Auntie May's recipe corner

"Brussels bad, avacado good."

What have the migrants ever done for us?

More on the lasting culinary damage caused by the scourge of unchecked migration™:

The doner kebab is believed to have been invented by Kadir Nurman, a Turkish immigrant living in Germany, in 1972. Mr Nurman, who died in 2013, said he got the idea after noticing that German workers had little time to sit down for lunch.

Several other Turkish immigrants in Germany have disputed this, claiming they were selling versions of the doner earlier than Mr Nurman.

However, the national original of the dish is not in doubt. “The doner is German,” Tarkan Tasumruk, chairman of the Association of Turkish Doner Producers in Europe, told the berlin.de website...

...while fish and chips has become known as a traditional British dish, many people claim it was actually introduced to the UK by Jewish immigrants from other European countries.

Fried fish was brought to Britain by Jewish refugees from Portugal and Spain, and the first combined fish and chip shop is said to have been opened by Joseph Malin, a Jewish immigrant in the East End, in the 1860s.

And don't even get me started on chicken tikka masala.*

Clearly it's not enough to just create a hostile environment for people coming here from abroad. If we really want to make everybody hate us, and truly embrace a future of miserable, self-inflicted isolation, we should also send back  all the foreign muck they forced us to eat and return to an honest British diet of boiled turnips.

Nobody ever said it would be easy,** but I'm sure that whatever the hell it was the UK thought it was voting for will be worth the pain.





*Does it really belong here, or is it just another foreign interloper which should be sent back home as soon as the UK has taken back control of its glorious borders?

**Terms and conditions apply. Contents may differ from those illustrated. We reserve the right to change, amend, modify, suspend, continue or terminate all or any part of the plan at any time without notice. We will not be responsible for any loss or damage.

Sweet as a nut

"Poundland Nutters: Mental health row over 'offensive' sweets"

Offensive Poundland nutters? Never mind mental health rows, Ukip should sue them for copyright infringement. 

We'll only rip you off for your own good

The food industry "will be asked to shrink thousands of products or find other ways to cut their calorie content as part of a Government crackdown on junk foods." Apparently the industry is totally cool with this request. Can you guess why?

The Food and Drink Federation (FDF), which represents manufacturers, welcomed the plans.

A spokesman said: “We are pleased that the Government has confirmed the broadening of its focus beyond just sugar - and towards calories - as it seeks to tackle obesity. FDF has long advocated this ‘whole diet’ approach.

“Singling out the role of individual ingredients and food groups does not help consumers to make good choices about their diet, lifestyle or general health.”

Somehow it doesn't surprise me that the industry welcomes the opportunity to sell us smaller portions for the same price, while claiming that they're only doing it for our own good and insisting that "it's not our fault, the government made us do it."

The politics of Daim bars and Everton mints

Before the election there was some talk of Theresa May having a "Nixon in China" moment, using her political credibility (remember that?) to float a series of interventionist policies.* According to conventional wisdom, a left-of-centre politician would never have got away with such deviation from market orthodoxy, due to the left's perceived economic credibility deficit.

What a difference a month makes.

Now Theresa May looks like the precise opposite of Nixon in China.

Nixon was supposedly able to make a conciliatory approach to Red China because of his proven credentials as a "tough" Cold War hawk. A Democratic president who tried the same thing would have been vilified as a Commie-loving appeaser.

Now look at May's position. She took charge of a party with the Brexit hawks ascendant. From their point of view, she had zero Brexit credentials ("Remaining inside the European Union does make us more secure, it does make us more prosperous and it does make us more influential beyond our shores" - Theresa May, April 25, 2016). As a suspected Brussels-loving appeaser, she desperately needed to appear tough on Europe and tough on the causes of Europe. Hence the mad rush to "get on with it", trigger Article 50 and out-Brexit the Brexiteers.

Nixon was perceived as being strong enough to seek cooperation, rather than conflict, with the designated enemy.

May was seen as weak on Europe, so was forced into acts of self-defeating belligerence, in order to prove how tough she really was.

In the language of the sweet shop, Nixon was a Daim bar, with soft chocolate on the outside and hard toffee within. May was more like one of those Everton mints with a hard, brittle shell concealing a soft centre.

The other salient feature of the Everton mint is that it looks very much like a humbug...


