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Competition! With actual prizes!

I’ve got a cold. Only about 60% of my tastebuds are working, and I wish they weren’t; my mouth tastes like the wrong end of a badger. This leaves me functionally without appetite…and writing about food’s making me feel ever-so-slightly nauseous.

So today, instead of the usual order of things, we’re going to have a caption competition. The person who submits the best caption in the comments wins two spice grinders – one filled with coffee beans, chocolate and rock sugar (it’s Jamie Oliver branded, but don’t let that put you off – excellent over ice cream or to finish chocolate desserts) and one South African grinder by Elements of Spice filled with sea salt, fennel seeds, Chinese ginger, lemon peel, coriander, celery, mint and cardamom. These things are brilliant added to some olive oil as a dry marinade for chicken pieces or as a sprinkle over popcorn.

I’m happy to mail these anywhere in the world, so this is open to all readers. Here’s your picture: get captioning! The winner will be announced on August 10.

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A taxonomy of meta-desserts

I occasionally get emails asking for more dessert recipes to be posted on this blog. I’m working on one which I’ll put up on Monday – meanwhile, Raspberry Debacle, a blog I enjoy enormously, has produced a sketch towards a taxonomy of meta-desserts, which should keep you happy over the weekend.

A quick question for readers – are there any recipes I’ve not blogged before which you’d like to see here? Please leave any suggestions in the comments section!

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Disco gin and tonic – yours to make at home with some electronic engineering

Regular readers will be aware of my tragic addiction to all things Las Vegas. It’s been nearly six months since our last visit, and I am pining for bright lights and cocktails. Few things make a drink nicer than some coloured lights in the vicinity.

Dr Weasel, ever alert to the causes of his wife’s grumpiness, decided to cheer me up by making me an animated, brightly lit drinks coaster.

Here it is under a gin and tonic:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xB8pWBLnvlw]

And here it is, glass-free, displaying a spinning galactic ice-cube.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QZgs8Dla2Q]

The coaster can be driven from any PC with a serial port and will display any 10×10-pixel video you wish. Over to Dr Weasel for his version of a recipe (100% less lead-free than the recipes you’ll usually find here).

You will need:

30 1K 0805 resistors (R1 – R30)
30 MBTA42 NPN transistors (Q1 – Q30)
10 100 Ohm 0805 resistors (R31 – R40)
10 FMMT717 PNP transistors (Q31 – Q40)
5 74HC594 SOIC shift registers (IC1 – IC5)
4 100nF 1206 capacitors (C1 – C4)

and finally:

100 TB5-V120-FLUX-RGB8000 RGB LEDs (LED00 – LED99)

The LEDs can be hard to get hold of at a decent price; eBay is once again the friend of the penurious electrical engineer.

Manufacture one or more PCBs using these Gerber and drill files. A double-sided PTH process is required, so it is probably best to use one of the various small-volume professional PCB manufacturers; I have found PCB Train in the UK to be fairly reliable. Assemble the board, taking great care when soldering the surface mount components. I found this one to be right at the limit of my dexterity.

Attach power and data cables to the connector in the bottom right of the board. Seen from above, we number the six pins:

1 2 3
4 5 6

The corresponding signals are:

  1. XVOLTS – drive voltage for LEDs. Connect to 4V current limited supply.
  2. SERIAL_CLOCK – shift data from SERIAL_DATA on positive-going edge.
  3. SERIAL_LATCH – latch 40 bits from shift register to LED control on positive-going edge.
  4. GROUND – common ground.
  5. 5VOLTS – supply voltage for control circuitry. Connect to 5V supply.
  6. SERIAL_DATA – input data for shift register.

To scan the display, clock 10 4-bit numbers into the shift register. To clock in a bit:

  • bring SERIAL_CLOCK low
  • modify SERIAL_DATA
  • bring SERIAL_CLOCK high

Once 40 bits have been clocked in, the SERIAL_LATCH signal can be brought high to transfer them to the LED control circuitry. Each 4 bit number selectively enables the red, green and blue LEDs in one row, and selectively disables all LEDs in one column. So if we clock in a string:

0011 0100 0111 ...
RGCB RGCB RGCB

This sets all the LEDs in row 0 to blue, all the LEDs in row 1 to green and all the LEDS in row 2 to cyan (green + red). It disables all the LEDs in columns 0 and 2. By rapidly clocking in various combinations of values (typically with only 1 of the 10 column-disable bits low), we can scan the array to build up an image, and use pulse-width modulation to give a range of apparent intensities.

This firmware can be used with an Atmel ATmega644 to generate the required signals in response to serial input from a PC or Mac.

A couple of words of warning. Modern LEDs can be very bright indeed. You could probably hurt yourself pretty badly by dialling them up to full intensity and ignoring your look-away reflex, so don’t. Also, when debugging your firmware it is easy to stall the scanning process and burn out the precious LEDs. Use a decent current-limited bench power supply, with the current dialled back to a few tens of milliamps to avoid this happening.

