Godiva treat from Nic
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Author Archives: Grace
Houses of Parliament Tour
The Houses of Parliament is the venue for the two houses of Parliament for the UK – the House of Lords, the upper house of Parliament responsible revising and initiating legislation, and the House of Commons, where the true power lays. It is the House of Commons who the Prime Minister is answerable to.
Tours of the Houses of Parliament are open to the general public (that is, non-residents) throughout the summer only, when the Houses are out on recess, or on Saturdays. Residents can get (free) tours throughout the year arranged through your MP or a Lord. So popular are these tours that apparently they have to be booked about six months in advance!
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On a lovely brilliant summer’s day Rache, Nic and I took the easier, but more expensive option, of buying tickets for a Saturday. The tour provided very popular and even though they limit numbers (I think approx. 30) there were at least three English groups that left in our particular time slot and each one was maxed out.
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The whole process of how the Houses of Parliament works was explained from how members get their “agenda” for the day, protocols in the two Houses (e.g. voting, speaking, where people sit!), and the history of significant art/statues were explained. I quite liked our tour guide but the big group made it difficult at times to hear what he was saying. We were taken through the House of Commons (the green room) and the House of Lords (the room). Interestingly in the House of Lords votes are physical votes, where members leave the chamber and walk through a particular division to indicate their choice. No hiding behind paperwork in the House of Lords!
The tour lasts for approx. 75 minutes and is well worth experiencing … if just to get a better understanding of how the UK legislative system operates. Unfortunately no photos inside the actual houses though 🙁
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Caleya Iberica
Caleya Iberica confusingly has two parts to the restaurant – the casual more bar-like atmosphere downstairs and the finer dining area upstairs, in addition the fine dining area seemed to be split even further into the main part where we were sat (we were the first diners, even arriving at 7pm!) and another area sort of along the top of the stairs. I was quite impressed with the space of the restaurant – it felt light and area and, even though we were the only diners upstairs for a little bit, the atmosphere of the noisier bar atmosphere filtered up to us.
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Additionally we, or I did since I was facing towards the window, had a lovely view down the street level courtesy of the floor to ceiling windows. Anyway, you’ll see what I mean if you visit … and this is something I definitely recommend that you do.
Normally first impressions are everything but I’m glad I didn’t let the first impression ruin the evening for me. When Sandra and I arrived at the front desk there was a receptionist/maitre ‘d there who was at first busy on the phone when we arrived but then proceeded, at the end of her call, to go fix the chairs by the bar. Um … hello? Remember us – the customer? Finally she came to check our reservation and brought us up accordingly to the fine dining area upstairs. It took the waiter some time to come to ask to give us a menu and, in his very very strong Spanish accent, explain the unavailabilities on the menu. It was unfortunate we couldn’t understand him but I did like the pro-active approach to making sure there was an attempt to tell us what we couldn’t have tonight. Thankfully a more understandable waitress came along to help us later on with our meal selections and service really picked up after this.
Normally in a new restaurant Sandra and I will try out the tasting menu. One of the unavailable dishes tonight happened to be on the tasting menu so the restaurant was very good at letting us play around with the menu to come up with a tasting menu of our own. In fact I suspect they would let you do this anyway to create your own tasting menu, which was pretty cool. Effectively a main/dish would be split into two and served to us, so portions were supposed to be a lot smaller but actually we walked out very very full!
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So what did we eat?
First up was a quarter of this mega loaf of bread served with two types olive oil salt. We must have been pretty hungry as we certainly dug into the bread which, in hindsight, could have been a mistake and might explain how full we felt at the end of the night. First up on our tasting menu was the Iberica Ham Croquetes. We got four each of these babies and they were delicious and very rich. Delicious.
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Next up was something that doesn’t necessarily look appetising and had Sandra worrying about the egg component (she’s not a fan of scrambled eggs) but was yummy. Corn crispbread, scrambled eggs, caramelised onions and Blue Cheese. For me it worked quite well although the crispbread was on the salty side.
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In substitution for a bean stew (not available) we chose a slow cooked octopus in its own jus with boletus (I had to google this – apparently it’s a mushroom), green asparagus, white onion and smoked paprika oil. I found I couldn’t really taste the smoked paprika oil drizzled over the onion but I think it worked mainly to take away the rawness of the onion. The octopus itself was extremely tender though strangely covered in a strange jelly like substance which made a delightful dish just a little off-putting.
