Italian baking, and Italian bread in general, tends to be a lot more relaxed than French baking. Where a Parisian baguette must have a specific number of slashes, and be baked to a certain hue and uniformity, an Italian ciabatta ‘passes’ if it looks vaguely like a slipper. Italian bread is a lot more rustic, [...]
So, cold isn’t it? All of a sudden, those rolled pieces of brisket and the big slabs of pork belly in the butcher’s window don’t seem like such a bad idea. Nor do the ox tails, hanging in braces on butcher’s hooks like some sort of skewered alien lifeforms. Well, never one to shy away [...]
Hype cycles are the invention of a big American technology consultancy firm who use them to show the way very new types of technology move from ‘stupid idea, it’ll never work’ right through to general acceptance as something that just ‘is’. A hype cycle is basically a graph that plots a line that rises very steeply [...]
What are friends for, eh? Well, sometimes, they’re useful for helpfully pointing out that your lovingly crafted peri peri sauce looks like a medical sample, suggesting that you might want to get that checked out at the special clinic, and then bombarding you with inappropriate You Tube clips, including the Manic Street Preacher’s Slash and [...]
A few months ago, we spent a weekend in Berlin, an edgy, intoxicating, graffiti-covered city tortured by its own past, the streets forming the canvas on which the horrors of the last century were played out. It was cold. Very cold. A type of unrelenting cold that attacked at the very core, damp, miserable, wretched, weather [...]