what is all this about bake off

london 7.19am 19.4C sunny thursday 2016

i wonder if i am the only one not interested in the bake off show. there is a lot of angst now about it being bought by channel 4, and the bbc losing it to that channel.

here is a article about the C4 boss saying why she bought it, to prevent the show , produced by love productions which is 70% owned by sky, from going off terrestial tv.

C4 is owned by the british govt but funded by advertising. so u might be asking what is this govt owned channel bidding against itself as it were, pushing up the price fighting against another arm of govt, the bbc… it is not meant to operate this way. unless it really is… that any show that gets too expensive for the bbc, can go to c4, where it can be self funded via adverts. after all, it was only when talks broke down over money with the bbc that c4 offered to buy it. 

so the bbc is like a nursery , nuture and cultivate talent and once the show gets too big and successful, hive it off to C4. it might be a good strategy actually. though as far as i am concerned, i dont care haha. i am not going to watch it at its new home. people making a competition out of bread and cake making will never swing my boat.

and what with 800mg bread being sold at 15p nowadays (like yesterday , so many warburtons loaves sold at reduced price)what is the point of making it yourself? i know, i  know… you can say but nothing tastes so good as bread you made yourself. not if i make it it is not. haha. i dont seem to have that knack of making it full of air so that it is light and airy. and bread i make gets mouldy real quick. 

Digital StillCamera

veg for 2p

london

simon came back from his mum’s. he got loads of veg, broccoli, cabbage,

kale, mixed veg, all for 3p, 2p, 7p, 5p, 10p, 8p. the supermarkets there really are fierce in their reductions.

i have never seen so much veg reduced to so little.

So unlike the supermarkets here in pimlico. only just now i got back from the sainsbury near me and only bought 2 basic white bread at 14p each. it is the cheapest i have seen it reduced by since the heady days when good quality bread are 10p each. these are basic bread costing 55p normally. i was craving a bit of bread as simon had eaten all the frozen bread i bought last time when the same supermarket reduced to 34p each. i ate 2 slices when i got back as toast, and frankly i dont taste any difference from more expensive bread. i put jam and peanut butter on them so they taste of those things. i doubt anyone eats bread by itself and since that is the only way to tell what they taste of it seems to me not important what they taste of as whatever they are will be swamped by the taste of jam and peanut butter or whatever spread u put on it.

he also bought tuna for £1. reduced from about £5.

( the tesco i was in just now i saw had tuna reduced too, but only to £4 from £5).

I had allready eaten that tuna that simon bought so dont have any to take a picture. I ate that as sashimi, (raw)dipping it in wasabi (from a tube) and black soya sauce. delicious. its been an age since i ate sashimi, and i have forgotten how nice it tastes. i ate the whole lot at one sitting haha. mixing it with a bit of white rice and ginger. that was my lunch no cooking involved and right welcomed as i was so hungry. simon said i can have all of it as he is not keen on tuna. he likes them as tinned tuna.

its lovely to revisit a taste sensation that i have forgotten about. its like finding it out for the first time. i wonder whether that is why people fast.

in my case i forget to eat something for a long time, and then rediscover it. others might fast and rediscover how nice food tastes when you are really hungry.

so many people are quite able to afford food, or eat often and never revisit that sensation of being starved. so fasting is a way of getting that feeling again. 

life here for me in london now is very nice. but then i make it nice by not bothering with things that are a bother to me.

you might say lucky you, but i think it is something i consciously make happen. it is no accident that my life is so nice.

the only thing that i cannot control is health. i am in good health now; i know one day i will have something goes wrong with the body, it is inevitable as i grow old. but i hope to keep that time when it happens at bay for as long as possible. haha.

we humans are so great and so exasperating as well

London Tuesday 29.13.10
I was in the sainsburys after my swim, and a old lady asked the woman stacking the bread where the 50/50 bread 400mg was kept. She pointed it out, at the top shelf and the old lady asked me to take one down for her. So I did.
It cost 75p. She saw the end date was 1nov, and asked me to look at the others on the shelf if any were later. But none were.
Then I noticed on the middle shelf the 50/50 bread was costing £1.25. For the same 400mg. It turned out these had their crust removed.

