Do I live in some kind of alternate universe to Guardian journos?

[oursin]

In article on debt, it states:
Ten to 15 years ago, annual fees were still charged for credit cards, so people did not generally have more than one.

Huh? it's nearly 30 years since I got my first credit card, and I've never paid an annual fee.

And in the article by confirmed carnivore spending a week as a 'veggie', he alleges that, in the

Comments

[rysmiel]

I'm still paying annual fees on my credit cards fwiw, with Bank of Ireland. Considering that they recently rang me at five am on account of not grasping the concept of time-zones, I'm inclined to chalk this up to the "bunch of bastards" hypothesis that explains 80% or so of their behaviour.

[jonquil]

(looks at U.S. newspaper headlines) This is not my beautiful timeline.

I wish I could find bergamot oil, or recipes that call for it.

[oursin]

I might see if Fresh 'n Wild in Camden have it, since I intend going there tomorrow anyway - though I've no idea what one uses it for except, perhaps, making pomanders - I can't think of a culinary use.

[jonquil]

Scenting your own Earl Grey because storebought just isn't aggressive enough for you?

[veejane]

> seaweed, bergamot oil, mirin, masa harina and ketjap manis.

This may be a dialect issue, but I've never even heard of the last two, and am under the vague impression that the third one is Japanese beer. (I'm not a vegetarian myself, but I cook from [recent] vegetarian cookbooks reasonably often.)

I can get seaweed at my local supermarket (I don't know what kind), and I live on the wrong side of the Ponceyville tracks. But I spent months wondering where to find buttermilk at my supermarket, before realizing that they did not carry it.

[amaliedageek]

Masa harina is made from hominy and used for corn tortillas; most grocery stores here carry it, but we have a considerable Hispanic population. Mirin is Japanese rice wine.

[veejane]

Aha! I knew it was a dialect issue. I just call that "rice wine" and I think I have some in my house.

My grocery store does carry hominy in a not-ground-up version, but, it's one of those "odd southern things" like okra, so I haven't adventured in that direction.

[oursin]

I think it's a special reduced/sweetened rice wine specifically for cooking - I don't think one would drink it.

[drasecretcampus]

I don't recollect coming across most of those ingredients in recipes or travels, but I guess I'd look them up in an ingedients dictionary or online and then talk to shopkeepers. I'm in what you might call an ethnically homogenous small town (cathedral only by virtue of a big church with an authority figure) and we do have an indy health food shop, an Asian supermarket, a Polish store and a Thai corner shop which has a similar range to Win Yip but an nth of the floor space. I might struggle on south and central american, but I think I'm smart enough to improvise something.

On the other hand I do come across ingredients I've heard of, but don't have (five spice was one), go out and buy said ingredient and then can't find the recipe.

[forthwritten]

I can't say that those are staples of my cooking or easy to obtain. On the other hand, we do have shops selling Caribbean, African, Polish and Indian ingredients and foods nearby...
It might also be me, and admittedly I own all of three cookery books (and BBC Food) but I haven't tended to see those ingredients in a recipe unless you're cooking something from that specific culture.

However, I do see the writer's point that vegetarians simply aren't catered for when eating out and that a lot of vegetarian food is boring. I once took my vegetarian ex to a local very good Chinese restaurant and he was in raptures because it was, as he said, "vegetarian food that actually tasted of something."

[oursin]

True: a lot of places are direly unimaginative about the veg option ('Aaaaaargh! Not the lasagne again! Anything but the lasagne!') but there are (I think increasingly) places that do think beyond the omelette/lasagne/3 bean chile choices. I've had remarkably good vegetarian dishes at such carnivore heavens as St John and Rules.

[sollersuk]

ER. Um. Having had Chinese friends with contacts (OK, relatives) in the restaurant business, the chances are that what he was tasting was chicken stock. I've had vegetarian friends who only eat out at Indian restaurants and avoid Chinese restaurants, unless they know them very well and know that they are operating in terms of Western perceptions of vegetarianism,