*Update - apparently, she's trying for another Nixon/China moment right now, only without the credibility...

Twee for two

Newport Pagnell resident shocks friends with this one weirdly specific trick:

"Vintage Teapot" Cake Decoration Workshop
17th June - 10am - 4.30pm
This 1 day workshop will enable you to create a vintage teapot cake and decorate a sugar teacup.
You will learn how to:

• Sculpt cake to achieve a 3 D effect
• Cover and smooth fondant
• Design your colour scheme
• Use molds
• Hand paint sugar fondant

Just £89 per person
Places are limited to just 8 per class

Spotted on a town noticeboard, in a town which currently supports a population of about 15,000 people and two cake decorating shops.

Not that I've got anything against novelty cakes, as such, but context is everything. Mastering the skill needed to come up with this sort of whimsical creation would be perfectly fine if you did it only once, for a very special event, or to impress the Great British Bake Off judges, but paying to reproduce it in a ninety-quid-a-pop cake-decoration-by-numbers workshop? Really? Is it just me, or is that a bit bonkers?

2 eggs, 1 cup

Why isn't the prime minister intervening over this year's real Easter egg scandal?

Eggs-hibit A:

On your left, an actual hen's egg. On your right, a 2017 Cadbury's Creme Egg. In the same cup. The prosecution rests its case.

Admittedly, that's a large hen's egg, the only sort I had in the kitchen this morning, but I can confirm that even a small real egg doesn't disappear into this particular cup with only the very top peeking out like the crown of Kilroy's bald head.

Not that I should be that concerned by the alarming shrinkage of Cadburys' Creme Eggs, as I've never been that keen on the sickly-sweet gloop-filled confections anyway, but I'm not going to let a minor detail like that stop me from having a moan about it. As somebody once said, "That was inedible muck. And there wasn't enough of it."

Drone delivery would be cheaper...

Mostly your standard Indian takeaway choices, apart from the penultimate bread.

"Helicopter naan" ??? Me neither. 

Against Marmite fundamentalism

As for those on the fence about the taste? Well, there’s not really a fence. “I have, to date,” says Watkins, “only met one person who has claimed to be ambivalent about the taste of Marmite, and I don’t believe them.”

I've never knowingly met this Watkins, so I can probably confirm that there are at least 100% more people with no strong feelings about Marmite than he imagines, and that at least 50% of the total known population of self-declared Marmite agnostics isn't lying.

I suspect that I'm only one of many people who think the stuff's OK occasionally, but nothing to get that excited about. I further suspect that the claimed extent this binary love/hate thing is advertising hype but, frankly, I'm too indifferent to such claims to spend any time verifying my suspicions.

None of us have unlimited time and attention, so if you're going to get worked up about something, get worked up about something that really matters. Like incorrect apostrophe placement, for example.

The new normal

From​ 2016's seemingly inexhaustible back catalogue of weirdness, here's one local news story that I inexplicably missed at the time:

A young woman has told how she had food shoved into her mouth by a mystery ‘feeder’ on the train home to Milton Keynes.

The stranger grabbed Victoria Adam’s scarf and started pushing his takeaway meal into her mouth.

The strange passenger then upset other people on the London Midlands train from Euston, causing a brawl to break out.

Parliamentary research assistant Victoria, 22, said the man sat down next to her after boarding the train just before 6pm on Saturday.

“I decided to put my headphones on as he was getting a bit annoying.

“He was getting annoyed that I didn’t want to interact so I decided to pretend to go to sleep.

“A few minutes later he started shoving food in my mouth and then began pulling at my scarf.”

Passengers huddled together in the next carriage after a brawl broke out with Victoria’s ‘feeder’. 

Milton Keynes Citizen, October 2016

Given the way 2016's creeptastic political celebrities have been busy recalibrating normal standards of public behaviour to way below what what was previously considered rock bottom, I wouldn't be surprised if shoving your carton of fries into an unwilling stranger's gob has become everybody's default way of saying "Hi" by October 2017.

God help us.

Farewell, Toblerone

I don't usually get the January blues, but here's a melancholy sight:

Yes, the last of the giant Christmas Toblerone is almost gone. Even worse, if you pop into the local Co-Op, in search of another fix, you'll find they've already cleared the shelves of chocolatey prisms to make way for Easter eggs and chocolate bunnies.

