Donate to Remove ads

Got a credit card? use our Credit Card & Finance Calculators

Thanks to johnstevens77,Bhoddhisatva,scotia,Anonymous,Cornytiv34, for Donating to support the site

Pet Petty Pepper Peeves

Grumpy Old Lemons Like You
Grumpi
Lemon Pip
Posts: 70
Joined: November 8th, 2016, 3:33 pm
Has thanked: 6 times
Been thanked: 8 times

Pet Petty Pepper Peeves

#167488

Postby Grumpi » September 19th, 2018, 4:04 pm

I hate Red Peppers. I hate yellow and green peppers too but mostly red peppers.
I hate them because when I taste them in a dish that is all I can taste for the rest of the meal.
Their flavour is so strong to me that it overwhelms all others.
Maybe this is my fault having my taste buds trained in the forties and fifties by a diet of bland food when takeaways were inevitably fish and chips and the only choice of exotic veg was mushy peas.
You might well say if you don’t like peppers then don’t eat them.
Obviously this is what I try to do but I am regularly caught out by convenience foods, cooks and canteens concealing peppers in foods without any fair warning.
Canteens concealing peppers in traditional dishes like cottage pie where they do not belong.
Convenience foods invariably have all the main ingredients in large print and pictures on the front of the package but red peppers get mentioned only in the small print list of ingredients on the back of the package reluctantly to conform to legal requirements.
Yesterday I was too lazy to cook an evening meal for myself so I bought a prepacked Sainsburys Taste the Difference slow cooked Steak Chianti. On the front described as Tender British beef in a rich red wine and tomato sauce, with two savoury parmesan dumplings.
The red bits in the photo looked like tomato. On the back Red Pepper was the 34th ingredient mentioned after Wheat flour and before onion.
After removing the packaging I discovered the dreaded rep peppers and removed as much as I could find before it went into the oven.
Alas, I had missed a couple of small pieces of pepper and for me the taste of the whole meal was tainted.
I hadn't meant to open a bottle of wine to accompany the meal but indulged myself as a consolation.

Watis
Lemon Quarter
Posts: 1404
Joined: November 5th, 2016, 10:53 am
Has thanked: 352 times
Been thanked: 489 times

Re: Pet Petty Pepper Peeves

#167490

Postby Watis » September 19th, 2018, 4:10 pm

For me it's mushrooms.

Even after picking them out and flicking them onto Mrs Watis's plate, they leave a taint in the meal, giving it a dank flavour.

Watis.

madhatter
Lemon Slice
Posts: 333
Joined: November 12th, 2016, 9:25 pm
Has thanked: 566 times
Been thanked: 125 times

Re: Pet Petty Pepper Peeves

#167580

Postby madhatter » September 19th, 2018, 10:38 pm

Maybe this is my fault having my taste buds trained in the forties and fifties by a diet of bland food


Me too. If I should want food to taste “hot”, I keep a bottle of brown sauce for that express purpose. The upside down squeezy bottles have the additional advantage that the sauce can be precisely metered distributed.

No poncy barbecue sauce, either.

If I want food to taste burnt, I am more than capable of burning it myself, thank you.

vrdiver
Lemon Quarter
Posts: 2574
Joined: November 5th, 2016, 2:22 am
Has thanked: 552 times
Been thanked: 1212 times

Re: Pet Petty Pepper Peeves

#167633

Postby vrdiver » September 20th, 2018, 9:38 am

Garlic. Especially garlic powder. A nasty, cheap alternative to proper flavouring with the unpleasant aroma left hanging in the air for hours afterwards. I used to dread being in small meeting rooms where people had (or had had) their shop bought lunches; the acrid stink of the stuff made me want to retch, but of course, polite custom dictated against such action.

Humous. Lovely stuff. Then they put garlic in it and it's ruined.

Don't get me wrong. Garlic, properly cooked, can be a beautiful, depth-enhancing flavour, but it's a rare processed food that achieves that state. In the meantime I've developed a Pavlovian response to the stuff, salivating (in a bad way) as soon as I smell it.

Peppers on the other hand...

bungeejumper
Lemon Half
Posts: 8064
Joined: November 8th, 2016, 2:30 pm
Has thanked: 2846 times
Been thanked: 3939 times

Re: Pet Petty Pepper Peeves

#167635

Postby bungeejumper » September 20th, 2018, 9:53 am

Urrrrgh. Dumplings!

