Lawks, it has been a while since I posted here. What has been happening?

I've had a cold, I've had an attack of my cyclical vomiting syndrome (which was bloody awful) and I have changed medication. The new medication makes me feel a bit weird, and it is only reasonably effective at dealing with my psychotic symptoms.

I am having a fun christmas with the neighbours cooking roast goose. More news as it comes in.

At the end of last week I was in Venice. It is an incredible place.

The architecture shows you are really abroad, I haven't been to a place like it. With its warren-like mass of little passages it must be a wonderful place to grown up in. OK, it is a bit dilapidated, but it was completely beautiful.

Once you get out on the main tourist areas you can have top food at reasonable prices, and not be fleeced for drinks. It is more peaceful in these areas, and dining by a canal on a lovely day in mid-October is a great pleasure.

Saint Mark's cathedral was amazing, and there are other deeply compelling churches to visit even if you are a confirmed atheist like me.

There is a lot of tourist tat around, like all of the crap glassware on display in every-other shop, but a lot of fun can be had there. It is clearly worth going off season, the weather was still great in October, and there was less of a mass of tourists. A top destination; I shall return.

 

... chip! Hooray for crap jokes!

I'd be a bit larger than I am now, I'd wager. Sweets Wholesale appeals to the child in us all. It appealed to the child in me enough to order 20kg of sweets.

This much will probably last quite a while.

Yesterday we went to The Southerner in the city. This is a boozer that sells Speight's beers, imported from New Zealand. We went with the neighbours, one of whom is from New Zealand, because we were promised that they do good roast lunches on Sundays. Good roast lunches, my arse. They were bloody awful: overcooked, leathery, flavourless meat, wet tasteless vegetables and the roast potatoes defied description. I wasn't so impressed with Speight's beers, either.

So, we needed perking up. This required decent wine, teddy bears and nappies. You can see me enjoying these around the neighbours' place below:

As you can see by my bulging Miffy t-shirt, now I am not spewing all of the time I have put on a shed-load of weight. I've had to move up to large-size Abri-Form X-Pluses. The wine was a rather cheeky little Chateauneuf, Mont-Redon 2004, which really blossomed with time in the glass. The afternoon passed with much pleasure and I felt rather jollied along by the whole affair. The kebabs we ordered later were much better than The Southerner's roast lunches.

I spent the weekend in France, we went to two good restaurants and one bloody awful one. Here is me moping in the dreadful restaurant:

Overall it was a fun weekend. However, I have come back to find myself in the depths of insomnia. It is bloody awful. I am supposedly on the waiting list for Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for insomnia. Who knows when that will happen. Moreover, there is a big chance they won't do it until I have completed a course of CBT for psychosis and that, of course, is even further away.

I may have been incredibly depressed before I met my lunch companion yesterday, but it worked out alright in the end (as it usually does). He was a lovely fellow, and we ate and drank very well. I felt great after lunch, so much happier than before I met him. Nice that one of my (presumably very few) fans is a really nice bloke. I suppose it helped that I was encased in a shield of exquisite tailoring.

Dr Wadge of the Food Standards Agency has made the excellent point on his blog that so-called 'detox' diets and suppliments are a waste of time and money. They are obviously a pile of toss and anyone who buys them is misguided at the very least. I couldn't agree with his suggestion of spending the money you save not buying them on Neil Young albums, though, perhaps Bent or Lemon Jelly...

I am back in Estonia after spending the weekend in Helsinki. People were commenting how good the weather was for the time of year whilst I found seven Celcius to be a tad on the chilly side.

I had a truly excellent bottle of wine in a Japanese restaurant that had perhaps the worst fish I have ever eaten. It was dreadful. If you are ever visiting Helsinki I can highly recommend Hotel Glo, but just avoid the sushi joint next-door. The cynic in me says avoid most of the restaurants, as I have rarely eaten well in Finland. What can you expect from a country where they love meat donuts?

I'll be here until Wednesday, then it is back to civilisation and my little cat.

I am in Tallinn at the moment. Most of the city that I have walked through looks like Communist-era concrete monstrosities, but the old town is reasonably pretty. I wouldn't come here if you are expecting decent food or drink; all of the beer I have had here has been foul and the food isn't much better. It is pretty cold, the warming power of my tweed jacket has been greatly appreciated.

I am off to Finland tonight for the weekend, then it'll be two more days in Estonia. I have to say I'll be pleased to get home, I miss my little cat.

I spent the weekend in France with the neighbours. The point was to go and visit three very good restaurants. At the first I ate this sausage:

The owner of the restaurant made suggestive comments as I toyed with the enormous sausage.

Things are still not entirely brilliant as far as mental health goes, but they have been a lot worse. I am generally holding off from lacerating my arms and only randomly cry a few times a day. The hallucinations are still pretty bad, but I am finally having my anti-psychotic medication changed to something useful on Monday, so hopefully these will be less of a problem soon.

Not terribly much has been happening to me over the past week; only one anecdote...

I got off the tube near where I live and because I was loaded down with shopping I got a taxi to take me the last bit of the journey. As we went through South-East London we drove toward a group of 10-11 year old children who were waving at the taxi as if they wanted it to stop for them. As we passed there was an enormous crash and the passenger window next to turned into a spider's web of cracks with a big hole in the middle of it. The little bastards had thrown a rock at the taxi window and smashed it to smithereens. They disappeared where the taxi driver couldn't follow them so he drove back to the taxi rank whilst he tried to contact the police. I have to say I really felt for the taxi driver as the cost of replacing a window would be less than his insurance excess, so he'd have to stump up the money himself, and as it happened in the morning he lost a day's worth of fares.

Today's excitement is going to one of the local microbreweries. Their beer is excellent and they make really rather good pizzas.

We had sushi for dinner last night; the smell of raw fish drove Kisu the kitten wild. We could hardly deny him a few bits of the lesser fish, and the partner even went to the trouble of arranging it sushi-wise. I am not sure Kisu really cared about that, though.

It is 2007, what joys await us all this year, I wonder? The march of time doesn't stop, despite the protests that took place in France last night. As I wish to remain a toddler for a long time I wish those protesters' demands to the UN to stop the 'mad race' of time were possible to be granted.

The Christmas period has been quite fun. My partner had ten days off and I really feel a lot happier when he is about. Shame he has to go back to work tomorrow. We drank some mind-bendingly good wines and, even though I didn't cook the goose and huge chicken terribly well, we ate some lovely food. Good meals will continue with our first dinner party of the new year occurring on Saturday. We'll be dining with a friend from university and his partner; she always likes to steal Butter when they come around. Butter doesn't seem to mind, he smiles, but I do!

Well, time for me to start washing some of the glasses used for yesterday's celebration. Happy new year to you all.

