A Christmas sermon on Food banks

The other day, while buying substantial quantities of cheese, ham and other delicious goodies at Borough Market, I considered how fortunate I am to be able to afford festive food of this quality.

There are many areas where society is becoming increasingly classless, but food and drink isn't really one of them.

At the top of the Tenenbaum, obviously, there are people far richer than I who can afford to enjoy this sort of artisan produce and shop in high-end markets all year round. (And indeed there is a tiny elite layer above them whose household staff buy it in for them!)

Then you've got people like me who, through a combination of economics and convenience are largely supermarket shoppers but who are lucky enough to be able to afford to splash out on Ginger Pig Ham occasionally. (It is fucking great ham even if it works out at about £3 per single slice!)

I know it's a bit of a crass generalisation, but lots of people will have a modest, Tescoey Christmas, with their tubes of Pringles, tins of Stella and industrial British pâté, and then there are those who will struggle to afford even this. Maybe even some who will be going hungry on Christmas Day.

I considered how I fitted somewhere in the middle of this socioeconomic Cheese and Ham sandwich, as I made a donation to the local Food bank, including a pack of Mince Pies (fairly decent ones too - Sainsbury's Taste the Difference, I think they were) to hopefully brighten someone else's Christmas.

They only accept dried/packaged/tinned food, otherwise I'd have gone the whole hog and taken them a bit of ham, maybe some of the gloriously stinky Époisses too.

Tiny Tim II - Revenge of the Festive Set Menu

There are lots of annoying things about Christmas, right?

The Godless over-commercialisation, the pubs full of fairweather drinkers, the bandwagon-jumping attempts at seasonal ales made by unimaginatively stuffing a bland, weak, twiggy bitter with nutmeg and cinnamon...

But a greater offence against the senses, possibly than all of these combined, is the shitty £25 Christmas set menu.

You know the one. Three courses. Three options per course. Inoffensive to the point of blandness. Where you have to try really hard not to look like a grumpy old scotal sac in front of co-workers as you wash down dry, overcooked meat with rough-as-fuck house red?

(I know that I had a bit of a whinge on this topic in the very early days of this blog, but it's been four years, so I'm entitled to another one. Consider it an early Christmas present.)

Tapping into Untappd

Generally I'm one of those 'early adopter' types.

I was singing the praises of strong, uncompromisingly-hopped American Pale Ales back in the 1990s when most people simply refused to believe that Yank beer could be anything other than bland pisswater.

I learned how to pronounce 'quinoa' and quickly dismissed it as a viable food option long before it became a staple of the dining table in fucking Highgate.

And this Winter I'm bringing back possets. Trust me, I'm way ahead of the curve on this one. At some point in the next couple of weeks I'll share my Insane Clown Posset recipe which will blow your ballsacks away.

But it's impossible to be bleeding-edge all the time.

For the past few weeks I've been using Untappd to keep track of my beer drinking, and while it's extremely useful and quite addictive, it does feel like I'm very, very late to the party, like some guy that only joined Facebook last month and still hasn't worked out that sending Frontier Crushville Candy Saga requests to everybody every 20 minutes makes him a cunt.

The Sausage Trilogy part III: Katzenjammers

Concluding the BV silly sausage season, I thought it might be an idea to let the professionals take the reins and review a place that specialises in all things sausagey.

Of course, there aren't really all that many sausage-oriented restaurants around, but one bold exception is Katzenjammers, a German bierkeller close to London Bridge station where you can drink authentic Bavarian beers and enjoy a range of traditional sausages from the region.

Located down a fairly steep flight of steps from Southwark street's Hop Exchange - in what may or may not have once been the site of the legendary Becky's Dive Bar - Katzenjammers is owned by the chaps who run the New Wheatsheaf pub next door, and while the basement look and feel is similar to the 'Sheaf, what's on offer is very, very different.

With long wooden benches and continentally-accented bar staff dressed in Lederhosen (they may technically be Eastern European rather than German but it doesn't shatter the illusion) it does capture the bierkeller atmosphere, and you can even order your beer in litre steins.

One thing that isn't typically German is the lack of table service - you order from the bar, and about half the customers seem to just be in there for a few beers.

When life gives you sausages...

'When life gives you lemons, make lemonade', goes the ancient proverb (which isn't actually all that ancient).

But what if you've just conducted a mammothian sausage taste test and your lemonless life has actually given you a fridge full of sausages?

