Category Archives: food+drink

New 12 Days of Christmas Meme!


New 12 Days of Christmas Meme!, originally uploaded by kcm76.

An extra Flickr PhotoMeme this week: A New Twelve Days of Christmas …

“The Twelve Days of Christmas” is an English Christmas carol which enumerates a series of increasingly grandiose gifts given on each of the twelve days of Christmas. It has been one of the most popular and most-recorded Christmas songs in America and Europe throughout the past century. [Wikipedia]

Create your own series of 12 gifts you would want …

One true love
£2M
Three ravishing concubines
Four miles of my own private sunny, sandy shoreline with nudist beach
Five stone less weight
Six winning lottery numbers
Seven days a week, every week, of warm summer sunshine
Eight hours good sleep every night
Nine percent interest on our savings
Ten green bottles of wine a week
Eleven acres of natural ancient woodland
Twelve month-long holidays a year

1. Mon Amie la Rose – IMG_1165a,** 2. Red Head, 3. Heart,** 4. Morning Light,** 5. 5-peace-stones, 6. lottery, 7. Too good to eat?, 8. tsukareta nya~,** 9. leon’s nine lives,** 10. wine bottles-10, 11. Buche bei Oberbantenberg,** 12. Wintery Temple**

As always these are not my photos but please follow the links to enjoy the work of the photographers who did take them!
(The starred ** photographs are from my Flickr favourites.)

And it is worth viewing this on black to bring out the colours!

Created with fd’s Flickr Toys.

My Meme: Run up to Christmas


My Meme: Run up to Christmas, originally uploaded by kcm76.

1. 1,001 sex toys from amazon, 2. Sound the Bright Flutes!, 3. In England they’re called Fairy Lights., 4. Christmas Tour of Homes, 5. Christmas Shopping, 6. Christmas Gold Organza Felt Tree 1, 7. My Lovely Bookworm, 8. IMG_8708_11242006, 9. Victorian Christmas II (Thomas Kinkade), 10. Christmas card, illustration, 11. weihnachtsmarkt2.jpg, 12. Pope Shenouda III, right, leads the Christmas liturgy held at the Coptic Cathedral of Saint Marcos late Friday, Jan. 6, 2006 in Cairo, Egypt.
As always these are not my photos but please follow the links to enjoy the work of the photographers who did take them!

Yesterday was the Feast of Christ the King (the Sunday before Advent) so this week’s meme focuses on the run up to Christmas.

As usual the questions and answers
1. Place you like to buy presents Amazon.co.uk
2. Christmas music Medieval Carols, traditionally sung
3. Something you use to decorate your house Fairy Lights
4. Where (or with who) are you planning to spend Christmas? It’ll likely be just us two, at home
5. Who do you like to got Christmas shopping with? Nobody
6. Theme/colour scheme of your Christmas tree Probably red and gold, but it depends what Noreen feels like at the time
7. Someone you like to buy presents for My bookworm wife (and no, this picture isn’t my actual wife; she isn’t on Flickr, yet!)
8. What are you planning to eat for your Christmas meal? Free-Range Organic Turkey
9. Somewhere you’ll go to a party Is anyone going to invite me?
10. Something you make for Christmas Christmas Cards; for the last several years we’ve had our own cards printed from one of my photographs
11. What gets you in the Christmas spirit? Traditional Christmas Music
12. Secular or Sacred? Although the Christmas liturgy is wonderful it’ll be secular

Created with fd’s Flickr Toys.

Anti-Depressant


Anti-Depressant, originally uploaded by kcm76.

Just a little interlude after midnight! Must be getting old disgracefully!

The wine is this years Beaujolais-Villages Nouveau; not cheap but pretty good considering the indifferent summer.

And the glass is at least 35 years old; I bought a set of 6 of these (very cheap glasses; anyone round here remember Green Shield Stamps? – that tells you they were cheap!) when I was either a 3rd year undergraduate or a first year postgrad student. I think we still have 5 of them, and they’re used regularly. I wonder how many bottles of wine (not to mention other liquors) these glasses have seen?

