Category: Food & Drink

Take-Home Foods

Food & Drink, Travels

As someone who’s traveled quite a bit, this article struck a chord with me:

A recent Reddit discussion has highlighted how trips abroad are capable of permanently changing a traveller’s diet, with commenters revealing foreign dishes they had on their travels that they now can’t stop eating. 

The list includes acai from Brazil*, Morocco’s cinnamon-dusted oranges, onigiri (Japanese rice balls), pasteis de nata (milk custard tart) from Portugal, ajvar (a red pepper paste) from the Balkans and even spaghetti carbonara  from Italy — which is quite different from the stuff you’ll get at Olive Garden, trust me.   (There’s other less-salutary stuff like haggis and buffalo wings on their list, but whatever.)

*can someone tell me the difference between acai and blueberries?

One of the foods on the Reddit list struck home for me:  French baguette and butter — which, having sampled it in Paris, made me refuse to eat American shelf bread ever again. Seriously.  Who would have thought that simple bread and butter would be an exquisite meal all by itself?  (Well, anyone who’s ever tasted the real stuff.)  It’s one of the few dishes which I prefer eating with unsalted butter, because the bread becomes unutterably sweeter.

That Portuguese tart (not Sarah Hoyt) is very familiar to me as the Afrikaans melk tert (they’re almost identical, and the Seffricans have even made a cream liqueur based on its taste).  The only difference is that the Porros use puff pastry instead of pie crust pastry.  Hmmmm… now that’s a thought.

I”m going to try the Moroccan oranges this weekend after I’ve done the Friday shopping (no oranges in the house), but with three different sugars as an experiment to see which tastes best.  (Light brown, Demarara or 10x mixed with the cinnamon, in case you’re wondering.)

I’ll also try making ajvar,  which sounds like hummus mixed with ground spicy red peppers, but I’ll use South African Peppadew spicy peppers because they are spectacular.

There are a couple that I’ve encountered on my travels which I wish were staples Over Here.

One of my all-time favorite imported meals happens to be poutines, from Canuckistan, but only one place around here makes them properly (the Holy Grail pub in Plano).  I must have eaten poutines at least twice a day when driving back from Montreal to Detroit, along with Tim Horton’s coffee to wash them down.

Another is Viennese Sachertorte which, having had some in meine schones Wien, would kill me if I could find it here because aaaaargh it’s luvverly.

Over Here, we’d call it “death by chocolate”, because it really is.

There are a few others, but I think they would be best enjoyed in their home countries (e.g. pisco sours in Chile and Welsh rarebit in Britishland).  Of Wadworth 6X and Greggs sausage rolls we will not speak.

And so, Gentle Readers:  tell me about your favorite furrin dishes, in Comments.

Reverse Jesus

Food & Drink, Gummint, Taxes and Theft

The Hollies once released a song called “King Midas In Reverse”, in which the hapless subject of the work was afflicted with the curse that unlike the mythical Midas (who turned everything he touched into gold), everything this guy touched turned to dust.  (Compare and contrast this with, say, a Socialist politician, where everything he touches turns to shit.)

Anyway, the title of this post is not intended to be irreligious, of course, but as we all know, Christ is supposed to have turned water into wine at a marriage feast in Cana, Galilee.

It seems as though a brewer is intent on turning their own beer into water:

Beer drinkers are furious after pub favourite Grolsch decided to slash its alcohol content.

The Dutch Pilsner has dropped from 4% alcohol by volume (ABV) to 3.4% leaving fans of the beer disgruntled.

Before it was relaunched by the UK by brewer Asahi in 2020 the beer was sold at 5% ABV and has now seen a further reduction in alcohol content.

Back when I used to drink a lot of beer, Grolsch was one of my favorites, with that porcelain-topped cap a lovely touch of class.  It tasted just plain wonderful, and to be frank, if I wasn’t planning on drinking heroically (Castle Lager in South Africa, Wadworths 6X in Britishland, Henry Weinhard Dark in Murka), I really didn’t mind paying the premium price for Grolsch.

But why would the brewers of Grolsch decide to water down their beer?  Ah well, if this was not initiated by the Stupids in The Marketing Department, of course one would suspect the dirty little fingers of Gummint poking into our various orifices.

And that suspicion would be correct.

New legislation introduced last year means drinks are taxed based on their alcoholic strength.

Since the alcohol duty regime came into effect in August and brewers have been reducing alcohol content, while keeping prices the same.

While the reductions may appear small, they generate a tax saving of 2p to 3p on every bottle. [none of which has been passed on to the consumer — K.]

Among the popular brands where the alcohol content has been cut are Foster’s, Old Speckled Hen, Kronenbourg, and Hophead — the practice has been dubbed ‘drinkflation’.

Drinkdeflation, more like.