Now I wonder what market research made Sainsbury think people will pay almost double to have the crust removed. I know. It is to cater to those who aspire to being uppercrust and serve cucumber sandwiches. It seems u must have crustless bread for that. And it is a bother to cut them off not to mention u can never get a sharp edge to it, or a uniform shape. So that bread is to appeal for the upwardly mobile.

The old lady was muttering that she cannot finish off hers, when she found there were no bread that expires longer than 1nov. I said u can freeze it. She went off and another lady came by looking for bread. And we both marvelled at the price of crustless bread . Though when I mentioned they can be freezed and keep for a long time, she said she never buy frozen , she only eats fresh.

Hmm, I wonder if she knows that a lot of the so called fresh have been lying around in the shop or warehouse for days. And/or have been thawed from frozen. Or have been picked green and transported hundred of miles and then controlled ripened in the warehouse.

But we humans really have this remarkable ability to believe in something and find it difficult to disbelieve it even if faced with evidence.

And the converse applies, we have the same ability not to believe in something even though faced with the evidence.

In other words, this ability to refuse to change our opinion once we have made up our minds is universal and might well be a survival trait.

I would be so bold as to say all the great discoveries made by Man are made by someone who refused to believe it cannot be done or refused to give up on his belief that it can be done.

added. am rather excited about this new discovery li fi. instead of wi fi.

Harvest 2013: its Bake Off with the fun bits taken out | Television & radio | theguardian.com

Harvest 2013: its Bake Off with the fun bits taken out | Television & radio | theguardian.com.

london .

I find this program, going on every day this week, extremely interesting. i think the reviewer here is deliberately courting attention by taking a contrary view just to get people reading his post. nothing like a contrary view to get attention. and he certainly achieved his aim, as i click on it to read it.

in the end, he had to admit it is an interesting program. never knew that carrots can be left in the ground to hibernate and be harvested in winter. unlike potatoes. if u have ever wondered how they can still have supplies of potatoes, carrots, right throughout winter, you will know it now.

potatoes seem to be a fussy grower… i get that impression, but maybe it  only appears to be from the format of the program,

and it is shocking to me that they put back the broccoli into the fields if there is a glut. i know even in supermarkets, broccoli must be eaten quick or they ripen and go brown. but as one commentator said, who lives in new zealand, where they sell off surplus fruits and veg in the local market at rock bottom prices, they dont do that in uk. instead they plough it back into the soil. what do they do with the tomatoes i wonder? make canned tomatoes perhaps?

in the past, i know i can get bags of tomatoes that are overripe for  £1 in brewer st, not any more. now they sell measly worn out old looking veg in a bowl for a £1 . nobody buys them. so who are they fooling?

and with this good weather this year, u would think they would get a record harvest, but no, it seems the awful winter,(or so they tell us though personally i find that winter quite mild) and the cold spring and the hot dry summer is not good for wheat.

growing barley is a better bet, as it is turned into whisky, so the canny scots do it. haha. barley grows better in scotland anyway but the whisky means it is sold like 100x, 1000x when it is turned into whisky. unlike wheat, which even at its premium quality can only be turned into bread, and you cannot charge a lot for bread, nobody will buy it. but whisky, well u can charge whatever u like, there will be lots of addicts who will buy it. if they can find a way to turn wheat into alcohol…

the barley should not have too much nitrogen fertiliser added to the fields, it seems, as it then reduce the carbohydrate in the seeds, and because carbohydrate is turned to alcohol, that means less alcohol in the whisky.

maybe the next program coming up about fruits might give a rosier picture, as the fruit trees may like these conditions.

Added. 16.9.13 yep, the fruit harvest this year is much better than last year. though i doubt we as consumers will see lower prices in the supermarkets for fruit. they will plough the fruits into the fields rather than sell it cheap to us. 

spring forward

London
I forgot to change my clock time to spring, and woke up and thought it was 7am when it is really 8am. Couldn’t quite believe it when I saw the time on the clock in my laptop. Until I remembered that the clocks are supposed to go forward today. So I went round my flat changing my bedroom clock , my living room clock and my kitchen oven clock.

Clocks always spring forward on the last Sunday of March. Usually the tv and newspapers warns us. But this year it happened to fall during the easter period and there are no papers today.

And the library is shut throughout this period so I was not able to read any from Friday onwards.