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What the World Eats

I loved this photoessay from Time. A few years ago, photographer Peter Menzel and journalist Faith D’Alusio visited thirty families across the world, and documented what they ate in a week in the book Hungry Planet. (The picture here is the British family’s weekly shop. I can thankfully say that my own weekly shop looks a lot more like the Chinese family’s haul, but rather more vegetabley.)

There are some shocks and surprises here, where weekly food rations are broken down by budget as well as by content. Well worth a look.

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US shopping – chillies and peanut butter

Regular readers will have noticed that there are a number of American recipes on this blog, some of them requiring ingredients that are hard to source in the UK. I usually deal with this by dragging a very heavy suitcase full of cans of creamed corn and hot sauce back home every time I visit America.

Happily, I’ve found an online company operating in the UK (and delivering worldwide) which stocks almost all the American ingredients I use habitually. (See this post for other online suppliers.) There’s Franks Hot Sauce for making Buffalo wings (in the picture above); Duncan Hines and Betty Crocker cake mixes (great for cheats‘ cake recipes); creamed corn (unaccountably hard to find here) and cornmeal to make cornbread; Aunt Jemima pancake mix; and all the Cap’n Crunch you can shake a milky spoon at. The Stateside Candy Co has slightly awkward navigation, but once you’ve found your way round, it’s easy to get your hands on what you’re after. Prices are a little higher than they are in America, but shopping like this does mean that you don’t need to buy an extra suitcase.

Alongside several pints of Frank’s hot sauce and enough creamed corn to bring the digestive tracts of a small village to a shuddering halt, I bought a jar of one of my favourite things on Earth: Smuckers Goober Grape (pictured left). This is a wonderful swirled confection of peanut butter and grape jelly (grape jelly being yet another thing it’s hard to find here) to spread on your toast direct from the jar. This is the problem (at least for me) with shopping for food online – it seems perfectly calibrated to make me buy snacks. I also ended up with a pack of Scorned Woman cheese straws made with chilli sauce (mediocre, full of additives and not recommended) and some perfectly noxious but also perfectly addictive pretzel bits filled with cheese.

Best of all was the bottle of Amazon Peppers. These are preserved in vinegar, and their small size and prettiness might obscure the fact that these are basically the hottest things I have ever put in my mouth. The orange ones at the neck of the bottle are orange habaneros – at between 200,000 and 300,000 Scoville Units, these are among the hottest chillies in the world. Touching the edge of your little fingernail to one of these guys and then touching the nail to your tongue will have you running to the tap for a big glass of water.

Habaneros are deliciously fruity, and, treated with respect, can act like a solid hot sauce. I used one between the two of us to accompany the Coca Cola chicken I cooked on Monday, and we sliced minuscule slivers off it to dab on the chicken pieces on our forks. We sweated a lot and found ourselves screaming occasionally, but we were happy. The yellow and red peppers in the bottle are the much more benign (at 30,000 to 50,000 Scoville units) Capsicum frutescens, the same pepper that’s used to make Tabasco sauce. Happily, the vinegar has carried the heat from the habaneros at the top all the way to the bottom of the bottle. You can use the very spicy vinegar as a cooking ingredient, and top it up when you’re done – heat will continue leaching out of the chillies.

Excuse me as I wrap up this post early. I need to go and wash my tongue.

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Gordon Brown – please get out of my living room.

The government is proposing to crack down on middle-class drinkers of wine, and is making noises which appear to mean that eight units a week (according to the BBC) are indicative of ‘a problem’ with alcohol. That’s four glasses of wine a week.

I can’t be the only person who, on reading this piece of puritanical, nanny-statist rubbish this morning, ran straight out to buy a bottle of wine. This comes hot on the heels of last week’s announcement that they were going to ignore the advice of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, and, flying in the face of all the published studies, instruct pregnant women to abstain from even a single glass of wine a week, or risk being looked at very hard by a dour man with a clunking fist.

It all comes together now. I assume that Gordon’s going to use a camera in my dustbin to measure how many wine bottles I throw away, and raise my taxes accordingly. I hope you’ll all join me in raising a glass to the very important fact that I enjoy my autonomy, and am perfectly capable of worrying about my liver on my own, unaided by the civil service.