You make a delicious sausage casserole, that's what. Here's the recipe. It's piss-easy.

Bangin' Bangers - Supermarket sausages taste-tested

When I was a child, Bonfire Night - or Firework Night, as we called it - was my absolute favouritest night of the year.

Better than my birthday, better than Christmas. Better than that day I found all that porn on Mitcham Common.

We didn't have a bonfire and we didn't go in for any of that 'penny for the guy' twattery. But what we did have was fireworks. Not on some common land with hundreds of other people, but our own fireworks in our own garden. Bang.

As soon as they hit the shops, I'd spend all my pocket money and any other cash I could beg, borrow or blag on the biggest, best fireworks I could buy. Then, when the big night came, my brother and I would line them all up, carefully arranging the 'display' in order, with the sparklers first and the biggest fireworks saved until the end.

The post-fireworks meal was always the same too. Sausages. Usually with baked beans and a jacket potato, properly baked in the oven with a thick, blistery skin and loads of butter. Good times.

Cider-pig, Cider-pig

I'm as guilty as anybody of maintaining cider's second-class citizenship as a poor relation to beer.

Pork belly in cider

Don't get me wrong. I like cider a lot and, as other beer writers have noted, it has a stronger claim to being our national drink than ale.

But how often do I write about the stuff? About as often as I put pen to paper on the subject of vegan wholefoods and legumes. Which isn't often, obviously.

At the pub I'll only even look at the ciders available when I've made absolutely fucking damn sure that there are no beers that I want. Even then, if I'm honest, it's more likely that I've already walked out, leaving a Ben-shaped cloud of dust for the cartoon landlord to gently prod into disintegratatedness.

And while beer recipes have been hot fodder for a while now, cider recipes are still a bit thin on the ground.

So, what with it being Autumn'n'shit, it's probably a good time to share a seasonal, cidery recipe with you good people. This is a simple and relatively inexpensive dish that really highlights the relationship betwixt butchered pig and fermented apple.

All my trials soon be over

'You'll be sitting around for hours', 'you'll get sent home early and told not to come back', 'You'll probably just do a one-day trial and that'll be it'...

Pretty much everything that people told me about jury service turned out not to be true. And that's probably for the best.

I started at Woolwich Crown Court last Monday (an absolute cuntbugger of a place to get to, by the way!) and I'm now well into my third case. It's been more or less non-stop and really rather interesting - both the trials themselves and the fascinating insights into the machinations of our flawed but strangely effective legal system.

Truth is, serving on a jury has been an ambition of mine since I was a child, and it's been at least as fulfilling an experience as I'd hoped for, if not moreso.

(I still want to release a single that makes the lower reaches of the charts, I still want to win a parliamentary seat, and I still want to race an Opel Monza against a Ford Granada coupe while listening to Queen, but at least I can tick jury service off the list now!)

The sad (but philosophically necessary) reality is that the more ambitious ambitions are, the more likely they will go forever unfulfilled, but while I'm on a role and still relatively young, it would be nice to try and fulfil some of my foody, drinky ambitions.

That's got to be easier than the Monza-Granada-Queen race, right?

Flap-Jack-Jock-Beef-Cock

Like 45% of the people in Scotland I was disappointed with the referendum result, even though it panned out exactly as I predicted.

Not because I'm a Nationalistic Scot or have any kind of Nationalistic Scottish interests, but because I care rather more passionately than most about answering the West Lothian Question and the unfairness that is the Barnett Formula. Independence for Scotland would have provided a clean and fair resolution to these issues and left the Jocks to do their own thing without impacting unreasonably on the rest of us.

For that reason I was staunchly and unashamedly in the 'vote YES and FUCK OFF' camp. I'm surprised there weren't more of us really. (Not that we got a vote.)

Good news according to Ben

For much of the last few weeks, I've been lain low by the disease of kings. If you want an idea of how excruciating the pain in and around my left ankle has been, I actually went ten whole days without a drink at one point. Seriously. Ten!

It's an insufferable tease too, this gouty fucker. Just when I think it's getting better and I can return to enjoying my usual hearty quantities of ale and meat, the bloody pain strikes again and I'm back spending days on end sat indoors on a diet of low-purine food and Naproxen.

However - and I'm probably setting myself up for another uric fail here - it does finally seem to have subsided somewhat, allowing a pain-free me to focus on some of the really rather good stuff that's been happening lately.

