The really exciting addition of Philip Howard to the line up shows how this show really has a high culinary pedigree and credibility. This two Michelin starred chef has been cooking at The Square for over twenty years and was presented with A Special Award at The Craft Guild of Chefs Awards last year. The great british public will not be so familiar with Phil, but I look forward to seeing that all change over the next few weeks.

Another 2 michelin starred chef (can you believe it!) in the line up is the brilliant Daniel Clifford from Midsummer House, absent from GBM for a while and his return is surely not to be missed. I will certainly be writing more on this programme and on both the judges and chefs. For now I will leave you with one last photo of the delightful Stephen Terry who will be competing in the Welsh heat, something tells me the chefs will have a great deal of fun and hard work coming their way.

So a few weeks later I found myself on a chefs shoot at Laverstoke Park in Hampshire. I stayed nearby in a delightful B&B where my most resounding memory was of a paisley eiderdown, I digress back to the shoot. One particular highlight of this day was casually extracting all the best game cooking times and techniques from Pierre as we ambled through the day. However this blog is not about Pierre or indeed Laverstoke Park and the tremendous work Jody Scheckter and his wife Clare have done with this bio dynamic farm and educational centre. It is about a certain chef whom I had found to be somewhat elusive, Raymond Blanc.

I had written to Raymond Blanc a couple of times and embarrassed myself further with several telephone calls, which resulted in precisely nothing. Camping outside Le Manoir Aux Quat’Saison was beginning to look like an option so you can imagine my delight when the first person to walk by me with a friendly ‘Good Morning” was the man himself. A couple of hours passed before i spied him again at the end of a field, this was my chance and however much of a lunatic I was going to appear charging across- I really hadn’t anything to loose. After a flurry of verbal incontinence on my part and excessive apologising (truly a British trait I have in abundance) Raymond was delightful and agreed for me to come to Le Manoir to paint him. Needless to say the rest of the day was fantastic.

The next hurdle was finding a date when he would have time to see me, eventually on a beautiful September day I arrived at Le Manoir. There really can be few more beguiling gardens to a food lover, or anyone for that matter, than where I found myself, it made the decision to paint Raymond within his garden abundantly obvious. We experimented around The Japanese Garden, Orchard, ancient pond and even cabbage patch and then I just let Raymond strike up some poses in a very impromptu fashion. I wanted it to be something not too formal but rather sincere and playful, as I found him to be.

Now freezing in my studio in Cornwall I think fondly back to that day and smile as I work towards the final touches on a painting I wondered If I would ever have the chance to do.

For the past 18 months I have been following the greatest chefs working in our country today with the end result being a book, provisionally
Titled ‘A Portrait of the Great Chefs of Britain’. At the time of writing I have painted 15 with a good deal more to go, I am excited to report 34 are onboard!

‘I could give pages of hyperbole on why and how I paint, to spare you I can succinctly say I am driven
by capturing the soul and the daily joy of working with that marvellous stuff that is oil paint.’  Henrietta Graham