece of meat.

Um, But it's very good, tasty and healthy.

But I hated nut roast.

I wonder if other countries eat that.

Leave your comments below.

Nut roast, listeners.

What sounds worse to you?

Toad in the hole or nut roast?

And do you have either of those things?

And also, leave your comments in the comments section below.

If you have food in your culture which and now think about this which is actually a lot more disgusting than a lot of English food.

Because the French, for example.

I live here and I love France, of course, but I do like to pick fun at French food culture because they're so serious about it.

All French people believe that French food is the best in the world and is untouchable.

You can't criticise it.

It's just...

You can't argue with it.

It's just brilliant and amazing.

And English food is weird.

It's just jelly and stuff that we don't like.

And...

And I have to point out, well, you know, French, you eat weird stuff too.

They eat brains of a young cow, and they'll eat a lot of glands.

They eat glands.

Is it the thymus gland from a cow, which is called...

I can't remember what it's called now, but they'll just eat some glands.

Yeah, this is fine.

This is fine French food.

You're eating glands.

What are you doing?

Think about what you're doing, and then you're looking at Britain and criticising us for eating fish and chips.

Yeah.

Anyway, I just had to get that off my chest.

No, that's a good point.

I think we don't take any pride in things that I think which in other cultures would be really pushed as an amazing, interesting regional thing.

So we have Scotch egg. which is a hard-boiled egg wrapped in sausage somehow.

I don't know how you manage to wrap an egg in sausage meat and then covered in breadcrumbs.

And that is presumably quickly fried, is it?

I don't know how you make a scotch egg.

But I think if that was in another country you would not hear the end of it about what an amazing, interesting bit of cuisine.

In our country, we are just like, well, I'm sorry.

I'm sorry about this.

I'm sorry we produced this.

It's a little bit of a joke.

I know it's embarrassing.

Even when you said Scott Chegg, it just sort of made me chuckle.

No one in France is laughing about their own food.

The French people just don't.

It's like, oh, tonight we have Hachis Parmentier.

Okay.

You know now, everyone's just like bah oui évidemment, Hachis Parmentier, c'est un classique de cuisine française.

And fair enough.

I mean, fair enough.

The food is good.

It is generally pretty good.

I do think things are better in England than they used to be.

I don't know if you have any British listeners, so I don't want to offend anybody.

But I think there is quite a regional split now, in my opinion.

And I apologise to all people north of Northampton, somewhere in the middle.

We went on holiday last year to the north.

And I...

I think the kind of – how can I put this politely –

Things have improved in the South quite a lot.

There are a lot of very good restaurants in the South of England where you can get some pretty good food.

I think London famously has more Michelin-star restaurants than Paris and statistics like that.

But it's hard to find that range of quality I found in the North.

Breakfast's very good.

Tea and scones and cakes and things, very good.

I'm talking about Yorkshire and up there.

Trying to find a nice meal that isn't fish and chips, I found was hard.

Yeah.

Down in the south around London, there's some amazing restaurants.

Anyway.

Well, in Yorkshire, the knives will be out for you, Martin.

They'll be like, he won't be welcome again.

It wasn't really the first time.

It wasn't welcome the first time either.

But we'll be even less welcome the next time he comes, if he does.

Yeah.

Anyway.

Go in disguise.

That's what this beard is for.

Just in case I want to go back to Yorkshire.

Just shave it off.

You'll be fine.

So what were we talking about?

Food.

So food you hated as a child, but you love mushrooms now.

I love mushrooms now and I love nut roast now.

So I don't know what I was thinking when I was 12.

Yeah, but your palate changes, doesn't it, as you grow older?

Yeah.

And so, before we leave this topic of French and British, we shouldn't just talk about Britain versus France.

But is there living in France?

What British food do you miss?

Do you stock up when you come back to Britain and buy some things which you can't get in France?

Hmm.

So generally I do stock up.

Whenever I go back to England, I'll visit Sainsbury's and I will stock up on certain foods.

So the things I stock up on are...

So first of all, I buy as much of a certain brand of peanut butter as I can get.

I don't know if it's a British brand or not, but it's Manny Life.

There's a plug for you, folks.

Manny Life peanut butter, which is available from most supermarkets in the UK.

And you can't get it in France.

And for some reason it's just significantly better than all other peanut butter that you can get here.

And it's 100% peanuts.

There's no palm oil or any of that nonsense in there.

It's all 100% peanuts, but it's just amazing.

They sort of deep roast the peanuts. and stuff first, and it's just absolutely outstanding.

You can get 100 peanut butter here, of course, but it just doesn't have the same outstanding flavor.

And my wife and daughter are both completely addicted to it.

And so, whenever I go to the UK, I basically break my back carrying – huge pots, the biggest pots of manny life peanut butter that i can find um, but other stuff.

So obviously tea, i don't know.

This doesn't really count as food, does it?

But um, it's food adjacent as a drink, So I'll stock up on proper, good tea.

So I'll get either Yorkshire tea or I'll go for Sainsbury's gold tea, which is perfectly great and has biodegradable tea bags, which Yorkshire tea doesn't have, which I think is.

You know, a plus point.

So I'll stock up on proper tea and maybe like a packet of McVitie's chocolate digestive biscuits.

But other than that...

Most of the stuff here, most of the stuff you can get here.

So in the supermarket I'll often find cans of baked beans, surprisingly in a little special section.

It's like a...

Weird food section.

And they have all these sort of odd things from different parts of the world.

And sometimes you find Heinz beans.

If I see Heinz beans I'll grab them so I can have my beans on toast, which my wife thinks is the most disgusting.

Like beans on toast.

You're having sort of those two things that just don't ever go together in her mind.

Just the most normal thing in the world for me.

British thing, isn't it?

Beans on toast.

Yeah, it is.

As far as I understand, I could be wrong, but Heinz is an American company.

But Heinz Baked Beans is as alien to Americans as it is to the French or anyone.

So that's something that we have. in the UK, but yeah, Americans would don't, they don't, they have bait.

They have a thing called bait beans, but it's nothing like what we think.

I think.

Yeah.

I was just.

You know I've done a.

What kind of beans?

They are just sort of like white beans in a kind of uh, thick sort of tomato sauce uh, although there's probably quite a lot of salt and sugar in it.

It's derived from tomatoes somehow.

You might not guess it was a tomato sauce, would you?

If you've never seen it or tasted it before, you wouldn't go, Oh, this is tomatoes.

Strange orange sweet sauce.

Yeah.

Cause it's kind of, it's not even exactly tomato colored.

It's sort of or it it.

Yeah, it's close to being the color of tomato, but something has happened to it which has turned it to a sort of orange color.

