Pages tagged “food”
09 Nov 2024
Pic'n'mix reinvented
What unites salted butter, cans of gin & tonic, Branstonnaise and Quality Street? That’s right: they’re all sold mixed up. Or as I’ve been calling it, “with added entropy”. Salt, butter, gin, tonic, Branston pickle and mayonnaise are all readily available. And now, in a move I thoroughly approve of, Quality Street have taken entropy out of their product. The individual flavours are being sold separately - John Lewis in Cambridge has a big fancy dispenser.
26 Jun 2023
Long, crustless hypotenuses
Branstonnaise is a new one on me: I’ve just discovered the third high-entropy food product to feature on this blog. It has prompted me to share a recipe for a sandwich. Ultimate Cheese is its name, and Sarah invented it while we lived in New Zealand. It doesn’t contain Branston pickle, but it does contain mayonnaise and another brown, tasty sandwich sauce. Note: the recipe is opinionated re: bread colour and cheese form (sliced over grated).
28 Feb 2021
Sula Sauce
Heinz have hit a sweet spot with this product in our house. That’s right: another high entropy cupboard product. Or should that be fridge product? No longer does Iris have to mash two sauces together to create her world famous “Sula Sauce”. I already have a world view that divides food into “better with mayonnaise” and “other” so I am pretty much right in the traction beam here. Iris shares my love for the white stuff and first tried mixing it with ketchup years ago, so the big corporations are playing catch up here.
20 Sep 2020
Now with added entropy
I’m currently working my way through this jar to make room in the cupboard for a jar of honey and a jar of tahini. I admit to being slightly perplexed by the seeming increase in items for sale which are just two other things mixed together. Salted butter is an oldie. Admittedly, I couldn’t make salted butter (easily) from salt and butter in my cupboard/fridge, but then I never consume butter in solid form anyway.
20 Aug 2020
Le Condimentâle
We discovered a new type of cheese while on holiday this year in France. In fact, you could say we invented it. If you own a campervan or are a keen camper you might have been introduced to the concept of “Condimental”. I won’t reveal the name of the friend who shared that word with me, but in our family we had already independently begun practising this slightly nefarious and gently thrilling collection activity.
20 Jan 2019
Saucy chat
I visited a burger restaurant in Islington with workmates recently, and a very wide-ranging conversation included quite some discussion of sauces. We compared favourites and tried to remember the differences between them all. It occurred to me that being able to compare one sauce’s recipe with another’s might be a fun geek project in git. So, here is the result of a hour’s wikipedia research and some tapping at a command line on a train ride:
31 Mar 2018
Secret Garden next left
Thanks no doubt to its high quality writing, my humble blog is followed by up to at least 1 million readers. This is in some senses a sponsored post, because (full disclosure) a kind and generous benefactor has sent me an item to review. The item in question comprises 1,200g of dried fruit, butter, eggs, nuts, sugar and sherry, at least some of which is a concealed citrus fruit. True Mozz food then.
14 Nov 2017
Bobotie
Christmas pudding is my number one foodstuff. Alongside it, lasagne, haggis, flapjack and pies. Clearly I have a predilection for stodge. We even have a term for it in our family. “Mozz food” has to have a certain density (calorifically and, er, massively). I love to crunch a crisp, to consume a cracker, but when hungry I will bat away these lower density delights in favour of something with a bit of heft to it.
10 Apr 2016
Quornucopia
One day this week I had lunch that contained quorn, quark and quinoa. That is all.
17 Feb 2016
IRN-BRU sorbet
Burns Night is a big deal in our family, and we celebrated it last month. The past couple of times I’ve made (what I think is) a successful sorbet from IRN-BRU, the most Scottish of soft drinks. I started from this recipe courtesy of Jane Levi/Silphium. Realising that the flavour would be more intense if I didn’t dilute the BRU, I figured: There are 10.3g sugar in 100ml of IRN-BRU (source).
01 Jun 2014
Weighing up
We returned home from a wonderful holiday with some wonderful friends and found our bathroom scales in the middle of the floor. They came in handy for checking airline luggage allowance on the way out, waited patiently while we gorged on meat, cheese, Campari and rosé wine, and then provided confirmation of exactly what we feared when we got home. Photo album from Villa Novia
12 Jun 2013
Spaced repetition and remarkable carrots
Memories are blurry. Asked to recall our earliest experience, most of us have vague recollections of some childhood incident. Facts, on the other hand, are sharp little points of knowledge. The Battle of Hastings took place in 1066. Alan Partridge’s middle name is Gordon. The capital of Kenya is Nairobi, and so on. Try to recall your earliest memory that could be described as “factual”. I admit to being slightly unusual in this regard (in fact, I admit to being slightly unusual).
10 May 2013
The structure of a smell
This is a post about the power of pictures and the smell of wee. Chemicals, in the macroscopic, room-temperature-and-pressure world that we inhabit, are defined by what they do. Cyclopentane is a flammable liquid, a solvent, it smells a bit like petrol - and so on. Structural formulae, to give them their proper appellation, are graphical representations of the arrangements of atoms within a molecule. Usually a few lines represent a carbon skeleton, and other atoms' elemental symbols are connected by lines representing covalent bonds.21 Jun 2012