Allergy Alerts
Yesterday, I was informed that Marks and Spencer had made a mistake with one of their gluten-free products. This is the gist of the problem.
Marks & Spencer has withdrawn some of its own-brand Gluten Free Rich Fruit Cake, because the product contains wheat flour. The product label incorrectly mentions that the product is ‘made without wheat’ and is ‘gluten free’. This makes the product a possible health risk to anyone who is gluten intolerant or has an allergy to or intolerance of wheat. The Agency has issued an Allergy Alert.
The full text of the message is on this web page at the Food Standards Agency.
There apparently is a syste of allergy alerts that you can subscribe to here.
Obviously, the system works, but in these days of austerity is it done as efficiently as it can be?
Blast! I Just Broke a Glass
I like to document all my clumsiness, so that I try harder! I was looking for something to drink and found a bottle of Green’s Premium Golden Ale. it’s not my favourite, but I try to like it. Perhaps these thoughts made my hand slip with the opener and the bottle fell over on the tumbler and broke it!
I must be more careful, next time!
Adnams Doesn’t Put the Gas in the Beer
When virtually everybody thinks of real ale, they think of Adnams, brewed on the Suffolk coast at Southwold.
When I was starting to drink, they had just thirteen pubs, but they did supply a good part of the club trade in Suffolk. Now their beer is found all over London and the South East, and I’ve even seen it as far north as Newcastle and Edinburgh.
Not bad for a small family company, albeit one that makes a quality product beloved of beer connoisseurs everywhere. But their proven route to success now seems to be being followed by Aspall, the cider maker.
Adnams now have a new venture, called Adnams Bio Energy, which on the face of it is as far from brewing as you can get. They are diversifying into the production of biogas from brewery and food waste. The latter comes mainly from Waitrose.
The scale is only small at present, but it would seem that properly developed it could be a valuable addition to our energy resources. National Grid have said that by 2020 about 15% of domestic gas could be produced in similar ways to that at Adnams Bio Energy.
Carluccio’s Is Open In Bury St. Edmunds
As I said I might earlier , I sampled the new Carluccio’s in Bury St. Edmunds today.
Strangely, I had a little trouble finding the restaurant, as it was tucked away in a corner of the arc Shopping Centre and the maps in the Centre didn’t show it. But thinking about it later and it was positioned, where many would either come from the cinema or the car parks. But I don’t use that cinema, as it almost exclusively shows American films in 3D and I don’t drive.
This was my first visit to any of the restaurants, since a new gluten-free menu has been brought in. It’s a bit different and it might be slightly larger. I had some bresaola followed by a mushroom risotto, all washed down with two glasses of lemonade.
One of the things I like about the restaurants in my present state was innocently illustrated by a two-year-old sitting with his parents. He managed to tip his food all over the floor. I worry about doing that with my gammy hand, but I know that if I did, it wouldn’t be too much trouble for the staff.
However, I behaved myself and thoroughly enjoyed my meal.
The Start of a Very Long Journey
Today there is no football, either for Ipswich or on the television. I do hate these boring International weekends! Especially, now that they don’t play on a Saturday, but on a Friday night.
After reading about Bury and their football for a fiver, I tried to find them on the web and found my local team, Bury Town, who must surely be the only team with Town in their name, who play in a town with a cathedral. In fact how many towns with cathedrals are there, that are not cities.
Bury Town, are playing in the Third Round of the FA Cup today, I think I’ll go! Perhaps then, I’ll follow the team in the cup that beats them and see how far I can get! It will be a long and difficult journey!
I’ll go early, check out the museums for some of the paintings and then have a gluten-free lunch in the new Carluccio’s.
Baked Haddock with Cheese
I usually cook haddock with tomatoes and onions, but I felt I needed something simple and quick. After searching the Internet I found this recipe.
The ingredients I used were.
- 1 cupful of goats milk
- 1 tablespoon of gluten-free flour
- 50 grms of butter
- 2 or 3 haddock fillets
- 1 cupful of grated cheese.
- salt and pepper to taste
These quantities make enough for perhaps a friend and myself, but as I was hungry, I made it for one.
The method was as follows.
- Melt the butter in a saucepan.
- Add the flour, mix with the butter and when smooth add the milk, salt and pepper.
- When thickened add the grated cheese and stir constantly over a low heat until the cheese is melted and the sauce is smooth.
- Meanwhile arrange the haddock fillets in an ovenproof dish and pour the cheese sauce over the top.
- I then baked it in the top of the bottom oven of the AGA for thirty minutes.
Gourmet Burger Kitchen
I bought two of their burgers last week in Waitrose and I had them for supper last night, with some onions and new potatoes. And very nice they were too! The only ingredients in the burgers are Aberdeen Angus beef and seasoning, which is just salt and pepper.