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I’ll forgive the burnt bits on my roasted baby potatoes on the next dish because the lightly smoked organic salmon was perfectly cooked. I couldn’t taste the heat in the supposed chilli cauliflower sauce but this dish actually worked for me. But I suspect that’ s only be cause of the gorgeous and obviously fresh salmon.
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Next up was another substitute to the tasting menu. Instead of chicken crispy confit suckling pig, apple puree and frizzy salad. Hello manna from heaven! Okay yes the pig was probably a touch on the overly fat size and as a result an extremely rich dish but I loved it. That’s the pig lover in me I guess …
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The regular tasting menu has two desserts on it but in a bonus, because it was my birthday, we got an additional dessert course and free champers. Caleya I love you! The caramelised rice pudding was up first. Rice pudding – I love you too!
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Then the champers
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Then a very strange dish which actually worked well even though it again doesn’t look the greatest. Crème caramel as you’ve never seen it before made with Muscovado sugar, granny smith apple consumme, black olives and rocket. Yes you read right! It was quite a mix of sweet and sour, with a bite of the rocket.
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Then the most giant birthday cake I’ve ever received or seen from a restaurant (and gratis!) Sandra said she’d emailed them before hand just to ask that Happy Birthday be scrawled on my dessert and maybe a candle thrown in and the restaurant replied to say they would bake me a mini-cake. So lovely although, in all honesty, my stomach could barely fit anything in at this stage.
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I was so pleased with my meal tonight at Caleya Iberica. After a slow start with the service it really picked up. For example, unlike Chez Bruce, they explained each and every dish (something all good restaurants do), they were very quick at topping up our water (the water test!), the head waitress was always coming in to check in with us (and not too much) striking up a nice chatter and, at the end, we got goodbyes and good wishes for my birthday from all the staff, with the head waitress making a point of coming to our table before we left even though she was busy with another table.
I would be quite happy to darken the doors of Caleya Iberica again that’s for sure – though I’ll make sure next time not to eat so much as to require that I be rolled out the door …
Bompas and Parr: The Complete History of Food
Bompas and Parr are known best as the jelly mongers, molding jellies into interesting shapes such as well known 
buildings (like the Gherkin) and even glow in the dark jelly (this one for a Mark Ronson birthday party.) You can tell that these guys are all about innovating with food – but not just what you consume but how it smells, the textures, the tastes etc. For a few days only their latest venture is The Complete History of Food.
Pat and I had no idea whatsoever what to expect – all we knew was that we had to turn up at a particular time, that we’d get some food and, being sponsored by Courvoisier, a fair amount of alcohol!
The event was being held in a house on Belgrave Square. It turned out that every floor represented some decade in the history of food. The first room was our introduction. There was a guy there who was going to assess our “humours” – which apparently dictate whether your body was in harmony.
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He would assess which humour was more dominant than the rest and based on this he would prescribe you a restorative. If you were:
Choleric you would get Cabbage (white wine, caper, artichoke) paired with a Courvoisier Exclusif Rose Water.
Melancholic you would get Popsicle (lemon, sorrel) paired with a Courvoisier Exclusif pear and Cardamom Sidecar.
Phlegmatic you would get Popcorn (truffle, porcini) paired with a Courvoisier Exclusif Apricot Martini
Sanguine you would get Fig (Beetroot, port, vanilla) paired with a Courvoisier Exclusif Spiced Meade with celery bitters
The mixologists and chefs from Saf were responsible for the restoratives and was served to us in a flooded Banqueting chamber. I tell you I hadn’t even started drinking yet and it was a challenge to walk into the chamber without losing balance – the threat of the water was real! But no one fell in which was good.
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This was the Medieval period by the way. The next was the Contemporary where we took a lift all the way to the top floor! Actually the lift was a good thing because it basically broke up the group so Pat, myself and two other people (who where from New Zealand and were very friendly) had the top floor to ourselves for the next experience. Up here the treat was representing the current bounty of good food that we have in the world today. The Rocher a l’Or (Michelin starred chef Aiexis Gauthier of Gauthier Soho’s take on a “Ferroro Rocher”) was a port reduction centre, surrounded by duck foie gras, coated with caramelised almond and rolled in gold leaf. This was paired with a flat champagne cocktail with a fizzy grape (from mixologist Paul Tvaroh of Lounge Bohemia.) I really liked the idea behind the fizzy grape which was a surprise to the tongue and mouth.
