h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Has anyone ever tried to find an item which is announced as being available "In selected stores only"?
Selected stores appears to mean any store other than the one you are actually in!
Is this the "selection" process?
If someone asks for the product in question it is transported to somewhere where nobody wants it thus maintaining stock levels?
Has anyone else noticed this?
Perhaps we should ask the BIROS (HGTTG) if they can help!

I've seen "available in specialist stores" before. Happily, there is a health food store near where I live, so such items are not hard to procure. I want to just add I do NOT shop in these places frequently (Once I brought some Vanilla Pods in there for an experiment in home-ice cream making, that's it) I have a reputation to protect.

Clive

I've seen "available in specialist stores" before. Happily, there is a health food store near where I live, so such items are not hard to procure. I want to just add I do NOT shop in these places frequently (Once I brought some Vanilla Pods in there for an experiment in home-ice cream making, that's it) I have a reputation to protect.

Clive

What is this "health food store" of which you speak.
This worries me as does the entry non-alcoholic drinks elsewhere in this section, I feel I may be missing something important here.....
The ice cream making sounds dangerously domestic to me.... though it is some way alleviated by the use of the word experiment.

The recipe made it sound SOOO easy but in the best traditions of the British cock-up, we got it go horribly wrong and ended up with a formless jaundiced gloop that started to dissolve the container. Ice-cream it was not. I don't go near the freezer any more.

Or this health food store either. If it doesn't come with bacon on the side, it's just not worth eating in my opinion.

Clive

The recipe made it sound SOOO easy... as they always do!
What they never tell you is that they have about 10 chefs to do the actual work. They also never take account of the fact that, due to a misguided inventiveness, the amateur will always try to substsitute some items of hardware or an ingredient while possibly commenting "Well it looks the same... so it should be OK".
The interesting thing is that for the most part, as with alcohol, the human race seems incapable of learning & leaving & we will always try something else that seems like a good idea at the time.
I personally avoid the kitchen at all costs now & have found that my life is a much happier (& cut free) place, I have not had anything truly vile to eat in ages (my last venture being a veggie curry for an ex girlfriend, which developed in to a toxic green slime that glooped ominously, made a sewer outflow look inviting & managed to stain a Pyrex pan, possibly for the best that we did not try to eat it really!)..
Have you noticed that "gloop" would appear to be a default state for many a culinary experiment... others are:
"Duality of existence"- Any sauce that requires you to thicken it, which would appear to be very complex entities, having two states.... liquid & solid.
"The Old Testament"- burned offerings.
"Needs more seasoning"- & an asbestos mouth after you add the pepper sauce which has been languishing in the back of your cupboard.
"Deceptively hot"- no steam or evidence of heat followed by third degree burns & a desire to wreak terrible revenge on the TV cooks of this world.
"Looks OK"- a tricky one this & possibly best to trust to your common sense & admire it from a distance.
"Smells OK too!"- you are about poison yourself & any guests.
"The bin"- the only place where home cooking can be properly appreciated! Of course this is also the only "true" default.
I refuse to do any more than possibly place a pre-made meal™ in the oven, forget about it & end up getting a take away.
If you must eat leave it to a highly trained professional! You can at least blame someone else then.
I am still woried about this health store.... though the bacon sounds good sizzling on that griddle!

I guess you lot won't have any interesting ideas for Christmas leftovers then.

Oh I don't know. Try me...

(And are we talking christmas recipes for left-overs or just christmas recipes? *wishes for a chef smiley*)

Christmas recipes for leftovers.Come on accept the challenge.

Bin them & go to see someone who can cook is what I suggest.

AH!But I can cook,I just wanted to see what horrible concoctions you students can come up with.
Student/communal life I remember it so well.Dodging the pans
of cold water thrown over the top of the shower cubicle,
hiding ones food under the bed(no fridge)and the monumental
water fights with the fire hose.The small petty revenges like sending off to every dodgy advert in certain 'magazines' and signing someone else's name and address as the recipient.

...The ritualistic shaving of a newcomer's head.

The posting of mock death-threats underneath doors (To the same guy, as it happened) and sudden, guilt-induced, antics with coat-hangers and blutac at half-one in the morning to retrieve said document before he woke up and read it in the morning. (I wasn't involved in this one )

Sellotaping over someones door in the middle of the night, for a sticky surprise in the morning.


As to student cooking. Hall food was dire so I took to stir-frying qiite a bit. I'm getting better. This was necessitated by the fact that we only had ONE hob in our kitchen. nothing else. No freezer either. Microwave, kettle uh-uh. The WAS a kettle. But that was rapidly consumed by limescale. We had an iron but no ironing board. and the carpet in my room was held down by newspaper to provide some traction to the lethal lino underneath, however, it frequently used to rile up and stand as high as my waist when i opened the door. so I took to supergluing around the edges. (They don't know about that yet...) oo-err, topic drift.

I'll stop now.

Clive