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Leaver or Limpet – How long with Johnson lead? – politicalbetting.com

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    SandyRentoolSandyRentool Posts: 20,792
    For those stockpiling frozen food: When the gas and electricity interconnectors are turned off and we get power cuts, you are going to have a lot of wasted food.

    Tinned food that is OK to eat cold is the way to go. Can I recommend beans & sausages followed by rice pudding.

    UHT milk may be a prudent option too.
  • Options

    Scott_xP said:
    Boris shouldn't have much to fear from that rabble - Sir Keir will help him in parliament, and the right-wing media, desperate to be vindicated for their earlier endorsement of Boris, will largely go with the government spin that Boris has pulled a blinder. It's the public Boris needs to keep on side, and he won't do that if there are only jars of gherkins at Sainsbury's.
    Goodness me.

    Delusion a mile thick.

    After covid, which has infuriated many tory voters, a surrender brexit bought with labour votes is suicide for the conservatives. Suicide.
    Most voters won't have a clue what constitutes a 'true' Brexit or not. Boris just needs a few photo ops of himself eating fish 'n' ships on a Cornish quayside surrounded by cheering trawlermen and it's job done.
  • Options
    SelebianSelebian Posts: 7,578
    rcs1000 said:

    Selebian said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Omnium said:

    I'm far from good at poached eggs, but boiling water is too hot, and I'm not sure that swirling (or vinegar) helps. (edit: if I could get this right i'd be very happy)

    The trick is a non-stick pan

    Heat the water until bubbles start rising from the bottom, but it's not a rolling boil

    Drop the egg in. No vinegar. No vortex.

    When is separates from the base of the pan it's cooked.
    The thing I've found makes a difference is freshness of the eggs. Local eggs straight from the farm (also cheaper than supermarket, which is a bonus...) always seem to poach just fine and hold together, not a non-stick pan and not even that much care to get the water boil just right. If they've been stored for a few weeks then they break apart in the water unless you're very careful.
    I've always found the trick is to put the egg in a mug, and then put the mug in the water. Leave it there for about about 30 seconds or so, and the egg whites begin (very slightly) to firm. You can then (still very, very gently) pour the egg out of the mug.

    Result, perfectly serviceable poached eggs.
    I'm starting to think we need some egg-poaching RCTs, randomised allocation of eggs and cooks and double blinding of cooks (to source of eggs, probably hard to blind them to cooking method!) and assessors (to source and cooking method) :wink:

    One more method - when I was an undergrad my mum bought me a microwave egg-poaching kit which was a little plastic cup into which you broke an egg and then microwaved it. The results were reliably inedible.
  • Options
    OmniumOmnium Posts: 9,832
    DavidL said:

    Sorry I seem to have come onto a cookery site by mistake.

    Perhaps. Inadvertently your comment is the funniest thing.
  • Options
    dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 28,050
    Roger said:

    Extraordinary Dylan selling the publishing rights to his entire back catalogue reckoned to be 600 songs. You feel that no amount of money would be enough Even the 'hundred's of million dollars' that has been discussed. To use any Dylan on an ad would be so prohibitive that you'd need a pretty huge budget to consider it and that's just one outlet.

    Dylan's been used on plenty ads. Victoria's secret, Cadillac and the Co-op off the top of my head.
    He's also notoriously amenable to using them in films and TV. Big Lebowski, Walking Dead, CSI spring to mind.
  • Options
    AlistairAlistair Posts: 23,670

    It is worrying that cases look like they are on the rise again, already.

    Amazingly "returning to normal" means a return to rising cases.

    It's like people don't understand what exponential means. When cases are down at summer levels exponential means tiny, tiny rises. When cases as as high as they are now exponential means a big rise in cases.

    Idiots whining about Scottish tier levels on twitter (like David Paton) see the new case figure decking and immediatly start screaming the Covid is over and all restrictions must be lifted. They seem to fail to understand that cases are still going up, rapidly, it is just that the rate of the increase has slowed.
  • Options
    contrariancontrarian Posts: 5,818

    Scott_xP said:
    Boris shouldn't have much to fear from that rabble - Sir Keir will help him in parliament, and the right-wing media, desperate to be vindicated for their earlier endorsement of Boris, will largely go with the government spin that Boris has pulled a blinder. It's the public Boris needs to keep on side, and he won't do that if there are only jars of gherkins at Sainsbury's.
    Goodness me.

    Delusion a mile thick.

    After covid, which has infuriated many tory voters, a surrender brexit bought with labour votes is suicide for the conservatives. Suicide.
    Most voters won't have a clue what constitutes a 'true' Brexit or not. Boris just needs a few photo ops of himself eating fish 'n' ships on a Cornish quayside surrounded by cheering trawlermen and it's job done.
    The remainer's great hubris. Voters are stupid. They really aren't.
  • Options
    FeersumEnjineeyaFeersumEnjineeya Posts: 3,925
    edited December 2020

    For those stockpiling frozen food: When the gas and electricity interconnectors are turned off and we get power cuts, you are going to have a lot of wasted food.

    Tinned food that is OK to eat cold is the way to go. Can I recommend beans & sausages followed by rice pudding.

    UHT milk may be a prudent option too.

    That is a worry. I was considering buying a generator, but the missus vetoed that one.

    Edit: Perhaps I could call it an Xmas present. Hmm.
  • Options
    RogerRoger Posts: 18,944
    RobD said:

    Cicero said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    If we get No Deal - which is starting to look horrifying possible - then the pressure for Boris to resign will be formidable. It will amount to the greatest political failure in modern British history, making Black Wednesday look like a pasty tax in comparison. There will be absolutely no reason, either for himself or anyone else, for Boris to hang around a moment longer.

    Not sure. We have now normalised empty shelves via Covid. Plus no one* will notice the extra administrative burden, to whatever degree it manifests itself, save for a "weren't these Stroopwafels a bit cheaper last week" type of thing. So there is a lot of leeway for absolute total fuck up that Boris can paint as near-normal.

    I have been prominent on here saying he will go (I have nine more months of my bet to run) on the basis of logic. It was obvious from the moment that TMay took office that she was manifestly unfit for it and hence was, to quote a noted newspaper editor, a "dead man walking".

    Boris is equally unfit to be PM. And he will fall. Just not in 24-hr rolling news time. People who are manifestly unfit for high office generally don't stay as PM for that long. cf J Corbyn.

    That said, he does look sticky because all his failings are often waved away as the behaviour of a lovable scallywag.

    *no one apart those who are filling out the forms and adhering to the new system, obvs.
    Ordinarily he and many of his cabinet colleagues would have been marched out of office by now. Lying and corruption aren't usually politically survivable, yet the bar to serve in a senior role appears to be having been sacked for one or the other previously.

    People won't realise how bad this is until it slaps them in the face. Customs checks whether under a deal or WTO will bring the UK supply chain to a crashing halt. When it gets untangled we'll find that we're paying a lot more for less things and every retailer and manufacturer and supplier will be saying why, intercut with the reporters embedded with the 48 hour queues to cross the channel.

    "This isn't the Brexit we voted for" - big price rises, mass shortages, mass unemployment. You can't hide the impacts of the end of the free market and free customs, or blame it on the other party, or positively spin it as better than what we had. As reality collapses in on people Johnson will be gone. At speed.
    There usually needs to be a catalyst and your final paragraph paints a reasonably possible picture of that catalyst. But as I said we have had empty shelves in very recent memory so I'm not 100% sure he won't have a get out.
    There is another factor that means we won't have empty shelves - supermarkets are quite deliberately dynamic. If a produce is unavailable and won't be available for a while they don't generally just put an "out of stock" label on its spot and leave that bit of their shelving empty - they fill the space with something else. They put a different product up instead, or they fill in with other products that would be next to it instead. So the shelves remain "full" (depending upon normal variance of how recently they were restocked) even if products are "unavailable".
    @RochdalePioneers literally works for a supermarket, doesn’t he?

    But of course, you know best.
    If Rochdale wants to say I am wrong then let him say how I am wrong and why.

    EG am I wrong and does his supermarket deliberately leave shelves empty when a stock is unavailable for a significant period of time or am I right and the supermarket will change the tickets and put different stock on the shelves instead?
    Phil this is what the real world looked like earlier this year.

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-51883440
    Thanks to panic buying which stopped in a matter of days because then people had full fridges and freezers. Its a self-correcting problem that can't go on forever.
    Exactly. I appreciate it when you agree with something rather than try to argue the opposite. Thanks.

    There were empty shelves because of panic buying. That's just the public for you I know what can you do but don't forget a lot of these people also voted for Brexit so we can't make any calls on their intelligence or common sense.

    There were empty shelves then and there may very well be empty shelves again.
    Yes if people react to no deal with panic buying then there may be some empty shelves for a few days while people panic buy.

    Then people's fridges and freezers will be full and they will stop panic buying and the supermarkets will have full shelves again. Just a few days later.

    Exactly as happened earlier this year. We didn't go for months with empty shelves, nor will we for months or years to come post-Brexit.

    If people start panic buying in the first week of January do you think come the May elections we will still have empty shelves and panic buying going on? Don't be ridiculous! 🤦🏻‍♂️
    You just don't understand the supply chain.

    We saw an initial blitzing of certain product categories - Pasta, Toilet Rolls, Paracetamol where people went mad and bought stuff they didn't need. After that we saw major shortage across a significant number of categories caused by the major modal shift in how people eat. The lockdown closed pubs and restaurants and workspaces - all the meals that used to be eaten out were now eaten at home. Pack formats became a major issue - there wasn't a shortage in beans but there was a shortage in retail cans and a surplus of huuuuge catering cans.

    Retailers were working flat out as were manufacturers trying to respond to wild swings in demand with a supply chain full of holes. Through this longer phase the gaps were not caused by panic buying at all - they were caused by supply chain disruption. We are about to have a major supply chain disruption which will cause not just short term inability to move products / materials but a long term need to try and restructure what comes from where and when.

    Manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers - all expecting long term issues and price rises. What do they know about it...
    Yes there will be disruption, again no shit Sherlock, I have always said there will be disruption.

    The invisible hand will work its magic and we will adjust. Some things may become a bit more expensive, some things may become a bit cheaper and some customers will substitute from more expensive goods to cheaper ones - and life will go on. The wheel of time will turn.
    The political wheel will also turn. The punters will remember the buckets of horse crap that have been served to them: "oven ready" and all the rest of it, and they will get very angry indeed. This will happen, even with "a deal", which is now down to hard Brexit only. With no deal, the Tories are going to be facing the kind of rage that will be scary to watch, let alone be on the receiving end of. I would feel sorry for you, but having seen the chumocracy at the wheel I´d personally like to see you all hanged.
    Wishing death on other commenters? How very classy.
    Too good for him. A repulsive lump of lard
  • Options
    malcolmgmalcolmg Posts: 42,229
    Carnyx said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    If we get No Deal - which is starting to look horrifying possible - then the pressure for Boris to resign will be formidable. It will amount to the greatest political failure in modern British history, making Black Wednesday look like a pasty tax in comparison. There will be absolutely no reason, either for himself or anyone else, for Boris to hang around a moment longer.

    Not sure. We have now normalised empty shelves via Covid. Plus no one* will notice the extra administrative burden, to whatever degree it manifests itself, save for a "weren't these Stroopwafels a bit cheaper last week" type of thing. So there is a lot of leeway for absolute total fuck up that Boris can paint as near-normal.

    I have been prominent on here saying he will go (I have nine more months of my bet to run) on the basis of logic. It was obvious from the moment that TMay took office that she was manifestly unfit for it and hence was, to quote a noted newspaper editor, a "dead man walking".

    Boris is equally unfit to be PM. And he will fall. Just not in 24-hr rolling news time. People who are manifestly unfit for high office generally don't stay as PM for that long. cf J Corbyn.

    That said, he does look sticky because all his failings are often waved away as the behaviour of a lovable scallywag.

    *no one apart those who are filling out the forms and adhering to the new system, obvs.
    Ordinarily he and many of his cabinet colleagues would have been marched out of office by now. Lying and corruption aren't usually politically survivable, yet the bar to serve in a senior role appears to be having been sacked for one or the other previously.

    People won't realise how bad this is until it slaps them in the face. Customs checks whether under a deal or WTO will bring the UK supply chain to a crashing halt. When it gets untangled we'll find that we're paying a lot more for less things and every retailer and manufacturer and supplier will be saying why, intercut with the reporters embedded with the 48 hour queues to cross the channel.

    "This isn't the Brexit we voted for" - big price rises, mass shortages, mass unemployment. You can't hide the impacts of the end of the free market and free customs, or blame it on the other party, or positively spin it as better than what we had. As reality collapses in on people Johnson will be gone. At speed.
    There usually needs to be a catalyst and your final paragraph paints a reasonably possible picture of that catalyst. But as I said we have had empty shelves in very recent memory so I'm not 100% sure he won't have a get out.
    There is another factor that means we won't have empty shelves - supermarkets are quite deliberately dynamic. If a produce is unavailable and won't be available for a while they don't generally just put an "out of stock" label on its spot and leave that bit of their shelving empty - they fill the space with something else. They put a different product up instead, or they fill in with other products that would be next to it instead. So the shelves remain "full" (depending upon normal variance of how recently they were restocked) even if products are "unavailable".
    @RochdalePioneers literally works for a supermarket, doesn’t he?

    But of course, you know best.
    If Rochdale wants to say I am wrong then let him say how I am wrong and why.

    EG am I wrong and does his supermarket deliberately leave shelves empty when a stock is unavailable for a significant period of time or am I right and the supermarket will change the tickets and put different stock on the shelves instead?
    Phil this is what the real world looked like earlier this year.

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-51883440
    Thanks to panic buying which stopped in a matter of days because then people had full fridges and freezers. Its a self-correcting problem that can't go on forever.
    Exactly. I appreciate it when you agree with something rather than try to argue the opposite. Thanks.

    There were empty shelves because of panic buying. That's just the public for you I know what can you do but don't forget a lot of these people also voted for Brexit so we can't make any calls on their intelligence or common sense.

    There were empty shelves then and there may very well be empty shelves again.
    Yes if people react to no deal with panic buying then there may be some empty shelves for a few days while people panic buy.

    Then people's fridges and freezers will be full and they will stop panic buying and the supermarkets will have full shelves again. Just a few days later.

    Exactly as happened earlier this year. We didn't go for months with empty shelves, nor will we for months or years to come post-Brexit.

    If people start panic buying in the first week of January do you think come the May elections we will still have empty shelves and panic buying going on? Don't be ridiculous! 🤦🏻‍♂️
    You just don't understand the supply chain.

    We saw an initial blitzing of certain product categories - Pasta, Toilet Rolls, Paracetamol where people went mad and bought stuff they didn't need. After that we saw major shortage across a significant number of categories caused by the major modal shift in how people eat. The lockdown closed pubs and restaurants and workspaces - all the meals that used to be eaten out were now eaten at home. Pack formats became a major issue - there wasn't a shortage in beans but there was a shortage in retail cans and a surplus of huuuuge catering cans.

    Retailers were working flat out as were manufacturers trying to respond to wild swings in demand with a supply chain full of holes. Through this longer phase the gaps were not caused by panic buying at all - they were caused by supply chain disruption. We are about to have a major supply chain disruption which will cause not just short term inability to move products / materials but a long term need to try and restructure what comes from where and when.

    Manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers - all expecting long term issues and price rises. What do they know about it...
    Yes there will be disruption, again no shit Sherlock, I have always said there will be disruption.

    The invisible hand will work its magic and we will adjust. Some things may become a bit more expensive, some things may become a bit cheaper and some customers will substitute from more expensive goods to cheaper ones - and life will go on. The wheel of time will turn.
    I do not understand how at your claimed age of approx 40 (I think) you have so little understanding of the basics of how the world works. Why not spend just half an hour in a supermarket looking at the little labels on things which tell you their country of origin? Or consider this rather succinct list from wikipedia, and factor in the concept that all crops are seasonal?

    "Crops commonly grown in the United Kingdom include cereals, chiefly wheat, oats and barley; root vegetables, chiefly potatoes and sugar beet; pulse crops such as beans or peas; forage crops such as cabbages, vetches, rape and kale; fruit, particularly apples and pears; and hay for animal feed."
    I'm thinking back to my grandmother's soup/stew - shank of lamb cooked with chunks of potatoes and swedes and lots of grated carrot. That memory/skill might eb handy ...
    Turnips will be in fashion
  • Options
    contrariancontrarian Posts: 5,818
    MikeL said:

    Haven't seen any comments on this but Republican in Pennsylvania has appealed PA Supreme Court ruling to SCOTUS.

    It's in Alito's territory - Alito originally requested evidence by 9th Dec (standard 6 day deadline) - ie after safe harbour deadline - but subsequently revised this to 9am on 8th Dec (he could have requested it much quicker if he had wanted to).

    Anyway some kind of ruling may well be issued tomorrow - link:

    https://reason.com/volokh/2020/12/06/circuit-justice-alito-walks-back-de-facto-denial-of-pennsylvania-emergency-appeal/

    I suspect Alito's deliberations will do more to decide the fate of the US election than a thousand calls for Biden from CNN.
  • Options
    SandyRentoolSandyRentool Posts: 20,792
    Poached eggs: For those who like to think that they are eating snot.

    Also known as doing the cooking and shell removal in the wrong order.

    BTW, is the main ingredient in a Layer Cake chicken?
  • Options
    IshmaelZIshmaelZ Posts: 21,830
    rcs1000 said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Omnium said:

    Omnium said:

    Omnium said:

    Omnium said:

    FF43 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Scott_xP said:

    TOPPING said:

    There were empty shelves because of panic buying. That's just the public for you I know what can you do but don't forget a lot of these people also voted for Brexit so we can't make any calls on their intelligence or common sense.

    There were empty shelves then and there may very well be empty shelves again.

    People called 999 when KFC ran short

    Food shortages due to Brexit will not be met with stoicism
    How many people did? Did 17.4 million people call 999 due to KFC ?

    The UK did react to food shortages with stoicism as recently as March. We got through it and life went on.
    I don't think you realise how hand to mouth - and how dependent on processed food - a lot of families are because of cash and time pressures. Not being able to get a pizza, for instance, can disrupt plans and routines. That is what is being ignored in the discussion, I think.
    given half the UK is being told to stay at home where are the time pressures ? You cant actually go anywhere much except the supermarket.
    People have to go to work and children to school. It's common to have a family with the children home and hungry at 5pm, and one adult not till 7, and so on ...