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From Contemporary we headed down to the Early 20th Centry where we were faced with a bouncy castle designed like the inside of a stomach! It was very funny! The message here was about the increasing consciousness about the effects of food on the body. The stomach showed someone who had eaten a TV dinner … which was our next stop.
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The 1950s and the world of mass production and technology. This was really cool – no food here but a scratch and sniff TV dinner! Chicken, Chips, Peas and Generic Strawberry Pudding. It was very effective!
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After this TV Dinner and our work out in the bouncing stomach we were starting to work up quite an appetite so we were very happy to see that our next meal was the Iguanadon dinner. The stories goes that on New year’s Eve 1853 Anatomist Richard Owen and sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins teamed up to recreate life-size models of dinosaurs, the first in the world, at Crystal Palace to which 22 leading scientists were invited to dine in and around.
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The food from Bistrotheque was lovely: duck confit with lentils, beetroot, black champagne sauce. The duck was cooked perfectly. Accompanying our meal was Josephine’s Tea Garden by Ben Leggett: Courvoisier Exclusif with green tea, apple juice and elderflower cordial, garnished with fresh mint leaves and citrus wedges. Refreshing but I’d had too much alcohol at this stage and passed it on to Pat!
Finally we entered the Renaissance. We walked in this room which was overwhelmingly pink and fully of dessert! This was inspired by the time the Earl of Leicester tried to woo Queen Elizabeth I with an entire garden full of dessert (over 300!) This was also of the introduction of sugar hence our dessert of candied Orange, iris Jellies and Ambergris Posset with Courvoisier XO. The Ambergris is actually the vomit of sperm whales and is a highly sought after ingredient in the perfumery world – as it ages it gets more fragrant. Apparently it makes a good flavouring in food too with some claiming its an aphrodisiac! Oh – I forgot to say there was a “biometric jelly” in this room where you put your finger into this electric monitor and once it picks up your heartbeat the jelly above it starts to jump around. Quite funny.
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The experience tonight was extremely cool. It takes ordinary dining to another level and gave it an interesting twist. For the alcohol lovers you get quite a bit of alcohol and for the foodies there’s quite a representation from various fine dining providers in the London so you get a bit of both worlds. Great fun.
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Chez Bruce
Chez Bruce has long been on my to do list ever since I think it was Gary who recommended it to me all those years ago. Using my birthday next week as an excuse, ha ha, I got Nate, Caro and Pat out for a night out. Chez 
Bruce is in Wandsworth so an area where I don’t normally go, that is south of the river! It’s a fairly smallish location but was apparently just about to go under renovation. Pat and I were just hoping it wasn’t going to be like Viktor where they were just trying to run the ingredients down! Luckily it wasn’t like that at all.
Service, at the start, was quite good. Nate and Caro were running a little late and even though they were fully booked for the evening there was no pressure on us to turn the table around. Very nicely they even let me charge my iphone on the laptop they were using to manage bookings. They put us at the front of the room which was 
nice because we could enjoy the last light of summer that way. The drawback to this position was that our main waitress barely paid attention to us after our food started arriving though I noticed that didn’t affect the service the tables next to us were getting. Service also eventually started to get steadily worse – the lady who served our drinks kept getting our drinks wrong and to be honest she just didn’t seem like she could be bothered to get it right, food was very slow in coming out (taking almost 40 minutes between courses) and generally wait-staff just weren’t giving our table any attention at all. This was quite surprising as normally in a Michelin-starred restaurant service is their top priority.
Food-wise at least it was all very well put together. Surprisingly there was no amuse bouche, which I must admit I’ve come to expect now from these kinds of restaurants, or no other delights though we did get some nice fresh bread at the start.
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Our meals consisted of quite high quality ingredients and mostly working together though my main, Sea bream with provencale vegetable relish, grilled baby squid, sauce nero, gnocchi and almonds, was more complicated than it needed to be with so many competing ingredients that it was hard to tell the flavour or theme. The nero squid sauce was divine however and the baby squid themselves very tender. Food portions were quite reasonable too.
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In a sign that I’m starting to get used to rich food I voluntarily opted for the Roast calf sweetbreads with truffle veloute, mushrooms, spatzle and peas. This was gorgeous!
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The delightful food was finished with a rather large crème brulee.
