La Beet

The first many times I heard this, I quietly wondered to myself, What do they mean? Earl Grey or Darjeeling? Slowly it dawned on me that tea (look it up, it’s a hot drink FFS) in this country often (but not always!) means the evening meal. But no, no, not as in dinner. Dinner is [...]

I read about a website and a book called Stuff White People Like in the Sunday Times. It both fascinated and irritated me and I couldn’t get it out of my head. I believe that I have a fairly good eye for things that’ll trend, except in the world of fashion. When looking through this [...]

India Knight’s column in today’s Sunday Times is about fat people. I commented positively on it on Twitter and got some response that amply shows how tender a spot overweight is. India’s point is that overweight is something that can actually be reversed. She attacks the new “fat lobby” for wanting to completely disclaim any [...]

Not finding inspiration and time to write here is probably a downside of being on Twitter with incredibly talented writers, often able to express something profound in 140 characters. And also having Twitter as a daily outlet for speculations, wonder and anger over things that pass in the world. But I’ll try to up my [...]

- so this is about food. After having used more or less the same bread recipe for the last ten years, I’ve now reverted to the famous No-Knead-Bread, popularised by my favourite food writer Mark Bittman. He uses yeast – I prefer not to, or at least only a tiny little bit. To avoid using [...]

After using new Netvibes tools to arrange all the blogs I follow into neat groups, easy to sort through, I’ve hardly looked at them. The reason is the same as for not writing anything here. So today I thought I should have a quick look through them and see if there’s anything worth recommending. And [...]

Am now back, don’t know yet if it’s with a vengeance, but it’s with something very innocent, namely a food recipe. First I’ll just tell you briefly what’s been going on in the meantime: I haven’t been well – will get back to that later, if I don’t end up deeming it too private/boring for [...]

Politics: An interview with Hanif Kureishi about what has happened to the world since the fatwa against Salman Rushdie‘s The Satanic Verses. It’s very interesting and deserves to be read by anyone who takes an interest in these matters. Here’s a quote: The Rushdie affair, Kureishi believes, transformed not just his own work, but also [...]

Writing about hunger today on April Food Day, inspired by Ari Herzog. His main concern is this charity, Feeding America. Although I have seen with my own eyes that also America has its share of extreme poverty, malnutrition seems to be a much bigger problem than hunger and with equally devastating short- and long term [...]

Science: Activity in Caudate Nucleus (a part of our brain) predicts our choices. That’s another part of our brain that seems to be moored in the hunter/gather era of humanity, because the study shows that the brain pushes our choice towards the one with the largest perceived reward. This is funny! Apparently, there’s very little [...]