Dear Mr. Vernon...

It's been a while since my intrepid search to find the best breakfast around turned up any new savoury evidence. Well, let's be brutally honest, it's been a while since I blogged about absolutely fucking anything, isn't it?

So, let's do a quick Brekkie review. Specifically The Breakfast Club, where I breakfasted last week. On my birthday. 42, since you asked. Getting old.

Anyway, 'The Club' has several locations across the capital, from Battersea to Hoxton as well as Oxford and Brighton, all of which should give you a general idea of where they are coming from and what sort of market they are after. (Possibly not 42 year olds, even if it is their birthday.)

Capital Breakfasts

You might remember, way, way back at the very dawn of the year, I enjoyed a rather fine breakfast at Duke's Brew and Que and resolved to seek out London's other great breakfasts to see if the Duke could be matched or perhaps even bested...

It went the way of most resolutions made at that time of year, obviously.

Yes, I know. I've let my readers down, I've let myself down, but most of all, I've let breakfast down.

It's the-most-important-meal-of-the-day, so it is, and I've done gone and let it down by utterly failing to stick to my pledge.

Well, until now that is.

Look, I'm not really a morning person. It's a lot of effort getting up and leaving the house before I've even properly woken up. It's hard enough on work days. And I don't even have an appetite until lunchtime usually.

But enough excuses. You've had to wait a long while, so, to celebrate Ben Viveur post No. 150,  here's a double review of the breakfast fayre from two of London's big meaty heavyweights: Simpson's in the Strand and the Hawksmoor Guildhall.

Can silly money buy the best breakfast in London or just the most expensive?

Hard and Fast day

Today has probably been the hardest fast day since I started doing the 5:2 diet over seven months ago.

It comes a couple of days after my birthday, so I've been drinking beer and eating cake and doing other things that I'm well entitled to do 'because it's my fucking birthday'.

But for some reason it's been particularly hard fasting today - all I've had is a little tub of flavourless cous-cous and a soup that tasted like watery mushy peas. Ugh.

It's been unsatisfying to the point of starvation, and I literally feel hollow and empty. Bad times.

I feel like beer, burgers and chilli cheese fries that burn my mouth.

Basically, I feel like another visit to Lucky Chip burger now, having belatedly discovered their full gorgeousness on Tuesday night. God, that would really hit the spot right now.

Oh yes, sit down my children, and I shall tell you a tale. A tale of aged beefy goodness. And fries.

Break Fast

One thing my diet of intermittent fasting has taught me - along with the satietal importance of soup, obviously - is the value of breakfast.

Yeah, I know the etymology; the whole thing about breaking ones fast'n'shit, but this is the first time that's really made sense on any kind of practical level.

See, for many years I've generally only partaken of a big cooked breakfast in the morning when either getting up early to travel somewhere (typically having a full English in an Airport Wetherspoons) or while staying in a hotel (on the morning of New Years Eve I had a fairly decent plateful at the Mortimer Arms near Romsey - first time I've had fried bread for many years, which in itself probably isn't a bad thing!)

A bad breakfast is an unpleasant thing, whether you're hungry in the mornings or not. During in the early-Naughties I lived for some time above a pub in Ipswich where a greasy and unpleasant full breakfast was served every morning. Sometimes the fried egg even had cigarette ash in it. After a few months of this I told them I'd go without. None of the other guests seemed to mind much, but then they consisted almost exclusively of builders from Teeside.
 
Anyway, I have been known to fry up a fry-up at home occasionally, but this would be our main meal of the day and probably eaten sometime well North of midday. During normal, everyday, stay-at-home life, I'd never think 'ooh, let's get up early and go out for breakfast!'

But this might be the year where that all changes.

On the mornings following fasting days I'm often ready for something substantial and assuming I stick to the diet for a while, 2013 could well end up being the year I seek out the best breakfast in London.

Montaguan Bicenquinquagenary

As many people predicted, England’s strategy of playing for penalties coupled with being quite bad at taking penalties means that we’ll have to wait a while longer for national sporting pride to be restored.

Maybe we'll do better in the Tennis? Or maybe we won't. Andy Murray's first round match at Wimbledon is a ridiculously tough one against Davydenko, and if he gets through that, the giant Croat Ivo Karlovic will likely await him in the second round. Two very strong opponents who in previous Championships would have been amongst the seeds.

So prepare for the crushing disappointment of an early Murray exit. Our best hope of getting a player into the second week might be Laura Robson who won the Jailbait singles a few years ago.

Murray's not even English, anyway.

But one thing we true Englishmen, women and children can – nay, must - celebrate this year is the 250th anniversary of our people inventing the sandwich. Go England! Go John Montagu! Hereditary Peerage is the mother of invention!

I've blogged about sandwiches before, of course, as like many people I often eat them for my lunch, but now there's a (relatively) new sandwich shop in town: 

The Earl of Sandwich on Ludgate Hill looks very nice on the outside, with a fairly classy branding that emphasises the heritage and history of stuffing bread with tasty fillings.

Baltic Birthday

Nobody likes getting old much, do they?

I spoke to a 101-year-old recently whose refreshing and darkly candid take on her longevity was 'I hate being old. All my friends are dead!'

I've a comparatively long way to go, not that I'm likely to make it that far, but I did 'celebrate' my 35th last week, and to add insult to injury, I was accosted by not one but two market research people the very next day, and had to select, for the first time, the '35-44' box in which I shall be stuck for the next decade!