Even the free papers were not publishing because of the holidays.

It is fun with clocks every year here in these northern countries like uk. Every year we get to spring forward and fall back. That is how I remember which way to jump the clock during spring and autumn.

Today it is sunny and bright outside and it is only 8.21am (though really it is really 7.21am).

Though the outside temp according to the weather website is 0C. Some areas of London like Finchley is -.4C but I think it might be a glitch.

Whatever the temperature, I am warm in my flat. it seems to stay a constant 12C whatever it is outside. I don’t have the heating on as usual.

Last night I walked to the supermarkets, hoping to find bargains, it being the day before Sunday when the supermarkets close all day. But there were not many bargains. Even the breads were reduced to 34p instead of 10p. I had run out of bread so bought a Tesco basic bread for 19p. Not much reduced from the normal 47p.

Now and then I have a desire to eat toast. That is why I buy bread. I know it is not really good for you. But simon eats it all before I get to it. If left to myself, that bread would keep for a long time in the freezer for the times when I crave toast.

It is funny that I prefer this basic wholemeal bread to the hovis seeded bread that were reduced in sainsburys from £1.50 to 34p. Would u have done the same? Somehow I want wholemeal bread. The seeded ones are plain white bread. And I would only buy them if they are 10p each.

I guess cost wise, it would be more of a bargain to buy those seeded ones , even at 34p. But I want wholemeal.

I was discussing the sainsburys price reducing strategy with a Chinese lady who was also on a bargain hunt like me. We noticed the 50/50 bread have all their crust removed. Even then instead of selling it for 10p which they do, it was 59p. I said even if they reduce it to 10p I wont buy it. I like the crust. What a waste really to remove it.
She asked what do they do with the crust?

I said most probably the bread is very old, and the mould have formed on the crust that is why they reduce it and repack it with a new sell by date.

I know they slice the bread that is close to expiring and repack it with a new sell by date. I have seen them do so. But this removing of the crust is a new one on me. 

Later the sainsburys brought out a batch of bread that they reduced to 34p, instead of 10p. I think it is because there was a crowd of people waiting for it and they know if they reduce it to 10p, there will be a fist fight.

As it was, there was no rush to buy the bread at 34p.haha.

 

These holidays are boring to me. In that the library is closed and I cannot read the daily papers.
And the religious nature of the events that happen are not of interest to me. Take for eg, the re enactment of the crucifixion in Trafalgar square on Friday. It was quite a cold day and I thought that actor playing christ must be freezing his arse off, unlike jesus . Though I guess it was a nice trade off between really being nailed to the cross to freezing. Haha.

There seems to be a huge fixation by people to enact the crucifixion. And in some countries, they actually nail the guy on the cross to make it real.

Ah well, their frixxging souls want it.

That I guess must be the genius of the human condition. We are capable of the heights of soaring achievement and the basement of mad behaviour.

added. i just saw the time of sunset and sunrise today. it is 6.37am and 7.32 today. without the clocks changing it would read 5.37am and 6.32pm. but with the new time we all think it is later setting than it is. this playing around with our time sense is playing havoc with our biological sense of time. 

It is no wonder people get depressed come autumn when the clocks go back. suddenly they find their sunset comes one hour earlier. that would make anyone depressed. 

Added.I think people seeing me foraging for cheap bargain food which are near expiring may get the impression I am doing it out of necessity. Not at all. I enjoy this. And it is a choice. I can well afford to buy bread at the full price but just as I would seek out discounts entry to gay clubs, I don’t see why I should pay full price when I can get them for 10p each. I don’t have any false pride or beliefs that would deter me from taking advantage of it.

I have not gone down that route of raiding supermarket refuse bins for food thrown away. Not from any distaste in doing it, but that I am too lazy to do it. Haha. It involves going in the dead of night. I am too lazy to do it. But I am all for it, as I think it criminal that supermarkets can throw away such a lot of good food.

I know my local Tesco throws away food regularly, because their cooling system constantly breaks down and whole shelves are cleared of food. It happens often. We are met with empty shelves when I go there, and a notice telling us about it being due to a malfunction. Instead of letting us buy it cheap they prefer to throw it away.