For lunch today my partner and I had lobster rolls. We had these a couple of times when we visited New York, so we decided to replicate the experience at home. All it requires is lobster meat, mayonnaise and brioche rolls. You chop up the lobster meal into not too small pieces and mix with the mayonnaise, which is then put in a brioche roll that has been sliced open and had the inside fried in goose fat. They were quite delicious.

Oddly, I woke up quite early this morning. When I was a smaller child I used to get so excited by christmas I'd feel sick and have to see the doctor. After opening presents it was back to bed for a couple of hour kip. I've now done my duty and rung up family, so now it is just frittering away time until it is time to roast goose and open the wine. Hooray for food and drink!

I purchased a four and a half kilogram chicken that we had at a dinner party last night. This is really rather large for a chicken, all of my cookery books only give instructions for roasting chickens up to two kilograms. This required some inspiration on my part to work out how long to cook it for. Sadly I mis-judged it and the chicken was rather dry. It tasted nice enough though. Nice for chicken sandwiches for lunch earlier.

It was quite a fun dinner party. Five bottles of wine between three of us, some of which were quite special. Went to bed at 2am and had a much-needed change. It is twelve hours later and I am still in the same nappy. For all of that wine I had I am still not very wet.

My good friends the neighbours are off on holiday today for a month. I will miss them. Last year we had them over on boxing day and cooked an enormous chicken; the chicken was almost as good as the company. Shame we will not be able to do this again. I wish them bon voyage for their journey and look forward to seeing them both on their return.

I am still feeling violently ill all of the time. At least the anti-emetics have stopped me from retching all of the time. I am a bit worried because it is now exactly three weeks until I am due to roast a lovely goose for Christmas. If I still feel this ill then it will not be a very jolly Christmas meal.

It is my birthday today, I am ancient... I mean, two. I've been given a magnum of rather good Austrian wine and some new wine glasses. Not terribly childish, I admit, but good nonetheless.

I started cooking a daube for tonight's dinner guests at eight this morning. Daubes are beef and bacon cooked in white wine and beef stock with some vegetables. That last one I made was excellent so I have high hopes for this.

Tonight the Ashes start, I'll be awake all night watching the first day of the first test. Come on England!

Next Wednesday it is my birthday; two again. I'll be having the neighbours around for a baroque feast and some rather nice wine. The real entertainment starts at 11pm UK time when the Ashes begin. This is the grudge match in cricket between England and Australia that happens every eighteen months. England won when Australia came over here for the last series, older readers may remember my frenzied blogging during the matches. Sadly, the England team have lost some key players from the last series due to injury so there are a few new and unproven faces in the team. Australia have some undoubtedly great players in their side, but many people suggest they are getting a bit long in the tooth. It promises to be an interesting series of matches; I'll be sleeping during the day and watching television all night when they are being played.

I had to go to Oxford today. I took advantage of my time there to pick up some wine from my cellar. I have to say that lugging back eighteen bottles and two magnums was somewhat of a strain. This will provide me with good drinking over the next couple of months. I'll have the magnums around my birthday (next month) with friends.

Oxford is a great place to visit, very beautiful. May I suggest that should you find yourself there and after something to eat the Chiang Mai Kitchen, down one of the back passages off the High Street, is a great place to eat.

I'm back from just over a week in the Basque country; it was a lot of fun. The day we arrived it was thirty Celsius, which was pretty good for October. I took a few photos. We saw this incredibly camp advert for a boozer when going on a tapas crawl; I like his freshly waxed legs.

This is the dog made out of flowers that guards the entrance to the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao.

Here are a couple of images of the Guggenheim itself. It is a great building, shame it is largely filled with crap.

Finally here is a slow-grilled ox-chop from a great restaurant in Tolosa. It is where I have had the best beef in the world.

Fluffy Bat, my security bat who is definitely a real bat rather than a Mothercare-brand cellular cotton cot blanket, has got rather filthy after months of soothing me in bed; it is time for a wash. This means I will not be embarrassed by how dirty he is when I take him on holiday at the end of the week.

We'll be going to the Basque country for our holiday, the North-East corner of Spain. This is a great place for eating and we have booked every meal in advance so we are sure of being able to go to the best places. We've been before and it is a real laugh. I must wear my floweriest shirts.

I've been really quite social this weekend. On Friday I met up with a friend who I have not seen for seven years. I was pleased that I am not alone in putting on weight in that time. Firstly we went to Dukes Hotel for martinis. This always pleases me, I get to say one of my favourite sentences, "Two Tanqueray martinis, please".

We then went out to a new place to eat, a gourmet burger bar in Camden called Haché. The burgers were really pretty good, I would be happy to go there again. Unsurprisingly, the wine list was laughably poor, but I really don't mind drinking beer with burgers.

Last night we had the neighbours around for pork and ham pasta bake. It should have been veal and ham pasta bake, but evil Sainsbury's don't sell veal. We indulged in much eating, drinking and cuddling of teddy bears. Not much stops me from cuddling Butter, but when everyone else has a teddy bear of their own he is in less danger of being taken from me.

Tonight is a bit more sedate, but I am still cooking something nice. It is a school night so there will be less boozing tonight.

One of the good things about being a big toddler is that I do not have arbitrary restrictions on what I am allowed to do. An example of this is spraying so much aerosol cream into my mouth that it overflows:

Mmmm... cream, sloo.

I suppose that I could be classfied as experiencing Childhood 2.0, the enhanced version of childhood.

My neighbours are really nice people. During these past difficult weeks they have always been keen to keep an eye on me. When I go around there they always seem to have something fun to do. Today this was making a chocolate cake.

If you really need me to continue, of course I ended up licking the bowls clean of cake mix. This was very satisfying.

By the way, 'sloo' was a word said at my primary school when nice food was being consumed.

I am having two friends over for dinner tonight. I'm feeling a tad nervous about this, I am still pretty fragile. I saw my nurse earlier and she really wanted to lock me in the bin.

I have cooked in advance so all I'll have to cook is rice. I hope it goes smoothly and no one gets whammed and argumentative.

I am sure Butter will be whipped out not too late into the evening.

I cooked pea and ham soup yesterday. I like to think I am pretty good in the kitchen, but this was awful. The problem was that it didn't contain any stock; an obvious loss, you might think. I assumed that cooking the peas in water I had used to boil the ham hock it contained would be enough. A mistake. It also needed cooking for less time, as it had become rather silty. I do like mushy peas, but this had no real flavour. I shall do better next time.

I am going out again for pizza tonight. I am going to my local microbrewery, which has a restaurant attached. It is called Zero Degrees. The pizzas are all really good and the beers are excellent. I do like their pilsner, it is a really lively, bitter lager. They also have a beer suitable for toddlers like me, it is their current seasonal beer and it is flavoured with strawberry and vanilla. Lovely stuff, and not at all girly.