But I maintain it's still a fantastic thing.

And if it wasn't for the maybe salt and sugar content, I think it is a healthy dish because beans are good.

They're good for you.

And is there with your children.

Have they followed you or followed your mum in their opinion of baked beans on toast?

My daughter thinks it's the most disgusting thing in the world.

So I think she's quite kind of French in her eating.

Marmite is another one, which is obviously another quintessentially English thing.

This kind of this black sticky spread that you can put on toast and other things like that.

And the thing about Marmite is that it, well, first of all, it's basically pure yeast.

It's like stuff that comes out when you make beer.

Yeah.

There's this black sticky stuff that is produced as a byproduct of making beer.

And most of the time, most normal people would throw it away.

But here in the UK, it's put into jars and sold.

And people then just put it on toast and baked potatoes and stuff and eat it.

The other thing about it, it's very, very healthy.

It's basically just pure vitamin B12.

In a jar.

Yeah.

But the other thing that everyone needs to know about Marmite is that it divides people.

So either you love it or you hate it.

Do you love or hate Marmite, Martin?

I love it.

You love it.

I love it.

Two jars downstairs.

Right.

I didn't.

Yeah, I never thought about it coming from the brewing world.

I mean, that sounds like a kind of a load of guys working in a factory making beer and getting this thick, viscous black stuff.

And for a bet, someone say, I'm going to eat some. and then go, oh, Ashley.

That's amazing.

Goes really well with a pint.

It's yeast extract, just to be completely clear.

And people get it wrong.

People, for example Americans again, or anyone really who discovers this stuff called Marmite that maybe their British friend has told them is brilliant and they're given a jar of it as a gift or something.

And then they put it on toast like it's peanut butter.

They put a massive spread of it on.

It's meant to use just very sparingly.

It's just a small amount because it's got a very strong flavor.

You certainly don't take a spoon and take a spoonful from the jar directly in your mouth.

That's disgusting.

You just put, well, it depends.

Martin's kind of gone...

But you could do that.

It depends on how much you love it.

But normally that's not the way it's eaten.

You normally just put a little bit on some toast or into what you're cooking and it just gives it this nice flavour. so Marmite yes they actually have Marmite on the shelves here again in that weird little section Marmite is often included and I'll always grab a jar although I don't know if I've ever finished a jar of Marmite in my life you don't need that much you only you only need a little bit and so and it just it just never goes off it's it's just indestructible and so i've i've never actually finished finished my jars of marmite they last forever i once uh when i was teaching english uh in a language school um I don't know how we got talking about that.

Students were asking about what, what strange food do you have in Britain?

And I, we got talking about Marmite and I couldn't really explain it.

I could see people with you know, you know as a teacher, when people are nodding politely.

But they, you know, they don't really understand.

And so I made a load.

There was a toaster in the staff room.

I made a load of toast, I buttered up all this Marmite on toast and brought it into the classroom.

Little cut into little strips and yeah, everybody had a try.

Yeah.

I don't, I don't think there were many, I don't think I converted many people to, to mom like that.

Have you ever, have you ever had any food in your class when teaching English?

I've never actually provided food myself to my students.

I've never thought of doing that.

I've had students bring food in.

For example, in the school that we used to work in, we used to get quite a lot of, I guess, students from Saudi Arabia or other parts of the Arabic speaking world.

And occasionally they would bring in Arabic coffee.

Again, not food.

It's a drink.

But they would bring in Arabic coffee which is like quite different to I don't know like the coffee as we know it.

And they'd have a...

It's kind of like got loads, it's got more, I guess, spices in it.

I don't know, is it cardamom?

Or even, what's that bright yellow spice?

Turmeric.

Turmeric, yes, exactly.

I think it's turmeric or cardamom.

Not saffron, turmeric or cardamom or something in there which gives it like a particularly sort of characteristic color.

So drinking Arabic coffee was really interesting.

But I've never actually provided food myself and gone, look at this.

Now eat this and you will speak English really fluently.

It's Marmite that you're missing.

Like, teacher, I need IELTS 6.5.

Marmite is what you need.

Teacher, I need British accent.

Marmite.

Yeah, we'll get back to the basic grammatical structures of the present continuous in a moment.

But first, we need to eat more toast.

Input.

This is the input section of the lesson.

I will be inputting Marmite and...

Chocolate digestive biscuits and a plate of Heinz baked beans on toast with a bit of Marmite added to the toast.

And this is the road to fluency.

Fluent in three months, brilliant.

So what else?

What other questions have I got for you?

This is very professional, isn't it?

Who was the last person or people you had over for lunch or dinner?

We haven't had people over for ages and ages and ages because we haven't sorted out our flat.

And because we've had, Because we've got like a two and a half year old kid who has kind of i don't know, just thrown a spanner in the works of our, of our um, you know, hosting of guests, so we haven't had someone around for ages martin okay just, we've just given up on hosting people recently uh, so i can't remember and we moved into our current place a few years ago and We've maybe had just a few guests over in that time.

So no one recently.

The place we used to live in.

We had people over all the time before we had kids and we used to invite people around quite a lot.

So I can answer questions about me 10 years ago Okay.

All right.

Well, if a hypothetical question if you were going to cook a meal, you had some people coming over for dinner and you wanted to impress them, what would be your go-to choice for?

Uh what, what?

What would you?

What would you make?

I'd make a phone call to Deliveroo.

I'd ask them to deliver something.

I don't know.

I don't really have like.

I feel like my cooking.

I don't know if again, this is because I'm British or what, But I feel like my cooking.

Of course it's not because there are loads of English, British people who are very flashy in the kitchen and you know, like we said before,

So I always keep thinking of this because I'm sure that everyone listening is like, boom.

Again.

I'm going back to this again because every now and then, when I'm teaching my lessons here in France, sometimes a lesson will come up about food.

And I've had some, oh, I don't know.

Like these days, my lessons normally go really, really well.

And I don't have any problems with lessons.

But you know, as an English teacher occasionally you have a lesson that just goes all wrong and the wheels fall off and it just kind of goes all completely wrong.

I haven't had a lesson like that for a long time, except when the subject is food.

And I'm, as a British person, attempting to teach food and cooking vocabulary to a class of French people.

It just doesn't work.

It...

Because it involves me trying to explain some sort of food and all the French people going, what?

You do what?

It's what?

Oh, dear.

Even with the lowest level of English, they still know more about food than you.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

And they just can't help themselves.

They can't help showing some level of disdain and amusement over our food cooking, you know, and I get all uptight and irate.

You know, like you think that your food is the best in the world, but you eat glands And they don't understand.

And it's like, okay, right.

Well, we've run out of time anyway.

I'm glad we achieved all of the aims for this lesson.