Looks good on black too!

Equilateral Chocolate

In his “Anti Gravity” column in the latest (November issue) Scientific American Steve Mirsky write rather mischievously, even zen mischievously, about recent food research “trivia”. The article contains this gem of a paragraph:

The journal Science reports that mathematicians from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University and the Free University of Brussels have igured out a better way to wrap spherical pieces of chocolate. There’s a lot of wasted material when wrapping spheres with square pieces of foil or paper. But our intrepid geometers found that by using equilateral triangles rather than squares, they could generate a savings of 0.1 percent. That’s one full square saved for every 1,000 pieces of triangle-wrapped chocolate you eat.

Doh? Well so what? Well let’s (very roughly) translate that into something meaningful.

Making some reasonable assumptions about wrapper size and weight … If every man, woman and child in the UK ate just 10 triangular wrapped chocolates this Christmas the savings in the wrappings would amount enough paper/foil to cover a full size football pitch. Can’t imagine Wembley Stadium covered in chocolate wrappers? OK. The weight of that saved wrapping is roughly equivalent to 1,000 ½lb boxes of chocolates! Now that’s a lot of over indulgence, even by my standards!

Oh and you can find the full Steve Mirsky article here.

Happiness Meme


Happiness Meme, originally uploaded by kcm76.

1. Meet the cat: VIC, 2. Sand Sea Sun – Snorkel!, 3. The meaning of Photography, 4. Happy Nude Recreation Week!!!, 5. my wine and Brad’s beer, 6. My wife’s hairy cunt, 7. 8×6 frosty morning railroad, 8. day one hundred five, 9. Longing for Spring, 10. ordinary pic, but really tasty salad, 11. Reading A Buyer’s Market, 12. Katsuo-ji Temple bells

This week’s question: Just tell us 12 things which make you happy, and a picture for each.

Answers:
1. Cats – because they’re magic
2. Sun, sea and sand
3. Photography – it’s about the only creativity I have
4. Warm sunshine on my skin
5. Beer and wine – two of the essentials of a contented life
6. Noreen, my wife (perhaps I should not say explicitly what I was going to!) and that after almost 30 years of marriage we still have great sex
7. Bright frosty mornings
8. Nudity – it’s normal and it’s comfortable
9. Spring green and blossom on trees
10. Good, tasty, fresh salad
11. Books, especially Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time
12. Bells

Created with fd’s Flickr Toys.

Friday Five: When Did You Last …?

OK so it’s a day late, but after I don’t know how many weeks I feel like doing this week’s Friday Five. So here we go …

When did you last…
1. Scrounge for change (couch, ashtray, etc.) to make a purchase?
I don’t recall ever having done so, even as a student. Guess I’m probably lucky.

2. Visit a dentist?
Monday 4 August 2008, 0830 hrs.

3. Make a needed change to your life?
I don’t do big, life threatening changes — unless you count marriage or moving house, and I don’t have a habit of doing them since I’ve done neither for getting on for 30 years! I do lots of small incremental changes — fine tuning if you like.

4. Decide on a complete menu well in advance of the evening meal?
Don’t make a habit of doing this either, so I don’t know when it last was. We may have a sketchy idea of what we’re going to eat 24 hours in advance, but it remains flexible until the last minute: eat what we fancy built around what we have available.

5. Spend part of the day (other than daily hygiene) totally/mostly naked?
I was going to say yesterday. But maybe I’ll say today instead, although I will be out for a chunk of the day. If I’m at home I’m usually nude unless I’m very cold or we have visitors. And as I work from home a lot that is quite a few days a week. “Nude when possible; clothed when necessary.”

[Brought to you courtesy of Friday Five.]

Zen Food Meme


Zen Food Meme, originally uploaded by kcm76.

