A random thread for food things that don't really warrant a thread of their own

[Jurek]

My granddaughter would like a rainbow cake for her second birthday. Is it wikid of me to use the pride flag colours and see how long till someone notices?* I think I have to.


* Someone absolutely will, I will be found out, that's accepted

Sorry, what's the difference? The pride flag colours are the colours of the rainbow at least as far as a cake goes. If someone claims there are seven colours in the rainbow they are as wrong as Newton was.

[Apologies, I'm a colour nerd and could bore the arse off you with this]

I'm genuinely interested to know how many colours you think there are, and what are they.
Everywhere I've looked says 7 - ROYGBIV.

[Clare]

Pride is ROYGBV (no I).

[The Family Cyclist]

By eck meats expensive, we've been eating less and less meat. Does depend on who does the shop as I'm the driver for eating less meat in our house but just seen a butchers on Facebook and a rolled shoulder of lamb is 30 quid.

[Tim Hall]

My granddaughter would like a rainbow cake for her second birthday. Is it wikid of me to use the pride flag colours and see how long till someone notices?* I think I have to.


* Someone absolutely will, I will be found out, that's accepted

Sorry, what's the difference? The pride flag colours are the colours of the rainbow at least as far as a cake goes. If someone claims there are seven colours in the rainbow they are as wrong as Newton was.

[Apologies, I'm a colour nerd and could bore the arse off you with this]

I'm genuinely interested to know how many colours you think there are, and what are they.
Everywhere I've looked says 7 - ROYGBIV.

I think it's something to do with Newton wanting seven colours, as seven was seen as a "better" number, so he bunged Indigo into the sequence.
(This is based on vague recollection of a radio 4 programme I heard a few years ago. Possibly.)

[Tim Hall]

Meanwhile, I went for a Healthy Walk today with My Young Lady and two of her many many children. We went to a Thee Pubbe for lunch. They rather brilliantly managed to use four different serving receptacles for our food.
1. Ceramic bowl, chicken curry
2. Basket. Scampi and chips
3. Slither of wood. Sandwiches
4. Slate. Burger and chips.
#bringbackrealplates

[Cudzoziemiec]

Meanwhile, I went for a Healthy Walk today with My Young Lady and two of her many many children. We went to a Thee Pubbe for lunch. They rather brilliantly managed to use four different serving receptacles for our food.
1. Ceramic bowl, chicken curry
2. Basket. Scampi and chips
3. Slither of wood. Sandwiches
4. Slate. Burger and chips.
#bringbackrealplates

I recently read a book set partly in a Welsh slate quarry circa 1916. One of the things it mentioned was "quarry supper", which led me to discover this poem:

The archaeology of eating's a strange thing;
our lunching in London
was fishfinger modern
like the plates on the placemats
but by just clearing the topsoil,
exposing the rock, and firing a fissure
through the layers of history,
we found we were still working
the same old "bargen"...
at mealtimes at least

Mam would summon us
for our suburban fare at five,
for that was expected of the wife
of a man for whom the rock was his life,

and some habits are as resilient
as those purple "dychis" and "ladis"
that were ferried formerly from Dinorwig

(although our family
had long since been driven
from their famine kitchen "bargen"
a and decamped to London
where stones of another ilk
could be split like silk...)

* * * * *
The archaeology of eating's a strange thing;
It's five once more, in Caernarfon this time,
and the spoons keenly sing
as they scrape the bowls...
"Hey!" I say, "you're not in the quarry now!"

-my mother's words in the London of my youth,
my grandmother's words in Llanrwst before that,
and my great grandmother's words
in the Fachwen of yore
relic-like words that have outlasted
my forefathers who once blasted
hewn rock from rough rock
and in the shed,
dressed slate into bread...

* * * * *
The archaeology of eating's
a strange thing...
tonight in London
though knowing nothing of dirt clearing
and tramway - making,
I still cleave my ideas,
and dress them on my imagination's edge,
because part of me
is still purple slate at heart
even tonight with my middle class haircut
and my Beaujolais teeth;

as I scratch new customs on an old slate
I know full well
I'm just a spit-and-hanky-wipe
away from a much harder kind of life;

seventy years
and two hundred miles down the line,
the sound of a closed quarry's hooter
still calls us to table to dine

Ifor ap Glyn

[graculus]

But do they go well with turnips?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-somerset-64789834

[Kim]

I'm genuinely interested to know how many colours you think there are, and what are they.

Two and a half.   

Blue, green and the shorter end of red.

[mrcharly-YHT]

By eck meats expensive, we've been eating less and less meat. Does depend on who does the shop as I'm the driver for eating less meat in our house but just seen a butchers on Facebook and a rolled shoulder of lamb is 30 quid.

Meanwhile, farmers are struggling to get enough for lambs to make it worthwhile raising them.

Something wrong here, methinks.

[pcolbeck]

I'm genuinely interested to know how many colours you think there are, and what are they.

Two and a half.   

Blue, green and the shorter end of red.

How many colours you think there are is cultural apparently. Yes the spectrum is a fixed part of nature but how we divide it up and name it isn't. The ancient Greeks had no word for "blue", they considered it a shade of green. We have "pink" as a distinct colour when its really just a shade of red.  Italians have a specific name for a shade of light blue " azzurro" which incidentally is the colour of the national football teams shirts and the nickname for them.

[Mr Larrington]

Homer thought the sea was the same colour as wine, but on the other hand he was blind* so he can probably be forgiven that one.

* Allegedly

[spesh]

Homer thought the sea was the same colour as wine, but on the other hand he was blind* so he can probably be forgiven that one.

* Allegedly

It's been a while since I've read any Homer, but ISTR that it's a bit more complicated than that, and relates to the evolution of languages.