    Meals such as pizzas and so on help a lot, but if they cannot be obtained reliably ... it will be interesting to see what happens.
    I take it you cant cook.

    Knocking up a hot meal is a doddle whatever your budget.
    So long as you like risotto.

    (The ultimate 50p meal.)
    couscous or noodles are the fastest thing youll cook aside from bread and wraps
    My favourite quick and cheap meal is an omelette. It is dead easy and if you do it right, a sophisticated dish.

    Toast and marmite with scrambled eggs on top. A bit of cheese on top of the toast that melts on impact with the hot egg if you are feeling particularly sophisticated.

    The better you cook your eggs the less need for cheese and marmite. Fantastic toast is the key, and some butter on the toast. Then perfectly cooked eggs. A hint of shaved cheese perhaps and the slightest taint of marmite on the buttering knife.

    All this celebratory bake off crap and you can't buy a decent loaf of bread!

    We need a blokeish bake-off. Bread for cheese and pickle sandwiches, bread for bacon sandwiches, buns for burgers, buns for hotdogs. Bread for pate, and we need to get the good pate's back for this bread.

    I can cook faultless boiled eggs, time after time: whites set, yolks runny.

    Food of the Gods.
    Although 'faultless' seems a boast, and although my boiled eggs are ok - I'm quite envious.
    Try this:

    Use eggs that have been at room temperature for several hours; NEVER from the fridge.

    Use large eggs (for anything smaller the timings will need to be reduced by some indeterminate amount!)

    Large pan of water brought to a good boil.

    Put 2-4 eggs into that boiling water for four and a half minutes. (More eggs than that and the timings might need slightly extending.) Turn off the heat and let them stand for another 30 seconds. Take them out, take the top off one to eat first and smash the tops of the others, to allow the heat out and stop them cooking.

    Eat with dipping soldiers.
    Perhaps its from the fridge thing.

    Do you have any insight on scrambled eggs? I'd say they would be my best hand in egg cookery - very slow, lots of butter, stirring madly.

    Poached eggs - these are the eggs of god. I intend to keep trying.


    Scrambled is the wife's forte. Wouldn't dare to tread on her toes there.

    Poached eggs - just get a decent poacher. Don't ever try to cook them in a swirl of boiling water. Urgh.

    You should investigate ' scrambled' yourself - buy loads of butter. Not omletting it is the key. It's a mans sort of egg dish anyway - best served very early to a sleepy girlfriend. You can even bugger up the toast if the scrambled eggs are right.

    Poached - trust me this is the true way of the egg!

    I'm far from good at poached eggs, but boiling water is too hot, and I'm not sure that swirling (or vinegar) helps. (edit: if I could get this right i'd be very happy)

    Tomorrow morning I'm going to follow your plan with some eggs that are out of the fridge overnight.
    Pro tip for poached eggs: your water should be only just wobbling on the surface, def. not boiling. Lower your unbroken eggs into it for 30 seconds, then hoick them out again and break them into the water as usual. This boils the outer layer of white so they hold together better.
    That's very similar to me - except I use the intermediate step of breaking the eggs into a mug.
    I am taking that under advisement; your method may deliver a smoother transition than mine.
  • Options
    MattWMattW Posts: 18,893
    edited December 2020
    rcs1000 said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Omnium said:

    Omnium said:

    Omnium said:

    Omnium said:

    FF43 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Scott_xP said:

    TOPPING said:

    There were empty shelves because of panic buying. That's just the public for you I know what can you do but don't forget a lot of these people also voted for Brexit so we can't make any calls on their intelligence or common sense.

    There were empty shelves then and there may very well be empty shelves again.

    People called 999 when KFC ran short

    Food shortages due to Brexit will not be met with stoicism
    How many people did? Did 17.4 million people call 999 due to KFC ?

    The UK did react to food shortages with stoicism as recently as March. We got through it and life went on.
    I don't think you realise how hand to mouth - and how dependent on processed food - a lot of families are because of cash and time pressures. Not being able to get a pizza, for instance, can disrupt plans and routines. That is what is being ignored in the discussion, I think.
    given half the UK is being told to stay at home where are the time pressures ? You cant actually go anywhere much except the supermarket.
    People have to go to work and children to school. It's common to have a family with the children home and hungry at 5pm, and one adult not till 7, and so on ...

    Meals such as pizzas and so on help a lot, but if they cannot be obtained reliably ... it will be interesting to see what happens.
    I take it you cant cook.

    Knocking up a hot meal is a doddle whatever your budget.
    So long as you like risotto.

    (The ultimate 50p meal.)
    couscous or noodles are the fastest thing youll cook aside from bread and wraps
    My favourite quick and cheap meal is an omelette. It is dead easy and if you do it right, a sophisticated dish.

    Toast and marmite with scrambled eggs on top. A bit of cheese on top of the toast that melts on impact with the hot egg if you are feeling particularly sophisticated.

    The better you cook your eggs the less need for cheese and marmite. Fantastic toast is the key, and some butter on the toast. Then perfectly cooked eggs. A hint of shaved cheese perhaps and the slightest taint of marmite on the buttering knife.

    All this celebratory bake off crap and you can't buy a decent loaf of bread!

    We need a blokeish bake-off. Bread for cheese and pickle sandwiches, bread for bacon sandwiches, buns for burgers, buns for hotdogs. Bread for pate, and we need to get the good pate's back for this bread.

    I can cook faultless boiled eggs, time after time: whites set, yolks runny.

    Food of the Gods.
    Although 'faultless' seems a boast, and although my boiled eggs are ok - I'm quite envious.
    Try this:

    Use eggs that have been at room temperature for several hours; NEVER from the fridge.

    Use large eggs (for anything smaller the timings will need to be reduced by some indeterminate amount!)

    Large pan of water brought to a good boil.

    Put 2-4 eggs into that boiling water for four and a half minutes. (More eggs than that and the timings might need slightly extending.) Turn off the heat and let them stand for another 30 seconds. Take them out, take the top off one to eat first and smash the tops of the others, to allow the heat out and stop them cooking.

    Eat with dipping soldiers.
    Perhaps its from the fridge thing.

    Do you have any insight on scrambled eggs? I'd say they would be my best hand in egg cookery - very slow, lots of butter, stirring madly.

    Poached eggs - these are the eggs of god. I intend to keep trying.


    Scrambled is the wife's forte. Wouldn't dare to tread on her toes there.

    Poached eggs - just get a decent poacher. Don't ever try to cook them in a swirl of boiling water. Urgh.

    You should investigate ' scrambled' yourself - buy loads of butter. Not omletting it is the key. It's a mans sort of egg dish anyway - best served very early to a sleepy girlfriend. You can even bugger up the toast if the scrambled eggs are right.

    Poached - trust me this is the true way of the egg!

    I'm far from good at poached eggs, but boiling water is too hot, and I'm not sure that swirling (or vinegar) helps. (edit: if I could get this right i'd be very happy)

    Tomorrow morning I'm going to follow your plan with some eggs that are out of the fridge overnight.
    Pro tip for poached eggs: your water should be only just wobbling on the surface, def. not boiling. Lower your unbroken eggs into it for 30 seconds, then hoick them out again and break them into the water as usual. This boils the outer layer of white so they hold together better.
    That's very similar to me - except I use the intermediate step of breaking the eggs into a mug.
    Eggs must be broken with one hand.

    Like Harry Palmer.
  • Options
    RogerRoger Posts: 18,944

    Roger said:

    Extraordinary Dylan selling the publishing rights to his entire back catalogue reckoned to be 600 songs. You feel that no amount of money would be enough Even the 'hundred's of million dollars' that has been discussed. To use any Dylan on an ad would be so prohibitive that you'd need a pretty huge budget to consider it and that's just one outlet.

    Maybe he feels that at 80 next birthday he would rather pass on the rights now while he can benefit from the proceeds. Maybe he will even stop touring! (Though I see he has 30 or more dates booked for next year...) Not that he makes that much from touring as he keeps prices low - he just loves doing it I think.
    Touring's one thing but making millions from selling his songs to Universal....JUDAS!
  • Options

    Trade isn't going to halt though. Trade will still happen even if it is disrupted.

    But yes for a couple of weeks if we are disrupted it's perfect possible to live off potatoes, root vegetables, peas, beans, cabbages, apples, lamb, seafood etc.

    But it won't be necessary. It is panic mongering to suggest it would be. Disruption doesn't mean an end to trade, it never has done.

    Trade will stop until they find a way to remove the bottleneck. We know the 12-20 hour queues to cross the EU border with a far smaller volume of trucks at a land border. So suggesting 48 hours plus delays for our sea border is sensible. As you can't tie up the truck fleet in that kind of queue they won't be sent. An eerie calm where the greatly reduced cross border traffic only waits a few hours as opposed to days.

    Problem is that if you step up traffic it backs up to a stop again. I know that you disagree with all of this despite the endless evidence that it is facts. Then again you've spent all afternoon telling me about how food supply chains and supermarkets work in a way that would be funny (they'll overface empty chillers with beans FFS) if you weren't so serious.
    I never said they'll overface empty chillers with beans.

    Why wouldn't they overface empty chillers with cold produce we have a surplus of?

    Be a good opportunity to have a sale on overfaced lamb perhaps?
    Jesus. Like I said, have no idea about how supply chain works.
    The lamb that gets exported to the EU - if there is a disruption to international trade then why can't that be sold in the UK?

    If there's something I'm missing then why not educate me? My local Morrisons wraps up its meat on-site with the in-store butcher, I appreciate not every supermarket does that but why can't lamb if we have a surplus of it be shipped to the supermarkets and sold there?
    Haven't. A. Clue. Mate. I already posted on this earlier. A "surplus" of "lamb" is what - specifics please. In the UK we have a taste for legs of lamb from young animals. We import from markets like New Zealand because we eat more legs than we have lambs. At the same time we export "lamb" (referred to in the trade rather tellingly as "sheepmeat") - the parts of the animal and the older animals that people don't eat. Same with pigs and cows. We mainly export full and half carcases - meat that we don't eat.

    So what you are saying is don't worry. Yes there is a shortage of Legs and Shanks of lamb. But look here, we have overfaced it with a tray of mutton. You MUST buy it. For Britain.
    One of the paradoxes of what's happening.
    The government values its sovereignty, to the extent of throwing goodness knows what out of the balloon to get it off the ground.

    But in terms of freedom of action of citizens- to go places easily, to buy what it wants cheaply, to do a wide range of jobs, government policy seems to be to limit our choices. Maybe not completely, but certainly noticeably.
  • Options
    MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 44,845
    UK cases by specimen date

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    MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 44,845
    UK cases by specimen date and scaled to 100K population

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    MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 44,845
    UK local R

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    MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 44,845
    UK case summary

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    williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 48,301

    Its quite possible that Boris Johnson is not Chamberlain or Churchill, but Sir Robert Peel.

    A man who forced through a measure that split his party for a generation. For the Corn Law repeal, read Johnson's Brexit.

    Except this time, I think it would be more than a generation. It would be for ever.

    The big political divide for the foreseeable is populist versus globalist and the tories are fatally split, there.

    Brexit doesn't map as neatly onto a national populist versus globalist dividing line as it might appear.
  • Options
    MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 50,193

    Omnium said:

    FF43 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Scott_xP said:

    TOPPING said:

    There were empty shelves because of panic buying. That's just the public for you I know what can you do but don't forget a lot of these people also voted for Brexit so we can't make any calls on their intelligence or common sense.

    There were empty shelves then and there may very well be empty shelves again.

    People called 999 when KFC ran short

    Food shortages due to Brexit will not be met with stoicism
    How many people did? Did 17.4 million people call 999 due to KFC ?

    The UK did react to food shortages with stoicism as recently as March. We got through it and life went on.
    I don't think you realise how hand to mouth - and how dependent on processed food - a lot of families are because of cash and time pressures. Not being able to get a pizza, for instance, can disrupt plans and routines. That is what is being ignored in the discussion, I think.
    given half the UK is being told to stay at home where are the time pressures ? You cant actually go anywhere much except the supermarket.
    People have to go to work and children to school. It's common to have a family with the children home and hungry at 5pm, and one adult not till 7, and so on ...

    Meals such as pizzas and so on help a lot, but if they cannot be obtained reliably ... it will be interesting to see what happens.
    I take it you cant cook.

    Knocking up a hot meal is a doddle whatever your budget.
    So long as you like risotto.

    (The ultimate 50p meal.)
    couscous or noodles are the fastest thing youll cook aside from bread and wraps
    My favourite quick and cheap meal is an omelette. It is dead easy and if you do it right, a sophisticated dish.

    Toast and marmite with scrambled eggs on top. A bit of cheese on top of the toast that melts on impact with the hot egg if you are feeling particularly sophisticated.

    The better you cook your eggs the less need for cheese and marmite. Fantastic toast is the key, and some butter on the toast. Then perfectly cooked eggs. A hint of shaved cheese perhaps and the slightest taint of marmite on the buttering knife.

    All this celebratory bake off crap and you can't buy a decent loaf of bread!

    We need a blokeish bake-off. Bread for cheese and pickle sandwiches, bread for bacon sandwiches, buns for burgers, buns for hotdogs. Bread for pate, and we need to get the good pate's back for this bread.

    I can cook faultless boiled eggs, time after time: whites set, yolks runny.

    Food of the Gods.
    Last week Wor Lass burnt boiled eggs.

    Forgot they were on, went to do something else, pan boiled dry, one egg exploded.

    Definitely no runny yolk!
    Minus 1000 Bloke Points for Wor Lass.
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    MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 44,845
    UK hospitals

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    Anyway, give me 5 minutes. Let me go back to the latest negotiation round of this food manufacturing partnership agreement I am negotiating. Not that I know anything about food manufacturing or negotiating as apparently I'm so wrong and Phillip with wot he knows is so right.

    I haven't actually said you're wrong. All I've said is the supermarkets will put what they can on the shelves, which they do all the time. You've not said how that's wrong besides claims of "you know nothing". If I'm wrong, why am I wrong?

    Will supermarkets let food rot rather than put it on the shelves? Will supermarkets keep empty shelves rather than put what they can get on instead?
    What did the supermarkets overface the bog roll aisles with. The home baking aisles. The entire fucking alcohol section of my Tesco Extra after the pubs shut despite a "3 items max" restriction.

    You want to replace fresh fruit and vegetables from abroad with what? Turnips? People don't want to eat turnips, if they did want to eat turnips then the supermarkets would sell more turnips. People want Cod or Haddock and Chips. They aren't going to eat Herring or Crab and Chips. We eat certain cuts of animals and export the rest. We aren't going to replace all of the foods that use imported meat / ingredients with a tray of mutton chops.

    You're wrong because you claimed there hadn't been gaps in supermarkets. You're wrong because you insist there won't be major shortages. You're wrong that you think supermarkets and manufacturers are "flexible" and can magic up *something* packed in *something* at minimal notice that customers actually want to buy. Wrong. Laughably wrong.

    A good example for you. Morrisons are unique as a supermarket in that they are also a major manufacturer. So when shortages really kicked in they could work with their own manufacturing and procurement teams on solutions. For several months they had an operating committee making board level decisions on emergency projects and emergency supply decisions.

    They got really creative in a way that only they could thanks to their vertical supply chain. They bought up a load of bulk flour and hand filled the paper bags that they use for pies and pasties on their counters. For a period they were one of the only retailers who reliably sold basics like flour.

    And then one day the operations committee reported the impact all of this was having. Stores were increasingly chaotic. A loss of control, waste even on high demand low availability products. And it was costing them a fortune (their mid year results showed that they literally bled money in a effort to keep *something* on sale).

    So the plug was pulled. All non-standard processes and projects stopped. A written instruction to trading and operations teams that if the edict meant they were could to have gaps on shelf then that was ore acceptable than the cost of trying to mitigate it. My buyer then had 10 weeks of completely off sale home baking - whole shelves empty until the normal process could bring a new product line in to replace the now unavailable ones.

    They can't overface except for very exceptional limited periods because facings are scientifically calculated to minimise losses and cash tied up without purpose. If product x needs 2 facings it gets 2 facings. They aren't going to stick 6 facings on because other stuff is missing - they won't sell it.

    That's why you're wrong. Because you are clueless about how any of this works but happy to guff on about how simple it all is.
  • Options
    MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 44,845
    UK deaths

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    contrariancontrarian Posts: 5,818

    Trade isn't going to halt though. Trade will still happen even if it is disrupted.

    But yes for a couple of weeks if we are disrupted it's perfect possible to live off potatoes, root vegetables, peas, beans, cabbages, apples, lamb, seafood etc.

    But it won't be necessary. It is panic mongering to suggest it would be. Disruption doesn't mean an end to trade, it never has done.

    Trade will stop until they find a way to remove the bottleneck. We know the 12-20 hour queues to cross the EU border with a far smaller volume of trucks at a land border. So suggesting 48 hours plus delays for our sea border is sensible. As you can't tie up the truck fleet in that kind of queue they won't be sent. An eerie calm where the greatly reduced cross border traffic only waits a few hours as opposed to days.

    Problem is that if you step up traffic it backs up to a stop again. I know that you disagree with all of this despite the endless evidence that it is facts. Then again you've spent all afternoon telling me about how food supply chains and supermarkets work in a way that would be funny (they'll overface empty chillers with beans FFS) if you weren't so serious.
    I never said they'll overface empty chillers with beans.

    Why wouldn't they overface empty chillers with cold produce we have a surplus of?

    Be a good opportunity to have a sale on overfaced lamb perhaps?
    Jesus. Like I said, have no idea about how supply chain works.
    The lamb that gets exported to the EU - if there is a disruption to international trade then why can't that be sold in the UK?

    If there's something I'm missing then why not educate me? My local Morrisons wraps up its meat on-site with the in-store butcher, I appreciate not every supermarket does that but why can't lamb if we have a surplus of it be shipped to the supermarkets and sold there?
    Haven't. A. Clue. Mate. I already posted on this earlier. A "surplus" of "lamb" is what - specifics please. In the UK we have a taste for legs of lamb from young animals. We import from markets like New Zealand because we eat more legs than we have lambs. At the same time we export "lamb" (referred to in the trade rather tellingly as "sheepmeat") - the parts of the animal and the older animals that people don't eat. Same with pigs and cows. We mainly export full and half carcases - meat that we don't eat.

    So what you are saying is don't worry. Yes there is a shortage of Legs and Shanks of lamb. But look here, we have overfaced it with a tray of mutton. You MUST buy it. For Britain.
    One of the paradoxes of what's happening.
    The government values its sovereignty, to the extent of throwing goodness knows what out of the balloon to get it off the ground.