When I were a lad, the Terry's Chocolate Orange was the special confectionery treat of the season and the Toblerone was just a another all-year-round chocolate bar. But at some point, while I wasn't paying attention, Toblerones disappeared from retailers' shelves, except during the run-up to Christmas, when they reappeared in super-sized form.

There's presumably some cunning marketing plan behind the limited availability. If so, it's working - I never used to be that fussed about Toblerones, but I've never craved a specific brand of chocolate bar quite as much as I do right now. And there was me, feeling all smug about not being just another brainwashed consumer. 

Who's the sugar daddy?

This article in the Telegraph by one Alex Deane, from a pressure group that calls itself People Against Sugar Tax, is ... erm ... interesting:

Jamie Oliver is a patronising bully and he can stick his sugar tax

A sugar tax on drinks and sweets would only hurt poor people. Politicians should ignore celebrities who want a nanny-state

...Oliver grandly told the Health Select Committee that he had had “robust” discussions with the Prime Minister about his proposed introduction of a 20 per cent tax on sugar-sweetened drinks. Which, we can confidently say, would be the beginning of sugar taxes, not the end of it – because the state, he thinks, should “frankly, act like a parent” when it comes to such matters.

This tells us all we need to know. Paternalism is a rather literal word for it. They know what’s best – not just for them, but for us. Not only do they know it; they want to force us all to share their choices, regardless of our own views.

It’s an unpleasant campaign, because it is hugely patronising. We all know that sugar isn’t good for us. From time to time, we choose to have it anyway. We eat sugary things because they taste good.

It’s an unpleasant campaign, because – whilse [sic] they really don’t like this point – those preaching over sugar are too rich to have to care about the price of food. The effect of sugar taxes would be to raise the price of food for those least able to afford it.

"If this bullying nonsense made it to the statute books, what have a stealth tax on those least able to afford it"

There's crumb of plausibility in Deane's extravagant Bake Off show-stopper-style confection of outrage. The look and feel of some prosperous celebrity chef lecturing the poor on how to make their pittance stretch further is patronising and paternalist, just like the man said. Even when the chef in question is less irritating than Jamie Oliver. 

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, for example, comes across as a thoroughly nice chap, but I still find it hard to stomach the spectacle of this well-heeled old Etonian advising the poor on how to eke out their slender food budget a little further. It's all too Victorian, too Lady Bountiful dishing out improving platitudes and nourishing broth to the lower orders.

Having said that, Jamie might get on my nerves with his mockney mucker patter, but AFAIK, he's no "bully." Bullies punch down, but Jamie offers training to young people from disadvantaged backgrounds who want careers in the restaurant business at his Westland Place restaurant and he took on the catering giants whose profits rested on feeding cut-price Turkey Twizzlers and similar muck to school kids. He might not be my cup of tea, but credit where it's due.

But what about his accuser, Alex Deane? Who's he?

The Independent has established that Alex Deane, a former chief-of-staff to David Cameron, played a key role in attempts to use the freedom of information law against one public organisation involved in promoting awareness against the health dangers of roll-up tobacco. Mr Deane is a director of Bell Pottinger which earlier this year requested documents from a health-awareness organisation funded by the NHS, the Bristol-based Smoke Free South West, following a campaign it ran against roll-up tobacco, which is popular in that part of the country.

I'm not sure that a Big Tobacco shill who's been using lawfare to silence critics is in any position to call Jamie Oliver is a bully, or to act all outraged over an "unpleasant campaign". Or that People Against Sugar Tax is definitely the grass roots campaign set up by ordinary people that it pretends to be.

Cakes that ought to sell like hot cakes

A brief pause to stop and celebrate one of the good things in life. Newport Pagnell's high street hasn't been in the most robust health over the last few years; familiar names closing down, an excess of charity shops (there's nothing wrong with charity shops in themselves, but they're an indicator species of a degraded retail ecosystem) and all that's before the Tesco supermarket that's colonising the old Aston Martin site has opened and sucked its portion of trade out of the high street.

There is at least one superb shop that thoroughly deserves to buck the trend, though. PicNic's, at 63 High Street is an establishment of which I'm not entirely sure we're worthy. A fine selection of delicious home-made cakes, superb sausage rolls (with mustard seeds in the sausage meat) an extensive range of sandwiches and soups and the occasional, generally successful, culinary experiment (rye bread pizza with sun-dried tomatoes was a bit out there, but it worked) and all very reasonably priced.