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Frozen foods

I was struck full of doubt and uncertainty when sent some vouchers by McCain, the frozen foods people. They wanted me to try their new McCain Gourmet range (I should point out that no money changed hands here, just a small envelope of vouchers), and I will admit that on receiving the first in what became a series of emails, I sat back at my desk and spent a couple of minutes scoffing loudly. After all – what comes to your mind when you think about McCain? Oven chips…OK, I buy oven chips now and then when I’m feeling lazy, and they’re pleasant, but not as good as the chips I make myself. Those grotesque smiley face reformed potato things that, alongside Turkey Twizzlers, formed the core of Jamie Oliver’s recent school dinners crusade are a McCain product. McCain also make those microwave pizzas, the potato croquettes I used to hide in my pockets rather than eat at school, and deep-fried mashed potato numerals for those who are using their supper to teach their children how to add. I marched to the supermarket, vouchers in hand, prepared to heartily dislike everything in the new range and ready to write something blistering after eating it.

But something curious has been happening to frozen foods in the UK recently. There’s much more emphasis in the ads we see on TV about the lack of preservatives and artificial ingredients in frozen products, especially since the fat-tongued one took on school dinners. Giles Coren, a food critic I like and respect, who takes food sourcing and sustainability very seriously, has been popping up advertising Birds Eye. This feels a bit like Sister Wendy advertising Ann Summers. His advertisements are all about freshness, quality and purity of ingredients, and responsible fishing and farming. McCain themselves have recently rolled out a new ad campaign (‘It’s all good‘), emphasising that they use small amounts of healthy fats, remove artificial additives wherever possible and use traffic light symbols to show how much fat, salt and other artery-clogging deliciousness is in each product. They’re also keen to point out that all the potatoes in their British products are British potatoes, so food miles are kept down.

The new McCain Gourmet range exemplifies the new approach. I was amazed on picking up a pack of Cheddar and Mustard Gratin from the freezer cabinet to read the ingredients list. The little metal dish contains potatoes; a mornay sauce made like I’d make it at home from whipping cream, butter, cheddar and wholegrain mustard; a sprinkling of cheese…and nothing else. What’s more, it tasted delicious and did not involve any interaction with my mandoline (a much loved but also much feared kitchen implement).

There followed a frenzied trawl through the whole range. My vouchers ran out after I’d tried the Potato Crumble with Four Cheeses (gorgeous Mascarpone, Danish blue, Cheddar and Grana Padano, topped with crisp breadcrumbs) and the Diced Potato with Leek and Parmesan, but by this point I’d been so thoroughly impressed that I bought the rest of the range as well. The Baby Potatoes with Roasted Tomatoes and Garlic are wonderfully, smokily garlicky; the Diced Potatoes with Tomatoes and Mixed Peppers were probably my least favourite of the lot, but I suspect this is because by this point I’d become addicted to creamy, cheesy sauces. You can buy your own to try at most UK supermarkets. The packs all weigh in at 400g and cost £1.89.

McCain, I’m sorry I imagined you were solely a purveyor of unspeakable fats and starches to schoolchildren. I eat humble (potato) pie. Keep producing stuff like this, and I’ll keep buying it. I’m lucky enough to enjoy cooking, so I don’t really mind spending an hour making a gratin from scratch, but when I can buy something this easy, this quick and this full of good, healthy, delicious things, I will occasionally consider spending that hour lying on my back in the garden with a glass of wine and feeling good about the world.

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Self-indulgent non-food post

The Great She Elephant has tagged me with another meme, and it’s nothing to do with food. (This is an excellent thing; usually I have three or four recipes cooked, photographed and scribbled down in rough ready to blog, but being ill a couple of weeks ago and very busy last week has reduced the size of my…foodstack to only one recipe at the moment.) Given that this post is about me and not about dinner, here’s a rare photograph of me without any food. (There is potential that I am plotting to eat the orchids in the photograph later.)

GSE, who knows me very well, has asked me five probing questions. If you’d like me to ask you some similarly probing questions for you to answer on your own blog, please leave a comment. (Lorna over at Biographia Literaria actually emailed me to ask to take part while I was busy answering these – Lorna, I’ll let you know when your questions are ready!)

1) Who is your favourite/least favourite celebrity chef and why?
Favourite is easy – I don’t know whether Jeffrey Steingarten counts as a chef, but he’s far and away my favourite food writer. Foodwise, I love Michael Mina (American celeb chef). I mourn the demise of Two Fat Ladies. One fat lady is nothing like as good.

Least favourite is also pretty easy. When I was eighteen, I won a food writing competition with Carlton TV, and got invited to the London Restaurant Awards as part of the prize. You can get a flavour of what a very long time ago this was from what I wrote about; those days, sushi on a conveyor belt was considered glamorous and exotic, and worth writing a long screed on. Bruce Willis was the guest of honour, having just opened Planet Hollywood.

