Food And Drink

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..

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)

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.

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.

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.

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”.

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.

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).

I’m not really a big fan of custom desktop backgrounds, generally prefering to stick with the default ‘Aqua Graphite’ image that I’m used to, but if I was, one of John Maeda’s food images would be my first choice. Perhaps this Damien Hirst’s shark-in-the-tank influenced “geometrical paradise of dried anchovies”: