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Wednesday 25 August 2010

The McDonaldisation of everything aka how they lie to you

I have a confession to make.

It’s nothing big, and I’m not ashamed of it by any means. I used to drink Vitamin Water.

Maybe it was the quirky labels, the ones that they cunningly customised to fit with whichever country they were trying to flog their wares I bought a bottle in Canada once, and the label had some Canuck reference. The bottles sold here in Scotland have labels aimed at Scots – it’s been awhile since I bought a bottle, but from what I remember the words “hangover” and “whiskey” were mentioned. Don’t quote me on that though.

Maybe it was the fact that one of the flavours was Dragon fruit.

I never picked up a bottle, looked at the label and thought “ooh, healthy!” I assumed they were healthier than fizzy juice, but I didn’t really think they were packed chock full of vitamins and I could stop eating my five-a-day.

I stopped buying (and drinking) the stuff when my boyfriend broke the news to me Vitamin Water is owned by Coca Cola. I don’t drink Coke or Pepsi for a reason – multinational soft drink companies that are trying to take over the world are not getting my dollar! That’s also why I don’t eat McDonalds or Burger King. Well, other than the “food” is shite.

Let’s just think of it this way. If I want to indulge in greasy, fatty, deep fried mess, I’d rather spend my couple of quid at a chippy, where there is at least some small chance the food is produced on site. Family businesses are always a favourite for me. Even if the burger patties and the chicken tenders come frozen in an industrial sized bag, at least your buck is going towards someone who lives and works in your community, not the McDonalds brand.

That’s why I am proud to live in one of the only countries in the world were Coca Cola and Pepsi are outsold by a local soft drink. I don’t drink Irn Bru either, but it’s nice to know Coke and Pepsi haven’t taken over every corner of the globe. There’s something comforting and homey about the Irn Bru adverts, and I think it’s a humour that may not translate well out of Scotland.

Wednesday 11 August 2010

Weekend roundup

Last weekend there was the infamous midgie massacre of my legs, from which we are still finding casualties. Despite this the boyfriend and I had a lovely couple of days at our friend’s farm. He picked us up on Saturday around lunchtime, which was lucky as I was starting to feel the Festival Rage. It’s an unfortunate affliction which seems to come on around this time in August when tourists start invading my city and treating us lowly locals as part of the entertainment. Anyways, enough of that…we shall only speak of nice things!

The puppy sat in the back with me, dressed in his Sunday best…



Saturday afternoon we raided the vegetable patch. There really is nothing quite like eating sweet peas straight off the plant, and I must have devoured a hundred of them. They were so sweet we could have had them for dessert!



I left a pile of empties behind me…



Sunday was for lazing about and not doing a whole lot. We didn’t want to tire ourselves out before the drive home! The boyfriend and I found a couple of sun loungers and settled into a nice reclining position. Even the puppy decided to adopt a distinctly horizontal stance.



We resurfaced for long enough to have a wee barbecue…



The buffalo steaks were from Puddledub Buffalo at the Farmers Market, and everything else – the carrots, the sugarsnap peas (my favourites) and the onions - came from the veg garden less than ten feet away. You really can’t beat zero food miles, from plant to plate in under a minute! The carrots were super-sweet and tasted like no carrot you could find in a supermarket and I think I ate more peas in those two days than I ever have in my life. We didn’t do much to them, just grilled with a little bit of oil and did the steaks in a splash of Lea and Perrins.

Tuesday 10 August 2010

Cure for insect bites - itch-be-gone!

I have found the Holy Grail, that thing I have been searching for every summer of my life but which has eluded me until now. I have found a cure for insect bites!!! Although not so much a “cure”, as I’d already been bitten, I have found the perfect combination of remedies to rid me of the incessant itching, and that is good enough for me.

Let me just say, I have tried every over-the-counter remedy the chemist’s has to offer, but with no results whatsoever. I’ve a desk drawer full of antihistamines, anti-itch creams and even specific ointments for the problem. I’ve tried lavender essential oil mixed in with some aloe vera gel for spreadability, which soothed my skin temporarily (and better than the creams and ointments from Boots I should add), but the itching just came back eventually.

Yesterday pr’evening, I stopped by Real Foods on Broughton Street after work for a small bottle of peppermint oil – my friend Chris had passed this suggestion on to my boyfriend as it might help with the infection – yes, some of the bites were infected and bleeding, possibly because I’d itched them or maybe because I’d slept under a wool blanket the other night…or possibly because midges are the handiwork of the devil – but I’m a little wary of using peppermint on insect bites as it can be a skin irritant. I asked the girl behind the counter if she could suggest anything for the bites, and she pointed me in the direction of a bottle of neem oil.

