Understanding your food

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." Oh, and totally ignore "nutritionism".

How to make a good cuppa

"The Americans are all mystified about why the English make such a big thing out of tea because most Americans have never had a good cup of tea." More.

I've been doing it all wrong.

Idea for making someone millions (maybe thousands)

It occurs to me, thinking further about my previous post, that there is nothing nicer than having a meal cooked for you. Then I got to thinking why it was relatively rare for people to have business meetings over meals they have cooked rather than at posh restaurants? It would establish so much more close a relationship with the person being entertained.

There are plenty of reasons why not, of course. People in big cities live miles and miles from the business districts, making it very difficult to travel there for the client. Also, inviting someone to a home requires a degree of prior intimacy in most cases. Many people will be living in messy, not particularly posh environments and would not want to invite a client in their smart business life to their not-so-smart home reality. If the client is a woman and the host is a man there is another whole range of issues: there are beds in homes and uncomfortably close beds in bedsits. All in all, the wrong messages might be being sent and received.

Which brings me to my idea. Posh restaurants have been invented and reinvented a million times in places like London and New York. Everybody is looking for the coming thing and will pay any amount to take their business clients to it. So what about an eating place that was nothing more than a series of very swish private kitchen-diners, with all ingredients ready and waiting for the customers (and perhaps sly evening classes to help incompetents like me to prepare for their role as the chef)? Surely there could be no better way to cement a close business relationship than by cooking a succulent roast for the boss of the other company and chatting over the kitchen top with a glass of red wine in hand as you burn the pudding.

(Not a bad way to cement a more personal relationship either, so long as there are no purple potatoes involved!)

Purple tatties!

I must admit I thought our relationship was going very well until I discovered she was trying to poison me.

I was blissfully unaware until I cut into the potatoes in the delicious feast of pork and apple sauce with all the trimmings that A. cooked for me the other day. It was all so English, so homely. Then: purple! PURPLE SPUDS! I could only conclude there must have been some chemical reaction with the strychnine or whatever it was she was trying to use.

Oh well, what the hell, if the one you love has decided you need doing away with then perhaps the only honourable thing to do is to dig in. They were very nice. Purple but otherwise very potatoey, with nice firm purple flesh and great with a glob of butter (at least that wasn't purple).

No pole-axing stomach aches yet.

Cold Stone

Ice cream in Japan is good but the American "Cold Stone Creamery" store I found in Yokohama was a welcome new departure. They take whatever flavour of ice cream you want and put all the goodies you choose (slabs of chocolate, nuts, sauces etc.) into the ice cream on the "cold stone" right there in front of you. That means the goodies are not frozen and make a delicious contrast to the ice. Yummalicious.

The heart of the cabbage

We now get most of our groceries from an organic delivery company called Radish Boya. The vegetables last better than the supermarket ones and it means we don't have to spend our time together as a family trudging around the shops. Anyway, one of A.'s things is to order the "seasonal vegetable box", which means they select seasonal stuff for us. Fresher and fewer airmiles, so better for the environment.

She was talking to her sister on the telephone the other day.

A.: "By the way. Do you have any good recipes for cabbage?"
Sister: "Ah, you must be using Radish Boya."
A.: "Seriously, we've had cabbages for the last four weeks. I don't know what to do with them. They are just piling up."

The next day, the new delivery came. We opened the vegetable box. There he was, big and proud. A. tried Bubble and Squeak that night. It hardly made a dent in our cabbage mountain. Cabbage surprise tonight, I expect.

Disney goes bananas

They are selling Disney packaged bananas at our local supermarket. Apples and oranges too. I suppose it is show business after all.

Talking of brands, Rover is alive and well and living as a bicycle in Japan. In keeping with the traditions of the marque, it is a rather boring one. The Chevrolet is much more sporty.

So, I'm asking myself, are all these macho farmers around Hiratsuka really in the closet?

The evidence. Ahem.