Yesterday I went for a pizza, oh the pleasure that gave me. The new drugs with their anti-emetic effects have rendered me wheat-proof. The wheat allergy is null and void whilst I am taking this stuff. Unfortunately, my doctor does not like people taking it for a long period of time so this will just be a passing piece of marvellousness but I am enjoying it whilst I can.

I've been prescribed some new drugs. Well, not new, I've taken them before. They are an anti-emetic but also cause constipation as a side effect. So effective were they last time I was taking them I could eat bread without throwing up or getting diarrhoea. This is a real plus; I hate being allergic to wheat and love eating bread. I shall celebrate with a sandwich when I've been taking them for a few days. The only side effect that I don't like is they make one terribly photo-sensitive. Should there be a bright and sunny day in the middle of winter I'll have to cover up. Luckily, I've got a hat.

Dinner was quite fun, we went to the Bermondsey Kitchen. Roast duck breast was quite nice, but the wine list left things to be desired. A rather alcoholic New Zealand Pinot Noir seemed more like lighter-fluid than a nice, elegant Pinot. Still, good to see a friend and nice to have something decent to eat in my currently food-barren world.

I appear to be losing weight; quite quickly as I am hardly eating anything. Bit of a spanner in the works tonight, though, as I am going out for dinner.

It is going to be one of those events in which being the 'friend who knows about computers' is my meal ticket. I have to advise someone on a laptop to buy. Bit of a challenge this as I've never purchased a laptop and my friend will have even less of an idea than me about what he needs. Still, it gets me out of the flat and hopefully noshing some decent food. I don't mind saying that eating nothing does make me quite hungry.

There has been a lack of food related entries this year due to the number of them at the end of last year. I am trying to lose some weight. It has reached the terrible state that all of my best and most baroque adult clothes don't fit me any more; I cannot get into my brown cord suit! Worse than that, my usual house attire of Oshkosh shortalls have become restrictively tight.

So, today for lunch I had half a packet of soft mint chews. I'll have the other half, and a vitamin pill, for dinner. I suppose it helps my dieting that my stomach is not really working at the moment. If I try to eat a meal I feel incredibly sick and often throw up. That didn't stop me from putting the weight on, I admit, but I am hoping it will help me lose it. It would be a shame if I had to forgo the Oshkosh shortalls now they don't make large toddler sizes anymore.

Back from Whitstable, it was quite a fun little holiday. The Sportsman was a bit disappointing. Our table for two was one end of a large table filled with drinkers. This food wasn't great either; I can cook better shin of beef at home. The Oyster Fishery was a lot better; good ingredients cooked very well. I really enjoyed my monk fish with Parmesan. So now I am home. Off to the neighbours for dinner tonight.

The Sportsman was good, but hardly thrilling. Whereas I stuffed my face at the Oyster Fishery restaurant. Good ingredients cooked well, no bad thing.

I was really worried this wouldn't be delivered today and I'd have nothing to eat on christmas day. It is a five kilogramme goose:

Next time you see this it'll be cooked and ready to eat.

A present has arrived from my lovely mother, a Spanish hamper:

The leg of Cinco Jotas pata negra ham is a particular delight, I love jambon Iberico. This will all be consumed with great delight and reasonable speed, assuming this toddler is allowed to play with the ham knife.

I should add this came from www.spanishhampers.co.uk.

I have booked a day trip to Whitstable between christmas and new year to deal with the booking in advance problem. I'll be going to The Sportsman and The Whitstable Oyster Fishery. Hopefully I'll be able to nosh of lots of oysters. They should be in the peak of condition in December. I might get some to bring home with me. I must remember to have some clean plastic pants so I don't get charged extra in the hotel.

I've been reading Chez Pim with great interest. It is even more food related than my blog; hard to beleive I know. Less themed on wet nappies, though.

... Its an ugly hake:

This fish is going to be tonight's loveliness. Baked in tin foil with some bay leaves and olive oil then served with thinned mayonnaise and flageolet beans.

Last night I ate osso bucco. This is veal shin cut into slices and slow cooked until it is all meltingly tender. Here is the veal just after being sealed:

It was completely brilliant, really tender and full of flavour.

I've just ordered my goose for christmas. This place had good reviews, so I also ordered an enormous free-range chicken. Even though I am an atheist I don't mind celebrating christmas, mostly because it is a few days off school in the nastiest part of winter, but also because it is not really a christian holiday. I will have to arrange guests to help with the chicken. Good job the neighbours are friendly and like good food.

The approach of my birthday was celebrated last night with a rather nice meal. We also drank rather well as can be read here. This soothes my frayed nerves about becoming the grand old age of two (again). The actual event tomorrow will be celebrated by a visit to the gastroenterologist to find out if my stomach can be operated on (please say yes) and the consumption of a magnum of champagne with the children from next door. This will be a good thing, although I imagine the acidity in the fizz will really hurt. Drinking at the age of two, I will certainly grow up to be a balanced and reasonable person.

I paid a pre-birthday visit to my mother and step-father this weekend. They own chickens that lay strikingly coloured eggs:

Very tasty they were too, although I would have appreciated some Sillfield Farm streaky bacon with them.

As I've mentioned, my birthday is coming up. The event will be celebrated a couple of days in advance by a meal, and on the day by a trip to the gastroenterologist. Sadly my birthday is not the only thing that is 'coming up'. The hiatus hernia I have has been causing problems recently. Not only do I feel sick a lot of the time when I eat, I also get gastric flavours bubbling up into my mouth most of the time. This is particularly nasty when I take one of my drugs that is extremely bitter. I am hoping the gastroenterologist will tell me he can operate on my stomach. I've had the operation before, but at the time I did not know I was allergic to wheat. My first meal after the operation was soup that was thickened with wheat flour, so it was a case of immediately staring to spew again. The violent churning of my stomach undid the work done in the operation, now I am waiting to see if it can be done again. This time I will not eat wheat afterwards.

Well, we all do, but I was suggesting something in a less physical-necessity sort of manner. I am sitting around at home, cuddling Butter and reading in a half-arsed manner, and I find myself incredibly bored. If this was the weekend I'd be cooking something baroque and planning what to drink later, but no such luck. So I need food and drink to keep me interested. Hardly a bad thing, but a real swine when there is no food in the house and all of my wine is too young to drink. Perhaps I'll chop the onions for dinner....

Much to my chagrin it is my birthday in a little over a week; two again. I'll be meeting up with some chums from university and going to dinner at a Gordon Ramsay joint. We all seem to have acquired partners in the last few years. As one of our number is a wine-maker he has arranged for us to take our own wine. Hooray! The corkage is astronomical, the meal will be a bit pricey for a humble toddler, but at least we will drink very well. Very well indeed. Meeting nice people and drinking and eating well makes even the pain of getting old less of a burden. Oddly, on a significant birthday of mine (I was two) a couple of years ago England beat Australia to win the rugby world cup; I've just watched England drubbing Australia in the rugby again. Good things can happen even though I am approaching further oldness.

