Further ramblings of a self-made pauper

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..

It’s all really rather distressing: I may be developing an allergy to pizza.

Pretty much on the spur of the moment last night we decided to go to ASK for pizza rather than cook. We have a nice chicken in ready to roast, but that would have taken until after 10 pm and that’s probably a little late to sit down and eat a large meal. We toyed with other ideas, but the pizza won out.

All good stuff: a rather splendid calzone for me and a spicy pepperoni pizza for Miss Furtle. A couple of bottles of beer and then home to watch the taped Doctor Who. Splendid.

Except that I woke up around 2.30 this morning with acid indigestion. This has happened the past few times I have had pizza in an evening – at some point I wake up in the early hours and reach for the Remegel. This is rather disconcerting as pizza is one of the great culinary delights of our age. I am hoping that it might just be the time of day I ate it. Cheese on its own does not do this, unless consumed in industrial quantities. It is the splendid combination of doughy pastry, olive oil, cheese and toasty goodness that seems to do the trick.

Drat, drat and thrice drat.

Give up pizza or stock up on the antacids? No contest, really.

It was probably, in hindsight, not a good idea to follow the large but vituous salad with a huge gobbet of Strawberry Cheesecake ice cream.

Me tum's full and it's beginning to mount a counter offensive...

Marks & Spencer own brand cola tastes not unlike cherry cola, but with one part in a hundred Alien Blood.

Of course the indigestion might actually be to do with other events, not just the cola.