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BBC Good Food Show: Chocolate

16 Nov 2008

Because there was so much to see at the BBC Good Food show on Saturday, I’m going to break down the day by types of food or drink. To get started, and before they all blur together in my mind in a haze of chocolaty goodness, I want to review the amazing British chocolatiers at the show.

Top Pick for BBC Good Food Show Chocolate: The Chocolate Alchemist
The Chocolate Alchemist is a West Sussex company that produces fully organic chocolate. I was immediately attracted by their impressive display of chocolate slabs. Chocolate slabs are much less common in the US but in the UK they come in a variety of flavours and designs and are effectively massive chocolate bars. The Chocolate Alchemist ones not only looked delicious but would make fantastic gifts.

They offered me a taste of their dark chocolate and peppermint bar which was divine. Although this, along with all of their other retail offerings showcased at the event, are sold year-round, they have a number of options that are great for the holidays including star-shaped truffles and cinnamon and nutmeg chocolate bars.

Their website is not set up to take orders online but they do have a full product list, a number to call to place orders and, for some strange reason, a comic strip featuring photos of stuffed animals making chocolate bars. Oh well, with chocolate this good they can throw in a few odd pages on their website.

Other favourites:
Jim Garrahy’s Fudge Kitchen
Unfortunately the Fudge Kitchen doesn’t have a shop in London (although they do ship worldwide and give you a free sample if you make it to their shops in Bath, Cambridge, Canterbury, Edinburgh, Windsor or York). Beyond tasting amazing, Fudge Kitchen immediately jumped out at me during the Show because it was such fantastic eye candy. Huge slabs of multicolour fudge in a variety of flavours were on display including some more unique flavours such as Strawberries and Cream, Banoffee Bonanza and Rich Chocolate Orange.

Check out their website for all flavours and ordering info.

Kernow Chocolate

This chocolatier gets a feature because of their incredibly awesome chocolate shot glasses. The chocolate samples were delicious but the shot glasses won me over. I didn’t buy a set but ideally I’ll get some for a party to serve Chocolate Covered Cherry Jelly Shots (cherry jelly – that’s jell-o for the Americans in the audience – shots served in the shot glasses. Yum!). Of course they had a wide range of other chocolates as well.

Also worth a look:
A few chocolatiers that are worth of note are Gorvett&Stone, The Chocolate Chef and Rumsey’s.

Tomorrow I’ll be featuring some of my favourite teas from the show.

BBC Good Food Show

15 Nov 2008

Well.  I am officially overwhelmed by the quantity of cheese produces in the UK.  And chocolate.  And pickles.  And marinades.  And, good lord there are a lot of jam producers.  I mean, they could start an army.  A very sticky army.

These realisations have come as I wander the crowded halls of Olympia Exhibition Centre (conveniently located quite near The Top Floor Flat) during the BBC Good Food Show which features, as one might guess, good food and lots of it.

Instead of attempting to run through all of my favourite parts of the show, I’m going to split up my afternoon at the Good Food Show into several smaller posts where I can talk about some of the great stalls and companies I saw and I’ll be posting those over the next few days along with pictures from the event.
To get the ball rolling, here’s a clip from the Nintendo DS cooking show demonstration.  They are promoting their new electronic cooking guide for the Nintendo DS and have the benefit of showcasing the cooking guide in a specially designed kitchen with giant screens for the guide and showing what’s on the stove top.  I have no idea who this chef was, which is a shame as he was incredibly entertaining, but here he is speaking about spices and showing off the Nintendo system.  Who would have thought that Nintendo, a system I pretty much associate with Super Mario and MarioKart, would be teaching us how to cook?

There are a number of cooking shows throughout the exhibition hall and some are definitely more engaging and useful than others.  As a general rule, of course, all of the shows are meant to promote a product or food and I find myself getting drawn into what are really live infomercials.  It’s only twenty minutes after stopping to stare in fascination at a blender demonstration that I realise I am effectively getting a sales pitch given by a very smiley woman trying to sell me a 400 Vitamix Blender quid blender.  I do manage to get a cup of smoothie out of it so I don’t feel completely suckered in.  Of course, that’s probably what they want me to think.

