MSG, Marinara and the magical fish

Way back in the long-long agos, when I were a wee sapling child and Feargal Sharkey was just launching his solo career, there was quite a lot of tooing and froing in the media about Monosodium Glutamate. MSG. Angel Dust.

These days it's all about Aspartame and how it makes Diet Coke actually more fattening than drinking melted butter because scientists on the internet proved it or something, but back in the late 1970s and early 80s the controversial food additive was MSG.

Worse than Heroin and Thalidomide, MSG was going to give us all cancer and turn us into Communists by the year 2000.

Thank fuck it's not around any more.

Although, in reality, it is. Probably more than ever, in fact. They just stopped calling it MSG and people stopped caring so much. People can be like that at times.

If you look closely at the ingredients, you can see that it turns up in loads of packaged savoury foods, from cheese and onion crisps to chicken wings to pizza to ready-made Marinara sauce. It's just called E621, or 'flavour enhancer'. these days 'Hydrolysed vegetable protein' is, I gather, almost identical too.

As rebranding exercises go, I think they can chalk it up as a success story. Bastards.

Back in the Kitchen

It's been absolutely ages since I posted a recipe, hasn't it?

NOT MY FAULT, mind. In the last few weeks I've lost a job and started a new one, and lost a grandmother - and you don't get new ones.

As a result, I've not been spending as much time in the kitchen as I normally do (which, I'm sure is a mighty relief to the kitchen which has pretty much been my submissive foodbitch since we moved in).

It really is a simple dish

Also, this little blogette has been dominated by my search for the London Pub of the Year, but now that the award has been won, I think we can vary things a tad. After all, some crazy people aren't actually interested in reading about pubs and beer!

Whilst I was musing poetically on the origins of the Cobb salad, I promised I'd share my 'thrown together from whatever happened to be in the fridge' for Salami & Aubergine Tagliatelle, and given that I finally got around to cooking it again this week, it's a promise on which I can actually make good.