 

 

teapot

london

this is a tea pot given to me recently by my friend when he came to visit and stay at my place. 

he said it was a present from someone who gave him permission to pass it on. he knows me, that i would not like him to buy things for me. most other people will be mortified to be told or to find out that their present was a second hand one. haha. but i hope my friends know me by now not to go out and buy me new stuff. 

it is rather nice of him of bring me a tea pot. he did not know i have broken mine, and am using a old one that has its spout broken. 

it looked like it is made of brass, or metal, but really it is porcelain, glazed to look like metal. and design to mimic an ancient chinese pot. 

quite nice, but and i immediately tested it by putting a tea ball, a sample that was given to me to try which i have lying about the flat for ages as even though i am chinese, i am not really into these korean designer tea leaves … i find them too weak. 

the tea is from AHAE.com and called tea of teas, green tea candy.

i have not noticed it before, but turning the box upside down i saw this ….ingredients; green tea 15%, sugar,rice, grapeseedoil,sesame oil, malt. why all these added stuff i wonder when just 100% green tea would be fine by itself. i noticed also the sell by date, 1.7.2012. so maybe that might explain why it was given as a free sample and why it did not smell of anything now. 

though i once had japanese green tea in a restaurant that must have some infused herbs in them, because it smelt so fragrant. 

anyway, the tea was very weak, and hasn’t got any flavour. still, i shall give it another chance, and refill it with hot water and see if more brewing brings out its flavour. the pot have a lid, but as u can see it can fall out easily if u tilt the pot too far. and u have to put a finger on it whilst u pour the tea. 

i think i shall use it to make chinese tea .

the trouble with tea pots that are not insulated is that the tea gets cold in them. 

but i rejoice in having two tea pots to play with now. 

i continue to like the old one with the broken spout. 

with the cold weather we are having now the hot tea is great to warm me. 

my friend i discovered to my delight is even better at resisting the cold than i. he goes round my flat in shorts. when even i am wrapped up. i was a bit worried that he might find my flat too cold, but i am glad he does not. it is -2C outside according to the weather website for london, but it is pleasant inside the flat. 

he told me rather an interesting thing that happened to him. 

he was at the supermarket near westminster tube station, and it was late, and he saw a warburton white bread reduced to 35p. so he took it to the counter, and without thinking placed it with the other side up, and the cashier saw a label saying old price 36p reduced  to 0.03p. then the cashier did a strange thing. he took a pen and scratched that out and charged him 35p. 

i did not know they can do that. i would have objected and at least have insisted that he charge me the more recently reduced price. and i think if u had objected he would have done it. but my friend did not notice this price and was prepared to pay 35p anyway. perhaps someone made a mistake because i have never known any shop to reduce it by such a small amount. haha. the lowest i have bought a loaf of bread is 10p. 

Added.20.1.13

i discovered that the tea ball i put in the teapot is not tea. found this out when i emptied the pot expecting to find tea leaves and there was nothing. it was candy, as it said so, but i was not paying attention because i noticed the words ‘tea of teas’, which must be somekind of trade mark or something and assumed it was tea.

In a way they are confusing the customer. it never occurred to me that it was some kind of sweet which u take to combat insomnia.I have not eaten another one, as somehow it puts me off. tea flavoured sweets sounds so weird. 

5 bad foods and other thoughts about healthy eating

London
1.1.13 tuesday
Watching this tv program on bbc2, called nature’s weirdest, presented by chris packham, showing travellers to foreign countries being infected with parasites and bringing them back in their bodies, makes me glad I am not travelling now.

And that I am glad I did not pick up these parasites when I was travelling in my younger days. U might say many of us travel to cities and towns and so are hardly likely to meet up with these parasites.

But many of these parasites are spread by flies and biting insects and these will invade towns and villages.

There is one that lives under the skin moves about and cause the immune system to reacte to its presence by causing a swelling in the skin. So over the years, u might find different parts of your body mysteriously swelling and subsiding for no reason at all. The worm do not damage the body of the host, which is clever of it, because if it did and kill the host it wont do itself any good.

I guess it is up to your soul whether u will get infected. After all many have gone there before and came back unscathed, until u came along and picked it up. So why you and not the others? It must be your soul wants to experience it.

I saw ‘Up’ the movie on tv just now. I am glad I did not see it when it first came out. It got a lot of good reviews, with people saying it is so feel good a movie, but I just cannot believe the story line. A house that flew away on balloons, is impossible.

