Stomachs on legs are proud to present

Encountered at a street-side eatery & juice place near Silom.

Fertility festival at Tagata Shrine, Aichi, takes place every year on March 15 when you can encounter phallus-shaped snacks.




In case you are wondering, they are chocolate-covered bananas.



...and okonomiyaki-coated frank.

Superflex.


http://superflex.net/

Romanescu Cauliflower ...who wooda thunk it.

From the simple cauli to the currency market.. they can all get mixed up in the Fibonacci sequence.

Is there a math equation for this though?

Strolled past this the other day.


.

The village pet store and charcoal grill

By definition a refrigerator stands alone in its corner and, withdrawn from the world, it controls its atmosphere and protects its contents. Its door must be kept closed, otherwise it looses its cool. This withdrawal explains the isolation of refrigerators.
Is it possible to envision the encounter between two refrigerators? In this installation, two solitudes unite through a canal connecting their inside worlds. This unusual encounter produces a mist on the surface that binds them together.

Michel de Broin

Thai's love branding and packaging more than most I've decided... and Vanilla Industries hits the brand loving spot. Vanilla Industries is the brainchild of the children of mega food conglomerate, S&P. S&P make pretty bad and pretty low grade bakery items for the large scale Thai market. Their children make marginally better bistro food at higher prices and better packaging.

First came the bistro and creperie...now comes dim sum and "japanese cafe" (whatever that is supposed to be)

On Ekkamai soi 12, in one of the many very cool old 1970s era houses that dominate the tree lined back sois of Sukhumvit is Vanilla Royal and Vanilla Garden.




Vanilla Royal is a dim sum...fairly bad, gluggy dim sum....edible mind you. The decor is, staff uniforms and overall presentation is, as to be expected great. So people come and they eat. Note the mercedes and bmw's in the car park. It's not that pricy by western standards but very pricy by Thai standards so its strictly high so in there.




Further down the garden path you can wash down your gluggy dim sum and fishy prawn flavour down with some decent coffee...or choose from their Western-inspired Japanese food at their Japanese Cafe...and try to remember you're in Thailand...





We went back for a second try, after the dim sum to try the cafe. Hock had the katsu pork bun, not quite what he had in mind, but tasty apparently


I had a somewhat comforting prawn and avocado sandwich drowned with seafood mayo wedged on pillowy soft white bread



It wasn't terrible but it was far from memorable.....I like a good garden, especially in Bangkok but there really is little reason food wise to visit this place

Update: well maybe I was wrong....we went back there again and had a coffee and sandwiches. The coffee is decent and the sandwiches were sandwiches of my childhood. Egg and mayo on crustless white bread and ham cheese and mushroom toasted on crustless white bread. Terribly trashy by western standards but decidedly Japanese and hi society by Thai ones. There is something strangely comforting about a well made egg sandwich that takes me and Hock back to our 1970s childhoods, vegemite and cheese sandwiches, cheese and Piccadilly sandwiches, vegemite and chip sandwiches, ham and cheese sandwiches, those strange salad rolls that always had grated carrot in them, lamingtons and custard pies....they probably just need to put asparagus rolls and some curried egg on the menu and it could quite easily be renamed the New Zealand Edmond's Cookbook Cafe. But then probably no one would go

I laugh in the face of Gout.



Though the Doc informs me I will without a doubt have the pleasure of getting gout when I am older.

Something to look forward too.

In the meantime bring on the brewers yeast and pigs liver.

Further professional rebuttal to the organic myths article, Peter Melchett of the Soil Association rebuts the silliness of Rob Johnston in the Independent

Thank god someone knows what they are talking about

BBC Four investigates efforts to introduce carbon labelling for food in the program "Costing the Earth"

An argument for fair trade ready made mircrowave chicken meals from africa?

Turns out the economies of scale via supermarkets might be quite good afterall...at least this might shut the holier than thou "locavores" up....but not necessarily

all and all it looks like the future is set to give us ethical dialemmas up the ying yang

enter the ethical quagmire here

Evil Eggplant

Pictured: violet, kumquat and fig macarons from the mediocre patisserie counter at Alan Yau's Yauatcha restaurant in Soho (it's right across from the kiwi coffee shop called Flat White which was also mildly disappointing).

It seems macarons are best left to the French, and high-end Japanese-style confectionary is best left to the Japanese, rather than trying to imitate both along with a dollop of jammy English blandness.

Macarons from Laduree or Pierre Herme or various small shops in Paris are very delicate, melt in your mouth affairs. These had the requisite jewel-like colours, but the flavours were not pronounced enough and the filling was a shock: a mouthful of sticky sweet jam. Yuck!

I've read that Alan Yau doesn't like Chinese sweets and desserts – so has the entrepreneur decided to tailor his offerings at Yauatcha to the tastes of little old English ladies? That's the only logic I can see behind the stodgy-jam-filled macarons idea. He would be better off making refined versions of custard tarts and puff pastries, or ginger-anise or jasmine or almondy apricot-kernel flavoured sweet rice flour dusted jellies in pretty shapes or, well...Actually there are a range of Asian-inspired French patisserie on offer, but this type of thing is never done properly outside of Asia. Not even the French or the Japanese patisserie chefs who live in Paris (i.e. Sadaharu Aoki) can get it right. Maybe it's our fault for being Westerners with bland palates.

Alan Yau is not actually the chef. He's an entrepreneur, who learned the restaurant trade first in his father's takeaway bar, then by opening the westernised-Japanese noodle chain called Wagamama in 1992, which he then sold and which grew into a behemoth. He has achieved something like celebrity-chef status via his 'soft-engineering' (mega-hussling and idea-mongering) in the restaurant trade.

He now owns two Michelin-starred Chinese restaurants in London, Yauatcha and Hakkasan (chefs Tong Chee Hwee and Cheong Wah Soon, both from Singapore), and a popular Thai chain called Busaba Eathai in collaboration with chef David Thompson. Smart guy... with a knack for seeing those obvious gaps in the culinary scene. I wish I could impress upon him the huge market potential for gourmet burgers or yakitori in Cologne – then he could go do all the venture capital stuff and make it a reality. And we wouldn't even need to have a 4-million pound restaurant interior. Child's play for Yau, I'd say!

But he and his patisserie chef Stephane Suchata at Yauatcha are not that good at desserts.