Tummyrumble

The Cube is right outside my office [Sponsored Video]

The Cube, unique pop up restaurant by Electrolux previously featured in other major European cities, is setting up shop right outside my office on South Bank.

Check out the amazing view of the Thames and Big Ben from that tiny elevated space...

This:

We wrote a bit about it on the Bookatable blog a while back. It's truly a unique concept.

You might wonder why Electrolux is sponsoring The Cube, but the food connection is quite plain and simple: they power a lot of professional restaurant kitchens, and I guess they want to do more...

Being in London for a mere 3 months, it's bound to book up quickly. Me being a notoriously bad planner, I hardly think I'll be able to get a ticket. This is one of the few foodie events I'd really like to do this year though.

(Full disclaimer, that video is part of a paid campaign run by Unruly Media. I urge you therefore to click the links and put some money you don't have to pay forward to my web hosting! I genuinely want to go though, wouldn't put this here if I didn't. Trust.)

Spikes in visits make me happy

I am such a simple creature. Peak a few numbers in my blog stats dashboard, and I smile.

To all who have come here from the Eat Like A Swede blog about LCHF, welcome! And thanks! :)

Would love to hear form you in the comments.

Also, for some reading on the importance of tracking for increased chance of success in weight loss and well being, if that's your sort of thing, check out my recent post titled "Fighting obesity with information" at hultberg.org.

Have a nice day!

Demand leads to price hikes. Price hikes lead to greed. Greed leads to... Exploding watermelons?!?

This sounds like a joke, but a so bizarre one it has to be true.

"Fields of watermelons have been exploding in China after farmers gave them overdoses of growth chemicals during wet weather." ... "Prices over the past year prompted many farmers to jump into the watermelon market. All of those with exploding melons were first-time users of the growth accelerator forchlorfenuron, although it has been widely available for some time, said China Central Television."

Water-mess-lons
Originally uploaded by sfllaw, thanks for sharing using Creative Commons!

My mind reels. There are chemicals that makes veg grow uncontrollably? What happens if you feed it to cats, do we get sabre toothed tigers?

Hang on... What about insects in the fields? Attack of the giant spiders? This is going to freak me out all day.

On a more serious note, I would love to know if this chemical (when used as it is supposed to) produces vegetables with the same nutritional "density" as without. If something grows to a larger size than it normally does, in the same time (I can't believe commercial farmers would wait a few weeks longer for the added size...), is it as nutritious or is it just the vegetable equivalent of water retention.

Check out a news report video with English voiceovers here.

Wheat and its potentially ill effects on your well being

The Independent today has a great article about tennis star Novak Djokovic and how staying away from wheat (and barley and rye) not only made him feel better but much upped his game.

There are lots of interesting facts in the article, but what really surprised me to see is just how many people go about their daily lives with wheat intolerance and just don't know about it.

As many as 600,000 people in the UK don't take well to wheat, about 1 in 10. With a mere 15% actually diagnosed for it, there must be so many who feel queasy, bloated and confused about why their stomach sometimes completely lets them down.

Probably fuels a whole off the shelf pharmacy industry segment with antacid pills, liquids, fibre additives and coal tablets.

I used to be one of them. In reality, the only action that has any chance of remedying a wheat intolerance is a change of diet.

One of the biggest benefits to me of trying out the Low Carb High Fat approach to eating was the realisation that I am likely to have a wheat intolerance. For about 10 years I didn't have the first clue, and never did a doctor even hint in this direction. "IBS, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, try this, try that, yes, the completely conflicting symptoms and ensuing advice are perfectly natural."

When I switched to LCHF, and stuck to it, my stomach took on a changed personality and I suddenly didn't need to fear being further away from a toilet than 2minutes. Socializing, plane rides, movie visits and going to the theatre took on a hole new meaning.

Coeliac UK is an organisation trying to spread the word about wheat intolerance and its effects, and with wheat present in so many things these days (not just pasta, pizza and bread...) information is key to helping the hundred of thousands of people who may not even realise their lives could be much happier.

I am doing my bit by where I can, trying to push more restaurants to understand the potential market of having (and advertising!) gluten free options on their menus. But now I am off to eat my breakfast of fried eggs topped with a bit of cheese. Yum. 

Tummyrumble, year 2010

At the start of the new year I always go back and sift through my website visitor statistics in Google Analytics to see what has been most read, how people found their way here and such.

I then update my "most popular" page with the current post leaderboard. ;)

This year there were some changes in the list compared to last year.

Winners!

The list is still, by far, topped by my recipes for Flying Jacob (bananas, rice and peanuts, yum!) and grilled sticky chicken drumsticks (check out the fun seasonal variation on that post...).

My old post on Japanese pickled vegetables sailed up from nowhere to position number 3, while the recent 2010 post roast asparagus wrapped in parma ham made a rocket jump to position 4! No wonder, asparagus and parma ham is such a great combo...

Another surprising newcomer is my instructions on how to make browned cabbage, the Swedish way. Actually, two variations: a classic and the way we do it in my family. I wrote that last Christmas (2009) and leading up to Christmas 2010 it got enough traffic to go straight in at place number 6! The great Google position it has must be the explanation. Surprising though, there are so many pages about browned cabbage out there.

The recipe and step by step instructions for grilled pastrami salmon jumped from number 11 to number 7.

And I am happy to see that the delicious mustard fruit chutney recipe I created after having tried the Salt Yard version climbed three positions to number 8.

Loser...

Sadly one of my own favourites, brown rice chicken casserole, has completely dropped of the top list... It deserves so much better! Please try it and leave a comment if you liked it. :)

Other stats and thoughts

The biggest traffic source is organic search (with keywords matching pretty exactly the top list of popular posts) while the biggest contributing site is Wikipedia (where I am the recipe linked for Flying Jacob (Flygande Jakob), this classic Swedish 70s dish).

Interestingly, Facebook is now the second biggest referring site.

I get almost 55% of my traffic from search engines, which I am not very happy about. Traffic sources (search, direct and referring sites) should be more balanced, and any blogger probably likes to tell themselves that they have loyal readers coming back... My reality though is that readers randomly stumble in, check out one recipe and then leave (most likely not to come back as I haven't seen much of RSS subscriptions go up the past year).

Early last year I made an attempt of being a bit more structured about my blogging. I published monthly a post on "in season ingredients", I tried to be more structured about reviewing restaurant visits (and also experimented with use of Flickr albums and embedded photo sets). 

Not sure if that is the explanation, but compared to 2009 number of visitors were up a whopping 40%, and page views up 29.9%! Latter half of the year I was much more lax in updating, but the increase in traffic seems to have remained.

This year I will try to focus almost exclusively on slow cooking recipes: stews, roasts, bakes, stocks and soups. Rather write a really useful post once in a while than lots of shorter less valuable posts just because I feel I should update the blog...

The low carb slant also seems to be working well, and since that's an area I feel quite strongly about, expect more recipes and posts along those lines. Fits well with my love of slow cooking too.

Let's see if an increased focus in topic will get more or less traffic over 2011!