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FYI I and probably almost no American absolutely cannot eat for example shiokara which is Japanese soupy squid entrails. I am totally with you. Not even in the realm of acceptability.

But fish sauce, I don't know the process beyond that it is fermented anchovies, according to wikipedia. There are high quality and lesser quality brands. Basically, do you like Thai food? Then you like fish sauce. It's like soy sauce for them. Incidentally wiki says worcestershire sauce is related, also being fermented and having anchovies. So I think it is much ado about nothing. A very little fish sauce goes a long way, I am not expert but it is great for sauteing shrimp with some garlic and hot pepper, also the typical Thai dipping sauce uses it. FWIW I got roped into trying Surströmming (fish fermented in a can from Sweden) and though I found a way to eat a little basically thought I'd die at first. That kind of survival style fermenting which you have to be marooned in the north sea to eat is a different ball of wax. There is apparently a vast number of kinds of traditional fermented foods many of which are horrible but fish sauce, at least the kind you can get form high quality brands, is one of the great jewels of cuisine. I wouldn't put it on a hamburger, I don't think, but it is central to Thai cuisine which makes everything okay! A link I found discussing brands -- http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/379200
and these:
http://shesimmers.com/2012/07/thai-fish-sauce-taste-test.html
http://www.thaifoodandtravel.com/features/fishsauce1.html

People do eat horses though - and not in the same way that people eat dogs (as in only very few countries).

  I've probably eaten enough salami and chorizo in my life to account for 2 or 3 horses and if I stop eating those varieties of sausage it won't be because they contain horse meat - it'll probably be the bowel cancer :P

Despite the prevalent idea that most people are against it, there are a growing number of Restaurants in the UK taking on the French style of cooking horse meat and it seems there are a number of places in Canada that also serve horse dishes.

Seriously - in a country where black-pudding and haggis are part of a good breakfast (Full Scottish breakfast - try it next time you're here :) ) horse meat isn't exactly stretching our minds or stomachs.

This is the recipe I've been using for a few years now.

The choice of chile will make or break this recipe. If you just use jalapenos, it will taste too grassy/vegetabley. Look for "New Mexico Chiles" in an ethnic market or a gourmet grocery. Whole Foods sometimes carries them here in CA. You can usually find the tomatillos there, too. (Be sure to take the husks off!)

Also, I substitute brewed black coffee for beer, and add a teaspoon of brown sugar.

I am, however, just relaying facts as they are, and you are getting all pedantic and trying to split hairs and ultimately it makes no difference because, again, you clearly don't know what you are talking about. As stated above, botanically speaking tomatoes are, yes, fruits because of their biological function. However, completely separate from that issue and backed up by centuries of tradition (and the fact that they taste fucking disgusting in a pie) is the fact that any chef worth his salt - hell, anybody who has any clue how to find his way around a kitchen - would know better than to conflate the biological function with a part of a plant with its proper usage in a dish.

You really want to use tradition as your main argument that tomatoes are not a fruit?

Anyone with two spare brain cells knows that tradition can often be seriously wrong. Tradition says treat frostbite by rubbing the affected body parts with snow - totally wrong. Just like tradition had people rubbing burns with butter, burning women who were too smart as witches, bleeding people to "release the bad humours that ailed them", drinking turpentine to "cure" other ailments, associating the full moon as the cause of lunacy, and not allowing women to be educated because our place is in the kitchen.

But let's take a closer look at the stupidest assertion you made - that tomatoes "taste disgusting in a pie." Again, you let tradition cloud your thinking, and seeing the obvious - pizza pies taste great in large part due to tomatoes (and the occasional pineapple - another fruit, btw). Or are you going to argue now that pizza pie is not a pie? It meets the definition of a single-crust pie. Or will you now also want to exclude steak and kidney pie, pork pie, fish pie, chicken pot pie, and a whole assortment of quiches, just because they don't meet your definition of a pie?

As for tomatoes in desserts, a quick search would have turned up plenty of results, including this - mentions of tomato shortcake and tomato sorbet, among other things.

What next? Claiming that carrot cake can't be a dessert because it includes a vegetable?

Don't be so ethnocentric with your traditions. It's wrong. Tomatoes are fruits, and continuing to argue otherwise when science says otherwise, on a tech site, makes you look like a nutbar

-- barbara

I am shocked that a website like this, filled with geeks, have forgotten to mention Forbidden Planet, the biggest comic and toy store in London - and I believe all of the UK. It's just a little bit south-east of Tottenham Court Road tube station.

I cannot recommend strongly enough the Transport For London journey planner. It'll give you excellent guidance on getting from point A to point B, complete with selecting which types of public transport you want to use.

It's not a bad idea to swing by Forbidden Planet on the way down to London's Chinatown. Found a nice thread here discussing Malaysian/Chinese cuisine in London.

Soho is directly north of Chinatown. Full of sex shops, gay bars, hole-in-the-wall strip joints and prime people-watching real estate. Best to go in the evening to really see the colourful people coming out. Have a pint at the The Ship in Soho. Wonderfully weird clientele. Old middle-aged punks, lesbian goths, dodgy looking ex-roadies, pensioner couples and gawking tourists who've heard about the pub.

Slightly north and a ways to the east of Chinatown is the Covent Garden area which is the heart of theatre in London and another great place to wander and people watch.

"rotten" is an emotionally loaded term, but fundamentally cheese is a cultured food.

No culturing necessary: milk proteins precipitate at low pH, and that's all you need to make cheese. A little proteolysis with papain, chymosin, etc, will change the character a little, as will pressing and culturing, but all you really need to do is precipitate the proteins. It's easy

The technique is generally referred to as "molecular gastronomy", and has produced even weirder things than listed in the main article. For example, Dufresne has used "meat glue" (i.e. transglutaminase, which was, IIRC, designed to produce Chicken McNuggets) to make pasta entirely out of shrimp, and another chef has made flavoured edible menus out of soybean and potato starch with fruit and vegetable inks that come in such varieties as steak and sushi. Here's a page with some interesting links on Chow:

http://www.chow.com/stories/10411