g7uk » food

How ASDA prevents customers from making price comparisons

GS — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 23:10:28 +0000

Heinz pulls ad for unhealthy Deli Mayo due to ‘gay’ kiss

GS — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 04:35:50 +0000

Heinz has pulled a TV ad which featured a kiss between two men, following 200 complaints from viewers. Some of them complained that it was unsuitable for children. However the ad was banned from being shown in and around kids’ shows anyway because the unhealthy Deli Mayo product is high in fat, salt or sugar, not because of the same sex kiss.

Britain throws away £10bn of food every year

GS — Thu, 08 May 2008 09:02:51 +0000

‘Each day, according to the government-backed report, Britons throw away 4.4 million apples, 1.6 million bananas, 1.3 million yoghurt pots, 660,000 eggs, 550,000 chickens, 300,000 packs of crisps and 440,000 ready meals. And for the first time government researchers have established that most of the food waste is made up of completely untouched food products – whole chickens and chocolate gateaux that lie uneaten in cupboards and fridges before being discarded.’

The Independent

Fast food: the reality

GS — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 16:09:09 +0000

Someone has photographed various fast food and put the photos alongside the glossy promotional images.

Check out the Basement Cafe and Social Centre in Manchester city centre

GS — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 01:43:08 +0000

It comes as a breath of fresh air to realise that there are still good people around in Manchester who are not focused on relieving you of as much cash as possible.

Home-made pasta sauce (video)

GS — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 00:33:19 +0000

Delicious! Make it with minced (ground) beef or lamb. I used lamb here…

I start off by frying the minced lamb (about 8oz/250g) in a little olive oil. I always get the really lean meat but I like to see how much fat comes off and drain it away if necessary. But don’t brown it completely.

Put a tablespoon of olive oil in another pan. Add a rasher of bacon that you’ve chopped into small pieces. This flavours the oil nicely.

Put in two small onions, chopped (I used red onions here), and two cloves of garlic also finely chopped. Keep stirring. After a couple of minutes put in a stick of celery and a small carrot, both chopped. You could also add a couple of sliced mushrooms (I didn’t this time). Cook and stir for another minute or two.

Add the minced lamb, stir for a minute (or longer if you didn’t pre-cook it a little before). Then put in a deseeded and chopped red pepper, a can of tomatoes with juice, a tablespoon of tomato puree, some black pepper, a stock cube, a bay leaf, fresh basil or a teaspoon of dried basil, a teaspoon of dried oregano and a pinch of chilli powder. Once this is bubbling, put on the lid and turn the heat right down so it is just simmering. Leave it like that for an hour.

Now watch the video to see how it turned out:

Download: Windows Media (wmv) | Quicktime/iPod

Serve with spaghetti or other pasta. Sprinkle some grated cheese on top (should be parmesan I suppose but cheddar is just fine!). I get my pasta from Marks and Spencer. They do several varieties that are made with free range eggs.

This is plenty for two people. If you cook up a triple quantity you can freeze it. Giving you several quick meals. Anyway, these things are always better at least kept overnight in the fridge, as it lets the flavours mingle.

Corned beef casserole (video)

GS — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 17:00:42 +0000

I’ve been making a few simple recipes that my mum used to do. Comfort food you could call it I suppose.

This one is really quick but tasty. Into a casserole dish put: a tin of corned-beef cut into cubes, two onions sliced (I used red ones here), some stock, black pepper and herbs (dried parsley here) and add sliced potatoes on top. Sprinkle with some grated cheese.

Cover and put into the oven at 180c/350f for about 20 minutes.

Now watch the video to see how it turned out:

Download: Windows media (wmv) | Quicktime (mov/iPod).

Do you like my old-fashioned cooker? I love them. This is a ‘Creda Carefree’ which I always think sounds like a drag-queen.

Cookers were very camp in the 1960′s and 1970′s. Tricity had a range that included the Contessa, Marquis and Tiara.

