On a recent trip to the USA I was struck by the absence of lamb on restaurant menus. This PDF on meat consumption trends underscores my point. The amount of lamb eaten in the USA is vanishingly small. Given the mixed nationalities who migrated west in the 1800 and 1900s this seems curious. Lamb is still popular in the UK, even if we traditionally have it with mint sauce. The French and Italians both treat lamb well and the eastern Mediterranean countries all cook lamb regularly. It is even a staple in Irish stew. All of these nationalities contributed to the country that is now the USA, yet lamb has gone missing.
After a quick serendipitous chat with Thomas Vander Wal, it seems lamb is commonly available in upstate New York and in California, but beef is the main elsewhere. So what happened that beef, chicken and even pork and turkey dominate so much in the USA. Lamb is a lovely meat.
Recently in cultural differences Category
I've been designing Nature Network over the past year or so and through it we've created social software for scientists. This is a different type of social software to the more general platforms like Facebook or MySpace or Vox. We have designed it to fit the needs of scientists, it has captured some of the professional aspects of scientific life.
I'm keen to find more examples of this, I spoke to some people at foocamp and discovered ModelMayhem and SchoolLoop. Both of these are good examples of the kind of vertical market social software I'm after. Each of them presents reasonable (fair) barriers to entry and has a language of its own, mirroring the existing phraseology used within each subject area.
ModelMayem is a site for fashion models, makeup artists and photographers. You need to show work and be approved to properly join the site. SchoolLoop is aimed a teachers and parents of pupils in schools in the USA. You need to have a pupil at a school in the USA. Sermo and LinkedIn also spring to mind, LinkedIn less so, as it is quite generic. Sermo is for registered doctors in the USA
Can you tell me of other examples you found on the internet, thanks.
Why did I just take an 18 month contract and a new N95 than wait six months with my Nokia 6630 and get an iPhone on O2?
The primary driver was availability, plus GPS, 3G, a decent camera and the rest (funny mocking ad comparing N95 and iPhone). I've waited through the N70, the N80 (briefly) and the N73 waiting for a phone which can act as a computer, camera and phone in one. I'm interested in how much of my persistence I can manage through my phone. I'm a twitter user and with the N95 I'll become a jaiku user. Then there is fire eagle and getting the flickr client working again on my phone.
The iPhone looks nice, but as willo and Duncan point out it is not without its flaws. Much of the UI strangeness comes from it feeling like an American product, not a European one. SMS is an important part of my life, as is decent 3G access. It seems unlikely that the iPhone will gain either 3G or proper GPS soon. The SMS issues, like only one recipient will be fixed, but the mapping aspect is important.
I lost my phone a while ago and I've not got round to moving the Lumisoft map application to my replacement 6630. I miss it a lot. I'd not realised how much a part of my life it had become for me in London. The N95 promised to offer this for the whole of the UK and potentially the rest of Europe. That is tempting.
Give me 18 months and an improved iPhone and I might be tempted, but for now the open environs of the N95 seem quite tempting, I'll be installing apache and Python soon. I really hope Omni allow S60 access to the rails app in OmniFocus though.
I've been dipping into Monocle over the last month or so and I've been really enjoying it. The writing is good, the coverage of different themes gives me something to read depending on my mood. It does remind me at times of a high class in flight magazine, but I think that is fine. I've found it great for background details for fiction too, part of my long term plan to write some shorts or a novel.
Much of the content is largely voyeuristic, in that I'm not going to buy the items or visit the places, but I read them nonetheless and I feel I could. So maybe it is armchair tourism at times too. I've now bought, but not read, issue two. I can't see myself subscribing, but I will keep buying Monocle from time to time.
I love barbeques, they are the point of summer, but some people don't seem to get it.
Yes
charcoal, vegetables and meat, slow gentle cooking
No
Gas, rack of "meat", charred burnt bits
Now that things have warmed up again, it is time to finish this post, started in the warm sunny days of July. I'm puzzled by how people barbeque, it is a man thing, racks of meat, mainly sausages or packs of BBQ meat. I'll agree that meat helps the flavour of the barbeque, as the meat fat cooking on the hot coals gives the right taste. However I don't understand why it is often just meat.
Gas barbeques and self lighting charcoal, they are just lazy, particularly gas barbeques. A barbeque has a dry heat, cooking over gas gives a different flavour as it is a wet heat from the water in the smoke. Self lighting charcoal makes the food smell of chemicals in my opinion, the sugar based lighting gels work best with plain charcoal. Though it is getting harder to find untainted charcoal. Plain charcoal is not that hard to work with, see below.
My ideal barbeque includes sweet corn, aubergine, peppers, halloumi and some sausages, lamb chump steaks or some well hung steak. The halloumi needs soaking in water for 5-10 minutes then drying off. All the veg and cheese need brushing with a little oil to ensure they don't burn. The steaks are best with some marinade, done the night before, or in the morning, some oil, vinegar, red wine, pomegranate molasses, spices and pepper.
Make a pyramid of charcoal using a two inch deep layer across the base of the cooking area. Place lighting gel as you layer the coals, then light in several places and wait for 10 - 15 minutes for the coals to catch. Once the centre is lit knock the pryamid out to ensure that most of the cooking surface has caught. Now comes the hard bit, grab a beer / glass of wine and wait til they are grey and there is no more flames. It is ready to cook at this point, before this it'll just burn everything.
I usually start with peppers skin down to test the heat, if they colour up quickly then I either raise the grill or take things off and wait. Then some sausages to get some nice smells and other vegetables. I leave halloumi and finer cuts of meat to the end, as the cheese and meat are best hot. Last of all shrimps or any fish, as that will taste everything else.
