Cool way to open champaign

Sabering in the Garden with Kathryn Borel Jr. from Kathryn Borel on Vimeo.

No Knead Bread

I love bread, but with very few exceptions I'm not very good at making it, so it was a nice surprise to find an easy way of making good bread over at "The Daily Spud".

The trick is to leave the bread for hours (about 24 in fact) so I made the dough on Monday night, covered it and went about my daily business.

last night I came home, did the final prep's which took about 10 minutes and again left the dough to rise before finally throwing it into the oven.

The result?

Perfect delicatessen quality bread.




original article

Ice Cream Ireland

Because I spend so much time on this blog just bitching about how crap everything is you might not know there are things I actually enjoy in life and one of them is cooking.

This Christmas my wife brought me an ice cream maker which necessitated the need for an ice cream recipe book and my google searches turned up a gem -The Murphy's Ice Cream Book of Sweet Things - written by two American brothers living here in Ireland who have set up their own ice cream business. The book is fantastic and many of the recipes from the book (and more) can be found on their blog which I browse to every week or so.

But here's the rant - Ben & Jerry have paid google.ie so that a search for “ice cream ireland” will display their site before/above http://icecreamireland.com as a “sponsored link".

It's a fairly petty thing to have done in my opinion (and the Murphy's) and I hope it fails and don't forget to check out their site if you like ice cream.

Protectionism makes you rich

I don't know if Peter Mandelson is the most evil person in Europe, but I bet he's in the top 5.

Neoliberal economists claim rich countries got that way by removing their barriers to trade. Nothing could be further from the truth. As Ha-Joon Chang shows in his book Kicking Away the Ladder, Britain discovered its enthusiasm for free trade only after it had achieved economic dominance. The industrial revolution was built on protectionism: in 1699, for example, we banned the import of Irish woollens; in 1700 we banned cotton cloth from India. To protect our infant industries, we imposed ferocious tariffs (trade taxes) on almost all manufactured goods.

By 1816 the US had imposed a 35% tax on most imported manufactures, which rose to 50% in 1832. Between 1864 and 1913 it was the most heavily protected nation on earth, and the fastest-growing. It wasn't until after the second world war, when it had already become top dog, that it dropped most of its tariffs. The same strategy was followed by Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and almost every other country that is rich today. Within the ACP nations, the great success story of the past 30 years is the country whose protectionism has been fiercest: during the 1980s and 1990s, Mauritius imposed import tariffs of up to 80%. Protectionism, which can be easily exploited by corrupt elites, does not always deliver wealth; but development is much harder without it.

The first goal of any society is to provide enough food and labour to sustain itself, under no circumstances should this be "outsourced", handed over to a third party or bartered away.

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