So what's my most impressive dish that I do?

I don't know.

I don't think I really impress with my food.

I think for me it's food is.

It's more just kind of like pretty basic stuff.

You know, as an English guy I'll just do.

I like to cook well, but I don't cook flashy stuff.

Um, So I don't know, I would do maybe baked salmon fillets in the oven, you know, kind of marinated in olive oil and soy sauce.

The soy sauce really helps a baked salmon fillet.

And heat also helps.

I just make food hot, Martin.

That's all I do.

I just take food that...

How bad can it be?

I just make it hot and keep it hot for a while until it's ready to eat.

And then I put it on a plate and we eat it.

I've got a few recipes, but none of them are particularly flashy, I think.

I don't know.

This is my chance to ask you the same question.

Do you cook?

Are you a cook?

I had a girlfriend when I was a teenager.

You cooked your girlfriend?

Sorry.

She was doing some sort of cookery course, cookery school, you know.

So she taught me some very basic things like how to make a white sauce, how to make a cheese sauce, how to make some really basic stuff, you know, when I was a teenager.

And so I kind of, I was an amazing cook when you're 18, you know, compared to everybody else.

When I went to university, people were amazed.

Yeah.

But I think I rested on my laurels, we would say.

I became too confident and never improved.

And so I'm still stuck at that kind of 18, 19-year-old level.

Still making that white sauce.

I can still make a cheese sauce.

I can make spaghetti bolognese.

I can make a cottage pie.

But chili con carne.

I think I'm quite good at making curries.

I got quite good at making Indian food, watching YouTube videos.

There's a brilliant YouTube channel.

What's his name?

Latif Inspired.

And I've learned how to make all sorts of interesting Indian things, but I kind of you know what I mean.

As a British person, you can't, you never feel comfortable saying, I'm good at making Indian food.

Like it's not, again, it's not our food, is it?

Even though this guy says on his videos, he says, this is not Bangladeshi food.

This is British Indian restaurant food.

Like it's a different thing.

Yeah yeah yeah, but uh yeah, no.

So i'm i'm i'm, i'm not, certainly not a great cook.

I'm still stuck.

Stuck in 19.

Well, when i was 18, i'm still stuck.

Yeah, But I think that's all you need those sort of recipes.

I like comfort food, and I like wholesome, simple stuff, family food, and...

But it's not flashy, impress the guests kind of stuff.

It's just, you know, food that the kids will eat that they will like that's healthy.

And that's not too difficult to cook when I've got a child attempting to climb up my leg while I'm doing it, you know.

Do the children come home for lunch or do you – what happens in – do they have school lunches in France?

Yes.

So this is – obviously this is France.

So yes, they're provided with decent school lunches and at the daycare, at the nursery – my son is fed and at school yeah they're provided with a full three or four course meal this being France there's a starter main course dessert cheese wine in a carafe of wine I was going to joke I was going to joke they don't have wine They don't, of course.

But no, they do starter, main course dessert, cheese.

So you can be sure that the kids are being fed pretty well at lunchtime.

Although my daughter, it's a kind of canteen situation.

So she gets to choose what she has.

And it's like trying to work out what she's actually choosing.

You know, at the end of the day, you know she comes home and you'll say what did you have for lunch?

And she sort of dismisses the question almost instantly.

I don't remember.

I can't remember.

What do you mean you can't remember?

It was just a few hours ago.

You have to remember.

Oh, I just had fish.

You know, she just clearly doesn't want to answer the question, either because she just doesn't find it interesting, or because what she ate was a chocolate yogurt, or three chocolate yogurts and a you know.

Some fish fingers or something.

Yeah.

She traded all her fish to some other kid for their chocolate yoghurt.

Yes, exactly, which is quite possible.

But no, the food that they provide at school is amazing, actually.

Do French children still complain about school lunches?

Because in the UK, school lunches have a very... bad reputation.

Not many people look back fondly on school lunches, do they?

No, they don't.

What was your experience?

Tell me about your school lunches.

What was the setup?

So, you know, you queue up.

I'm asking you to remember going to the war or something.

You look pained when I ask.

Oh, God.

Your head immediately went into your hands.

Yeah, I remember like dinner ladies right, who are employed to provide the food and stuff, dinner ladies and there would typically be a ladle that goes a dinner lady and a huge metal pot and with God knows what inside, and the ladle, which is that big spoon, goes into the pot and then onto your plate.

And as you slide your tray, you continue to slide your tray and you take the bits and pieces.

I remember some pretty bad things.

I've, I've, mostly forgotten.

But then when I was a teenager, at secondary school, from like the age of 11 to 15 or 16, there was a long period where I would eat exactly the same thing for lunch every single day.

And I can't believe I did it.

But like a few years, because you could choose at that point, you know, what you wanted.

And I would always have two slices of pizza and two what they called cracknels.

And a glass of milk.

A Cracknell was a... I think just at my school they called them Cracknells.

But you'll know exactly what they are.

It's basically crushed up cornflakes mixed in with chocolate and then like an ice cream scoop.

Like the dinner lady scooped it out with an ice cream scoop.

And then this kind of like half, half a ball of cornflakes covered, broken cornflakes, covered in chocolates, and the chocolate would set.

I don't know if they put them in the oven and bake them for a bit or something.

I don't know.

But then it would be like this chocolatey cornflake ball ball and that was the dessert, and I'd have two of them and a glass of milk.

So two slices of pizza, two cracknels and a glass of milk.

That's what I'm built on Amazing.

I suppose the milk was probably quite good for your growing bones, the calcium.

But pizza and chocolate cornflakes, probably not.

I think the pizza's got virtually no nutritional value, considering there wasn't even anything on it.

It was just cheese, vague tomato sauce and and pizza base.

Uh, but it was so delicious, it was just so good.

I just couldn't.

I was completely addicted to, to this lunch every day.

It was like well, if i've got the choice, i'm definitely having that again.

Yes, i will never be bored of this.

And um, Maybe the cornflakes.

Maybe there's something of value in that, but I had a bowl of cornflakes for breakfast already.

Yeah.

So if it wasn't for my mum's cooking, I would probably be malnourished.

You'd have got scurvy or something.

Vitamin disease.

Right.

Okay.

School lunches.

Brilliant.

Well, um, You just talked about eating the same thing over and over again for two years.

I'm not sure if this is related, but in America, the land of the free, they famously allow prisoners who are going to be executed to have anything they like for their final meal.

So would you in that situation?

Would you?

Presumably you wouldn't still be choosing two slices of pizza and a crack knoll.

Two crack knolls.

What would be your choice is my question.

Well, a bit like Ali G, I would choose the all-you-can-eat buffet and I would just keep eating, and eating, and eating, and then never be able to execute me because I still haven't finished.