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My experience at Chez Bruce tonight felt like quite a mixed bag – I was very disappointed in the service which started off so promisingly but I was very happy with the food. I’m hoping the blip in the service was just that and not a longer term sign that its going down hill.
Amsterdam, Holland
Its been about seven years since I last visited Amsterdam so my memory of it has faded somewhat. I think we 
stayed in a different area last time, being closer to the museums etc., but this time around Laney and I stayed not too far from the red light district. Actually finding decent accommodation for a reasonable price was quite hard, I guess it has something to do with it being summer but we finally we ended up at this B&B which was quite nice, came complete with a towel swan, even if we were on the top floor at the top of some really scary narrow winding stairs (admittedly something that Amsterdam is known for …) Our room even had a split level area with separate bed up a rickety ladder but Laney and I both worried that we’d be too tired, or something else, after a night out for either of us to make it 
safely up the ladder so we didn’t venture upstairs …
We were pretty lucky with our weekend in Amsterdam, the sun was shining, the temperatures nice and warm and Holland had reached the final of the World Cup (which was played today) so there was a great buzz in the air.
The Experience
We arrived late on a Friday night after a hard day at work and decided that there wasn’t a better time for a stroll. We ended up touring around the red light district where to my surprise practically everyone walking the street was a dude! I know that there is a particular attraction that is mainly for the men but I was surprised there weren’t at least a few females around. They say you shouldn’t take photos of the ladies in the red light district and it’s a fair piece of advice. For a start the ladies in the red boxes are there to earn and living, and not to be a tourist attraction, so its only respectful not to take photos of them as if they were performing monkeys. Secondly if you do end up taking a photo the ladies are not backwards in coming forward to swear at you, spit at you and even throw water at you. This was something we witnessed first hand when a person in front of us decided to take a photo! I felt really bad for both of them actually!
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Our visit to Amsterdam didn’t really have any sort of plan. We thought we’d just wake up and see what we felt like doing. First stop was somewhere for breakfast, or more like an early lunch. It was very nice not to be rushing around trying to fit everything in on a trip. After a breakfast/lunch of croquette for Laney and a hot dog for me (yummy) we were off walking the canals of Amsterdam. Amsterdam is really pretty though as I look at my self-photos again having them in their background every canal looked nearly exactly the same! Ha ha! I noticed there were hooks at the top of most buildings – apparently they used these hooks for moving big item stuff to the top floors rather than risking the narrow staircases they would move the furniture in through the windows. That’s pretty innovative.
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After about half an hour of casual strolling we arrived at the House of Bols, but before we got there we saw this:
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It didn’t click until a couple of house later that it wasn’t saying “I am sterdam” but rather “I amsterdam”! Derrr! Ha ha.
The House of Bols is a new museum, new in the sense I don’t recall it being there seven years ago, showcasing what Lucas Bols is all about. Basically its an alcohol museum but also filled with some interactive elements. The girl at the front desk was super friendly, even going so far as to help us with recommending one of her favourite local restaurants. Actually as a whole I’ve found that every Dutch person we ran into, in the service industry at least, was very friendly and always willing to have a long chat with us about anything and everything.
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Lucas Bols is supposedly the oldest Dutch company still active and the oldest distillery brand in the world. Bols is one line from the company and produces vodkas, gins, genevers (where gin evolved from) and liquers. We spent quite a bit of time in the museum, mainly because the alcohol was so strong that I wasn’t confident about being able to walk for a bit after drinking it! We also spent time in the Hall of Taste where there were over 35 different “smells” which you could test. It was fun but some of the smell were a little shocking and unexpected. Its amazing how many smells you actually misinterpret when you can’t see where it is originating from. At end of the hall is this funny mirror. Laney took the funniest photo ever which had her nearly wetting her pants. I’m sure she’s shown me the photo at least 20 times since over the rest of the weekend …
Another room at Bols is this music video room which Laney decided to transform into our own private disco. Heh heh.
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There are other exhibitions etc. in the House of Bols but that’s pretty much what we found interesting except for the alcohol. With your entry to House of Bols you get two free shots and a free cocktail – you redeem this at the end of your visit at the bar at the end. You get to choose your drink from a selection of cocktails, where you can also print out the recipes so you can make it at home. The bar was pretty cool and at the time of day we were there it wasn’t too busy which was nice – so we could take our time over drinks, take stupid photos etc. Its been a while since I’ve had alcohol and in combination with the fact it was very strong it really hit me for six. I could see all the other customers looking at me worriedly as with my glowing red face and bloodshot eyes they must have been worried I’d fall over or something. Heh heh.
