Londoncooking.co.uk

Cherie Blair has it, Micah Richards has it… Hell, even Ron Weasley has it.

LondonCooking has some advice, in the midst of the Great Swine ‘flu plague of 2009:

Not our own slogan (we wish), but that of a very timely T-Shirt range.

Well… It’s good enough for Katie Price. And she hasn’t got swine flu. Yet.

Read about the history of the ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ slogan.

Look what slithered into my inbox last week:

‘I hope you are well.  I have really enjoyed looking through your blog.  (personalise what you like) I hope it is ok for me to quickly introduce myself and ask for your help in spreading the word about a cooking competition I have set up?’

Note to PR workhounds: always read your work thoroughly before hitting the ’spam’ button. It continues:

‘I work for a PR company called [name removed to protect the incompetent] and we are currently working with [generic food show/exhibition name here.]‘

‘The idea of the competition is to encourage people to submit their favourite British or Irish recipes in the medium of a video recipe!’ [!loving the exclamation!] ‘Entrants simply need to upload a video to lookandtaste.com with the tag bobi09com and it will automatically be entered into the competition.’

‘It would be fantastic if I could send you additional information about this event [no] and competition [nox2] and equally as great if you got involved and decided to enter a recipe.’ [guess what? That would be no! (notice the exclamation, thought you'd like that)]

‘We are offering a select number of bloggers [I'm 'select' - hoorah! And there was me thinking you were just spamming the entire blogpopulation!] the chance to offer their readers a comprehensive 30% discount on double ticket. Meaning they can book a double ticket (two adults) for just £10.50 – full price of £15…’

Wowee! If I put together a video (no small task, of course, if you want to do it well) you’ll ‘gift’ me a princely sum of £5 – bargain!

Like the food ad networks that want to pay bloggers 1p per thousand views of their site (no joke), this is what’s known in the business as digital usury.

Stupid question.

Everyone knows the honey monster wins everytime.

Still, spotting said ’spelt popples’ in a local tofu emporium, I thought: “What the hell, can’t be all that bad?”

I should add I have fond childhood memories of sugar puffs, and was only allowed to eat them when I went to visit my grandparents up north (usually while watching kids TV classic Wackaday (another forbidden pleasure.)

LondonCooking Verdict:

The honey monster has nothing to fear from his vegan competitors.

Spelt popples are utterly bland, without a doubt more like styrofoam than anything else I’ve ever tasted.

Honey Monster Foods 1 – Amisa ‘Special Diet Nutrition’ – 0

More classic Sugar Puff ads, ooh… and buy the T-Shirt (you know you want to – it’s just £2, and for charidee, after all.)

On the other hand, the less said about Honey’s rap duet with Samanda (‘Honey Love’) the better.

London Cooking’s raison d’etre is to serve you regular lashings of delicious, quick, healthy recipes (plus a little bar/pub/restaurant tips on the side.)

On the odd occasion, however, we like to veer off topic.

There was a piece in London-based newspaper the Economist lately on the various different nicknames the capital has earned over the years:

Manhattan-on-Thames, Londonistan and, lately Rekyavik-on-Thames, to name a few. But where does the Economist say our fair city is headed now? In essence:

‘London will simply resemble the less prepossessing city it was in the 1970s and 1980s, before the excesses and excitements of the New Labour epoch’

So, as we journey to the past (not necessarily a bad thing?) LondonCooking would like to suggest the following as a fitting, affectionate new nickname for ‘the big smoke’:

Nodnol

This links us to the classic episode of Red Dwarf in which the crew lands in an alternate London where everything plays out backwards. And as they too discover, it’s not all bad…

What do you think? Does the name fit? And will it stick?

It’s got to be more cheery than ‘the Abyss’, or ‘the Empire of Hunger’, right?

Here at LondonCooking, I like to think we run a tight ship. That’s as nothing though compared with the almighty bbcgoodfood.com, where we’ve learned that every recipe is triple tested before it goes up on the site.

Just in case you’re having trouble visualising this process (I still am), what this means is that every lemon self-saucing pudding has already been through a Rick Stein, a Gordon Ramsay and a Raymond Blanc before it can grace the site.

Some might say this is insane. But I call it robust. What do you think?

NB – bbcgoodfood.com now has videos too.