Today's thoughts
Jun. 7th, 2009 02:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chris1. Several of you are going through rough times at the moment, particularly in terms of health developments. A blanket comment like this doesn't come close to cutting it, and I'll try hard to make the time to send you my warm thoughts while they're still topical, but do know I'm thinking of you.
2. Word of the day, or at least the word I've had going through my head since I woke up, is "escutcheon". It turns out that I didn't know what it means; I thought it meant something like "soupçon", or another way of saying "a small amount". Apparently it has a number of different meanings, none of which are even close to that, and some of which are not to be used lightly.
3. I work five minutes' walk (including a large and ever-so-slightly wobbly bridge) away from Stockton's main shopping centre. To give you a flavour, it features a Home Bargains, a Poundworld, a Wilkinson's and at least one or two more similar overstock stores. At work, we're quite keen on Dunkables, which are boxes of offcut, misshaped, broken and otherwise rejected chocolate biscuits. (Cookies!) I liken the fun of opening a box and discovering what's inside to that enjoyed by those of you who collect baseball cards, plus the biscuits are generally off-cuts of something at the classier end of the spectrum; you know, fancy selection box biscuits. The best pull I've had were biscuits that looked like Rocky (the biscuit, not the fictional boxer) but were made from "chocolate orange" chocolate. I didn't know anyone made those.
Similarly, on Friday, I bought a see-through bag of "Luxury Chocolate Misshapes" just because I liked the look of them, and they did indeed turn out to be genuine examples of rejects from some very famous chocolate box or another. (Without the wrappings, obviously.) Trouble is, I can't quite remember the original boxes well enough to tell if they were Quality Street, Roses, All Gold, Milk Tray or something else. (I'm pretty sure it wasn't Black Magic, but...) There needs to be a web site which catalogues these offcut biscuits and chocolates for ease of recognition. Is there, or do I need to start it?
4. On another similar "does this web site exist - and, if not, why not" front, I'd like to use a web site which automatically ran the "What song are you listening to?" application continuously upon several radio channels and keeping a list of the last few songs played by each radio station. Ideally it would also feature links to the songs' lyrics at one of the million and one lyrics web sites out there. This is a web site which possibly even has a business model, unlike most web site ideas, in that at least it could fairly obviously feature affiliate links to buy the songs that you might just have missed.
5. I understand there is great science behind the concept of picking wines which will go well with different courses of a meal. By extension, it surely ought to be possible to use the same logic to combine non-alcoholic drinks and meals. Suppose you have decided that your four drink options for the day are milk, orange juice, Coke and generic off-brand sugar-free lemon-and-lime, but you don't want to have any of them more than once. (There's always water as a possibility too, I guess.) If you knew you were going to have (over the course of a long day) (a) cheese on toast, (b) my wife's particularly brilliant spaghetti bolognaise and (c) vegetable curry with rice, are there some general principles that can be applied to decide which drink should go with which meal?
2. Word of the day, or at least the word I've had going through my head since I woke up, is "escutcheon". It turns out that I didn't know what it means; I thought it meant something like "soupçon", or another way of saying "a small amount". Apparently it has a number of different meanings, none of which are even close to that, and some of which are not to be used lightly.
3. I work five minutes' walk (including a large and ever-so-slightly wobbly bridge) away from Stockton's main shopping centre. To give you a flavour, it features a Home Bargains, a Poundworld, a Wilkinson's and at least one or two more similar overstock stores. At work, we're quite keen on Dunkables, which are boxes of offcut, misshaped, broken and otherwise rejected chocolate biscuits. (Cookies!) I liken the fun of opening a box and discovering what's inside to that enjoyed by those of you who collect baseball cards, plus the biscuits are generally off-cuts of something at the classier end of the spectrum; you know, fancy selection box biscuits. The best pull I've had were biscuits that looked like Rocky (the biscuit, not the fictional boxer) but were made from "chocolate orange" chocolate. I didn't know anyone made those.
Similarly, on Friday, I bought a see-through bag of "Luxury Chocolate Misshapes" just because I liked the look of them, and they did indeed turn out to be genuine examples of rejects from some very famous chocolate box or another. (Without the wrappings, obviously.) Trouble is, I can't quite remember the original boxes well enough to tell if they were Quality Street, Roses, All Gold, Milk Tray or something else. (I'm pretty sure it wasn't Black Magic, but...) There needs to be a web site which catalogues these offcut biscuits and chocolates for ease of recognition. Is there, or do I need to start it?
4. On another similar "does this web site exist - and, if not, why not" front, I'd like to use a web site which automatically ran the "What song are you listening to?" application continuously upon several radio channels and keeping a list of the last few songs played by each radio station. Ideally it would also feature links to the songs' lyrics at one of the million and one lyrics web sites out there. This is a web site which possibly even has a business model, unlike most web site ideas, in that at least it could fairly obviously feature affiliate links to buy the songs that you might just have missed.
5. I understand there is great science behind the concept of picking wines which will go well with different courses of a meal. By extension, it surely ought to be possible to use the same logic to combine non-alcoholic drinks and meals. Suppose you have decided that your four drink options for the day are milk, orange juice, Coke and generic off-brand sugar-free lemon-and-lime, but you don't want to have any of them more than once. (There's always water as a possibility too, I guess.) If you knew you were going to have (over the course of a long day) (a) cheese on toast, (b) my wife's particularly brilliant spaghetti bolognaise and (c) vegetable curry with rice, are there some general principles that can be applied to decide which drink should go with which meal?
(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-07 02:58 pm (UTC)As far as other soft drinks go I am not sure that your idea works so well. In my experience the science of pairing wine with food is based on the style and flavour of the wine, which can be dry or fruity or oaky or creamy, and have many different tastes, all different kinds of fruit and so on. Wine is not just alcoholic grape juice - well, it is but it doesn't taste of it.
The problem I run up against when theorising about pairing a soft drink with something is that the flavour of orange juice or lemon and lime is WYSIWYG. They're nice flavours that do exactly what it says on the tin, but they're one flavour only, and don't compare in the same way the multiple - and often so subtle that I can't spot them - flavours of a good wine.
Thinking about your challenge, however, I would have the OJ or the lemon with cheese on toast, for the opposite reason to the curry - the acidity of the fruit might go well with the more neutral dairy flavours. I think either of those flavours would also be perfectly pleasant with the spag bol but wouldn't complement it. Coke I wouldn't have with anything on that menu, Coke is for American food only.
Of course there are some foods that wine will never go with, including most - some would say all - British foods as we have no wine-making tradition. A good example is fish and chips, which works best with a drier lager, such as an Italian beer, or very well chilled apple juice (Kingsley Amis recommended Guinness, but I've never tried that particular combination).
People are also now producing guides for pairing artisanal, micro-brewed beers with food. However I don't know of any equivalent for non-alcoholic drinks. Maybe there's a market?
(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-07 02:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-07 04:28 pm (UTC)Hey, my spag bol IS American! :D