    But in terms of freedom of action of citizens- to go places easily, to buy what it wants cheaply, to do a wide range of jobs, government policy seems to be to limit our choices. Maybe not completely, but certainly noticeably.
    The EU does not believe the 'sovereignty' schtick of Boris's tories. They think Boris no more wants to go it alone that eat a giant sh8t sandwich.

    And they are correct.
  • Options
    MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 44,845
    UK R

    From case data

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    From hospitalisation data

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    Its quite possible that Boris Johnson is not Chamberlain or Churchill, but Sir Robert Peel.

    A man who forced through a measure that split his party for a generation. For the Corn Law repeal, read Johnson's Brexit.

    Except this time, I think it would be more than a generation. It would be for ever.

    The big political divide for the foreseeable is populist versus globalist and the tories are fatally split, there.

    Whoever he is, he's a poundshop version of them.
  • Options
    TimTTimT Posts: 6,328
    edited December 2020
    IshmaelZ said:

    rcs1000 said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Omnium said:

    Omnium said:

    Omnium said:

    Omnium said:

    FF43 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Scott_xP said:

    TOPPING said:

    There were empty shelves because of panic buying. That's just the public for you I know what can you do but don't forget a lot of these people also voted for Brexit so we can't make any calls on their intelligence or common sense.

    There were empty shelves then and there may very well be empty shelves again.

    People called 999 when KFC ran short

    Food shortages due to Brexit will not be met with stoicism
    How many people did? Did 17.4 million people call 999 due to KFC ?

    The UK did react to food shortages with stoicism as recently as March. We got through it and life went on.
    I don't think you realise how hand to mouth - and how dependent on processed food - a lot of families are because of cash and time pressures. Not being able to get a pizza, for instance, can disrupt plans and routines. That is what is being ignored in the discussion, I think.
    given half the UK is being told to stay at home where are the time pressures ? You cant actually go anywhere much except the supermarket.
    People have to go to work and children to school. It's common to have a family with the children home and hungry at 5pm, and one adult not till 7, and so on ...

    Meals such as pizzas and so on help a lot, but if they cannot be obtained reliably ... it will be interesting to see what happens.
    I take it you cant cook.

    Knocking up a hot meal is a doddle whatever your budget.
    So long as you like risotto.

    (The ultimate 50p meal.)
    couscous or noodles are the fastest thing youll cook aside from bread and wraps
    My favourite quick and cheap meal is an omelette. It is dead easy and if you do it right, a sophisticated dish.

    Toast and marmite with scrambled eggs on top. A bit of cheese on top of the toast that melts on impact with the hot egg if you are feeling particularly sophisticated.

    The better you cook your eggs the less need for cheese and marmite. Fantastic toast is the key, and some butter on the toast. Then perfectly cooked eggs. A hint of shaved cheese perhaps and the slightest taint of marmite on the buttering knife.

    All this celebratory bake off crap and you can't buy a decent loaf of bread!

    We need a blokeish bake-off. Bread for cheese and pickle sandwiches, bread for bacon sandwiches, buns for burgers, buns for hotdogs. Bread for pate, and we need to get the good pate's back for this bread.

    I can cook faultless boiled eggs, time after time: whites set, yolks runny.

    Food of the Gods.
    Although 'faultless' seems a boast, and although my boiled eggs are ok - I'm quite envious.
    Try this:

    Use eggs that have been at room temperature for several hours; NEVER from the fridge.

    Use large eggs (for anything smaller the timings will need to be reduced by some indeterminate amount!)

    Large pan of water brought to a good boil.

    Put 2-4 eggs into that boiling water for four and a half minutes. (More eggs than that and the timings might need slightly extending.) Turn off the heat and let them stand for another 30 seconds. Take them out, take the top off one to eat first and smash the tops of the others, to allow the heat out and stop them cooking.

    Eat with dipping soldiers.
    Perhaps its from the fridge thing.

    Do you have any insight on scrambled eggs? I'd say they would be my best hand in egg cookery - very slow, lots of butter, stirring madly.

    Poached eggs - these are the eggs of god. I intend to keep trying.


    Scrambled is the wife's forte. Wouldn't dare to tread on her toes there.

    Poached eggs - just get a decent poacher. Don't ever try to cook them in a swirl of boiling water. Urgh.

    You should investigate ' scrambled' yourself - buy loads of butter. Not omletting it is the key. It's a mans sort of egg dish anyway - best served very early to a sleepy girlfriend. You can even bugger up the toast if the scrambled eggs are right.

    Poached - trust me this is the true way of the egg!

    I'm far from good at poached eggs, but boiling water is too hot, and I'm not sure that swirling (or vinegar) helps. (edit: if I could get this right i'd be very happy)

    Tomorrow morning I'm going to follow your plan with some eggs that are out of the fridge overnight.
    Pro tip for poached eggs: your water should be only just wobbling on the surface, def. not boiling. Lower your unbroken eggs into it for 30 seconds, then hoick them out again and break them into the water as usual. This boils the outer layer of white so they hold together better.
    That's very similar to me - except I use the intermediate step of breaking the eggs into a mug.
    I am taking that under advisement; your method may deliver a smoother transition than mine.
    Scrambled - beat the eggs lightly with heavy cream, a pinch of salt and ample white pepper. Do not overbeat - you want there to be some whitish bits in the finished product. Melt ample butter in small saucepan over medium heat, pour in custard mix, stir regularly with a straight-edged spatula so that nothing burns on the pan bottom, take off the heat when eggs are semi-solid to allow final cooking under residual heat. Stir in grated sharp cheddar until cheddar melts, and just before plating, chopped fresh chives. Serve on thick slabs of toasted and well-buttered sourdough/rustic bread. Cheap, quick and easy.
  • Options
    contrariancontrarian Posts: 5,818

    Its quite possible that Boris Johnson is not Chamberlain or Churchill, but Sir Robert Peel.

    A man who forced through a measure that split his party for a generation. For the Corn Law repeal, read Johnson's Brexit.

    Except this time, I think it would be more than a generation. It would be for ever.

    The big political divide for the foreseeable is populist versus globalist and the tories are fatally split, there.

    Brexit doesn't map as neatly onto a national populist versus globalist dividing line as it might appear.
    I think it depends whether you see Brexit as an end or a beginning. Boris Johnson sees it as an end. Nigel Farage sees it as a beginning.

  • Options


    Tinned food that is OK to eat cold is the way to go. Can I recommend beans & sausages followed by rice pudding.

    When I started my first job, I was sharing a flat. The first time my parents came to visit, my flatmate was sitting in the kitchen eating baked beans out of the tin.
    They didn't bat an eyelid at the time, but for the next 36 years (until she died), whenever I mentioned him, my mother always said "oh yes he's the chap who eats beans out of the tin".

  • Options
    moonshinemoonshine Posts: 5,248
    Johnson and UvdL take a break 1:40hr into their call. I assume the PM is not reciting the Iliad in Greek down the line and this means we’re finally getting quite close to nailing down the detail.
  • Options
    IshmaelZIshmaelZ Posts: 21,830
    TimT said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    rcs1000 said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Omnium said:

    Omnium said:

    Omnium said:

    Omnium said:

    FF43 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Scott_xP said:

    TOPPING said:

    There were empty shelves because of panic buying. That's just the public for you I know what can you do but don't forget a lot of these people also voted for Brexit so we can't make any calls on their intelligence or common sense.

    There were empty shelves then and there may very well be empty shelves again.

    People called 999 when KFC ran short

    Food shortages due to Brexit will not be met with stoicism
    How many people did? Did 17.4 million people call 999 due to KFC ?

    The UK did react to food shortages with stoicism as recently as March. We got through it and life went on.
    I don't think you realise how hand to mouth - and how dependent on processed food - a lot of families are because of cash and time pressures. Not being able to get a pizza, for instance, can disrupt plans and routines. That is what is being ignored in the discussion, I think.
    given half the UK is being told to stay at home where are the time pressures ? You cant actually go anywhere much except the supermarket.
    People have to go to work and children to school. It's common to have a family with the children home and hungry at 5pm, and one adult not till 7, and so on ...

    Meals such as pizzas and so on help a lot, but if they cannot be obtained reliably ... it will be interesting to see what happens.
    I take it you cant cook.

    Knocking up a hot meal is a doddle whatever your budget.
    So long as you like risotto.

    (The ultimate 50p meal.)
    couscous or noodles are the fastest thing youll cook aside from bread and wraps
    My favourite quick and cheap meal is an omelette. It is dead easy and if you do it right, a sophisticated dish.

    Toast and marmite with scrambled eggs on top. A bit of cheese on top of the toast that melts on impact with the hot egg if you are feeling particularly sophisticated.

    The better you cook your eggs the less need for cheese and marmite. Fantastic toast is the key, and some butter on the toast. Then perfectly cooked eggs. A hint of shaved cheese perhaps and the slightest taint of marmite on the buttering knife.

    All this celebratory bake off crap and you can't buy a decent loaf of bread!

    We need a blokeish bake-off. Bread for cheese and pickle sandwiches, bread for bacon sandwiches, buns for burgers, buns for hotdogs. Bread for pate, and we need to get the good pate's back for this bread.

    I can cook faultless boiled eggs, time after time: whites set, yolks runny.

    Food of the Gods.
    Although 'faultless' seems a boast, and although my boiled eggs are ok - I'm quite envious.
    Try this:

    Use eggs that have been at room temperature for several hours; NEVER from the fridge.

    Use large eggs (for anything smaller the timings will need to be reduced by some indeterminate amount!)

    Large pan of water brought to a good boil.

    Put 2-4 eggs into that boiling water for four and a half minutes. (More eggs than that and the timings might need slightly extending.) Turn off the heat and let them stand for another 30 seconds. Take them out, take the top off one to eat first and smash the tops of the others, to allow the heat out and stop them cooking.

    Eat with dipping soldiers.
    Perhaps its from the fridge thing.

    Do you have any insight on scrambled eggs? I'd say they would be my best hand in egg cookery - very slow, lots of butter, stirring madly.

    Poached eggs - these are the eggs of god. I intend to keep trying.


    Scrambled is the wife's forte. Wouldn't dare to tread on her toes there.

    Poached eggs - just get a decent poacher. Don't ever try to cook them in a swirl of boiling water. Urgh.

    You should investigate ' scrambled' yourself - buy loads of butter. Not omletting it is the key. It's a mans sort of egg dish anyway - best served very early to a sleepy girlfriend. You can even bugger up the toast if the scrambled eggs are right.

    Poached - trust me this is the true way of the egg!

    I'm far from good at poached eggs, but boiling water is too hot, and I'm not sure that swirling (or vinegar) helps. (edit: if I could get this right i'd be very happy)

    Tomorrow morning I'm going to follow your plan with some eggs that are out of the fridge overnight.
    Pro tip for poached eggs: your water should be only just wobbling on the surface, def. not boiling. Lower your unbroken eggs into it for 30 seconds, then hoick them out again and break them into the water as usual. This boils the outer layer of white so they hold together better.
    That's very similar to me - except I use the intermediate step of breaking the eggs into a mug.
    I am taking that under advisement; your method may deliver a smoother transition than mine.
    Scrambled - beat the eggs lightly with heavy cream, a pinch of salt and ample white pepper. Do not overbeat - you want there to be some whitish bits in the finished product. Melt ample butter in small saucepan over medium heat, pour in custard mix, stir regularly with a straight-edged spatula so that nothing burns on the pan bottom, take off the heat when eggs are semi-solid to allow final cooking under residual heat. Stir in grated sharp cheddar until cheddar melts, and just before plating, chopped fresh chives. Serve on thick slabs of toasted and well-buttered sourdough/rustic bread. Cheap, quick and easy.
    PB living up to its Reithian ideal today: inform, educate, entertain. I like to add tinned anchovies to scrambled eggs, and eat them with tomatoes with basil on them.
  • Options



    Not for the last 5 years plus. Aldi are just another supermarket when it comes to the majority of their products - they have a central buying team, stores are laid out to a "planogram" showing which product where and of how many facings. They do have food special buys but mostly in ambient in the centre aisle.

    As for Aldi and the union flags, they are a great champion for British sourcing. But so many of those british made products use imported ingredients / packaging. Many of the shortages we saw earlier this year were because there was a national shortage of plastic film used to form the bag that so many kinds of product come in. Almost all of the raw plastic used by UK packaging producers is imported. As are foil trays for produce and fresh foods. And don't get me started on the supply situation for wooden pallets...

    Can I ask a purely practical question? I have been very gradually building up supplies of food for the last 18 months (since Johnson became PM), and I reckon I have enough for 3-4 months. There are just 3 things which I don't have so much of:
    Milk
    Bread
    Root vegetables

    I can't see any reason why those should be in short supply, but would be interested in what those more expert then me think?
    You can freeze milk and bread - we have a freezer dedicated to just that. And if you have a bread making machine, you can easily make bread from stockpiled flour. You can buy packs of ready-frozen vegetables. Not as good as fresh, admittedly, but a lot better than no veg.
    UHT milk. Keeps for ages at room temperature.
  • Options
    williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 48,301

    Its quite possible that Boris Johnson is not Chamberlain or Churchill, but Sir Robert Peel.

    A man who forced through a measure that split his party for a generation. For the Corn Law repeal, read Johnson's Brexit.

    Except this time, I think it would be more than a generation. It would be for ever.

    The big political divide for the foreseeable is populist versus globalist and the tories are fatally split, there.

    Brexit doesn't map as neatly onto a national populist versus globalist dividing line as it might appear.
    I think it depends whether you see Brexit as an end or a beginning. Boris Johnson sees it as an end. Nigel Farage sees it as a beginning.
    Boris Johnson ostensibly sees it as a beginning too, in that it will enable an acceleration of globalisation. That's how he sold it to people in the referendum.
  • Options
    TimTTimT Posts: 6,328
    MattW said:

    rcs1000 said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Omnium said:

    Omnium said:

    Omnium said:

    Omnium said:

    FF43 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Scott_xP said:

    TOPPING said:

    There were empty shelves because of panic buying. That's just the public for you I know what can you do but don't forget a lot of these people also voted for Brexit so we can't make any calls on their intelligence or common sense.

    There were empty shelves then and there may very well be empty shelves again.

    People called 999 when KFC ran short

    Food shortages due to Brexit will not be met with stoicism
    How many people did? Did 17.4 million people call 999 due to KFC ?

    The UK did react to food shortages with stoicism as recently as March. We got through it and life went on.
    I don't think you realise how hand to mouth - and how dependent on processed food - a lot of families are because of cash and time pressures. Not being able to get a pizza, for instance, can disrupt plans and routines. That is what is being ignored in the discussion, I think.
    given half the UK is being told to stay at home where are the time pressures ? You cant actually go anywhere much except the supermarket.
    People have to go to work and children to school. It's common to have a family with the children home and hungry at 5pm, and one adult not till 7, and so on ...

    Meals such as pizzas and so on help a lot, but if they cannot be obtained reliably ... it will be interesting to see what happens.
    I take it you cant cook.

    Knocking up a hot meal is a doddle whatever your budget.
    So long as you like risotto.

    (The ultimate 50p meal.)
    couscous or noodles are the fastest thing youll cook aside from bread and wraps
    My favourite quick and cheap meal is an omelette. It is dead easy and if you do it right, a sophisticated dish.

    Toast and marmite with scrambled eggs on top. A bit of cheese on top of the toast that melts on impact with the hot egg if you are feeling particularly sophisticated.

    The better you cook your eggs the less need for cheese and marmite. Fantastic toast is the key, and some butter on the toast. Then perfectly cooked eggs. A hint of shaved cheese perhaps and the slightest taint of marmite on the buttering knife.

    All this celebratory bake off crap and you can't buy a decent loaf of bread!

    We need a blokeish bake-off. Bread for cheese and pickle sandwiches, bread for bacon sandwiches, buns for burgers, buns for hotdogs. Bread for pate, and we need to get the good pate's back for this bread.

    I can cook faultless boiled eggs, time after time: whites set, yolks runny.

    Food of the Gods.
    Although 'faultless' seems a boast, and although my boiled eggs are ok - I'm quite envious.
    Try this:

    Use eggs that have been at room temperature for several hours; NEVER from the fridge.

    Use large eggs (for anything smaller the timings will need to be reduced by some indeterminate amount!)

    Large pan of water brought to a good boil.

    Put 2-4 eggs into that boiling water for four and a half minutes. (More eggs than that and the timings might need slightly extending.) Turn off the heat and let them stand for another 30 seconds. Take them out, take the top off one to eat first and smash the tops of the others, to allow the heat out and stop them cooking.

    Eat with dipping soldiers.
    Perhaps its from the fridge thing.

    Do you have any insight on scrambled eggs? I'd say they would be my best hand in egg cookery - very slow, lots of butter, stirring madly.

    Poached eggs - these are the eggs of god. I intend to keep trying.


    Scrambled is the wife's forte. Wouldn't dare to tread on her toes there.

    Poached eggs - just get a decent poacher. Don't ever try to cook them in a swirl of boiling water. Urgh.

    You should investigate ' scrambled' yourself - buy loads of butter. Not omletting it is the key. It's a mans sort of egg dish anyway - best served very early to a sleepy girlfriend. You can even bugger up the toast if the scrambled eggs are right.

    Poached - trust me this is the true way of the egg!

    I'm far from good at poached eggs, but boiling water is too hot, and I'm not sure that swirling (or vinegar) helps. (edit: if I could get this right i'd be very happy)

    Tomorrow morning I'm going to follow your plan with some eggs that are out of the fridge overnight.
    Pro tip for poached eggs: your water should be only just wobbling on the surface, def. not boiling. Lower your unbroken eggs into it for 30 seconds, then hoick them out again and break them into the water as usual. This boils the outer layer of white so they hold together better.
    That's very similar to me - except I use the intermediate step of breaking the eggs into a mug.
    Eggs must be broken with one hand.

    Like Harry Palmer.
    How do you break Harry Palmer with one hand?
  • Options
    RogerRoger Posts: 18,944
    dixiedean said:

    Roger said:

    Extraordinary Dylan selling the publishing rights to his entire back catalogue reckoned to be 600 songs. You feel that no amount of money would be enough Even the 'hundred's of million dollars' that has been discussed. To use any Dylan on an ad would be so prohibitive that you'd need a pretty huge budget to consider it and that's just one outlet.

