thehoopiestfrood's Profile

I'm from the UK and when my brother lived in America he brought back some American Cadbury's Dairy Milk and we did some blind taste testing and we all thought it tasted "wrong" - it wasn't what we were used to in taste, texture or how it melted in your mouth. But American chocolate has to withstand much greater extremes of temperature than British chocolate. I've been told a lot of American chocolate has (presumably edible) wax in it to stop it from melting, but I don't know how true that is. My brother said after a few months he got used to the chocolate in the US so it's obviously just a matter of readjusting to some extent.

And obviously some Europeans look down on British chocolate (at least according to the press) and its vegetable fat content, so a lot of it is just what you're brought up with I think. It's the same with milk - if you move to a different country the milk often tastes different.

Those headphones are "Plattan"s by Urbanears. (They also do a bunch of other styles.) They come in a rainbow of colours which change very slightly every season or year. I have a pair in last year's red colour and I really like them. They seem pretty reasonably priced (especially if you get them on sale like I did) and I appreciate that they don't have a ton of overt branding. I think they look great and sound good - admittedly I've never tried any high-end headphones to compare them with, but I wouldn't really expect them to compete with expensive headphones, given their low-ish price.

http://www.urbanears.com/headphones/plattan

Stunning. I would love floor tiles that looked like this!

I wish Cuisinart would sell the ICE-21 (especially the red model) in the UK. They sell fancier models but don't seem to sell the more basic ones or coloured options. (This also seems to be the case with their food processors/choppers, which is really annoying.) The ICE-30 or ICE-40 seem to be the only non-compressor options available over here, but I'd really like a small, cheaper starter ice cream maker, and I really think the red one is so much cuter.

I have never been able to drink due to health problems and am actually allergic to alcohol and I have got so much stick for this from people over the years, even from quite good friends. I've actually been called a liar and been told that it's not possible to be allergic to alcohol and I've had people demand to know what would happen to me if I did drink alcohol (ie. would I be sick, would my illness relapse etc etc.). I've also had people try and trick me into drinking alcohol or spike my drink to try and see what would happen, but luckily I caught them. :S I'm also now on medication that means that even without the aforementioned problems I couldn't drink alcohol anyway, so there's really no way I will be drinking alcohol in the foreseeable future.

However, obviously all of that shouldn't matter. I should be able to politely refuse a drink without having to justify myself or give my entire medical history or give some sort of medical letter from a doctor or evidence proving that I'm not allowed to drink. I'm not preachy or some sort of spoilsport - I have as much fun as anyone else when I go out and I have no problem with anyone else drinking and you really wouldn't notice I wasn't drinking if you weren't trying to force drinks upon me.

The worst incidence of this was when I was at a summer school in Germany. We were at a picnic and the teacher was actually really harassing myself and a Muslim girl for not drinking. I was quite a bit older than her and able to hold my own in the argument, but she was from the Middle East and it was her first time in the West and he ended up convincing her to drink, which I thought was pretty disrespectful.

I went there a couple of times when I lived in Hamburg and it was great! :) There's also the most amazing coffee shop/cafe/museum thing next door. http://www.speicherstadt-kaffee.de/

In fact, there are a huge number of museums and attractions in the Speicherstadt / warehouse district, it's pretty great.

^eligible even, need to pay more attention!

I absolutely adore this.

No, that is the general misunderstanding to do with cheese which causes this problem. It's nothing to do dairy. Cheese can be vegetarian or non-vegetarian depending on if it contains rennet. Rennet is an enzyme taken from the stomach of calves, so any cheese containing this is not vegetarian.

We're quite lucky in the UK, and the majority of cheeses nowadays are suitable for vegetarians, and everything is labelled very well so you can tell if they are vegetarian or not. However there are still cheeses which are not - such as parmesan - which, as I explained before, is never ever vegetarian. There are some vegetarian hard cheese substitutes, but they can never be called "parmesan".

Obviously how much you care about this depends on how "strict" a vegetarian you are - and a lot of people just aren't aware of this and it causes problems for people who aren't vegetarians when they are cooking for vegetarians.

There are similar problems with gelatine (bones), isinglas (fish swim bladder), cochineal (bugs) and whey (when taken from non-vegetarian cheese).

Very nice, and I too love the red TV stand. Any info on where you got it?