And indeed, to share these good times with my readers.

BV London Pub of the Year 2013-14 - the results

Some jobs are very straightforward.

Look at human statues, for example. They barely move, and yet all-too-frequently have the temerity to expect payment for their efforts! Piss easy.

Being the bass player in the Stereo MCs is also an incredibly easy job. The bassline of 'Connected' contains, literally, one note (an F#), repeated about 500 times. Again, an absolute pissing piece of pissy piss.

A far more challenging task, however, is working out the podium finishes in the Pub of the Year. Believe me, I've spent many sleepless nights staying up weighing up the merits of each pub, trying to work out who should come where in the pecking order and listening to Stereo MCs.

But the wait is over. It's time to reveal the top five pubs in London and crown the 2013-2014 winner!

White lines (Do do it!)

The debate over the harmfulness of electronic cigarettes has been one of this year's hot topics, with industry assertions that using them is safer than staying indoors wrapped in cotton wool tempered by more cautionary counter-claims.

One thing's for certain though - they've really taken off like a big tobaccoey firework. You see a hell of a lot a lot of people vaping these days, not all of them cigarette smokers trying to quit either.

I myself own an e-cig purely for occasional, recreational use whenever I can get hold of refill cartridges in nice fruity flavours. Or chocolate, obviously. OK, and vanilla.

Whether it's harmful or not is fairly immaterial to me, as I consider real smoking a calculated risk worth taking in order to enjoy the occasional briar pipe or watermelon shisha.

But I've held the view for some years now that there is a genuinely 99.99% safe 'vice' that still feels a bit, well, naughty, and yet hardly anybody is aware of it. And it's incredibly enjoyable.

I'm talking about white snuff. Specifically, Schneeberg.

A first timer's guide to the GBBF - from a GBBF old timer

So, the GBBF starts tomorrow, and I've been looking forward to it since, well, since the last one! If I had a calendar, I'd have been crossing off the days in a big red marker pen (but not sniffing the nib afterwards, because that's solvent abuse, kids).

Alcohol abuse, on the other hand, is perfectly fine - so long as it takes place within the awesomeness of a big fuck-off beer festival.

I've been going for 20 years now, and while it was always a unique event, it's now bigger and better than ever and looms like a vast, beery ox in a year-round field of chickens. The very anticipation causes me to come up with fucktarded metaphors.

Anyway, the sheer massiveness of it all it can be a tad daunting for GBBF virgins, so following on from my rough guide to British beer festivals, here are a few friendly tips for anyone who perhaps doesn't have an awful lot of GBBF experience:

Second to Naan

So, Mrs B-V and I have been up in Yorkshire for a couple of days, mostly to drink beer and watch our annual opening-day defeat. No surprises there.

No way, no fucking way!

But we discovered, completely by accident, a lovely little pub - the Fox in Shipley - as well as visiting several favourite haunts in the city of York, and there was a surprise in store there too.

The biggest-by-fucking-miles naan bread I've seen in my entire 37 years.

Honestly, I couldn't believe it. Let alone eat the bastard.

Overall, the food at Akbar's is pretty indifferent and consists basically of a few simple variations upon a standard Balti theme, some of which weren't as saucy as their clearly needed to be.

But the huge naans, served upright on vast spikey towers, are blogworthy out of their sheer ridiculousness.

This wasn't some sort of special Guinness Book of Records attempt or anything either - it's a standard menu item. Most people seemed to have one on their table!

It utterly dwarfed my garlic chicken tikka balti, which itself was a decent size.

I guess things are bigger up north. Though not necessarily better...

BV London Pub of the Year 2013-14 - part four

Alrighty then, it's the final three contenders in this year's Pub of the Year competition. But first, a very brief Q&A following a couple of questions readers have been asking me. Pfft. Readers, eh? Eh...?

Q: Is any pub ever going to score the full 10 points? 

A: Well, the theoretical maximum is actually nine points, and this has been the case since the competition began (it also applies, in a looser sense, to my restaurant reviews - I'm a big fan of the 9* system). As to whether any pub could pick up a perfect score, it's certainly possible, and combining aspects from two of the finalists should give a hefty fucking clue as to how this might be achieved. When it happens, it'll happen.

Q: Why limit the bonus points to 2?