For the record, no money, food or other consideration has changed hands in connection with this blog post - this is not an infomercial. I just think it's a cracking local business and, speaking as a man who likes his food, I wish it well.

It was the wurst of times...

Otto von Bismarck probably didn't say 'Laws are like sausages - it is better not to see them being made.' He certainly didn't say 'Zeppelins are like sausages - it is better not to see them being made', which isn't surprising, given that Otto died in 1898, almost two years before the maiden flight of Ferdinand von Zeppelin's first airship.

Surprisingly, wurst production does have more in common with Zeppelin manufacture than the shape of the finished product. Specifically, as this great piece from Edible Geography points out, the gas bags containing the hydrogen that gave the airships lift were made from cow's intestines, just like sausage skins. In World War One, producing one of Count Zeppelin's now-weaponised flying sausages used up as many cow's guts as thirty million or so regular sausages, so sausage production was banned in Germany and in all German-occupied territories.

'Zeppelins versus sausages' - like 'guns versus butter', only not quite so catchy.

___________________________

Update - not quite such an obscure factoid as I'd assumed - I've just caught up with Channel 4's TV documentary Attack of the Zeppelins on 4oD, which also had the straight dope on the Zeppelins-versus-sausages model. As with most modern documentaries it was a bit CGI-heavy but, to be fair, it cut to the story quite soon and kept the inevitable 'here's what we're about to show you' in-programme trailer to a minimum. The documentary's still available on line for a short time, (if your device can use Adobe Flash Player - I'm not sure if regional access is limited) on 4oD.

Modern life is rubbish

Here's some vintage advertising, spotted in a side street off Church Street, Wolverton:

We want the daintiest breads available to humanity, we want them here, and we want them now!

My kingdom for a horse! Mmmm ... tasty!

TV chef Clarissa Dickson Wright thinks that the recent outcry over horseflesh in supermarket burgers has less to do with the public feeling cheated out of their advertised ration of mechanically-recovered cow parts than it does with our ancient cultural taboo against eating poor Neddy.

I used to think that the our national aversion to hippophagy might have had something to do with the Normans. After all, William the Bastard's spawn and their cronies in the Norman nobility appropriated huge tracts of England as "royal forests", their own private hunting grounds, and felt so strongly about keeping the plebs out that penalties for poaching included the blinding or castration. If these were the sanctions for filching the odd bit of game, imagine the strop our horse-loving overlords would have got into if hungry Anglo Saxons had dared to butcher one of their beloved destriers or hunting steeds for the pot.

Then I googled it, and found that most authorities seem to think that the taboo had more to do with religious, rather than aristocratic, disapproval. Specifically, Pope Gregory III was apparently keen to stamp out pagan horse-eating rituals among the Germans.

According to Clarissa Dickson Wright, though, the taboo started with an ecclesiastical ban, but not a papal one:

I do think I know why we’re alone in Europe by not eating horse, though. It’s all down to King Alfred. When he was trying to build up his cavalry squadron, he brought in horses from Spain, which were stockier than our own. But the English, much to his annoyance, kept eating them – in those days, horse meat was eaten in large quantities. So he commanded the Archbishop of Canterbury to anathematise the eating of horse. Essentially, if you ate it, you were going to hell. 

So there you have it - a specifically English (Wessex-ish?) ban, enacted by the Primate of All England, at the behest of the Monarch least likely to win Celebrity Great British Bake Off. This raises two possibilities; either:

 a) CDW is citing some apocryphal tale, like the one about King Alfred burning the cakes, or

 b) A lot of the things I thought I knew about the Dark Ages are wrong.

As every well-informed schoolchild knows, in 1066 the Normans had cavalry, but the English fought on foot and William triumphed at Hastings after the English shield-wall broke. Nothing there about King Harold fielding cavalry of any sort. If King Alfred had really introduced a squadron of mounted warriors help see off the Vikings, the idea must have failed to catch on, given the notable lack of cavalry in England a couple of centuries later.

