I mean, what tops Le Royale? Le Imperiale?
Wikipedia to the rescue. The Angus Third Pounder is not sold outside America and Canada (where it is called an Angus Deluxe in Ontario). No clarification, however, on whether this is because the rest of the world has the metric system, and wouldn’t know what the fuck a third pounder is.
In order:
I tried nothing at all in Texas, mostly because I was far too zonked. Corona will have to wait for another time.
Happy Onam to all my Mellu readers and fans! You guys rock. May your days be filled with immigration to Gelf and lots of todee.
I first thulped Onam sadhya five years ago at the IIMB mess, where the Mellus in the batch prepared and served it for lunch. Whatta meal. Burp.
Today, alas, I am stuck far far North of Hebbal Flyover. And Delhi doesn’t have a single dedicated Mellu joint (at least, that I know about). Woe.
Appropriate uses for mangos:
Love Food Hate Waste has five tips on how to save money by not wasting food (via). Although the list has been designed with a UK audience in mind, some of the tips hold equally well for us junta sitting in India. For example:
Tinned beans, frozen vegetables, meat and fish and dried fruit, nuts, pasta & noodles, rice & grains, are all essentials with a long shelf life – meaning you will always have the ingredients standing by to pull together a delicious meal or to jazz up your leftovers. The trick is to replace items once you have used them up. It helps to keep a note stuck on the inside of the cupboard door – scribble down items as soon as you have finished them and check it when you write your shopping list.
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Planning your meals is one of the most effective ways you can cut wastage and food bills. Start by checking your fridge, freezer and store cupboard so you don’t shop for things you already have.
When I was in Bangalore, not planning my meals in the morning could lead to disaster. I would forget I had fruit or salad lying in the fridge, and then eat dinner out near office assuming there was nothing at home to prepare. By the next day, the salad would have spoilt, and I would have wasted the salad as well as the cost of the dinner out. Sticking a list of what I did have on the fridge door every weekend would have helped in the planning meals if I’d checked it every day and planned my dinner and breakfast according to it.
On a related note, it’s time to bring up another rant about refrigerators (people who read my mailing list know I do this often). Picking a refrigerator is fraught with peril. You’re always trading off convenience with expense and a tendency to waste.
I positively hate manual defrost refrigerators. If the light goes for extended periods (as it does so often in India) you wind up with a huge puddle on the kitchen floor. If you forget to defrost, whatever is in the freezer gets iced over and you have to go at it with a pickaxe. And I’m too much a twenty-first century types to remember to defrost the thing myself. That’s the fridge’s job, dammit!
Now unfortunately a frost-free fridge comes in large sizes and so uses more electricity than the manual defrost ones (in addition to being more expensive to begin with anyhow). The large size also means you have a tendency to throw stuff in there and then forget it’s there – as I did with my salads.
Fortunately, there are mitigants. You can cut down on the wasted electricity by filling the freezer with water bottles so all that energy goes to some use. And sticking a list of what’s in there on the fridge door could help you avoid forgetting it.
Extreme geekiness alert: In fact, if you wanted to truly power-use your fridge lists, you could create an individual Post-it for every item, and flip the Post-its around so that what you were planning to use in the evening would be right on top. The only way to be even geekier is to have a laptop in the kitchen and update your fridge MIS on an Excel sheet (or Google spreadsheets for that matter) as you remove stuff from the fridge and eat/ cook it. Sadly, my kitchen in Bangalore was too small to allow this. But I recommend it highly – a laptop in the kitchen also means you can download recipes.
The stuff I’ve written above does assume that:
What with current trends of urbanisation, corporatisation, sararimanisation, growing numbers of young migrant professionals, growing salary demands of bais, yada yada, I think the number of people fulfilling the above conditions will grow. This is my yumble contribution to them. Maybe, I should set up a post/ page for useful kitchen tips.
Via Skimpy’s Google Reader Shared Items, I have discovered this wonderful website: pintprice.com. It’s the wikipedia of beer prices. Users e-mail in the price of a pint of beer wherever they live or travel, and the data are updated down to city level. The listed price of a pint in Bombay, for instance, is USD 1.82 - which is accurate enough.
