Posts by Idiot Savant
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B Jones:
I've yet to find a hot chocolate anywhere that's as good as the stuff I make at home. I got the recipe years ago from the Listener - you melt a slab of dark chocolate with 300ml of cream in a pot over hot water, add a little vanilla essence (or baileys, or whisky, or chilli or whatever you like most with your chocolate), let it cool to room temperature and beat it until holds its shape. You add a spoonful to a cup of hot milk for hot choc without any grainy rubbish at the bottom. This would keep in the fridge for months, but it gets consumed pretty quickly.
That's not hot chocolate - that's a basic chocolate icing, which you're then diluting with milk!
The Listener did have a nice recipe for a Spanish hot chocolate: 50g of 55% bittersweet (10 squares) slowly melted into a cup of milk, with a Tbsp of sugar and a cinnamon stick; then once its all melted, you whisk in a cup of strong black coffee and a dash of brandy. Serve over orange peel. Alternatively, there's the recipe I grabbed over the net for Parisian: 1 cup milk, 1/3 cup cream, 1/4 cup sugar, 1/2 block 55% bittersweet, slowly melt it together. It's the Turkish coffee of hot chocolates, like taking molten dark chocolate and then diluting it a bit so its drinkable. use very small cups...
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Apparently they also now require word verification for posting if you make a large number of posts in a single day. What's a "large number"? Apparently more than 5 - in other words, if you are a high-volume political blog.
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Giz a yell if it looks like it's not quickly resolving. I might know someone who knows someone.
What's "quickly"? I finally have stuff to post today (an appalling incident of racism in Oz, Northern Territory Aborgines apparently winning control over fishing rights, and another US torture scandal), and it would be nice to be able to talk about it while its all current.
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Fuck me - I've been shut down as a "spam blog". It's a false positive, brought about by my pernicious habit of linking to content on news sites, but it means I can't post until some dumbarse in America actually looks at the blog and manually unlocks it. Which given US standards of "customer service", could never happen.
If I'm not unlocked in 20 days, I get deleted. Marvellous.
Fscking false positives.
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As for its shittiness, is it really that bad? Am I led to believe that SB's global dominance has been based on selling crud?
Nope; its coffee is apparently very good by American standards. But it just doesn't stack up in a country which knows how to make coffee properly.
(I wonder how it does in Europe...)
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Think about people. You get decent coffee in Whangarei for chrissakes. Don't go telling me that Whangarei's rich food culture is whooly based on homegrown creativity and shininess.
Except it was. Starbucks was a late entrant to a market already saturated with good coffee, and which was already spreading to every corner of New Zealand. There was a shop selling Espresso (and pies) in Shannon, for Cthulhu's sake! That ought to tell you how not-new they were.
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Hang on. Done right its pretty damn good.
It might be. But our food culture didn't used to be about doing it right - it was about serving up meat and three veg because that was the food culture we had imported from Britain, and we didn't know any better. Now we have choice, and a food culture which recognises quality and which is unashamed to steal and synthesise. And those are very good things compared to the culinary desert we used to live in.
(I should also throw some snark at false contrast between British cuisine (if you can call it that) and "imported foreign muck". To point out the obvious, British food is just as imported and nowdays just as foreign. Despite the pretensions of monarchists and the Wizard of Christchurch/Oamaru, we ain't "British" anymore...)
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What's the real reaon behind the hatred of Starbucks? I suggest that its democratization of coffee opened access to gourmet coffee for the rabble, not the shitty coffee itself
Except that in NZ, good coffee was already democratised. The facts just don't support your smear.
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Freedom farms sells things other than bacon? I wonder if any of it is available in Palmerston North...
And the demise of Anglo-Saxon food is IMHO one of the great positive things to have happened in NZ during my lifetime. You can take your fatty baked chops and boiled cabbage with mushed potato and stick them somewhere unpleasant. Like England.
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disasters that are not the result of conspiracy (she says so explicitly)
Though there is the bit where she highlights NeoLibs at the IMF and World Bank talking about the desirability of provoking crisis so as to have an excuse to implement "reform". And a couple of examples from Canada and the Carribean where they did just that, using bogus statistics to manipulate credit ratings and hot money flows to strongarm countries into allowing themselves to be pillaged. Which kindof puts the constant negativity from our local business community and right-wing thinktanks into perspective...