Margaret Thatcher and soft-serve ice cream

As if restoring Britain's pride, crushing the unions, saving the Falklands and helping defeat Communism wasn't enough.

Horse meat: Two places, two views

via Retronaut

With horse meat scandal playing itself out to its inevitable bureaucratic and editorial conclusion, it's interesting to see two takes on equine cuisine. The above from the United States and below from Britain.

We really don't like horse meat.

Hippo steaks

Popular Science looks back at the meat of the future: Hippopotamus.

I don't know.  I've been up close with hippos in the wild and, frankly, I'd lay better odds on domesticating leopards.

Sous vide cooking heading mainstream?

Boil-in-a-bag takes on a whole new meaning thanks to Eades Appliance Technology's (EAT) SousVide Supreme Demi. Using a cooking technique that was once the reserve of laboratories and upmarket restaurants, the SousVide Supreme Demi aims to provide home chefs with the means to create perfectly cooked dishes with laboratory precision in a compact, affordable, countertop “water oven” that’s as easy to operate as a slow cooker and only consumes as much power as a 60-watt incandescent bulb. .. Continue Reading Sous vide cooking heading mainstream?

AGA iTotal Control Cooker

The AGA iTotal Control Cooker that you can control from your tablet anywhere in the world.

I thought the whole point of an AGA was that it didn't have any controls.  Things fall apart, the centre does not hold.

GTRI develops prototype chicken-deboning robot

Chickens have another reason to lose sleep thanks to roboticists at the Georgia Tech Research Institute’s (GTRI) Intelligent Cutting and Deboning System. Using 3D imaging technology, this robot can debone an entire chicken with the skill of a human butcher and has the potential of saving the poultry industry millions of dollars by reducing costs and waste... Continue Reading GTRI develops prototype chicken-deboning robot

Free-range jerks

From MSNBC:

(N)ew research has determined that a judgmental attitude may just go hand in hand with exposure to organic foods. In fact, a new study published this week in the journal of Social Psychological and Personality Science, has found that organic food may just make people act a bit like jerks.

Or the more likely explanation is that people who buy "organic" produce are a load of ignorant urban poseurs with more money than sense who live to posture ad nauseum about their "healthy" "green" diet when, in fact, they wouldn't know "organic" if they fell into manure pond.

In short, the sort of people who you find at a Seattle organic produce markets didn't become jerks, they are jerks.

Pass the birthday mustard

This year marks the 250th anniversary of the greatest culinary advance in human history: The sandwich.

Let all pause for a moment of reverent silence.

Crisps

Not as good as hedgehog flavoured, but passable.

Caviare flavoured crisps.

It makes me go all peckish.

Sandwich

Moral: If you're going to make a sandwich,  you have to commit.

The crisps of Tantalus

A confession by the man who designed the seals on those *&^%ing crisp packets that you need a rhinoceros to open.

I understand he's gone into hiding now.

Locavore lunacy

A few years ago, when the daughter was still in the infant stage, we took a cross-country motor trip from Seattle to Minneapolis.  During this, I discovered two things: First, working a petrol pump in South Dakota in the middle of winter in a howling wind while wearing a leather coat intended for Puget Sound is a good way to freeze to death and second, local food.  I don't mean regional recipes or cafes that serve bizarre burgers.  I mean the way in which the food spectrum changes.

I was fascinated with how the fish I encountered became smaller, more expensive and generally nastier until I visited a up-market supermarket in Burnsville, MN that was trying to sell salmon fillets at a premium price that a Seattle fishmonger would have chucked in the bin.  Meanwhile, the steaks became bigger, more tender and cheaper until for the price of a modest burger in Washington State I could, in Wyoming, buy a restaurant steak that completely obscured the plate and I could cut it with a fork.

This, to me, is what a locavore movement should be about; extolling to the masses the virtues of their local livestock and produce, imploring restaurants to take advantage of the local fish, reminding them that the sweet corn is delicious beyond the power of description and pointing out that the cheese at the farmers' market is a bit of all right.

Mind you, I have been to a few places in the world where the local stuff was so bad that I'd recommend importing every last crumb, but as a general principle, it's sound.

And I'm not alone.  Turn on any one of Gordon Ramsey's 3,472 television programmes and you'll hear him telling &^% restaurateurs that they're @)^&ing stupid not to @^%$ing use (&%@ing local food in their $%#@ing restaurants, the !&(%s.

Unfortunately, this being the age of irresponsible environmentalism and self-serving Gaia worship, locavorism has been co-opted into a hair-shirt movement devoid of any science, maths, economics or common sense as they turn a simple truth like buying the local rabbit is nicer into a crusade to Save the Planet^TM.  The image that keeps springing to mind is some benighted locavore fanatic who's fallen completely for the party line and vows to only eat what is grown within twenty miles.  Unfortunately, he lives in a prairie and the only thing grown within the sacred limits is grass.  Unless your name is Nebuchadnezzar, good luck with that.

The advocates bleat on about calories expended, food miles, sustainability and all manner of other things that they clearly don't understand, but which they seem to imagine make an iron-clad case for saying that if you eat New Zealand lamb, we'll all be dead by 2050.

It's at this point that logic and apocalypse fatigue starts to set in.  If things have really got so bad that my enjoying Chilean asparagus is the knife edge on which the fate of the world balances, then its far too late and would you please pass the hollandaise sauce?

Which reminds me, I must work on the Earth Day menu.  Let's see what's the best food I can find that will really clock up the odometer?

Elephant nose

Yanko Design (The DREADCO of the design world) offers this magic wand that can tell if your airline meal (if you get one) is a pure offering or an abomination in the sight of Blessed Gaia.

It's a step up from the Ouija board.

Kobe?

Eaten any Kobe beef in the US in the past couple of years?

No, you haven't.

Checking the odds

Headline from the Bloomberg Businessweek:

A Hot Dog a Day Raises Risk of Dying, Harvard Study Finds

You mean raises it above 100 percent?

We used to dream of plankton!

When I were a lad, we 'ad it tough.  We'd have to get up at two o'clock in the morning, go down t'mill, work 18 hours a day, come home and all we'd 'ave t'eat was a bowl of plankton.

Cooked?

Aye.

Luxury.

Marmite spill

A lorry overturns on the M1; spilling 20 tons of Marmite.

Authorities reported  airlifting enormous quantities of buttered toast for the clean up.

Decline is a choice

Proof from the Telegraph that the EU is a dead tyranny walking:

Beekeepers face being driven out of business by a European court ruling that pollen must be listed as an ingredient of honey.

No wonder the Empire has to go cap in hand to the Chicoms!

What's for breakfast?

A proper breakfast

I have a joke that my family and friends sincerely wish I'd stop making while digging into leftover takeaway, but won't until I get a laugh: What's so strange about eating Chinese food for breakfast?  A billion people in China do it everyday.

Now the question of what Chinamen eat for breakfast is answered as well as for 49 other countries around the world.

However, they still fail to answer why 49 countries still refuse to tuck into a full English breakfast of eggs, bacon, sausage, baked beans, chips and a fried slice as God intended.

French logic

You're economy is on the brink of collapse, your country is being overrun by an unstoppable tide of Muslim immigration, car burnings are a national pastime, you can't even tweak the budget without starting a riot, your pseudocurrency is on the verge of imploding, and your European Empire went from birth to decadence in one step, so what do you do?

Ban ketchup!