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Archive: food

It looks like Scots are tight after all

29 August 2007 20:31

Categories: Current affairs, Entertainment, Food and drink, General, Scotland, Television

There are some adverts running at the moment that jar with me a bit. The charity World Vision is advertising for sponsors. Nothing wrong with that of course. And the adverts are hardly going to be works of creative genius either. It’s pretty much what you would expect from that sort of advert.

World Vision advert: 'It's your call Scotland' But there is one thing that really annoys me about them. They go out of their way to point out that the advert is aimed at Scotland. The image to the right is from an advert I saw in MSN Messenger (they know where I live!). If I recall correctly, the television ad says something like, “Come on Scotland!”

I’m not sure what to make of it. There is nothing else particularly Scottish about the adverts. The actor is English, and I recall an older advert featuring John Craven. I am guessing that similar campaigns are running all over the UK, either with no reference at all to Scotland, or with a reference to your particular region. “It’s your call Anglia!”

My guess is that England does not get its own name check, either for England or regions of England. I know there are a few bloggers who get annoyed about Scotland getting fancy labels on its food in supermarkets while England has to make do with being British. English in British out, they call it.

But I don’t really understand the need to mention Scotland in the adverts. Does it actually make Scots delve deeper in their pockets this line is included in their adverts? It must do, otherwise it would be hard to justify the extra cost and effort involved in making different versions of adverts for different parts of the country.

2 comments

My lifestyle choice vindicated by the top story in the news

15 August 2007 01:08

Categories: Current affairs, Entertainment, Food and drink, General, Personal, Scotland

I have spent most of the day saying, “I told you so!” to my mother. I cannot bloody stand Morrisons. While I’m aware that the cause of the latest chapter of E. Coli O157 Scottish edition has not yet been confirmed as Morrisons, it is not looking too good for them.

I had never heard of Morrisons until they took over Safeway. And Safeway was bad enough. I mean, as far as I could tell, the only reason you would shop at Safeway was if the other nearest supermarket was Lidl. Even then, at least Lidl don’t pretend to be classy when they’re not. It’s a bit like, “Look at us being a cheapo food shop where all the cooking instructions are not in English. Take it or leave it.”

Then along comes Morrisons, and boy, that really put Safeway into perspective. Invariably, their own-brand food tastes foul. You might say, “Serves you right for buying own brand food.” But I can eat own brand Sainsbury’s, own brand Tesco, and even own brand bloody Asda without being condemned to a yucky mouth (if you are lucky), violent diarrhoea attacks (if you moderately lucky) or death (if you are unlucky).

Even Kwik Save’s “No Frills” products were more appealing than Morrisons own brand. And I am not talking Morrisons economy or value lines. Actual own brand, I am talking about. Rancid. I have always told this to my parents, who sadly persist on going to Morrisons even though the food is foul.

I think I first noticed when I ate a pork pie. I mean, how you can eat a pork pie that is so dodgy that you can taste its dodginess is beyond me. Surely the point of pork pies is that they are disgustingly, disgracefully unhealthy. I doubt the existence of premium free range organic pork pies (although if you know of any, point me in the direction). Yet this pork pie was drier than the Sahara desert, which is just plain wrong. Actually, I think a mouthful of sand from the Sahara desert may have been preferable.

Then there are the rolls. Most supermarkets say something along the lines of, “Freshly baked today.” The label on this packet of “crusty rolls” says “Prepared for you in this store”. That is about as ominous as it gets. These rolls are less “crusty” and more “rock solid”. It tastes as though they have been “prepared for me in this store” then left out in the blazing sun to go stale for five days before someone remembered to put it out on the shelf.

One of my mother’s suggestions was that maybe it is not Morrisons’ fault, but a problem with their suppliers. But that hardly vindicates Morrisons. It just suggests that they are too cheap and / or rubbish to hook up with a supplier that can make pork pies with some moisture in.

If the source of this E. coli outbreak turns out to be Morrisons, then it will suggest that they were dealing with a meat supplier that was unable to follow the most basic of hygiene instructions. You know, like washing your hands between handling uncooked and cooked meat. Stuff that children know.

And of course I have an opinion on their logo, which is surely one of the worst known to man. Yellow and black can be a nice combination, but what is with that disgustingly ugly font? It looks like it was designed in the 1980s. The new logo is not much of an improvement. It looks like it was designed using Microsoft Word’s draw tools.