And where did he obtain his bloodstock? In Alfred's time, the larger part of the Iberian peninsula consisted of the Islamic Emirate of Córdoba. I'm guessing that a Christian monarch didn't get Arabian steeds from a Muslim realm engaged in sporadic border warfare with Christendom, as represented by the fracturing Carolingian Empire and the Kingdom of Asturias. Christian Asturias, however, did have mounted warriors of its own by Alfred's time:

At the start of the 9th century Visigothic armies were mostly composed of infantry. They had not yet adopted the Moorish jinete style of fighting. Their cavalry was a small cadre of knights. After the reconquest had moved into the plains south of the Douro River they would begin to have town militias, mostly spearmen and archers, but also including mounted sections of caballeros villanos. It was the caballeros villanos who fought in the Jinete style of the Moors. Asturias continued to have a cadre of armored knights.

If being at war with Viking raiders was enough to cement some sort of alliance with Alfred, the Kingdom of Asturias might have ticked that particular box:

By the mid 9th century the Viking attacked on the coastal Kingdom of Asturias in northwest of Spain. During the reign of Alfonso III Vikings were stifling the already weak threads of sea communications that tied Galicia to the rest of Europe. Raiding continued for the next two centuries. 

CDW's tale's sounding improbable, but possible, so far. But what about the ecclesiastical aspect?

There were two Archbishops of Canterbury during Alfred's reign, Æthelred and Plegmund. According to CDW's own A History of English Food it was Æthelred who came up with the horesemeat ban. But I've not been able to find any other source for her story of an Archbishop ordering the gentis Anglorum to abstain from their unchristian taste for  horsemeat, or any reference to Alfred's army including cavalry.

It's an intriguing story, but from what I've seen so far, I'd trust TV historian Michael Wood to do the history of the Dark Ages and TV chef Clariss Dickson Wright to tell me how to make a rabbit pie, but not vice versa.

Deadly diseases - gotta catch 'em all

Modern parents live in a constant state of asymmetric warfare with the well-resourced, resourceful people who make money from punting tat to kids. We missed the height of the Pokémon ("gotta catch 'em all") craze, but are now fighting a losing battle with Michael Acton Smith, the evil genius who spawned Moshi Monsters.

On line-time spent in the world of Moshi Monsters isn't currently our problem - we've (accidentally, but conveniently) forgotten the password we created when we created The Boy's account in a moment of weakness. It's the real-world incarnation of the characters as collectible/collectable plastic figurines that we're struggling with. According to the definitive publication of record (Moshi Monsters - The Official Collectable Figures Guide, bought with £6.50 worth of Christmas money, but treasured by its owner far above rubies), there are 'over 950 characters!' Nine hundred and bloody fifty.

Having previously experienced the pester power potential unleashed when the owners of the Thomas the Tank Engine franchise decided to multiply the number of branded characters to include a host of additional trains and ancillary vehicles which made only the briefest of appearances in the stories, but immediately became must-have items for every avid junior Thomas fan, we are not amused. That particular fad has long since run its course, but we're still trying to dispose of engine-shedloads of obscure and now unwanted rolling stock on Ebay.

Marketeers, busy moulding the next generation of consumers - don't you just love 'em? Still, at least all Michael Acton Smith has discovered is a way of indirectly parting parents from relatively small increments of disposable income. If he was in the junk food biz, he'd be adding the injuries of premature mortality and avoidable morbidity to the insult of pester power. If ... no, when Moshi Monster-branded fizzy drinks, sugar laden-cereals and salt, saturated fat and poly phosphate-rich mechanically-recovered meat products appear in the supermarkets, I hope Acton Smith loses some sleep over these abominations.

Mind you, if you think any of this is new, or worse than what used to happen, take a look at this collectible item, and think again:

This is what my dad was collecting when he wasn't much older than my son is now. It's Denis Compton from his Player's Cigarettes 1938 collection of trading cards depicting famous cricketers of the day (I still have the complete collection, lovingly stuck into their album - he did catch 'em all). It wasn't just cricketers. Courtesy of Imperial Tobacco (owners of Player's Cigarettes), he also collected and swapped cards depicting 'Hints on Association Football', 'Cycling 1839-1939', speedway riders and railway engines (already popular before the Reverend Awdry unleashed the first of a host of anthropomorphic engines on the world), along with various other themed collections issued by the other big tobacco companies.

