General Chat

I was just going through some old magazines and news papers and found this excellent article by Matthew Fort about verbal laziness of food writers and reviewers. He has written about food for the Guardian since 1989.

Cooked to perfection – What does this actually mean? Used it in place of knowledge or thought. Not even God can cook things to perfection.

Decadent – Why is pleasure in food considered decadent? It’s a pathetic Protestant puritan fallacy

Melt-in-the-mouth – Almost invariably used to describe meat. Invariably inaccurate. If meat melts in the mouth, see a doctor immediately.

Moreish – tedious cliché. The meaning has been drained out of it like water out of a bog.

Nom nom nom – this really is a remarkable combination of the infantile and the barbaric.

Pan-fried – Twaddle. What else do you fry in? A kettle? There’s frying or deep-frying, that’s all.

Scrumptious/Scrummy – The sign of intellectual bankruptcy. Not to be used even as a joke.

To die for – A self-evident absurdity. No food is worth dying for.

Foodie – I’m tired of this expression. You’re tired of this expression. We’re all tired of this expression. So why do we use it? And why do we think that someone weird because they’re interested in food and are happy to express it? The Italians don’t seem to thinks so. Neither
do the French, Spanish, Poles or Portuguese.
 

I have a few of my own -

Home made - when it is mealy cooked in the restaurant, it does not make it home made.

Delish - incredibly annoying and has made its way into the vocabulary of food writers everywhere.

Falling off the bone -If something is "falling off the bone," take my word for it, its probably not worth eating

Flavourful  - Is that the opposite of flavour-empty?

Posh Nosh - Do you also gnash when you posh-nosh?

Another pet HATE - why do people take pictures of their food?

What are yours?

when something is described as "gourmet"... I think it's just a snob word.... or if it's used on a product in the supermarket (gourmet yoghurt?! gourmet salt!!!!?) it usually means it's more expensive.

And........ I hate food snobs!

I hate food snobs too, and I know a few one of whom is a rubbish cook. :-D :-D

I hate the word organic and refuse to buy anything so labeled. Evidently here in Canada one can label anything "organic" without any proof that it was grown without chemicals. As a matter of fact some testing was done and it was found that many of these so-called organic products had more chemicals in them than other products.

From a programme I once watched, it could have been Panorama, I was led to believe that the only way you could be sure that no slave labour had been used to pick your bananas was to buy organic ones.

As for frying. Something I read and, again, I can't remember what, makes me think that deep frying is when you do it in deep oil, shallow frying is when you have a shallow layer of oil in your pan and pan frying is when you only have a tiny amount of oil.

Then again, you wouldn't be frying in the tea pot would you?

I also detest food snobs. I eat a lot of offal - because I like it. The fact that it's cheaper than some tasteless 'good' cuts is merely because it isn't 'fashionable'.
I buy a lot of venison offal (how powsh is that?) and the stallholder refers to me as 'Hannibal'. :-0

I also dislike wine snobs. I don't like my wine to taste of wood, I like it to taste of fruit. I also don't like strong wine, and as I have to carry it home on the bus, I tried, and like Sains***** 'basics' wine - 10% proof, and handily in a lightweight plastic bottle. It's a bit rough initially, but so am I!!
One day, I was putting a couple of bottles in my basket, when a lady with a cut glass accent, commented:
'I don't know how you can drink wine from a plastic bottle'.
I replied:
'Personally, I pour it into a glass to drink it, but each to his own' :-D :-D

I don't like wine and am fed up with people who tell me it is because I have never had a decent wine.

No,I didn't like the 48 Krug I had once either. It is not the vintage, it is not the price, it is not the nose.

It is the fact that all wine tastes of rotten fruit to me and I don'tlike it!

We try to get to the local farmers' markets (not always possible). We know the produce has been recently picked, and hasn't spent days in a truck.

We all know that farmers use chemicals; if they didn't the product would be eaten by bugs.

I'd like to know what the "organic farmers" use. Do they sit there all day and pick off the bugs?

The bug pickers must get a good wage, because the "organic" veg is sometimes four times the cost of "ordinary" veg. Doesn't taste any different to me.

We use our local farm shop for most meat, pigs and chickens are born and reared on the farm, other meats can be tracked back and identified to locally sourced farms.
Fruit and vegetables are always fresh, but vegetables are very
often miss shaped but taste is far superior. The prices are not significantly higher but well worth the extra.

Sharron, they make their own sausages and meat pies; they are truly delicious.

Have you noticed.......... what used to be "cheap" & tasty (for example, lamb shanks)...... once the yuppies found them, the price went up?

:-(

@ Maggie "Personally, I pour it into a glass to drink it, but each to his own".

Love it what a fantastic comeback remark! :-D :-D :-D :-D

'Experts' who enthuse over a wine. Hints of Blackberry? All I can taste is the oak-casked tannin!

Mind you, with the amount of tax added to a supermarket bottle, the higher the price on the shelf, the more 'value' there is in the liquid. Less expensive Reds can be made more palatable if they are decanted/aerated or allowed to 'breathe' before consumption.

Michelin stars don't quite live up to expectation, admittedly on the one and only occasion its been sampled. It might have been a One Star.

3 course lunchtime menu for £20 which is v reasonable in the SE. The service was superb.
Bouillabaisse - not as deep a fishy taste as expected, and luke-warm. No bits of fish in the liquid.
Risotto with (pan fried!) Bream - quite common now and easy to cook
Can't remember the desert, but small 'tasting' portions. It was tasty!
If we hadn't had had all 3 courses, we'd have still been hungry.

DET My nephew is a really delightful young man whom I love dearly, however, he is a wine bore and to be honest I find it to be embarrassing and irritating when he goes into a boring monologue over a bottle of wine.

One mans wine is another mans' poison :-D :-D :-D

There is a highly prestigious restaurant in the area and I had a meal there, a vegetarian one.

I didn't find it up to much. It did look very impressive with its squiddly bits but the flavour and texture weren't particularly impressive.

It certainly didn't match the rve revues I read on line from people who wanted you to know, orthink they had been there.

Re why do people take photos of their food.

When on holiday and eating something that I enjoy and which looks colourful, I often photograph it. I always write a holiday diary and part of the interest is the food we eat, so the photo goes in the diary.

Ann that seems like a really good idea. I was referring to pictures on FB there seems to be an epidemic of plates of food, and some of them look less than appetising.