A: Quite simply, because if I allowed pubs to pick up bonuses for everything good about them, they could build up a tally beyond the maximum, and pubs which had a few nice features but average or even piss-poor could theoretically score highly. It's the same reason why food, even supertasty Zeus-food is only worth between -1 and 1 points. This is a pub competition and the scoring system is weighted so that the quality and range of real beer is by far the most important - though not always decisive - factor.

Now on to the final three pubs...

BV London Pub of the Year 2013-14 - part three

OK, so, it's the first batch of the new contenders. Can they challenge the early pacesetters and defending champions?

Given the choice between coming up with a hilarious and thought-provoking intro and diving straight into the pubs, I chose the latter. Enjoy!

BV London Pub of the Year 2013-14 - part two

2013-14 was a great year. Easily as good as 1982-83, and possibly even up to the high standards of 1969-70.

Anyway, here's the next batch of PotY contenders as we run down the remaining finalists from last year's competition. (That's 'run down' as in list them in order, not driving at them in a motor vehicle with murderous intent, obviously.)

The first batch have laid down a competitive gauntlet. Now let's check out the rest...

BV London Pub of the Year 2013-14 - part one

So, it's the height of Summer, and that means only one thing.

Well, actually it means quite a few things. Like higher ambient temperatures than during the rest of the year. And flights to the continent becoming more expensive. And schoolchildren hanging around city centres in the daytime because it's the holidays.

But in Ben Viveurland it means this one, specific thing: London Pub of the Year.

The prestige that comes from winning the PotY trophy cannot be understated, of course.

Last year's winner - no longer with us

Last year a team of professional understaters from the UN spent six weeks attempting to understate the prestige, and all of them went home bitterly frustrated at their abject failure to understate the prestige. One subsequently split from his wife after the feelings of shame failed to go away and began to affect their marriage.

That's how fucking prestigious it is.

It all kicks off today, and, yes, it all feels a little unusual because last year's winner is no longer with us, but we've found a way around that. The scoring system is the same as ever, and personal bias and preference will undoubtedly play a significant role.

Parts one and two will feature the four surviving finalists from last year plus the two natural successors to the Catford Bridge Tavern.

Parts three and four will showcase six fantastic new challengers, and then around a month from now, we'll be announcing the winner and getting the trophy engraved.

Exciting times. And, for one pub, a colossal faceful of prestige is splurging your way. Soon.

Final meal 2014 - Black Forest Churrasco

The super-sharp amongst you will recall that, when Italy faced Spain in the Euro 2012 final, I created an awesome new recipe - Gnocchi Bravas - combining the respective cuisines of the finalists.

The super-curious will now be wondering if I've done something similar for Argentina vs Germany in the World Cup, and the answer is: Yes. Yes, I have.

The super-cautious can probably look away now, as it's a bit, well, left-field. Think of it as an inspired tactical substituion.

Birra alla pompa a Roma

So, Italy turned out to be no better than England at the World Cup. Worse, in fact, if your criteria for judging which team is better is 'results against Costa Rica'.

As I said the other day, nobody hates Italy, though I'm starting to refine that theory slightly on the basis of new information. Specifically:

1. Rome is fucking brilliant for beer. 
2. Rome is fucking shit in a lot of other ways.
3. There is probably nowhere in Italy where the food is bad. 
4. Not even Rome.

Regular readers will have picked up on the fact that I've never much liked lazy beach holidays - not for me the indignity of sprawling, sunburned, for a fortnight on a beach like some sort of floppity-haired manatee - and as such I've always thought of myself as more of a short city break-type person.

But, having just returned from the Italian capital, I've realised that I don't much like them either.

Allow me to explain.

It's almost Pub time

If you run a pub, it might be time to start getting excited. Nervous, maybe. Perhaps even a little aroused.

You see, we're into the final few days of June, which means that the epicentre of the year is fast approaching, and the judging of the 2013-14 London Pub of the Year can begin.

Now in it's third year, the competition is likely to be more intense than ever as the number of brilliant pubs in the capital has increased substantially over the past 12 months. (Obviously if your pub is fucking shit you have nothing to worry about. Move along, nothing to see here...)

You'll probably have noticed that we have a bit of a logistical dilemma though, in that last year's winner, the very wonderful Catford Bridge Tavern closed its doors for the last time just a few months after picking up the trophy.

So, I've given things a lot of thought and come to a decision. I think it's a good one because there are literally no losers. Not yet, anyway.

Tuck Off

Nobody believes me when I tell them about five finger KitKats - there's even misinformation on the internet denying their very existence - but in the mid-1980s they were as real as Feargal Sharkey topping the charts and Findus Crispy Pancakes for tea. 

