Cooking, portion sizes & second hand books
Aug. 5th, 2009 06:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
narcasseSlow cookers make a comeback as Brits save money in the kitchen Telegraph.co.uk
This is probably true in some cases but I find it hard to believe that this is an overall trend, mostly because before the credit crunch panic the idea of cooking your own food was being marketed as the latest upcoming trend. Celebrity chefs were all the rage and supermarkets like Marks & Spencer and Sainsbury’s were sponsoring cooking shows. Home-cooked food was making a comeback; Keith Floyd reruns were jostling with new Delia Smith series, Ching He-Huang was telling us that we’d never heard of Chinese food before and Rick Stein was gushing over the wonder of seafood. Cooking, or at least the idea of it, was the latest trend. Cookbooks, food magazines, TV channels dedicated to food shows: it was all pitched at the level that cooking was the latest thing. It was the pineapple and cheese sticks of the current decade.
Tapas was in, so was conveyor-belt sushi. We’d even come round full circle to the point where the dishes of the 80s were starting to be ‘deconstructed’ and remained. A bread making machine was a wonderful idea and would coordinate well with your juicer. Griddle pans were being brushed lightly with oil and wax was being cut off supermarket cheeses. Food was the in thing, it was this season, on trend or whatever else PR departments had decided to call it. Of course this was the UK so continental cold cuts and cheeses weren’t anything new in our supermarkets but these days more people were looking. The mainstream supermarkets were also figuring out that there was a huge market for the Indian products that everyone usually went to the Indian shops for and started stocking them, though oddly Chinese and Japanese products don’t get so much of a focus, possibly because the Chinese supermarkets are huge and well known anyway. Likewise there are Caribbean products coming in, generic Caribbean honey & ginger tea is the real deal after all, and Polish ones too, so that you can buy borsht extract and thick syrupy coke.
The food industry, products that could be cooked by the end user, cookbooks that would tell you want to do with those products was booming long before this credit crunch malarkey kicked in. Home cooking was fashionable. Of course saving money is a good idea anyway and that’s being reinforced by the current panic but that’s not to say that it wasn’t happening before. My last job location was surrounded by plenty of food outlets where I could have bought my lunch but I preferred to bring my own because at the end of the day there’s only so many times I’d want to eat similar things. The variety of food providers was rather wide but still, having tried them all and tried them a second or third time I did finally get bored, and then it became a chore to drag myself down the street and pick the thing that I found least bothersome to eat. Maybe part of the problem there is that I’m a little bit of a foodie, albeit not a Michelin star rating one, so I will actively go out and sample an entire range and having sampled them will probably decide that I don’t want to eat any of those things on a regular basis in the middle of the lunch rush. I actually wound my way back down to plain ham sandwiches in the end because I couldn’t think of anything that I really, honestly wanted to eat but I needed to eat something.
Suffice to say I’m all for eating something that you genuinely want to enjoy and when you’re in a rush it’s home cooked food, prepared the day before that usually measures up in opposed to something you’ve had to grab in a hurry. After all, when you cook your own meals you can decide what you want to eat right from the start instead of having to select from a range of things prepared by somebody else which might or might not include anything that appeals. I like Domino’s Meateor pizza but I wouldn’t want to eat it everyday or have my choice restricted to pizza in general. So really, in my opinion, while this current crisis might be helping boost home cooking inclinations, those inclinations were already there in the first place for a whole variety of reasons of which economising is only a single one.
Smaller chocolate bars, mini drinks cans to be standard under Government plans Telegraph.co.uk
This is something that I feel somewhat divided about. On one hand it would be nice to be able to pick up smaller portions of things if I fancy a snack or a drink when I’m out and about but on the other depending on price and my carrying capacity at any given time it’s also nice to be able to pick up something where I’ll end up having half left over for later. This is especially true for bottled drinks or chocolate. Even if I don’t finish my bottle of water in transit it tends to be useful to have it to hand, even if I won’t touch it for the weekend I spend at my destination, for the return journey. It’s more about convenience in this case where I might not have the time or inclination to buy a new bottle at the train station before I get my train home. Then again the article talks about soft drinks cans which aren’t something I buy while travelling simply because they won’t close so you can’t save half even if you want to. So in that case it might well be a good idea but I’ll reserve judgement until I see how they’re pricing these things to see if they’re actually more cost effective.
Actually, when I think about it I don’t really buy chocolate bars either unless I’m really heading for a drop in blood sugar. I’ve a tendency to buy larger bars anyway, think Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, Milka or Lindt, so that I have plenty left over for the next time I fancy some. The image heading the article shows a Mars bar which isn’t something I eat anyway since I find them too rich so again this is another case where they’re probably talking about a product that I don’t really buy myself. In fact if the aim is to cut down on the size of regular chocolate bars or cans of soft drinks it looks like the entire idea is being aimed at children so I can see the benefit, but at the same time just restricting the amount per portion won’t really do much by itself. After all, what’s to stop someone just buying two bars instead of one or at least resenting that the government is trying to price them out of being able to buy what they want? They’re trying that with cigarettes and alcohol after all and all that’s done is annoyed me.
