Anyway, I can’t remember it exactly but I’m still enjoying it from the fridge, one of my better creations and wonderfully hot.

You need

• A handful of whole almonds. I used ones that had not had the brown “chaff” removed
• 2 tsp of whole cumin seeds
• 1 clove garlic
• 25 or more large dried red chillis (the 10cm or so long ones from India)
• 1 tsp salt
• A little olive oil

How to make it:

1. Roast a handful of whole almonds in the oven – don’t burn them but bring the flavour out. Roast them at say 180C for about 20 minutes
2. Roughly chop the almonds
3. Fry in olive oil a couple of teaspoons of whole cumin seeds. Once browning and aromatic, turn off and add 1 crushed garlic clove and mix
4. Remove from the pan and put in a blender/chopper with the almonds and whole dried chillis
5. Process until you have a coarse paste

The end result is quite a “rustic” coarse paste, with very strong flavour. Try it!

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Check out this excellent article detailing the thankfully widening appreciation that meat consumption at the levels we see in the West is simply not sustainable, especially on a global scale. China is entering the global food import market and the relative affluence developing there and in other countries is going to make it impossible for meat consumption to continue as it is.

You simply cannot feed millions of tons of grain to animals in order to eat them and ignore the fact that this food goes a lot further when fed directly to humans. It is deeply ironic that China, with a diet typically very low in dairy and meat produce, may well be the deciding factor as to whether people in Western countries do or don’t have meat on their plate most days of the week in 5 years time.

One thing’s for sure – its going to become a lot more expensive, which is as it should be. The gap between non-organic and organic prices is likely to narrow as the bottom-of-the-barrel produced meat prices increase due to scarcity. This is probably a good thing in the long term, as people will have notchoice but to eat less but better reared meat and dairy products. It might even in time turn around the prospects of our respective nations’ health – but possibly not so for the Chinese.

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I was in London the other day and noticed a lot of Cadbury chocolate adverts for Dairy Milk bars, along the lines of  "There’s a glass and a half of milk in every bar". This is a very disturbing ploy for which the ASA should be punishing Cadbury – effectively trying to sell their awful chocolate (which it has been argued can’t be called chocolate due to the high level of fats relative to cocoa) as a "healthy" food on the basis that most people, incorrectly, believe cow’s milk to be a healthy food product.

The conspiratorial side of me wondered if there was a joint promotion going on between the Dairy Council and Cadbury to do what is effectively promotion of both products.

Instead, I happened on a link of sorts. Yahoo appear to be in the beta testing phase of a new service called Yahoo Kids! One presumes this is to protect children from all the potentially offensive and/or insanely boring parts of Yahoo – or you could argue its to collate as much marketing information on children as possible… there is a caveat at the footer of their pages about collection personal information.

Anyway, I found the Food and Eating section. Oh the horror. Take out a couple of entries from oxfam about chocolate and tea, and you have direct links to:

• 4 (yes you read correctly, four) Cadbury chocolate sites, presumably "educational" in nature
• The British Egg Information Service – hey we all need more cholesterol
• Kellogg’s – those bastions of sweet cereals
• A site selling sweets
• The Dairy Council’s website – cow’s milk is for… cows
• Ribena – mmm more sugar
• Walkers – makers of crisps (who notably -do- make unsalted crisps)

There’s a couple of minor information sites there too, but that’s the section so far. No doubt Yahoo! will say it is early days yet, but I have this one question:

How long will it be before advertising regulations on children’s junk foods are extended to places where children will be given false "educational" material on the web?
You can bet this tactic is in use elsewhere on the web, where frankly pathetic people are paid to find sites like this to list links to the "educational" content they are providing to suck kids into their products.

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The cake shown here is a completely different vegan chocolate fudge cake… but isn’t it delicious looking! Anyway, Demuths is one of the few “gourmet” level vegetarian eateries in the UK. The food is just brilliant. There’s also a new cookery book in the pipeline, which I’m really looking forward to.
As a person who works with a fair amount of web content, you simply cannot emphasize enough the important of great imagery. If you have a “small” (read: low budget) website out there but it really matters to you in commercial terms, you simply have to spend some money on getting a great photographer to take those killer images you need to get your point across. On the web a lot of people see more than they read.

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I quote:

"Because it contains no calories, aspartame is considered a boon to health-conscious individuals everywhere; and most of us, if we think about it at all, think it is safe. But independent scientists say aspartame can produce a range of disturbing adverse effects in humans, including headaches, memory loss, mood swings, seizures, multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s-like symptoms, tumours and even death."

The full article is available in the print version of the magazine, and includes a timeline since 1965 covering the development of the chemical through to today, including the various tactics used to gain FDA approval including fraudulent trials and hiring FDA staff after approval. Oh, and "all-round good guy" Donald Rumsfeld is implicated – appointed as CEO to Searle (the company behind Nutrasweet) and later when the Reagan administration begins, magically the product gets FDA approval within a year after languishing unapproved for 15 years.

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While we don’t go for convenience foods normally it is very nice to be able to have something like this for times like parties at other peoples’ houses where it is often very difficult to provide foods that are vegetarian and gluten free and similar to what other children are eating. It’s the kind of thing that will become more of a problem as she gets older.

These pizzas are absolutely amazing for gluten-free pizza bases though – of course nowhere near a gourment extra-thin true Italian-style wood fired pizza, more like your average cheap "tomato and mozzarella with spongey base" fare. However to achieve that at all without gluten is simply amazing. It’s just a shame they have to use cow’s milk and eggs in them or I’d be eating them myself occasionally (yes, gluten avoidance can lower your good taste barriers).

Score 1 for Dietary Specials though, as unlike some of their other products (such as their croissants), and a lot of the dreaded Tru-free stuff, there’s no hydrogenated fats in the pizzas. 

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The WHO and other organisations are getting rather anxious about a potentially massive outbreak of blird flu in humans. It is truly terrifying.

We’re talking tens of millions of people dying, and the response is along the lines of… "let’s wait until it gets here and then contain the birds and people it infects, and give out millions of vaccines".

As far as I can gather these bird flu cases are arising from intensive breeding of poultry for meat. It is not clear whether past flu epidemics were caused by this, although I’m sure some or all weren’t. After all such intensive rearing of animals is a relatively recent development.

However, given the close link with the outbreaks in the last few years it would seem complete madness for humans to keep breeding animals in these conditions, given the huge number of lives at risk.

So this is yet another reason to stop eating meat – and world leaders should be working to reduce the levels of poultry farming globally, as it’s always better to tackle the cause of a problem rather than the symptom. This should also help to mitigate a whole slew of other health and social problems.

I also heard on the radio that a major pharmaceutical company has donated millions of doses of a flu drug to the WHO to help control any outbreaks. Call me a cynic but I hope the drug has been sufficiently tested already and that people in less-developed countries will not be used as live trials when an outbreak does occur.

Don’t get me started on the huge amounts of Amazon forest being destroyed primarily to grow soya beans for cattle feed.

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