Sorry.

I don't know.

What would I choose?

My last meal?

I don't know.

I think it would probably be like something my mum cooks, which is like the ultimate kind of comfort food.

I nearly said Kung Fu food.

That's weird.

Comfort food, not Kung Fu food.

What's that?

So what's your mum's top dishes then?

What's your favourite things that she makes?

Um, so she does, you know all sorts of stuff, that's.

But every time we go we say mom, can you make your lasagna?

And she's like, really?

And then she's apologizing to my wife.

And my wife absolutely, my French wife absolutely loves my mum's spaghetti bolognese and lasagna.

And it is amazing.

It is the most amazing lasagna.

I don't know what she does to it, but it's just... just tastes so good.

It's so comforting.

And yeah, my mom apologizes to my wife and says, I'm sorry, it's lasagna again.

And my wife's like yes lasagna, you know but um, But it is really good.

So maybe I would just go for my mum's lasagna with this nice salad and she makes this salad dressing and she's just got the ratio of ingredients in the salad dressing completely down, after however many decades it is that she's been making it.

So it's like a mix of olive oil and white wine vinegar mustard garlic, crushed garlic, a bit of salt, a tiny bit of sugar into this salad dressing which is just put on some lettuce and cucumber and avocado and tomato.

But that is just so good in combination with this British lasagna.

Yeah.

Yes.

I'll have that please.

You're so right.

We all do that, don't we?

We apologize for lasagna.

We say, I'm sorry, it's only lasagna.

But it's like one of the most time-consuming things you can make is a lasagna.

You've got to make two sauces, really, haven't you?

You've got to make the bolognese sauce or the tomato sauce and you've got to make a cheese sauce and yeah, and everyone loves lasagna.

I mean he's like, oh yeah yeah, you know what, you know what?

I think I'm just gonna have lasagna.

Yeah really, yeah me yeah, me too, yeah.

But as British people, we always, we always apologise.

Sorry only, it's only this, you know Yeah, it's weird that we do.

We're obviously known for apologizing.

Although I'm not sure that people really understand exactly the ways in which we apologize.

Because we will apologize as a... What's the word for it?

We apologize before we do something.

So it's not like we're apologizing after.

I think when people think people hear oh, british people apologize a lot, they assume that we're always saying, oh sorry, i did this, sorry for that, sorry that we're apologizing after we've done something.

But we apologize before we've done something in order to somehow make the thing that we're doing better than it's like a very complicated psychology, as if we say sorry before we do it, then that's going to make the thing more palatable and better.

I think it's perhaps being sort of modest and self-deprecating, isn't it?

You know what I mean?

You're saying, hey, I'm not showing off.

I'm not immodest.

I'm not going to say this is amazing.

That's for you to say.

Although my sister-in-law does do that.

Anyway, that's another story.

Look what I made.

Isn't this delicious?

She says.

I think you're not British, are you?

You have to say sorry first.

You can't say it's delicious.

You have to apologize.

And then we have to go, no, no, no, it's delicious.

Exactly.

It's a little game we play.

We say, sorry, it's only lasagna.

The other people say, oh, no, I love lasagna.

And you go, well...

And we all know, really, I'm quite pleased with my listen.

Yeah.

I'm going to say, well, what was the question?

Did I answer the question?

Your favourite food, your favourite meal.

Yes, you did.

Oh yeah, that's it.

I'm about to be executed.

Presumably I murdered someone.

Or maybe I committed treason.

Yeah.

And I'm about to be executed in the morning.

I mean, I...

I don't think they do that in Britain, unless I kill the king.

It's the only way in which you'd maybe be executed these days.

I'm assuming that I'm in some other country, maybe in some sort of autocratic country.

It's a very hypothetical situation.

Oh, okay.

Sorry, I'm a very literal person.

You've got to be in America being executed.

Yeah, I'm in Texas.

I'll have some Mexican food.

What have you got?

We've got Mexican food.

Right.

I thought so.

The apologizing thing.

When I used to teach English students, would you know?

Well, in my language we say bon appetit, you know.

And in Spanish, you say, you know, buena provecho.

I don't know.

In every language, there's a phrase for, and now please enjoy your meal.

And so students would sometimes ask, what do you say in English?

I said, well, we don't really.

I used to joke and say, well, we say good luck.

We say sorry.

But yeah, we say sorry.

We say dig in, don't we?

Dig in.

Go on then, dig in.

It just means don't wait for me.

You start.

It doesn't mean enjoy it.

It just means go ahead, eat.

Yeah, get it over with.

And dig in.

Something like you're doing something.

It sounds more like gardening than... Digging a grave for someone.

Let's get this done.

Come on, dig in.

Let's just dig our way through this.

Anyway.

So um, I've lost.

We said we were just I was.

The idea was I was going to ask you 10 questions in half an hour.

Yeah.

And we're coming up to an hour.

We're still talking about food, but I'll say this is the last question then.

Okay.

It was off topic, slightly off topic, but we're still connected to the world of the dinner party.

But another hypothetical, very common hypothetical question is you have in a dream dinner party.

You can invite anybody from history, alive or dead.

Which three people would you invite?

Okay, this old question.

Now, first of all, I wouldn't invite anyone dead because that would be disgusting, wouldn't it?

Yeah.

You're very literal again.

It's going to put you right off your food, isn't it?

You know it's like uh, if you invite any, you know, especially if they've been dead for a while.

You know, I'm sorry, I can't.

I don't think I can eat this.

I'm sorry.

It's just, I can't because there's a dead man at the table.

There's in fact two dead people here.

Um, Of course, it's hypothetical.

They would be brought back to life.

Ideally so, yes.

Yeah, okay, okay.

So this question right, so you can invite any three people to your hypothetical dinner party, alive or dead.

Who would you pick?

I find it really hard to answer this question because...

Why?

Why do I find it hard to... I don't know.

I sort of struggle with the concept of the dinner party because I sort of think...

Okay.

So I can invite the three people and it may be it's just like three people I would love to meet but the dinner party could potentially be a terrible evening because, though you know, it's just going to be me talking to that one guest asking lots of questions.

So Paul McCartney, tell me about how you did this.

Great, thanks.

Now, and then I'm like, right, Grandma.

It's like Paul McCartney and my grandma.

You know grandma, what was it like living through world war two?

And then, okay.

And then, then over here, I've got Rob, right.

So who, who would it be?

I don't know.

Stuart Pierce.

What was it like scoring that goal in the FA cup final in 1990?

And then you know like okay, you two just be just yeah grandma, paul mccartney, paul mccartney grandma, you know, let me.

