soledad penadés

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I was walking to take the bus when I passed near the hotdog post near Tottenham Court Road station. The powerful roasted onion flavour caught my nose immediately as was expected (I'm a big fan of roasted vegetables!) and then I wondered: why do people depreciate so much these hotdogs, saying they are a major health menace, but then they go to any of those big fast food chains and have the big menu with fries, biggest carbohidrated drink and whatnot?
I mean, at least in these hotdogs you can see the onion being fried, same for the frankfurt sausages, and that's something which you can't see very easily in the fast food chains. Maybe you may think the oil is the key of all the horrors but I refuse to admit that the oil for the hotdogs is less healthy than the other one.

The power of advertising is amazing, without doubt.

Although most probably no one of you is going to believe me, yesterday I ate sushi for the first time in my whole life! I had a weird, innate aversion to anything which involved eating raw fish, which produced me horrible visions of gastroenteritis episodes and what not, and made me reject systematically even the mere suggestion of a visit to japanese fast-food chains like Yo! Sushi. But I decided that it was stupid to act like that and that I needed to stop this non-sense about hypocondriacal hallucinations, so I kind of obliged myself to taste it. And now I'm addicted to all things sushi.

We went to a little japanese restaurant round the corner - we had spotted it past week but we decided to surround to a nachos feast instead (which left me thinking about nachos for the rest of the week, by the way). It was nice and cosy, with lots of small garnments and details here and there with japanese characters, which are quite different compared to your nearest chinese restaurant (namely a waterfall painting and a big fishtank). The japanese ones remind me a lot to all the movies which mr.doob watches, for example the characters of Spirited Away (original title is "千と千尋の神隠し, Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi"), or simply Dragon Ball, to use a more popular example - there was a picture of a dragon like that one there.

I have always been attracted by the japanese culture, although not proactively enough, to describe it somehow. But since Shifter taught us how to create (korean) sushi rolls I became more curious about it all, and yesterday, after forcing myself to overcome my initial aversion to eat raw fish, I definitely decided that I have to learn more about sushi (that is, I want to cook sushi!).

Funnily enough, today a couple of office mates bought japanese food for lunch (which made me hate my humble sandwich for a while). And I realised there are two more japanese take-aways round my new office (apart from the one that I already spotted). Hmmm…
Next stop, the supreme japanese restaurant that trace knows - gotta fight round two versus the sticks! :)

(Picture titled "too pretty to eat" by celiece, taken from sxc.hu)

There are news which can shock you deeply when they suddenly arise in your screen. Now I can't find the news (information overload, anyone?) but basicly they were:

1. McDonald's restaurants are going to be refurbished and redesigned to look more healthy, less plastic, more like an iPod (!!!)
2. Construction workers are demanding healthy breakfasts. They can't find healthy alternatives in the "deep fry" restaurants (as one could expect!!)

So… McDonald's, the king of fries and greasy food wrapped in plastic containers which you can eat in a plastified yellow environment, are now trying to use more natural furniture which looks less "toyish". Why? The article was pointing that young professionals liked more the Starbucks ambience, with lounge style furniture, dim lights, etc, and MCD wanted to steal those customers back to their share. Hummm… I'm afraid you can't compare the delicate smell of a coffee with the agressive in-your-face stink of MCD burgers, even if you have the finest furniture ever. Even if you feel that you are inside an iPod.

And then you also find that those apparently rude and not worried at all about their diet hardworkers, the lovely construction workers, get suddenly interested about having a good breakfast with vegetables. Lots of them. So what's going to happen with the Full English Breakfast restaurants?

More: I bought a salad on friday for lunch and I noticed they didn't come in a completely plastic box as they came before on that store. Even more, there was a label which proudly stated they had removed the maximum amount of plastic they could and that's why I was eating a salad from a cardbox. How lovely. No, seriously, I like the detail. I think I must have been the first one in asking explicitely in the market to not to have a non recyclable plastic tray for the meat, "it is enough with the bag". So yes, that's nice.
But maybe because I'm spanish and I've grew in a "mediterranean" diet, all this fever about going healthier sometimes seems ridiculous to me, as for me it is the natural choice.

Of course I'm happy with the mediterranean diet becoming famous (that way I can get better, exotic ingredients in the shops such as olives) but sometimes it's a bit excessive: you feel like bombed page after page, mediterranean restaurants multiply on every corner (offering a delirious shuffle of whatever ingredient at the same time, just because they are meant to be healthy, and leading to abominations like paella with jalapenos), mediterranean food is announced and promoted by chefs (which turn to be famous just for the sole fact of embracing the mediterranean diet) and it finally looks so trendy that you know that even the promoters don't believe themselves.

Let's see how many months/years does it last… and let's start wondering which healthy lifestyle will be copied next.
Ahhhh … trends!!!

Well, as trace was feeling a bit paparazzi on sunday and he has put a very mysterious picture on his blog accompanying the soffa story end, I thought it might be interesting to reveal what was happening in that glowy food lab.

And more concretely it was a fish paella. That is, a "paella de pescado". Although I am more fan of the vegetables one, it's good to change from time to time. (I have to do a post about paellas too, but I'll reserve it for another day).

I was commenting yesterday to trace that it had been published recently an study outside there showing how people was dropping cokes, fantas and even robinsons in favour of mineral water, smoothies and juices. I think it is quite interesting, at least because I have made exactly the same.

Past year, when sml! came to London, we were having some dinner on a shawarma & kebab place near Old Street, and he said he was drinking coke as it was an special event, as he had stopped drinking it recently. I was looking at him and thinking "woh… he can't be talking seriously!" But some months after, for some reason I realised our diet is not good. I read somewhere we are living in the Sugar Society. And it sounded quite right. Everything is edulcorated, more and more each day - as we get used to that sweetener level and can't manage to distinguish, we need to have even more sugar in our food. Same goes with the salt. Add more and more until the body explodes. Luckily I am not a salt-fan; I prefer to use other spices as parlsey, garlic, rosemary, etc.

So to stop using sugar was a good step. No more sugar in the coffee - honest! At the beginning I added some honey but I got used to not to add even honey and just enjoy the coffee in itself, without saturating my senses with loads of sugar. It was the time to enjoy fruits too. A pity it is winter, and winter fruits are extremely boring. Apples and pears. And pears and apples. You can get all kinds of apples here, but all of them are plain boring. I hardly can find an apple that I really like. Either they are too acid, too bland, too like a crude potato - boring. I still had a bit of hope with pears, but they have also dissapointed me. I don't know if I am idealising the pears I ate when I was a child but they were sweet and juicy, their skin was terse and didn't look like plastic. I have been looking for those for some years and I can't find them, neither here or in Spain. Maybe they are an extinguished species. Who knows.

I would love to have summer fruits all year long. Peaches, apricots, grapes, watermelons, strawberries… you know. Nobody can get bored with them, so many colours and suggesting flavours and smells. A pity that artificial, greenhouse fruits do not taste exactly like the real ones, I have to wait until the right time comes.

Meanwhile I am enjoying this great new situation in which I haven't drunk a single coke or fizzy drink for almost two months - when before I drank at least three times per week, accompanied by a crisps bag to make it worse. It is extremely reconforting to know that each time one drinks a coke can, is also drinking ten sugar spoons, which are of course completely unneeded and artificial. So welcome water, juices (specially natural ones!), fruits, milk… and let's just stop intoxicating our bodies.