Body Image

This image has been popping up a lot in my Twitter feed recently (how modern am I?), and I want to scream every time I see it. She might be a very nice person, she might be very healthy and outlive me by centuries. But that is not a body that appeals to me in the slightest. No doubt she'd say the same about mine, but that's not the point and this is my blog. We're talking about body image here, and how the media and marketing tosspots imagine perfection should look, thereby alienating, scaring and generally discombobulating the 99% of people who don't look anything like that.

She's drinking a green smoothie, a 'superfood' apparently, blithely ignorant that the only superfood in the world is bacon. I bet she goes on detox programs too, blissfully unaware that the human body already incorporates all the systems needed to keep it safe from toxins and it doesn't even charge you for it.

But back to body image. Huffington Post carried this article recently. A photo of a slightly tubby but happy looking young lady was given to 18 designers (14 of whom were women) in assorted countries. They were asked to modify it to represent their idea of the perfect woman. Heaven help me if I ever go to China. And it's interesting to note that only one of them changed the colour of the white underwear. To red. Italian.

Anyway, horses for courses, one man's meat is another mans poison (KLANG KLANG CLICHE ALERT), but really I want to find out where that woman lives and send her a pie. Possibly full of bacon. I'm sure she'd thank me for it.

keefcooks.com - much improved website

I've been very quiet on the blogging front lately because I've been hard at work building a complete revamp of keefcooks.com. Now it's done, and I'm very pleased with it. It's a serious redesign with several major objectives.

Firstly, to improve the findability of the recipes, both for people and for search engines. Secondly, to improve the experience for viewers on mobile phones. And thirdly, to increase advertising recipe - because if I'm going to keep on doing these recipes and the accompanying videos, I do need some money coming in!

So I tackled the findability issues by scrapping the 7 or 8 categories that I had - it was becoming very limiting anyway, and replacing that with a whole bunch of other groupings - Cuisine/Origin, Meal Course/Type, Main Ingredient, Cooking Method, Cooking Time, Most Recently Added and Most Viewed. And there's also an old-fashioned search box if you want to do it that way.

That taxonomic structure (yes, an SEO expert actually called it that) will help search engines get to the content much easier, and I've used friendly URLs throughout the site so that the clunky old web addresses like keefcooks.com/recipe_detail.php?id=27&t=3 become smart, streamlined and readable, like http://www.keefcooks.com/spaghetti-carbonara-easy-recipe/.

Another behind-the-scenes idea I've implemented is structured data markup. You're probably scratching your head, but what it means is you use a schema that relates to recipes. So first of all, you are directly telling the search engine you're talking about a recipe. Then you tell it the recipe name, cuisine, prep time and cooking time (in a rather arcane ISO format), the ingredients and a summary of the method. In Google search results, some of this info appears as a 'rich snippet' along with a small thumbnail that makes your result stand out from the others and be more likely to be clicked on.

As far as revenue goes, there's really only one option at the moment, and that's Google AdWords. I designed the site specifically to fit Google's standard sizes for adverts. I do also have a PayPal Donate button, which has resulted in precisely 1 donation in the 2 years that I've been running this site. Please feel free to donate as much as you like!

Finally, I spent quite a lot of time building the print version of the recipe details page. If you choose to print out a recipe, you get a nice clean layout without any advertising or menu links (you might have noticed that clicking links on paper doesn't work!). What you do get, however, are 2 QR (Quick Response) codes. If you have a barcode scanner app on your smartphone, you can scan the codes - one of them takes you to the original recipe on the website, the other takes you to the video on YouTube.

So that's the new-look website. Hopefully I've made it super-easy and simple to use. And as any good designer will tell you, making something simple is actually a very hard thing to achieve, and after all that graft, I need a beer. So will someone please hurry up and make a PayPal donation!

Restaurant Review: Tuk Tuk, Madrid

Late last year, business partners Ric and Alan shook up Madrid's rather staid food scene by opening Tuk Tuk (in the trendy Malasaña barrio, Calle Cardenal Cisneros 6), serving Asian street food. It was a bit of a risk - Madrileños are not known for embracing exotic foreign food. While Madrid already had a number of Asian restaurants - lots of Cantonese, several 'Indian' (Bangladeshi, normally), a couple of Thai places - none of them was outstanding and none had the guts to serve authentic recipes. The curse of 'adjusting to suit local tastes' prevails in Madrid.

Tuk Tuk is different - the food is bursting with Asian flavours, served without pretension, and very affordable. The first restaurant became so popular they had to turn away more people than they could serve at weekends. Clearly the demand was there, so a couple of weeks ago they opened a second venue (in the gay Chueca barrio, Calle Barquillo 26) that can accommodate twice as many people as the first Tuk Tuk.

We went on a Saturday lunchtime a few days after it opened. The interior follows the design cues of the original Tuk Tuk - black and red, a big photo-mural of an Asian city street, Chinese lanterns and illuminated advertising signs. This location can hold about 60 people on three levels - the ground floor, a mezzanine and a basement. The basement is unusual in that it has natural daylight filtering into it, so it's a lot more pleasant than most basement dining areas.

We've eaten at the original Tuk Tuk several times, so our expectations of the food were pretty high. We were not disappointed. The menu isn't divided into starters and mains, it's divided into Rice Bowls, Thai Curry, Barbecue dishes, Noodles dishes, Noodle Soup, Salads and Soup.