    Dylan's been used on plenty ads. Victoria's secret, Cadillac and the Co-op off the top of my head.
    He's also notoriously amenable to using them in films and TV. Big Lebowski, Walking Dead, CSI spring to mind.
    He's fine using his music in ads but gets big money for them. Those are all big ads (depending where they were seen). If you want his voice as well as his tune you pay a hell of a lot more. Mark Knoffler turned down £1,000,000 for the tune of Local Hero for an electricity privatisation i shot because he didn't like Thatcher!
  • Options
    SandyRentoolSandyRentool Posts: 20,792


    Tinned food that is OK to eat cold is the way to go. Can I recommend beans & sausages followed by rice pudding.

    When I started my first job, I was sharing a flat. The first time my parents came to visit, my flatmate was sitting in the kitchen eating baked beans out of the tin.
    They didn't bat an eyelid at the time, but for the next 36 years (until she died), whenever I mentioned him, my mother always said "oh yes he's the chap who eats beans out of the tin".

    I've done it on a train.
  • Options
    HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 117,233

    Its quite possible that Boris Johnson is not Chamberlain or Churchill, but Sir Robert Peel.

    A man who forced through a measure that split his party for a generation. For the Corn Law repeal, read Johnson's Brexit.

    Except this time, I think it would be more than a generation. It would be for ever.

    The big political divide for the foreseeable is populist versus globalist and the tories are fatally split, there.

    Most of the Tories are united on Brexit, most of Peel's party were opposed to Corn Law repeal and all that led to was a political realignment with the Peelites joining the Liberals and in time the Protectionist Liberals like Chamberlain joining the Tories, the Tories still won again.

    All a populist v globalist split would do would be to create a similar realignment, the Corbynites would split off from Starmer Labour and form a new protectionist hard left party, the Cameroons would split off from the Tories and form a new globalist liberal party with the LDs and maybe some Blairites too and Farage's remaining supporters would merge into the Tories too.

    Only thing stopping it is FPTP, if we had PR it would probably happen next week
  • Options
    contrariancontrarian Posts: 5,818

    Its quite possible that Boris Johnson is not Chamberlain or Churchill, but Sir Robert Peel.

    A man who forced through a measure that split his party for a generation. For the Corn Law repeal, read Johnson's Brexit.

    Except this time, I think it would be more than a generation. It would be for ever.

    The big political divide for the foreseeable is populist versus globalist and the tories are fatally split, there.

    Brexit doesn't map as neatly onto a national populist versus globalist dividing line as it might appear.
    I think it depends whether you see Brexit as an end or a beginning. Boris Johnson sees it as an end. Nigel Farage sees it as a beginning.
    Boris Johnson ostensibly sees it as a beginning too, in that it will enable an acceleration of globalisation. That's how he sold it to people in the referendum.
    Indeed, but I suspect Johnson's definition of 'globilisation' is rather different to many of his voters. Something he is about to find out very shortly.
  • Options
    CiceroCicero Posts: 2,320

    Cicero said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    If we get No Deal - which is starting to look horrifying possible - then the pressure for Boris to resign will be formidable. It will amount to the greatest political failure in modern British history, making Black Wednesday look like a pasty tax in comparison. There will be absolutely no reason, either for himself or anyone else, for Boris to hang around a moment longer.

    Not sure. We have now normalised empty shelves via Covid. Plus no one* will notice the extra administrative burden, to whatever degree it manifests itself, save for a "weren't these Stroopwafels a bit cheaper last week" type of thing. So there is a lot of leeway for absolute total fuck up that Boris can paint as near-normal.

    I have been prominent on here saying he will go (I have nine more months of my bet to run) on the basis of logic. It was obvious from the moment that TMay took office that she was manifestly unfit for it and hence was, to quote a noted newspaper editor, a "dead man walking".

    Boris is equally unfit to be PM. And he will fall. Just not in 24-hr rolling news time. People who are manifestly unfit for high office generally don't stay as PM for that long. cf J Corbyn.

    That said, he does look sticky because all his failings are often waved away as the behaviour of a lovable scallywag.

    *no one apart those who are filling out the forms and adhering to the new system, obvs.
    Ordinarily he and many of his cabinet colleagues would have been marched out of office by now. Lying and corruption aren't usually politically survivable, yet the bar to serve in a senior role appears to be having been sacked for one or the other previously.

    People won't realise how bad this is until it slaps them in the face. Customs checks whether under a deal or WTO will bring the UK supply chain to a crashing halt. When it gets untangled we'll find that we're paying a lot more for less things and every retailer and manufacturer and supplier will be saying why, intercut with the reporters embedded with the 48 hour queues to cross the channel.

    "This isn't the Brexit we voted for" - big price rises, mass shortages, mass unemployment. You can't hide the impacts of the end of the free market and free customs, or blame it on the other party, or positively spin it as better than what we had. As reality collapses in on people Johnson will be gone. At speed.
    There usually needs to be a catalyst and your final paragraph paints a reasonably possible picture of that catalyst. But as I said we have had empty shelves in very recent memory so I'm not 100% sure he won't have a get out.
    There is another factor that means we won't have empty shelves - supermarkets are quite deliberately dynamic. If a produce is unavailable and won't be available for a while they don't generally just put an "out of stock" label on its spot and leave that bit of their shelving empty - they fill the space with something else. They put a different product up instead, or they fill in with other products that would be next to it instead. So the shelves remain "full" (depending upon normal variance of how recently they were restocked) even if products are "unavailable".
    @RochdalePioneers literally works for a supermarket, doesn’t he?

    But of course, you know best.
    If Rochdale wants to say I am wrong then let him say how I am wrong and why.

    EG am I wrong and does his supermarket deliberately leave shelves empty when a stock is unavailable for a significant period of time or am I right and the supermarket will change the tickets and put different stock on the shelves instead?
    Phil this is what the real world looked like earlier this year.

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-51883440
    Thanks to panic buying which stopped in a matter of days because then people had full fridges and freezers. Its a self-correcting problem that can't go on forever.
    Exactly. I appreciate it when you agree with something rather than try to argue the opposite. Thanks.

    There were empty shelves because of panic buying. That's just the public for you I know what can you do but don't forget a lot of these people also voted for Brexit so we can't make any calls on their intelligence or common sense.

    There were empty shelves then and there may very well be empty shelves again.
    Yes if people react to no deal with panic buying then there may be some empty shelves for a few days while people panic buy.

    Then people's fridges and freezers will be full and they will stop panic buying and the supermarkets will have full shelves again. Just a few days later.

    Exactly as happened earlier this year. We didn't go for months with empty shelves, nor will we for months or years to come post-Brexit.

    If people start panic buying in the first week of January do you think come the May elections we will still have empty shelves and panic buying going on? Don't be ridiculous! 🤦🏻‍♂️
    You just don't understand the supply chain.

    We saw an initial blitzing of certain product categories - Pasta, Toilet Rolls, Paracetamol where people went mad and bought stuff they didn't need. After that we saw major shortage across a significant number of categories caused by the major modal shift in how people eat. The lockdown closed pubs and restaurants and workspaces - all the meals that used to be eaten out were now eaten at home. Pack formats became a major issue - there wasn't a shortage in beans but there was a shortage in retail cans and a surplus of huuuuge catering cans.

    Retailers were working flat out as were manufacturers trying to respond to wild swings in demand with a supply chain full of holes. Through this longer phase the gaps were not caused by panic buying at all - they were caused by supply chain disruption. We are about to have a major supply chain disruption which will cause not just short term inability to move products / materials but a long term need to try and restructure what comes from where and when.

    Manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers - all expecting long term issues and price rises. What do they know about it...
    Yes there will be disruption, again no shit Sherlock, I have always said there will be disruption.

    The invisible hand will work its magic and we will adjust. Some things may become a bit more expensive, some things may become a bit cheaper and some customers will substitute from more expensive goods to cheaper ones - and life will go on. The wheel of time will turn.
    The political wheel will also turn. The punters will remember the buckets of horse crap that have been served to them: "oven ready" and all the rest of it, and they will get very angry indeed. This will happen, even with "a deal", which is now down to hard Brexit only. With no deal, the Tories are going to be facing the kind of rage that will be scary to watch, let alone be on the receiving end of. I would feel sorry for you, but having seen the chumocracy at the wheel I´d personally like to see you all hanged.
    We can all disgree but wanting people hanged is crossing the line
    Bit of a brain fart after a long hard day, I meant hung out to dry... On the other hand.. 😏
  • Options

    Trade isn't going to halt though. Trade will still happen even if it is disrupted.

    But yes for a couple of weeks if we are disrupted it's perfect possible to live off potatoes, root vegetables, peas, beans, cabbages, apples, lamb, seafood etc.

    But it won't be necessary. It is panic mongering to suggest it would be. Disruption doesn't mean an end to trade, it never has done.

    Trade will stop until they find a way to remove the bottleneck. We know the 12-20 hour queues to cross the EU border with a far smaller volume of trucks at a land border. So suggesting 48 hours plus delays for our sea border is sensible. As you can't tie up the truck fleet in that kind of queue they won't be sent. An eerie calm where the greatly reduced cross border traffic only waits a few hours as opposed to days.

    Problem is that if you step up traffic it backs up to a stop again. I know that you disagree with all of this despite the endless evidence that it is facts. Then again you've spent all afternoon telling me about how food supply chains and supermarkets work in a way that would be funny (they'll overface empty chillers with beans FFS) if you weren't so serious.
    I never said they'll overface empty chillers with beans.

    Why wouldn't they overface empty chillers with cold produce we have a surplus of?

    Be a good opportunity to have a sale on overfaced lamb perhaps?
    Jesus. Like I said, have no idea about how supply chain works.
    The lamb that gets exported to the EU - if there is a disruption to international trade then why can't that be sold in the UK?

    If there's something I'm missing then why not educate me? My local Morrisons wraps up its meat on-site with the in-store butcher, I appreciate not every supermarket does that but why can't lamb if we have a surplus of it be shipped to the supermarkets and sold there?
    Haven't. A. Clue. Mate. I already posted on this earlier. A "surplus" of "lamb" is what - specifics please. In the UK we have a taste for legs of lamb from young animals. We import from markets like New Zealand because we eat more legs than we have lambs. At the same time we export "lamb" (referred to in the trade rather tellingly as "sheepmeat") - the parts of the animal and the older animals that people don't eat. Same with pigs and cows. We mainly export full and half carcases - meat that we don't eat.

    So what you are saying is don't worry. Yes there is a shortage of Legs and Shanks of lamb. But look here, we have overfaced it with a tray of mutton. You MUST buy it. For Britain.
    I never said that 'you "MUST" buy it'. Just that there is an opportunity to put on something, at a discount, that people might not normally buy.

    If people go to the supermarket and find mutton available, at a cheap discount, then it's entirely possible people would choose to buy it.
  • Options
    WhisperingOracleWhisperingOracle Posts: 8,503
    edited December 2020

    Its quite possible that Boris Johnson is not Chamberlain or Churchill, but Sir Robert Peel.

    A man who forced through a measure that split his party for a generation. For the Corn Law repeal, read Johnson's Brexit.

    Except this time, I think it would be more than a generation. It would be for ever.

    The big political divide for the foreseeable is populist versus globalist and the tories are fatally split, there.

    Brexit doesn't map as neatly onto a national populist versus globalist dividing line as it might appear.
    I think it depends whether you see Brexit as an end or a beginning. Boris Johnson sees it as an end. Nigel Farage sees it as a beginning.

    Farage is a "globalist", in the real sense of favouring transnational financialised capitalism, currency market spiv posing as a homesy robin hood.
  • Options



    Not for the last 5 years plus. Aldi are just another supermarket when it comes to the majority of their products - they have a central buying team, stores are laid out to a "planogram" showing which product where and of how many facings. They do have food special buys but mostly in ambient in the centre aisle.

    As for Aldi and the union flags, they are a great champion for British sourcing. But so many of those british made products use imported ingredients / packaging. Many of the shortages we saw earlier this year were because there was a national shortage of plastic film used to form the bag that so many kinds of product come in. Almost all of the raw plastic used by UK packaging producers is imported. As are foil trays for produce and fresh foods. And don't get me started on the supply situation for wooden pallets...

    Can I ask a purely practical question? I have been very gradually building up supplies of food for the last 18 months (since Johnson became PM), and I reckon I have enough for 3-4 months. There are just 3 things which I don't have so much of:
    Milk
    Bread
    Root vegetables

    I can't see any reason why those should be in short supply, but would be interested in what those more expert then me think?
    You can freeze milk and bread - we have a freezer dedicated to just that. And if you have a bread making machine, you can easily make bread from stockpiled flour. You can buy packs of ready-frozen vegetables. Not as good as fresh, admittedly, but a lot better than no veg.
    UHT milk. Keeps for ages at room temperature.
    Do you like the taste? I prefer to have cereal with no milk, and black coffee, than use UHT milk. I might get a few cartons for emergencies though.
  • Options
    OmniumOmnium Posts: 9,832
    edited December 2020
    TimT said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    rcs1000 said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Omnium said:

    Omnium said:

    Omnium said:

    Omnium said:

    FF43 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Scott_xP said:

    TOPPING said:

    There were empty shelves because of panic buying. That's just the public for you I know what can you do but don't forget a lot of these people also voted for Brexit so we can't make any calls on their intelligence or common sense.

    There were empty shelves then and there may very well be empty shelves again.

    People called 999 when KFC ran short

    Food shortages due to Brexit will not be met with stoicism
    How many people did? Did 17.4 million people call 999 due to KFC ?

    The UK did react to food shortages with stoicism as recently as March. We got through it and life went on.
    I don't think you realise how hand to mouth - and how dependent on processed food - a lot of families are because of cash and time pressures. Not being able to get a pizza, for instance, can disrupt plans and routines. That is what is being ignored in the discussion, I think.
    given half the UK is being told to stay at home where are the time pressures ? You cant actually go anywhere much except the supermarket.
    People have to go to work and children to school. It's common to have a family with the children home and hungry at 5pm, and one adult not till 7, and so on ...

    Meals such as pizzas and so on help a lot, but if they cannot be obtained reliably ... it will be interesting to see what happens.
    I take it you cant cook.

    Knocking up a hot meal is a doddle whatever your budget.
    So long as you like risotto.

    (The ultimate 50p meal.)
    couscous or noodles are the fastest thing youll cook aside from bread and wraps
    My favourite quick and cheap meal is an omelette. It is dead easy and if you do it right, a sophisticated dish.

    Toast and marmite with scrambled eggs on top. A bit of cheese on top of the toast that melts on impact with the hot egg if you are feeling particularly sophisticated.

    The better you cook your eggs the less need for cheese and marmite. Fantastic toast is the key, and some butter on the toast. Then perfectly cooked eggs. A hint of shaved cheese perhaps and the slightest taint of marmite on the buttering knife.

    All this celebratory bake off crap and you can't buy a decent loaf of bread!

    We need a blokeish bake-off. Bread for cheese and pickle sandwiches, bread for bacon sandwiches, buns for burgers, buns for hotdogs. Bread for pate, and we need to get the good pate's back for this bread.

    I can cook faultless boiled eggs, time after time: whites set, yolks runny.

    Food of the Gods.
    Although 'faultless' seems a boast, and although my boiled eggs are ok - I'm quite envious.
    Try this:

    Use eggs that have been at room temperature for several hours; NEVER from the fridge.

    Use large eggs (for anything smaller the timings will need to be reduced by some indeterminate amount!)

    Large pan of water brought to a good boil.

    Put 2-4 eggs into that boiling water for four and a half minutes. (More eggs than that and the timings might need slightly extending.) Turn off the heat and let them stand for another 30 seconds. Take them out, take the top off one to eat first and smash the tops of the others, to allow the heat out and stop them cooking.

    Eat with dipping soldiers.
    Perhaps its from the fridge thing.

    Do you have any insight on scrambled eggs? I'd say they would be my best hand in egg cookery - very slow, lots of butter, stirring madly.

    Poached eggs - these are the eggs of god. I intend to keep trying.


    Scrambled is the wife's forte. Wouldn't dare to tread on her toes there.

    Poached eggs - just get a decent poacher. Don't ever try to cook them in a swirl of boiling water. Urgh.

    You should investigate ' scrambled' yourself - buy loads of butter. Not omletting it is the key. It's a mans sort of egg dish anyway - best served very early to a sleepy girlfriend. You can even bugger up the toast if the scrambled eggs are right.

    Poached - trust me this is the true way of the egg!

    I'm far from good at poached eggs, but boiling water is too hot, and I'm not sure that swirling (or vinegar) helps. (edit: if I could get this right i'd be very happy)

    Tomorrow morning I'm going to follow your plan with some eggs that are out of the fridge overnight.
    Pro tip for poached eggs: your water should be only just wobbling on the surface, def. not boiling. Lower your unbroken eggs into it for 30 seconds, then hoick them out again and break them into the water as usual. This boils the outer layer of white so they hold together better.
    That's very similar to me - except I use the intermediate step of breaking the eggs into a mug.
    I am taking that under advisement; your method may deliver a smoother transition than mine.
    Scrambled - beat the eggs lightly with heavy cream, a pinch of salt and ample white pepper. Do not overbeat - you want there to be some whitish bits in the finished product. Melt ample butter in small saucepan over medium heat, pour in custard mix, stir regularly with a straight-edged spatula so that nothing burns on the pan bottom, take off the heat when eggs are semi-solid to allow final cooking under residual heat. Stir in grated sharp cheddar until cheddar melts, and just before plating, chopped fresh chives. Serve on thick slabs of toasted and well-buttered sourdough/rustic bread. Cheap, quick and easy.
    Scrambled in my view, and I've worked on this a lot. Butter - start off with lots of it - heat a pan incredibly gently and stir the butter and the eggs. Add butter if it even slightly looks like you're done. Keep stirring incredibly gently. When the whole stirring crap seems daft then serve. (Next time you'll give it an extra stir)

    Edit: easily 30m on this.




  • Options
    GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,117
    moonshine said:

    Johnson and UvdL take a break 1:40hr into their call. I assume the PM is not reciting the Iliad in Greek down the line and this means we’re finally getting quite close to nailing down the detail.

    I hope so.
  • Options
    contrariancontrarian Posts: 5,818
    HYUFD said:

    Its quite possible that Boris Johnson is not Chamberlain or Churchill, but Sir Robert Peel.

    A man who forced through a measure that split his party for a generation. For the Corn Law repeal, read Johnson's Brexit.

    Except this time, I think it would be more than a generation. It would be for ever.

    The big political divide for the foreseeable is populist versus globalist and the tories are fatally split, there.

