7 Reasons

Tag: dish

  • Guest Post: 7 Reasons Why Brits Love Fish And Chips

    Guest Post: 7 Reasons Why Brits Love Fish And Chips

    Drenched in salt and vinegar and melt-in-the-mouth delicious, Fish and Chips is one of the most delectable; one of the most naughtiest dishes in the UK and us Brits LOVE it!

    7 Reasons Why Brits Love Fish And Chips

    Here are 7 Reasons why a mouth-watering portion of steaming hot Fish and Chips remains the nation’s favourite dish…

    1.  Fish and chips is quintessentially British. The first British Chip Shop opened in Mossley, Lancashire in the 1850s and since then, the country has been crazy for a good hearty portion of Fish and Chips. By the 1930s, there were 35,000 chippies! So it’s no wonder that it’s a dish that’s become synonymous with British culture and is as quintessentially British as cucumber sandwiches, double decker buses, red post boxes and moaning about the weather!

    2.  It tastes and smells so good!! Freshly mown grass, baking bread and sizzling bacon all feature high on the list of best-loved aromas in Britain, but there is one smell that beats them all…

    Yep, you’ve guessed it – the tempting aroma of fish and chips topped a poll that aimed to discover the UK’s most preferred smell. Fried goodness covered in mouth-watering lashings of salt and vinegar – we bet you can smell it now. Simply delicious! The heady combination of smell and flavour is enough to make anyone on a diet question their healthy eating intentions and it’s also probably one of the only dishes that causes arguments between couples. You know the routine – the guy orders the tasty accompaniment alongside his steak, the lady orders the side salad; then by the end of the meal the guy is lucky if he’s had more than a forkful. Ladies, for the sake of men everywhere – get your own chips!!

    3.  Reminds you of the good times. Long before our high street was packed with takeaways offering delectable delights from around the world on every corner, our staple fast food was the good old fashioned fish and chips!

    So it’s no wonder that the heady whiff of the good stuff can send us spiralling into a world of nostalgia – day trips to the seaside as a kid; Friday night tea-time treats; sharing a bag on the way home from the cinema after your first ever date; the great love story that started in the queue of a chip shop after a night out… ah memories.

    4.  You’re never too far from a chippy. The chip shop boom hit in the 1930s when the UK had more than 35,000 fish and chip shops. The dish was in such high demand that that some chippies had to employ doormen to oversee the queues!

    Now we’re a little bit less heavy handed about getting our grubby mitts on the greasy goodness but there are still 11,000 chippies in the UK today.

    And with three billion chip dishes served across the country every year – making up 300 million meals in total – you’re never too far away from a tasty portion.

    But it’s not just us Brits who love the potato treat – oh no! Did you know that Belgian holds the rather quirky record of cooking chips for the longest amount of time? Chris Verschueren cooked up a storm when he served 15,000 portions of chips in a whopping 83 hours!

    But back on home soil, a Yorkshire fryer – The Wensleydale Heifer – now holds the record for the largest portion of fish and chips, weighing in at 101lbs and beating the existing Massachusetts record by 24lbs.

    5.  Kept our troops going! It’s a hearty filling meal for sure, but did you know that during the Second World War, chips were one of the few foods that were not rationed?

    So when our troops were out fighting in the fields, the good old fashioned, ever-reliable portion of chips kept them going!

    6.  Famous people can’t resist it. The first chippy opened in the UK in the 1850s, so we’re pretty sure Queen Victoria dined on a fine portion of ye olde fish and chips. It was also the meal of choice US President Barrack Obama’s children when his wife Michelle visited the UK. And the ever eccentric Lady Gaga tucked into a delicious portion washed down with whisky before she met the Queen earlier this year! Who knows, this could inspire her next food-related outfit….

    7.  Created other bonkers delicacies. Deep fried Mars Bars. We don’t need to say anymore. Don’t judge – just enjoy!

    What about the future of the nation’s favourite dish? Well, there are sad times ahead for our beloved dish and it’s all because of inflation. Back in the 1970s, you could expect to pay a very modest 25p for a portion, but then inflation took hold – and it hasn’t stopped since.

    The infographic ‘Counting the Cost of Fish and Chips’ created by the experts at Baines and Ernst – a leading financial solutions company – showed that the biggest price increase occurred during 1975 and 1976.

    Prices jumped from 40p to 50p – going up to 83p by the 1980s. Now you can expect to pay £3.30 for a portion but up to as much as £5 if you live in London – the highest price in the UK!

    So it looks like what was once a Friday night regular is now becoming a rare treat for families around the UK.

    Article by Baines & Ernst
    This article and infographic ‘Counting the Cost of Fish and Chips’ was written by Baines and Ernst – one of the country’s leading providers of debt help in the UK.

  • 7 Reasons That the IKEA Plastis is the Ultimate Washing-Up Brush

    7 Reasons That the IKEA Plastis is the Ultimate Washing-Up Brush

    The IKEA Plastis is amazing.  It’s truly a thing of wonder.  Here are seven reasons that it’s the ultimate washing-up brush.