To start, we shared a bowl of Hong Kong Char Sui - marinated Pork loin served with a dome of sticky rice speckled with black seeds (nigella, I think). Then we had Moo Ping - Thai skewers of marinated pork - and Tom Ka Gai, a delicious Thai chicken soup buzzing with the flavours of coconut, lime, lemon grass and only the chef knows what else. It was all superb.

So, give your taste buds a treat and go to Tuk Tuk.

Food Education

When I was at school, cooking ('domestic science') was definitely for girls. Us lads didn't get a look-in, it was woodwork and metalwork for us chaps. And that was okay until I left home to go to Uni, and had to fend for myself, foodwise. I'd never been encouraged to cook at home, although I could manage things like frying an egg, making beans on toast etc. Remember, this was the olden days, the 1970s, when access to information was nowhere near as splendid and easy as it is now. The interwebz did not yet exist, and knowledge was acquired from school or the public library (the cook-book industry was nowhere near as big as it is now, in fact I don't think my mother owned a single cookery book). So I would phone my mother in a panic to find out how to make Yorkshire pudding, for instance.

I mention all this because last week, a new GCSE curriculum was announced in the UK for cooking and nutrition. It will take effect from September 2015, and the contents of it are, frankly, amazing. I would quite like to do the course myself!

Haggis

It was Burn's Night last weekend (25th January). Haggis is compulsory eating on this day of celebrating Scottishness, and this year I decided to make my own, as authentically as possible. That, of course, means hitting the offal in a big way. I thought I might be thwarted at the first hurdle, getting hold of a sheep's pluck. The pluck is the heart, liver and lungs of a sheep, and it turns out to be readily available at the casquería (offal) stalls at my local market. This surprised me, but asadura is a fairly common peasant dish round these parts. What I couldn't get was a sheep's stomach to stuff the filling into, so I had to make do with sausage casing.

Now, if you're in the US, you would have a seriously hard time getting a complete pluck, because your government deems lungs to be unfit for human consumption. I think you could make a reasonable version without the lungs, but don't tell any purists I said that.

Here's my haggis recipe, and here's the video of me making haggis.

So the drill for a formal Burn's Supper involves at least one bagpiper playing 'Scotland the Brave' (you might think there's some bravery involved in making/eating haggis), and the host or Master of Ceremonies reciting Robbie Burns' 'Address to a Haggis'. The haggis is, of course, accompanied by neeps and tatties, and a wee dram or ten.

It's really not difficult to make haggis, although it can take 5-6 hours. And remember, for a chef, every night is burns night.

Why I'll Never Post a Quinoa Recipe

Quinoa is a tiny grain that many nutritional crackpots like to describe as a 'superfood'. Although it only grows in Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador, in recent years it has found its way into Western countries. I've tried it several times, and I have to say I'm not impressed. I mean, it's okay, but the way some people talk about it you would expect the most thrilling food experience of your life.

Here's why I don't use it:

• It only grows in South America, and therefore has to travel halfway around the world to get to me
• Its price has trebled over the last 20 years, putting it out of reach of the people for whom it used to be a staple
• The marketers insist it is pronounce 'keen-wah', but I can never bring myself to say it like that. The name is Spanish, and Spanish is pretty much a phonetic language. So it should be pronounced 'kwin-oh-ah'
• It seems to have little or no flavour - you might as well eat cous-cous

Free-From. Fad?

I feel sorry for people with food intolerances, I really do. It must be horrible not to be able to eat a slice of toast, or a really good pie made by me, because it contains gluten. Or to be killed by a peanut.

Last month, the lovely and always-right European Community introduced a new regulation concerning  the provision of allergen information to consumers of unpackaged food products. Meaning any food offered in a café or restaurant, or sold loose in something like a bakery or deli. It is a huge burden on the industry (hands up those who are not surprised), involving staff training, information displayed on websites, menus and menu boards. Guess who's going to pay for this? Yes, you, the consumer. But you can't argue about it - consumers have a right to know whether what they order might kill them, right?

The legislation covers 14 allergens - the usual suspects (gluten, lactose, etc) - plus linseed (lupin), which I've only ever come across as an oil used by painters.

All well and good (ish) - if you know you have an allergy to something, you should be able to find out reasonably easily whether what you're about to buy is safe for you.

But here's a thing. Sales of things like gluten-free bread are rising rapidly. Non-coeliacs are buying this stuff because they believe it might be better for them. Other 'free-from' products are also seeing growth in sales.

And here's another thing. I defriended someone on Facebook a few months ago. She had posted about how she'd just carried out allergy testing on all seven of her kids. How? Simples. The kid holds out his/her left hand and you place the thing you wish to test in it. He/she sticks his/her right arm out horizontally. The tester presses down on the right arm. If there is no resistance and the arm can be pushed down easily, it means the kid is allergic to whatever is in the left hand.

I queried this. Does it work with liquids? 'Sure - just put it in a small glass'. Hmm. Glass is pretty inert, how can the body tell what's inside it? 'It just can'.

So this woman is telling her kids they don't need to eat Brussels sprouts or whatever else they don't like because they have an allergy. And for the rest of their lives, they'll probably believe it, on the basis of an idiot test.

And the poor food vendors will have to deal with this forever.