    Most of the Tories are united on Brexit, most of Peel's party were opposed to Corn Law repeal and all that led to was a political realignment with the Peelites joining the Liberals and in time the Protectionist Liberals like Chamberlain joining the Tories, the Tories still won again.

    All a populist v globalist split would do would be to create a similar realignment, the Corbynites would split off from Starmer Labour and form a new protectionist hard left party, the Cameroons would split off from the Tories and form a new globalist liberal party with the LDs and maybe some Blairites too and Farage's remaining supporters would merge into the Tories too.

    Only thing stopping it is FPTP, if we had PR it would probably happen next week
    Agreed. If Johnson tried to force through a 'weak' brexit I wouldn;t rule it happening next week anyway.
  • Options
    TimTTimT Posts: 6,328
    Omnium said:

    TimT said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    rcs1000 said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Omnium said:

    Omnium said:

    Omnium said:

    Omnium said:

    FF43 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Scott_xP said:

    TOPPING said:

    There were empty shelves because of panic buying. That's just the public for you I know what can you do but don't forget a lot of these people also voted for Brexit so we can't make any calls on their intelligence or common sense.

    There were empty shelves then and there may very well be empty shelves again.

    People called 999 when KFC ran short

    Food shortages due to Brexit will not be met with stoicism
    How many people did? Did 17.4 million people call 999 due to KFC ?

    The UK did react to food shortages with stoicism as recently as March. We got through it and life went on.
    I don't think you realise how hand to mouth - and how dependent on processed food - a lot of families are because of cash and time pressures. Not being able to get a pizza, for instance, can disrupt plans and routines. That is what is being ignored in the discussion, I think.
    given half the UK is being told to stay at home where are the time pressures ? You cant actually go anywhere much except the supermarket.
    People have to go to work and children to school. It's common to have a family with the children home and hungry at 5pm, and one adult not till 7, and so on ...

    Meals such as pizzas and so on help a lot, but if they cannot be obtained reliably ... it will be interesting to see what happens.
    I take it you cant cook.

    Knocking up a hot meal is a doddle whatever your budget.
    So long as you like risotto.

    (The ultimate 50p meal.)
    couscous or noodles are the fastest thing youll cook aside from bread and wraps
    My favourite quick and cheap meal is an omelette. It is dead easy and if you do it right, a sophisticated dish.

    Toast and marmite with scrambled eggs on top. A bit of cheese on top of the toast that melts on impact with the hot egg if you are feeling particularly sophisticated.

    The better you cook your eggs the less need for cheese and marmite. Fantastic toast is the key, and some butter on the toast. Then perfectly cooked eggs. A hint of shaved cheese perhaps and the slightest taint of marmite on the buttering knife.

    All this celebratory bake off crap and you can't buy a decent loaf of bread!

    We need a blokeish bake-off. Bread for cheese and pickle sandwiches, bread for bacon sandwiches, buns for burgers, buns for hotdogs. Bread for pate, and we need to get the good pate's back for this bread.

    I can cook faultless boiled eggs, time after time: whites set, yolks runny.

    Food of the Gods.
    Although 'faultless' seems a boast, and although my boiled eggs are ok - I'm quite envious.
    Try this:

    Use eggs that have been at room temperature for several hours; NEVER from the fridge.

    Use large eggs (for anything smaller the timings will need to be reduced by some indeterminate amount!)

    Large pan of water brought to a good boil.

    Put 2-4 eggs into that boiling water for four and a half minutes. (More eggs than that and the timings might need slightly extending.) Turn off the heat and let them stand for another 30 seconds. Take them out, take the top off one to eat first and smash the tops of the others, to allow the heat out and stop them cooking.

    Eat with dipping soldiers.
    Perhaps its from the fridge thing.

    Do you have any insight on scrambled eggs? I'd say they would be my best hand in egg cookery - very slow, lots of butter, stirring madly.

    Poached eggs - these are the eggs of god. I intend to keep trying.


    Scrambled is the wife's forte. Wouldn't dare to tread on her toes there.

    Poached eggs - just get a decent poacher. Don't ever try to cook them in a swirl of boiling water. Urgh.

    You should investigate ' scrambled' yourself - buy loads of butter. Not omletting it is the key. It's a mans sort of egg dish anyway - best served very early to a sleepy girlfriend. You can even bugger up the toast if the scrambled eggs are right.

    Poached - trust me this is the true way of the egg!

    I'm far from good at poached eggs, but boiling water is too hot, and I'm not sure that swirling (or vinegar) helps. (edit: if I could get this right i'd be very happy)

    Tomorrow morning I'm going to follow your plan with some eggs that are out of the fridge overnight.
    Pro tip for poached eggs: your water should be only just wobbling on the surface, def. not boiling. Lower your unbroken eggs into it for 30 seconds, then hoick them out again and break them into the water as usual. This boils the outer layer of white so they hold together better.
    That's very similar to me - except I use the intermediate step of breaking the eggs into a mug.
    I am taking that under advisement; your method may deliver a smoother transition than mine.
    Scrambled - beat the eggs lightly with heavy cream, a pinch of salt and ample white pepper. Do not overbeat - you want there to be some whitish bits in the finished product. Melt ample butter in small saucepan over medium heat, pour in custard mix, stir regularly with a straight-edged spatula so that nothing burns on the pan bottom, take off the heat when eggs are semi-solid to allow final cooking under residual heat. Stir in grated sharp cheddar until cheddar melts, and just before plating, chopped fresh chives. Serve on thick slabs of toasted and well-buttered sourdough/rustic bread. Cheap, quick and easy.
    Scrambled in my view, and I've worked on this a lot. Butter - start off with lots of it - heat a pan incredibly gently and stir the butter and the eggs. Add butter if it even slightly looks like you're done. Keep stirring incredibly gently. When the whole stirring crap seems daft then serve. (Next time you'll give it an extra stir)




    Always open to new techniques. Will definitely give that a go.
  • Options
    RogerRoger Posts: 18,944
    Cicero said:

    Cicero said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    If we get No Deal - which is starting to look horrifying possible - then the pressure for Boris to resign will be formidable. It will amount to the greatest political failure in modern British history, making Black Wednesday look like a pasty tax in comparison. There will be absolutely no reason, either for himself or anyone else, for Boris to hang around a moment longer.

    Not sure. We have now normalised empty shelves via Covid. Plus no one* will notice the extra administrative burden, to whatever degree it manifests itself, save for a "weren't these Stroopwafels a bit cheaper last week" type of thing. So there is a lot of leeway for absolute total fuck up that Boris can paint as near-normal.

    I have been prominent on here saying he will go (I have nine more months of my bet to run) on the basis of logic. It was obvious from the moment that TMay took office that she was manifestly unfit for it and hence was, to quote a noted newspaper editor, a "dead man walking".

    Boris is equally unfit to be PM. And he will fall. Just not in 24-hr rolling news time. People who are manifestly unfit for high office generally don't stay as PM for that long. cf J Corbyn.

    That said, he does look sticky because all his failings are often waved away as the behaviour of a lovable scallywag.

    *no one apart those who are filling out the forms and adhering to the new system, obvs.
    Ordinarily he and many of his cabinet colleagues would have been marched out of office by now. Lying and corruption aren't usually politically survivable, yet the bar to serve in a senior role appears to be having been sacked for one or the other previously.

    People won't realise how bad this is until it slaps them in the face. Customs checks whether under a deal or WTO will bring the UK supply chain to a crashing halt. When it gets untangled we'll find that we're paying a lot more for less things and every retailer and manufacturer and supplier will be saying why, intercut with the reporters embedded with the 48 hour queues to cross the channel.

    "This isn't the Brexit we voted for" - big price rises, mass shortages, mass unemployment. You can't hide the impacts of the end of the free market and free customs, or blame it on the other party, or positively spin it as better than what we had. As reality collapses in on people Johnson will be gone. At speed.
    There usually needs to be a catalyst and your final paragraph paints a reasonably possible picture of that catalyst. But as I said we have had empty shelves in very recent memory so I'm not 100% sure he won't have a get out.
    There is another factor that means we won't have empty shelves - supermarkets are quite deliberately dynamic. If a produce is unavailable and won't be available for a while they don't generally just put an "out of stock" label on its spot and leave that bit of their shelving empty - they fill the space with something else. They put a different product up instead, or they fill in with other products that would be next to it instead. So the shelves remain "full" (depending upon normal variance of how recently they were restocked) even if products are "unavailable".
    @RochdalePioneers literally works for a supermarket, doesn’t he?

    But of course, you know best.
    If Rochdale wants to say I am wrong then let him say how I am wrong and why.

    EG am I wrong and does his supermarket deliberately leave shelves empty when a stock is unavailable for a significant period of time or am I right and the supermarket will change the tickets and put different stock on the shelves instead?
    Phil this is what the real world looked like earlier this year.

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-51883440
    Thanks to panic buying which stopped in a matter of days because then people had full fridges and freezers. Its a self-correcting problem that can't go on forever.
    Exactly. I appreciate it when you agree with something rather than try to argue the opposite. Thanks.

    There were empty shelves because of panic buying. That's just the public for you I know what can you do but don't forget a lot of these people also voted for Brexit so we can't make any calls on their intelligence or common sense.

    There were empty shelves then and there may very well be empty shelves again.
    Yes if people react to no deal with panic buying then there may be some empty shelves for a few days while people panic buy.

    Then people's fridges and freezers will be full and they will stop panic buying and the supermarkets will have full shelves again. Just a few days later.

    Exactly as happened earlier this year. We didn't go for months with empty shelves, nor will we for months or years to come post-Brexit.

    If people start panic buying in the first week of January do you think come the May elections we will still have empty shelves and panic buying going on? Don't be ridiculous! 🤦🏻‍♂️
    You just don't understand the supply chain.

    We saw an initial blitzing of certain product categories - Pasta, Toilet Rolls, Paracetamol where people went mad and bought stuff they didn't need. After that we saw major shortage across a significant number of categories caused by the major modal shift in how people eat. The lockdown closed pubs and restaurants and workspaces - all the meals that used to be eaten out were now eaten at home. Pack formats became a major issue - there wasn't a shortage in beans but there was a shortage in retail cans and a surplus of huuuuge catering cans.

    Retailers were working flat out as were manufacturers trying to respond to wild swings in demand with a supply chain full of holes. Through this longer phase the gaps were not caused by panic buying at all - they were caused by supply chain disruption. We are about to have a major supply chain disruption which will cause not just short term inability to move products / materials but a long term need to try and restructure what comes from where and when.

    Manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers - all expecting long term issues and price rises. What do they know about it...
    Yes there will be disruption, again no shit Sherlock, I have always said there will be disruption.

    The invisible hand will work its magic and we will adjust. Some things may become a bit more expensive, some things may become a bit cheaper and some customers will substitute from more expensive goods to cheaper ones - and life will go on. The wheel of time will turn.
    The political wheel will also turn. The punters will remember the buckets of horse crap that have been served to them: "oven ready" and all the rest of it, and they will get very angry indeed. This will happen, even with "a deal", which is now down to hard Brexit only. With no deal, the Tories are going to be facing the kind of rage that will be scary to watch, let alone be on the receiving end of. I would feel sorry for you, but having seen the chumocracy at the wheel I´d personally like to see you all hanged.
    We can all disgree but wanting people hanged is crossing the line
    Bit of a brain fart after a long hard day, I meant hung out to dry... On the other hand.. 😏
    Don't resile. Too much virtue signalling on here. No one with a brain thinks you could find a rope strong enough to hold that heffalump
  • Options
    contrariancontrarian Posts: 5,818

    Its quite possible that Boris Johnson is not Chamberlain or Churchill, but Sir Robert Peel.

    A man who forced through a measure that split his party for a generation. For the Corn Law repeal, read Johnson's Brexit.

    Except this time, I think it would be more than a generation. It would be for ever.

    The big political divide for the foreseeable is populist versus globalist and the tories are fatally split, there.

    Brexit doesn't map as neatly onto a national populist versus globalist dividing line as it might appear.
    I think it depends whether you see Brexit as an end or a beginning. Boris Johnson sees it as an end. Nigel Farage sees it as a beginning.

    Farage is a "globalist", in the real sense of favouring transnational financialised capitalism, currency market spiv posing as a homesy robin hood.
    Indeed, but the crucial difference is a deep distrust of the influence of 'supranationalism' for want of a better phrase. A la Trump.
  • Options
    GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,117


    Tinned food that is OK to eat cold is the way to go. Can I recommend beans & sausages followed by rice pudding.

    When I started my first job, I was sharing a flat. The first time my parents came to visit, my flatmate was sitting in the kitchen eating baked beans out of the tin.
    They didn't bat an eyelid at the time, but for the next 36 years (until she died), whenever I mentioned him, my mother always said "oh yes he's the chap who eats beans out of the tin".

    I've done it on a train.
    A post for which it may be important to click on "show previous quotes" ... :wink:
    He's a Geordie so he's probably done it on the train back from York to Newcastle on a Saturday night.
  • Options
    BluestBlueBluestBlue Posts: 4,556
    moonshine said:

    Johnson and UvdL take a break 1:40hr into their call. I assume the PM is not reciting the Iliad in Greek down the line and this means we’re finally getting quite close to nailing down the detail.

    But wouldn't it be glorious if he were? Halfway through the Catalogue of Ships she would gladly accede to all of our demands.
  • Options
    Roger said:

    Cicero said:

    Cicero said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    If we get No Deal - which is starting to look horrifying possible - then the pressure for Boris to resign will be formidable. It will amount to the greatest political failure in modern British history, making Black Wednesday look like a pasty tax in comparison. There will be absolutely no reason, either for himself or anyone else, for Boris to hang around a moment longer.

    Not sure. We have now normalised empty shelves via Covid. Plus no one* will notice the extra administrative burden, to whatever degree it manifests itself, save for a "weren't these Stroopwafels a bit cheaper last week" type of thing. So there is a lot of leeway for absolute total fuck up that Boris can paint as near-normal.

    I have been prominent on here saying he will go (I have nine more months of my bet to run) on the basis of logic. It was obvious from the moment that TMay took office that she was manifestly unfit for it and hence was, to quote a noted newspaper editor, a "dead man walking".

    Boris is equally unfit to be PM. And he will fall. Just not in 24-hr rolling news time. People who are manifestly unfit for high office generally don't stay as PM for that long. cf J Corbyn.

    That said, he does look sticky because all his failings are often waved away as the behaviour of a lovable scallywag.

    *no one apart those who are filling out the forms and adhering to the new system, obvs.
    Ordinarily he and many of his cabinet colleagues would have been marched out of office by now. Lying and corruption aren't usually politically survivable, yet the bar to serve in a senior role appears to be having been sacked for one or the other previously.

    People won't realise how bad this is until it slaps them in the face. Customs checks whether under a deal or WTO will bring the UK supply chain to a crashing halt. When it gets untangled we'll find that we're paying a lot more for less things and every retailer and manufacturer and supplier will be saying why, intercut with the reporters embedded with the 48 hour queues to cross the channel.

    "This isn't the Brexit we voted for" - big price rises, mass shortages, mass unemployment. You can't hide the impacts of the end of the free market and free customs, or blame it on the other party, or positively spin it as better than what we had. As reality collapses in on people Johnson will be gone. At speed.
    There usually needs to be a catalyst and your final paragraph paints a reasonably possible picture of that catalyst. But as I said we have had empty shelves in very recent memory so I'm not 100% sure he won't have a get out.
    There is another factor that means we won't have empty shelves - supermarkets are quite deliberately dynamic. If a produce is unavailable and won't be available for a while they don't generally just put an "out of stock" label on its spot and leave that bit of their shelving empty - they fill the space with something else. They put a different product up instead, or they fill in with other products that would be next to it instead. So the shelves remain "full" (depending upon normal variance of how recently they were restocked) even if products are "unavailable".
    @RochdalePioneers literally works for a supermarket, doesn’t he?

    But of course, you know best.
    If Rochdale wants to say I am wrong then let him say how I am wrong and why.

    EG am I wrong and does his supermarket deliberately leave shelves empty when a stock is unavailable for a significant period of time or am I right and the supermarket will change the tickets and put different stock on the shelves instead?
    Phil this is what the real world looked like earlier this year.

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-51883440
    Thanks to panic buying which stopped in a matter of days because then people had full fridges and freezers. Its a self-correcting problem that can't go on forever.
    Exactly. I appreciate it when you agree with something rather than try to argue the opposite. Thanks.

    There were empty shelves because of panic buying. That's just the public for you I know what can you do but don't forget a lot of these people also voted for Brexit so we can't make any calls on their intelligence or common sense.

    There were empty shelves then and there may very well be empty shelves again.
    Yes if people react to no deal with panic buying then there may be some empty shelves for a few days while people panic buy.

    Then people's fridges and freezers will be full and they will stop panic buying and the supermarkets will have full shelves again. Just a few days later.

    Exactly as happened earlier this year. We didn't go for months with empty shelves, nor will we for months or years to come post-Brexit.

    If people start panic buying in the first week of January do you think come the May elections we will still have empty shelves and panic buying going on? Don't be ridiculous! 🤦🏻‍♂️
    You just don't understand the supply chain.

    We saw an initial blitzing of certain product categories - Pasta, Toilet Rolls, Paracetamol where people went mad and bought stuff they didn't need. After that we saw major shortage across a significant number of categories caused by the major modal shift in how people eat. The lockdown closed pubs and restaurants and workspaces - all the meals that used to be eaten out were now eaten at home. Pack formats became a major issue - there wasn't a shortage in beans but there was a shortage in retail cans and a surplus of huuuuge catering cans.

    Retailers were working flat out as were manufacturers trying to respond to wild swings in demand with a supply chain full of holes. Through this longer phase the gaps were not caused by panic buying at all - they were caused by supply chain disruption. We are about to have a major supply chain disruption which will cause not just short term inability to move products / materials but a long term need to try and restructure what comes from where and when.

    Manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers - all expecting long term issues and price rises. What do they know about it...
    Yes there will be disruption, again no shit Sherlock, I have always said there will be disruption.