    IKEA Plastis washing up brushes in red, yellow and blue

    1.  It Creates Envy.  The IKEA Plastis washing-up brush is capable of provoking great envy.  I first saw one in a friend’s kitchen four years ago and, ignoring all of the more expensive and conventionally desirable objects that surrounded it (almost the entire Le Creuset range of pots and pans, a very swanky digital radio, a fully-tiled kitchen floor), I made a beeline straight for it.  “This is amazing!”, I exclaimed, as I picked it up, wide-eyed, to examine it.  “It’s a washing-up brush”, my friend replied, helpfully.  “Yes, I can see that”, I said, “but it’s got a sucker on the bottom.  It’s ingenious*.”  And that was it.  I had fallen in love with the simplicity and brilliance of the design.  I wanted that washing-up brush more than I want a cat that can talk or the ability to levitate (which I would use mostly to surprise people in first-floor rooms).  I had to have one.

    2.  It Creates Anticipation.  “It’s from IKEA”, my friend said.  “What!  NNNNNNNNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” was my rational and measured response during which I adopted a posture worthy of Edvard Munch’s The Scream, but in a well-appointed Bolton kitchen.  This may seem like an overreaction to the prospect of purchasing something from IKEA, but it really isn’t.  Had the Plastis been available solely from the moon it would have been easier to get hold of.  I live in the centre of a city.  Because of this I choose not to own a car.  This is because I live in the bit that most people drive to and I have no desire to visit the suburbs/industrial estates/retail parks/Frankie and Benny’s so I don’t need one.  Public transport is also not a practical option when it comes to visiting our local IKEA and the Plastis isn’t available to order online (I checked.  Weekly), so I had to wait four years until we required a sufficient quantity of shelving, lampshades, sideboards and other stuff in order to justify renting a car to get the Plastis.  During that time I tried not to think of the brush every day**, but I thought about it a lot.  They say that absence makes the heart grow fonder and, in the years that the brush was absent from my life, I grew very fond of it indeed.  Perhaps too fond.

    An IKEA Plastis washing-up brush in red
    I stopped short of getting a tattoo of the Plastis.

    3.  It Makes Grown Men Jump For Joy.  “There it is!  There it is!” I exclaimed breathlessly to my wife while pointing to a display on the other side of a very large room in IKEA, before abandoning her and hurrying toward the stand of brushes.  And there it was.  Or, more excitingly, they were.  There were loads of them, in several colours, standing upright in serried ranks on their suckers.  There was an army of them.  This is what it must be like to be The Queen during the trooping of the colour, I thought.  After four, long years, I was finally about to get hold of a Plastis!.  Obviously, I studied them all very carefully before selecting one and, while my wife was away playing with wardrobes, tape measures and shelving, I made my important decision.  Though it wasn’t a very difficult one because…

    4.  The Plastis Comes In Red.  This is important.  As one of the rules of our kitchen (immediately after the rule that every time I paint the ceiling, something else will spring a leak and ruin it again) is that nothing goes in there unless it’s red.  We have red pots, red pans, red blenders, red mug-stands, red radios, red everything.  Josef Stalin and Ken Livingstone would get into our kitchen: Winston Churchill and Joseph McCarthy would not.  Unless they’re any good at laying floor tiles (red), in which case, they’d be very welcome.

    5.  It’s Great Value.  The IKEA Plastis is fantastic value priced, as it is, at £1.11.  Not only does this mean that you can buy joy and fulfilment for less than the price of a cup of coffee, but – with its preponderance of 1s – should you wish to print this page out, it will be cheaper to do so as the number 1 uses less ink than any other number.  Also, should you be near a superstitious type at this moment, the three ones will be causing them to say “Nelson!” and dance around, meaning that you get free entertainment too.  Obviously, in our case, the fantastic value was slightly offset by having to buy a sideboard and rent a car to get one, but it’s still better value than paying council tax, which costs many times more and doesn’t make anyone happy.

    6.  It’s Even Better Value For Dishwasher-Owners.  Because, as the people at IKEA will tell you, the Plastis is dishwasher-safe.  Which means that you can wash your washing-up brush inside the dishwasher, which is great, because otherwise, if we didn’t have a dishwasher, we’d have to buy another washing-up brush to wash our washing-up brush with.  So for dishwasher-owners, the cost of washing-up brush ownership is halved.***

    7.  It’s Got A Sucker.  Obviously the best bit about the Plastis is the sucker, and since we got ours home I’ve been experimenting with it.  I’ve stood it up on the draining board, I’ve stuck it to the wall, I’ve affixed it to the (red) biscuit tin and, best of all, I’ve stuck it to my forehead and chased the cat around the house pretending to be an alien (consequently, for the past two days I’ve had a large purple circle in the centre of my forehead which doesn’t look like it’s going away any time soon).  There is literally nothing that can’t be improved by sticking a Plastis to it.  Even people.  The Plastis is awesome and one day, who knows, I might even use it to wash something up.

    *I promise you, our conversations are usually far more interesting than this.

    **Because that would be weird.

    ***Yes, I did use this argument in IKEA to justify purchasing the Plastis to my wife, who responded by using a technique that she has developed during our marriage called Smile & Nod.