You might think I am joking, but this is a big part of what makes Morrisons unappealing to me. I mean, when the shop’s signage and products’ packaging are so ugly, it hardly gives you confidence about the quality of what’s inside. In short, Morrison’s image is old-fashioned and fusty. The food I had tasted old and fusty.

I am not all that picky when it comes to foods. Sure, I’m a bit queasy about sell by dates and the like, but I don’t mind eating cheap food. But I began to notice a pattern and it actually got to the point where I refused to eat own brand Morrisons products. This is not a joke. It is not every day you have your lifestyle choices vindicated by the top story in the news.

(NB. I do not wish to imply that I could have caught E. coli or any other gastric disease from Morrisons own brand pork pies or crusty rolls. Just that I found them so totally disgusting that I refused to eat them ever again.)

8 comments

Weetabix idents

31 July 2007 16:39

Categories: Entertainment, Food and drink, General, Personal, Television

Perhaps my geekiest guilty pleasure is an interest in television idents. Many a lonely Friday evening has been spent perusing such websites as TV Ark and The TV Room. Not because I’m a sad loner, you understand, but because it’s the really cool thing to do these days.

I also love cereals. The most functional cereal of them all is Weetabix. It’s the only way to go if you have a particularly challenging day ahead. There is nothing in the world that three Weetabix can’t solve. Except perhaps indigestion.

So an advertising campaign that combines the might of Weetabix with the quaint kitsch of classic television idents cannot be anything but awesome. I don’t watch much television these days, so I guess there is the chance that everyone in the world apart from me already knew about it and this post is a bit like going, “ALL BECAUSE THE LADY LOVES MILK TRAY! LOL!”

The only way I learned about the Weetabix advertising campaign was from a post at Idents.tv. I had seen one of the adverts before out of the corner of my eye, probably when I was fast forwarding through the adverts during a grand prix. It didn’t occur to me that it was supposed to mimic idents, with their trippy ambient music and strange abstract visuals.

The TV theme is continued at the Weetabix.tv website, where all of the ident-adverts are available to view. A lot of them have clearly been inspired by classic BBC Two idents from the 1990s.

We have all seen idents thousands of times. Yet, they are forgotten by many and treated as though they are merely wallpaper at best and an annoyance at worst. Yet, idents are the most familiar sight on television; a reminder that all is right in the world. They are beautiful pieces of design that are almost always better than the programme that follows them. So it’s great to see idents being recognised by Weetabix in their advertising campaign.

5 comments

Congratulations to Nestlé

6 April 2007 22:26

Categories: Entertainment, Food and drink, General

For the Smarties egg. This is brilliant.

You get loads of different spin-off mini chocolate eggs these days. Most of them can’t hold a candle to the original Creme Eggs. But the Smarties egg is just brilliant. It’s got a really nice inside that’s a bit like how a Milky Way used to be before they were white on the inside. And then, inside that creamy mush, sits a cluster of little Smarties.

Much better than the normal ‘let’s stick some gunk in a chocolate egg and see how many suckers buy it’ nonsense.

6 comments

The most important meal of the day. Well that’s dinner, isn’t it?

3 November 2006 01:21

Categories: Commuting, Entertainment, Food and drink, General, Personal, Radio, University

I am a huge fan of the radio programme Up All Night. On Wednesday nights / Thursday mornings — if I am awake — I like to listen to Dr Karl’s science phone in. The man is smart and enthusiastic. He’s one of those people that can explain everything in layman’s terms.

But one day he said something that I could never agree with. It might be sound advice, but I cannot take it. Something like, say, “try to take five portions of fruit and veg a day” is fine enough advice for me. But what Dr Karl said on this occasion defies all common sense. He said: “Breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, dine like a pauper.” Never will I do this!

Mike Flynn says, Down with breakfast. I agree. I know that breakfast is meant to be the most important meal of the day, because it breaks your fast and all that. But if I must eat breakfast, at least allow me to have a sufficiently small breakfast. Preferably one that won’t turn my backside into a drainpipe.