Designed to fit in the old-fashioned mechanical vending machines that my late grandad serviced for a living, the five fingers were shorter than on the normal model, giving the KitKat what we'd call a 'landscape' orientation these days.

They were one of only two sweet items available from my schools very limited tuck shop - the other being little boxes of chocolate-filled discs, sort of like giant Smarties but much bigger. Bigger even than Minstrels. But I can't for the life of me remember what they were called because I always had a five-fingered KitKat.

The vending machines were always out of order (grandad never came to repair them) and the tuck shop was only open for about 20 minutes a day, which probably added to the allure. When, in 1989, I moved to a massive Secondary school with a permanently open canteen that sold all kinds of crisps and chocolates, including normal 'portrait' KitKats, it just wasn't as special.

Footballfish

So, England's chances of advancing beyond the group stages in Brazil suffered a predictable setback at the hands of Italy, but nobody seems to be particularly disheartened by the result.

Maybe it's because everyone blithely expects Uruguay and Costa Rica to bend over for us so we can continue the ancient English custom of squeaking through to the quarters and losing on penalties.

But maybe it's just because it was Italy. And people don't really mind losing to Italy. Because they don't mind Italy?

I've long thought that the reason that England struggle in World Cup finals is that while they may be consistently good enough to dispatch the weaker nations, there exists a core of national teams that, for various reasons, are more or less invincible to us, even on their bad days.

And Italy are one of those teams that we're simply incapable of beating. Along with Germany, Brazil, Argentina, France, Spain and Portugal. A somewhat lengthy list, which in itself pretty much explains why we never fucking win anything.

The thing is, if it had been Germany or Argentina or one of those other teams that we never beat no matter how well we play, we'd all be right, royally fucked off about it, but because it's Italy, we just, well, sort of accept it. Così è la vita.

Tap Takeovers - crafty fad or natural successor to the tied house?

Whether you believe that 'craft beer' is a product that can be clearly and reasonably defined, an abstract and flexible concept, or a steaming pile of pretentious poo (and, no, we're not going to resurrect that protracted and painful debate here) it's hard to deny that that the craft movement has given us some great, life-enhancing new things.

Innovation. High prices. Black IPAs. Pop-up bars. Breakfast Stouts. Canned beer that isn't bland and metallic. New and exciting hop varieties with big fuck-off citrus flavours.

All good stuff, apart from the high prices,  and one of the latest, and possibly most significant additions to the 'what have the crafterati ever done for us?' list is the Tap Takeover - another concept imported from the USA that could change the way we drink.

I have very little time for the craftwank debating society, but I know I'd rather be going out for beers in 2014 than in 1999 when the only people who had ever heard of a tap takeover were three bearded Oregonians called Josh. (And, being American, they probably called it a 'Faucet Appropriation' or 'Diaper Sidewalk' or something.)

Ten of your Five a Day

If you read enough articles filed under 'health' you will, eventually, explode in a befuzzled ball of contradiction and confusion, and that's only if you haven't already starved yourself to death through abstemious fear.

According to the papers and newswebs, almost everything is bad for us - there are all studies that prove it'n'shit - and yet, according to someone somewhere else, the very same stuff is good for us. Because there are all studies that prove it'n'shit.

So for years and years, we were all told that fruit juices and smoothies were really healthy, but now that message is the sole preserve of the manufacturers of fruit juices and smoothies. Every other nutritiocunt bangs on about how much sugar is in them and how they're as bad as cola-type drinks, which are, of course, the number one cause of obesity on planet obesity.

The 16 species of Beer Drinker

What are the two things we like most in this world?

That's right. Beer. Beer and...

Venn Diagrams! Everybody loves Venn Diagrams, right?

So, where do you fit in?

Drinking beer out of an Easter Egg

Some people might argue that my blog posts are often a little too long; too verbose; too banging-on-about-shit-for-2000-words etc.

So, in a 'fuck that' sort of a vein, this one is just some photos of me drinking beer from an Easter Egg.

Yeah, I know I could posit that this is 'the future' and that brewers could introduce a range of chocolate egg-conditioned ales, but I won't. It's just some wanky photos'n'shit, but quite possibly a world first.

Oh, and the beer was LBC Oyster Stout, at the Tap East. 

Enjoy.