1. Pudge – Leave Me Alone, I’m Sleeping!, 2. SPAM – Enjoy your meal !, 3. blue string pudding, 4. Sticky toffee rat onna stick., 5. Bull’s Blood, 6. Not sure, but I think there’s Mexican food in there somewhere., 7. Unsalted Butter Cone, 8. Eating the hanging meat, 9. 12×12 Happy Cats, 10. the little colorful Paki, 11. iCI – Independent Curators International, 12. The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat

Having done a fairly boring response to this week’s meme, I thought, as I have a reputation to keep up, I’d better do a more mischievous one! So here, in the spirit of Zen Mischief, it is …

Questions and Answers:
1. What is your favorite breakfast? Sleep
2. What is your favorite lunch? Luncheon Meat
3. What is your favorite dinner? Blue String Pudding
4. What is your favorite snack? Sticky Toffee Rat onna Stick
5. What is your favorite drink? Bulls Blood
6. What is something you eat everyday (or often)? Food
7. What is a food you hate? “It was the best butter”
8. What is your guilty pleasure (as far as food is concerned)? Eating
9. What food smells gross to you? 144 of Anything
10. What is your favorite ethnic food? Sub-Continental
11. What is your favorite restaurant? Ici
12. What was the last thing you ate? Genesis 3:13

Created with fd’s Flickr Toys.

Food Meme


Food Meme, originally uploaded by kcm76.

1. Large Breakfast, 2. chish n fips, 3. The rock fishes, 4. Nuts to Christmas, 5. Adnams “The Bitter” (Cask), 6. Homemade Bread, 7. DSC11784 – Cow stomach (beef tripe) in meat market (Laos), 8. Too much f*cking pizza, 9. pernod, 10. my sister, the blue-eyed Indian bride, 11. Hinder, 12. Gala Apple

Questions and Answers:
1. What is your favorite breakfast? Fried cholesterol
2. What is your favorite lunch? Chish ‘n’ Fips
3. What is your favorite dinner? Bouillabaisse
4. What is your favorite snack? Nuts
5. What is your favorite drink? Adnams
6. What is something you eat everyday (or often)? Homemade Bread
7. What is a food you hate? Tripe
8. What is your guilty pleasure (as far as food is concerned)? Too Much
9. What food smells gross to you? Pernod
10. What is your favorite ethnic food? Indian
11. What is your favorite restaurant? Tilley’s Bistro, Bath
12. What was the last thing you ate? An Apple

Created with fd’s Flickr Toys.

Nico's


Nico’s, originally uploaded by kcm76.

This week’s self-portrait: 52 Weeks 33/52 (2008 week 41).
Yet another reflection picture!

This week I’ve been eating out at the best “greasy spoon” in all London: Nico’s, 299 Cambridge Heath Road, London, E2 0EL. Open Monday thru’ Saturday, 0645 to 1900. It is right outside Bethnal Green tube station on junction of Bethnal Green Road and Cambridge Heath Road.

Greek Cypriot, now run by the second generation. You can have anything from a bacon roll, through Egg & Chips to Dolmades or Kleftico. The food is cheap and the portions are large; do not order the mixed grill unless you are a real glutton or starving: it comes on two(!!) oval plates, one of meat the other piled with chips. A steak sandwich comes with (free) chips on the side — a full portion of chips that is! And they’re real chips too. Everything is cooked to order and the kitchen is openly visible from the counter. Needless to say it does a steady trade! Eat in or take-away.

It is very close to the V&A Museum of Childhood, where Noreen works; I was there too earlier this week and was taken out to lunch at Nico’s: I had: 2 (large) Sausages, Mushrooms and (a pile of) Chips; can Diet Coke. Noreen had: Double Egg, Beans and (a pile of) Chips; can Diet Coke. Total cost £8.50.

Highly recommended for restoring the soul but not for either the cholesterol levels or the waistline. Pure food pornography. 🙂


Nico’s, originally uploaded by kcm76.