Memories of a more innocent, wholesome time when the manufacturers of  'the deadliest artefact in the history of human civilisation' a product that 'killed about 100 million people in the 20th Century' issued trading cards to small children to promote their brands. Hard to believe in an age when cigarette packets are plastered with graphic health warning images and hidden from the impressionable sight of children.

How many people died as an indirect result of learning to "like" cigarette brands as small children? This spring, all being well, I'll be fifty. Dad died of a heart attack before reaching his half century. Whether this was wholly or partly due to growing up in a society where heavily-marketed tobacco products were familiar childhood friends, I'll never know. He was a fairly moderate smoker, fond of a pipe, or occasionally one of those rank little Hamlet cigars (presumably, like Bill Clinton, he didn't inhale - and no bloody wonder, they smelled vile) but he'd more or less given up tobacco in ciggie form before he died, so the jury's out in his case.

By the time I was growing up, I think they must have stopped directly tempting kids with tobacco-related collectibles - at least I don't remember cigarette cards as such. There were still trading cards, of course, but as I recall, they were mostly associated with less questionable products like Brooke Bond or Ty-Phoo tea. Kids hadn't completely kicked the cigarette card habit, though. Although I don't remember actual cigarette cards, I do remember sweet shops still stocking "sweet cigarettes" -sugary white cylinders with a red tip, packaged up like a a pack of real ciggies and generally featuring cigarette card-style trading cards. I also remember coming across chocolate versions, made from the sort of low-grade, tasteless, gritty chocolate generally used for cheap chocolate Christmas novelties.

I didn't collect many cards from sweet cigarette packets - the few surviving collections of aeroplane, dinosaur and space travel trading cards I still have, were issued by tea companies. I do remember collecting a few of these bizarre early '70s "Krazy Kreatures From Outer Space" cards, issued by the Primrose Confectionery Company of Slough (I'm pretty sure they were issued with sweet cigarettes, which Primrose did manufacture, although my old memories aren't 100% reliable and there's an outside chance that they actually came with bubble gum packs):

I never caught 'em all, possibly due to what I thought was subtle parental disapproval (of the subject matter rather than the fact that they came with packets of unwholesome things like sweet cigarettes and/or bubblegum). As an aspirational lower-middle class family there always seemed to be an unspoken pressure steering me in the direction of solid, educational Ladybird / Blue Peter / Look and Learn-style material, as opposed to frivolous stuff like The Beano, Dandy and psychedelic pictures of space monsters painted, no doubt, by drug-crazed hippies. As a thoroughly square kid with swotty aspirations, I capitulated to this perceived pressure without resistance, (although not without a guilty yearning for the wackier world(s) of Krazy Kreatures From Outer Space). If you want to indulge this particular guilty pleasure, there are higher-res reproductions of the Krazy Kreatures on the Monster Brains blog (some of them are very strange) and a reproduction of one the "Astronaut's Guides" from the back of the cards on this Gerry Anderson fan site.

I don't know when sweet cigarettes became less common, but judging from the Space 1999-branded packets, they must have been going up to the end of the 1970s, when Dad's heart finally gave out, possibly due to thirty-odd years of ingesting low levels of tobacco products.

According to Mr Wikipedia, sweet cigarettes have been around since the early 1900s. For all I know, they may have had as little to do with the tobacco industry as liquorice bootlaces have to do with the makers of real shoelaces, but given Big Tobacco's relentless pursuit of every marketing opportunity on earth, I suspect some collusion somewhere down the line. Whether or not they were part of Big Tobacco's conspiracy to recruit new smokers, it's highly likely that they were a bad thing. I say 'were' - they apparently still exist, albeit marketed under the disingenuously innocent-sounding name of "candy sticks".

For whatever reason, sweet ciggies weren't my gateway drug to the real thing and their only legacy to date has been rather too many fillings (I didn't even particularly like them, but having bought the damn things for the trading cards, you had to eat them, obviously). Mind you, maybe my fillings have less to do with sweet consumption than the perverse incentives that used to be given to NHS dentists, whose remuneration used to be directly related to the number of treatments they gave. The temptation to do a bit of not-entirely-necessary drilling to top up the holiday fund must have been huge.