The more-or-less random guide to beer and music pairing

While the rest of you were lazily completing the London Marathon yesterday, I was crossing a far more important finishing line, with a pint of Conwy Surfin' IPA.

Yep, it's the end of another round of Spoons Bingo, and having ticked off the 50 beers on the Wetherlist I can go back to mostly drinking in normal pubs. Yay!

...and that's 50 out of 50!

It has to be said that I wasn't hugely impressed with the ales this time around and there were one or two really strange flavours in the mix. Mauldon's 'Lemon Adder' tasted like cold lemon tea, while I detected more than a hint of instant gravy granules in Nethergate 'Hell Hound'!

And even more bizzarely, Bateman's 'Springtime Oatmeal Biscuit' reminded me of tempura prawns. No, really.

Or maybe there was just something up with my tastebuds that night?

Anyway, while sitting in the Crosse Keys in the City the other evening, working my way through many of these strange beers and listening to 'sum choonz', I suddenly came up with a brilliant idea.

Or, at least, a brilliant-after-eight-pints-of-strangely-flavoured-biannual-festival-ales idea.

Beer and music pairing.

I mean, how fucking cool is that?

It's grim up North

OK, when I say, 'GO', I want you to think of the top three great cuisines of the world and name them aloud.

In fact, give me the top five. You ready...?

GO!

........

So, what have we here then? French? Sure. Italian? Indian? Japanese? Did somebody clever say Turkish Cypriot? Maybe even American or Mexican?

But I'm guessing nobody gave much thought to the food of Iceland. And that's reasonable, given that it doesn't have much of a reputation on the global platter, and any crumbs of reputation it does have tend to focus on stereotypes of Scandinavian stodge and manky pickled fish.

It wasn't a topic I'd spent a lot of time thinking about either, but I've just got back from Reykjavik where I was able to enjoy - or perhaps 'endure' might be a better word - some traditional Icelandic food, and add some empirical weight to my affirmation of the stereotype.

Shooting practice with Spiced Applescotch

You might find it difficult to believe, perhaps even a little upsetting by proxy, but occasionally my blog comes in for some... how can I put this... criticism?!?

It's alright. I can take it.

Sometimes readers disagree with my view - which is their privilege and right - and there will always be irritable brewers and or restauranteurs who decide that I've been overly critical of their restaurant or their beer and get all touchy about it. I guess it's easier to go on the defensive than looking at the reasons why somebody might have found their product to be a bit shit.

Then there are those who, despite my incontravertible loveliness, just don't appreciate my particular writing style, or who are offended by the prevalence of swearing. Fair enough. You go and read summat else then, wankycunt. I'll stay here and make cheap profanity gags.

One common criticism that I think has been entirely resonable and just though, has been about the quality of the photography. I think it's fair to say that often the snapshots taken on a 3 year old phone perhaps don't quite do justice to the food I've prepared.

So... I done got me a new camera.

Pornographic Joy

Over the past week I've had to firmly bite my tongue and reign in some of my more controversially heartfelt opinions, following the passing of certain individuals with whom I probably would not have got along.

But I face no such moral dilemma today.

Cards on the dining table, I'm genuinely saddened to hear about the death of Clarissa Dickson-Wright, one of my favourite 'celebrity chefs' - if such a tawdry description isn't doing her a disservice - and a truly great English eccentric.

The finest foodie television of the late 1990s saw Clarissa infamously paired up with Jennifer Paterson, an equally outspoken lady of similar girth and uncompromising good taste.

It's been nearly 15 years since Paterson's death brought Two Fat Ladies to a premature end - Christ, time flies, doesn't it? - and it's strange to think that, at 66, Dickson-Wright is actually younger than Paterson was when they started making the series. Both taken too soon.

Can canned beer ever be any good?

Before we were old enough to get served in pubs, my friends and I used to buy cans of beer from the corner shop. We thought it was all very grown up - particularly because we eschewed the usual Fosters and Stella in favour of tinned John Smiths, McEwans Export, and my favourite at the time, Royal Oak.

There was even a 'draught' bitter from Guinness with one of those plastic 'widgets' in the can, which were all the rage in the early 90s. It was probably discontinued years ago, but back in the day it was massive, and even had its own bizarre TV ad, where some guy travelled to an unspecified hot country and chose to keep his supply of Guinness bitter in a river!

Remember this?

I thought it was a nice beer at the time, but I ate Big Macs and Dairy Milk back then as well. Didn't know any better (which was ironic as I thought I knew it all).

