Recipes

I am often amazed to see recipes that are recommended by well known chefs for the ordinary bloke, like me, to try are almost impossible to follow. There was a recipe for "real" curry which had about fifty items on it most of which I do not have on the shelf; I know someone who tried to do it and failed - she ended up serving her guests with a well known bottle version straight from Sainsbury's shelves.
Then there are recipes that look complicated but, when you take the trivial items away from them, are really quite simple. By "the trivial items" I mean a bit of this and a bit of that - leaves mostly chopped for artistic effect. One this week in a colour mag by a "famous chef" boiled down to (if I may) grilled steak with trimmings i.e. trivial items.
I was surprised on reading one of Keith Floyd's menus for roast lamb that it had garlic in it and rosemary. Who wants garlic with roast lamb for God's sake? And surely mint sauce is better than rosemary. And why cook it in red wine?
It seems to me that a lot of the stuff that is added these days are so powerful that they often suppress the real taste of the main constituent. Floyd covered his bream with white wine sauce! Isn't the fish good enough on its own?
I liked a fishmonger on Nigel Whatshisname's show who held up a mackeral and said how beautiful it was and all you needed to do to it was fry it or grill it and eat it as it was, no trimmings, with a hunk of bread.
Today I had a roast lamb with mint sauce (from the garden - the bottle stuff is not good), boiled potatoes, carrots, parsnips and French beans, followed by a plain rice pudding (not from a tin). All helped down with a few glasses of red wine. Angel's food.