There's no big message to take away from all of this except, perhaps, that marketing is powerful stuff and it will beat up public heath and steal its lunch money, given half a chance. You don't have to be a historian familar with the 1860 Food Adulteration Act to see the harm done by laissez-faire - it's there in living memory. Also, any politician who pops up and bleats about the virtues of "self-regulation" for Big Tobacco, or the the processed food and drinks industry is clearly the lobbyists' bitch, rather than the citizens' friend.

And finally, maybe Moshi Monsters aren't that bad, after all (at least until they get drafted to push junk food to kids). Especially this one:

A child's toy in the form of a masonic/Illuminati/dollar bill-style pyramid, complete with all-seeing eye? And it glows in the dark! Never mind The Boy, that's so cool that I want one. If anybody's wondering what to get me for my 50th birthday, I'll happily settle for a Moshi Monsters Series 1 Halloween Glow In The Dark - Cleo Ultra Rare Orange Moshling Figure. A happy birthday and a novus ordo seclorum to me!

Montezuma's breakfast

In our house, when I were a lad, we sometimes used to eat something we called a "Mexican eye" . Take one slice of a sliced loaf, cut a circular hole in the middle, part-fry it, break an egg into the middle, then finish frying, until you end up with a piece of fried bread with a fried egg in the middle. A plate of Mexican eye was traditionally accompanied by my dad cracking some gorily unamusing ocular-themed joke on the lines of 'How do you make a Venetian blind? Poke his eyes out!'

Here's one I made earlier:

It's not an entirely faithful recreation of this cholesterol-laden childhood treat - for the authentic 1960s/1970s vibe, use white bread, rather than the seeded granary thingy we had in the bread bin and fry in something suitably retro like Spry Crisp n' Dry or Trex.

I've tried to get all nostalgic with people over this snack, but nobody I've ever met outside my immediate family has a clue what I'm talking about. When I explain what I mean by "Mexican eye", they tell me it's just a variation on "eggy bread", a dish a lot of other people seem to have grown up with, but which we never cooked in our house.

Mr Google's been no help on my nostalgia quest - when I type in "Mexican eye" I get information about things like Cuete a la Mexicana, a Mexican-style roast made with eye beef, (AKA tenderloin). Alternatively, up pops something extremely NSFW (Urban Dictionary presents some rather eye-opening material if you type in the phrase "Mexican eye" - I won't link directly, but smut buffs now know where to go).

So, it looks as if me and my family are more or less on our own on this one. Is there a special word for unshared nostalgia? There should be.

I love the smell of wet cherries in the morning

If you came across the intriguing phrase 'they are paying $600 a day for the helicopter to blow dry their cherries' you'd just have to read on, wouldn't you? Full story here.

Prophetic

You Know What Those Cadbury Chocolates Need? A Little More Cheese

It seems that the Brits are a tad pipped over Kraft Food’s planned acquisition of Cadbury, the iconic British candy company. They worry that Kraft, the maker of Velveeta processed cheese and Oscar Mayer hot dogs, will drag down Cadbury’s oh-so premium reputation.

Today, Kraft’s CEO Irene Rosenfeld sought to calm these fears, saying, “We have great respect for Cadbury’s brands, heritage and people.” Rosenfeld also used the opportunity to announce a new line of products that would adapt the Cadbury brands to American tastes and also promote synergies between the two company’s product lines. The brand extension includes three new flavors of Cadbury Creme Eggs:

• Creme Cheez: a chocolate egg filled with Cheez Whiz

• Steak Creme: a chocolate egg filled with A1 Steak Sauce and wrapped in bacon

• Miracle Creme: a chocolate egg filled with a mixture of Miracle Whip and Grey Poupon

Happy Valley News Hour January 21 2010

Well, I haven't seen any creme eggs with misspelled ersatz cheese filling on pre-Easter sale this year but, after Kraft's re-engineering and right-sizing of Cadbury's human capital, the prophecy has come to pass. Lo, the brands have been extended and, as the prophets foretold, even so hath the synergies been promoted:

Philadelphia with Cadbury

...a blend of cool, creamy, Light Philadelphia with delicious Cadbury milk chocolate. It’s a fabulous snacking sensation. Sounds wrong, but at 86 calories per serving, it’s oh so right! 

2011 advertising copy from the Kraft food conglomerate.

To be fair, your standard creme egg was the most disgusting Cadbury product ever, so "spoiling" the chocolate-coated blob of sickly-sweet gloop with procesed cheese would have been no great crime in my book.