Filed under: Food
In Heston Blumenthal’s The Fat Duck, they serve a dish of fish, usually salmon that’s been slow cooked then coated with liquorice and served with some sauces. One of the garnishes is the individual sacs of a grapefruit. The other day, I thought I’d try to separate the individual sacs of a grapefruit, just for kicks.
The dish I served it with was a version of the Thai pomelo salad, subbing grapefruit instead of pomelo, and with grilled prawns, cucumber ribbons, deep fried shallots, peanuts, mint puree and a dressing. My god! It isn’t easy. With stubby fingers, you’ll probably break half the sacs. Because a grapefruit isn’t as dry as a pomelo, it’s hard to pry away the rind from the flesh to begin with. After that, you really need to pay close attention to gently lifting away the individual sacs. I pretty much did like a quarter of the grapefruit useable. I ate another quarter and juiced the rest for my dressing. At The Fat Duck, I can see how torturous it would be to do 4 whole grapefruit.
Looks real pretty though and I like that you get the individual sacs. With whole filleted segments in a more traditional style, you don’t quite appreciate the bursty nature of citrus fruits. Also, if i ever saw this on a plate, I’ll know that some poor sod somewhere slaved over this.
I want a cool camera that is smallish and shoots good. I’ve narrowed things down to 2. The first is the gold standard for prosumer compacts, the Panasonic LX-3. The second is its latest challenger, the Canon S90. Bear in mind the former is over a year old. The latter came out in August this year.
Looks wise, the S90 wins for me. Clean, cute, simple, old schoolish and smaller. The LX-3 though, you can attach the Ricoh LC 1 lens cover and suddenly, it becomes super awesome. Check out the video!
Performance wise, they’re both prosumer compacts. Both come with exceptionally bright and fast lenses that go down to f2.0. The LX-3 comes with a super wide angle, 24mm lens. Which makes it very unique. The S90 though, has greater range, 28-105mm compared to 24-60mm on the LX-3. The S90’s sensor is slightly smaller than the LX-3’s but I’ll assume the difference is negligible for my purposes. Apparently, the S90 reduces more noise but loses detail whilst the LX-3 is noisier but more detailed. Macro mode wise, which is the main reason why I would want a new camera, the LX-3 wins hands down with its 1cm macro focusing. That’s just insane. The S90 is 5cm in comparison. The S90 comes with 3.8x optical versus the LX-3’s 2.5x zoom. But I don’t think it really bothers me. I want to shoot up close, not from faraway and then zoom in.
The only reason why I think the Canon would be good is because it also comes with a control ring. In fact, it’s got 2 control rings, one customizable to whatever you want. Kinda like a DSLR, which you can set to make it change various functions, from aperture to focus to ISO etc. Pretty nifty, even if it smells like a gimmick.
I’m still leaning towards the LX-3. Price wise, at the moment, they’re pretty similar. I reckon the LX-3 would cost me a little bit less after I fix a Ricoh LC1 on it and ultimately, it seems more like the camera that I want for my purposes, even if I think the Canon looks much better. It’s also got a hot shoe and you can get a super wide macro lens for it. Which seems to have made my mind up I guess. God, am I actually sacrificing form for function? Well, I suppose I could get the Leica D-Lux 4, which is basically slightly improved over the LX-3, just in a much sleeker and sexier body. It also fits the Ricoh thingy! HAHAHA, best of both worlds! Pity, it’s about $400 more than the other 2!
