The Ladybird cookbook

Had a rootle on the internet and turned up a picture of the Ladybird book mentioned below. The cheese-and-orange hedgehog is actually on the cover. As are Scotch eggs, a horrid-looking pie and a homemade orange drink of some sort. Very Seventies. Had I known it would some day be worth six bucks, I would have kept that little cookbook.

Pale and interesting shortbread

My first ever cookbook was one of those thin little Ladybird books, which mainly featured ‘recipes’ for things like a hedgehog, made by skewering an orange with cocktail sticks and wedging grapes and cubes of cheese onto the cocktail sticks.

The only thing I can ever remember making from it and, therefore, the first recipe I ever followed, was shortbread. I must have been about six. My mum helped a lot and the shortbread was edible, if no more.

Our daily bread might make you sick

There is no way of saying this without sounding insufferably pretentious but here’s hoping that the multi-awardwinning new film from Austrian director Nikolaus Geyrhalter – Unser Taegliche Brot or Our Daily Bread – will get a release in Ireland. It’s a documentary on the mechanisation of food production and, although beautifully shot, it is disturbing stuff if the trailers are anything to go by.

Geyrhalter dispensed with a voiceover – the machinery that produces our food provides most of the soundtrack – and lets his starkly bright, clinical images communicate the nauseating message. (Via Pruned)

Why can’t they leave food alone?

Somewhere on my net surfing last week, I came across the Grapple. That’s pronounced grAYpel. Apparently, Grapples look like apples but taste like grapes. The producers, the C&O Nursery in Wenatchee, Washington state, say they soak Extra Fancy Fuji apples in water and “concentrated grape flavor”.  

What is wrong with apples that taste like apples? Wikipedia has a little more on it, including a link to some photos.

Easy topping for fish

Without really thinking about what I might do with it, I took some fish from the freezer yesterday (yes, I hold my hands up, it was cod again). Had no time to go shopping for additional ingredients so I had to make do with what I had in a pretty bare larder.

Using my mini food processor, I whizzed up two slices of white bread, a generous handful of flat leaf parsley, two cloves of garlic, a squeeze of lemon juice, a glug of olive oil, sea salt and black pepper. Put the fish in an oiled dish, squidged the breadcrumbs on top and lobbed it in the oven (200C) for a little shy of 20 minutes. It was only delicious.

Do they still count as aphrodisiacs?

Fascinating piece here about how French oyster farmers are adopting new technology to keep their business alive and vibrant.

There are all sorts of interesting nuggets (pearls?) here: from the fact that oyster quality used to be tested by injecting liquid from an oyster into a mouse – if the mouse croaked, the oysters were bad – to the information that many oysters are now triploids, that is, bred from two fathers and one mother.

One French oyster farmer rejects the notion that triploids are ethically unsound:

“That orange juice you drank this morning?” he says. “Triploid oranges. Farm-raised salmon and trout? Triploids.”

Ewww…that just can’t be good for us.

Roundup of Irish food blogs

Kieran over at Ice Cream Ireland is appealing for more Irish food & drink blogs so fingers crossed a few people will be tempted to dip a toe in the water. Maybe a finger in the pie would be a better hackneyed metaphor to use in this case.

Anyway, between Kieran’s post and the comments, there is a pretty extensive roundup of Irish food blogs. Must update my blogroll to reflect this lovely smorgasbord of recipes and observations.

Incidentally, read all about smorgasbords here.

Friday foodie links III

The Chinese will employ mice as food tasters during the 2008 Olympics.

Spam sculpture (via Slashfood). Spamhenge, spamtinis, spam fries…

Epicurious tells Americans how to eat fewer pesticides. I wonder is the same true of fruit & veg available in Ireland?

As ever, BoingBoing had a few gems this week. When doesn’t it? Here are two oddities they highlighted:

Season Shot, which are shotgun shells packed with seasoning. When you cook your pheasant or whatever, the shot casing melts and you are, at least theoretically, left with nicely seasoned meat.

Also photos on icing. Maybe it’s just me but if I had children, I would not want to eat cakes or cookies with pictures of my kids on them. Except maybe when they were really getting on my nerves.

Positively Distinctly Pea & Minty Soup

Cully and Sully, the poster boys for wholesome convenience food, recently launched a new range of soups. Tried the (Positively Distinctly) Pea & Minty Soup today for lunch. The lads recommend chopping some fried streaky bacon into it so I did and it made it. The soup is sweet and fresh-tasting but a whole bowl of it could get tiresome without the salty tang of some added bacon. Am having one of those days but the soup definitely cheered me up. Recommended.  

Space: the final fast food frontier

The latest advertising wheeze from the fast food industry: KFC has an ad that can be seen from space.

They’re not really targeting extraterrestrials with this. Instead, they’re giving away 10,000 free sandwiches (what we would call chicken burgers) to customers who can find the secret message from Colonel Sanders hidden in the image. This could be asking a lot of people who like their food served in buckets.