With the sausages tonight I cooked Boston baked beans:

Sadly, due to my unfamiliarity with the new set of kitchen scales I got today, and largely due to general vacancy, I added double the amount of brown sugar I should have. This didn't ruin what was a very nice dinner, but the beans were a tad on the sweet side.

I went to the butchers yesterday and asked for two thick rump steaks which were meant for two of us to eat. He cut a rump steak weighing over a kilogram, trimmed it up and then asked if we wanted that cut in half or another cutting. You'll recall this steak weighed over a kilogram and it was only for two of us. So I said, "Cut another, please". So we had over two kilograms of excellent rump steak for the two of us to choke and cram down our faces. It looked something like this:

That is quite a big carving knife next to them so you get some idea of scale. Luckily, the next-door neighbours were available for dinner so we invited them round for over half a kilo of meat each and pommes boulanger (potatoes cooked in chicken stock and wine). I felt really stuffed.

My kitchen is small and perfectly formed, hence the cooking is usually pretty good. There are loads of entries here about food because I really enjoy cooking. Truth be told, cooking is generally quite easy and you get to eat the results so it surely must be a good thing to be doing. Eating is one of those things you have to do, so you may as well extract as much pleasure as possible from it. People who claim to be bored by food, they eat to live rather than live to eat, are in many ways lacking an important source of pleasure in their lives, and they must be slightly pitiable because of that. The only problem is it is somewhat of a consuming passion; if you cook something bad, particularly after a string of successes, you feel bad. On the rare occasions I ruin food (occasionally steaks or scallops at the request of guests with poor taste) I feel I have wasted my time to produce something less than pleasurable. I am really happy to play kitchen, even if it means I have to hang out with the girls at day-care. Girls can often be quite nice so there is nothing wrong with this. They are especially nice if they are as enthusiastic at playing kitchen as I am.

I agree with both Gina Gershon ("I don't trust people who don't like to eat.") and George Bernard Shaw ("There is no sincerer love than the love of food.").

My wonderful purveyor of quality pork products, Sillfield Farm, is again providing tonight's dinner: Sicilian-style sausages. In an attempt to pander to passing popularity these sausages are flavoured with Chardonnay wine. Ignoring the fact that Chardonnay is not a local grape in Sicily, it is pretty silly to suggest that any Chardonnay character beyond 'being a bit wine-y' is going to make it into the sausages once they've been cooked. It also irks me that Chardonnay is used in order to capture the vague popularity this grape has, when most Chardonnay (certainly at the quality level for putting into sausages) is not very interesting. How can I exorcise my spleen? By having a glass of Riesling, of course.

That is about as close as I can currently get my knees together due to the rather bulky nature of the cloth nappy I have been put in.

My apologies, the last entry was not about food. There is no reason why it should have been, but lots of entries have been of late. Last weekend's cooking^* was rillettes; duck meat (in this case, one can also use pork or goose) preserved in its own fat:

It is rather rich, but very nice. I'm impressed by how much we've got through since we only started late on Tuesday evening.

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^*It wasn't just rillettes, also cassoulet and salt and pepper pork 'squidlets'. Both were successes.

I went to a concert last night, some rather good Vivaldi was played. However, before the concert I went to dinner in a boozer. Only two things on the menu did not contain wheat, something that is a source of much discomfort for me, which were chips and mushy peas. I was not disappointed by this as I love mushy peas, they are the food of my youth. However, I was less pleased when the mushy peas arrived and they were livid green rather than greeny-grey, a bad sign. A taste confirmed it, they had been made from fresh, or at least frozen-fresh, peas. Proper mushy peas (ie. those I used to eat all of the time when not eating custard) are made from dried peas that have been soaked for a long time; they are much siltier and much less green. Little I could do about it really apart from choke down my livid-greens with a pout and drink four pints of strong real ale. I did say I enjoyed the concert.

A stunning success, of course. The meat was tender, moist and full of flavour, the boiling liquor was rich, porty and meaty. I can be seen below enjoying it with a glass of a rather cheeky little Bandol:

Dinner tonight is oxtail, hooray! This is a rich and meaty dish, but a bit involved in preparation. First of all one has to boil up the oxtail with some vegetables and a pig's trotter:

After many hours the oxtail is removed:

You then pluck all the meat off the oxtail, removing the largest bits of fat. This results in a large plate of meat:

Doesn't that look lovely? Meanwhile, the boiling liquor is strained to remove the vegetables and pig's trotter, half a bottle of port is added and it is boiled to reduce it. Just before you are ready to serve add the meat back to the port/meat reduction to warm it then serve with horseradish mash or rice. If it works out alright I will, of course, post about it, but so far I am pleased; that meat tasted really lovely. Some people make this with only one oxtail and a cow's tongue, but I am an oxtail purist.

Once again the spume of drivel turns to food as a source of inspiration for another pointless entry. As a growing toddler, growing in degree of opinionated-ness if nothing else, I find a late breakfast can really set me up for a day of playing with Butter. Thanks to the magic of top-flight bacon from Sillfield Farm how could a growing toddler ask for a better looking breakfast than this:

The new excitement in my area of town is the river taxi. Yesterday I took a trip to Canary Wharf for huge steaks and beer at the rather good Gaucho Grill. The sights on the way there include the Thames Barrier:

We also go past that great white elephant the Millennium Dome:

Then the now-unused Royal Naval College in Greenwich:

And finally the Cutty Sark in also in Greenwich, the end of the Greenwich foot-tunnel is just visible on the right of the picture:

Quite neat little journey, and lunch was brilliant. One of the best rib-eye steaks I've had in quite some time, and when I asked for it rare rare it was. Beers from the Meantime Brewery, which has merited a mention here before, so I was very pleased to have a drinkie.

I get many people visiting me (via search engines) who seek information about what they should feed picky toddlers. I am no longer picky, but once I was, so I am sure my suggestion of steak tartare will go down very well with those angst-ridden parents. If not, they can try the rat shit coffee from Flores.

The review of L'Arnsbourg mentioned below may be some time in coming; I am not feeling entirely at my most top bunny, alas. However, I feel it worth pointing out that when you have gone to the effort of learning the phrase "Je suis allergique de la farine de blé^*" to say to people who speak faultless English, L'Arnsbourg is the place to do this. Not much of the menu contained wheat flour anyway, but I was highly delighted to have, instead of a little tart for course six, a bowl of deeply lovely potato foam/soup with a sheet of fresh truffle shavings on top. It does slightly ruin things if one then goes on to have mind-binding, gut-meltingly strong cheese and a bloody great big cigar, but until those points in the meal I really was fuelled like fire. The first real course is certainly worthy of mention: a rectangular sheet of veal carpaccio with a dribble of truffled-honey and tiny cubes of apple and feta cheese on top all perfectly aligned on a rectangular plate. It slipped down a treat.

