Tummyrumble

2010: A few of my favourite memories

It is the time of year (15 minutes before leaving for the NYE celebrations) to write lists of things that were and things to be.

Here are my favourite memories from the year that was.

My favourite restaurant 2010: Hawksmoor Seven Dials. Astounding attention to detail, excellent food, best burgers in town.Fri Dec 31 20:32:59 via HootSuiteMagnus Hultberg
manne

Best read 2010: "I'm not scared", Niccolo Ammaniti. Beautiful writing, captivating, letting you see the world from the eyes of a scared kid.Fri Dec 31 20:38:13 via HootSuiteMagnus Hultberg
manne

Tastiest burrito 2010: Surprisingly found in a food truck in the tiny Swedish town of Ängelholm... http://ow.ly/3wEnCFri Dec 31 20:39:47 via HootSuiteMagnus Hultberg
manne

Strangest dish I cooked during 2010: Herring ice cream. As delicious as it sounds scary. Trust. http://ow.ly/3wEojFri Dec 31 20:40:49 via HootSuiteMagnus Hultberg
manne

Best recipe I found on a food blog in 2010: Fish fragrant aubergines, by @hollowlegs: http://ow.ly/3wEqXFri Dec 31 20:42:45 via HootSuiteMagnus Hultberg
manne

Best food blogger events I attended in 2010: at Bob Bob Ricard and The Ship in Wandsworth. Just can't pick one. http://ow.ly/3wErvFri Dec 31 20:44:04 via HootSuiteMagnus Hultberg
manne

Greatest London find during 2010: Mudchute City Farm. Lovely for quiet day, great food, complete break from busy London. http://ow.ly/3wEtZFri Dec 31 20:47:37 via HootSuiteMagnus Hultberg
manne

Best event I attended in 2010: The making of British Citizen Ingrid (@ingthorpe). http://ow.ly/3wEuMFri Dec 31 20:48:46 via HootSuiteMagnus Hultberg
manne

My favourite underground restaurant visit in 2010: LexEat Supper Club. Winner on style points. And troll like dessert. http://ow.ly/3wEvMFri Dec 31 20:50:17 via HootSuiteMagnus Hultberg
manne

Nostalgic find of 2010 in mum's stash of embarrassing childhood memories: My letter to Ronald Reagan. http://ow.ly/3wEwRFri Dec 31 20:51:47 via HootSuiteMagnus Hultberg
manne

Best (not just because the only) cooking course of 2010: Ashburton Cookery School. Great teachers, amazing facilities. http://ow.ly/3wExTFri Dec 31 20:52:51 via HootSuiteMagnus Hultberg
manne

My favourite restaurant dish of 2010: Char grilled steak with coriander mustard at Ottolenghi. Divine in its simplicity. http://ow.ly/3wEzrFri Dec 31 20:55:06 via HootSuiteMagnus Hultberg
manne

Right, enough of sifting through the past year. Hope you all had great memories from 2010, and will make even more during 2011! Happy NYE!Fri Dec 31 20:58:45 via HootSuiteMagnus Hultberg
manne

Best cookery books of 2005

As the year comes to an end we all start to make lists. In the world of cooking the lists of course focus on cookery books, restaurants and food experiences. Sadly enough, I have hardlly bought any cookery books at all this year since the problem with living in a rented room in a shared house is that 1) you don't have that much space to begin with and 2) you know that you soon(ish) will be moving out and the more stuff you have the more work it will be...

However, lately I have been made aware of this great magazine called The Week (online at www.theweek.co.uk) where all the latest news, editorials, movie releases and so on are collected and presented in a very easy to digest format. Tufte would be proud of these people I think. Think of it as the Cliff Notes of news media, updated weekly. Just what I need.

Best part is I don't even subscribe. I have this kind friend who has a subscription, and monday mornings I go to her place, have a cuppa and a chat, and as I leave she gives me the latest issue. Brilliant start of the week, my friend B and The Week is. Offline P2P document sharing, how cool is that?

So anyway. Lists. In the issue I got this Monday The Week has collected nine of the best cookery books of 2005, as they have been presented by various magazines and web sites. I am not going to list them all, that would be like what, theft... But I will mention the two I found the most interesting and that I really would love to buy myself.

Top of the list, mine as well as The Week's, is The Silver Spoon by various contributors. This has been the best selling cookery book in Italy for the past 50 years, but it is not until now that it has been made available in English!

With the best of Italian regional cooking represented, this has been a traditional gift to newly married women. Very big (I like big books) with 1,250 pages and over 2,000 recipes this is quite a volume. Recipes are arranged by ingredients, a property of a cookery book that I certainly like!