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Sometimes I don’t know why I drink. I always look terrible!
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We met this guy there who was visiting from Germany (he was actually an American working overseas) and he was nice enough. I’m mentioning him because we later saw him at a Bulldog Café! Some people come to Amsterdam to sightsee and some people come experience … shall we say out of body experiences – so that was next up on our itinerary. I have admit that I’ve never indulged in any sort of mind/body altering substances, not even a cigarette, so the experience for me this weekend was very different. We started with a space cake which looked to me like a small chocolate muffin – it sold for €6! The cake tasted really nice but, sadly, it didn’t have any effect on me at all. We had a good table at the Bulldog Café though which overlooked some of the red light district so it was very entertaining to watch the men go in and out of the rooms!
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Not long after we’d finished our cakes the guy we met at the House of Bols came along and volunteered to get a packet of reefer. I wasn’t very sure about trying them but I’m glad I did because I know its definitely not for me. Once again they smokes had no effect on me at all, other than giving me a severe sore throat – perhaps I wasn’t smoking it right but it didn’t have any effect on Laney either. So, we decided we had to step it up.
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The list of what to do and what not to do with these things goes for pages and seemed almost intimidating before you even start but I think it sums to not eating anything before (to prevent nauseau) or after (it will reduce the effects) and not to do them in combination with other products (or you’ll have flashbacks later on). You’re also supposed to enjoy it in a quiet place, like the park, or your room but basically you should be relaxing and not moving around. This was a mistake we made because for the first hour or so we were walking around town – Laney said she wasn’t feeling any effect but all I remember was feeling scared because I couldn’t tell the difference between a dream and reality. Walking around felt like I was in my head somewhere and I could have easily curled up in a ball in the middle of the street and not realised. Every time I blinked my eyes I would lose five minutes. It was so weird. Thankfully eventually we went back to our room where, as you can imagine, climbing the stairs was an interesting experience. For the rest of the evening I was giggly and apparently talking really loud. A big storm came over Amsterdam as well so that only added to the interesting experience. Fair to say I don’t think I’ll be indulging again in the near future – the lost of control, or really, the loss of the concept of reality was just overwhelming.
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And that was Saturday! Sunday was a visit to the Heinekken Brewery. I remember going last time. Its quite a good attraction (did you know that they keep the DNA of the old brew alive!) and you get a couple of free drinks at the end. The funniest part is that when we got to the end of the visit and were going to get our drinks we found this very young Brazilian boy who was going around asking people who were leaving for their drinks if they hadn’t redeemed it. To say he was quite drunk was an understatement. Oh just a hint – there’s a room which has beds where you lay and watch a video above your head. This had the longest line ever for it but its not really worth it – all you get to watch is old adverts for Heinekken!
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After Heinekken we went in search of the field which apparently was going to have the biggest outdoor screens in Europe where they would broadcast the World Cup final To our disappointment we would be leaving Amsterdam just as the game started so we couldn’t stay to enjoy the festivities. We were still able to enjoy the atmosphere though, scoring orange T-shirts, and join the flow of orange …
Oh, for a different kind of souvenir make sure you visit this shop:
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Melur
I only know about Melur because of a recent promotional campaign with the people at Groupon/Mycitydeals. A bunch of us Asian folk headed down tonight for a quick meal. I must say I was expecting a kind of cheap and cheerful place but when I walked into their restaurant on Edgware Road I was very surprised – inside it was fairly modern and new and it was relatively busy, even at 6pm in the evening! Checking out their website now its apparently Malaysian Cuisine with French Panache!
They were certainly French with the service which was impeccable. Even more impressively they got each and every one of our orders (there were eight of us) correct and served to the right person despite the fact we were all over the place with our orders!
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Food is very reasonably priced, even without our discount, with starters around the £3-£6 range, mains/noodles averaging around £6-£10, and desserts about £4. My calamari which I had for starters was the best I have in some time – lightly fried (it was clear that new oil had been used), tender, full of flavour and there was a lot of it! My mee goreng noodles were a bit disappointing though its fair to say I’ve yet to find a good one in London. On the other hand the char kway teow, that a couple of the others had, looked pretty good.
I could resist a dessert to finish my meal. It was very very sweet.
