Carrots

Got given a free taster of a chicken recipe thingy in Sainsbury's the other day. It was quite nice and on offer, so we bought a couple. The idea is that you put your (raw) chicken and your vegetables in a bag, then put the bag in the oven and bob's your uncle. Today we had the first one, "Rustic chicken". Let me give you a brief review.

Pros.

• Easy to prepare. 
• Tasted alright. 
• The chicken was tender. 
• Beans were alright.

Cons.

• Some potatoes were not cooked enough, but others were fine. I guess I should have turned it over half way through or something.
• The carrots were not so well cooked. Again that may have been my fault. Should have cut them up into thinner slices.
• It was quite difficult to serve. Tried spooning it out, but that isn't very easy with massive green beans in there. Tried tipping it out onto the plate, but only succeeded in getting the cooking juices everywhere.

In conclusion it gives you an easy, tasty meal with not a lot of washing up. I think it would be better the next time as I can learn from my mistakes.

Clarkson

I don't agree with Jeremy Clarkson on many issues, but carrots are one of them. I want to see a massive glow-in-the-dark dildo of a carrot. The kind of vegetable you could club somebody to death with. We do not like dirty wrinkly organic carrots, where there is nothing left once you have peeled them.

Nice carrots

Rubbish carrots

Which neatly Segways me to another favourite topic: GM foods. GM food is great, but we seem to have forgotten why it is here. Several years ago this new idea appeared in the mainstream media (I am thinking of Tomorrow's world), perhaps it had already been around for a while. The idea was that we could use "science" to do faster what people had already been doing for thousands of years by selectively breeding crops: to produce bigger, faster growing, more resilient (to pests and climate), juicier, tastier (in short: better) varieties. (Oh dear, I seem to have overused a certain piece of bipartite punctuation.)

The reason for developing the GM technologies was to help starving africans, to grow crops in arid, famine stricken lands where not a lot grows. We can develop crops so that the people that live in these parts of the world can feed themselves more easily. However, that seems to have been completely forgotten, the only noise we here about GM now is when it is grown in the UK and the USA. I have absoltely no idea if people are trying to grow GM crops in the otherwise unfarmable parts of africa. Like most new ideas, it only really gets going when we work out how to use it to make rich people richer (or fat people fatter).

I once told a friend something I had heard not long before on this topic, unfortunately I didn't quite get the quote verbatim. I said, "Give a starving man some rice and you can feed him for a day, give him a spade and you can feed him forever." Lee thought I was making a joke about black people.

And on that bombshell...