I've just finished Tomb Raider (2013). It was pretty excellent ( Read more... )

For the past few weeks I've been working on my raspberry sorbet recipe. I think I've now perfected it, but one of the ingredients is cream, which might mean that it's actually an ice cream recipe ( Read more... )

I just created a cocktail I quite liked:

30ml cognac
30ml double cream
15ml Frangelico
15ml white cream de cacao
5ml Kahlua
5ml Chambord
5ml green Chartreuse

Shake all ingredients with ice; strain into a Martini glass.

I think I shall call it a Kiss of Peace.

It is of course no secret that supermarket's own-label products are often the same products as sold elsewhere, but under different labels. Since Sainsbury's aren't in the business of making detergent, obviously 'Sainsbury's' detergent is actually somebody else's detergent. It might be that the manufacturer of Sainsbury's detergent also ( Read more... )

There were two facts mentioned in passing in the Economist a fortnight ago, which struck me as astonishing, one good and one bad.

To start with the good news, in this article, citing this paper, it says:The number of poor in “non-fragile” states has fallen from almost 2 billion in 1990 to around 500m now; they think it will go on declining to ( Read more... )

I understand why people get upset if someone makes a video insulting their religion. What puzzles me is how attacking US embassies is supposed to help. Given the secrecy surrounding the production of the video, it seems unlikely that the US government could have stopped it, even if they didn't have a constitutional protection for free speech. ( Read more... )

We have (since April) drunk wine from the following places:

• France, 46 (of which, Rhone, 11, Loire, 9, Burgundy, 9, Languedoc, 6, Bordeaux, 4)
• Italy, 23
• Spain, 17
• Australia, 14
• Chile, 10

sashagoblin has, perhaps unwisely, lent me a book on Food and CultureI'm quite interested by Mary Douglas' ideas about the semiotics of food in British culture (and more specifically British middle class culture). She proposes that meals take a three-fold shape, and are structured metonymically. If one's frame of reference is mathematical, rather than ( Read more... )

We've just finished tasting the second batch of wine. I now have 112 reviews up on Ocado, although I've actually written notes for 129 bottles since 21st April: some are for wines which are no longer in stock and some are for wines from other sources ( Read more... )

The Romans sometimes stored wine in bottles, using a layer of olive oil floated on top to protect it from the air. However, until the 17th century, the near universal way of storing and transporting wine was in barrels (or amphorae). Once a barrel was opened (tapped), it would need to be drunk fairly swiftly, as there was then no way of ( Read more... )