Once the pubs started letting us in and we got to drink real beer on a regular basis, it soon dawned on me that the metallic fizz we'd been supping was inherently inferior, and that was that, really. For the best part of 20 years, I've only ever drunk canned beers very, very occasionally, and then usually only out of politeness.

That changed a couple of days ago.

Better beerfests and Big bears in Battersea

Following my comments the other day about Batemans brewery making some great strides forward, I should probably conserve some of the same breath to mention last weeks Battersea Beer Festival, another once sickly patient showing great signs of life and strength.

Because it was the closest one to where I grew up, Battersea was one of the first beer festivals I ever attended, and consequently became one of the first I got a bit disillusioned with.

OK, a lot disillusioned with. And probably with due cause.

Set in a small space within the Battersea Arts Centre, it would often fill to capacity, meaning a lengthy queue outside. And when you got inside there would only be a few beers on, mostly bland, boring, mainstream stuff that you could drink in greater comfort in a pub just down the road anyway.

Sometimes you wouldn't even get in - turned away after 45 minutes standing outside in the cold, because they'd run out of beer. I remember one occasion when they let people in for free because the only beers on were Young's Ordinary and Winter Warmer or something. It really wasn't much of a festival.

And so some years I wouldn't bother with Battersea at all.

This is all going back a few years, mind. I don't know if CAMRA's National Executive put them on special measures or something, but, last week's fest suggested that Battersea have completely turned things around.

Chocolate digestives and black pepper - in beer

When I first started properly drinking beer, Batemans were one of my very favourite breweries. Valiant, XXXB and Salem Porter were all music to my teenaged tastebuds, and the one-off Jawbreaker, brewed with hard toffee, was my favourite beer of 1996.

I even immortalised Batemans XB in a rather ghastly poem I wrote as a student:

"'Quintuple rum and black', said she.
It came to twelve pounds twenty-three
Including, of course, a pint for me
(of Batemans XB)"

The only other verse I remember is:

"Said he, 'this bird's with me tonight.
We'll settle this outside - ALRIGHT?!?'
And out of me he kicked the shite
(I lost the fight)"

I like to think that the quality of both my writing and my nights out have improved since then!

Pepys' cheese on toast

One of the loveliest foodie images of all time is that of Samuel Pepys burying his cheese when the Great Fire of London started.

I'm sure he did his bit helping to evacuate the women and children or whatever, but I just love the idea that his hunk of Parmesan was of such profound importance to him that he was damned if he'd allow it to melt away in some nasty fire.

Truly a man of high principle and considered priority!

Anchovy-fried Crostini with Parmesan shavings

Nobody really knows why Parmesan was so significant in Pepys' day, just that it was. Experts have theorised that Parmesan may have been used as a generic seasoning in place of salt, and added to meals to make them taste, well, nicer.


Our Sammy wouldn't have been sprinkling it on Spag Bol or Risotto which were still centuries away from London's menus, but clearly it was one of the most valuable and treasured imports at the time (some say more expensive than gold).

You can imagine the men of the late Renaissance tucking into big hunks of meat with some gently melting Parmesan on top, giving the flavour an umami boost. I'd hazard that they also whacked a bit in when making soups and stews.

Improved import channels with Parma mean that it's not so expensive these days and possibly not worth burying in the event of fire, but it's remarkable how Parmesan has stood the test of time.

We're still finding new things to sprinkle it on to make them taste even better - and here's a brand new recipe that does just that.

5:2 diet - the 2014 update

Hmm, so it's almost the end of January and I finally get around to blogging my first, err, blog of the year. Pretty lazy, even by my rather languid standards.

Alright, here's what happened:

Putting my life back together, following an unsuccessful Christmas, I disguised myself as a trio of travelling Italian chefs and worked my passage Southwards, wearing only a series of edible loinclothes, until I reached the Andes, having ceded over a quarter of my bodyweight to the elements along the way...

Perfectly convincing story, yes?

You fucking have it your way then. I'm blogging away now, aren't I?

And I promise you, I will be sharing a bunch of new recipes and reviews over the next couple of months. In the meantime though, I thought I'd respond to some of the correspondence I receive occasionally - specifically, all you chaps and chapesses who ask me how the Intermittent Fasting ('5:2') diet is going.

Not that I actually get a lot of correspondence, mind. More would be welcome. Please write to me, please, please, please...