beer monkey wrote:Seems a lot of US members just go to Mac's for the coffee...
And lets face it...how hard can it be to produce a decent cup of coffee..?

saint wrote:you dont still drink camp coffee do you westie ?

seymourbutts wrote:Is in true that Usa, and European people are obese as a result in part of fast food outlets such as this one? And a contributing factor to the average thai now being larger?? Did anyone see "Supersize Me"? I think the longer we go without one of these american type fast food chains in Udon the better!! Although i know we have one already KFC...
And truthfully i had the worst cup of coffee ever in Starbucks koh Samui!!! Its was disgusting and at european prices!!! Its wholesale greed!!! We pay in the west something like 2.00 uk for the cheapest cup they have..The price reflects, wages, rent, business taxes etc etc, ALL of these expenses are a fraction of the cost in Thailand so to me anyway its just greed charging the same price in thailand as in europe, or for the perdantic , as near as damm it!!!

You never see anyone with a degree eating a fry-up; they're too intelligent to consume it, says Times restaurant critic
The news that Heston “Bacon and Egg Ice-Cream” Blumenthal is to have a hand in revamping the Little Chef chain of service station restaurants has thrown Britain's gastronomic reactionaries - and believe me, they are legion - into a ferment.
“Eggs and bacon were made for the breakfast table, not some poncy ice-cream,” roared The Daily Telegraph, no doubt suppressing a florid belch as its morning kippers turned in its stomach.
Hash-browns are dismissed as “ghastly manifestations of American imperialism” (damned uppity colonials), and Sir Winston Churchill himself might as well be playing Elgar in his Union Jack underpants as we read that: “A good English breakfast never lets you down.” No, it kills you. That's what an English breakfast does. The current £7.25 “Olympic” breakfast at Little Chef comprises: “two rashers of crisp backbacon, British outdoor-reared pork sausage, two griddled eggs, whole-cup mushrooms, crispy sauté potatoes, fresh griddled tomato, Heinz baked beans and toasted or fried extra-thick bloomer bread”.
Olympic? What the hell event do they have in mind, the 3,000m casualty dash? The Triple Barf (also called the hop, skip and vomit)? The Synchronised Massive Coronary? Ye Gods, if that's what our young athletes are going to be packing down daily in advance of 2012 then we'll win even fewer gold medals than the, er, none, which I believe is currently predicted for this whey-faced generation of feckless British fatties.
The fried English breakfast was conceived during the Industrial Revolution (probably) as a form of fast fuel for a working class that actually worked. They ate 3,000 calories in the morning, then they burnt 3,000 calories by lunchtime. Or died when the mine collapsed. But you don't burn 3,000 calories driving a forklift truck, or answering the phone at Argos, or fiddling your disability benefit. The work dies, but the breakfast lives on. Result: obesity crisis. (Knowing this, and fearing the backlash, Little Chef recently moved to slim down “Fat Charlie”, the obese chef who features in its logo, but nothing came of it - presumably because the porky little scrote just wouldn't stop eating.)
I'm not exaggerating about the effect of fried breakfasts on working-class health. I made a film for Channel 4 in 2005 called Tax the Fat (which I truly believe we should) in which I visited a truck-stop café just outside Pontefract. With a public health nurse at my side, I tested two dozen random truckers and found that none was less than 3st (19kg) overweight. Some had body-mass indices of around 50, which is double the level at which you are defined as “overweight” and only five points short of the score that has you reclassified as a small town. And all of them - all, mind - were eating fry-ups.
I managed to persuade one of these truckers, an 18st sweetie called Paddy, to replace his daily fried breakfast with a large bowl of porridge, but to make no other changes to his diet. We weighed him two weeks later. He had lost a stone.
You see, it's complex (or “slow-release”) carbohydrates you want in the morning. They keep you going till lunchtime, don't set off crazy blood-sugar “spikes”, and lay down no fat. Porridge, water, a little salt. Breakfast doesn't have to be a banquet. Your palate is so clean and mellow at that time in the morning that, with a cup of tea, swollen oats taste really quite interesting. There's the whole rest of the day, as your tongue clogs up with processed snacky gack, to start upping your intake of more sugary, fattier, punchier foods.
I'll tell you what's holding us back from finally getting rid of the fried English breakfast for ever: lack of education. You never see a person with a degree eating a fry-up, do you? Certainly not someone with a 2:1 or better in a humanities subject from a university founded before the invention of the iPod. That's because they are smart enough to know better.
And if you already knew that a fry-up was fatty and don't care, then you ought to know about some even scarier health risks you're running at your breakfast table.
According to the immune biologist Dirk Budka, of the Hale Clinic in West London: “Bacon, ham, sausage, all these foods are full of nitrates and other things designed to prolong shelf-life, and the longer the shelf-life the greater the bacterial activity. It's just as bad with smoked fish, kippers, all of that. All the patients who come to me with bowel trouble turn out to have high levels of these sorts of foods in their diets. And long-life food is terrible for people with allergies, too.And then of course there is all this fat. At this time in the morning, when your body is barely awake, suddenly your gall-bladder has to release emergency quantities of bile to digest the fat and it's going to be jumping in triangles. It's going to be screaming ‘what are you doing to me?'. You're going to get heartburn, you're going to get belching...”
But apart from that, it's all good?
“Not at all, it's terrible. There's no proper carbohydrate. There's tinned baked beans, tinned tomatoes, more long-life food, more bacterial activity. And your English sausages are full of I don't know what. It's just what a butcher sweeps from the floor at night. A European will not eat these. In Europe a sausage is 90 per cent meat. I grew up eating good wurst like this. And rye bread. That's what you need to eat. To make a technical term: the English breakfast is full of rubbish.”
Oh, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, “wurst, rye bread... this Budka's a German, what does he know about a good breakfast?” And, indeed, there is more than a smidgen of nationalism, even xenophobia, in our attachment to the traditional English breakfast. The French have their croissant and coffee, the Greeks their sheep cheese and olives, but our morning plateful is honest and shiny and pink. Just like we are.
In fact, from his name, this geezer who's come in to ruin the Little Chef sounds like he might be a foreigner, doesn't he? “Heston” is OK. Sounds like he knows a thing or two about service stations. But “Blumenthal”? We didn't win the war to have some kraut come over here and feed us garlic sausage and pumpernickel for breakfast, no doubt with a side order of Lebensraum and a mug of hot Colditz. In fact, he sounds as if he might even be a Jew. A toasted bagel with cream cheese and lox is OK at Paddington station when you're waiting for a train. But if a pig hasn't been killed then we're not calling it breakfast.
If anything proves the dunderheaded wrongness of the fried British breakfast it's the fact that we crave one most when we've got a hangover. Sure, the fat and salt will exacerbate the dehydration that is causing the problem, making the headache worse, the sweats colder and the existential angst more palpable. But what the hell, we feel like it. We're drunk, we're underslept, we smell, we can't walk straight, it hurts to talk and all we want is something to make the blood rush to our stomach, and away from our brains, briefly ameliorating not only the cephalalgia, but also the guilt about snogging that tramp on the night bus. Something, above all, to thicken our sick when the nausea hits again.
And this you want to call a national dish?

old-timer wrote:There is an interesting brew of coffee called "Kopi Luwack" that Macdonalds may consider. The beans for this particular coffee are eaten up by Asian Palm Civets:

asian palm civet.jpg

Once this little fella has pooped out the beans they are collected and roasted and finally brewed into a cup of coffee.
I can't imagine what was going through the mind of the first person to collect civet sh1t to make coffee...............