bainesy

English breakfast. Vegetarian. Eh? Eh???????????????

A nice small subject then...? Give me ten years and I might begin to list some of the candidates. While I think, once could do worse (for London ideas) than visit Fancyapint.com

I had heard of this machine, and must admit to dismissing it out of hand. However, perusal of the various coffee authorities (alt.coffee, Coffeegeek) reveals quite a few positive mentions for it. The consensus is it's easy to use, and makes passable coffee (with a pod system you're never going to get anything amazing). Randy Glass's review is perhaps the best. ...but I won't be replacing my Gaggia just yet

This Article in the Guardian will come as no surpise to most people who know about the practice of injecting cheap intensively-reared pork with water (presumably in order to give it a fake 'juiciness'). It's pleasing though to see a Trading Standards Institute coming out clearly against the practice - even if it is legal.

Atlantic City. Lemons, Susan Sarandon and Burt Lancaster.

This is quite irrelevant, and completely off-topic, but for the first time in ???years I'm listening to 'Lodi' by Creedence Clearwater Revival, and - stone the crows - talk in this blog is about Lodi. I need to lie down. Thanks for the great blog though wnissen. *leaves room with a shrug and glazed look in eyes*

Errm...Dumb and Dumber? I don't think this was posted with the other Goodfellas quotes. The defining line in the downfall of a tragic (anti)hero

Ginger Pig are doing the Ps de B as an offer at £12.50 at the moment Matthew, although they'd sold out by the time I roused myself from my recumbent position today and made it to Southwark. Label Anglais seem to be about £5.60 a kilo (Ginger Pig and others). Sorry...I'm all for testing experiments but though my head told me to buy chicken my heart told me it was a steak-frites evening.

Here's a page with a picture (scroll down to 'Telline') of what I recall - like pretty little pebbles. Click

Bux, by 'plain and unadorend' I didn't mean raw - I have seen Tellinas served in a dish simply steamed open (in fact I cooked them like that when I was in Denia earlier this year). They were tiny, but opened up like normal shellfish on cooking, and were well worth the trouble of eating. Rhonda, you haven't said yet whereabouts in Spain your friend encountered these?

Tellinas? They can be tiny, and from what I recall they can be served as a plain unadorned dish in the Valencia region. They're beautiful tiny shellfish, and worth extricating from the shells - maybe your friend should have more patience, and eat them like the English eat (some) shellfish - with a cocktail stick...? If the shells remain shut after cooking of course, they should be discarded as usual.

An update - pretty hilarious as usual - to the 'Steve don't Eat It' files Click I see a touching coincidence in the fact that Jon's last post in this thread has Ray Charles - R.I.P.- as his sig.

5. Devolve some of my mayoral powers to the rest of the country, so there weren't so many culinary deserts everywhere BUT London

A certain J Rayner reviewed a rather rushed meal there in yesterday's Observer. Click Conveys quite nicely that awful restless feeling you get when you know your time is limited so strictly.

And one that always resonates (not that I've any fame to give, but, well, you know...)

There was a spate of food-poisoning in Britain a couple of decades ago, when 'slow cookers' first came on the scene. People using them to make that retro-staple chili con carne were often eating kidney beans which, though they'd been cooked for hours, had never reached the internal temperature necessary to destroy their toxins. My nomination is olives - I have vague memories as a child of eating one from straight from a tree, unaware that they need a curing process to make them edible. I wouldn't recommend it. edit: for spelling

Oh well...my two penn'orth (and if there's going to be a ruck between the hedonists of the world and the dieticians then I'm with the former). Human beings aren't machines, and as well as our digestive tracts we have brains - hell some people even say we've got a soul. Yet some dietary advice seems to bypass this fact (and there is a LOT of pseudo-science bullshit peddled in that field). Our brains tell us when something is pleasureable, and to go further, that feeling one gets eating a fresh Helford oyster, drinking the first swig of beer after a hard summer's day's work, the "god-shot" espresso, foie gras, jamon iberico, manzanilla, cox's orange pippin, is more than pleasure. It is, or can be, euphoria. Now, in the field of bullshit science I am second to none, but I'm damn sure that when I get that feeling it's doing me more good than bad. And isn't that feeling the reason we're here after all? (meaning on eGullet, although, on reflection, maybe I mean it more profoundly). Of course, there is much to commend a diet comprising 'natural' ingredients - I don't for instance, want that oyster or that apple mucked around with thank you, and, in general terms the 'natural' approach is a positive one. "Organic" is, broadly, a good thing (but transporting organic products half way round the earth to peddle them at inflated prices to gullible supermarket shoppers certainly isn't). But, equally, some foods are immeasurably better in a "refined" state (I'm not sure I want to chew on hops, malt and brewers yeast - I'd rather someone "refined" them first please). Of course some people are required for health reasons to follow a restrictive diet, but, I wish some of the practitioners would recognise a more holistic (!) approach, and accept that a neo-puritan attitude to food and drink ("drink more water, cut down on alcohol/caffeine/refined foods blah blah blah") might be missing something. Oh I could ramble on and on, but it's a nice day outside, and the coffee is (clearly) kicking in.