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^*Blé is a word that can be said with great relish and ostentation partly because blé makes me so violently ill, but mostly to irritate the locals with silly mis-pronunciations. I aimed for a long-a as in "Blaaay".

Whilst dining in Strasbourg I asked for the description of a dish named Männerstolz that I saw on a menu. Nice little restaurant, the waiter chappie spoke English slightly and was keen to flash his linguistic ability by saying it was a "Good sausage, big sausage, good sausage for men." My companion's knowledge of German suggested a translation might be "Men's pride". The regret? How can I have possibly failed to order an implement given such descriptions? I do not know, but I did. A bit of research today has yielded that these things can be upward of one metre in length. I'd be proud of such a sausage.

Let me try and dig my way out of my foolishness by suggesting that given such a hunk of meat I might be tempted to behave my at my wurst and run around beating other diners with it.

Right, a select few pictures from Alsace.

Firstly we must realise that even though a lot of Alsace was pounded to dust in the middle of last century, an awfully large amount of it is terribly pretty. Even if we ignore the majestic vineyards we have innumerable views like this:

Strasbourg also manages to have a spooky and foreboding cathedral

Obviously, a trip to a wine region will have a slight theme of drinking, so here I am lashing my way through a magnum of Trimbach CFE 1995. Trimbach make very acidic wines so you'll note the two bottles of Gaviscon in front of me.

Finally, at the three-star mentioned below I didn't feel it polite to spend the entire meal sucking my thumb like the other toddler present, so at the end I sucked on something else.

I have been away from the spume of drivel for a period of time on the grounds of being in France. Apart from extended separations from computers I simply find the French keyboards too irksome to manage serious typing. As soon as mobile phone providers start flogging these lovely little toys I will have less of an excuse, but I am sure I'll think of another by then.

News from France? Little of general interest. I did spend some time in my cellar:

Also some time in the cellars of wonderful winemakers, including the chap who was about to lose the bung in this barrel:

I attended the awfulness that is a toga party. Being a toddler I naturally wore a child's tunic and made sure I had a toy projectile weapon with me:

And finally I stopped by the local purveyors of meat:

Toddlers are well-known for their enjoyment of slimy, mushy sort of things, so it may be of little surprise that I really enjoyed my lunch today:

Three hundred grams of quite ripe Gorgonzola Dolce slapped a satisfied smile across my face, even though it required wiping the excess cheese from it in order to discern the smile^*. I'd have much preferred it on some decent bread rather than the pin board-esque rice cakes I am now obliged to eat. Standing in front of the supermarket's 'free from' shelf suggests they are so named either because they are 'free-from' flavour or because those who gleefully buy from them are 'free from' any form of likable character; and I am now tarred with the same brush as them.... Booohooooohoooooooooo....

---

^*I do like cheese, it is one of those partially-spoiled foods that can provide so much pleasure. Sigmund Freud had a bit of a problem with cheese, we are told, some problem with the symbolism relating to his lactating mother in a rancid, solid form. Weirdo.

I do recognise that people are given to bending the truth if it means they can make money, but when a relationship of me paying quite a lot of money to someone has been established for a long time perhaps it is rude of them to stiff me for a few quid on false pretences. This is especially true when it means they might lose out on future custom.

There is a very good beef supplier in London's best food market who provides beef to various three-stars and their meat is invariably excellent. As it is such high-quality I do not mind paying slightly above the odds for it. Last weekend I went and asked if they had a rib or other good joint for roasting. "No rib or anything like that left, sadly", came the reply, "But I do have plenty of silverside left." In view of the way I had phrased my question I assumed this meant that silverside would be fine for roasting. So when I got home and looked in my books I was naturally quite peeved to discover that silverside is a tough lump suitable only for pot-roasting or stewing, never roasting. I tried slow roasting it with loads of basting juices and barded with fat but needless to say the beef was very tough indeed. The flavour was lovely, but leather-tough beef is no fun. I will give the beef woman a hard stare next time our paths cross.

This just leaves me time for tonight's cocktail recipe, mashed potato. For this you need:
800g peeled King Edward potatoes
250g good-quality unsalted butter
150ml double cream
Fresh ground pepper to taste.

Chop up the potatoes into small-ish pieces and boil vigorously for twenty minutes in a large pan filled with well salted water. Drain the potatoes and place back in the empty pan over the lowest heat possible. Mash the potatoes until reasonably broken-up. Add the butter in five stages, mashing vigorously between each addition of butter so that the butter is completely incorporated before adding the next batch. By the time all of the butter has been added the potatoes should be mashed enough to be lump-free. Pour in the cream and mash/stir this in with the masher. It will initially go a bit thin, but if you mash and stir for a minute or two it will thicken up again to result in a very pleasing mashed-potato consistency. Grind in black pepper to taste and serve.

Mashed potato is an essential ingredient in such sophisticated nursery-dishes as smoked eel with bacon and mash.

Soupy twist.

As has been commented before, food makes me sick. I have vaguely thought for a while that I often feel terribly sick when eating bread and had always assumed it was something to do with the bulk of bread playing havoc with my hiatus hernia, but it appears I may be wrong. I mentioned this 'bread theory' to a frequent dining companion and he said, "It is not just bread, pasta also makes you squirt both ends every time you eat it." My heart sank.

It would be a terrible thing if I did have some intolerance for wheat or gluten for a couple of reasons:

1. Bread can be really, really lovely, and I would hate to avoid it most of the time.
2. This is the really bad one. I would feel awful about being associated with the ~90% of people who claim to have some kind of food intolerance, but in fact only have a sanity intolerance.*

This would pain me very much. Whenever one meets someone who claims to have an intolerance to some form of food it is generally safe to assume they are talking a steaming pile of horseshit. As I mentioned above, out of all people who claim some form of food intolerance, less than 10% actually have any form of medically recognisable food intolerance that causes any real symptoms. For an amusing discussion of this kind of drivel that people are wont to spew, do check out Jeffrey Steingarten's two books (here and here).

This is much the same as people who go around claiming they have 'flu. Generally, they do not. A chum in the disease department who was researching the influenza virus was once so annoyed with everyone going around claiming they had 'flu that he advertised for people who thought they had 'flu to come and have a blood test (expenses paid). Naturally, out of the hundred or so samples he tested, no one had 'flu and less than 10% had ever encountered a 'flu virus in any significant way during their entire lives. I must admit, as an ex-disease-studying sort of chap, to sharing his irritation. Not only because of the cheapening of the image of the serious disease that is 'flu, but also with over-the-counter drug companies who seem all too happy to suggest that their blends of paracetamol and decongestant is going to make someone who is suffering from 'flu feel well enough to to do six impossible things before breakfast. If someone in your employ really does have 'flu they will not be coming into work and if you expect them to you deserve to catch it.

