The General Chat Thread

5unflower wrote: »

I'm just trying to figure where you could possibly be doing your supermarket shopping that you have developed such a bad opinion about Germans and their attitude to food...? I fully agree with you on ALdi and Lidl, they are very different over there and I would never go near them, unlike over here, where I use them more frequently. But any other supermarket, I absolutely love shopping in when in Germany! The variety and choice of produce is so much bigger than over here. Fake meats...?? Admittedly I would usually buy in the local butchers rather than supermarket over there, but again the choice of cuts and quality never appeared to me in any way inferior to Irish meats...and don't get me started on comparing Irish and German sausages or cold meats for that matter

Just very interesting to see an Irish person having such a bad opinion about German food, never encountered that before...

I shop everywhere here. Kaisers, Edeka, Rewe...even Kadewe for certain things. The produce here is nowhere near in comparison to Ireland.

You do realise Irish sausages are 10000000 times better and healthier than German ones though? And yes fake meats.

I had a sous of mine source bio chicken breasts for two weeks before as a little project for him. Find good priced, nicely raised chicken breasts. The butchers kept saying to him that "This is not 100 percent chicken breast, we always inject flour and water into the breast straight after the farmers hand them to us" This occured over 6 times. . Dont get me started on finding fresh fish....

Im not just speaking as an Irish person living here either, im speaking as a person who works 85 hours a week with food, produce and feeding (majority) german people. Give me Tesco, Dunnes and the Irish aldi and lidles well above any food store in germany.

5unflower wrote: »

I guess actually working in the food/restaurant industry gives you much more of an insight into the differences in sourcing/producing food in the two countries.

I would be much more of an average consumer tho I do look into where things come from and what goes into them, and with sausages for example what I meant was that Irish ones tend to have a much higher fat content and much less flavour than German ones? I may not be exactly comparing likes with like here, so I'm open to correction.

Oh and you said elsewhere above that you see Germans eating a lot of fried food...again very interesting as I have certainly consumed a lot less fried food in Germany than I have ever over here. But I wonder if there are also significant differences between the different regions in Germany...fresh and really good fish dishes might be more of a thing in Hamburg and the North Sea coast than in Bavaria, where the very hearty, meaty cuisine prevails.

What would be your experience with bakery produce? Just because this seems to be another area that Germans pride themselves in and again I personally find the variety and quality of breads much better than Irish breads.

I think German food culture is based heavily on fried food. Take for instance the Scnitzel, (its Austrian but the wiener art is eaten by everyone here)..all the sausages that are fried etc. The pork in Germany is also nowhere near as high quality as Ireland as there is too much of the damn stuff.

Germans do baking extremely well. The bread here is for sure better than Ireland I believe but thats mainly down to broadening the variation of yeasts, seeds and flours used. The turkish breads here in Berin in particular are mind blowing.

Again, the food culture in Berlin is phenomenal... The turkish, asian and many different cuisines beat Irelands food culture hands down.. Im just talking about supermarkets and produce in General. Its a shocking one.

Alun wrote: »

The baby potatoes in Lidl are sometimes Nicola. They vary a lot though, so you have to check the label.

Again they sometimes have it in Lidl when it's in season.

I try checking the labels, but most of the time they just say "salad potatoes". I've never seen them actually giving the variety.

And I've never yet seen white asparagus in Lidl. There are a few farm shops around here in Cork that sell it, but you can tell it's not field-fresh there, either.

Having said all that, I have noticed a dramatic increase in the variety of fruit and veg on sale throughout the country, from Aldi and Lidl to farmer's markets, in the last few years. It really makes me happy to see that, and I hope it will continue.
Until then, I shall do my best with a spade and some seeds and bulbs my mom sent me over

Alun wrote: »

Maybe it's dependant on the individual shops, but I've definitely bought it in the one in Greystones.

I'll definitely keep checking, May's just round the corner after all

All I usually find is the green asparagus - flown in from Peru, according to the label, and available year-round. I buy it, but it does somewhat freak me out to have asparagus in autumn and winter...

I made my own burger buns today with this recipe. They turned out really well. Nice and soft but not so much that they disintegrated when I was eating my burger.



And of course the picture is sideways!

