…spices, at last :) Here at the Vamsoft HQ we have a nice backyard, an ideal place for a sunny mini spice garden. During the long winter (starving for fresh summer basil and tomatoes), I decided to finally utilize the backyard and plant a few of my favorite spices and herbs. The ORF Tech Support guy, Krisztian also liked the idea, so last Thursday we took the seeds, the flower pots, some soil and made our little garden with thyme, origano, basil and rocket/rucola.
I was a bit concerned about planting too early, but this morning I was suprised to see that only in five days the rocket started growing! That means pesto di rucola with fresh gnocchi within 2 weeks! :) No wonder why English calls rucola “rocket”.
Meanwhile, we have relased the 4th development release of ORF, with minor adjustments to the PowerLog format. The PowerLog report preprocessor is nearly complete, it is going to be integrated with the ORF Service in the next few days. The technology research with the embedded Internet Explorer control was successful, so now it is pretty sure that we will use embedded HTML for displaying and printing reports. Also, the decision has been made about the report resolution: it is going be 1 day, which means that the shortest period of time that reporting will handle is one day.
Is that you or Krisztian. Whoever he is, he looks from the side, so much like my brother Stephen the traffic engineer at bexley.gov.uk, I almost fell out of the chair!
That’s actually Krisztián *and* me :))) Krisztián is on the right, I’m on the left photo. So I guess we both look like Stephen then :)
It is good to see that you that you have an interest in food. One of the biggest problems around these days is fast food. We have heard that MacDonald’s/KFC are bad, but why?
It’s not just that they contain fats, it’s the type of fat they use. Basically they fry stuff in what is known as transfat, basically vegetable oil that has been reacted with hydrogen under pressure. Some people call this industrial oil.
They use it because it takes a lot longer to degenerate after repeated use.
The stuff is lethal, see the website URL link (Click on Allianz) above. It seems that KFC in Hungary tops the list!
I watch a few cooking programs on TV, like surfing the menu developed by a pair of British / Australian chefs as they do a long tour around the Australian coast line.
They are into trendy cooking like using pumpkin seed oil, contains lycopene the stuff that makes tomatoes red and a proven anti-cancer agent, you need to take it with fatty acids though to help absorption hence pumpkin seed oil.
That explains why I got stomach hurt after having food from KFC :)
Unfortunately, I rarely have time for cooking on weekdays, so I buy fast food once or twice a week. I usually prefer gyros/kebab/Chinese food, though.
As for oil, I trust in olive oil for almost any purpose — extra virgin olive oil also contains antioxidants and generally considered as healthy. I also use butter in same cases (I know it’s not healthy), because it can make some food much better than oils [try sauté courgette in olive oil vs. butter or the mixture of both — butter or butter + oil will be much better]
I am not entirely surprised that Hungary has the worst performance in this regard, basically you can sell any junk with aggressive marketing here. Burger King is crowded by entire families on the weekend. For the equal price or 30% more, they could have much better food in a regular restaurant :(
You said you like cooking shows; I am not sure if you’ve seen Jamie Oliver’s “School Dinners”, in which he attempts (and, more or less fails) to reform UK school food. It’s depressing to see what processed nightmare we and our children eat.