Meanwhile, back to the plot: The idea of largely giving up bread is woefully depressing, so the thing to do is an experiment. All this week I have eaten only food that contains no gluten or any form of wheat product. How many times have I felt violently nauseous, been sick or squirted at the other end? None. The evidence suggests avoiding bread and pasta could well be the way forward. Bugger.

Naturally, the experiment is not over yet. After a period of time, a week might do, if I am still not redecorating the bathroom several times a day I shall make myself a great big sandwich with my favourite bread and wait for the result. That will be another piece of evidence, but since it would not be a blind experiment (I'll know I am eating bread so that may influence the result) I shall suggest to someone cooking me food that at some point they slip wheat-flour into it without telling me. If I find myself feeling violently ill then I shall weep as only a toddler can weep when denied sweets. Or worms.

---

*As an aside, I mentioned this to my dear mother the other day. Even though she is a deeply lovely old bint with a doctorate in almost-science she is convinced she has every disease on the planet, be they known to unknown to modern medicine. Consequently, her list of 'food intolerances' is longer than my arm, and as I am a very big toddler my arms are quite long. So, when relating this anecdote the conversation went much like this, "There are two reasons I would be peeved by holding back on my bread consumption. Firstly, bread can be so very good <etc>. Secondly, I would hate to... ah... So, how are you today?" Much as it is reasonable to be aware that some people, no matter how much you like them, are irrational, raddled old loons, pointing it out to them in no uncertain terms is perhaps a tad unnecessary.

Children can often be terribly picky eaters. As I have pointed out I used to be such a picky child, but as I hope has become abundantly clear now that I am a big, clever toddler I'll eat pretty much anything. This is good as it enables a lot of pleasure to be experienced. Jean Antheleme Brillat-Savarin may have had wider interests in mind when he said, "The limits of pleasure are yet to be defined or reached", but ostensibly he was talking about food. He was clearly a top chap as he has had a cheese named after him; quite a rich, fatty cheese, come to think of it.

During my life I've eaten a variety of interesting and thought-provoking foods. Raw, often live, fish seems somewhat tame compared to the weirdness of Komodo dragon, dormouse, cat, blackbird, dog, sparrow, rat, squirrel, hedgehog, meat wine and (of course) coffee made from rat poo. Some of these had more merit than others, but they were all consumed in locations where these were traditional or local specialties. Some people might feel slightly odd about sticking a dog on the barbecue that your local guide was proud to have hit with his dilapidated 4x4 a few hours earlier (perhaps dog needs a decent hanging time, I just do not know), but it is quite an anecdote. Perhaps I have gone full-circle and come back to eating a rich and varied diet. When I was a slightly smaller toddler and had just learned to walk, I am told I used to cry to be let out into the garden so I could go and dig up worms with the aim of eating them whole, live and covered in grains of soil.

Still, I can demonstrate that I do have a healthy appetite these days:

The key with getting children to be less picky eaters is to give them a wide variety of (ideally) strongly flavoured foods as soon as possible. An oft-suggested dish is cabbage, but since this is merely strongly flavoured and has few redeeming characters then perhaps steak tartare with plenty of Tabasco in it might be a more profitable direction to explore. Not only would this provide one's child with healthy food and a healthy attitude to food, it would also scandalise any hard-of-thinking people who happened to witness said child tucking into such a great dish. There is no need to worry about very young children being scared by strong flavours, despite the current trend of assuming children require a bland, characterless life in order so that they never have any fun until their minds have accepted that being dull is the only way forward. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that toddlers of around eighteen-months old find the smell of faeces from their nappies to be as appealing, if not more so, than the smell of banana.

Of course, food is only part of the story, one also needs to develop a taste for all of the rich and varied drinks out there.

Although, this dining experience once again pointed out how awful it is to have a television on whilst dining or in a bar. Especially if there is cricket on.

What a rude toddler I am....

One of the interesting things about the US was the supply of different celebs. There are plenty rolling around London, but perhaps they are not quite so famous as those one ends up boozing next to in New York. I am not of the Avid Merrion persuasion but I was amused to have a few people pointed out to me whom I really should have recognised. Kevin Spacey sat next to us in one restaurant and was terribly charming, although he did not like a restaurant that I thought was great. He was spot-on about dining in London, though. Mel Brookes was staggering around in quite the silliest hat I have ever seen, and his voice is quite recognisable when shouting down a mobile telephone in order not to be drowned out by the ever-present traffic noise. Willem Dafoe was asked for an autograph in one dining establishment, possibly a touch intrusive. Far better, I thought, to keep giving him sidelong glances in order to work out from where one recognised him before it finally clicks, you bang the table and shout, "Ah, him!" Then get back to muttering about the service, they clearly had more well-heeled people to keep happy. Finally, I was not only impressed by Elliott Gould's choice of bar, but also by his steady gaze after drinking their heroic cocktails.

As I hope I have mentioned in the past, the USA can be really rather a lot of fun.

I realised I was being terribly idle not writing this up immediately so here we go with the report that matters from my trip: the food in chronological order.

New York City first round

Honmura An

Oyster and scallop sashimi
Beef tataki
Kobe pork
Various soba
De Montille Pommard Rugiens 2000
Quality: Good, but small portions and hardly thrilling

 

Rare Bar and Grill

Calamari fried in beer batter
Mexican cheeseburger
Chilli burger
Fries
Onion rings
Quality: Perfectly reasonable, staggeringly large portions

 

Cru

Duck meatballs
Mascarpone ice cream cones
Raw fluke with caviar
Raw langoustine with truffle
Burrata three ways
Grain fed veal "sous vide" with black-truffle anchovy mayonnaise 
JJ Prüm Wehlener Sonnenuhr Riesling Spätlese 1995
Ramonet Chassagne-Montrachet Ruchottes 2000
Mugnier Chambolle-Musigny les Amoureuses 1993
JJ Christoffel Ürziger Würzgarten Beerenauslese Auction 1975
Quality: Great wine list, wonderful service and well-priced. Quite brilliant

 

Kuruma Zushi

Neck and belly toro
Herring
Spanish and horse mackerel
Kampachi
Hamachi
Shima aji
Seabream
Sweet shrimp
Eel
Monkfish liver
Japanese tiny shrimp
Kuruma shrimp
Squid
Sea urchin
Several more grades of toro
Herring roe
Lots of sake
Quality: Amazingly good.

