Tag: food

Shower thought for the morning was: why is cream cheese spread 'Philadelphia' called that? Is it from Philadelphia? (My box isn't, of course: it came from Ireland.)

Alt

Dan, a white man with blue hair and a goatee, wearing a purple t-shirt, stands in a spacious residential kitchen holding a 'Family Pack'-sized tub of 'Original Philadelphia'.

Nope, it turns out that it was originally invented in New York in the 19th century and named for Philadelphia because Philadelphia, PA was at that point famous for its dairy industry. Just another bit of parasitic branding leveraging a borrowed association, like the Quaker Oats guy or the Rolls Razor. Now I'm wondering how many other examples I can find!

Hanging with my team at our meetup in Istanbul, this lunchtime I needed to do some accessibility testing...

(with apologies to anybody who doesn't know that in user interface design, a "kebab menu" is one of those menu icons with a vertical line of three dots: a vertical ellipsis)

Breakfast today will make use of leftovers to produce a bean chilli pizza. This'll work, right?

Alt

Pizza built with bean chilli and mixed grated cheese, ready to go into an oven.

Update: yeah. This works.😋

Alt

Finished pizza, looking delicious.

I have A Plan for today. Step #2 involves a deep-dive into Algolia search indexing, ranking, and priority, to understand how one might optimise for a diverse and complex dataset.

So obviously step #1 involves a big ol' coffee and a sugary breakfast. Here we go...

Alt

A wooden kitchen surface containing a red mug full of freshly-brewed coffee alongside a plate painted with fruits on which sits a heart-shaped doughnut, topped with chocolate and decorated with an iced motif of a sunflower. Beneath the plate, out-of-focus, are the pages of a news periodical.

This evening I used leftover cocktail sausages to make teeny-tiny toads-in-the-hole (my kids say they should be called frogs-in-the-dip).

It worked out pretty well.

Alt

A pyramid of four bite-sized toads-in-the-hole alongside chive mash and carrots, smothered in gravy, on a plate.

Micro-recipe:

1. Bake cocktail sausages (or veggie sausages, pictured) until barely done.
2. Meanwhile, make a batter (per every 6 sausages: use 50ml milk, 50g plain flour, 1 egg, pinch of salt).
3. Remove sausages from oven, then turn up to 220C.
4. Put a teaspoon of a high-temperature oil (e.g. vegetable, sunflower) into each pit of a cake/muffin tin, return to oven until almost at smoke point.
5. Add a sausage or two to each pit and return to the oven for a couple of minutes to come back up to temperature.
6. Add batter to each pit. It ought to sizzle when it hits the oil, if it's hot enough. Return to the oven.
7. Remove when puffed-up and crisp. Serve with gravy and your favourite comfort food accompaniments.

Got the ratio of chipolatas to bacon wrong for your Christmas pigs-in-blankets and now have more cocktail sausages than you know what to do with? No, just me?

Here's my planned solution, anyway - teeny tiny toads-in-the-hole! (Toad-in-the-holes?) Let's see how it works out...

Alt

Cupcake-sized Yorkshire pudding batter cups, each with a cocktail sausage or two inside, being inserted into an oven.

The fifth day of Christmas, and perhaps my last opportunity of the season to justify having trifle... for breakfast.

Alt

Dan, standing on a kitchen, holds a large bowl partially filled with trifle.

Even when you're not remotely ready to think about Christmas yet and yet it keeps getting closer every second.

Even when the house is an absolute shambles and trying to rectify that is one step forward/one step sideways/three steps back/now put your hands on your hips and wait, what was I supposed to be tidying again?

Even when the electricity keeps yo-yoing every few minutes as the country continues to be battered by a storm.

Even when you spent most of the evening in the hospital with your injured child and then most of the night habitually getting up just to reassure yourself he's still breathing (he's fine, by the way!).

Even then, there's still the comfort of a bacon sarnie for breakfast. 😋

Alt

Brioche bun loaded with thick cut bacon rashers, plated, on a wooden surface.

After a morning of optimising a nonprofit's reverse proxy configuration, I feel like I've earned my lunch! Four cheese, mushroom and jalapeño quesapizzas, mmm...

Alt

Gas stovetop.a frying pan contains a tortilla wrap topped with tomato sauce, cheese, mushrooms, and jalapeños. Beside its a plate containing a completed quesapizza: two crispy tortilla wraps sandwiching their contents.

For some reason, the breakfast chef assumed that when I asked for two eggs benedict that I might want them on two separate plates. As if I WEREN'T totally planning to scoff them both myself! 😂

Alt

Two portions of eggs benedict, in front of a window showing a 25th-storey view of Barcelona.

This child is eating sausages with one hand while playing a video game about eating sausages with the other.

Alt

A child slouches in an airport lounge chair. Her right hand is being used to eat a plate of sausages. Her left hand is playing 'Fork N Sausage' on a tablet.

Is this life-imitating-art or the other way around? Who can possibly say?