I am allergic to dumplings. Nasty, tasteless, stodgy balls of sticky paste which somebody might (or then again, might not) have dunked into gravy in a desperate attempt to give them a bit of interest on the plate. Dumplings stick to the inside of my mouth and throat and make me think I'm going to choke to death.

Whoever thought all that 1940s food was fit to eat was seriously misguided. :| Didn't the world suffer enough in the 40s and 50s, what with all that mushy-boiled cabbage and suchlike? The war would have been over quicker if all those dumplings had been used as ammunition instead.

Not that modern dumplings are much better. Only the other week, I was faced with quinoa dumplings, which were half the weight of their potato equivalents but twice as sticky on the way down. I might as well have been trying to eat half-dried wallpaper paste.

Then again, don't get me started on keen-wah. Or seaweed crisps, or those snacks made from dried locusts (or whatever). Or those infuriating people who put corn syrup into anything and everything. Sometimes I hate everybody.

So there. :evil:

BJ

didds
Lemon Half
Posts: 5244
Joined: November 4th, 2016, 12:04 pm
Has thanked: 3244 times
Been thanked: 1018 times

Re: Pet Petty Pepper Peeves

#167665

Postby didds » September 20th, 2018, 11:36 am

lemon meringue pie.

invented by the devil and/or the CIA as a torture item.

Ghastly.

I can;t think of anything else I dislike as much - in fact that I just would not eat. Even tripe is OK in small amounts in a soup/stew. Though its probably twenty years since I did!

didds

bungeejumper
Lemon Half
Posts: 8064
Joined: November 8th, 2016, 2:30 pm
Has thanked: 2846 times
Been thanked: 3939 times

Re: Pet Petty Pepper Peeves

#167673

Postby bungeejumper » September 20th, 2018, 12:23 pm

didds wrote:Even tripe is OK in small amounts in a soup/stew. Though its probably twenty years since I did!

I seem to recall that fried tripe and onions was really quite palatable. Although that was a full forty years ago. These days I'm banned from offal altogether because of the cholesterol count. (I have a medical condition.) Pity, actually, I used to enjoy a bit of liver. Even without chianti.

BJ

OLTB
Lemon Quarter
Posts: 1343
Joined: November 4th, 2016, 9:55 am
Has thanked: 1339 times
Been thanked: 607 times

Re: Pet Petty Pepper Peeves

#167774

Postby OLTB » September 20th, 2018, 7:57 pm

Coconut is the food of the devil :evil: :twisted: :evil: :twisted: :evil: :twisted:

UncleEbenezer
The full Lemon
Posts: 10690
Joined: November 4th, 2016, 8:17 pm
Has thanked: 1459 times
Been thanked: 2965 times

Re: Pet Petty Pepper Peeves

#167810

Postby UncleEbenezer » September 20th, 2018, 11:25 pm

OLTB wrote:Coconut is the food of the devil :evil: :twisted: :evil: :twisted: :evil: :twisted:

So the devil has good taste.

Though to be fair, coconut is best as a cooking ingredient alongside complementary flavours, for example in a curry.

OLTB
Lemon Quarter
Posts: 1343
Joined: November 4th, 2016, 9:55 am
Has thanked: 1339 times
Been thanked: 607 times

Re: Pet Petty Pepper Peeves

#167848

Postby OLTB » September 21st, 2018, 7:58 am

UncleEbenezer wrote:
OLTB wrote:Coconut is the food of the devil :evil: :twisted: :evil: :twisted: :evil: :twisted:

So the devil has good taste.

Though to be fair, coconut is best as a cooking ingredient alongside complementary flavours, for example in a curry.


UncleEbenezer is in league with the chef of the devil :)

bungeejumper
Lemon Half
Posts: 8064
Joined: November 8th, 2016, 2:30 pm
Has thanked: 2846 times
Been thanked: 3939 times

Re: Pet Petty Pepper Peeves

#167866

Postby bungeejumper » September 21st, 2018, 9:21 am

UncleEbenezer wrote:Though to be fair, coconut is best as a cooking ingredient alongside complementary flavours, for example in a curry.

Coconut is fine and dandy as far as it goes (and assuming you don't have false teeth, which I don't.) What the world doesn't seem to have noticed is that it's absolutely loaded with saturated fats, which aren't a good idea at all.

A few years ago I was given a cookery book by the ultra-trendy Hemsley sisters, who have made a career out of persuading hip Londoners to cook in the good old wartime style of their grandmothers - pies, pastries, junkets, suet puddings, more pies, home made soups, and slow-boiling old beef bones for 48 hours to make "beef tea". (I kid you not.) It doesn't take a lot of researching to establish that the people who ate the fatty diets they've espoused could probably expect to live to fifty or maybe sixty with a bit of luck.