    The invisible hand will work its magic and we will adjust. Some things may become a bit more expensive, some things may become a bit cheaper and some customers will substitute from more expensive goods to cheaper ones - and life will go on. The wheel of time will turn.
    The political wheel will also turn. The punters will remember the buckets of horse crap that have been served to them: "oven ready" and all the rest of it, and they will get very angry indeed. This will happen, even with "a deal", which is now down to hard Brexit only. With no deal, the Tories are going to be facing the kind of rage that will be scary to watch, let alone be on the receiving end of. I would feel sorry for you, but having seen the chumocracy at the wheel I´d personally like to see you all hanged.
    We can all disgree but wanting people hanged is crossing the line
    Bit of a brain fart after a long hard day, I meant hung out to dry... On the other hand.. 😏
    Don't resile. Too much virtue signalling on here. No one with a brain thinks you could find a rope strong enough to hold that heffalump
    Endorsing hanging now, how low do you want to go
  • Options



    Not for the last 5 years plus. Aldi are just another supermarket when it comes to the majority of their products - they have a central buying team, stores are laid out to a "planogram" showing which product where and of how many facings. They do have food special buys but mostly in ambient in the centre aisle.

    As for Aldi and the union flags, they are a great champion for British sourcing. But so many of those british made products use imported ingredients / packaging. Many of the shortages we saw earlier this year were because there was a national shortage of plastic film used to form the bag that so many kinds of product come in. Almost all of the raw plastic used by UK packaging producers is imported. As are foil trays for produce and fresh foods. And don't get me started on the supply situation for wooden pallets...

    Can I ask a purely practical question? I have been very gradually building up supplies of food for the last 18 months (since Johnson became PM), and I reckon I have enough for 3-4 months. There are just 3 things which I don't have so much of:
    Milk
    Bread
    Root vegetables

    I can't see any reason why those should be in short supply, but would be interested in what those more expert then me think?
    You can freeze milk and bread - we have a freezer dedicated to just that. And if you have a bread making machine, you can easily make bread from stockpiled flour. You can buy packs of ready-frozen vegetables. Not as good as fresh, admittedly, but a lot better than no veg.
    UHT milk. Keeps for ages at room temperature.
    I know, we have that as well, but I'm really not keen on the taste of the stuff.
  • Options
    OllyTOllyT Posts: 4,925

    felix said:

    I dearly want a deal and am certains there will be some bad consequences from no deal - however, there is the teensiest danger that some of our more prolific sufferers of DRS are hyping the dangers up to a degree of absurdity that will look very silly in the weeks and months to come if they don't happen. It reminds me a lot of the Remain campaign which had so many good things it could have said but didn't...and lost.

    I think we are all agreed on the consequences of a No Deal - reduced supply, less choice and higher prices - the issue is whether it will matter to people or not. Some of us believe it will, others are less convinced. We'll see.

    To be fair it is not clear just what will happen post 1st January in a no deal scenario and as is so often the case it is rare for some of the catastrophising views on here to become reality
    IIRC you used to bet appalled at the prospect of a No Deal Brexit, now it's the Tories on the brink of doing it you are just nodding along. If Labour was about to do it you would be apoplectic.
  • Options
    williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 48,301

    Its quite possible that Boris Johnson is not Chamberlain or Churchill, but Sir Robert Peel.

    A man who forced through a measure that split his party for a generation. For the Corn Law repeal, read Johnson's Brexit.

    Except this time, I think it would be more than a generation. It would be for ever.

    The big political divide for the foreseeable is populist versus globalist and the tories are fatally split, there.

    Brexit doesn't map as neatly onto a national populist versus globalist dividing line as it might appear.
    I think it depends whether you see Brexit as an end or a beginning. Boris Johnson sees it as an end. Nigel Farage sees it as a beginning.

    Farage is a "globalist", in the real sense of favouring transnational financialised capitalism, currency market spiv posing as a homesy robin hood.
    Indeed, but the crucial difference is a deep distrust of the influence of 'supranationalism' for want of a better phrase. A la Trump.
    Is a regional grouping of countries with a shared cultural heritage really globalism though, or is it anti-globalism?
  • Options

    Trade isn't going to halt though. Trade will still happen even if it is disrupted.

    But yes for a couple of weeks if we are disrupted it's perfect possible to live off potatoes, root vegetables, peas, beans, cabbages, apples, lamb, seafood etc.

    But it won't be necessary. It is panic mongering to suggest it would be. Disruption doesn't mean an end to trade, it never has done.

    Trade will stop until they find a way to remove the bottleneck. We know the 12-20 hour queues to cross the EU border with a far smaller volume of trucks at a land border. So suggesting 48 hours plus delays for our sea border is sensible. As you can't tie up the truck fleet in that kind of queue they won't be sent. An eerie calm where the greatly reduced cross border traffic only waits a few hours as opposed to days.

    Problem is that if you step up traffic it backs up to a stop again. I know that you disagree with all of this despite the endless evidence that it is facts. Then again you've spent all afternoon telling me about how food supply chains and supermarkets work in a way that would be funny (they'll overface empty chillers with beans FFS) if you weren't so serious.
    I never said they'll overface empty chillers with beans.

    Why wouldn't they overface empty chillers with cold produce we have a surplus of?

    Be a good opportunity to have a sale on overfaced lamb perhaps?
    Jesus. Like I said, have no idea about how supply chain works.
    The lamb that gets exported to the EU - if there is a disruption to international trade then why can't that be sold in the UK?

    If there's something I'm missing then why not educate me? My local Morrisons wraps up its meat on-site with the in-store butcher, I appreciate not every supermarket does that but why can't lamb if we have a surplus of it be shipped to the supermarkets and sold there?
    The point about lamb is that British farmers produce a significant amount of lamb and British consumers eat a significant amount of it, but not the whole animal, just some meaty parts like the legs and the back. The rest is exported to southern/eastern europe, with more meaty bits imported from there. In a No Deal situation you may rediscover your taste for sheep entrails. Bon Appetit.
  • Options
    OllyT said:

    felix said:

    I dearly want a deal and am certains there will be some bad consequences from no deal - however, there is the teensiest danger that some of our more prolific sufferers of DRS are hyping the dangers up to a degree of absurdity that will look very silly in the weeks and months to come if they don't happen. It reminds me a lot of the Remain campaign which had so many good things it could have said but didn't...and lost.

    I think we are all agreed on the consequences of a No Deal - reduced supply, less choice and higher prices - the issue is whether it will matter to people or not. Some of us believe it will, others are less convinced. We'll see.

    To be fair it is not clear just what will happen post 1st January in a no deal scenario and as is so often the case it is rare for some of the catastrophising views on here to become reality
    IIRC you used to bet appalled at the prospect of a No Deal Brexit, now it's the Tories on the brink of doing it you are just nodding along. If Labour was about to do it you would be apoplectic.
    Since when have I nodded along - my posts have consistently wanted a deal

    However, if it is a no deal it is a failure by both sides
  • Options
    nico679nico679 Posts: 5,103
    The media want to overplay the importance of the ERG nutjobs .

    The Tories have an 80 seat majority and any deal will easily get through the Commons . The country has been held hostage for 4 years by this group.

    Most of the country will just be relieved to have a deal and move on , the insane no deal death cult won’t be happy , Farage will of course shout betrayal regardless of what’s in the deal in a desperate attempt to remain in the public eye .

  • Options
    MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 37,667
    I think a parallel between Thatcher vs the miners can be drawn between Boris vs no deal. In both cases the outcome is a known, the difference is that Mrs Thatcher spent a long time preparing the nation for the inevitable miners strike by stockpiling coal and ensuring there was never any chance of shortages and we could break the strikes and outlast any resolve the strikers had. This time we sort of know what will happen with no deal and Boris/the government haven't done any of the prep work for it, we haven't stockpiled, we haven't got processes in place and there is no guarantee that we can outlast the resolve of the EU to hold on to their unsustainable position on the LPF/fish.

    This is why Boris has made a grave error on not getting the two year extension.
  • Options
    moonshinemoonshine Posts: 5,248

    Trade isn't going to halt though. Trade will still happen even if it is disrupted.

    But yes for a couple of weeks if we are disrupted it's perfect possible to live off potatoes, root vegetables, peas, beans, cabbages, apples, lamb, seafood etc.

    But it won't be necessary. It is panic mongering to suggest it would be. Disruption doesn't mean an end to trade, it never has done.

    Trade will stop until they find a way to remove the bottleneck. We know the 12-20 hour queues to cross the EU border with a far smaller volume of trucks at a land border. So suggesting 48 hours plus delays for our sea border is sensible. As you can't tie up the truck fleet in that kind of queue they won't be sent. An eerie calm where the greatly reduced cross border traffic only waits a few hours as opposed to days.

    Problem is that if you step up traffic it backs up to a stop again. I know that you disagree with all of this despite the endless evidence that it is facts. Then again you've spent all afternoon telling me about how food supply chains and supermarkets work in a way that would be funny (they'll overface empty chillers with beans FFS) if you weren't so serious.
    I never said they'll overface empty chillers with beans.

    Why wouldn't they overface empty chillers with cold produce we have a surplus of?

    Be a good opportunity to have a sale on overfaced lamb perhaps?
    Jesus. Like I said, have no idea about how supply chain works.
    The lamb that gets exported to the EU - if there is a disruption to international trade then why can't that be sold in the UK?

    If there's something I'm missing then why not educate me? My local Morrisons wraps up its meat on-site with the in-store butcher, I appreciate not every supermarket does that but why can't lamb if we have a surplus of it be shipped to the supermarkets and sold there?
    The point about lamb is that British farmers produce a significant amount of lamb and British consumers eat a significant amount of it, but not the whole animal, just some meaty parts like the legs and the back. The rest is exported to southern/eastern europe, with more meaty bits imported from there. In a No Deal situation you may rediscover your taste for sheep entrails. Bon Appetit.
    I’ve tried sheep’s brain, served in the whole roasted head. Chopsticks to lift out the flaps. Wasn’t enough chilli sauce in all the world to stop the instant retch. If there’s a no deal Brexit, I’ll stick to British shellfish I think.
  • Options
    Andy_JS said:

    I still don't understand why Cameron agreed to holding the Brexit referendum.

    He was gambling that he wouldn't have to enact his pledge because there would be another coalition? When he won the majority he was over-confident of getting remain?
  • Options
    bigjohnowlsbigjohnowls Posts: 21,926


    Tinned food that is OK to eat cold is the way to go. Can I recommend beans & sausages followed by rice pudding.

    When I started my first job, I was sharing a flat. The first time my parents came to visit, my flatmate was sitting in the kitchen eating baked beans out of the tin.
    They didn't bat an eyelid at the time, but for the next 36 years (until she died), whenever I mentioned him, my mother always said "oh yes he's the chap who eats beans out of the tin".

    I've done it on a train.
    A post for which it may be important to click on "show previous quotes" ... :wink:
    He's a Geordie so he's probably done it on the train back from York to Newcastle on a Saturday night.
    20p cold Rice Pudding

    £1.99 Tin Opener
  • Options
    DecrepiterJohnLDecrepiterJohnL Posts: 24,702
    edited December 2020
    Roger said:

    dixiedean said:

    Roger said:

    Extraordinary Dylan selling the publishing rights to his entire back catalogue reckoned to be 600 songs. You feel that no amount of money would be enough Even the 'hundred's of million dollars' that has been discussed. To use any Dylan on an ad would be so prohibitive that you'd need a pretty huge budget to consider it and that's just one outlet.

    Dylan's been used on plenty ads. Victoria's secret, Cadillac and the Co-op off the top of my head.
    He's also notoriously amenable to using them in films and TV. Big Lebowski, Walking Dead, CSI spring to mind.
    He's fine using his music in ads but gets big money for them. Those are all big ads (depending where they were seen). If you want his voice as well as his tune you pay a hell of a lot more. Mark Knoffler turned down £1,000,000 for the tune of Local Hero for an electricity privatisation i shot because he didn't like Thatcher!
    You can draw a line from Boris's Tory broadcast with cue cards, through Love Actually, back to Dylan's Subterranean Homesick Blues round the back of the Savoy.
    http://www.shadyoldlady.com/location.php?loc=852
  • Options
    PhilPhil Posts: 1,953
    moonshine said:

    Trade isn't going to halt though. Trade will still happen even if it is disrupted.

    But yes for a couple of weeks if we are disrupted it's perfect possible to live off potatoes, root vegetables, peas, beans, cabbages, apples, lamb, seafood etc.

    But it won't be necessary. It is panic mongering to suggest it would be. Disruption doesn't mean an end to trade, it never has done.

    Trade will stop until they find a way to remove the bottleneck. We know the 12-20 hour queues to cross the EU border with a far smaller volume of trucks at a land border. So suggesting 48 hours plus delays for our sea border is sensible. As you can't tie up the truck fleet in that kind of queue they won't be sent. An eerie calm where the greatly reduced cross border traffic only waits a few hours as opposed to days.

    Problem is that if you step up traffic it backs up to a stop again. I know that you disagree with all of this despite the endless evidence that it is facts. Then again you've spent all afternoon telling me about how food supply chains and supermarkets work in a way that would be funny (they'll overface empty chillers with beans FFS) if you weren't so serious.
    I never said they'll overface empty chillers with beans.

    Why wouldn't they overface empty chillers with cold produce we have a surplus of?

    Be a good opportunity to have a sale on overfaced lamb perhaps?
    Jesus. Like I said, have no idea about how supply chain works.
    The lamb that gets exported to the EU - if there is a disruption to international trade then why can't that be sold in the UK?

    If there's something I'm missing then why not educate me? My local Morrisons wraps up its meat on-site with the in-store butcher, I appreciate not every supermarket does that but why can't lamb if we have a surplus of it be shipped to the supermarkets and sold there?
    The point about lamb is that British farmers produce a significant amount of lamb and British consumers eat a significant amount of it, but not the whole animal, just some meaty parts like the legs and the back. The rest is exported to southern/eastern europe, with more meaty bits imported from there. In a No Deal situation you may rediscover your taste for sheep entrails. Bon Appetit.
    I’ve tried sheep’s brain, served in the whole roasted head. Chopsticks to lift out the flaps. Wasn’t enough chilli sauce in all the world to stop the instant retch. If there’s a no deal Brexit, I’ll stick to British shellfish I think.
    Brain has been off the menu since mad cow disease. Nobody wants to find out if scrapie will have the same effect on people.
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    IshmaelZIshmaelZ Posts: 21,830
    Italy passes 1,000 deaths/million on worldometer, joining Peru and Belgium. Spain very close behind.
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    AnneJGPAnneJGP Posts: 2,869

    Scott_xP said:

    What is the obsession with adding dairy products to scrambled egg?

    Eggs.

    Seasoned.

    Scrambled.

    Perfection.

    Because it tastes great, and is good for you. Here's my ultimate (lazy) scrambled egg recipe:

    Get a very good non-stick frying pan. Switch on the ring (low heat), and dump in a good blob of butter (I use unsalted), lots of salt (I use Himalayan pink), lots of pepper, and sometimes some coconut oil too. Instead of milk, put in a good blob of natural yoghurt. Stir. Break the eggs straight into the pan - I usually do three per person, sometimes 4. They will slowly start to fry, but there's ample time to break them up with a wooden spoon. Continue to stir. Keep the ring on low and don't be tempted to turn it up high to get the eggs cooked faster. Stop when the eggs are still creamy but not runny.

    You are welcome!
    It has always baffled me that (as you say) scrambled eggs and also omelettes are considered good for us. But fried eggs are absolutely not.

    Eggs, butter, seasoning in all cases. Why is one not good?

    Good evening, everybody.
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    sladeslade Posts: 1,941
    I have a boiled egg for breakfast most days. Sometimes the white cooks fine but the yolk stays runny but often they are both solid or both runny. Any tips? For dinner tonight I am having slow cooked lamb with peppers, apricots, and honey. Lovely. If some of the fears materialise perhaps for the last time.
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    FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 76,336
    edited December 2020
    The Christmas hall pass is looking more and more a very bad idea. England haven't squashed covid down enough and Wales is already running away in the other direction, but waiting until after Christmas to decide if further restrictions are required.

    Lockdown in February.....
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    moonshinemoonshine Posts: 5,248
    Phil said:

    moonshine said:

    Trade isn't going to halt though. Trade will still happen even if it is disrupted.

    But yes for a couple of weeks if we are disrupted it's perfect possible to live off potatoes, root vegetables, peas, beans, cabbages, apples, lamb, seafood etc.

    But it won't be necessary. It is panic mongering to suggest it would be. Disruption doesn't mean an end to trade, it never has done.

    Trade will stop until they find a way to remove the bottleneck. We know the 12-20 hour queues to cross the EU border with a far smaller volume of trucks at a land border. So suggesting 48 hours plus delays for our sea border is sensible. As you can't tie up the truck fleet in that kind of queue they won't be sent. An eerie calm where the greatly reduced cross border traffic only waits a few hours as opposed to days.

    Problem is that if you step up traffic it backs up to a stop again. I know that you disagree with all of this despite the endless evidence that it is facts. Then again you've spent all afternoon telling me about how food supply chains and supermarkets work in a way that would be funny (they'll overface empty chillers with beans FFS) if you weren't so serious.
    I never said they'll overface empty chillers with beans.

    Why wouldn't they overface empty chillers with cold produce we have a surplus of?

    Be a good opportunity to have a sale on overfaced lamb perhaps?
    Jesus. Like I said, have no idea about how supply chain works.
    The lamb that gets exported to the EU - if there is a disruption to international trade then why can't that be sold in the UK?

    If there's something I'm missing then why not educate me? My local Morrisons wraps up its meat on-site with the in-store butcher, I appreciate not every supermarket does that but why can't lamb if we have a surplus of it be shipped to the supermarkets and sold there?
    The point about lamb is that British farmers produce a significant amount of lamb and British consumers eat a significant amount of it, but not the whole animal, just some meaty parts like the legs and the back. The rest is exported to southern/eastern europe, with more meaty bits imported from there. In a No Deal situation you may rediscover your taste for sheep entrails. Bon Appetit.
    I’ve tried sheep’s brain, served in the whole roasted head. Chopsticks to lift out the flaps. Wasn’t enough chilli sauce in all the world to stop the instant retch. If there’s a no deal Brexit, I’ll stick to British shellfish I think.
    Brain has been off the menu since mad cow disease. Nobody wants to find out if scrapie will have the same effect on people.
    Still gets served in the trendier restaurants in Australia.
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    CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 40,132
    moonshine said:

    Trade isn't going to halt though. Trade will still happen even if it is disrupted.

    But yes for a couple of weeks if we are disrupted it's perfect possible to live off potatoes, root vegetables, peas, beans, cabbages, apples, lamb, seafood etc.

    But it won't be necessary. It is panic mongering to suggest it would be. Disruption doesn't mean an end to trade, it never has done.

    Trade will stop until they find a way to remove the bottleneck. We know the 12-20 hour queues to cross the EU border with a far smaller volume of trucks at a land border. So suggesting 48 hours plus delays for our sea border is sensible. As you can't tie up the truck fleet in that kind of queue they won't be sent. An eerie calm where the greatly reduced cross border traffic only waits a few hours as opposed to days.

