Dino
You wait ages for a cool thing to come along and then, like buses, three come along at once. An invite to the launch of the new Angry Birds cookbook (Angry Birds: Bad Piggies Egg Recipes), with the new Nokia Lumia 800 AND top baby-friendly chef Aldo Zilli had all the ingredients (sorry) for me to drop whatever I was doing, grab the kids and head down to see what all the fuss was about. I’ll try to tackle each one in order, just in case you’re interested in either one.
So, the main attraction was the new Angry Birds “Bad Piggies Egg Recipes” cookbook. Sure you need to like Angry Birds (who doesn’t) and you need to like cooking, but most of all, you need to like eggs. Every recipe features eggs in some way; from “Huffin ‘n’ Puffin” (cheese and egg soufflé) to Angry Meringues (er, meringues), each page comes with an equally cool Angry Birds cartoon illustration.
If I’m being honest, the recipes aren’t the strongest element. There aren’t any pictures of the finished dish and the dishes themselves are quite sophisticated for something that is arguably aimed at kids (however big). It’s a bit of fun though and will be a great Christmas present for anyone remotely into Angry Birds… or eggs. The RRP is £10.99 but I notice it’s currently around £8 on Amazon, so you know what to do if you want one!
So naturally, you needed to have a go at Angry Birds at the launch so Nokia duly obliged by supplying their latest Nokia Lumia 800 handset running the latest Angry Bird levels. Now I won’t over egg (sorry) this one but I used to be a big Nokia fan. Then, when Nokia forgot to be good, I went to the iPhone and never looked back. I also work in the mobile industry now so knew that Nokia had just done a deal with Microsoft (yawn) to put the new Windows OS (yawn) onto their phones. So what was my verdict? I never thought I’d say it again, but I loved it. One of the coolest things (and it may just be for the dads) is you can interact your XBox avatar live on your phone, in 3D. And it has real sat-nav style maps with turn-by-turn navigation, not like my iPhone’s hopeless map. Slick, great touch screen, nice interface, seamless social integration of Twitter and Facebook and all in all, welcome back Nokia. At last there’s another choice other than iPhone, Crackberry and nerdy old Android phones. Oh, and it comes in different colours too. Check it out at http://www.nokia.co.uk/gb-en/products/phone/lumia800
And last, but by no means least, we got to meet Aldo Zilli, the man behind the Zilli restaurant chain and also the über trendy Baby Zilli organic baby food range. If you’ve seen the packets (like those foil space food packs), Aldo is the smiley bald guy on the front. He’s like that in real life. He not only cooked all of the egg dishes from the book but also added a dollop of celebrity flair to the event. Now I have to admit, what with my hectic lifestyle and all, I haven’t had a chance to try his baby food range but it looks great from the outside.
Aldo has two small children so you can see where the inspiration and passion came from. The range is categorised by age (or stage) as well as separate products for breakfasts, puddings and drinks. I wish grown up food was that simple sometimes. There are plenty of offers on the (rather nice) web site so head over to http://www.zillibaby.co.uk/ and have a look. And best of all, I now have a funky Angry Bird sticker to put on my laptop. Man, I love free stickers…
