Year In Pictures: 2010/09/19 - Branston Pickle

[plonq]

I have heard this product mentioned now and again from people in the UK, usually pitching it as the greatest invention since sliced bread or fellatio. I had planned to look for it when atara and I went for English food on Thursday, but the store attached to the restaurant was depressingly bare. I was lamenting this fact to an expatriate English co-worker the next day while we stood around outside waiting for them to put out the fire in our office building so that we could return to work, and he mentioned that it is available at most of the larger local grocery stores. I asked him if it lived up to the hype, and he assured me that he quite liked it, and that I probably would too.

There is a small cynical side to me that has trouble accepting recommendations for new food products. On the one hand, I can't think of any reason why there would be a conspiracy out there to trick me into eating something disgusting. On the other hand, I am not above trying to convince somebody that sheep bladders are delicious. "Trust me, I ate them all the time when I was working in the Kelowna uranium mines. Enough mayonnaise and you'd swear you were eating pork tenderloin."

Anyway, he didn't lie. I tried some on bread with cheese, and it was quite delicious.



I snapped this one by sitting the camera on one kitchen stool to steady it, and pointed it at the jar of Branston Pickle over on the other other stool. I set the aperture to f/5.6 with a shutter of 4 seconds. I could have reduced that by removing the polariser but - meh. Removing the filter would have taken longer than the 4-second exposure time.

I cropped it a bit in software, and colour corrected it. It's still a bit on the warm side, but pretty close to proper balance. If I try to push it any more, the whites will end up looking blue. Compact fluorescent bulbs provide just about the worst possible lighting for photography IMO.

We did our usual trek out to the farmers' market yesterday and picked up an assortment of goodies. I may do a photo-dump of pictures I took there, or you can just follow any of these pictures back to my Flickr account and see them there. This vendor had set up a pumpkin tree laden with sugar pumpkins. I have a couple of sugar pumpkins from last week that I need to roast and purée. Perhaps I shall do that tomorrow.


The only significance of this shot is that it's the first one I posted from my new iPod. I was showing it to somebody at work and took this shot to demonstrate the camera. It had a neat "artsy" look, and I decided to run with it as my daily picture. It's a pretty mediocre camera, but it's about on par with most cell phone cameras I have seen. It's good enough for those "I wish I had a camera to get this" times.

Comments

[elfasi.livejournal.com]

I was just explaining to an American today about pickle in a British context. Branston pickle and cheese is indeed good, especially on hunks of crusty bread :) Also goes nicely with ham.

[pfcottontail.livejournal.com]

That's a pretty cheap pumpkin!!