I’d heard of neem oil before, and had a vague inkling to its skin-soothing properties – however, it was an oil I hadn’t come across during my time as an Aromatherapy student as I don’t believe it is that widely used in massage. I’ve certainly never heard of it used in that way before – possibly because the oil smells a little like poultry seasoning! I’ve read up a bit online about the stuff, and some folk have likened the smell to dirt, musk, decomposing coffee grounds and garlic. And oddly, peanut butter.

The essential oil is extracted through cold-pressing the seed kernels of the neem tree. The neem tree is a relative of mahogany, and is more commonly found in Asia, especially India and Burma. It is thought to have antiseptic, antiviral, anti-inflammatory, anti-fungal and immune enhancing properties, and is also thought to be amazing for the skin (both in regulating oiliness and relieving irritating skin conditions like eczema and psoriasis).

The oil I used wasn’t 100% neat neem oil but a blended skin preparation – it was blended with a carrier oil (jojoba I believe) and eucalyptus, but to be honest I didn’t get much of a whiff of the eucalyptus. Eucalyptus is known for its antiseptic properties as well, so I figured I couldn’t really go wrong.

First I ran a hot bath. I emptied out most of a tub of bicarb of soda into the water (it wasn’t full, as I’d made a few sticky toffee puddings a few months ago, but it was at least 75% full). A friend had recommended the bicarb in a warm bath to soothe skin irritations, so I thought I would give it a go. I had originally planned to use oatmeal as well, but I couldn’t find any plain oatmeal in the flat – my boyfriend found some porridge oats with raising, sultanas and almonds but I thought I’d give it a miss.

I added a few drops of the peppermint oil into the water, then quite a bit of the neem oil. After I got in the bath and soaked for a bit (and my boyfriend and the puppy both came in to check on me), I rubbed plenty of the neem oil onto my legs to cover the bites and soaked some more.

When I got out of the bath I patted myself dry, so didn’t rub the oil residue off my legs. I didn’t use any other moisturiser but just got dressed in my jammies and left the rest of the oil to soak in. I didn’t feel the need to scratch once in the middle of the night, and as a happy side effect, possibly because I’d added the oil to my bath water as well, a huuuuge spot on my upper lip seems to have cleared up quite a bit. It’s not completely disappeared, but it doesn’t look fit to burst like it did last night.

I rubbed some more neem oil onto my legs this morning before getting dressed, and even with leggings on (I refuse to bare my legs until I look less like the elephant man’s lesser known cousin) the bites are only giving off the slightest hint of a tingle. I don’t feel the urge to scratch, and even though I can still feel the tingle, the irritation is about 90% gone and it is now bearable.

Incidentally – and this is my reasoning that it was the neem oil that helped the most overall – a few rogue bites on my arms and chest are still pretty itchy, and those were the places I hadn’t applied the neem oil, either in the bath or this morning.

Monday 2 August 2010

Weekend roundup

I had a mini adventure on my way to see the boyfriend on Saturday night. It all started when I got in a taxi at Leven bus station…

Everything started out fine. The driver was friendly, said he hoped I liked old time rock-and-roll, then proceeded to stick on a Bobby Darrin CD. This was going the way of an old Buddy Holly tune, and I had no objections. He even quoted me twenty quid for the journey, including a brief stopover at Sainsburys so I could pick up a few groceries. Not bad considering I have sometimes paid thirty quid just for the journey from Leven to St Monans, without a stopover.

After we left the Sainsburys car park, the driver mentioned he wasn’t that familiar with St Monans, and asked if I cold get directions – the place I was headed to was on land that belonged to a local farm, so he had no idea how to get there. I said fine and phoned the boyfriend. He was halfway through rattling off directions when I heard a sentence you never want to hear coming out of the mouth of someone driving you to a remote cottage, halfway to your destination and nowhere near your starting point on a deserted road.

“I think my car is breaking down.”

Ah crap. At that point I noticed his car was making a clunking noise that most definitely did not sound healthy. It was stuck in second gear, and the driver was concerned if he stopped the car, it may not start back up again. The house I was going to was not quite in St Monans, and would take us slightly off-road for a few hundred metres, so I told the driver it would be ok to drop me off by the bus stop on the main road – he felt bad as I was a lone female and it was getting quite late, but there really wasn’t anything for it and I didn’t want him to be stranded on a farm road waiting for help! He’d already phoned his dispatcher, who’d said unfortunately they couldn’t send anyone for ages to pick him up. His plan was just to ease the car back to Leven and hope for the best.

As we neared the bus stop, the driver gave me a two minute warning and I undid my seatbelt, opened the passenger side door, and chucked my overnight bag onto the pavement. Then I jumped out. He couldn’t stop the car completely, but he did manage to slow down enough so I didn’t have to do a ninja-style dismount. As he pulled away I heard him shout “are you alright?”, but I’d landed on my feet and other than a dusty bag, no damage at all.