In these here United States, we used to refer to 3.2% beer as “squirrel piss”, so I suspect that 3.4% can’t be far off.

Good thing I don’t drink beer in any quantity anymore, or else I’d be getting angry.

Wrong Categories

Food & Drink, Old Fartism, Two-Minute Hate

As I wrote only yesterday about the silliness of pubs allowing children inside their premises, and on many occasions about my permanent dislike of the whole “gastropub” nonsense, you can imagine my irritation upon reading this article about Britain’s best pubs, and finding the following results:

Best Pub For Families
and
Best Pub For Food

Bloody hell;  two anger buttons for the price of one article.

But wait!  there’s more!

Best Pub For Dogs

I need a drink.  Thanks to the article though, there are at least three pubs I know not to visit.

No Place For Children

Entertainment, Food & Drink, Two-Minute Hate

It seems like only yesterday (actually, a month ago) when I made this comment about bars and pubs:

The business of a pub is to serve booze to grownups. End of.

You can imagine my irritation, therefore, when I saw this little bit of nonsense:

Two fuming mums have criticised a historic pub for not catering properly for their kids — and claim their youngsters were told to “turn the iPads down” while they were dining.

The angry mothers took to Tripadvisor to deliver two bruising one-star reviews of Victorian pub Sam’s Chop House after having Sunday lunch there.

They say that no children’s menus were offered, not enough high chairs were available and that they were left appalled when asked by staff to turn down the iPads their brood were watching in the restaurant.

The mums said they were told they were not allowed to take their prams into the restaurant, “which was fine”.

Big of them.  Then:

“I’d rather have gone to Toby Carvery for half the price and a much more decent roast dinner than atrocious meal they call Sunday roast.”

I bet the staff, and all the other patrons, wished they had.  All of which begs the question:  why didn’t they go to Toby’s instead of a basement pub?

Okay, I have no plans to visit Manchester in the future (Mr. Free Market:  “Never venture north of the M4, dear heart” ) but if I ever do, I’ll be heading to Sam’s Chop House, you betcha.  It sounds like my kinda place.  I don’t consult any of the so-called “ratings” websites like TripAdvisor much anyway, but if I were to do so and found a one-star rating like the above, I’d be more likely to go there because it means that Management has the right idea about how to run a drinking establishment.

Kids have no place in a pub.  It’s not as though there aren’t enough fucking eating establishments everywhere that cater to the rugrats, that parents have to take their precious brood into a booze palace and disturb the serious drinkers.

Fach.

It’s The Cost, Stupid

Food & Drink

From some source or another SOTI:

It’s been a rocky year for the restaurant industry, with rising costs due to inflation and changing consumer habits driving a slew of chains with household names into Chapter 11 bankruptcy. According to those who follow the industry, there is no definable silver lining ahead for an industry in deep trouble.

Have to agree with this, because it’s a well-known fact that once food prices go up, they never come down again.

Last Sunday New Wife and I took a little trip to Sherman TX (a.k.a. the last exit off the highway before you get to Oklahoma) for a little antique / bargain shopping.  (I know, I know;  to most men, “antiquing” is just another term for “strap the rat cage to my face”, but I don’t mind it because New Wife and I have very similar tastes when it comes to shopping, and she is a fanatical scrimper  when it comes to this kind of thing.)

Anyway:  Sherman is not in the middle of nowhere, but you can certainly see Nowhere from the town square.  One would expect a small town to have small-town prices, and indeed, the wares are the antique mall were very reasonable.  (Not that we bought anything, but still.)

On the other hand, it was when we went out for lunch that the shock hit home.

You see, I’m in charge of the grocery shopping chez  du Toit, so I’m accustomed to the price increases in food — I’ve ranted about it often enough on these pages — and I’ll be honest and say that we haven’t eaten “out” in about four months, other than the occasional takeout order of fries from Sonic and the like.

So we treated ourselves to a small BBQ lunch at the Cackle & Oink [sic], a nice little place just north of town.  Modest premises, hometown feel, lots of locals inside… you know the drill.

And two small meals with iced tea came to over $50.

I nearly passed out.

Look, BBQ has always been kinda spendy, I know.  But in the past, a small order of ribs and brisket (our normal fare) seldom ran over $30, or maybe a tad over with the tip.  But $50???

Somebody told me the other day that two burgers at Five Guys now costs in the region of $40, and I couldn’t believe them.  Now, I do.

It just means that we’ll be eating at home in the future, and if my prognosis about food prices is indeed true, we’ll never be eating out again.  What a lovely prospect (and just when we were beginning to claw ourselves out of our recent abject poverty, too).

And for restaurants, the prospects will be similarly gloomy, you betcha.

I don’t know what could possibly avert this situation.  Maybe a Trump election would help, in that some sanity will be restored and inflation tamed, but somehow I doubt it.