Further ramblings of a self-made pauper

I am full of very tasty Chinee food.

On Friday, a takeaway place up in Barnet High Street shoved a menu through our letter box, so we thought we'd try them out during tonight's game, especially as it's Chinese New Year..

Result!

The best local Chinee takeaway doesn't deliver and the other two both have different faults and it's sometimes difficult to remember which thing to avoid ordering from either one of them. So we tried the new place and I am pretty sure they will be getting our custom from now on.

That's Chinese, Indian and Pizza taken care of. We also have a delivery menu for, of all things, a kebab place. Who knew such things existed? I doubt we'll use them; if we get drunk enough to want a kebab, we'll most likely be incapable of navigating the intricacies of a telemaphone...

For lunch instead of a sandwich followed by an apple and/or banana, I thought that I should ring in the changes.

I have the fruit already, so it was just a case of finding something to supplement it; I have learnt from bitter experience that simply eating fruit at lunchtime leaves me hungry part way through the afternoon. Well, I mooched around Marks and Spencer’s food hall and happened upon a tub of taramasalata and a tub of low fat humus. I then realised that they were there in a 3 for 2 deal, so I picked up an additional humus to take home. Next order of business was pitta bread, which was quickly acquired. Of course, this all seemed like a good idea at the time. Low fat, more vegetable and some fishy bits to provide proteins and things.

Except that now I feel rather bleh. I am full and have a half pot of humus remaining, which will have to follow the other one home: I don’t trust the fridge here in the office. I also have a half pack of pitta bread left. That will doubtless be too solid to eat tomorrow, or get forgotten until it is – or has sprouted those interesting blue spots that suggest it might not be good eating any more.

My coffee is looking at me accusingly. It knows that I shall drink it, but IO shall probably have to wait until it is virtually cold. I had forgotten that pitta has much in common with rice and just keeps on expanding in the stomach.

It will be some hours before I can face an apple or a banana.

Sandwich tomorrow, then. Bleurgh…

Ye Gods, but I'm starving. I shall now nip out and purchase suitable sustenance.

I have been drinking my coffee black all morning, in an attempt to see if the removal of an additional pint of semi-skimmed milk from my daily diet will have any effect. I may not live long enough to notice the effect on my waistline, but damn it, take away that constant drip-drip-drip of calories during the morning and I am suitably ravenous!

Something baguetty and chewy, I think.

Ever since I have been (tentatively) trying to eat more healthily, I have scarfed back more apples than ever before in my life. In fact, since January, I have probably eaten more apples than in my previous 48 years combined. In the past, I would occasionally pick up and eat an apple and usually enjoy it, but I never really felt the need to go back and have another one; that single apple would cheerfully last me oh, I don’t know, twenty years?¹ When the apple-eating rate was higher than that, it would have been when I was a kid and had much less control over what I could eat.

On those rare occasions I stopped to think about the humble apple, I decided quite early on that my favourite is the good old Granny Smith and that the Golden Delicious was the greatest misnomer in the species Malus domestica², particularly the French Golden Delicious, which to my taste buds seemed (and seems) like an exercise in developing cotton that grows in a handy green wrapper.

Anyway, I have just explored a rather disappointing³ Egremont Russet and have a slightly battered Pink Lady awaiting its fate in, probably, an hour or so from now. Since Pink Lady apples were recommended to me I have to say that they have moved up the list and are close on the heels of the Granny Smith as far as my tastes go in these matters.

I now find myself soliciting advice on where to go next in my trip around the world’s apples. To be honest, British apples, or at least apples grown in Britain – I don’t care much if they originated abroad, I just don’t care to spend a fortune on an apple that has been flown from Guatemala and has a mild aroma of chicory⁴.

To make the grade, an apple has to be crisp, firm, juicy and not too tart or too sweet. It can vary pretty much between sweet and tart, but shouldn’t move from inducing a diabetic coma on the one hand to causing my face to implode on the other. And yes, I am willing to give the humble russet a second chance, but I shall have it a little fresher next time.

¹A bit of an exaggeration. Ten years is probably more accurate.

²I am far more learned with the internet than I am without it.

³To be fair, I have had it hanging around about 3 weeks: it may have tasted better when fresher.

⁴For the sake of discussion, let’s pretend that I am more mindful of my carbon footprint than I really am. It gives me extra brownie points for no additional effort on my part.

It is a generally accepted fact that roast potatoes are the vegetable in a roast dinner with the highest individual value¹. This leads to the necessity for a vegetable exchange rate when there is a paucity of spuds on the menu.

Now if there are four diners and a roast dinner is on the horizon, the well-prepared cook will ensure am equal number of roast potatoes for each person. But what happens when, through some calamity, natural or man-made, there are fifteen roasters? One person will have to make do with three, which is manifestly unfair as the other three have four. Of course, the host will wish to balance the servings by compensating the loser with other vegetables.

Precisely how much broccoli makes up for the missing roaster, or how many peas? Will an additional spoonful of cabbage make up the deficit? Does a roast parsnip equal a roast spud, or is it only 90% of the value and how do you make up the remaining 10% deficit? Then you have veggies so appalling – swede, for example – that adding it is simply heaping insult upon injury. Right thinking people would gladly give up a roaster to do without swede. It is a vegetable so bad that it has a negative value².

With the roast potato at the top of the roast dinner chain, then, I shall assign it a value of ten. This being the case, what value can we assign to other vegetables? Time, I think, for a poll.

Before we go to the poll, however, I should point out that in this case we are simply considering vegetables and their impact upon the palate; we are not interested in their relative nutritional merits, this is entirely value assigned by taste and smell. Neither are we concerned with meat or fish and certainly not with a Yorkshire Pudding³.


[Poll #1131251]

¹By which I mean that it is not a generally accepted fact.

²I shall brook no argument t on this point: swede is vile. If you are odd enough to think otherwise, kindly keep it to yourself. This is a respectable journal.

³The Yorkshire Pudding is that rarity on the dinner plate. It trumps the roast potato. One average sized Yorkshire is worth at least two roasters and as such is an easy way of buying off potato deficits, though again, an imbalance of Yorkshires creates the same concerns one level up. A deficit of both roaster and Yorkshires is unconscionable and the cook should be shot..

There is no foodstuff on the planet that cannot be improved by the addition of cheese of one kind or another. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. There are many, many different cheeses and there is always one that goes nicely with something.

So imagine my dismay, then, when I see that colonel_maxim, himself no stranger to the gustatory excellence of the curd bewails the addition of a tasty mozzarella to bulk up a curry that is just too small for a single portion, but just too big to make it worth cooking additional victuals. In short, I was dumfounded.

I must confess that the glutinous side-effect of the mingling of cheese, curry and rice was an unforeseen bonus, but this in no way detracts from the basic question of taste. And the ensuing meal was decidedly tasty.

It did occur to me later, that this is halfway to being a recipe for a curried cheese patty, for had I had some flour, it would have been easily possible to make the curry into two or three patties and fried them. Now that would have been a tasty treat.

Especially with onions.

“Not a particularly discerning palate?”

Tch. I think the evidence speaks for itself.