The website also lists the ten cheapest, and the ten most expensive countries in the world for a beer. What’s really interesting is that in Rwanda, a pint is only 0.32 GBP, while in neighbouring Burundi, it’s at least three times more – 0.94 GBP in Bujumbura, and a whopping GBP 5.51 in Burundi City.
Imagine the arbitrage opportunity at the border! This, I feel, is the future of finance – FX traders carrying yen will be replaced by beer traders carrying Urgwagwa.
Over SMS, BJ asks:
Aaloo paratha is to a punjoo like curd rice to a tambrahm agree?
Not really. As TCA Srinivasa-Raghavan pointed out, for TamBrahms curd rice is both necessary and sufficient1. However for Punjews aaloo parathas are only sufficient2, since they can be replaced by mooli parathas, gobi parathas, or makki di roti.
Put another way, you cannot be TamBrahm if you do not eat curd rice. You can be a Punjew even if you don’t eat aaloo parathas, as long as you eat makki di roti instead.
1: He was drawing an analogy to how Indian economists treat statistical jugglery.
2: Provided they are two number aaloo parathas.
You pay for it on the treadmill.
This Mint article on school lunches in Japan is rather alarming in its enthusiasm for the nanny state. It also gushes about the Japanese self-sufficiency movement, which actually dooms Japanese farmers to small farms and eats up money in food subsidies:
Chisan, chishou, the local term for ‘produce local, consume local’, is a major campaign in Japan and it is reflected in the school menu as well. The cabinet office directive says that ingredients for the meals have to be sourced from places no more than 30km away.
And also about government campaigns which set out what people should eat:
So, on 15 July 2005, a new law on syokuiku came into force. It lays down the basic philosophy for “dietary education” to eradicate all these problems at the root. Says Miho Kawano, assistant counsellor at the cabinet office on dietary education promotion department: “Syokuiku is based on the theory that every individual needs to acquire knowledge about how to choose food, be aware of healthy diet and food safety.” What is impressive is the scale and precision with which the movement has been launched all over the country and how every school, prefecture, municipal office, corporate, NGO and literally every citizen on the street has been drawn into the programme.
Which are expensive and intrusive:
According to Kawano, the programme has an annual budget of $98.31 million (Rs391.27 crore) and there are 190,000 volunteers involved. The goal is to get at least 20% more volunteers by 2010 who will spread awareness about nutrition and the link between diet and health all over Japan. And, in a brilliant masterstroke, health insurance societies, too, have been drawn into the programme. Hutami says that from April 2008, the government is planning to route special health checking and guidance facilities to every Japanese citizen through insurance societies. Successful societies will be given a reward, while unsuccessful ones will be penalized.
On a slightly less rational note, the praise given to The Shri Ram School annoys me:
Although it is not organized on military lines like the Japanese school lunches, The Shri Ram School lunch programme is constantly evolving. For instance, the menu, devised by the teachers, is circulated to parents and also vetted by dieticians.
Bah. Death to TSRS.
But the article is still very nicely written and has lots of interesting details. Do read it.
I am off to Singapore for the next two weeks on *cough*a shareholder sponsored junket *cough cough* training.
During the course of training I will be staying at two five star hotels. It’s hard to pick the best thing about this sort of luxurious accommodation. There are two very strong contenders.
The first is the free breakfast. The idea of a breakfast buffet where I eat as much as I can before its time to head off to the seminar rooms is beguilingly attractive. When it’s being expensed to my cost code rather than to my salary account, it’s nirvanic. But it’s still not a clear winner.
Because there is the other, equally strong contender: free laundry.
Yes, free laundry. I am currently dumping all my clothes into my suitcase so that they can be washed and ironed by professional launderers (who, I just realised, will be Chinese, thus making this an even better deal). After six months of having my clothes washed by a maid who believes that the best way to deal with clothes is tough love, and who leaves the ironing to me, I will finally have an opportunity to have all my clothes stainfree, fluffy, sweet smelling, and crisply ironed. The mind reels in delight.
Right then. Time to get back to packing.
PS: Ritwik, you will have to wait a little longer for the Sohrabuddin and Idiotarians post. If I write a long post while in Singapore, it will imply a failure on my part to spend my free times out partying with an international contingent and Mr. Walker.
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