<tappity tappity>

We may never know for sure, but one peculiar fact casts the mystery in an interesting light: there is no word for “blue” in ancient Greek.

Homer’s descriptions of color in The Iliad and The Odyssey, taken literally, paint an almost psychedelic landscape: in addition to the sea, sheep were also the color of wine; honey was green, as were the fear-filled faces of men; and the sky is often described as bronze.

It gets stranger. Not only was Homer’s palette limited to only five colors (metallics, black, white, yellow-green, and red), but a prominent philosopher even centuries later, Empedocles, believed that all color was limited to four categories: white/light, dark/black, red, and yellow. Xenophanes, another philosopher, described the rainbow as having but three bands of color: porphyra (dark purple), khloros, and erythros (red).

The conspicuous absence of blue is not limited to the Greeks. The color “blue” appears not once in the New Testament, and its appearance in the Torah is questioned (there are two words argued to be types of blue, sappir and tekeleth, but the latter appears to be arguably purple, and neither color is used, for instance, to describe the sky). Ancient Japanese used the same word for blue and green (青 Ao), and even modern Japanese describes, for instance, thriving trees as being “very blue,” retaining this artifact (青々とした: meaning “lush” or “abundant”).

https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/hoffman_01_13/

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine-dark_sea_(Homer)

[Mr Larrington]

Conclusion: 'shrooms were more common in Ancient Greece than previously suspected.

See also: Revelation, Book of.

[T42]

Italians have a specific name for a shade of light blue " azzurro" which incidentally is the colour of the national football teams shirts and the nickname for them.

Bialetti brought out a beautiful Squadra Azzura moka pot a couple of football world cups ago.  Wish I'd bought one back then, even though I'm not that keen on moka-pot coffee and I loathe football.

[Ham]

Well, after all that faffage, the reality of achieving an exact colour mixing white icing hit home. Six letters in her name, six colours we haz in our rainbow.

[andrewc]

https://twitter.com/UllapoolCraic/status/1631050352601464833


£50 for 2 portions of chish & fips at the Kylesku Hotel !   According to that tweet the same people are buying up places all along the NC500 route and jacking the prices sky high. 

[Cudzoziemiec]

Which is presumably only going to drive more NC500 visitors into campervans, with attendant litter.

[Basil]

The pub provided a home made lamb cawl for clwb wisgi tonight.   

[Cudzoziemiec]

Toblerone again. It has 11 segments. Or 15. Or another number. Depends when and where.

In 2016, Toblerone grabbed headlines when it increased the gaps between the triangular chocolate chunks on bars sold in the UK, supposedly to be able to sell the snack at the same price but at a weight reduced from 170g to 150g. A year later, Mondelēz also reduced the weight of Toblerone bars sold in Germany, with the number of triangular peaks down to 11 from 15.

Such “controversies” guaranteed Toblerone a run of free marketing, with sales reportedly rising in spite of supposed outrage among customers. The bar reverted to its original shape in 2018.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/05/matterhorn-mountain-toblerone-packaging-design-switzerland

[Pickled Onion]

My granddaughter would like a rainbow cake for her second birthday. Is it wikid of me to use the pride flag colours and see how long till someone notices?* I think I have to.


* Someone absolutely will, I will be found out, that's accepted

Sorry, what's the difference? The pride flag colours are the colours of the rainbow at least as far as a cake goes. If someone claims there are seven colours in the rainbow they are as wrong as Newton was.

[Apologies, I'm a colour nerd and could bore the arse off you with this]

I'm genuinely interested to know how many colours you think there are, and what are they.
Everywhere I've looked says 7 - ROYGBIV.

Only just saw this...

For someone with normal colour vision, there are approximately 10⁶ discernible colours (ref: Pointer et al, 1980-mumble)

For the named colours in a spectrum/rainbow, up to Newton people said there were five (RYGBV) but in a kind of "unified theory" way, Newton wanted there to be seven. Mostly because of the musical octave, but also seven days in a week, seven planets in the solar system. If we accept orange, there are six.

[Mrs Pingu]

I see the Guardian has a Felicity Cloake 'how to make' on pasteis de nata.
They look like a right PITA to make.
Probably just as well given my expanding waistline.

[citoyen]

I see the Guardian has a Felicity Cloake 'how to make' on pasteis de nata.
They look like a right PITA to make.
Probably just as well given my expanding waistline.

Interesting! They're something I've been wanting to make for a while but I've never even got as far as researching a recipe. I've made croissants and I think these look like less faff.

I've often wondered how they get that texture in the custard, which is nothing like the texture of an English custard tart at all.

May well give them a go.

[mrcharly-YHT]

https://twitter.com/UllapoolCraic/status/1631050352601464833


£50 for 2 portions of chish & fips at the Kylesku Hotel !   According to that tweet the same people are buying up places all along the NC500 route and jacking the prices sky high.

That doesn't seem excessive to me.

Remote location == more expensive to operate.
Busy tourist route == charge more

I note that the hotel offers a 30% discount for locals.

Of the two decent local places we eat out in, the only dishes under £20 that they offer are vegetarian (edit- just checked and they do have pork belly for £19). Fish dishes are £22-£32.

Fish, oddly, is expensive up here.
I've spent £18 on buying white fish that was to cook for a meal for 3 people.

[Wowbagger]

That wonderful moment when the coffee thingy makes the whooshing noises to declare that the coffee's ready, but then when you pour it you realise you forgot to put any coffee in.

[T42]

Lunch at our favourite Thai restaurant yesterday - been going there for 20 years. Very disappointing: the noodles weren't warm enough and the salt & pepper prawns had too much sugar & not-very-Thai 5-spice powder, no garlic or ginger, and the salt & pepper mix was undetectable.  We do better at home.

Had the same dish last time and it was great, so we put it down to an off day and we'll see how they do next time.