So, transposing that diet (which was for a physically active population, remember) to today's stressy, under-active townies is a guaranteed recipe for filling the coronary wards pretty fast. I stopped reading when I discovered that the Hemsleys recommend tipping a whole can of coconut milk into your soup. The problem here is that a medium-sized can of coconut milk contains your entire week's recommended intake of sat fats.

Think I'll give it a miss, thanks.

BJ

swill453
Lemon Half
Posts: 7962
Joined: November 4th, 2016, 6:11 pm
Has thanked: 984 times
Been thanked: 3643 times

Re: Pet Petty Pepper Peeves

#167869

Postby swill453 » September 21st, 2018, 9:32 am

bungeejumper wrote:So, transposing that diet (which was for a physically active population, remember) to today's stressy, under-active townies is a guaranteed recipe for filling the coronary wards pretty fast. I stopped reading when I discovered that the Hemsleys recommend tipping a whole can of coconut milk into your soup. The problem here is that a medium-sized can of coconut milk contains your entire week's recommended intake of sat fats.

Um, not quite. A typical example* I looked at had 48g saturated fat in a 400ml can, the weekly allowance according to the NHS* for a man is 210g. Assuming the soup recipe served four, a portion would be well within the daily allowance.

* https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/p ... /261626649
* https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/eat-well/e ... rated-fat/

Coconut oil, on the the other hand, is one of these fads that was touted as a superfood one year then the next year it's realised that it's the same or worse than any other fat or oil.

Scott.

roger4
Lemon Pip
Posts: 81
Joined: November 5th, 2016, 3:01 am
Has thanked: 266 times
Been thanked: 44 times

Re: Pet Petty Pepper Peeves

#168094

Postby roger4 » September 22nd, 2018, 9:16 am

Well, not everyone agrees with the American Professor who said Coconut Oil was POISON, in her lecture in Germany. What was not said at the time was that she acts as a paid consultant for American Soya Oil Producers Association. Do you think that might have a bearing on her comment?

I have seen a study conducted in Sri Lanka where the population uses coconut in virtually all dishes that shows the incidence of ischaemic heart disease over the past few years has increased by about 5% per year, BUT the consumption of coconuts per head has declined by about 10% from 300+ per year to around 275. Ignoring the sensationalism of her remarks and concentrating on the facts, that would tend to leave rather a large question mark about the desirability or not of coconut oil in food. Just to illustrate further, coconut oil is used extensively for cooking in South & Southeast Asia but the statistics for heart disease are comparable to western countries.

Oh, and for the record I do enjoy all colours of capsicum.

Roger

bungeejumper
Lemon Half
Posts: 8064
Joined: November 8th, 2016, 2:30 pm
Has thanked: 2846 times
Been thanked: 3939 times

Re: Pet Petty Pepper Peeves

#168140

Postby bungeejumper » September 22nd, 2018, 12:12 pm

roger4 wrote:Well, not everyone agrees with the American Professor who said Coconut Oil was POISON, in her lecture in Germany. What was not said at the time was that she acts as a paid consultant for American Soya Oil Producers Association. Do you think that might have a bearing on her comment?

Could be. :) But there's enough here to make me take the issue seriously. (Like...….)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/article/ ... 9efc2a9ee7

WRT Sri Lankans not falling over with heart disease because of coconut oil, I gather that the male life expectancy is 71, compared with 67 in Indonesia. It's always a dangerous game trying to compare these things across ethnic divides - for instance, because 75% of South Asians (and more than 90% of Africans) can't stomach milk properly, and because certain diseases (including type 2 diabetes) are a much greater vulnerability in both of these populations. You're always going to find it hard to compare like with like.

Then again, I understand that the shorter lives in some regions is thought to be part of the reason why they don't go down with long-term ailments like cancer which are more likely to feature in older populations. People don't live long enough to get the chance, you see?

So you can prove anything with statistics. I do buy the Mediterranean diet/lifestyle argument, though, and I'm also inclined to accept the Japanese argument. I also remember reading somewhere that, although the Japanese have a low vulnerability to heart disease, it only applies while they're living in Japan. Move them to America, and they immediately start falling over at the same rate as Californians. Funny, that. (Well, okay, not very. ;) )

BJ


Return to “Bitter Lemons”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 10 guests