The BBC Good Food Show is still running at Olympia Exhibition Hall through Sunday, 16 November so if you’re in the area I highly recommend you take a look.  As an added bonus, you can buy 2-for-1 tickets online with the promo code ERP for tomorrow’s show which makes the price much more reasonable.  As a general rule I don’t like paying L19 for a sales pitch… but a free ticket and a smoothie always sweeten the deal.

More updates from the BBC Good Food Show, including my top picks from the event, coming soon.

B-I-N-G-O

14 Nov 2008

Whew, it’s been another incredibly busy week and I’m so glad it’s finally the weekend.  I’m definitely ready to relax and although for me that means working on my novel, possibly going on a walk and just chilling out, I’m often completely amazed at how much the gambling and gaming industries are such a big deal here in the UK.  The nice thing is, it doesn’t seem to have the negative connotations that it has in the States and there are bookie shops all over the place as well as lots of gambling/gaming websites online.

I’m always amused and somewhat intrigued by the idea of online gaming for money and although I would never consider playing poker or any other sort of card game, I keep wondering if I would enjoy playing Bingo online as it seems to be so incredibly popular.  bet36 Bingo are having a Winter Wonderland promotional competition for their online gaming site for Bingo and it seems like it’s worth a look to see how Bingo is played online here in the UK… who knows, if I entered I might actually win a bit of money and, believe me, with the way the market is going and costs are rising, I could certainly use it!

All in all, whether I’m bemused by the gambling culture or just sleeping through the weekend, I’m quite happy that it’s Friday and I have a couple of days to myself!

NaNoWriMo

12 Nov 2008

So, it’s been quite busy getting back into the swing of things since I took last Thursday and Friday off work.  We’re busier than ever at Spoonfed and it’s been so exciting to be working there.  That’s part of the reason there have been fewer posts of late, and also why I haven’t had too much time to make a longer update about my latest trip.

The other reason is that I am participating in something called NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month.  Although it’s international now, it’s an American based event that takes place every November and encourages writers to write 50,000 words (about 100 single spaced typed pages) over the course of the month.  This amounts to 1667 words or about 3 pages per day.  It doesn’t sound so bad at first, but it’s actually a huge time commitement and I’m currently way behind in my word count.

That said, I’m putting in a lot of effort to hit 50k by the end of the month and I think I can make it with some diligent weekend work and the occational evening of leaving the office on time. Once I have a better idea myself, I’ll give an update as to what, exactly my novel is about.  No expectations for literary genius, please – the goal of NaNoWriMo is to write for quantity not quality just to get the mental gears spinning and the ball rolling on a personal writing project.  It’s not to late – want to get involved yourself or read about it for next year? Check out the official site for NaNoWriMo or my personal NaNoWriMo page.

AH Busy

5 Nov 2008

The last week has been unspeakably crazy, in a really good way. I don’t have a prayer of saying everything I want to, so again I’m stuck with just doing a bullet point recap of some really amazing experiences. Hopefully I can elaborate more over the next week…

– Friday, Halloween, I went to a Jive Nation Halloween party. I know Sarah took some pictures, I’ll have to see if I can track them down.

– Saturday, Sarah, Steve and I went to Stuff Live, a gadget and tech exhibition where we had super convenient press passes. Glad we didn’t pay for tickets, though. Very cool stuff to look at but it was mostly a sales pitch.

– Sunday, caught up with the entire third season of Heroes.  *whew* Is it just me or is that show gotten completely ridiculous? Still great, but super ridiculous.

– Monday, had press tickets to see La Cage Aux Folles which was absolutely hilarious and such a feel good musical. You can read my review of the performance (which just opened at a new theatre in the west end) of La Cage Aux Folles on Spoonfed.

– Tuesday, went with Alex to Planet Hollywood after work to watch the election results, ended up staying until half past one in the morning amidst the cheering Obama fans.  I felt so proud of America and really thrilled to be from the USA last night and although I’m jumping on the Obama bandwagon a little late, the international response to his victory has really impressed me.

– Today, made a hectic post-work run to the pharmacy, and the bureau de change to get Euros, then ran home to start/finish packing as I leave SUPER early tomorrow for Munich.

Wow, I’m exhausted just thinking back on it.  Sleep was pretty much the one thing I haven’t managed in the last few days so I’m going to try to have an early night before my 5am wakeup call.  I’ll be updating although the way so you’ll probably hear more from me while I’m in Germany and later Austria this weekend than you have these last few days.  Cheers!