I'm just going to talk to stewart pierce for a bit.

Um, it's just going to be really weird.

Also we're assuming that they actually will would want to come to my dinner party as well.

You know, i might say, paul mccartney hey, i'm having a dinner party.

Oh, i'm sorry.

Um, you know, i'm in sao paulo, i'm doing a gig.

I can't make it In this hypothetical universe.

They have to come, but they might just sort of sulk through the whole evening and refuse just one word answers because they don't want to be there.

Because, like Winston Churchill was.

Like Winston Churchill was like I was resting in peace and I've been brought back from the afterlife and brought back to earth.

My back hurts.

He's like, Oh God, my back hurts.

I really need the toilet and I have to come here and sit with you for three hours.

And you and your yeah, you and your grandmother and some guy, some football player that I've never even heard of.

Yeah.

Okay, I'm too literal.

I'm too literal.

I need to actually just go with it.

All right.

So who would be my three guests?

I find it so hard to answer this question.

I can never think of the right combination of people.

Probably change every day for most people, wouldn't it?

You'd think of another three or another...

Yeah.

Okay.

Should we change it to three living people then?

No, no, no.

I can go with the dead people.

That's all right.

Because, you know, now I've understood that it's just a hypothetical discussion question.

Okay, right.

Let me get to the point.

So I'm...

I don't know.

I think one guest that I would think of is HG Wells, the writer.

Yeah.

Okay.

Because I'm a big fan of his writing.

I love all his stories.

I think they're amazing.

Have you had HG Wells' stories on your podcast?

Have you read many of his?

Yes, I've read, I think, three of his at least three of his stories, or two of his short stories and some of the War of the Worlds.

And so, yeah, he just had this incredible imagination.

His short stories are just lovely.

And he was very kind of.

It was a real visionary because he came up with these sort of science fiction stories that were very prescient.

And they really turned out a lot of them turned out to be very close to the truth.

You end up with these fantastical things, which he kind of predicted.

I remember he wrote one about something it's called something like the Fantastic Flying Machine or something.

But I mean, he's written it in the 1890s, perhaps.

I don't know, I could be wrong.

But I mean before flight, you know.

But what he's describing is quite a.

Was that one you read out on your?

It's not one of the ones I've read out, but I know the one.

It's the story of a guy who has this incredible, ambitious idea to build a flying machine.

And it's described, made of wood and...

All these bits of rope that are pulled together and stuff.

And him and his associate build it.

And it's a lot of character about how ambitious he is.

And no one believes it's going to work.

And people see it on the side of the hill.

They don't know what it is.

And then one day they do it.

And it's incredible.

It flies, spoiler alert.

It flies through the air.

It's absolutely amazing.

No one can believe what they're seeing.

And then they lose control and they crash and die.

Oh, okay.

I didn't remember the ending.

I was to block that from my mind.

Which is another thing I love about his stories.

They often have these really surprising endings.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I was living in East Putney in London when I read that.

And there's a bit in it describing how it swoops down over East Putney tube station platform.

Yeah.

That's why I remember it.

So HG Wells, good choice.

Yeah.

Also, you know someone interested in society and had opinions about the way that society should be run and stuff.

So kind of I expect not just an interesting storyteller and someone who's got an interesting mind, but someone with opinions about things which should be interesting.

Once again, we're caught up in the practicality of it, because if it was real, you would just want to talk to him, wouldn't you?

You wouldn't yeah, exactly.

So john lennon stop could just write us.

Go and write a song and come back in 45 minutes to an hour, And then I'll talk to you.

HG Wells, you go and write a short story in that time.

So, yeah.

Who else then?

So I've got HG Wells.

Now this is...

Again.

What everyone says in these sorts of situations is like well, since I can bring anyone back, I'll bring back a member of my family, so I can ask them things that I never asked them.

I can't decide which one, though.

It's either my maternal grandfather or my paternal grandfather.

So my maternal grandfather, Dennis...

Maybe him, because I'd love to ask him about what he did in World War II.

He was involved in D-Day.

He landed on one of the beaches and then had a campaign in Europe and stuff.

And he never talked about it, really, when he was alive.

So I want to drag him back to reality to ask him about things that he just obviously never wanted to talk about.

So I will force him to tell me and a couple of people that he's never met before everything he did in World War II.

Or my paternal grandfather, Eric, who I never met because he died before I was born.

So I would quite like to have the opportunity to meet him and actually get to know him.

Amazing.

And then the third person, I don't know.

I thought of Carrie Fisher, actually.

Uh-huh.

The actress who played Princess Leia, but she was a sort of very witty person, very clever person, a writer, someone who was a very good sort of conversationalist, the sort of great guest on a chat show.

And I just think she was very funny and down-to-earth, very good talker, very interesting person, insightful conversation, someone who's very willing to be candid, would be willing to share a lot of her own personal opinions and experiences and things like that.

Plus, I could have Princess Leia at my table, although i wouldn't talk about that with her because she's probably fed up with having to.

You know people.

Oh my god, princess leia, you know.

So i wouldn't actually say that, but it would still be a kind of a thrill for for the the.

Again, the 12 year old me would be quite happy about that.

I often wonder with people who are that famous for one particular thing, You've got to walk a fine line, haven't you?

If you meet them.

They must find it annoying if people say, oh, tell me about this scene in Star Wars.

But equally or not perhaps equally.

But they must also find it odd if you never acknowledge the fact that they are extremely famous for this thing, you know.

Yeah.

The whole dinner party would go by.

We talk about, you know, future of society with HG Wells and uh, you know uh the the, the.

You know what my grandfather did in in battle.

And then Carrie Fisher's like, okay, wait a minute.

So you brought a science fiction writer.

You brought a guy who was involved in a lot of war and you've never you didn't think to ask me once about Star Wars.

What, how did that, how's that working?

Are you not going to ask me about that?

Yeah.

What I like about your choice is that I think, if you, This question gets asked all the time, doesn't it?

Dinner party guests.

And there must be several times where people have all chosen the same combination.

So...

There's been many times people have answered Gandhi, Queen Elizabeth I and Julius Caesar, or something like that.

But nobody has ever said H.G.

Wells, Carrie Fisher, and my grandfather, Dennis.

No, that's right.

It's a unique combination.

So well done for doing that.

Again, I don't know if it's going to be a successful dinner party at all there, Martin.

I don't know if those three people are going to get... Like my granddad...

I don't think he would have got on particularly well with Carrie Fisher, who is very much all about oversharing, you know, and my granddad was a very kind of like taciturn person, you know, not the sort of person who shared a lot.

And then there's HG Wells, who you can, apparently you couldn't shut him up.

I don't know.

I think my granddad and HG Wells would probably.