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Although none of us really went for it there are some great drinks on the cocktail menu (including non-alcoholic stuff).
And for any Muslims who want to try Malaysian food – its all Halal!
Finally, you gotta laugh at their toilet signs!
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National Dining Rooms, National Cafe and Cape Town Fish Market
For our catch up tonight Jenny and I had planned on going to the National Dining Rooms. Unfortunately they were apparently not open evenings so we ended up in The National Café instead. The room is lovely but unfortunately the service was horrid. Jenny had made reservations for us but when we walked in no one paid attention to us so we weren’t sure if we should just sit ourselves down. We ended up walking to the back to the bar to ask one of the bar men what we needed to do!
Once we sat down our waiter took an age to come over and give us our menus, and then he took another age to come back to take our orders! This café has generally gotten good reviews so it must have been a terrible terrible blip in service for tonight. We got so tired of the lack of service that we decided to just pay for our drinks and leave (and even then it took an age for our bill to be brought to us.)
Very disappointed.
We headed over to Cape Town Fish Market where we were disappointed for another reason.
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The service was excellent and friendly, even when I tipped all the pepper over my fish! I blame the last person who used the pepper …. but the food was very average. The sushi roll was okay but our shared main of the Kalk Bay Platter (prawns, mussels, fillet of fish, calamari and Robata baby squid) for £36.95 seemed quite overpriced for what we got. The fried stuff was a bit soggy, the prawns didn’t taste right, and the fillet of fish was on the warm rather than hot side (it tasted much better after I got a fresh hot fish …) The Robata baby squid was probably the best thing on the plate but I kind of felt ripped off anyway.
Dana Centre: The Science Behind Ice Cream
The Dana Centre at the Science Museum is a pretty cool concept – an adult focused venue it hosts a variety of
evening events focusing on contemporary science. Tonight’s event, though still adult-only, would appeal to the 
child in all of us: The Science Behind Ice Cream.
We had two speakers, Dr Chris Clark, from R&D at Unilever to give us his perspective on ice cream and Christian Oddono, from the famed Oddono’s in South Kensington to give us his perspective on gelati. Both were compelling and charming speakers, though of course the topic was quite interesting of itself!
Dr Chris Clark went first and I tell you there is so much about ice cream that I don’t know. For example, ice cream is at least 50% air with the other half made up of ice (30%), fat (4.5%-15%) which is used to stabilise the air bubbles to increase creaminess in ice-cream and the balance a “matrix” – a sticky substance which is composed of milk, sugars and stabilisers. He also talked us through how you make ice cream including olden days when they used to “refrigerate” ice cream using salt and ice only. No one quite knows who or when ice cream was made but his favourite story is that ice cream was invented by Mongolian Horsemen. Ice cream really needs two basic elements – cold and movement, so the theory was that when the horsemen were taking cream in containers as provisions for long journies the horses galloping caused air bubbles/ice crystals to form in the cream and of course in Mongolia it was so cold that it froze thus the creation of ice cream. Whether its true or not the story seems quite a romantic story of the origins of ice cream.
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Then the demonstration part of his talk. After donning all the necessary equipment (goggles and gloves) he took a tub of chocolate custard, a bottle of liquid nitrogen, a wooden spoon and stainless steel bowl and ta-da he had chocolate “ice cream”. It kind of looked a bit of a mess but we could see where he was going – cold and stirring (causing the air bubbles.)
So the secret to really fine velvety smooth ice cream is a lot of fat (so you’ll find that a Magnum ice cream probably has about 4x the amount of fat of regular ice cream), but of course that wouldn’t be very good for our long term health! Therefore Unilever are trying to develop a way to keep sugar and fat contents low but still allow them to produce this ice cream and one way is to make the fat droplets really really small. Let’s see how 
they go! At this point of the talk Christian made an observation that fat goes the pleasure zone of your head so that’s why sorbets are less pleasurable than ice cream – because they have limited fat. As in all things there is research going on in this area to make sorbet more pleasurable.
Another way you can compare ice cream is that a higher quality ice cream like Ben and Jerry’s is going to feel physically heavier than a cheaper ice cream – and that’s why ice creams are sold by volume not weight.
I could have listened to Chris speak on ice cream all day but he wrapped it up and we got into our taste testing session! Crazy flavours of gelati that were home produced so to speak by Christian at his gelati store. The flavours were:
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1. Salmon. This really tasted like a cold salmon mousse. Taste was much improved when eaten with the lovely waffle cone.