Fantastic - thanks Peter. No one I have spoken to in England has even heard of Marburg (says a lot for our insularity). I try my hardest to learn a little bit about a new place I am visiting, and your recommendations form part of that. If I get the chance to visit any of them I'll report back. Thanks again bainesy

eGullet: fantastic - where the conversation can turn effortlessly from 3 star chefs to THE seminal dub album Andy - I like the way you modulated your language to the subject...

Would that be pizzoccheri? Never had it myself, but there's a great recipe on Chuck Taggart's fine Creole and Cajun Recipe Page (pizzoccheri is of course, neither Creole or Cajun - from Lombardy it appears - but he does have a world food section) Click Giorgio Locatelli also did a version on his UKTV Food series. edit: to say EndlessAutumn beat me to the answer by three minutes...

From Mirror.co.uk - the celebrity chefs taking part in the forthcoming Ramsay's Hell's Kitchen, are "politician Edwina Currie, singers Belinda Carlisle and Matt Goss, Bad Girls actress Amanda Barrie, actor James Dreyfus, investigative journalist Roger Cook, sprinter Dwain Chambers, TV host Abi Titmuss, comic Al Murray and actress-singer Jennifer Ellison". Words fail me. Anyone see tonight's Kitchen Nightmare about Moore Place in Esher? It seemed to lack the either the sheer car-crash awfulness of the first episode, or the kitchen-interest factor of the following two - I couldn't see the point.

Hi To foster good Anglo-German relationships a few of my English friends and I occasionally meet up with an ex-pat friend living in Germany, and his like-minded German friends, and, well, basically get drunk for a long weekend. This year's event is in Marburg, about which I can't discover a great deal except that it's a pretty university town. I wondered if anyone had any experience/recommendations for the town? Not too stuffy, not too expensive (see comment about getting drunk). Or does it suffer (like Oxford here in England) from a surfeit of students too devoted to raucous living to care about good food/drink? (Mind you - that doesn't sound too uninviting really... ) thanks bainesy

I agree the back-slapping and the 'froth' are irritating (Kirsty Wark: "I keep cookbooks by my bed to read at night (my favourite is Nigel Slater))", and it's a shame to have to read HFW merely plugging his latest book, because I enjoy his columns normally. There's clearly an editorial policy to combine 'serious' food articles with 'lifestyle' ones. I enjoyed the article about vietnamese 'pho', and the (rather slanted against science) one about additives, but "I've never had good sex with a vegetarian" complete with preposterous photos...gawd help us. I think the biggest disappointment is that it doesn't seem to have developed at all (see the comments from 2001 earlier in the thread). Mind you - it's better than nothing isn't it? bainesy (wondering if anyone else is fed up with Nigel Slater using the odious word 'toothsome' at every opportunity)

Hear, hear Hathor. To make a 'supersize' 'grande' 'vente' or whatever companies like McD's call them implies either a horrendous (but quite enticing ) amount of espresso in the drink, or diluting it with excessive amounts of milk. To get any taste (i.e. using milk with a high cream content) one will be consuming a LOT of fat. Going down that route would mean the nation in question would end up with large numbers of obese...oh...wait...hang on a minute.... ....ahem

I was surprised recently when, at one of the butchers at Borough Market in London, I asked for 'grean streaky bacon' the PBTC said 'smoked or unsmoked?' [Had I better explain here that, at least in Britain, 'green' traditionally means unsmoked?]. He continued 'all our bacon is green - it is organically bred'. The (green) bacon was fantastic BTW - but I thought it was interesting that such a 'traditional' term was not in currency at a stall that seemed to pride itself on a traditional approach. Language develops I suppose...