 

Nicky's Vietnamese Sandwiches

Pate sandwich
Chicken sandwich
Quality: Nice sandwiches for the price

 

DB Bistro Moderne

Chicken oyster salad with shrimp
Roast chicken salad
Twenty-nine dollar burger
Biale single-vineyard Zinfandel
Quality: Quite fun, quite cheap. I did like the burger and use of chicken oysters

 

WD-50

Pickled tongue with fried mayonnaise
Corned duck
Octopus
Monkfish and pear consommé
Flatiron fillet steak with caramelised onion tart
Pineapple, pine nut, pine needle
French toast with brown-butter ice-cream and bacon
Kreydenweiss Pinot Blanc 2002
Joguet Chinon Clos des Chenes 2002
Quality: Really very good indeed. Very inventive with a high level of skill in ingredient selection, menu composition and preparation. Certainly this was much better than Kevin Spacey told us the night before. Wine list was rubbish, alas.

 

On to Washington DC

Blacksalt

White anchovies
Malpeque oysters
Serrano-wrapped white shrimp with aji blanco
Braised octopus in tomato, garlic and olive oil
Maine diver scallops and duck ravioli
Rock shrimp risotto with asparagus, thyme and mascarpone
More Maine diver scallops with duck ravioli
Chateau Ste-Michelle Eroica 2003
Quality: Very good. Top class ingredients handled very well

 

Ben's Chili Bowl

Half-smoke chili dog
Chili burger
Cheese fries
Vanilla shake
Diet Coke
Quality: Well, I enjoyed it apart from the cheese fries that were more disgusting than I can articulate

 

Sushi Ko

Tuna sashimi
Toro sashimi
Rockfish sashimi
Ama ebi sashimi
Flounder sashimi
Yellowtail sashimi
Salmon sashimi
Crab with ikura sashimi
Uni sushi
Monkfish liver sushi
Flounder sushi
Seared white tuna sushi
Seared toro sushi
Eel in some form of sauce canapé
Tuna with spring onion canapé
Yellowfin with Japanese potato and garlic crisp canapé
Salmon canapé
Burgundy 'three ways'
Mugnier Musigny 1999
Quality: Stunning. Slightly less traditional than Kuruma, but really good nonetheless. Great Burgundy list

 

Corduroy

Filipino spring rolls
Warm goat's cheese with potato scrapings
Lobster roll
Flatiron steak
Creme brulée
Dönnhoff Oberhäuser Brücke Riesling Spätlese 2000
Cristom Marjorie Vineyard Pinot Noir 2001
Quality: A good, well-executed, interesting and affordable meal

 

New York City round two

Peter Luger

Shrimp cocktail
Porterhouse steak
Fries
Brooklyn lager
Quality: Good ingredients, cooked with a surprising lack of ability

 

Pearl Oyster Bar

Fried oysters
Fresh oysters
Lobster rolls
Hot fudge sundae
Sierra Nevada Pale Ale
Quality: Very good, lobster was top-hole and very affordable

 

Wallsé

Lobster ravioli
Spätzle supposedly with rabbit
Kavalierspitz with rösti
Wiener-schnitzel with cold, tasteless, deeply nauseating baby-food
Gobelsburg Heiligenstein Riesling 2003
Quality: Woeful, one of the worst meals it has been my displeasure not to have avoided eating. The service was laughably poor, but I did not laugh at the time, I shouted, in fact

 

Tomoe sushi

Baby spare ribs
Monkfish liver in ponzu sauce
Toro sushi
Yellowtail belly sushi
Squid sushi
Sweet shrimp sushi
Scallop sushi
Stimpson clam sushi
Smelt roe sushi
Sea eel sushi
Kirin Ichiban
Quality: Variable, from awful to reasonable

Rice to Riches

Traditional romance rice pudding
Coast to coast cheesecake rice pudding
Quality: Nice enough, but cold rice pudding? Hmmmm....

 

Gotham Bar and Grill

Scallop ceviche with avocado
Pasta with prosciutto, chorizo and baby clams
New York steak with onion rings and mustard custard
Martinelli Charles Ranch Chardonnay 2002
Celera Mills Vineyard Pinot Noir 2000
Quality: Very good, but not the most exciting of food

 

Grand Central Oyster Bar

Jumbo Shrimp Cocktail
Various fresh oysters
Smokehouse platter
Bay scallops in herb butter
Brooklyn lager
Sierra Nevada Pale Ale
Quality: Passable, but the service was piss-poor

 

Jewel Bako

Black sesame tofu
Toro tartare with oscietra
Monkfish liver
Two other appetisers
Rockfish
Green tea fried shrimp
Sashimi:
Three types of yellowtail
Toro
Sweet shrimp
Grunt fish
Live yellow clam
Another type of live clam
Akami tuna
Japanese snapper
Sushi:
Squid
Seared toro
Sea eel
Chopped mackerel with ginger
Akami tuna
Little white shrimp
Uni
Seared white fish
Baumard Trie Speciale 2000
Quality: Staggering good. Lawks!

 

Le Bernardin

Smoked salmon rillettes
Flash-marinated scallops with truffle and parmesan snow
Progressive tasting of marinated fluke ceviche
Lobster choucroute with pineapple and bacon
Boxler Riesling Sommerberg V 2000
Quality: I was pleased there was raw and barely-cooked fish on offer, and the prices were reasonable, but not up the the standard I had hoped

 

Pearl Oyster Bar (again)

Fried oysters
Oyster, clam, lobster and shrimp cocktail
Lobster roll
Sierra Nevada Pale Ale
Quality: Still good

 

Lombardi's

A vast pizza with sweet sausage, red onion and anchovies
Quality: Good enough and cheap

 

Weight gain in a little under two weeks:

Two and one half kilogrammes

Greetings. I am having a terribly large amount of fun. There is wonderful food here and great cocktails. If you plan to have really good sushi I do suggest Kuruma Zushi, but do bring huge stacks of cash.

Yesterday was St Patrick's day; it appears there are a terribly large number of people here who claim some association with Ireland yet I did not hear an Irish accent all day. Ah well. I forgot it was a day associated with green-ness when I dressed in the morning so felt a touch nervous when I was staggering about wearing orange. If you are unfamiliar with why this is a fax pas then do have a look here.

No pictures as yet, alas, I am yet to find a join that will allow me to upload them. Right, to the bar!

Cooking for meal for some friends is an activity filled with pleasure. Of course, since you wish to entertain your friends and spend time in their company hiding in the kitchen all evening is not an optimal strategy. Therefore, one must choose food that is easy to cook yet satisfying. A very successful meal is 'petit salé aux lentilles' or 'bacon, lentils and vegetables boiled in big pot', if you prefer. My recipe comes from Simon Hopkinson's book that I have mentioned elsewhere.

The key to cooking is good ingredients. I was particularly pleased with the two kilogrammes of high quality bacon sourced from one of London's most useful places, Borough Market. My selection of ingredients is shown below.

All of this is boiled up (I add a couple of glasses of wine to the boiling mixture) and then just before serving the recipe gives one of my favourite cooking instructions: Stir in butter to add richness.

Even though there was plenty of fat on the huge slabs of bacon, butter is pretty much an essential ingredient in almost anything nice that one cooks. My guests seemed reasonably pleased when the food was served, as shown below.