They are one of the best things about summer, hopefully we'll get a few more in before the end of summer proper.
I'm not really a sports fan, but I managed to watch some of the football recently, whilst on holiday in France. So this will not be insightful commentry on the actual games, though England were dull as dishwater mostly. For the record, I'm now cheering on France, as I have Hugenot ancestors, at some point.
The point. which came to me was the huge number of flags which litter the central reservations of UK motorways, there are literally thousands of them, snapped off and flung by car wheels, to the middle, to lie poor and neglected for the remains of the summer. Oddly, in France I only saw some sun hats with French colours, alongside some shoes for Portugal, Brazil and France. Yet there is no denying that the French support their team, but their cars are unadorned. I'm puzzled as to why the English feel the need to drape their houses, cars and children in the English flag, primarly for football.
A while ago I wrote about battery recycling, I drew the sad conclusion that although batteries are a dense source of heavy metals, the industry in the UK does not regard this as an issue. There are no or minimal battery recycling facilities in the UK, the majority end up in domestic waste, the bulk of which is incinerated or buried.
So on a recent trip to France, I was surprised to see containers marked "piles" (french for batteries) on the SeaFrance boats and in the supermarkets we visited. The French seem to see it as a much greater issue, than we do in this country. So the next trip I make to France I'll be bring the bag of used batteries sitting in the kitchen and leaving them in France. It is little effort and means that now I can recycle paper, card, some plastic, glass, aluminum and tin cans. Organic matter goes in the compost bin and the only waste we create is dairy products, meat scraps, stale bread and other starches (they do not compost well) and various plastic wrappings.
Recently I have been listening to the various arguments about all day pub opening on the today programme and each commentator was saying that a change in culture was what is required to control the 11 o'clock kick out tension and violence in Britain's city centres.
This is true, I feel, a longer slower drinking pace will mean that people will not get drunk as quickly. However I feel that this emphasis solely on the opening hours misses the point a bit. Most of my French, Italian and Spanish friends are amazed at the post work pint phenomenon, office and shop workers drinking 3-4 pints with only crisps as accompaniment. The quality and cost of British pub snacks is often woeful. Too much frozen food into the fryer, everything seems to either be full of fat, like potato wedges or not fresh, like the pub nachos, straight from the packet and onto the plate, then into the microwave. Promoting the place of the kitchen in the British pub seems to be an important aspect of this cultural divide, the majority of places that the the rest of Europe drinks in are cafe-bars, where the place of food and decent coffee is already well established.
Something else that I feel makes us differ is the volume of beer we drink as a standard measure, a pint is quite a lot of beer to drink compared to a 330ml bottle. In France, often the standard measure for bottles or for draft is 250ml or 330ml. The pacing factor is often the time it takes for round buying, if this is pints at a time with no food as opposed to half or third of a litre with food, then it is no wonder the British are seen as drunks.
Moving to the smaller measure would not be as big a shock as it seems, many people already drink bottles of beer in preference to pints, or they drink gin and tonic. The half pint is seen in a poor light, so getting the publicans to serve ales and lagers in 330ml glasses would be of benefit to society. I cannot see the average drinking male in the UK going for it thought, the manliness of pint drinking is too well ingrained. Pity for the ale drinker, then as he or she is comdemned to insobriety or ridicule or lager.
Can we please have sensible sized amounts to drink with food in bars where you can hear yourself think, or is that too much to ask ? I mean we have got beyond wine being a choice of red or white and there are plenty of pubs with decent cask ales, some even have nice food. Still the standard British pub is a place devoted to drinking copious amounts of lager with the music too loud to have a conversation and not quite enough chairs, all designed to encourage you back to the bar, we as the customers need to take back control of the situation.
Recurrent meme from The Guardian, apparently we still lag down the scale in terms of number of bank holidays as compared to the rest of Europe, even with the additional ten countries. There is a campaign website to rectify this asking you to vote for a preferred day, personally I think an autumnal bank holiday would be best, but it is not as straightforward as it seems. Funny sniping from the CBI too, puffing about keeping Britain competitive, "We all like the idea of more time off, but most people understand that can't come without cost" — live a little!
Over the weekend I started to write about Elizabeth David and her wonderful book, An Omelette and a glass of wine, whilst trying to catchup on the weeks of lost blog posts.
Today reading in NNW, I find that Ben Hammersley has a post on the same book. His take is about RecipeML and sharing online recipes, something that this site might have done in a previous life.
My reason for writing about that excellent book is not this time for the delightfully written recipes, which often share a small story or credit the originator of the dish, but for the descriptions of the markets in the final 30 odd pages of the book. She describes the markets of Cavallon and the Provence and the northern makets in the cider apple growing areas of the Nord Pas du Calais and Brittany. These rich details of the simplicity of fresh quality market food are still there in France 40 years later, luckily. Thus as well as a cookery book, Elizabeth David has written a travel guide to the culinary delights of France, which holds pretty true to this day.
Another institution which held this role was the Bond films from the early 60s, all those long panning shots of foreign exotic locations acted as a stimulus to the burgeoning jet travel industry of that decade and on to the easyjets of today.
We no longer need Bond films to show us the locations to travel to, but for the British at least our culinary appetites still need whetting from the writings of the recent past.
I'm off to France for a few days over the coming Bank Holiday weekend and looking forward to these sights and smells once again. In Britain we can make markets like this happen for special occasions, like pre-Christmas or even weekly for some cities, but in France they are 10 a penny in most medium sized towns. Grenoble has at least 3 most days, maybe in the UK we just don't get enough sunshine to make the fruit burst forth and ripen.