I think my granddad would be very interested in listening to him.

I don't know what he'd make of Carrie Fisher.

She would probably think, why am I here with these men?

You know, I don't know.

Have you, um?

Have you ever met anybody famous and talked to them about um?

You know, I've been in that situation of not knowing whether to mention the elephant in the room or not.

Yes yes, I have.

I've mentioned this on the podcast before, so apologies for any listeners who have heard me talk about this before, but I once met Eddie Izzard.

Oh yeah,

Yes.

And I actually had dinner with him.

The comedian.

Okay, so for people who don't know, Eddie Izzard sort of you know, a great standup most famous during the nineties and then the noughties, um uh, a really brilliant standup comedian who became an actor and then an activist and stuff afterwards.

Um, But just a brilliant stand-up.

And when I lived in Japan for a couple of years, I didn't really have TV.

I had a TV with some video cassettes like a few video cassettes, but didn't have that much entertainment.

And I had Eddie Izzard stand-up shows on CD.

And I listened to them a lot over and over and over again.

And I kind of really got into listening to them and got to know the routines really well.

Really enjoyed listening to his standup CDs.

And he became a sort of comedy hero of mine very much.

And then, like later on, moved here to France, ended up doing standup here.

Got to know some French standup comedians, including a guy called Yassine Bellus who is good friends with Eddie.

And Eddie Izzard speaks French, and he sometimes does stand-up in French.

And so I found myself one evening... I went to one...

So Eddie Izzard came to France as part of the D-Day commemorations years and years ago.

Let me start this story again.

My grandfather, Dennis so uh, Eddie Izzard came to um Normandy um, as part of the D-Day commemorations.

It was like 70 years since D-Day, was it anyway?

Um, And he came and he did some shows.

He did a three hour show.

It was an hour of standup in German, an hour of standup in French and an hour of standup in English.

Back to back.

He broke off from his American tour to come to Normandy to do this big thing as part of the commemorations for D-Day.

You know, his idea was that, you know, uniting the three languages through comedy.

He's very pro-European, isn't he?

Yes, that's right.

And Yassine said to me oh, come to the show and maybe afterwards you can come backstage and I can introduce you to Eddie.

And I thought, wow, this is amazing.

So I came to the show, watched him do his show and everything.

It was brilliant.

And then afterwards I was standing around and Yassine appeared out of a door and said hey, come here.

So I wandered over and then walked through some corridors.

And then there I am in Eddie Izzard's dressing room with Yassine and a couple of other people.

And Eddie's there after he's done his show. you know, recovering from his show.

And he asked me, oh, this is Luke.

He's a comedian as well.

And so I shook his hand.

Oh, wow.

It's great to meet you.

And then Eddie was like, right, let's go and have, let's go and have some dinner then.

Where should we go?

And then we all went off to a restaurant and there was.

I was sitting there with Yasin and another friend of mine.

And then just, so it's my friend, me, Yasin and Eddie there and some other people.

And so some of the time Eddie was talking to those other people and then half the time he would turn and sort of be with us.

And I'm sitting there at the table with Eddie Izzard thinking to myself, I've got nothing.

I've got nothing to offer.

You know, I felt so self-conscious.

Oh, God, I can't keep up.

Because half the time they're speaking French.

You know, because everyone on the table can speak French.

And Eddie really loves to speak French.

So half the time they're chatting away in French and I'm just sort of sitting there not contributing anything.

Even in English, I'm like, I don't know.

I don't feel like I've got anything of value to offer this situation.

So the whole time I was just like, oh my God, I can't believe I'm sitting next to Eddie Izzard.

You know, more or less sitting next to Eddie Izzard.

And then at the end of the evening, and bear in mind that that morning he flew from Chicago.

He's all jet lagged.

He did three hours of comedy. you know, in three languages.

He's exhausted.

And we're all standing outside the restaurant, you know, we're all getting our coats on and stuff.

I find myself standing next to Eddie and I thought right, this is my chance to tell Eddie Izzard you know how much of a hero he is.

And I really kind of made a meal of it.

And I...

Nice food link.

Made a meal of it.

There we go.

What does that mean?

It means I messed it up.

Yeah, if you make a meal of something, it means you do it really badly and you kind of mess it up.

Which is interesting as an English expression, that we consider making a meal as equivalent to doing something really badly.

Perfect.

Yeah, so I made a meal of this and I ended up rambling to this exhausted Eddie Izzard.

Rambling to him like oh Eddie, And he's kind of trying to remember who I am, you know.

Oh, listen...

You know, I used to live in Japan and when I didn't have a TV and and so I had some of your CDs and I just used to listen to your CDs all over the all the time.

And then I kind of like looked at him.

I was like, so you're in my head now.

Why did I say that?

You know, I kind of looked at it and went, you're in my head.

And he just didn't know what to say.

He just was like, okay.

Like for the first time in his life, Eddie Itard didn't know what to say.

And he was just like, right.

Okay, great.

And then he was thinking, right, I really need to get to the airport.

I need to get out of this country.

Who's this again?

Yasin, help!

Oh, man.

The conversation didn't go anywhere, but I was just so desperate to tell him how inspiring his comedy was and stuff.

But I just

And since then, I've just always thought, no, that's not what you do when you meet someone.

You say to them, listen, I'm a huge fan.

I love your work.

That's the way you should put it.

I really love your work.

It's brilliant.

Anyway, you know, how was the show tonight?

And then you just start talking to them as a normal person.

You know, because as far as they're concerned, they're just a normal person and you're a normal person.

They don't need that, you know, hero worship stuff.

It's just awkward.

Well, I don't think you should feel bad about it for two reasons.

I think, firstly, they probably get that every day of their lives, don't they?

Someone coming up and they can see, ah, this guy's going to regret it later.

They must know wow, this is someone who's such a fan that now they're going to think about every word they said and feel terrible about it.

So that, that must be normal.

And also, as you say, he's probably extremely jet lagged and just out of energy at the end of an incredible long day.

Yeah.

Did you say do the three hour gig?

He did, in three languages.

That was that night?

Yeah, that was that night.

You could excuse him if he just stared silently into your eyes and didn't say anything.

Yeah.

And what do you say?

What's the rejoinder to, you're in my head now?

Is it like thanks or what good?

Or you know, like you know in all our course books as english teachers, you know we teach.

How are you?

I'm fine, you know?

Uh, thanks very much.

You're welcome.

You're in my head now.

Um, I don't know what to say.

Okay.

All right.

There's never a chapter in the vocabulary book on dealing with obsessive fans.

Yeah.

Or just dealing with really awkward conversations and you don't know what to say.

Oh, that's nice.

Yeah.

So, shall we come to a close on food?

