joeblade

joeblade

Food & drink

  1. Decaffeinated

    9 February, 2010: Feeling in an experimental and somewhat jittery mood, I decided to stop drinking coffee for a short spell, to see what would happen.

  2. Cooking with tongue

    3 October, 2009: An important part of being a card-carrying member of the North London glitterati is the ability to harp on like a tedious idiot about buying the cheaper, more hilarious cuts of meat from the butcher rather than relying on neatly-packaged and sanitised lumps from Sainsbury's. I've been letting the side down in that respect, so here's a story about how I tried to cook some ox tongue the other day.

  3. Borough Market

    22 December, 2008: Recently I visited London's Famous Borough Market for the first time. I've lived in London now for nearly two years and it was only ever a brief Tube journey away, but then I lived in Canterbury for five years and still only visted the Cathedral during my final month, so the jaunt to Borough Market is still pretty rushed by my standards.

  4. In Defence of Chains

    10 June, 2007: I'm going on the defensive. Is a generic English town centre actually as bad as we're led to believe? If I've accidentally shaved an artery then I don't want to be wandering around the quaint side streets looking for an independent chemist.

  5. An open letter to St. John Bread and Wine

    1 April, 2007: There aren't many subjects in the world I feel confident enough to speak on, but I think I can be considered a credible source when I say that it should not take 45 minutes to make a bacon sandwich.

  6. Pizzatarian

    26 November, 2006: For the last 18 months or so, I've done fairly well in avoiding fast food and takeaways, and it's almost entirely down to laziness --- so long as the effort involved in getting fast food delivered to me is marginally greater than simply cooking some pasta, I was safe.

  7. Tea and Chocolate

    8 October, 2006: The transition from Summer to Autumn in the UK is usually a fairly swift one; one week the sun is blazing high in the sky, the next week everyone's wearing three layers in order to dress for both hot and cold temperatures. Then it rains for the next three months.

  8. The Perfect Steak

    9 July, 2006: I have recently spent some time refin­ing my steak cook­ing tech­nique, and am now doc­u­ment­ing it here for future gen­er­a­tions and myself if I hap­pen to for­get. Please note that this is a way of cook­ing my per­fect steak — your per­fect steak will undoubt­edly be com­pletely dif­fer­ent (and, obvi­ously, com­pletely wrong).

  9. Unhappy Food

    26 March, 2006: So I’ve writ­ten about junk food and I’ve writ­ten about health food, but it’s time now to explore a dif­fer­ent cat­e­gory that I’ve only lately realised exists; unhappy food, i.e., food that, when eaten, causes the eater to be unhappy.

  10. Café Culture

    12 March, 2006: When spending a significant amount of time in a town or city, there are two things I like to be sure of; one is where I can get a decent cup of coffee in nice surroundings.

  11. Five Times a Day

    26 February, 2006: Nutritionists, politicians and the entire food industry all agree that we should all be eating a minimum of five portions of fruit and vegetables every day in order to prevent death by happiness.

  12. Taste the Difference

    9 October, 2005: If you live in Oxford then you probably shop at Tesco. This is not a social comment, it's just that with a Tesco Metro serving the whole of East Oxford and a large out-of-town Tesco serving the rest, you're not left with much choice in the matter.

  13. English Coffee

    11 August, 2005: So I was out and about, a styl­ish man-about-town, and I popped in to Pret a Manger for a quick espresso. Actu­ally, that’s a bit redun­dant, isn’t it? Surely all espres­sos are quick espres­sos. Hmm.

  14. Willpower

    21 April, 2005: I can be fairly strong-willed at times. Though my increas­ing sup­ply of gad­gets might sug­gest oth­er­wise, that’s just because it’s what you can see. If you could see all the crap I don’t buy, well, you’d be dead impressed.

  15. The Big Bang

    8 February, 2005: Although Oxford has pubs and shops and restau­rants in abun­dance, like most Eng­lish towns it’s over­whelmed by chains. Though a cer­tain amount of snob­bery has kept the likes of Wool­worths and Wilkin­sons away from the cen­tre and safely tucked away in the sur­round­ing smaller towns, the cen­tral retail areas still lean dan­ger­ously close to generic.