jonny goes to england

What about some lovely goose fat on your potatoes? Afterwards you can use it to grease up that squeaky door.

Yesterday, I was having a quick dinner at Ping Pong Dim Sum at the south bank branch. Obviously, they serve a big variety of dim sums — that is steamed little pockets filled with different Chinese ingredients. There are buns, puff pastry, dumplings and lotus leaves as wrappers. Buns are basically normal pastry, puff pastry are very soft blown up things (man I really lack the words to describe that!), and dumplings resemble transparent fish skins in looks and taste (just more sticky and less delicious I guess!). The different wrappers can then either be steamed, fried or baked, and get served in typical bamboo boxes (see picture). You order about 3-5 different dim sums for a good meal, each of them around £3.50. The variety in food you eat makes the whole meal enjoyable and quite different to a usual dinner. Modern interior and quick service, certainly good for quick dinners.

While I’m certainly not a fan of US food I found these two spirit and wine jelly at breakfast quite funny. One has tequila the other champagne and I think you just spread it like jam on a bread .. tasted weird but not bad!

Onion Jam. Two words of horror and I had it for lunch. You buy a sandwich with “Ham & Cheese”, but what they don’t tell you is that it contains onion jam! Think of onion jam as sugary confiture with lots of onions cut into ..

In other news, I’m flying to Arizona over the weekend. However, I ended up — in an evil twist — to give the talk at the workshop on Sunday! Title of the talk is Lagrange Multipliers and Maximum Information Leakage in Different Observational Models. Wish me luck.

Wikipedia refers to a study from the British Cheese Board which states the following:

A 2005 study carried out by the British Cheese Board claimed that when it came to dream types, Stilton cheese seemed to cause odd dreams, with 75% of men and 85% of women experiencing bizarre and vivid dreams after eating a 20 gram serving of the cheese half an hour before going to sleep.

So I thought I’m going to test this out and I bought a pack of blue stilton. One of my housemates decided to join me in the experiment.

First impression of this cheese was that it’s a rip-off from Gorgonzola. Which is most probably the case given that Gorgonzola’s history is few thousand years old and Stilton only 200. It’s drier than Gorgonzola, a bit milder and more salty. I had my first portion last Sunday, 30g before sleep.

The next morning, I didn’t notice any weird dreams .. however I realised how deep my sleep was. I slept like a rock which is usually not the case. That week I took Stilton twice again, last time on Wednesday night. I went to bed at 12:30 and set my alarm to 08:10. Unfortunately, I woke up after 09:30 with the alarm turned off! Now, everybody who knows me better knows that this happens extremely rarely … for me that’s a sign that Stilton is indeed altering sleep patterns. My housemate who also took blue stilton reports similar deep sleep experiences

So … go to your grocery store, get blue stilton and report back

Kuerzlich auf Reuters: Swiss government says Euro 2008 fans can have their chips

BERNE, Switzerland (Reuters) - The Swiss government has agreed to ease restrictions on the importation of potatoes following fears that Euro 2008 football fans could face a shortage of French fries next month.

A spokesman for the country’s department of agriculture told national radio on Wednesday that the government would allow an additional 5,000 tonnes of potatoes to be brought in.

Im Artikel lernt man auch, dass Cervelats mit Brazillianischen Kuhdaermen umhuellt werden..

I found this in our student union shop. These alien-sticks are supposed to be sausages but alone seeing the texture of it makes me feel funny. Check it out:

I ran across this ad on Sainsburys.com (basically the Coop/Migros/Denner of UK). They are promoting meal ideas .. and apparently they suggest you a bowl of dubious meat balls with over cooked noodels and peas (yes peas..) for your family. “As seen on TV” .. damn it they showed that dog food even on TV?!

This ad is disturbing in many ways..

The last two days our own little conference was running, solely for phd students. There were about 25 talks, few poster presentations and two panel talks mostly about managing your phd. Lunch, coffee and dinner was offered and paid as well! All in all it was really well organised.

For dinner we went to Thai Vista, a nice restaurant with (apparently) authentic thai food. Afterwards, we went to brick lane. During the night, the bar Cafe 1001 beside our venue (Clemens, Jani that’s where we went! :&gt was raided by police. Both road sides were blocked off and everybody who left the area was searched. I tried to get strip-searched but it didn’t happen!

Ok. Here goes another food story. I bought this cheese plate with a “continental selection” of cheese. I don’t remember exactly but I don’t think I managed to eat any of them completely. The Brie was especially ridiculous. It was packed in an extremely tight, air-proof, welded plastic foil. I don’t know the right name for such a packaging, but I’m sure in German it would have a streng name such as “Schmelzplastikschutzatmosphäre”.

Now you know Brie is a soft cheese — the combination of a soft cheese and super tight packaging is not ideal. It’s hard to separate cheese from plastic and you end up with cheese everywhere on the table and all the plastic bits in your mouth.

Speaking of which, I found this great cheese shop in Covent Garden. It’s called Neils Yard Diary and sells all sort of french goat cheese and other nice stuff.