Housemate rant

trewornan said:

Let me educate you.

British food got a bad reputation in the post war period, quite deservedly. Rationing was to blame for a lot of the decline along with the era of true mass production which followed. This was exacerbated by the influx of ideas and recipes from other countries which were poorly understood and often used in inappropriate ways. The result was a period of very poor cuisine which didn't really end until the late 80's.

After that British food improved considerably and these days it's fairly good. Unfortunately it tends to be a bit of a mish mash of different international cuisines.

This is a shame because proper traditional British food is actually very good, classic traditional dishes for example:

Steak and Kidney Pudding
Stargazey Pie
Roast Beef and Yorkshire Pudding
Oxtail Stew
Shepherds Pie

and so on, are (when properly made) absolutely delicious. But food like that is now difficult to find, not that international dishes aren't nice but it's still a shame.

A yob is a loud and aggressive man who behaves antisocially, generally with connotations of youth and low social status.

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Your post reminded me of how delicious roast beef and Yorkshires are. My Mom will make one once or twice a year and it is my favorite meal probably (with gravy all over everything). Also I am a huge fan of corned beef and cabbage but no one else in my family digs it much so I can't get it but once a year on St. Pat's. When I was away at school I bought about ten of them before St Pat's (they are incredibly cheap then) and froze them and had one a month for the year.

I also really appreciate your taking a moment to explain the basis for the "English food sucks" myth, I find that sort of thing very interesting.

"A yob is a loud and aggressive man who behaves antisocially, generally with connotations of youth and low social status"

Like my post lol.

GB

JEEP said:

As to problems with housemates; consider yourself lucky it is just food. I have tried to live together with a highly religious bi-polar paranoid schizophrenic that had trouble finding out whether he was John the Babtist, Christ reborn or Søren Kirkegaard (his last was actually Kirkegaard) - one thing was certain though; he knew that I was Satan (seriously, no kidding). That was, in lack of a better word, quite interesting and outright scary. He was intelligent enough to manipulate everyone into believing that it was me who had the "problem", luckily he ended up doing some things that quite effective led everyone to realize what was going on (you really do not want to know) - and he was thrown out. After we had thrown him out he started stalking me for a short while - luckily for both of us he stopped.

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Oh come on , tell us

philamac said:

Oh come on , tell us

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Really, you have to tell us. You can't just bring it up like that, and then tell us we don't want to know. We'll tell you if we don't want to know, but WE DO!

Please tell us (I bet it involves poop).

GB

General Burnside said:

Also I am a huge fan of corned beef and cabbage but no one else in my family digs it much so I can't get it but once a year on St. Pat's. When I was away at school I bought about ten of them before St Pat's (they are incredibly cheap then) and froze them and had one a month for the year.

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Corned Beef and Cabbage is about as Irish as Spaghetti and Meatballs is Italian (It's not). Those are Irish-American and Italian-American dishes.

Doc4 said:

I am reminded of head-in-the-clouds-up-their-own-@$$ chefs on Kitchen Nightmares, unwilling to effing see that their effing food is effing crap, in the effingly poignant phrasing of effing Gordon "F" Ramsay.

The solution is probably to just go "each cooks his own", so your stomach survives.

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They call it Kitchen Nightmare in Canada? We've got Hell's Kitchen down here!

Lucius said:

Corned Beef and Cabbage is about as Irish as Spaghetti and Meatballs is Italian (It's not). Those are Irish-American and Italian-American dishes.

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The nearest Irish dish would be to fry up some bacon and then to chuck a load of chopped cabbage into the pan. Very nice. Though I think the English favourite of Bubble&Squeak is even better.

adamant said:

They call it Kitchen Nightmare in Canada? We've got Hell's Kitchen down here!

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There's Hell's Kitchen (which if I remember rightly is GR running his kitchen with newbies or celebs getting sworn & shouted at) and Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares (where GR drops into an outside kitchen, shouts & swears a lot at the owner and chefs)

adamant said:

They call it Kitchen Nightmare in Canada? We've got Hell's Kitchen down here!

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Kitchen Nightmares is Gordon Ramsey's first show and it's in the UK. He goes to failing restaurants and tells them, in very colorful ways, what their problem is. There's also a sensationalized American version now. He still does his thing, but he's really become a caricature of himself.

As for Hells Kitchen, that's when he takes a bunch of chefs and tells them they suck for several weeks at a time until he eventually tells one or two that they don't suck anymore.

I watch both shows regularly.

General Burnside said:

Really, you have to tell us. You can't just bring it up like that, and then tell us we don't want to know. We'll tell you if we don't want to know, but WE DO!

Please tell us (I bet it involves poop).

GB

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Fortunally no feces was involved.

Let's just say that he was doing what he could to make me hurt him - his entire agenda was to make me into the monster he saw me as.

On top of all the psykological ****. There were the bouquets of dead flowers, threathening poems(!), knocking and yelling at my door at night, calling my friends (even old friends of mine he had never met - I still do not know how he got thir phonenumbers, but I suspect he somehow had managed to get hold of my cell phone without me knowing it) telling them that I was menatally ill and/or evil, disposing his garbage and ashtray in my clean clothing, (because I once had asked him to clean up a messy kitchen that had been left for a week), the constant feeling of him having been in my room moving around my stuff when I was out (my room could only be locked form the inside, he had full acces when I was out) + a lot of other things in the same alley as these.

All these things he managed to do for 2-3 months before the other people (childhood friends of mine) living in the house discovered what was actually going on (because his knocking and shouting waked them up at night aswell) - untill that they had refused to believe it.

One of the last things he said to me was that I was en epmty-souled vampire - and that his mission was to destroy me and rebuild me as a real human in his own picture!

Today I can, sort of, laugh about - but it has taken me a few years to get that far.


Regards.

Jakob

philamac said:

The nearest Irish dish would be to fry up some bacon and then to chuck a load of chopped cabbage into the pan. Very nice. Though I think the English favourite of Bubble&Squeak is even better.

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Wow, the bacon cabbage thing sounds great. I looked up what b and s was and it sounds awesome too.

General Burnside said:

Wow, the bacon cabbage thing sounds great. I looked up what b and s was and it sounds awesome too.

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Chop up some strips of bacon into bite size pieces and fry until crisp in a little oil in a large pot. Remove the bacon and drain on some kitchen paper. Put a large knob of butter into the pot and melt over a medium heat. Add a finely chopped onion and gently fry until soft. Gradually add finely shredded cabbage, stirring to ensure it is well coated with butter. Cook until the cabbage is done to your taste (soft on the outside, still crunchy on the inside is best). Add the bacon pieces, a little sea salt and as much freshly ground black pepper as you can stand and heat through. Serve it with mashed potato.

This is the only viable cabbage recipe in the known universe, all others are null and void and may be safely ignored
--
Paul

Why not buy a cookbook and offer a sporting challenge? Pick a favorite, you both make it and take it down to your local pub, serve it out but don't let folks know which is which...Ask the simple question, Which one is better...

Easy enough...

thirdeye said:

Why not buy a cookbook and offer a sporting challenge? Pick a favorite, you both make it and take it down to your local pub, serve it out but don't let folks know which is which...Ask the simple question, Which one is better...

Easy enough...

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The one with $20 on the plate.