food, reviews and of course coffee
I do quite like fish and chips, but rarely eat them when I am out to eat, unless I am buying a take away. Down in Plymouth in the Watering Hole down on the quay I made an exception for these.
The batter was good, the mushy peas were good. I took fries in preference to the chunky chips on the menu. I didn’t though think much of the tartar sauce. Though that may be because I don’t like tartar sauce!
Enjoyed reading this blog article about the differences between the fast food you see in the advertising and the fast food you actually get.
People around the world know fast food as one of the most reliable distributors of disappointment ever produced by the business world. We know that if we ever feel the need to complain about something, we can just grab a page out of a coupon booklet, adorned in pictures of juicy burgers, then go have a party. Why, the restaurants themselves usually plaster their walls with pictures of juicy burgers – often hanging right over your table – so that you need only open your eyes to find something to compare your food with, while you eat it. Needless to say, the results of my little project were unsurprising… which shouldn’t be a surprise.
My favourite part is that the food in many of the advertising pictures wouldn’t actually fit in the boxes that they are supplied in!
Sometimes speed and ease is what is needed in the kitchen. I do use tinned pulses and beans a fair bit in my cooking. Though I know I can buy dried, soak and cook them myself, I do find that using tinned is quick and easy. It also allows for last minute changes to recipes or what I am going to cook for dinner.
One problem I do have is that sometimes a regular sized tin of pulses or beans is too big. So I was pleased to find these small tins at my local Waitrose of Borlotti Beans.
I have used these for salads and for cooking, as with my recent pork and borlotti beans recipe.
What is also nice about these is that the beans are not in brine, so less salty.
Sometimes I wish pubs that serve food had a little more imagination.
Look at this combo starter for sharing.
Most of the stuff on that platter is deep fried!
I guess that is what most people want from a combo starter, personally I would have liked them to use fresh ingredients rather than processed stuff out of the freezer that is then thrown into the deep fat fryer. I know there’s some salad and at the far end is some chicken and garlic bread, but why not take a leaf out of the Spanish tapas cookbook or a Greek meze cookbook and be more creative.
Tried the Italian sausage and red wine tortelloni from Morrisons.
After cooking it in a pan of boiling water for about two minutes I drained the pasta and added a couple of spoonfuls of creme fraché. I served the pasta with some freshly grated parmesan and freshly ground black pepper.
Though the texture was good, I did feel that the pasta lacked any distinctive flavour. I certainly couldn’t taste any red wine in the pasta filling and the sausage was not very apparent in the filling. Overall I was disappointed with the pasta.
I cooked some Sainsury’s Taste the Difference Ultimate outdoor reared pork sausages.
They were quite nice, meaty, not too salty and didn’t go bang!
I recently had duck at a hotel restaurant.
Slightly overcooked and slice, it was served on a bed or oriental vegetables in a overpowering and salty oyster sauce. Bizarrely it was served with deep fried potato balls rather than rice, which would have been my preference.
I didn’t enjoy it as much as I thought I would.
Made me smile.
Gareth Richards: “Wooden spoons are great. You can either use them to prepare food. Or, if you can’t be bothered with that, just write a number on one and walk into a pub…”
From BBC.
Too often when I have curry it looks like this!
A brown dish made of some meat with a brown curry flavoured sauce?
As though curry is a single flavour in its own right!
Supermarket curries, though not much better, at least realise that there is more than one kind of curry.
Personally I much prefer to make my own curries rather than have something like you see above.
What about you?
See the instructions here.