    Problem is that if you step up traffic it backs up to a stop again. I know that you disagree with all of this despite the endless evidence that it is facts. Then again you've spent all afternoon telling me about how food supply chains and supermarkets work in a way that would be funny (they'll overface empty chillers with beans FFS) if you weren't so serious.
    I never said they'll overface empty chillers with beans.

    Why wouldn't they overface empty chillers with cold produce we have a surplus of?

    Be a good opportunity to have a sale on overfaced lamb perhaps?
    Jesus. Like I said, have no idea about how supply chain works.
    The lamb that gets exported to the EU - if there is a disruption to international trade then why can't that be sold in the UK?

    If there's something I'm missing then why not educate me? My local Morrisons wraps up its meat on-site with the in-store butcher, I appreciate not every supermarket does that but why can't lamb if we have a surplus of it be shipped to the supermarkets and sold there?
    The point about lamb is that British farmers produce a significant amount of lamb and British consumers eat a significant amount of it, but not the whole animal, just some meaty parts like the legs and the back. The rest is exported to southern/eastern europe, with more meaty bits imported from there. In a No Deal situation you may rediscover your taste for sheep entrails. Bon Appetit.
    I’ve tried sheep’s brain, served in the whole roasted head. Chopsticks to lift out the flaps. Wasn’t enough chilli sauce in all the world to stop the instant retch. If there’s a no deal Brexit, I’ll stick to British shellfish I think.
    And to think all the recipes tonight have been absolutely tasty sounding, and then this comes along ...

    In fact, this provokes a memory, coming up from the abyss like something from the Cthulhu mythos. My granny used to cook sheep's heid at home. From the butcher three doors away, or maybe the other two within 100 yards. Split in two. And boiled, none of this fancy roasting.

    Mind, it was for the dog. But the smell ...

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    nico679 said:

    The media want to overplay the importance of the ERG nutjobs .

    The Tories have an 80 seat majority and any deal will easily get through the Commons . The country has been held hostage for 4 years by this group.

    Most of the country will just be relieved to have a deal and move on , the insane no deal death cult won’t be happy , Farage will of course shout betrayal regardless of what’s in the deal in a desperate attempt to remain in the public eye .

    The ERG is nothing against two dozen assorted Leavers in the Cabinet, who will be ex officio supporters of whatever deal or partial deal or no deal Boris serves up.
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    moonshinemoonshine Posts: 5,248
    Meanwhile BBC Laura says the phone call has ended. And that nothing much got achieved.
  • Options



    Not for the last 5 years plus. Aldi are just another supermarket when it comes to the majority of their products - they have a central buying team, stores are laid out to a "planogram" showing which product where and of how many facings. They do have food special buys but mostly in ambient in the centre aisle.

    As for Aldi and the union flags, they are a great champion for British sourcing. But so many of those british made products use imported ingredients / packaging. Many of the shortages we saw earlier this year were because there was a national shortage of plastic film used to form the bag that so many kinds of product come in. Almost all of the raw plastic used by UK packaging producers is imported. As are foil trays for produce and fresh foods. And don't get me started on the supply situation for wooden pallets...

    Can I ask a purely practical question? I have been very gradually building up supplies of food for the last 18 months (since Johnson became PM), and I reckon I have enough for 3-4 months. There are just 3 things which I don't have so much of:
    Milk
    Bread
    Root vegetables

    I can't see any reason why those should be in short supply, but would be interested in what those more expert then me think?
    You can freeze milk and bread - we have a freezer dedicated to just that. And if you have a bread making machine, you can easily make bread from stockpiled flour. You can buy packs of ready-frozen vegetables. Not as good as fresh, admittedly, but a lot better than no veg.
    UHT milk. Keeps for ages at room temperature.
    I know, we have that as well, but I'm really not keen on the taste of the stuff.
    Don't like the taste? Covid-19 will fix that.
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    tlg86tlg86 Posts: 25,222
    edited December 2020
    Look at the breakdown by age - very encouraging.

    And gender too - women more sceptical, which surprises me.
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    MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 37,667

    The Christmas hall pass is looking more and more a very bad idea. England haven't squashed covid down enough and Wales is already running away in the other direction, but waiting until after Christmas to decide if further restrictions are required.

    Lockdown in February.....

    Yes, England will be where Wales is now in two weeks, then we're going to have the free pass. January is going to be a disaster with mega lockdown resulting in more business failures and more unemployment.

    January is going to be a miserable month.
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    nico679 said:

    The media want to overplay the importance of the ERG nutjobs .

    The Tories have an 80 seat majority and any deal will easily get through the Commons . The country has been held hostage for 4 years by this group.

    Most of the country will just be relieved to have a deal and move on , the insane no deal death cult won’t be happy , Farage will of course shout betrayal regardless of what’s in the deal in a desperate attempt to remain in the public eye .

    Quite right. Yes, some Leavers will huff and puff, but a significant number, being careerists or Boris sycophants, will proclaim it a triumph. That should sufficiently muddy the waters to prevent a rebellion of any significance from getting underway. Boris can then move on to climate change, the British euro-sceptic Right being finally obliterated.
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    BluestBlueBluestBlue Posts: 4,556

    Its quite possible that Boris Johnson is not Chamberlain or Churchill, but Sir Robert Peel.

    A man who forced through a measure that split his party for a generation. For the Corn Law repeal, read Johnson's Brexit.

    Except this time, I think it would be more than a generation. It would be for ever.

    The big political divide for the foreseeable is populist versus globalist and the tories are fatally split, there.

    Brexit doesn't map as neatly onto a national populist versus globalist dividing line as it might appear.
    I think it depends whether you see Brexit as an end or a beginning. Boris Johnson sees it as an end. Nigel Farage sees it as a beginning.

    Farage is a "globalist", in the real sense of favouring transnational financialised capitalism, currency market spiv posing as a homesy robin hood.
    Indeed, but the crucial difference is a deep distrust of the influence of 'supranationalism' for want of a better phrase. A la Trump.
    Is a regional grouping of countries with a shared cultural heritage really globalism though, or is it anti-globalism?
    If Remain had been able to make that argument effectively - and it's quite a good one - they would have won. Unfortunately, Mutti nullified that line of reasoning at precisely the wrong moment by making it clear that to her the needs of those outside Europe had to trump those of its own citizens. Brexit was all but decided at that moment.
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    pingping Posts: 3,733

    Andy_JS said:

    I still don't understand why Cameron agreed to holding the Brexit referendum.

    He was gambling that he wouldn't have to enact his pledge because there would be another coalition? When he won the majority he was over-confident of getting remain?
    This ^ is the correct answer.
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    RobDRobD Posts: 59,029
    tlg86 said:

    Look at the breakdown by age - very encouraging.
    What's with the young people not believing it is safe.
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    nico679nico679 Posts: 5,103

    MikeL said:

    Haven't seen any comments on this but Republican in Pennsylvania has appealed PA Supreme Court ruling to SCOTUS.

    It's in Alito's territory - Alito originally requested evidence by 9th Dec (standard 6 day deadline) - ie after safe harbour deadline - but subsequently revised this to 9am on 8th Dec (he could have requested it much quicker if he had wanted to).

    Anyway some kind of ruling may well be issued tomorrow - link:

    https://reason.com/volokh/2020/12/06/circuit-justice-alito-walks-back-de-facto-denial-of-pennsylvania-emergency-appeal/

    I suspect Alito's deliberations will do more to decide the fate of the US election than a thousand calls for Biden from CNN.
    Alito and the other conservative justices have already set a precedent . Their view is state courts shouldn’t allow new rules to voting which go against the state legislature. The case you’re referring to is where the State Supreme Court agreed that the state legislatures decision on mail in voting didn’t go against the PA constitution . They did not rule in conflict with the state legislature.

    The SCOTUS can’t intervene against the state legislature, and any desperate attempt by the plaintiffs to bring Gore v Bush fails because in that instance it was the Florida Supreme Court not the legislature that was deemed to have been violation of the US constitution.

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    CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 40,132
    RobD said:

    tlg86 said:

    Look at the breakdown by age - very encouraging.
    What's with the young people not believing it is safe.
    Trendy antivaxx twats? or simply the different risk balance of catching the pox vs a complicaiton of the vaccine?
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    moonshine said:

    Meanwhile BBC Laura says the phone call has ended. And that nothing much got achieved.

    Who knows..
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    IanB2IanB2 Posts: 47,584
    edited December 2020
    TimT said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    rcs1000 said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Omnium said:

    Omnium said:

    Omnium said:

    Omnium said:

    FF43 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Scott_xP said:

    TOPPING said:

    There were empty shelves because of panic buying. That's just the public for you I know what can you do but don't forget a lot of these people also voted for Brexit so we can't make any calls on their intelligence or common sense.

    There were empty shelves then and there may very well be empty shelves again.

    People called 999 when KFC ran short

    Food shortages due to Brexit will not be met with stoicism
    How many people did? Did 17.4 million people call 999 due to KFC ?

    The UK did react to food shortages with stoicism as recently as March. We got through it and life went on.
    I don't think you realise how hand to mouth - and how dependent on processed food - a lot of families are because of cash and time pressures. Not being able to get a pizza, for instance, can disrupt plans and routines. That is what is being ignored in the discussion, I think.
    given half the UK is being told to stay at home where are the time pressures ? You cant actually go anywhere much except the supermarket.
    People have to go to work and children to school. It's common to have a family with the children home and hungry at 5pm, and one adult not till 7, and so on ...

    Meals such as pizzas and so on help a lot, but if they cannot be obtained reliably ... it will be interesting to see what happens.
    I take it you cant cook.

    Knocking up a hot meal is a doddle whatever your budget.
    So long as you like risotto.

    (The ultimate 50p meal.)
    couscous or noodles are the fastest thing youll cook aside from bread and wraps
    My favourite quick and cheap meal is an omelette. It is dead easy and if you do it right, a sophisticated dish.

    Toast and marmite with scrambled eggs on top. A bit of cheese on top of the toast that melts on impact with the hot egg if you are feeling particularly sophisticated.

    The better you cook your eggs the less need for cheese and marmite. Fantastic toast is the key, and some butter on the toast. Then perfectly cooked eggs. A hint of shaved cheese perhaps and the slightest taint of marmite on the buttering knife.

    All this celebratory bake off crap and you can't buy a decent loaf of bread!

    We need a blokeish bake-off. Bread for cheese and pickle sandwiches, bread for bacon sandwiches, buns for burgers, buns for hotdogs. Bread for pate, and we need to get the good pate's back for this bread.

    I can cook faultless boiled eggs, time after time: whites set, yolks runny.

    Food of the Gods.
    Although 'faultless' seems a boast, and although my boiled eggs are ok - I'm quite envious.
    Try this:

    Use eggs that have been at room temperature for several hours; NEVER from the fridge.

    Use large eggs (for anything smaller the timings will need to be reduced by some indeterminate amount!)

    Large pan of water brought to a good boil.

    Put 2-4 eggs into that boiling water for four and a half minutes. (More eggs than that and the timings might need slightly extending.) Turn off the heat and let them stand for another 30 seconds. Take them out, take the top off one to eat first and smash the tops of the others, to allow the heat out and stop them cooking.

    Eat with dipping soldiers.
    Perhaps its from the fridge thing.

    Do you have any insight on scrambled eggs? I'd say they would be my best hand in egg cookery - very slow, lots of butter, stirring madly.

    Poached eggs - these are the eggs of god. I intend to keep trying.


    Scrambled is the wife's forte. Wouldn't dare to tread on her toes there.

    Poached eggs - just get a decent poacher. Don't ever try to cook them in a swirl of boiling water. Urgh.

    You should investigate ' scrambled' yourself - buy loads of butter. Not omletting it is the key. It's a mans sort of egg dish anyway - best served very early to a sleepy girlfriend. You can even bugger up the toast if the scrambled eggs are right.

    Poached - trust me this is the true way of the egg!

    I'm far from good at poached eggs, but boiling water is too hot, and I'm not sure that swirling (or vinegar) helps. (edit: if I could get this right i'd be very happy)

    Tomorrow morning I'm going to follow your plan with some eggs that are out of the fridge overnight.
    Pro tip for poached eggs: your water should be only just wobbling on the surface, def. not boiling. Lower your unbroken eggs into it for 30 seconds, then hoick them out again and break them into the water as usual. This boils the outer layer of white so they hold together better.
    That's very similar to me - except I use the intermediate step of breaking the eggs into a mug.
    I am taking that under advisement; your method may deliver a smoother transition than mine.
    Scrambled - beat the eggs lightly with heavy cream, a pinch of salt and ample white pepper. Do not overbeat - you want there to be some whitish bits in the finished product. Melt ample butter in small saucepan over medium heat, pour in custard mix, stir regularly with a straight-edged spatula so that nothing burns on the pan bottom, take off the heat when eggs are semi-solid to allow final cooking under residual heat. Stir in grated sharp cheddar until cheddar melts, and just before plating, chopped fresh chives. Serve on thick slabs of toasted and well-buttered sourdough/rustic bread. Cheap, quick and easy.
    Or do a frittata. Turn the grill on. Meanwhile, sauté up some onion and garlic with whatever veg you have around, chopped up small, with some salt and pepper and a few chilli flakes (optional, or chopped chilli, also optional). While that’s going, whisk up a few eggs with generous pinches of any Italian herbs you have on hand. Pour the eggs over the onion and veg and leave it to cook for just a few minutes, fiddling with it just to make sure the egg is spread evenly and doesn’t stick at the edges. When the edges begin to set, grate over generous amounts of the hard cheese of your choice, bung the frying pan under the grill for five to eight minutes, then serve and eat. For added finesse sprinkle some fresh cut herbs over the top.

    Adding a tiny bit of water to the whisked eggs seems to help the egg spread.
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    RobD said:

    tlg86 said:

    Look at the breakdown by age - very encouraging.
    What's with the young people not believing it is safe.
    If you are 18, you basically having nothing to fear from COVID...so much easier to be fearful of something that they still can't tell you how long it will work for etc.
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    turbotubbsturbotubbs Posts: 15,520
    RobD said:

    tlg86 said:

    Look at the breakdown by age - very encouraging.
    What's with the young people not believing it is safe.
    Wierd conversation with a tutee last week. Apparently the youth have moved on from clean eating into not having any meds entering their body either. Genuinely astonished by this, but I can see the ‘logic’ of their chain of ‘thought’...
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    slade said:

    I have a boiled egg for breakfast most days. Sometimes the white cooks fine but the yolk stays runny but often they are both solid or both runny. Any tips? For dinner tonight I am having slow cooked lamb with peppers, apricots, and honey. Lovely. If some of the fears materialise perhaps for the last time.

    Boiled eggs -- the trick is always to buy the same size eggs. Then once you've established your timings, you are set for life.
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    Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 25,679
    AnneJGP said:

    Scott_xP said:

    What is the obsession with adding dairy products to scrambled egg?

    Eggs.

    Seasoned.

    Scrambled.

    Perfection.

    Because it tastes great, and is good for you. Here's my ultimate (lazy) scrambled egg recipe:

    Get a very good non-stick frying pan. Switch on the ring (low heat), and dump in a good blob of butter (I use unsalted), lots of salt (I use Himalayan pink), lots of pepper, and sometimes some coconut oil too. Instead of milk, put in a good blob of natural yoghurt. Stir. Break the eggs straight into the pan - I usually do three per person, sometimes 4. They will slowly start to fry, but there's ample time to break them up with a wooden spoon. Continue to stir. Keep the ring on low and don't be tempted to turn it up high to get the eggs cooked faster. Stop when the eggs are still creamy but not runny.

    You are welcome!
    It has always baffled me that (as you say) scrambled eggs and also omelettes are considered good for us. But fried eggs are absolutely not.

    Eggs, butter, seasoning in all cases. Why is one not good?

    Good evening, everybody.
    Frying things at high temperatures can remove some of the goodness and result in 'acrylamides' - carcinogenic compounds building up. So I don't think frying is as good as the other ways, but I don't avoid fried eggs at all. Frying them in coconut oil (or good lard or beef tallow) would be best, as these fats are more heat stable.
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    MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 37,667
    Carnyx said:

    RobD said:

    tlg86 said:

    Look at the breakdown by age - very encouraging.
    What's with the young people not believing it is safe.
    Trendy antivaxx twats? or simply the different risk balance of catching the pox vs a complicaiton of the vaccine?
    Differential risk, for someone who has a 10% risk of dying or severe complications an vaccine that might have a 0.001% risk of severe side effects is very attractive. For young people COVID risks are about 0.01% in terms of death or severe complications so a vaccine isn't that much safer until it's been widely distributed. I'm sure that the number will improve when wide rollout begins and there are no side effects.
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    If I had to guess I'd say they discussed a lot of stuff but need to take it back to their bases now (EU members and UK HMG) to see what more can be done.

    UK has made gestures today with IM Bill and also on fishing, and the EU has been looking at LPF limits too, so something is definitely going on.
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    Carnyx said:

    moonshine said:

    Trade isn't going to halt though. Trade will still happen even if it is disrupted.

    But yes for a couple of weeks if we are disrupted it's perfect possible to live off potatoes, root vegetables, peas, beans, cabbages, apples, lamb, seafood etc.

    But it won't be necessary. It is panic mongering to suggest it would be. Disruption doesn't mean an end to trade, it never has done.

    Trade will stop until they find a way to remove the bottleneck. We know the 12-20 hour queues to cross the EU border with a far smaller volume of trucks at a land border. So suggesting 48 hours plus delays for our sea border is sensible. As you can't tie up the truck fleet in that kind of queue they won't be sent. An eerie calm where the greatly reduced cross border traffic only waits a few hours as opposed to days.

    Problem is that if you step up traffic it backs up to a stop again. I know that you disagree with all of this despite the endless evidence that it is facts. Then again you've spent all afternoon telling me about how food supply chains and supermarkets work in a way that would be funny (they'll overface empty chillers with beans FFS) if you weren't so serious.
    I never said they'll overface empty chillers with beans.

    Why wouldn't they overface empty chillers with cold produce we have a surplus of?

    Be a good opportunity to have a sale on overfaced lamb perhaps?
    Jesus. Like I said, have no idea about how supply chain works.
    The lamb that gets exported to the EU - if there is a disruption to international trade then why can't that be sold in the UK?

