For the past year Brett Lider has been blogging the food he has eaten at Google…

Pipette + dressing + tomato + mozzarella = Appetizer, Google-style
Originally uploaded by Brett L..

( Technorati tags: google | food)

From The Jean-Paul Sartre Cookbook:

I keep creating omelets one after another, like soldiers marching into the sea, but each one seems empty, hollow, like stone. I want to create an omelet that expresses the meaninglessness of existence, and instead they taste like cheese.

(via Memex 1.1)

( Technorati tags: cookbook | cooking | sartre | philosophy)

Went to see Matthew Herbert and his apron-clad ‘brigade’ perform Plat du Jour at the Barbican on Monday night. Unfortunately I couldn’t shake the feeling that Herbert and co were a little bored by the idea of a last London performance (they delayed the start for a few minutes trying to work out if they could do the whole thing in reverse, just to make it more interesting for themselves) and his slightly irritating assumption that most of the audience had seen it before seemed like a reason not to try too hard.

Their decision to pre-prepare many of the samples in order ‘to pick up the pace’ a bit was probably good for those who had previously been subjected to five-minute gaps between tracks, though I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who was disappointed to not to see ‘Lenka Clayton’s great films about giant vegetables and lobster-eating competitions’ or Dani (Siciliano, Herbert’s wife), who didn’t make it in time to sing her vocals on ‘Celebrity’.

That said, the whole thing really was a compelling feast for all the senses, even if the accompanying smells prepared by two on-stage ‘chefs’ and fanned towards us were understandably a little heavy on the garlic and burnt toast. And being one of hundreds of people each simultaneously biting a perfect little Red Pippin at the start of ‘An Apple A Day…’ was fun, tasty and surprisingly loud!

Mugison’s wild, energetic opening set was hugely entertaining, especially for me when I was roped on stage from the front row to help project a video of his girlfriend onto his guitar so they could sing a duet together. ‘Mugi’ is apparently a big star in his native Iceland and his new album ‘Mugimama - is this monkey music’ is released in the UK on Herbert’s Accidental Records, who like to describe him as “a troubadour for the electronic age”, which seems apt.

My arrival back from Halifax with a live lobster for dinner re-ignited the ‘is it cruel to dispatch a lobster in boiling water’ debate in our household. I’ve always had a bit of a lobster fetish (I once had a fabulous Katherine Hammnet lobster t-shirt, now faded beyond recognition), so the mere presence of a live lobster in the house was a big thrill for me and especially for the kids.

In the back of my mind was a recent story concerning new Norwegian research into the welfare implications of everything from cooking live lobsters, keeping bees and the use of worms on hooks as bait, which concluded that invertebrates do not suffer pain, discomfort or stress. This is the ‘no brain, no pain’ argument. On the other hand organisations such as PeTA’s ‘Lobster Liberation Front’ dispute this and have dismissed the Norwegian findings as pandering to the (admittedly very powerful) Norwegian fishing lobby, maintaining that boiling a lobster alive is tantamount to torture. Trevor Corson, author of The Secret Life of Lobsters, has a good summary of the arguments.

Whatever you believe, there’s no doubting the ethical dubiousness of a bizarre lobster game found in a video arcade in Japan (via Boing Boing and RocketBoom) and this: “an old sport turned into a new high profit vending game”.

And finally, whilst we’re on the subject, this seems like an appropriate point to link to an entry I wrote (in 1999, I think) on shellfish for h2g2, a Douglas Adam-inspired wikipedia-alike now owned by the BBC.

The long-awaited (by me at least) new album Plat du Jour from Matthew Herbert was released last week. Over two years in the making this is a ‘concept’ album about “the international language of food” with some great tunes, including two standout tracks: Celebrity, made entirely from food aimed at children endorsed by celebrities and the only vocal track (”Go Gordon, go Ramsay, go Beyoncé…”) and The Nine Seeds Of Navdanya, generated from seeds provided by a conservation organisation in India. Check out the Plat du Jour website for the complete list of ‘ingredients’ for each track including a grain of sugar, 30,000 chickens, a salmon farm and the sewers below London (then download the album here for a fiver.)

(Cover image from the awesome CoverFlow)

Not unsurprisingly it’s perfect to listen to in the kitchen, especially if you’ve got a lot of chopping or mixing to do.

Knowing my predilection for liquorice, some family members recently brought me box of crushed liquorice root back from Egypt. Rather than drink the infusion, I thought I’d attempt to recreate a Heston Blumenthal dish we ate at the Fat Duck 18 months ago: SALMON POACHED WITH LIQUORICE. I remembered I’d kept Blumenthal’s recipe for liquorice jelly from The Guardian in 2003 for exactly this reason. The dish we ate at the Fat Duck was garnished with chicory (without doubt the best chicory I’ve ever tasted), but The Guardian version (and the version on today’s menu at the Fat Duck) recommends pink grapefruit and asparagus alongside the salmon, as “both liquorice and asparagus contain a compound called asparagine”. I didn’t have the required agar flakes to make the all-encasing, heat-resistant gelling agent, so in the end simply grilled the salmon, but nevertheless it was terrific, even if the asparagus was from Peru and the dish looked absolutely nothing like this. My (vege-gel) jelly looks dark and mysterious in its jar though.

I now also feel like I’m one step closer to my ambition to restarting my career as a sculptor by making a grizzly bear-sized liquorice cat (I once made three life-sized marzipan pigs).

Overheard on a train (two women chatting about lunch): “Is taste symmetrical?”, meaning Are Human Taste Thresholds Similar on the Right and Left Sides of the Tongue? Basically, the answer is yes: “taste threshold sensitivity is equivalent on the left and right anterior tongue for most individuals.”

And whilst we’re on the subject of eavesdropping, check out Overheard in New York.

David Hempleman-Adams, who broke a 25-year-old world balloon altitude record in December last year with the aim of drawing attention to climate change, broke another world record yesterday, hosting a dinner party for his mates Bear Grylls and Alan Veal, 7,000m (25,000ft) above Salisbury Plain. The three-course meal included asparagus tips, duck a l’orange and fruit terrine. Dining four miles above the earth has its own particular hazards as Patrick Barkham reports in today’s Guardian: “they had to snatch off their masks and gulp their food before taking some more oxygen, while being careful not to drop anything - a spear of asparagus falling from that height could kill someone.”

(Shameless plug: check out The Climate Challenge which we made for The Climate Group to support David’s world balloon altitude record attempt).

One of the highlights for me at the PAL Digital Science Lab for Wellcome/NESTA I attended recently was an evening spent sampling a couple of Dean Maddon’s cocktails of nucleic acids. I’m pleased to note that the recipe is available online. Best served in a test tube, obviously.

The Getting Things Done meme is not just exploding across the web: recently Victoria Moore in the Weekend Guardian refered to a liquorice tea as stuff that “somehow encourages the transparent and focused mind required to Get Things Done” (it’s the capitalisation that gives it away, surely: and clearly a reference to David Allen’s “mind like water”, a state in which you only give the attention to things that they deserve).

Now liquorice is one of my favourite things, and something described as “more like a shape than a taste” just had to be worth trying, especially if it was likely to give me a productivity boost too. I managed to track it down at Goodness Direct and ordered three boxes*. And then had to wait ages, as a high demand for Yogi Tea Licorice Egyptian Spice meant there was none in stock. The verdict? Yes, it really does “curl around your mouth in the most extraordinary way”…

(*If you decide to order some for yourself, tell them I sent you and quote this reference: RB38986W.)