Category Archives: Food

Food Health Random

Caffeine vs Alzheimer’s

July 6, 2009 – 11:04 am

Good news for coffee lovers such as myself – caffeine seems to prevent and reverse Alzheimer’s.

The doses in the research were fairly high though – 500mg per day, or about 5 cups of coffee (the US standard for espresso is 64mg caffeine per fluid ounce, which equals 96mg per shot). I might have got through that in a day at one stage, but I’m not chain-chugging Red Bull and coffee like I used to a few years ago. I do tend to double-shot my home-made espresso so I’d need to drink 2-3 a day to keep up with the mice in the test – not too bad, but still more than I usually have these days (I go for quality over quantity).

Of course, they don’t say how much the mice started twitching, how many heart palpitations they had, and how they coped with the inevitable post-caffeine crashes. But overall, I think everyone would take those ahead of a degenerative mental condition. Here’s hoping this research continues to go well.

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Films Food Health

Super Size Me

September 18, 2008 – 4:53 pm

I don’t watch a huge number of films, but I do enjoy watching them occasionally and I’ve been using LoveFilm for the last couple of months after a friend recommended it. It’s especially good for catching up on films you didn’t have time to see when they came out. This week we had Super Size Me through the letter box, which another friend had recommended to me a while back.

I like documentaries generally, at least the informative ones anyway, and this one was simultaneously informative, funny and utterly disugusting in equal measure. I have to admire the guy for putting his health horribly at risk in the name of research, although I think everyone involved was surprised at just how much damage he could do in 30 days.

Some of the stats were interesting – I really didn’t realise that in the USA (allegedly) 40% of meals eaten by the average person are bought rather than made at home (that includes restaurants, take-out and fast food). To me that’s an incredible number – in comparison in our house I’d guess over 95% of the food is made at home.

But then, I’ve never really understood fast food. I can count the number of times I’ve eaten at McDonalds on one hand (in the 20ish years I’ve been an adult), and it’s always a very, very last resort – usually in airports at 3am when I’m jetlagged, but in recent years even that bastion has gone really thanks to decent airport restaurants being open 24/7. Our Island must be one of the last places in the world with no McDonalds – we did have a Burger King for a few years, but it shut down and is now a cafe / bistro. And don’t get me started on KFC – quite how you can take something as potentially delicious and healthy as chicken and turn it into a greasy, MSG-laden monstrosity I’ll never know (we don’t have any of those either, thank goodness). Probably the most decent food I’ve had from a fast-food joint is In-N-Out Burger (you were right Eric) – I actually saw them peeling real potatoes and mincing real beef, which is certainly a plus compared to the factory processed garbage most of these places use. Even so, I wouldn’t choose to eat it if I had an alternative.

As a bizarre coincidence, I read today that Activision is setting up a promotional partnership between Guitar Hero and KFC. Ugh.

Anyway, worth watching if you haven’t seen it already. Look out for the extras on the DVD, they’re very interesting – they did a decomposition test on ‘real’ food versus McDonalds, and it seems that even bacteria refuse to eat McDonalds french fries because they lasted for 10 weeks in a jar with little to no decomposition. That’s scary.

Now to await the UK follow-up – the health effects of eating nothing but take-out curry for 30 days ;) Or maybe the fish & chip diet; although despite the unhealthy cooking mechanism, at least the ingredients in your local chippie are usually fresh & local, rather than being heavily factory processed like McD/KFC. The curry diet is almost certainly more entertaining though :)

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Food OGRE Personal

Sinbad picks up: Healing Potion

July 4, 2008 – 11:26 pm

I’ve been having a bit of a crappy week, with a particular project taking way longer than I had expected and causing me to explore the darkest crevices of my mind looking for new and creative ways to swear at it, with only mixed success. Cue long hours, too much coffee and Red Bull, and some seriously knotted shoulder muscles. That’s why it was an especially nice surprise this morning to find a box on my doorstep, containing an unexpected gift from a friend & long-time Ogre user in France (tuan kuranes) – a bottle of Champagne and also a bottle of a local speciality, Chartreuse.

I’m not much of a drinks expert, despite this not being the first time I’ve received locally-themed alcohol from people using / benefitting from Ogre, so I looked it up, and it has quite a history – originally developed (or learned / adapted from an earlier alchemical recipe, details are sketchy) in the early 17th century by Carthusian monks as an ‘elixir of long life’ and all-round healing potion.  Even though it’s produced on a larger scale now it’s ingredients are still only known by 2 monks at one time, allegedly. It’s also incredibly alcoholic, at 110 proof (55%) – guaranteed to put hairs on your chest. Or remove the hair from your entire body – it’s probably 50:50.

All in all, very interesting stuff. I immediately thought of Absinthe when I saw it, but it’s mostly the colour and strength that they have in common I think. I’ve tried a little already with some ice as advised, and its very, very unusual. The best way I can describe the taste is if you imagine grazing on the more herbal elements of your spice rack and then gargling with lit paraffin. I’m sure I can taste oregano and thyme in there, as well as the more obvious anise – but there are 130 plants in there somewhere according to the site. It certainly does taste medicinal! It’s a bit much for me undiluted, I’m going to experiment with mixing it later – orange juice and hot chocolate seem to be popular options. It’s apparently good to cook with too, in small doses.