They may not be vegetarian, but they are certainly gluten-free!
Inverness to Kyle of Lochalsh
The Kyle of Lochalsh Line is one of the great railway journeys in the world. It is probably best described as legendary, as anybody of a certain age, who has ever collected engine numbers or closely observed trains, has heard of the railway, that winds its way from Inverness almost to the Isle of Skye.
I’d spent the night in a comfortable B&B called Ivanhoe, where they went to a lot of trouble to get me some gluten-free rolls for my breakfast. They prepared a buttered spare for my lunch with some salmon or meat that I might buy on the journey. I would certainly stay at Ivanhoe again.
The line sweeps between sea and mountains and alongside lochs on its way to Kyle of Lochalsh.
The real problem on the line is that there is just too little capacity. I have been reading in Modern Railways about the problems of the replacement of the inadequate Pacers, that I used to get from Doncaster to Scunthorpe. Surely the thing to do would be to create rakes of say four or five Mk 3 coaches and use those on lines like this with a diesel engine and then cascade the Class 158s to where they are desperately needed like East Anglia, Lincolnshire and the North.
Doncaster to Edinburgh
I had a few minutes to change trains at Doncaster, before I got on the fast train towards the North. I’d known when I booked that the last part of the journey to Edinburgh would actually be a coach as they were doing substantial work in the Morpeth area. At least though when I got in the Scottish capital, I knew that it was perhaps a ten minute taxi to a comfortable bed in my friend’s house.
Doncaster is a station that has had a serious makeover with most of the facilities modern and up-to-date. But I don’t know, but it just lacks something.
Perhaps, stations should be destinations in their own right.
I know St. Pancras International is in a different league from every other station in the UK and possibly Europe, if you believe some of the statements of the head of SNCF, but I believe all stations should aspire to be a little bit like that station.
If say you are meeting someone in the station, it should be a pleasant place to wait, have a coffee, read the paper and perhaps watch the trains coming and going.
Moving a Train
The picture shows a Southern train from the routes south of London, probably being moved to the works at Doncaster or York for repair or refurbishment. There is a lot of movement at a station like Doncaster.
Stations should also be places for business meetings, so that say if you are based in london and want to meet your managers from say Hull and Newcastle, then perhaps a sensible and productive lunch in the middle would be an idea.
I didn’t venture outside of the station, so I don’t know whether their is a nice hotel or restaurant outside or not!
But why not create a sensible cafe/restaurant, shops and perhaps a hotel high up in the station? Many stations have beautifully structured roofs and the proper structure placed up there would compliment them. In some ways, the engineering involved would be similar to that in some of our art gsalleries and museums, where roofs and mezzanines have been created. Space should always be use to the maximum, and now that trains make a lot less pollution, the roof space might be ripe for development
It might not be practical, but so many of our stations are cluttered and there is nothing more than a Costa and a burger bar.
We can do so much better!
It’s just a small point, but to get it right, you must get all the details right. For instance they’d put in nice new toilets in Doncaster, but the toilet roll dispensers were all broken, as they were badly designed.
Coming up, I would have been able to just walk across the platform, but when going north, it meant I had to use the underpass. Perhaps, we should ensure that as many connections as possible are just a short walk on the level! Doncaster, Peterbough and York aren’t too bad. They would also be a lot better, if people didn’t travel with the kitchen sink on wheels trailing behind them.
I was travelling very light and all I had was just a shoulder bag, that carried a spare pair of knickers and socks for each day I was away and a shirt for every two. I didn’t bring a laptop, as I’ve now come to the conclusion that every gram is something else to carry and more strain on my decrepit body.
We arrived in Newastle on time and whilst others were dreading the bus, I was being philosophical. There was a bit of a scrum at the coaches, but I was on quickly and managed to get a double seat for the nearly three hour trip. I think it could have been better organised with perhaps a few coaches going direct to Edinburgh, rather than having to drop off perhaps one person at Berwick and Dunbar. Some American passengers were getting distinctly edgy, as they’d only got into Heathrow that morning. They’d have probably changed their plans, if they’d known about the coach, but then the information their agent got in the US seemed to be incomplete. Travel agents are to me the lowest of the low, as they always book you on the route that gives them the most commission, so possibly East Coast pays better than Virgin! We are lucky in that we have two equally fast routes to Scotland from London and you should use the one that is more convenient, not the one that is obvious.
A Welcoming Coffee
I’ll say one thing for Glanford Park though! The Douwe Egberts coffee was good and it warmed me up.
To be fair, all the stewards and staff seemed to be very welcoming.
The Anonymous Widower 