Yes, okay.

Let's get the bill.

This episode was sponsored by Manny Life.

Is that right?

Yeah, Manny Life and Marmite and Heinz Beans.

Well, that was great.

I enjoyed talking to you, Luke.

Maybe we'll do another one. another topic.

Yeah.

I, I really enjoyed this.

Thank you for preparing the questions for saving me the bother of having to, to do all that stuff.

This has kind of been like Martin's English podcast.

It's sort of been hosting this one.

Um, Yeah, I appreciate that.

Thanks a lot.

Good to talk to you, Luke.

Yeah, it was a pleasure.

I really enjoyed talking about that.

Funnily enough, one of my questions that I'd crossed out was is French cuisine the best, or why, or why not?

Then we ended up talking about that pretty much nonstop anyway.

It's a good question, though.

What is the best cuisine in the world?

I mean, it's a really good question.

French is up there, but I don't know.

I think Italian food is potentially better.

Sorry, French people.

I went to Thailand a couple of times when I was younger for like a month at a time.

And the first time I went...

I remember my first evening out seeing a guy.

Have I, have I told you this before?

A boring old man repeating my same stories.

But, um, In the first evening, I went out to a restaurant.

There was a couple of guys sat there, one eating spaghetti carbonara and the other one with a baked potato.

And I can remember thinking you absolutely.

You know what kind of person comes to Thailand and eats that.

But after two weeks, and I love Thai food and all spicy stuff.

After two weeks of Thai food breakfast, lunch and dinner I was like where was that place?

You could get a baked potato.

I've got to have something really bland.

I want to have something...

Like for two weeks, it's just give me a baked potato.

Yeah.

So I don't know.

And when we were in Burgundy recently, you know, some amazing, amazing meals.

Yes.

But sometimes I think like well, if I'm honest with myself, one evening i had a kind of it was just a an egg poached in a sort of red wine gravy.

That was.

It came with some other things, but that was it.

It was an extremely posh restaurant and that was the, And it was like this is amazing cooking, but did I really enjoy eating a poached egg in red wine gravy?

Not really.

Whereas the next day I had some sort of burger and chips.

I definitely enjoyed that, you know?

So I think sometimes we're a little bit uh, emperor's new clothes worried about, um being honest, what you actually enjoy.

Give me a nice sausage sandwich.

Yeah.

Toad in the hole, please.

Although I never really like toad in the hole.

You don't like toad in the hole?

Well, I just think I love sausages, but I just think a sausage that's done it is.

You've potentially baked that sausage.

I mean, you roasted a sausage, it's not.

It's not the great way to.

They're all invariably burnt across the top and raw underneath, aren't they?

Yeah okay, fair enough.

It's not the best way to cook a sausage, this is true.

You've got to pan fry a sausage, probably.

Or grill.

Grill?

No, pan fry a sausage.

But yeah, I guess Toad in the Hole is kind of probably one of those recipes that's made in order to get rid of ingredients, isn't it?

Or it's the sort of thing that my mum would have cooked for my brother and me just because we would have eaten it.

It's the sort of thing that's not that expensive.

The kids will definitely eat this.

I just have good memories of it because it was basically just carbohydrate and sausage meat.

That's what you want when you're, again, 12 years old.

Yeah.

I think all that Yorkshire pudding is just an old-fashioned, cheap way of filling up the family.

On what is it?

Flour and fat.

I think that's all it is, isn't it?

There's not really any ingredients to it.

I think this accounts for a lot of English food.

It's just stuff that's cheap and filling.

I don't know why this is.

Is this just a class thing?

Is this that working class communities needed to find ways to to fill up their families on not very much money, with limited ingredients.

Think of it like we have a dessert bread and butter pudding.

I'm talking to you now like I'm still doing the episode.

I feel like I'm still recording.

I feel like I'm still going to include this as a bonus bit at the end.

But we have the dessert, bread and butter pudding, which is just old, stale bread crusts thrown into a bowl of milk, maybe a few raisins sprinkled over the top.

And then put it in the oven.

And that's all it is, isn't it?

It's old bread and milk.

Oh, I suppose sugar.

It's so good, though.

And again, I think in other countries, that would be like, oh, this is our regional speciality.

You must try this in Spain, France, Italy, all over.

This would be something people take enormous pride in.

And we're like, well, obviously, I'm sorry, it's just bread and butter.

So you're saying in other food cultures, they actually do it on purpose.

They intend to, they buy the bread to do it.

Whereas for us, it's like...

Our bread and butter pudding is more just like, oh, someone's made a mistake.

We've got too much bread.

What are we going to do with it?

Well, we can't just throw it away.

So we better make it into something.

All right, cover it in all this extra milk and some sugar and raisins.

They're cheap.

And then put it in the oven.

So our cuisine is a sort of a mistake.

Whereas Italian food is like carefully planned in advance and based on generations of tradition.

And ours is more like I don't know how are we going to.

You know, what are we going to do with all this stuff?

Yeah.

In Europe, there's lots of food that's quite similar, isn't there?

There's a Spanish version, or an Italian version, or a French version of what we would just consider stew.

So like Lancashire hot pot or whatever.

I mean, scouse comes from that dish, isn't it?

It's just chuck everything in a pot. and it's called Scouse.

Oh, is that right?

Yeah, it's like a Lancashire thing.

You just chuck everything in a pot.

Again, it's just something warm in the winter.

It might have a bit of meat in it, but it's vegetables, and just chuck it all in there.

Some people call it Irish stew because it's the same thing in Ireland.

But it's called that locally, scouse.

And because the people of Liverpool used to eat it, they're called scouses.

But that trade route from Liverpool that goes around the top of Britain to Scandinavia, to all the ports along the north of Germany and Denmark and Sweden, They have a similar dish also called something like scouse.

It sounds almost the same.

This is the same language.

This is a basic dish of a stew of some boiled vegetables and meat you eat in the winter.

But I'm sure in those countries, it's like, oh, this is our traditional speciality. people are traveling from, you know, thousands of miles away and they're, they're being hosted by like the, you know, the tour, the, the high level tour guides to, uh, arranging for them to have like the local speciality.

It's a stew.

And yeah.

The other thing I wanted to talk about we didn't talk about was that how few words we have for other languages.

Have more words to describe more varieties of things that when I sorry, that's the problem I have when I'm teaching French people about food, because they're like how do you say this in English?

I'm like, yeah, I don't know.

There's no word for it.

Or they've got one word, like one very sophisticated sounding word, to describe a way of cooking which is like boiled boiled.

That's it.

Boiled cabbage.

Exactly.