About five minutes later my boyfriend rocked up with the puppy. The sun had vanished completely but I’d started reading a magazine by streetlight.

We had a bit of a tearful hello as we’d not seen each other in over 48 hours – the longest we’d been separated in ten months. I know he’s at our friend’s for a reason – it’s a damned good reason too, and he is doing a good thing – but I miss him like crazy. He was looking good – and more importantly healthy – but a bit scruffy. The boys never do care about hygiene much when left on their own for a few days, although our host Chris can be a bit girly sometimes, with his love for aromatherapy oils, Kiehls moisturiser and fairylights.

The walk down to Chris’s cottage is quite nice in the dark, though in late July the sun never entirely goes away, so the sky wasn’t entirely pitch black. The puppy was even relatively well behaved.

We had a pretty chilled out evening, though it was weird having Chris’s cottage all to ourselves. We usually end up there with a few people sitting round the fire, but on Saturday night it was just the two of us and the animals. We made a beef stew with the groceries I’d bought in my 30-second-dash through Sainsburys and settled in to watch the rest of “Gangs of New York”. Quality film, if a bit traumatic in parts. It’s done a lot to redeem Leonardo DiCaprio in my estimations after the entire “Titanic” debacle – oh hell that was a shit film. I really think he’s much better in films where he isn’t portrayed as the romantic hero – he’s not got the face for it, but he’s a decent character actor playing quirky roles, like in “What’s eating Gilbert Grape”.

We didn’t talk much, just sat with the coal fire burning and the film on the laptop in the corner. I dozed off for a few minutes when the boyfriend went to check on the food, but this time I made it through the whole film. Chris’s cat came in at one point, and the puppy decided to investigate – that cat is so much more chilled out than ours, and he just sat there and took it as puppy prodded him, gave him kisses and nuzzled his ear. We took a few photos because, as per usual, we are like the pet paparazzi.

“Get your coat, you’ve pulled”






The next morning we went on a short walk into town to grab some groceries and provisions for Sunday lunch. The fridge was bare when I turned up (I thought it was an exaggeration – it wasn’t) so we were looking for a meat, some veg, and maybe snackage. I love the idea of living in a seaside town, but what I would find very hard to live with is the lack of choice. There are two shops in town open on Sunday, and one of them is a generic chain convenience store. To be fair, it does stock some unusual produce – I’ll get to that later – but it’s mostly generic over-farmed meat and ready meals full of additives and E-numbers.

On the walk home poor puppy was a bit ill, so we stopped at the local vet’s surgery to jot down the emergency number. We had to tie puppy up and this was the only thing we could find. Cute! I’ve no idea what he is doing with his tail though.







Chris arrived home with his dad not long after, so we dispatched Pa of Chris with the leftover stew from the night before and “Orange County” on DVD. We stuck the whole chicken in the le Creuset pot I’d unearthed for Chris a year ago from my infinite stores of kitchen equipment (still no signs of depletion) with a drizzle of oil and rubbed with some sundried tomato pesto. It was a pure lazy Sunday lunch, but Chris doesn’t have an oven so the choices were limited. We had to cook the chicken in a toaster oven – oddly something I’ve had to do before for Christmas and Thanksgiving at my mum and dad’s house, as my mum cannot use her oven and relies on a small toaster oven they’ve had since I was in primary school. The actual oven is used to store baking trays, muffin tins and frying pans.

We gave Chris his wee pressie – we found this sitting on top of the deep freeze in the Spar and I thought it was too random to pass up. I hope he never eats it at it may kill him, but the fact someone has marketed this is amazing to me.

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Sunday 1 August 2010

Squat Lobster fusilli with baby plum tomatoes

A few weeks ago I spied a wee treat at the Farmers Market - something I'd heard about from friends who came from the west coast but had never seen or tasted myself. Two wee tubs sitting amidst the peppered mackerel and smoked salmon they sell in abundance. I had to have them. They were expensive and I had no idea how to cook them, but I bought them anyways. Two 100g pots of shelled squat lobster tails.

I just threw together this little recipe tonight with what I had the fridge. The squat lobster tails had to be taken out of the freezer yesterday as the bloody thing is in serious need of defrosting, and the wee pots of loveliness were in danger of going to waste.

Squat lobster fusilli with baby plum tomatoes
1 tbsp rapeseed oil
1 onion, sliced
5 cloves garlic
200g squat lobster tails, shell removed
10 baby plum tomatoes
Spelt fusilli (regular wheat pasta can be used as well, I'm just trying to cut down on wheat)


Cook fusilli in boiling water.

Heat oil in a heavy bottomed pot. Add the onions and sauté gently until softened. Add squat lobster tails and sauté until just cooked - do not overcook! Finally add tomatoes and garlic, give it a stir just to heat through, and remove from heat.

Toss with cooked pasta.

Poshest packed lunch ever!




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