A funny thing happens after you've been in space for a few days. The foods you liked on day one suddenly don't taste as good, and soon you're reaching for the hot sauce, even if you don't really like spicy foods. So why does it happen? Well, the short answer is that people lose their sense of smell in space. Astronauts have reported that food doesn't taste right after a few days on the International Space Station. Coffee is bitter, folks start craving sour and sweet foods, and everyone starts reaching for hot sauce.
It’s Food Jim (But not as we nose it…)
Freedom Of Sweets
For some time now, I've been arguing that legal scholars ought to be challenging the contention of food corporations that the First Amendment gives them the right to market foods any way they like, even to kids. I simply cannot believe that the Founding Fathers of the United States intended the First Amendment for this purpose. In December 2010, I urged public interest lawyers to examine current food marketing practices in light of the First Amendment. I am pleased to see that they are now doing so.
Filed under Features
Tagged fat, freedom of speech, obesity, The Atlantic
Du-kan Afford It?
Following in Mr Ramsden’s footsteps, I’m off to begin my austerity Dukan diet test, involving Diarylea triangles and Value Ham washed down with own-brand cola…
The first day was difficult. There was little care or art in the food I cooked, but instead a wish to merely fill my face with as much protein as possible so that I could think about something other than food. It didn’t really work. You see, eating a single food group on repeat is a largely unsatisfying process. A plate groaning with chicken livers (cooked in sherry vinegar, onion and garlic) with herbs, chopped gherkin, low-fat yoghurt – vile stuff if you ask me – and sprinkled with smoked paprika sounds decent enough, but was crucially missing bread or, say, something green and crunchy. It wasn’t a complete dish.
Filed under Features
Tagged celebrities, Du-kan Afford It?, dukan diet, ham, protein
Brassica Sharks
You wouldn’t think that an artist hand-making t-shirts that promote organic produce out of his garage and a fast food giant would be fighting over a advertising slogan. Chick-fil-A, the “quick-service” restaurant with more than $3.5 billion in revenues in 2010 has taken legal action to stop Bo Muller-Moore from trademarking the phrase “Eat More Kale,” claiming it infringes on their trademarked slogan, “Eat Mor Chikin.”
Filed under Features
Tagged corporate, david and goliath, kale, legal battle, Treehugger.com
Fish on a Friday
What to do when you're too lazy to get the bamboo steamer out of the cupboard… and in Penang
We are settled in, kind of. I've unpacked the kitchen, and the rest of the house too — sort of. My office is nearly together, and we now have internet at home, which means I can get back to spending time in this little space. But it's late Friday afternoon and unlike in Kuala Lumpur, where we regularly worked until 8 or so, in Penang we make a point of enjoying our evenings. So I plan to close this computer while there is still light in the sky, take the dogs for a walk, and then kick back and contemplate dinner.
Filed under Recipes
Tagged Eating Asia, fish, Malaysia, penang
A Reason to like Fennel
For years my brain has said ‘Yes’ to fennel while my tongue screams ‘Ugh’. Last night I made this and they agreed to disagree. Yum.
Spiced pork and cumin sausages with fennel and preserved-lemon salad recipe. Home-made spicy 'sausages' served with bread, yogurt and a salad of crunchy fennel and piquant preserved lemon
Filed under Recipes
Tagged Fennel, silvena Rowe, The Telegraph
Sweet Words
When is a biscuit more than a biscuit? When it’s an interracial cookie.
Lemon and Rosemary Shortbread. It’s like a Tiger Woods cookie… a little bit of everything. They have sugar and flour and loads of butter. They also have lemon zest, lemon juice, fresh rosemary, and a little splash of almond extract. And most importantly, they don’t need any resting time. Which in the world of Shortbread, is amazing. I hate waiting for cookie dough to rest, it’s almost completely impossible.