Alternative Manchester Pride

GS — Sat, 19 Aug 2006 23:40:58 +0000

If you’re tired of the commercialisation of our Pride event in Manchester, check out this.

‘An alternative queer carnival running counter current to the main pride parade, happening in Manchester on the 26th of August (the bank holiday weekend)- needs you! We are recruiting an army of old dears in twin sets and on soap boxes. Our aim: to poke the gay conscience with our knitting needles… we object to gay ghettoisation, the selling off of our pride to corporate sponsorship and the absence of any awareness raising about gay rights and gay activism history as the source of our pride.’

And from 1-3 September 2006:

‘Get bent! is our answer to the commercialism of the mainstream pride event. in response to our pride being sold back to us by consumerism we are putting on a weekend of free events, food and fun.’

Should soya carry a health warning?

GS — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 02:06:22 +0000

From The Guardian.

I’m finding it hard to keep up-to-date with what’s good and what’s bad. An article I read recently suggested it may be more healthy to eat butter rather than margarine…

Rocketbust: the question the articles never asked about Rocketboom

GS — Thu, 06 Jul 2006 11:17:30 +0000

Andrew Baron, the creator and producer of the videoblog show Rocketboom, and Amanda Congdon its star, have parted company according to reports.

In all the hype that surrounded Rocketboom in its first year online, there was one question that always went unanswered.

Print articles and TV reports were in awe of the show. Breathlessly, they told us how it was produced in an ordinary living room, had a quarter of a million viewers each day and yet cost just $20-$50 to make. Some even suggested that the main expense was photographic light-bulbs.

Andrew, the creator and producer of Rocketboom, was quoted as saying he spent some 8-14 hours making each five-minute episode. Which will be no surprise to anyone who has been involved in the time-consuming business of making television programmes or video.

But, as they predicted a rash of ‘user-generated’ Rocketboom-style programmes coming to a website near you, what none of these ‘anyone can do it’ reports ever asked, was how did the people behind Rocketboom pay the rent and buy food?

It was clear that making Rocketboom was a full-time job. After a year, I began to wonder. Did Rocketboom have a financial backer who had given them start-up cash? Was Andrew a rich-kid who didn’t have to worry about earning a living? Were they all on welfare?

Of course money isn’t everything, but eventually it became clear they did want to earn an income from the show.

As a video blog, Rocketboom has been a spectacular success. A phenomenon and I wholeheartedly congratulate Andrew and Amanda on what they did. But, as a business, it represents a missed opportunity of quite staggering proportions. I read they made about $80,000 from the one ad they had so far.

To be running for eighteen months, with 300,000 viewers per day, five days per week, and make only that, is just mind-boggling. With Google ads you can make $500 a year from a website that only gets 50 visitors a day…

History is littered with the tales of people who had great ideas or creativity, but failed to do what was necessary to turn those into an income. Rocketboom gave away its product under a creative commons licence. Its website and show usually carried no ads. It seems to me that the only valuable asset is the ‘brand’ and Amanda Congdon is a huge part of that.

Now the bubble has burst. Occasionally Rocketboom was brilliant (Amanda dancing in Russia), but often it was a bit too off-the-wall and left us scratching our heads in bemusement. Andrew was an expert on the RSS distribution side of things, with the result that Rocketboom was the first to make it big. It was a novelty and highly popular for that reason. That iconic combination of Amanda and the map… They captured a moment in time and I fear that moment is now over.

If I was Amanda, I would start making a new online show right now while she is so much in the public eye. If I was Andrew, I would sell the Rocketboom show, archives (which don’t have a lot of value because they are so topical) and domain name and split the money with Amanda, while they still have the chance to make some money from this. Otherwise Rocketboom is going to begin a slow fade into history without making either of them rich.

The worst thing would be to get tied up in a legal case for several years, by which time there will be nothing left to carve up. Time is of the essence for both of them…