‘Brèves de comptoir’ are authentic quotations collected from everyday life and particularly gossips at the bistro. Absurd borders on humour or poetry, news and sometimes philosophy. Mine are of course food oriented, a concentrate of what feed my life, what I swallow every day, what I read, hear, try, taste… In London and the world…

 

– In the serie ‘I love gadgets’ here is the ‘Foodini’ ! The first 3D food printer. They call it the natural machine and will be, according to them, THE innovation, as big as the microwave years ago. The aim ? Cook fresh ingredients and manage time-consuming parts of food preparation that often discourage people from cooking. I don’t think that preparing and cooking ingredients then put them in pipettes is a gain of time to make a pizza which normally take 15min for a homemade one, anyway… www.naturalmachine.com

– The Real Junk Food Project is fighting against food waste. Over the past 12 months, the project have intercepted 50 tonnes of ‘unwanted’ but perfectly edible food from supermarkets etc and fed thousand of people in their cafés around UK. therealjunkfoodproject.co.uk

Mercer’s dairy is making wine ice-cream, made with real wine (up to 5% alcohol by ice cream). Try the Cherry Merlot, Chocolate Cabernet or Red raspberry Chardonnay. They have distributors all around the world, not in Europe, not yet. www.mercersdairy.com

– The new trend is snorting…cocoa. A Belgian chocolatier, Dominique Persoone created the sniffable chocolate powder. It’s calorie free and the taste lingers for hours. He created a shooter and catered for the Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood birthday party. www.chocolateshooter.be

– To support actively local farmers in North West London, ‘Field to Fork’ is the solution. They supply fresh organic veg bags from farmers to your community. From £8.50 a week. fieldtoforkorganics.coop

– The ramen spoon is going to solve our problems when eating noodles. It’s a 2 in 1, fork and spoon, to roll up your noodles and slurp your soup at once. www.uncommongoods.com/product/ramen-spoon-and-fork

– Jamie Oliver talked about it in 2006 and like very often he was taken for a fool, but nowadays, eating squirrel is becoming more and more common. At the Jugged Hare, a gastro pub they can sell 40 to 50 portions a week. The idea is to protect other species in extinction. There are millions of squirrels in UK, what was in the 19th century a delicacy in United-States is coming back in force. If you want an hormone-free, non GMO and free range meat, go for squirrels, the flesh is nutty and sweet. You will also eat very local food, even though they are not coming from Hyde Park, they are not from far from there in UK.

– It’s still difficult to prove the origin of fries, so Belgians have launched a petition to get the fries recognized as one of mankind’s cultural treasures. It’s always been a bone of contention between Belgians and French. Even if we call them French fries, the Belgian ones are, I have to admit, the best.