True book-lovers will never love Oxfam Telegraph.co.uk
Interestingly here my first reaction was to wonder aloud that people actually went to Oxfam shops for books. I can’t say that I frequent charity shops or second-hand bookshops much these days but that’s more for a lack of their being any good ones in my current vicinity. There’s a very small town, or perhaps is actually technically a village, north of London, just on the edge of Zone 6, with only one high street upon which sits one of the wonders of the bookish age. It was one of the finest second hand book shops that I’d ever had the pleasure of entering. They held an eclectic selection of books from guidebooks on the drawing of human anatomy to the rare and often sort after DragonLance comics. I picked up most of Tales of the City there in an old and out of print edition, the aforementioned comics, the anatomy book and one on the evolution of Japanese art styles in that wonderful shop. And I never even noticed if there was a charity shop of any kind on that street because of that. In London proper I’ve picked up books on the architecture of French cathedrals and a very, very old Salvation Army history among others. I’ve also sighed longingly at shelf upon shelf of dusty, esoteric texts that were far, far beyond my price range. In a town north of London in a bizarre sort of market I’ve picked up first edition copies of various novels. In a shamble of a shop in the Midlands I’ve picked up, spine stuck together with masking tape, something by Llewellyn Publishing.
All of the above examples are second hand book shops, spaces dedicated to the sale of second hand books. That’s all they stock, all they do and they’d be my first port of call for a book that I couldn’t find if I was intent of haring after it physically. These days it’s easier to search out something online but if that failed me and I had the time and inclination I’d be scouring the second hand book shops instead. It would never cross my mind to even glance into a charity shop for that sort of thing. Charity shops hold a variety of things after all, they may have books as well but the odds are that if I can’t find what I’m looking for on online catalogues then the general charity shops won’t have it either. Charity shops have always stuck me as useful for general knickknacks, they hold a range of items of course but I’ll always associate them with the sudden, surprising glance into a window that reveals a perfect set of Turkish teaglasses. I associate them with rare ornaments or vintage clothing or the occasional old, mass market paperback. They’re fascinating by themselves but they’re still not those rare and antiquarian book sellers that I’d seek out specifically, at least not to my mind.
This is probably true in some cases but I find it hard to believe that this is an overall trend, mostly because before the credit crunch panic the idea of cooking your own food was being marketed as the latest upcoming trend. Celebrity chefs were all the rage and supermarkets like Marks & Spencer and Sainsbury’s were sponsoring cooking shows. Home-cooked food was making a comeback; Keith Floyd reruns were jostling with new Delia Smith series, Ching He-Huang was telling us that we’d never heard of Chinese food before and Rick Stein was gushing over the wonder of seafood. Cooking, or at least the idea of it, was the latest trend. Cookbooks, food magazines, TV channels dedicated to food shows: it was all pitched at the level that cooking was the latest thing. It was the pineapple and cheese sticks of the current decade.
Tapas was in, so was conveyor-belt sushi. We’d even come round full circle to the point where the dishes of the 80s were starting to be ‘deconstructed’ and remained. A bread making machine was a wonderful idea and would coordinate well with your juicer. Griddle pans were being brushed lightly with oil and wax was being cut off supermarket cheeses. Food was the in thing, it was this season, on trend or whatever else PR departments had decided to call it. Of course this was the UK so continental cold cuts and cheeses weren’t anything new in our supermarkets but these days more people were looking. The mainstream supermarkets were also figuring out that there was a huge market for the Indian products that everyone usually went to the Indian shops for and started stocking them, though oddly Chinese and Japanese products don’t get so much of a focus, possibly because the Chinese supermarkets are huge and well known anyway. Likewise there are Caribbean products coming in, generic Caribbean honey & ginger tea is the real deal after all, and Polish ones too, so that you can buy borsht extract and thick syrupy coke.
The food industry, products that could be cooked by the end user, cookbooks that would tell you want to do with those products was booming long before this credit crunch malarkey kicked in. Home cooking was fashionable. Of course saving money is a good idea anyway and that’s being reinforced by the current panic but that’s not to say that it wasn’t happening before. My last job location was surrounded by plenty of food outlets where I could have bought my lunch but I preferred to bring my own because at the end of the day there’s only so many times I’d want to eat similar things. The variety of food providers was rather wide but still, having tried them all and tried them a second or third time I did finally get bored, and then it became a chore to drag myself down the street and pick the thing that I found least bothersome to eat. Maybe part of the problem there is that I’m a little bit of a foodie, albeit not a Michelin star rating one, so I will actively go out and sample an entire range and having sampled them will probably decide that I don’t want to eat any of those things on a regular basis in the middle of the lunch rush. I actually wound my way back down to plain ham sandwiches in the end because I couldn’t think of anything that I really, honestly wanted to eat but I needed to eat something.