Shenshen wrote: »

I'll definitely keep checking, May's just round the corner after all

All I usually find is the green asparagus - flown in from Peru, according to the label, and available year-round. I buy it, but it does somewhat freak me out to have asparagus in autumn and winter...

Bradley's, North Main Street had Irish green asparagus last week.
M&S have UK green asparagus seasonally too.

White asparagus is cruelty to vegetables.
It's the veal of the vegetable world!;)

suvarna phulphagar wrote: »

Hey,I am Indian and I am a vegetarian but I cannot get any vegetables like the ones that I use in India because I am currently living in Ireland.

You might get them in a local Asian supermarket.

In dublin there is one in blackrock I mentioned before. The owner appears to be Indian, most others are Chinese. He has lots of veg I did not recognise.

rubadub wrote: »

I was very surprised it was open until 8pm each night. I had to ring the market owner to ask if they were opening as there was no info on the web. I had to walk through the arch in pitch black to get to it, though you can come in from the other side.

Seems to be an Indian father & son running it, friendly guys who are genuinely interesting in what you want. I told them they should advertise more and that I would post it on a website, I have no connection, just do not want to see them close! and its a shame that such a good shop is unknown.

They are up the back of the market, where the green arrow is pointing here
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=53.300859,-6.178485&hl=en&num=1&t=h&vpsrc=0&z=19

There is a Filipino shop in dun laoghaire too "Pinoy sari sari store"

That blackrock shop got in coconut flour for me, and seem willing to getting whatever you would want.

You know that feeling, when you've been sick for way too long and by the "end", you're itching to do something. Anything. Anything other than sit/lie/watch tv/turn into a vegetable.

That was me last week and I took it out on my recipe folder (print outs from recipes I'd found online and cut outs from newspapers/magazines - all stuffed in a folder and up with my recipe books). It was a total mess. Every time I wanted to find a recipe, I'd have to go through the whole thing, knowing it was there somewhere, but hell if I know where. Usually hoped that if I made it "lately" it'd be nearer the top of the pile, but I'd usually mess up the pile every time I searched, so yeah: mess.

So, last week, I took over the kitchen table, and over a couple of days on go-slow (still sick really!), I alphabetized by main ingredient my whole recipe folder. \o/ The beacon of organisation, my kitchen now is.

The flip side of this, was that I found stuffed in with all my go-to recipes, a heap of "I should try these" recipes. So I've gone and made a new to-do recipe folder of stuff I've been collecting for years, but I've somehow managed to forget about/not get around to doing. Which is kinda awesome really. We don't really cook by what we want in this house because we belong to a CSA, so we cook according to whatever the farmer decides to throw our way each week, so it's really nice to have all the recipes I've not tried yet to hand for super little effort with super little notice. (Like a radish pickle recipe from Aoife McElwaine that I've kept since July last year, waiting on the next batch of radishes and the first lot came in this week!)

There is definitely something to be said for a breath of fresh-organised-air post illness, even if it is just something as simple as organising my recipes

Now that I've written this (and re-read it), I feel like it's a tad on the side of over-organised?! Help me out here, am I the only one or are ye all stick-them-in-a-pile folk, or digital-over-analog folk?

I similarly had a recipe folder, including one for melting chocolate pots by Delia that I photocopied, and was crackling with the spills of chocolate from overuse!

I used evernote to photo all of them, and put in a recipe folder. You can search evernote by title, which is great; but recently became a premium subscriber, which searches very well inside photos, so no need for alphabets.
I also tag them by course / ingredient / my own codes such as "lazy" "fast" "healthy" "so bad it's good" "try soon". And have a "shopping list" tag to add on. Unlike recipe apps, which I tried, evernote also holds my entire life. And has a web clipper so can clip recipes from websites! And works across all platforms.

I should be paid for the amount of times I mention how amazing evernote is during the day to my co-workers. Who purely to shut me up have all downloaded it, and love it.

But it's so handy for all cooking / recipe related stuff. Save all the instructions for cooker conversions, etc!

By the way, don't bother with seperate app "evernote food", find ordinary evernote more than enough - which also has my travel details / work projects / notes on films I want to see / thesis folders / scans of bills/receipts/expenses / tips. If evernote go bust, my life will fall apart.