Monday Catch Up

Hi, all.  Hope you had a good weekend.  Mine was good apart from my wife falling ill on her PADI Open Water course, get well soon!

I had a nice bottle of my favourite Prosecco this weekend plus a lovely Chilean Fairtrade Carmenere, reviews to come.  I’m also going to start posting reviews of my favourite cook books, keep an eye open for those.

Finally, a Hello and Thank You to my favourite Bury St Edmunds blogger, Ruby.   Her blog of a couple of weeks ago left me with a craving for a Blue Goo ice cream.  I finally managed to have one this weekend when I was in town with my daughter, it was worth the wait.  A lovely ice cream and stonking value at £1.60 for a large cone.  You know, I now find myself looking at people in Bury with cameras and thinking “Is that Ruby?”.  I wonder if anyone will ever look at me in the wine isle of Sainsbury’s and think “Is that ITs Food?”…

I’m off to work on my wine reviews, check back later on in the week.

p.s. Did any of you pick up this bargain? Mine’s due to be delivered today!

Tech bargain for you: 500Gb Network hard drive

Hi all, wow, I think that’s 3 posts today! This won’t happen much but I’ve just come across a great bargain which I want to share with you.

Amazon.co.uk have the Western Digital 500GB World Edition Gigabit Ethernet NAS for £119.99. Wow!

This means you can plug this in to your network at home and immediately have 500Gb (1/2 a terrabyte!) of network storage available for anyone on the network. MP3 music files, DVD movies, photos, etc. I’ve got one to see if we can cheekily use it in our smaller offices as storage. Maybe it’ll work, maybe not.

If you think this is a good deal (I do!) then please click on the links above as they’ll help me out. Think of it as a thank you

iPods on the menu at The Fat Duck

You probably know that I’ve been lucky enough to go to The Fat Duck on a couple of occasions and think Heston Blumenthal is a foodie God. The restaurant has been named second best restaurant in the world for the second year running (it won the year before). It is fantastic!

Some people say that the food is pretentious but I wager they’ve never eaten there. The food is wonderful and it’s all about the experience of eating. Yes, a lot of effort is put into the food looking wonderful BUT the flavours are the real stars of the show. Heston puts flavours together you’d never have considered but it works incredibly well, EVERY TIME. Genius.

It now seems he’s gone a step further in scintillating your senses. Gizmodo reports that Heston’s new menu item “Sound of the Sea” has you listening to sea related sounds whilst eating the dish. I know he’s done something similar in Spain in the past which was all related to “The English Summer” (sounds of lawnmowers, bees, cricket, etc.)…

My ideal restaurant experience tends to be when someone else picks up the tab but, for others, they need a little bit more to get the most out of their nosh.

The Fat Duck in Bray, Berkshire is now one of the world’s most renowned restaurants, thanks to the mad genius of owner/chef Heston Blumenthal.

The man who’s never adverse to a bit of experimentation has decided iPods and music will enhance its menu. A new dish called ‘Sound of The Sea’ comes with iPods on the side. It is comprised of seaweed, seafood and tapioca, comes served in a wooden box with a surround of sand and seashells and diners are requested to listen to sounds of the sea on the iPods as they chow down.

Talking to Square Meal, Blumenthal said:

“I did a series of tests with Charles Spence at Oxford University three years ago, which revealed that sound can really enhance the sense of taste. We ate an oyster while listening to the sea and it tasted stronger and saltier than when we ate it while listening to barnyard noises, for example.”

No, you don’t get to keep the iPods.

You go Heston! When I can next afford to come along to the restaurant (unless you want to invite me) I’ll be trying this out. Having said that though it did cost us £800 (for 4 people) last time we went…

So, what do you think readers? Would you like to try the “Sound of the Sea”? Is Heston a genius (hint: Yes) or overrated (hint: No)? Have you eaten there? Do you want to pay for me to go? Let me know.

Boycott of Wine

No, don’t worry, that’s not me (it’s Cider and Prosecco for me this weekend!). I’m talking about Russia boycotting Moldovan wine. My favourite “blog about goings on in Russia” (!) English Russia reports…

Russian government has declared a boycott for wine from Moldova, so they confiscated all the Molodova wine in Moscow and put in one place and then used tractors to destroy it. But tractor is not so perfect in this job so there was left a lot of leftovers which attracted locals for some free wine. Pics and videos are below. Even policemen were interested in bottle or two of some illegal wine.

Those crazy Russians… I’d love to taste Moldovan wine, can anyone help me out?

Speaking of Moldova, if you fancy a very funny Moldovan based read try Playing the Moldovans at Tennis by Tony Hawks. No, note the skater Tony Hawk, Tony Hawks the British comedian of Morris Minor & The Majors “Stutter Rap” fame. This has to be one of my favourite books of all time, along with his other best sellers Round Ireland with a Fridge, One Hit Wonderland & A Piano in the Pyrenees.

Link to English Russia: Boycott of Wine (plus pictures & video)…

Please.. I need one of these…

So, I’ve just watched Brief #0159 from Geekbrief.tv where Cali installs Vista on her Mac Pro.

I have to put my hands up now, I’d love a Mac. I’ve played with Linux (currently running Ubuntu 7.04) which is fun but I’d really love a Mac. OS X looks amazing and with Boot Camp you can dual boot to Vista as well. As you probably know, my first experience with Vista was disappointing but I’d like to give it a go.

So, all you multi-millionaires out there please feel free to donate to the “get me a Mac” cause! If you’re slightly less “minted” then you could always buy something from Amazon and help that way , they even sell stuff from Apple!