2. Mustard (Wholegrain Yellow Mustard). Though I probably wouldn’t eat too much of this one the heat in this ice cream was strangely refreshing in a way that say a chilli or wasabi flavour gelati wouldn’t be. Really strong flavours but like the Salmon the taste was much improved when combined with the waffle cone it came in.
3. Banana, Parmesan and Garlic. In a toasted sandwich this is actually exactly the kind of thing I’d eat (though I’d probably also through in bacon or ham ….) but in a gelati? Odd! Apparently this came from some ice cream creation contest that Heston Blumenthal was judging at some food fair a few years ago. He awarded it second place … behind a bombay mix flavour! Taste-wise this gelati really grew on me – the sweetness of the banana followed by the sharpness of the parmesan and garlic. But I suspect its not for everyone …
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4. Chilli chocolate. Then we moved on to more regular and dessert like gelati. I wouldn’t normally go for a chocolate ice cream/gelati but this one was divine. Probably because the chocolate was very rich.
5. Honey and Lavendar. The best flavour of the evening I think it terms of actual palatability. Very very sweet though.
6. Green Tea. A refreshing flavour to have as the last.
Interestingly like a wine tasting the others at our table disposed of their ice creams after having a bit of a taste … but I wasn’t going to waste any part of them. 😉
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Whilst we were being served our gelati poor Christian had the difficult task of talking! Clearly the audience attention was split between the tasting and his talk. He was quite a compelling speaker and told us of how he started his business (his background is actually in finance), speaking of the time his shop was featured in an episode of “Out of the Frying Pan”, and then describing the differences between gelati and ice cream. In essence gelati is focused more on using fresh ingredients, use of a different machine, and the fact it has a greater overrun than ice cream (that is, you can make more in volume) so it freezes a lot harder. He mentioned a few good gelati shops in London including Marine Ices (which has been on my to do list for a few years now!) Christian also spoke of the impact on the environment, e.g. sourcing fresh ingredients, and even psychology – he avoids colouring in his gelati as it impacts the behaviour of children.
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Here are some fun facts:
– The top 3 flavours in England (according to Unilever) are: Vanilla, Chocolate and Strawberry!
– The worst flavours made by Oddono’s and Unilever were Guiness and a Pink Grape Fruit Ice Lolly respectively
– The Unilever Holy Grail is Fresh Strawberry ice cream. The problem being that as soon as you crush strawberry it loses its flavour.
It was an enthralling evening … even if my belly is aching a bit from all that ice cream! Heh heh!
The Mercedes-Benz World Summer Concert Series
Since I haven’t been to any of the other music festivals this summer, and I didn’t have any on the calendar, when the email for discount tickets to the Mercedes-Benz World Summer Concert Series came into my inbox I thought why not. The line-up didn’t sound too bad with Will Young, The Saturdays, Scouting for Girls, Alexandra Burke and Olly Murs though if I’m honest the only reason I wanted to go was to see Alexandra Burke! and I guess maybe a little part of me wanted to see Will Young, who was the headlining act, too.
It was kind of weird to be going to a car factory/showroom/museum to attend a concert but hey for the most part it worked. There is heaps of space out there and all they really need was stage, lots of porta loos and lots of chairs!
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Unfortunately the planning wasn’t that great in terms of placement. We were towards the back and side and we had okay views … when the booze line wasn’t in our way! The alcohol shack was right behind us and because they were so slow the lines often went all the way down the aisles to at least halfway to the stage! Frustrating but at that stage people were up on their chairs and moving around and standing in the aisles to see the performers anyway!
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First up on stage was Olly Murs
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Then Alexandra Burke
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Scouting for Girls proved popular with the young teen girls
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A small break for the self-photos
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Rather randomly, as they weren’t on the bill, we had special guests The Wanted. Apparently to make up for the fact that the concert was late starting they had called up to say they were happy to go on and do a couple of numbers!
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The Saturdays were full of high energy though a dude with a giant yellow poster kept getting in our way!
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And finally Will Young, who was good but unfortunately our concentration was suffering at that stage and we left before he completed his set!
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The concert today was a looong afternoon and evening but we had a good time. The crowd was a totally random mix of people from really little kids to really old adults. It was fairly relaxed though queues were ridiculous first for the drink, then for snacks and then for ice cream! Ah well!
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