Unsurprisingly, after a large, hearty and fart-provoking meal one can feel a bit jaded and in need of soothing, as we are all happy to admit.

Custard is a noble thing with a noble history. There are savoury custards (such as in quiches), sweet custards and even things that call themselves custard that really are just horribleness. So I feel very happy that I have enjoyed custard all of my life.

Indeed, as a very young child I was a much more awkward diner than I am now I am a very old child. My dear mother would call and say she was going shopping and ask if I would like anything. "Custard!" was the always the reply screamed from the top floor. "Alright, a packet of fresh custard," she would reply with incredible tolerance, "anything else?" "Another two, no three, packets of custard", is usually all I could manage to conjure from my mind.

So, I was terribly pleased to visit my next-door neighbours last night, a charming and successful couple (one of them has a website with pictures), for cocktails and develop what could realistically be described as a custard cocktail. It is a simple mixture of one part advocaat with two parts vanilla milk from Marks and Spencer. This is best served chilled, ideally from a good baby bottle such as one of these or these; since the custard cocktail is quite thick, it is wise to have a reasonably sized hole in your teat.

I was as happy to drink this last night as I would have been to drink it when I was six. I admit, if I was presented with a baby bottle filled with it at the age of six I'd have been pretty embarrassed, even though I would have secretly been so very happy. Even happier after a few sucks when the alcohol started to kick in....

I am visiting New York City next month, and as this is a staggeringly big city, I can only hope that Mr Jefferson's observation is correct.

I have been furiously booking fine dining establishments over the past couple of weeks, and I thoroughly expect to be staggering around watching my toes disappear over the course of two weeks. Whilst many Europeans feel the need to be sniffy about food in the US, there appear to be an awfully large number of fine establishments in New York City. I particularly look forward to trying some first-rate sushi, of which there is a positive dearth in London, alas.

There are two things yet to be arranged: Excellent drinking establishments and nappies. As far as the first is concerned, I have a large tome and the power of the internet which together I hope will not lead me astray. Or, rather, allow me to lead myself astray. With regards to the latter, should anyone know where I can purchase decent adult nappies in New York City do feel free to drop me an email.

I greatly look forward to my sojourn in a new city. I have prepared the very best in classically styled, contemporary English tailoring to aid the locals in spotting me; I am always happy to provide people with a good laugh.

So says a Basque proverb; sounds fine to me. My thoughts are on the subject of food for it is the birthday of a younger relative today. Much to my dismay she has been hoodwinked into becoming a vegetarian and so the thought of her birthday meal is so depressing I could not bear to ring her up today.

I feel I will be dining rather better as I have an organic, free-range chicken from my local supermarket. No doubt it is charged with positive chi as well, but I did not read the label that carefully, I was merely concerned with getting something that tastes nice rather than any wider principles.

The key to roasting a chicken and the broad pleasure that such a meal can provide are expounded upon admirably by two articulate commentators on food Simon Hopkinson and Hugh Fearnly-Whittingstall in two of the most generally useful cookery books a person could wish to own: Roast Chicken and Other Stories and Meat. The second of these books has served me terribly well, I never realised roasting grouse was so easy and could provide so much pleasure.

Clearly, Meat is a book not shy of extolling the virtues of noshing on dead animals. "Good", I find myself thinking. It also has a reasonably coherent philosophy behind the quest for good meat and so why one should not buy disgusting, factory-farmed rubbish from Iceland. In an ideal world it would make good reading for any vegetarian who was open-minded about why they eat what they eat. Sadly, like a lot of cultists, reasoned debate holds no sway with most and they'll just go on eating their depressing food and feeling terribly pleased with themselves, even if they do feel ill a lot of the time.

For a good read about how meat does make us feel wonderful, why it is so good for us and a more general understanding of food in general Harold McGee's latest book is well worth a browse. When catering for a vegetarian, in order to escape from the panic about knowing what to cook I do find Jack Dee's advice to be useful. Serve a large, rare steak because either they'll secretly be glad or they'll be too weak to complain.

As an earlier post has reported, I have high blood pressure. I also have a fabulously knackered stomach; eating food generally makes me feel, if not be, violently ill. The pancake eating frenzy of an hour ago is still making my head spin with nausea. The obvious view I could take is that my years of fast living have caught up with me, and so I am now old, spent and generally past-it. My father once said, "If you are over fifty and wake up to find nothing hurting, you must be dead." Could this be true at thirty, as well?

Obviously not. My father is clearly a miserable sod who is too willing to view everything in terms of his own decrepitude. Not that he has had enough fun to be truly decrepit, but that is another rant... At this precise moment in time, I am vaguely hoping there is a bigger picture to see about the functioning of one's body and mind. It may not last, but I may as well enjoy feeling positive.

I had the questionable pleasure of spending some time in the company of a young child recently. For much of this time, the child was spewing fluids from various orifices and generally complaining loudly about its incompatibility with existence in a normal environment. Whilst food may often make me blow bits and I do get distracted if not soothed by suitably fine booze, it did strike me that I was really far less incompatible with existence than this fresh young thing.

Now, I would not begin to suggest that I could beat the average eighteen year old in any test of physical ability, beyond alcohol tolerance, but some abilities do become more finely tuned. I hope that when the average teenager looks at me their mind is filled with disgust at what a rancid old fart they perceive. I hope they do because my mind has a big, smug grin slapped across it for I have had many more, hilariously better experiences than them and when more come along, I am capable of enjoying them in more experienced, analytical, visceral and (let us be honest) utterly filthy ways than their imaginations are equipped to deal with.

Younger readers please feel free to mock me for my crapulence, but at least I've had enough experiences to make me crapulent. I just wish I had more energy to go and get Butter...

No entries here for a few days on the grounds of my computer going tits up. It turns out that the memory I had purchased was just not up to scratch; much random crashing eventually resulted in trashing my operating system. Needless to say, this was vastly annoying. All of this down to buying something on the grounds of it being 'cheap and functional'.

I feel terrible that I have been sucked into this laughable way of thinking. I have often stated that 'cheap' does not necessarily equate with 'good'. I remember visiting an associate and he suggested we go out for dinner as he knew a place worth going to. "Is it good?" seemed like a reasonable question to ask. "Oh yes," he replied, "It is all you can eat for nine dollars." I had to respond, "I didn't ask if it was cheap, I asked if it was good." He said, "Well, the food is not very good, but I do not like paying for food." I do not feel the need to return there.

There is no reason why good things have to be expensive, but mindlessly choosing the cheapest thing is a false economy at best and worthy of contempt at worst. As Kingsley Amis said, nice things are nicer than nasty things; I am willing to pay a few extra pence for a product of real quality. Especially if it means my computer works reliably and result keeps me free from explosive rage...