The awards ceremony was seething with celebrity chefs. Raymond Blanc kissed me on the lips. I discovered that although he was very short and smelled of garlic, I didn’t mind at all. Anthony Worral Thompson was surrounded by big blondes. Some woman from Eastenders didn’t eat anything, but sat in the toilets dabbing foundation on her face and sniffing all evening. Stephen Saunders (pictured on the right – now proprietor of a restaurant in Newmarket where I had a downright bad meal last year) was spectacularly and upsettingly sleazy, and won my personal Most Badly Behaved Chef award. Last year, I learned that as well as being responsible for serving me a godawful meal, Stephen Saunders is also responsible for these (not safe for work!) photographs, under his pseudonym Steve McQueen. Those at work and therefore not able to click are missing nude women balancing pumpkins on their arses, doing suggestive things to marrows, wearing parma ham hotpants and using their pudenda as fruitbowls. Stephen Saunders – you’re my least favourite celebrity chef.

2) Could you help me track down a recipe for Slovenian cheese roll pancake dumpling thingies?
Amazingly, yes. Many thanks to Moldova.org. You can find the recipe for sirovi štruklji here.

3) How many full bottles of fragrance do you have and which are your five favourites at present?
GSE and I both collect perfumes, although she is probably a little more rabid about her habit than I am, having dedicated space in her fridge for certain very special perfumes. There is dedicated space in my fridge for cheese and emergency chorizo.

I currently have 87 bottles not counting decants (although some of these are duplicate bottles of particular favourites which have been discontinued – I have five bottles of Guerlain’s Meteorites and two of Guerlinade, from before they’d announced the decision to keep selling it in the Paris boutique). My current five favourites (this took a lot of soul-searching) are: Guerlain’s Apres l’Ondee, The Different Company’s Bois d’Iris, Guerlain’s Mitsouko, L’Artisan Parfumeur’s Dzing!, and Diptique’s Philosykos.

4) Do you say No2ID and why?
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. (There are so *many* things Benjamin Franklin says better than I do.)

ID cards are a dreadful idea. They won’t work for any of the purposes the government has rolled out (which include preventing illegal immigration and terrorism); identification doesn’t prove intent. They won’t prevent identity fraud – what better tool for the identity fraudster than a single database of all the people in the country? They won’t present a greater obstacle to people-smugglers than passports and visas already do. They turn the citizen/state relationship on its head (I should be able to ask a policeman for his papers – he should emphatically not be able to ask for mine). The cards themselves are the least of the problem – the giant database they’ll necessitate is a horrific idea.

Some people have very good reason for wanting to obfuscate their identity or location. These people include those on witness protection programmes, people escaping domestic abuse, asylum seekers being pursued by aggressive foreign governments, investigative journalists…the list is enormous. When a database is accessible by staff in banks, doctors’ surgeries, the police station, lawyers’ offices, Government agencies like the CSA, pharmacies and so forth, the sheer number of people using the thing increases the probability that one person whose intentions aren’t good and lawful will be able to access it.

Don’t get me started on the Government’s awful track record with IT projects, the fact that biometrics aren’t a proven technology, the costs or the compulsion aspect. The whole thing’s a fascist mess, and anyone with any imagination would be barking mad to vote Labour in the
next election. Please consider having a look at NO2ID’s website and signing up to their email newsletter.

5) What is Dr Weasel’s best quality?
I’m a very lucky lady – I’ve got a fantastic husband who has a bundle of best qualities. Dr Weasel is intimidatingly smart, thoughtful, kind, honest, handsome and generous. He buys me flowers every week, does the washing up and the vacuuming and buys chocolate éclairs when I’m feeling sad. He’s incredibly hardworking, and takes his responsibilities at work, at the university (where he’s Director of Studies in Computer Science at a couple of colleges – told you he was intimidatingly smart) and at home very seriously. He’s as messy as I am, doesn’t object to my perfume habit, and tells me he loves me every day. I love him too.

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Stomach bug

I’m laid up with a really nasty tummy bug at the moment, and I’m afraid I really can’t face writing about, still less eating, food without feeling very poorly. I should be posting as usual next week (this on the understanding that I don’t wither away and die from lack of sustenance in the meantime).

A reminder for Cambridgeshire and south Suffolk readers – the Reach Fair starts at noon on Monday May 7. Looking out of the window, I can see chair-o-planes, a coconut shy, a big whirring thing with a picture of Britney Spears on it and some swing boats. There’s a beer tent and a hog roast, and lots of opportunities to buy local produce like organic herbs from Snakehall Farm and local honey – please come and say hello if you’re visiting.

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Lisbon, anybody?

I have to go to Lisbon for a few days next month. The last time I visited I was 12 and didn’t pay much attention to where the restaurants were, although I do have very fond memories of Bom Jardim, or Rei del Frango (King of Chickens) which is still, apparently, there. Nineteen years ago, Bom Jardim was fantastic – a high-ceilinged, slightly dingy room where you were handed a spit-roasted chicken, a bowl of peri-peri oil and a small paintbrush with which to annoint your chicken. I hope it’s not changed.

Do any readers who have been in Lisbon more recently than me have restaurant recommendations, food shopping ideas or any useful bits of Portuguese? Please leave your comments below!