Moving on in the list, the next book that caught my eye was Arabesque by Claudia Roden. Cover looks lovely, it really makes me want to dive in. Recipes are collected from Lebanon, Morocco and Turkey and according to the review this "is easily one of the most inspiring books of the year".

Sounds good. Real good.

Since I started cooking more, and reading a lot about cooking, I have found that there are more people than me in the world that actually read cookery books, from start to finish. Going over lists of ingredients, carefully studying series of photos, trying to sense in my mind what a certain combination of spices would taste like...

What I also really like is cookery books where the recipes are tied in to more or less a story, or the author's memories. That makes me a bit interested in a third book on the list, Climbing the Mango Trees by Madhur Jaffrey.

Labelled as an "evocative memoir" the books is not only a collection of recipes based on the author's background from growing up in Delhi, they are all also linked to memories of dinners, lunches, weddings and picnics.

Promising. I like reading my recipes in context.

Explanation of the obesity epidemic

Currently I am reading "Don't eat this book" by Morgan Spurlock, the guy who made the movie "Super size me". Quite a fascinating and horrifying read. As anyone who saw the movie can guess it is all about how fast food in general and McDonalds in particular contribute to the world wide spreading epidemic of obesity around the world. We as a species get fatter every year, and instead of doing something about it we seem to dive deeper into our junkie hole of sugars, carbohydrates, trans fats and all the other stuff that is so good and tasty in moderation but slowly killing you in excess.

Sure, a little pleasure in your life now and then is well needed. Like my friend Eliott once said, "Everything is good in moderation, even excess". We really need to start pacing ourselves when it comes to food however, we are well past the boundaries of what can be called moderated excess.

Today I received an email, one of those witty ones that circulate among friends and friends of friends around the Internet forever (they are a bit like messages in bottles, bobbing around across the digital ocean...) with arguments in a Q&A format explaining in a very rational way why working out is bad for you.

One of the arguments caught my eye (thanks Anders for pointing that out):

Q: Is swimming good for your figure?
A: If swimming is good for your figure, explain whales to me.

I laughed a bit, and then it struck me! This means something! I felt like the guy in "Close encounters of the third kind", when he sits in front of his mashed potatoes and starts shaping an odd looking mountain on his plate...

We all know about global warming. Be it true or not, the theory goes that because of our excessive use of the planet's resources (another excess we need to moderate by the way...) we are screwing up the weather and slowly melting our polar caps. Water levels in our oceans are rising, and fifty to a hundred six to fifteen years from now (revised this after some pretty shocking reports, I am getting quite concerned even though this text may not convey that very well), much of what we call home will be part of the rather boring and so very wet ocean floor.

Which creatures are not only mammals, but also well suited for life in cold and deep waters? Whales. They are also quite intelligent, care about their offspring and even (as Dory in "Finding Nemo" so amusingly taught us, thanks Disney for the educational value of your movies!) have a language of sorts allowing them to communicate over vast distances of dark and cold ocean waters!

Starting to see it?

Stop being scared of the obesity epidemic! It is nature's own way of adapting us as a species to the self inflicted consequences of global warming! Mother Nature, Gaia if you so will, comes to our rescue. With a really thick layer of fat around our bodies, and great floating skills thanks to the lower density of fat compared to muscles, we will be able to survive the rising waters and adapt to our new ever bluer planet.

But what about the health problems, I hear you say, what about the coronaries, the clogged up arteries, the back and knee problems? Not a problem! Once we are all submerged in Earth's great floatation tank we won't put the same physical strain on our bodies hence the risks of being fat will basically go away!

Smart woman, our Gaia, she has clearly thought this through well. Surely The Flying Spaghetti Monster is in on this somewhere, but I have yet to figure that part out.

Next thing you'll see are reports about obese people developing gills. Mark my words, we have a bright future ahead of us as the ruling sea creatures of this beautiful (and clever!) planet!

Westminster Abbey goes to war with Dan Brown

The religious fellows over at Westminster Abbey apparently are sick and tired of getting questions about The Da Vinci Code, since they have "armed their marshals with leaflets to tell tourists exactly what the novel got wrong. Filming on location for the upcoming movie is totally out of the question.

Among the arguments of what Dan Brown got wrong I especially like this one:

"Relies on apocryphal Gnostic texts which had been excluded from the biblical canon because they were imaginative."

Yes, of course. And I think that should be interpreted as "excluded from the approved propaganda since they didn't coincide with our goal of world wide male domination."

It is all a conspiracy you know.

URL: ThisIsLondon: Abbey joins Da Vinci row [via]