Filed under Recipes
Tagged biscuits, Novice Chef, tiger woods
A Quick Bite in Chelsea
What could be more pleasant that an afternoon’s Sloane spotting in Pimlico over a plate of fresh mackerel?
“Ya, I’m like totally over committed… so I can’t take on anything else right now,” explains a long limbed carefully shaven gent in his early twenties to a lady friend.
Reclining club-class style in his chair, dressed in tennis gear and clutching a glass of rose at The Orange on Pimlico Road he does look stretched, admittedly.
When having lunch in Sloane-ville, I find the food tends to play second fiddle to the entertainment. And last Friday I was lucky enough to spot a Made In Chelsea style gent on my way out the door after another brilliant meal at this utterly reliable gastropub. Continue reading
Imperial Schizophrenia
A true collision of sweet and sour dining style
very grizzled fine-dining veteran knows that your enjoyment of dinner can be directly affected by where you’re seated in a restaurant. But I’ve never encountered two rooms as jarringly different as the ones on display at Sam Talbot’s new seafood restaurant, Imperial No. Nine, which opened several weeks ago off the lobby of the Mondrian Soho hotel. The main dining room, where I was seated one grim evening, is a windowless lounge-lizard Siberia. There, the house music is annoyingly loud, and the glowing imitation Louis Quatorze furniture looks like it’s been lifted from the VIP lounge of an after-hours club in suburban L.A. The garden room, by contrast, is an airy space enclosed in glass, like a giant greenhouse, and decorated with flowerpots and handblown chandeliers. On a clear evening, you can look up and see the stars twinkling dimly over downtown Manhattan.
Filed under Reviews
Tagged Imperial Schizophrenia, new york, restaurant, style
Atherton no longer A-mazeing
With a Royal Wedding in the air, the stench of unemployment wafting through the bunting and a London trend for overpriced, small plates of food, 2011 is starting to smell a little like 1981. So said @richmajor slightly euphorically about the state of things, as we enjoyed our first meal at Pollen Street Social.
Perhaps he was hallucinating in the Athens-like heat. Head chef Jason Atherton, formally of Ramsay’s maze, had managed to find the only golden statue of a leg of lamb in London, displayed proudly in the window. The effort would have been better spent securing the services of an electrician to fix the air-conditioning. But, I tried to stay positive as my legs glued themselves to the black leather, Manhattan-style banquette at which we were sat. Continue reading
Filed under Reviews
Starting From Zero
How would you feel if 9/11 reminded you of the night you fell in love?
On the second anniversary of 9/11, he said that he’d invited some friends to get a drink and they’d reacted as if that were a tacky way to commemorate a nation’s tragedy. I was then and am still firmly of the belief that a stiff drink is a fine way to soften the blow of a crappy memory, and told him that a complete stranger would be happy to meet him for a drink after work. Two years later, I married him.
Filed under Features
Tagged 9/11, blog, cake, love, relationship, smitten kitchen
Oh Deer, Drunk Again
Our ladette, binge-drinking culture has finally reached Sweden.
A stunned Swede discovered a seemingly intoxicated moose entangled in an apple tree. Per Johansson, 45, who lives in south-western Sweden, says he heard a roar from the garden of his neighbour, who was on holiday, late on Tuesday and went to have a look. There he found a female moose kicking about in the tree. The animal was likely to have been drunk from eating fermented apples.
Cod Love Hugh
The day I gave into the sustainable fish militia, and bought some fresh sardines…
After months of Fearnley-Whittingstall’s fish offensive, I officially can’t get excited by certain fish any longer. It’s hard to love a piece of well-travelled, expensive salmon when Hugh’s told you umpteem times that coley, pouting, megrim and mackerel are probably living in ponds in your back garden – and actually like being barbecued. So last weekend, as I wandered around my fishmongers in Nunhead looking for dinner material, I ignored the overfished salmon, tuna and prawns in favour of local, fresh sardines for dinner (priced at £2.75 for eight they could only be endanger of being too prolific). Continue reading
Filed under Features
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