    If there's something I'm missing then why not educate me? My local Morrisons wraps up its meat on-site with the in-store butcher, I appreciate not every supermarket does that but why can't lamb if we have a surplus of it be shipped to the supermarkets and sold there?
    The point about lamb is that British farmers produce a significant amount of lamb and British consumers eat a significant amount of it, but not the whole animal, just some meaty parts like the legs and the back. The rest is exported to southern/eastern europe, with more meaty bits imported from there. In a No Deal situation you may rediscover your taste for sheep entrails. Bon Appetit.
    I’ve tried sheep’s brain, served in the whole roasted head. Chopsticks to lift out the flaps. Wasn’t enough chilli sauce in all the world to stop the instant retch. If there’s a no deal Brexit, I’ll stick to British shellfish I think.
    And to think all the recipes tonight have been absolutely tasty sounding, and then this comes along ...

    In fact, this provokes a memory, coming up from the abyss like something from the Cthulhu mythos. My granny used to cook sheep's heid at home. From the butcher three doors away, or maybe the other two within 100 yards. Split in two. And boiled, none of this fancy roasting.

    Mind, it was for the dog. But the smell ...

    Smoked sheep's head is a traditional Christmas meal in some coastal parts of Norway. Those parts always seemed to provide the Camp Bosses (Head chefs) on the Norwegian rigs so it was the mainstay of any Norwegian offshore Christmas along with Lutefisk and 'Roadkill and Cabbage'. The smoked sheep's head was easily the best of those festive choices.
  • Options

    Carnyx said:

    moonshine said:

    Trade isn't going to halt though. Trade will still happen even if it is disrupted.

    But yes for a couple of weeks if we are disrupted it's perfect possible to live off potatoes, root vegetables, peas, beans, cabbages, apples, lamb, seafood etc.

    But it won't be necessary. It is panic mongering to suggest it would be. Disruption doesn't mean an end to trade, it never has done.

    Trade will stop until they find a way to remove the bottleneck. We know the 12-20 hour queues to cross the EU border with a far smaller volume of trucks at a land border. So suggesting 48 hours plus delays for our sea border is sensible. As you can't tie up the truck fleet in that kind of queue they won't be sent. An eerie calm where the greatly reduced cross border traffic only waits a few hours as opposed to days.

    Problem is that if you step up traffic it backs up to a stop again. I know that you disagree with all of this despite the endless evidence that it is facts. Then again you've spent all afternoon telling me about how food supply chains and supermarkets work in a way that would be funny (they'll overface empty chillers with beans FFS) if you weren't so serious.
    I never said they'll overface empty chillers with beans.

    Why wouldn't they overface empty chillers with cold produce we have a surplus of?

    Be a good opportunity to have a sale on overfaced lamb perhaps?
    Jesus. Like I said, have no idea about how supply chain works.
    The lamb that gets exported to the EU - if there is a disruption to international trade then why can't that be sold in the UK?

    If there's something I'm missing then why not educate me? My local Morrisons wraps up its meat on-site with the in-store butcher, I appreciate not every supermarket does that but why can't lamb if we have a surplus of it be shipped to the supermarkets and sold there?
    The point about lamb is that British farmers produce a significant amount of lamb and British consumers eat a significant amount of it, but not the whole animal, just some meaty parts like the legs and the back. The rest is exported to southern/eastern europe, with more meaty bits imported from there. In a No Deal situation you may rediscover your taste for sheep entrails. Bon Appetit.
    I’ve tried sheep’s brain, served in the whole roasted head. Chopsticks to lift out the flaps. Wasn’t enough chilli sauce in all the world to stop the instant retch. If there’s a no deal Brexit, I’ll stick to British shellfish I think.
    And to think all the recipes tonight have been absolutely tasty sounding, and then this comes along ...

    In fact, this provokes a memory, coming up from the abyss like something from the Cthulhu mythos. My granny used to cook sheep's heid at home. From the butcher three doors away, or maybe the other two within 100 yards. Split in two. And boiled, none of this fancy roasting.

    Mind, it was for the dog. But the smell ...

    Smoked sheep's head is a traditional Christmas meal in some coastal parts of Norway. Those parts always seemed to provide the Camp Bosses (Head chefs) on the Norwegian rigs so it was the mainstay of any Norwegian offshore Christmas along with Lutefisk and 'Roadkill and Cabbage'. The smoked sheep's head was easily the best of those festive choices.
    It sounds rather good, to be honest.
  • Options
    DecrepiterJohnLDecrepiterJohnL Posts: 24,702
    edited December 2020
    OT the late John Wells has just popped up in an old Lovejoy episode. He'd have made a marvelous Boris.

    ETA The next episode has Britain and the new 1992 EU.
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    MaxPB said:

    I think a parallel between Thatcher vs the miners can be drawn between Boris vs no deal. In both cases the outcome is a known, the difference is that Mrs Thatcher spent a long time preparing the nation for the inevitable miners strike by stockpiling coal and ensuring there was never any chance of shortages and we could break the strikes and outlast any resolve the strikers had. This time we sort of know what will happen with no deal and Boris/the government haven't done any of the prep work for it, we haven't stockpiled, we haven't got processes in place and there is no guarantee that we can outlast the resolve of the EU to hold on to their unsustainable position on the LPF/fish.

    This is why Boris has made a grave error on not getting the two year extension.

    One of the questions for later is going to be "what was Boris thinking of?" Had he quietly got a minion to do the necessary in (say) late May, nobody would have noticed, and most would have understood. Set a deadline for negotiations of about now, sure, but (literally) buy some time to do the boring stuff that needs to be done.

    That's probably the answer, of course. Meaningful preparations are boring, which is why Boris and Dom (for in those days, it was Boris and Dom) feared them.
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    Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 25,679
    IshmaelZ said:

    TimT said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    rcs1000 said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Omnium said:

    Omnium said:

    Omnium said:

    Omnium said:

    FF43 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Scott_xP said:

    TOPPING said:

    There were empty shelves because of panic buying. That's just the public for you I know what can you do but don't forget a lot of these people also voted for Brexit so we can't make any calls on their intelligence or common sense.

    There were empty shelves then and there may very well be empty shelves again.

    People called 999 when KFC ran short

    Food shortages due to Brexit will not be met with stoicism
    How many people did? Did 17.4 million people call 999 due to KFC ?

    The UK did react to food shortages with stoicism as recently as March. We got through it and life went on.
    I don't think you realise how hand to mouth - and how dependent on processed food - a lot of families are because of cash and time pressures. Not being able to get a pizza, for instance, can disrupt plans and routines. That is what is being ignored in the discussion, I think.
    given half the UK is being told to stay at home where are the time pressures ? You cant actually go anywhere much except the supermarket.
    People have to go to work and children to school. It's common to have a family with the children home and hungry at 5pm, and one adult not till 7, and so on ...

    Meals such as pizzas and so on help a lot, but if they cannot be obtained reliably ... it will be interesting to see what happens.
    I take it you cant cook.

    Knocking up a hot meal is a doddle whatever your budget.
    So long as you like risotto.

    (The ultimate 50p meal.)
    couscous or noodles are the fastest thing youll cook aside from bread and wraps
    My favourite quick and cheap meal is an omelette. It is dead easy and if you do it right, a sophisticated dish.

    Toast and marmite with scrambled eggs on top. A bit of cheese on top of the toast that melts on impact with the hot egg if you are feeling particularly sophisticated.

    The better you cook your eggs the less need for cheese and marmite. Fantastic toast is the key, and some butter on the toast. Then perfectly cooked eggs. A hint of shaved cheese perhaps and the slightest taint of marmite on the buttering knife.

    All this celebratory bake off crap and you can't buy a decent loaf of bread!

    We need a blokeish bake-off. Bread for cheese and pickle sandwiches, bread for bacon sandwiches, buns for burgers, buns for hotdogs. Bread for pate, and we need to get the good pate's back for this bread.

    I can cook faultless boiled eggs, time after time: whites set, yolks runny.

    Food of the Gods.
    Although 'faultless' seems a boast, and although my boiled eggs are ok - I'm quite envious.
    Try this:

    Use eggs that have been at room temperature for several hours; NEVER from the fridge.

    Use large eggs (for anything smaller the timings will need to be reduced by some indeterminate amount!)

    Large pan of water brought to a good boil.

    Put 2-4 eggs into that boiling water for four and a half minutes. (More eggs than that and the timings might need slightly extending.) Turn off the heat and let them stand for another 30 seconds. Take them out, take the top off one to eat first and smash the tops of the others, to allow the heat out and stop them cooking.

    Eat with dipping soldiers.
    Perhaps its from the fridge thing.

    Do you have any insight on scrambled eggs? I'd say they would be my best hand in egg cookery - very slow, lots of butter, stirring madly.

    Poached eggs - these are the eggs of god. I intend to keep trying.


    Scrambled is the wife's forte. Wouldn't dare to tread on her toes there.

    Poached eggs - just get a decent poacher. Don't ever try to cook them in a swirl of boiling water. Urgh.

    You should investigate ' scrambled' yourself - buy loads of butter. Not omletting it is the key. It's a mans sort of egg dish anyway - best served very early to a sleepy girlfriend. You can even bugger up the toast if the scrambled eggs are right.

    Poached - trust me this is the true way of the egg!

    I'm far from good at poached eggs, but boiling water is too hot, and I'm not sure that swirling (or vinegar) helps. (edit: if I could get this right i'd be very happy)

    Tomorrow morning I'm going to follow your plan with some eggs that are out of the fridge overnight.
    Pro tip for poached eggs: your water should be only just wobbling on the surface, def. not boiling. Lower your unbroken eggs into it for 30 seconds, then hoick them out again and break them into the water as usual. This boils the outer layer of white so they hold together better.
    That's very similar to me - except I use the intermediate step of breaking the eggs into a mug.
    I am taking that under advisement; your method may deliver a smoother transition than mine.
    Scrambled - beat the eggs lightly with heavy cream, a pinch of salt and ample white pepper. Do not overbeat - you want there to be some whitish bits in the finished product. Melt ample butter in small saucepan over medium heat, pour in custard mix, stir regularly with a straight-edged spatula so that nothing burns on the pan bottom, take off the heat when eggs are semi-solid to allow final cooking under residual heat. Stir in grated sharp cheddar until cheddar melts, and just before plating, chopped fresh chives. Serve on thick slabs of toasted and well-buttered sourdough/rustic bread. Cheap, quick and easy.
    PB living up to its Reithian ideal today: inform, educate, entertain. I like to add tinned anchovies to scrambled eggs, and eat them with tomatoes with basil on them.
    Oh yum, that sounds good. I sometimes stir a bit of wholegrain mustard through mine.
  • Options
    gealbhangealbhan Posts: 2,362
    moonshine said:

    Trade isn't going to halt though. Trade will still happen even if it is disrupted.

    But yes for a couple of weeks if we are disrupted it's perfect possible to live off potatoes, root vegetables, peas, beans, cabbages, apples, lamb, seafood etc.

    But it won't be necessary. It is panic mongering to suggest it would be. Disruption doesn't mean an end to trade, it never has done.

    Trade will stop until they find a way to remove the bottleneck. We know the 12-20 hour queues to cross the EU border with a far smaller volume of trucks at a land border. So suggesting 48 hours plus delays for our sea border is sensible. As you can't tie up the truck fleet in that kind of queue they won't be sent. An eerie calm where the greatly reduced cross border traffic only waits a few hours as opposed to days.

    Problem is that if you step up traffic it backs up to a stop again. I know that you disagree with all of this despite the endless evidence that it is facts. Then again you've spent all afternoon telling me about how food supply chains and supermarkets work in a way that would be funny (they'll overface empty chillers with beans FFS) if you weren't so serious.
    I never said they'll overface empty chillers with beans.

    Why wouldn't they overface empty chillers with cold produce we have a surplus of?

    Be a good opportunity to have a sale on overfaced lamb perhaps?
    Jesus. Like I said, have no idea about how supply chain works.
    The lamb that gets exported to the EU - if there is a disruption to international trade then why can't that be sold in the UK?

    If there's something I'm missing then why not educate me? My local Morrisons wraps up its meat on-site with the in-store butcher, I appreciate not every supermarket does that but why can't lamb if we have a surplus of it be shipped to the supermarkets and sold there?
    The point about lamb is that British farmers produce a significant amount of lamb and British consumers eat a significant amount of it, but not the whole animal, just some meaty parts like the legs and the back. The rest is exported to southern/eastern europe, with more meaty bits imported from there. In a No Deal situation you may rediscover your taste for sheep entrails. Bon Appetit.
    I’ve tried sheep’s brain, served in the whole roasted head. Chopsticks to lift out the flaps. Wasn’t enough chilli sauce in all the world to stop the instant retch. If there’s a no deal Brexit, I’ll stick to British shellfish I think.
    Bloody hell. I can’t eat that. Do something Boris, this is serious!

    Are the betting markets moving at all?
  • Options

    Carnyx said:

    moonshine said:

    Trade isn't going to halt though. Trade will still happen even if it is disrupted.

    But yes for a couple of weeks if we are disrupted it's perfect possible to live off potatoes, root vegetables, peas, beans, cabbages, apples, lamb, seafood etc.

    But it won't be necessary. It is panic mongering to suggest it would be. Disruption doesn't mean an end to trade, it never has done.

    Trade will stop until they find a way to remove the bottleneck. We know the 12-20 hour queues to cross the EU border with a far smaller volume of trucks at a land border. So suggesting 48 hours plus delays for our sea border is sensible. As you can't tie up the truck fleet in that kind of queue they won't be sent. An eerie calm where the greatly reduced cross border traffic only waits a few hours as opposed to days.

    Problem is that if you step up traffic it backs up to a stop again. I know that you disagree with all of this despite the endless evidence that it is facts. Then again you've spent all afternoon telling me about how food supply chains and supermarkets work in a way that would be funny (they'll overface empty chillers with beans FFS) if you weren't so serious.
    I never said they'll overface empty chillers with beans.

    Why wouldn't they overface empty chillers with cold produce we have a surplus of?

    Be a good opportunity to have a sale on overfaced lamb perhaps?
    Jesus. Like I said, have no idea about how supply chain works.
    The lamb that gets exported to the EU - if there is a disruption to international trade then why can't that be sold in the UK?

    If there's something I'm missing then why not educate me? My local Morrisons wraps up its meat on-site with the in-store butcher, I appreciate not every supermarket does that but why can't lamb if we have a surplus of it be shipped to the supermarkets and sold there?
    The point about lamb is that British farmers produce a significant amount of lamb and British consumers eat a significant amount of it, but not the whole animal, just some meaty parts like the legs and the back. The rest is exported to southern/eastern europe, with more meaty bits imported from there. In a No Deal situation you may rediscover your taste for sheep entrails. Bon Appetit.
    I’ve tried sheep’s brain, served in the whole roasted head. Chopsticks to lift out the flaps. Wasn’t enough chilli sauce in all the world to stop the instant retch. If there’s a no deal Brexit, I’ll stick to British shellfish I think.
    And to think all the recipes tonight have been absolutely tasty sounding, and then this comes along ...

    In fact, this provokes a memory, coming up from the abyss like something from the Cthulhu mythos. My granny used to cook sheep's heid at home. From the butcher three doors away, or maybe the other two within 100 yards. Split in two. And boiled, none of this fancy roasting.

    Mind, it was for the dog. But the smell ...

    Smoked sheep's head is a traditional Christmas meal in some coastal parts of Norway. Those parts always seemed to provide the Camp Bosses (Head chefs) on the Norwegian rigs so it was the mainstay of any Norwegian offshore Christmas along with Lutefisk and 'Roadkill and Cabbage'. The smoked sheep's head was easily the best of those festive choices.
    Roadkill? On a rig in the middle of the North Sea?
  • Options

    Carnyx said:

    moonshine said:

    Trade isn't going to halt though. Trade will still happen even if it is disrupted.

    But yes for a couple of weeks if we are disrupted it's perfect possible to live off potatoes, root vegetables, peas, beans, cabbages, apples, lamb, seafood etc.

    But it won't be necessary. It is panic mongering to suggest it would be. Disruption doesn't mean an end to trade, it never has done.

    Trade will stop until they find a way to remove the bottleneck. We know the 12-20 hour queues to cross the EU border with a far smaller volume of trucks at a land border. So suggesting 48 hours plus delays for our sea border is sensible. As you can't tie up the truck fleet in that kind of queue they won't be sent. An eerie calm where the greatly reduced cross border traffic only waits a few hours as opposed to days.

    Problem is that if you step up traffic it backs up to a stop again. I know that you disagree with all of this despite the endless evidence that it is facts. Then again you've spent all afternoon telling me about how food supply chains and supermarkets work in a way that would be funny (they'll overface empty chillers with beans FFS) if you weren't so serious.
    I never said they'll overface empty chillers with beans.

    Why wouldn't they overface empty chillers with cold produce we have a surplus of?

    Be a good opportunity to have a sale on overfaced lamb perhaps?
    Jesus. Like I said, have no idea about how supply chain works.
    The lamb that gets exported to the EU - if there is a disruption to international trade then why can't that be sold in the UK?

    If there's something I'm missing then why not educate me? My local Morrisons wraps up its meat on-site with the in-store butcher, I appreciate not every supermarket does that but why can't lamb if we have a surplus of it be shipped to the supermarkets and sold there?
    The point about lamb is that British farmers produce a significant amount of lamb and British consumers eat a significant amount of it, but not the whole animal, just some meaty parts like the legs and the back. The rest is exported to southern/eastern europe, with more meaty bits imported from there. In a No Deal situation you may rediscover your taste for sheep entrails. Bon Appetit.
    I’ve tried sheep’s brain, served in the whole roasted head. Chopsticks to lift out the flaps. Wasn’t enough chilli sauce in all the world to stop the instant retch. If there’s a no deal Brexit, I’ll stick to British shellfish I think.
    And to think all the recipes tonight have been absolutely tasty sounding, and then this comes along ...

    In fact, this provokes a memory, coming up from the abyss like something from the Cthulhu mythos. My granny used to cook sheep's heid at home. From the butcher three doors away, or maybe the other two within 100 yards. Split in two. And boiled, none of this fancy roasting.

    Mind, it was for the dog. But the smell ...

    Smoked sheep's head is a traditional Christmas meal in some coastal parts of Norway. Those parts always seemed to provide the Camp Bosses (Head chefs) on the Norwegian rigs so it was the mainstay of any Norwegian offshore Christmas along with Lutefisk and 'Roadkill and Cabbage'. The smoked sheep's head was easily the best of those festive choices.
    It sounds rather good, to be honest.
    Its certainly a lot better than Roadkill and Cabbage.
This discussion has been closed.