It’s true. I can’t just get up and eat breakfast then go about my business. I don’t think I have a very strong stomach. Eating breakfast early in the morning makes me a bit ill you see. If I have a free morning then I will almost always leave about half an hour or an hour before eating. This is fine.

But if I have something to do early in the morning I obviously just have to eat my breakfast pretty much as soon as I get up. But I simply don’t have the appetite if I have just got up. It takes at least half an hour for me to feel like wanting to eat something.

Now you smartarse responsible adults reading this will just be thinking, “why don’t you just get up half an hour earlier then?” Don’t be so preposterous. I need every last wink of sleep I can get, particularly if I’m going to stay up all night listening to worthy science phone-ins.

Besides, I once heard on the Thursday night / Friday morning sleep phone in that it is natural for people my age not to get up until about midday. One time, when we were being forced to play some rubbish ball game in the freezing cold at 10am, my PE teacher was obviously concerned at our breathless gasping. She did a straw poll, asking how many of us had eaten breakfast. Less than half had eaten breakfast. Do you know why? Because we need our sleep damnit!

The idea that I need my breakfast in order to function during the day goes against all of my real life experiences. Sure, if I don’t eat my breakfast I might get a rumble in my tummy by about 11 o’clock, but I get that even if I’ve had breakfast. I must have gone to school dozens of times without ever eating a bean until lunch, and look at me — I’m still alive.

I don’t need my breakfast. I need to sleep in the mornings! I don’t want to be forcing fibre down my gullet only for it to be ejected within the space of a train journey (20 pence piece at the ready for entry to the loos at Waverley Station).

This morning I woke up on my friend’s sofa in Dundee having spent the night over. There was no breakfast for me to have. I thought, well I’d better have breakfast because it’s the most important meal of the day apparently and I have to breakfast like a king. So I popped into the Spar. I couldn’t find anything that didn’t have to be heated in the microwave.

Knowing that having such an early breakfast would only make me ill anyway, I just hopped on the train home. My first food came an hour and a half after I woke up. Sure, I was starving when I got home. But boy, it was a great breakfast. I appreciated it much more than I would have appreciated any soggy sandwich I might have bought from a convenience store. And there was no need for a sloppy poop toilet trip.

Sometimes I’m lucky in that I won’t need to dispose of my waste following an early breakfast. But I will still have an unsettled stomach. It’s no wonder nobody will sit next to me during lectures because at some point during that first lesson I will have to unleash a gastric gas catastrophe. It isn’t pleasant. I can’t imagine what must be going on in my innards for such foul smells to be created.

Maybe you think I’m ill or I have some sort of allergy, but I doubt it. As I said, if I leave a bit of time after waking up before eating then I have no problems whatsoever. I can wolf down as much cereal as I like during the evening with no dire(-rhoea) consequences. If I have an allergy to anything, it’s to the morning.

I certainly don’t have an aversion to traditional breakfast-time foods. Infact I have at least one bowl of cereal per day — but always at around 9pm. Additionally I had some toast this evening. Yesterday lunchtime I had a bowl of fruity porridge. I’m not averse to the odd afternoon fry-up either. Even croissants are for lunchtime as far as I’m concerned.

So, if breakfast isn’t the best meal of the day, what is? Well, unlike Mike Flynn, I don’t think it’s lunch. Sandwiches might be good, but I’ve had some awful sandwiches in my time. It’s pretty hit and miss. Also, I have to pace myself when having lunch. I’ve got to be careful not to eat too much in case I don’t have enough room for a later meal that must be eaten with the family round the table.

The best meal of the day certainly isn’t anything called “tea”. Tea is not a meal. It is a hot drink that tastes like compost if you leave the bag in for too long.

You’ve guessed it, mostly because it’s in the title of this post: The best meal is dinner. The most diverse of the meals, dinner also usually provides you with the only hot meal of the day. Possibly the only decent slab of meat of the day. A nice mountain of filling carbohydrates. And I don’t care if I’m meant to eat like a pauper at this time. This is the biggest meal of the day. Fact.

Dinner is also a gateway into the evening, a period of freedom. Breakfast is usually just leading up to a hellish train journey and a bleary-eyed morning of work. Even lunch heralds the beginning of more work. Dinner links the end of work to the start of a relaxing, restful evening.

So down with breakfast indeed. Let’s hear it for dinner, the proper most important meal of the day.