In any case, it’s great to experience unusual local produce like this; I always like to try local food / drink when I’m away on holiday or business, and I’m grateful to Paul for sending a little bit of France my way, brightening my week, and generally spreading the Ogre love. Kudos for picking something as green as the big dude himself, too :)

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Food Open Source

Ubuntu: Free as in Cola

May 10, 2008 – 6:23 pm

I happened to be passing through one of our local Fair Trade shops today to pick up some more coffee beans, as is my habit – not only do they have more variety than most regular supermarkets, but their blends are almost universally better quality, thus slaking the taste buds of the discerning Java drinker as well as giving a warm fuzzy feeling that you’re doing something positive for farmers in developing countries, or at least helping them get screwed slightly less than they would otherwise be.

Anyway, the crux of this story is not coffee, because right there on the counter as I was paying I spotted a drinks can emblazoned with the name ‘Ubuntu Cola’, which made me suddenly smirk and chuckle involuntarily in a way that prompted the cashier to give me an unusual look. Of course, I could have spent the time explaining to him that Ubuntu was the name of a free software operating system, and thus to see it turning up on the side of a can of cola was pretty surprising, but we could have been there for a while, and he probably wouldn’t have thought me any less crazy by the end of it either – I suspect he would have just been a little more specific about it (i.e. a crazy geek). As such it was faster just to grab a can, add it to my tab and be on my way.

So what’s it like? Well, it’s a little darker than regular big-name cola and tastes quite a bit like Pepsi, although oddly it seems to remind me of the Pepsi of my youth, perhaps because the ingredient list seems a little simpler and it’s loaded with natural cane sugar rather than ‘high fructose corn syrup’ (whatever that is). Overall pretty good – I usually don’t choose to drink cola these days but it was worth the experiment, if only for the blogworthiness :)

As it turns out, there’s a whole Ubuntu Trading Company and it appears Ubuntu Cola might just be the first of many Ubuntu food products. I wonder what Mark Shuttleworth thinks of that?

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Food Personal

The timeless mystery of Irn-Bru

April 26, 2008 – 5:24 pm

I’m just quaffing on one of these at the moment and it occurred to me that in an international context it might be blogworthy, since maybe it’s not that widely available around the world. Irn-Bru is a Scottish carbonated drink that’s been going for about a hundred years now, and it’s, well, odd. It’s bright orange, but it doesn’t taste remotely orangey. It’s as refreshing as a citrusy drink, but it tastes nothing like fruit, or quite like much else on this planet. It’s got more than a slight hint of barley sugar, but it’s nowhere near as cloying as that might suggest, and there’s clearly something else in there too. Irn-Bru is an enigma.

I love it though – I don’t chug canned drinks that much any more, but when I do it’s nearly always Red Bull (or the cheaper British imitator, Red Rooster which is surprisingly good) or Irn-Bru. There’s something pretty unique about it – they won’t tell you exactly what’s in it (which is pretty common in traditional Scottish fare), but they hint it might have something to do with girders – at least they used to, until they were forced to remove that from their advertising because it was misleading to the public, given that there weren’t in fact any genuine girders in there (just some kind of ferrous additive), and obviously, consumers could be confused by that. If they had been hit rather hard in the head by such a girder in the past, rendering them drooling halfwits perhaps. 

Anyway, it’s got all the ingredients any hacker needs in a drink – water, carbon dioxide, caffeine, sugar, additives and a weird flavour. Perfect, and you can drink it in greater quantities than Red Bull without the unfortunate side-effects, such as being so hyper you’re convinced you can see 10 seconds into the future :) I’m not sure how widely it gets distributed outside of the UK but if you haven’t tried it yet, give it a go if you see it.

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Food

Culinary Tributes

March 30, 2008 – 4:42 pm

Some Boston-based friends introduced me to The Cheesecake Factory a few years back when I was over there, and I was impressed. Not by the cheesecakes – oddly enough both times I’ve been there, we barely made it as far as the dessert. No, there was one particular dish on their menu that made the place memorable for me, and it was an appetiser – their Avocado Egg Rolls. Personally, I would never have picked that off a menu unprompted – I like avocado well enough, but it wouldn’t necessarily be my starter of choice in usual circumstances given the cornucopia of options available, but my ever savvy hosts insisted I try them, as they were, and I believe I quote correctly, "to die for". I was quietly skeptical, but when in Rome as they say.

Anyway, it turned out they were entirely correct – I was amazed how good these things tasted, particularly when combined with the dubious looking but nevertheless divine dipping sauce they came with. I don’t think I’ve tasted a more appealing vegetarian dish before or since (not that I tend to deliberately seek out vegetarian options, but have been known to partake in them on occasion), and on seeking them out during a later return trip to Boston my interest was reinvigorated. As such, I was determined to try to recreate them in my own kitchen at some point.

Well, it took a while, mostly because of busy lifestyles and some slightly awkward ingredients (tamarind in particular is not that easy to come by here), but last night we finally got around to doing it, armed with a helpful recipe harvested from the intertubes. We were prepared for anything up to and including total disaster, but in fact it turned out pretty darned well. We’d probably tone down the honey a touch in the dipping sauce next time, but that’s just down to tweaking – other than that it ended up very authentic.

Yummy :)

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