Suffice to say I’m all for eating something that you genuinely want to enjoy and when you’re in a rush it’s home cooked food, prepared the day before that usually measures up in opposed to something you’ve had to grab in a hurry. After all, when you cook your own meals you can decide what you want to eat right from the start instead of having to select from a range of things prepared by somebody else which might or might not include anything that appeals. I like Domino’s Meateor pizza but I wouldn’t want to eat it everyday or have my choice restricted to pizza in general. So really, in my opinion, while this current crisis might be helping boost home cooking inclinations, those inclinations were already there in the first place for a whole variety of reasons of which economising is only a single one.
Smaller chocolate bars, mini drinks cans to be standard under Government plans Telegraph.co.uk
This is something that I feel somewhat divided about. On one hand it would be nice to be able to pick up smaller portions of things if I fancy a snack or a drink when I’m out and about but on the other depending on price and my carrying capacity at any given time it’s also nice to be able to pick up something where I’ll end up having half left over for later. This is especially true for bottled drinks or chocolate. Even if I don’t finish my bottle of water in transit it tends to be useful to have it to hand, even if I won’t touch it for the weekend I spend at my destination, for the return journey. It’s more about convenience in this case where I might not have the time or inclination to buy a new bottle at the train station before I get my train home. Then again the article talks about soft drinks cans which aren’t something I buy while travelling simply because they won’t close so you can’t save half even if you want to. So in that case it might well be a good idea but I’ll reserve judgement until I see how they’re pricing these things to see if they’re actually more cost effective.
Actually, when I think about it I don’t really buy chocolate bars either unless I’m really heading for a drop in blood sugar. I’ve a tendency to buy larger bars anyway, think Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, Milka or Lindt, so that I have plenty left over for the next time I fancy some. The image heading the article shows a Mars bar which isn’t something I eat anyway since I find them too rich so again this is another case where they’re probably talking about a product that I don’t really buy myself. In fact if the aim is to cut down on the size of regular chocolate bars or cans of soft drinks it looks like the entire idea is being aimed at children so I can see the benefit, but at the same time just restricting the amount per portion won’t really do much by itself. After all, what’s to stop someone just buying two bars instead of one or at least resenting that the government is trying to price them out of being able to buy what they want? They’re trying that with cigarettes and alcohol after all and all that’s done is annoyed me.
True book-lovers will never love Oxfam Telegraph.co.uk
Interestingly here my first reaction was to wonder aloud that people actually went to Oxfam shops for books. I can’t say that I frequent charity shops or second-hand bookshops much these days but that’s more for a lack of their being any good ones in my current vicinity. There’s a very small town, or perhaps is actually technically a village, north of London, just on the edge of Zone 6, with only one high street upon which sits one of the wonders of the bookish age. It was one of the finest second hand book shops that I’d ever had the pleasure of entering. They held an eclectic selection of books from guidebooks on the drawing of human anatomy to the rare and often sort after DragonLance comics. I picked up most of Tales of the City there in an old and out of print edition, the aforementioned comics, the anatomy book and one on the evolution of Japanese art styles in that wonderful shop. And I never even noticed if there was a charity shop of any kind on that street because of that. In London proper I’ve picked up books on the architecture of French cathedrals and a very, very old Salvation Army history among others. I’ve also sighed longingly at shelf upon shelf of dusty, esoteric texts that were far, far beyond my price range. In a town north of London in a bizarre sort of market I’ve picked up first edition copies of various novels. In a shamble of a shop in the Midlands I’ve picked up, spine stuck together with masking tape, something by Llewellyn Publishing.
All of the above examples are second hand book shops, spaces dedicated to the sale of second hand books. That’s all they stock, all they do and they’d be my first port of call for a book that I couldn’t find if I was intent of haring after it physically. These days it’s easier to search out something online but if that failed me and I had the time and inclination I’d be scouring the second hand book shops instead. It would never cross my mind to even glance into a charity shop for that sort of thing. Charity shops hold a variety of things after all, they may have books as well but the odds are that if I can’t find what I’m looking for on online catalogues then the general charity shops won’t have it either. Charity shops have always stuck me as useful for general knickknacks, they hold a range of items of course but I’ll always associate them with the sudden, surprising glance into a window that reveals a perfect set of Turkish teaglasses. I associate them with rare ornaments or vintage clothing or the occasional old, mass market paperback. They’re fascinating by themselves but they’re still not those rare and antiquarian book sellers that I’d seek out specifically, at least not to my mind.