So I spent five years in Spain teaching, and in particular in this one sort of sea... a port on the on the north north west coast La Coruña and seafood is incredibly important and everybody spends you know money on having the best seafood and like you were saying the only lessons I ever had problems with were the the disastrous lessons was where I people started asking me about what is this type of prawn what's this what's this in Spanish it's a small in English it's a prawn and this one king prawn king A big prawn.

Well, that's a big king prawn.

And this one?

Shrimp?

I don't know.

And we've got like 30 different types of, well, they'd say this crab?

I don't know.

I don't know anything about crabs.

That's a red crab, and that's another crab.

That's a red crab, but that's not a red crab.

Exactly.

And they'd get really angry.

No, that's not a crab.

I don't know.

Exactly.

My experience.

Yeah.

I really enjoyed that.

Thank you for preparing the questions and next time we'll do a different topic.

Yes.

Good to speak to you, man.

Take care.

You too.

So there you go.

That was 10 questions about food with Martin Aaron.

Thank you very much to Martin for taking the time to prepare the questions.

This is a format that we can use again and again.

And Martin's going to come up with other topics and other questions.

If you've got any suggestions for topics.

Is there a specific topic that you would like us to do next time?

If you've got a specific topic in mind, let us know and Martin can...

Prepare some questions and you can hear us rambling about that.

I hope you enjoyed that conversation.

It was fun, a fun way and funny way to talk about a certain subject and also to reveal lots of vocab on a certain subject in context.

Send in your comments.

I'd love to read your responses, get the conversation started.

What about the questions that Martin asked me?

Here are those questions.

If you fancy answering any of these yourself in the comments, then go ahead.

Who prepares the food in your house?

What food did you really dislike as a child?

Were you a fussy eater? uh what well we've got what british food do you miss but obviously that might not apply to you uh unless you've ever lived in the uk and now you don't and you miss certain things like what i really miss is cornish pasties luke um Have you ever had any food in your class when teaching English?

That one again might not apply to you, but what do you think of the combination of food and learning?

Do they go together, food in the classroom?

How do you feel about that?

What about food on the podcast?

What about when someone eats or drinks food? on a podcast.

How do you feel about that?

People do have strong feelings about that.

Who was the last person or people you had over for lunch or dinner?

What did you cook?

What's your go-to recipe in that situation?

This is the same question.

If you were going to cook a meal and you wanted to impress someone, what would be your go-to choice?

Do French children complain about school lunches?

Well, do children complain about school lunches in your country?

What are school lunches like?

In Britain, kids typically will complain about school lunches.

What was your experience with school lunches as a child?

If you were about to be executed and you were offered one final meal of your choice, what would you choose?

And imagine you're having a dinner party and you can invite any three people, alive or dead.

Who would you invite?

And yes, those people would be somehow magically brought back to life again.

You wouldn't just have three corpses at the table.

That would be terrible.

But you're having a dinner party.

You can invite any three people.

Who would you invite and why?

A reminder of Anna's competition.

Send us your creepy stories.

We want your creepy stories.

Have you ever had a strange experience that you can't quite explain, or something that made you frightened?

Describe it.

Send us your description.

LukeTeacher at Hotmailcom or in the comments section of the episode recently with Anna Brooke about paranormal experiences.

I'd love to know your stories.

Send them to me.

Anna and I will read them.

The ones that we like, I'll read out on the podcast, and the best one will receive a copy of Anna's book.

New book, Death by Chocolate.

There you go.

So send us your stories.

I'm keen to read your accounts of creepy, strange and unexplained experiences.

Also remember, check out the premium episode that accompanies this conversation that you heard just now.

As i said at the beginning, i picked out various bits of vocab relating to this subject of food and created a vocab quiz and then recorded an episode with my wife and i tested her using the questions.

So you can try to maybe compete with her or keep up with her when it comes to answering the questions with the bits of vocab.

And when you've done that, you can listen to this conversation again.

And those bits of vocab will be glaringly obvious to you. you'll be surprised.

It's a surprisingly effective method of teaching you taking time to actually focus on bits of vocab and then listening in context.

You will suddenly notice things that maybe you didn't even notice before, or things you didn't understand before.

It's a kind of like a fast track to broadening your vocabulary in a very effective way.

Um, And also my wife and I chatted about various things, like what she thinks, as a French person, of my cooking and of English food in general.

It's a nice episode on lots of different levels.

You can check it out if you are a premium subscriber, teacherluke.co.uk slash premium.

And that is it for this episode.

Thank you so much. for watching or listening wherever you have been enjoying this episode.

Thanks again to Martin.

I look forward to doing the next one of these.

I don't know what topic he will choose next time, but it's going to be interesting and enjoyable, I'm sure.

Have a lovely morning afternoon, evening or night.

Wherever you are in the world and whatever you are doing with yourself at this moment in time, whether you're sitting on public transport or walking down the street or just lying down in a dark room.

Or, I don't know, flying a helicopter or digging a huge hole in the ground for some reason.

Or, I don't know, what else could you be doing?

Travelling across the ocean to an oil refinery or a secret base in the middle of the sea.

Because you're working for a James Bond bad guy from a James Bond film who's created like an evil base where he's going to take over the world with some super weapon.

And you answered a job advertisement in the newspaper that said you know guys wanted for, you know evil base construction job.

You know discretion advised, discretion required.

You know job description required must be very bad at shooting weapons and you know you don't mind being killed by British special agents.

Maybe that's you.

If that is you, then well, just good luck and I hope that everything goes alright for you and that the bad guy ultimately doesn't succeed and that you survive.

Yeah, and if you see James Bond, say hi from me.

Okay, that's the end of the episode.

Have a lovely time and I'll speak to you next time.

But for this time, it's time to say goodbye.

Bye, bye, bye, bye.

For more information visit.

You'll get regular premium episodes with stories vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation teaching from me, and the usual moments of humour and fun.

Plus, with your subscription, you will be directly supporting my work and making this whole podcast project possible.

For more information about Luke's English Podcast Premium, go to

[Food, Culture, and Culinary Conversations: A Deep Dive]-[10 Questions about Food 🍲 with Martin [985]]

📋 Summary

Introduction: The Concept of Themed Conversations

The Dynamics of Food Preparation

The Cultural Divide: English vs. French Food

Culinary Habits and Personal Preferences

Hypothetical Scenarios and Reflections

Conclusion

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

[Food, Culture, and Culinary Conversations: A Deep Dive]-[10 Questions about Food 🍲 with Martin [985]]

📋 Summary

Introduction: The Concept of Themed Conversations

The Dynamics of Food Preparation

The Cultural Divide: English vs. French Food

Culinary Habits and Personal Preferences

Hypothetical Scenarios and Reflections

Conclusion

Deep Learning with ListenLeap

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

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