And all those talking dogs … it was so ridiculous, I switched the tv off and went to cook my dinner rather than see it to the end. It was too childish by which I mean it was creating silly sentimental situations.

2.1.13 Wednesday
I got an email from stumbleupon.com I subscribed long ago but forgot to visit it for sometime now. This emailed sent me some suggestions so I clicked on one, and came across this website, with the headline 5foods that are bad for you.

i did not realise it at the time, but it was an advert for a weightloss website and the video is a standard one used by all of them to catch the eye.
The link went to a weightloss website but the video is very interesting, even though it is a spiel for joining their membership, (quite reasonable I thought at £29 for a one off payment, and money back if u don’t lose weight.)
And their list of 5 foods that are bad for u is very good.

It is concentrated fruit juice,
Wholemeal bread
Margarine
Soy
Gm corn.

They are all processed foods made by manufacturers.

U might think soy is natural, it is from the soya bean and we in Malaysia all know it as the soya bean milk drink and tofu. In their natural state they are very healthy, we used to buy these drinks at the hawker stalls, and slabs of tofu in the wet market; but not when the manufacturers have got their hands on it. Haha.

As for the genetically modified (GM ) corn, it illustrated it with a picture of a corn on the cob. i think corn on the cob  should be ok, but all the stuff they add in foods by the manufacturer to bulk it out will be bad.
I don’t buy the suggestion by the website that GM is bad.

It is the amount of any foods eaten which determines if u gain weight or not. I think u can still eat all the above so called bad foods, and not lose weight provided u eat very little of it and mix it with a lot of other types of foodstuff that is in its original state. Like fresh veg, fruits, and foods u cook from scratch.

My suggestion for what it is worth is that they are not bad, per se. You can eat them just don’t eat a lot of them.

I find the secret to weight loss is really eat very little of any one type of foods. but have a vast variety of them, so that add them up and u can eat as much as u like.

In the video it is mentioned that sweet increased glucose levels and affect insulin production, all of which affect the suger levels in the blood and that have an effect on fat storage by the body.

So cut out the suger and that is why the concentrated fruit juice is not good for you. They have a lot of suger in them. I don’t hear them say don’t put suger in your tea or coffee. That would be the natural conclusion of not having sweets in the diet.
Needless to say I don’t put suger in my drinks, nor drink soda or squash drinks.

The bread? It is a processed food, like pasta, pizza.
I eat them, but I keep them frozen so I don’t feel I have to finish off the whole loaf at once, for fear it goes off.

Margarine, is because of its transfat. So now they are suggesting u eat butter instead. But again, don’t slather the butter on like there is no tomorrow. I bet u can eat margarine, but just coat it thinly and not pile it on. I spread it very thinly if I use it . I don’t spread jam on top of my magarine on bread. I just spread one layer and that is it.

Soy and corn will be in a lot of processed foods so best just avoid processed foods. And remember, cheese , olives are processed foods.
Quite a lot of foods are processed though u might not suspect at first.

U cannot eat fresh olives by itself, it is inedible.

So best to not eat a lot of them, because in many cases it is hard to know what is processed or not.

This guy says there are 5 foods that are absolutely so bad, u cannot even eat them in moderation.
He lists doughnuts, soda, French fries, chips(I think he meant what the british call crisps, tacos, corn chips), fried non fish seafood.

The non fish seafood, like shrimps, lobsters, clams, oysters, shell fish, he says is full of mercury. And parasites.

I like shrimps, but they are expensive anyway so that limit’s the amount I eat them. So I guess they naturally limit my intake of them. Sometimes it is good not to be so rich … because it makes u eat less of these expensive stuff and save your health. Haha.

If u are very rich u can eat loads of meat, fish, seafood, caviar, etc that cannot be good for you, just the sheer amount u can eat, it makes a glutton out of you. And u have to have great discipline to limit yourself. If u are rich, and u cannot eat all these things as much as u like, it kind of take the fun out of being rich, don’t you think?

I doubt their advise about not eating those things. Health wise it is not that big a factor. once in a while it is ok to eat them. Anyway, don’t get so obsessed about them, the amount of mercury poisoning is so small, u will die of something else first.

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2003/10/18/worst-foods.aspx