I'm now officially part of the target audience for Radio 2, The Spectator and Guy Clapperton's LifeOver35 blog, although in preperation I've been reading the latter for a few months, the Speccie for several years, and I actually like to think I've outgrown the Light Programme!

In recent months I've been acquiring new ailments left, right and centre, and a spell of extended stress at work (it would be less depressing working at a children's hospice) is taking its toll on my blood pressure. 

All I need now to trigger the textbook midlife crisis is a bad marriage - though, fortunately, I'm very happy being married to Mrs B-V who surprised me with a unique birthday present in the form of a trip to Latvia!

Beer

Chronophobia aside, the big day itself was quite enjoyable, with several beers at the Craft Beer Company to numb the pain, some of which were very good indeed. Highlights included Summer Wine Diablo, 6% and bursting with Citra hops, and a Black IPA from Arbor, though the 7.5% Breakfast Stout from the same brewery was a long and sickly struggle from the first sip to the bottom of the glass.

Birthday beer

Fortunately our flight to Riga the following day wasn't until late afternoon, so I didn't pay too heavy a price for overindulgence in strong ale. My system probably needed to stock up too, as Latvia isn't known for it's beer. Or, indeed, anything much.

Firstly, a few recommendations for anybody thinking of visiting Riga:


1. You can realistically 'do' Riga in a single day, so it's probably a bad idea to book a stay of more than two nights. We had two nights and were getting bored.

Being 35+ I'm never happier than when sitting down, but Riga is one of these 'old towns' that you have to walk around, with manky cobbled streets. Never been my kind of destination, and probably never will. Some things don't change as you get older. 



2. Try to avoid ever flying Ryanair. To anywhere. They are cheap, but their planes are cramped and unpleasant and we got stung with 'security charges' at the airport which they had deliberately not included in the upfront price to keep it cheap. Wankers.

There wasn't even a bus to take people from the gate to the plane, despite the plane being further from the gate than I've ever seen before - probably around 400 yards, which is a long way to dash in torrential rain with other aircraft moving disconcertingly around as you run across the tarmac.


3. Avoid using the strangely-named Terravision coach service to Stansted. It's bad enough having to fly from fucking Stansted in the first place, without this total shower of incompetence. 

Rather than running to timetables, they seem to depart only when there are enough bodies to completely fill the thing up, which for us meant standing in the aforementioned rain at Stratford worrying that we'd miss our flight on the way out, and standing around at Stansted late at night, knowing that we'd miss the last DLR on the way home.

It's the Ryanair of coaches.


4. In fact, don't fucking fly at all. There's too much hanging around, too much hassle getting to and from airports, too much turbulence and fearing for your life, and too few people in passport control at British airports. 

It's the Terravision of travel. Except that that's already Terravision.



5 (and back on the actual subject of Latvia rather than general whinging about shit). Don't take too much money. Riga is cheap and it's hard to spend. You can get a half-litre of beer in a bar in the centre for about £1.30 and a plate of food for the same price. I bought the best spoon ever for about a fiver. No, really. It's a great spoon.
 

The important stuff

So, what about the food and drink?


Well, with so little to do we spent quite a lot of time eating and drinking, and I noticed some similarities to Lithuania and Estonia, both of which I've previously visited. 

Grey peas; Steak with liquor

The national dish is grey peas, which thankfully aren't like peas as we know them, but a sort of cross between split peas and black-eyed beans, cooked with onion and bacon. It's not unpleasant and widely available (for a couple of quid).

What was unpleasant, however, was lunch on our first day. Somehow we seemed to find ourselves in a workers cafe in the basement of some government offices and not knowing about the food, just pointed to something behind the glass which we ascertained was a sort of potato pancake with meat inside.

The 'meat' was some kind of reconstituted pulp, almost entirely unseasoned apart from the sour cream which they seem to serve with everything in this part of the world. Maybe it was pink slime? I couldn't eat much of it without gagging, whatever it was.

Oh for some beer to cleanse my mouth...

Riga has a brewpub, Lido, located in some suburban shopping mall away from the old town that we didn't get to visit, but their beers are available fairly widely, and their old town outpost, Alus Seta offered an opportunity to try the closest thing to proper beer in the area (and some grey peas!)

This lot cost about £2.80

As expected, it's nothing to write home about. I tried their regular light lager, a honey beer which was a bit more interesting, and an amber which was darker and maltier. All of it was very fizzy and none of it was particularly hoppy.

Alus Seta is also well known for it's traditional Latvian food, though slightly disconcertingly, you have to queue up, canteen-style, with a tray and point to everything you want.

Suck it and see

Again we didn't know exactly what we were getting, but most of the stuff here was indeed very good. Skewers of moist chicken, garlic roast potatoes, thick garlic-infused steak with a parsley sauce a bit like the 'liquor' dispensed by our very own pie'n'mash shops. 

Clearly if you choose the right thing, there is some tasty food to be had here.

Garlic Bread? Garlic? Bread? Queens?

While some of the food can be bland, garlic features heavily and, as is common in this region, the garlic bread is something rather special - black rye bread deep fried in thin slices, probably in garlic-infused oil, and liberally coated with smushed garlic. 

Served with blue cheese sauce in the Queens pub, they were particularly good, though perhaps not the healthiest snack ever.


There was unfiltered wheat beer on here (passable), as well as Latvian 'Kiss' cider, which is a lot like the Scandinavian ciders that have taken off over here in recent years - horribly, horribly sweet and synthetic-tasting.

But as we were staying for a few (and some vodka, balsam and cream liquers) we were able to eat our way through the food menu, which was at odds with the 'English pub' theme.

After the garlic bread, smoky hunters sausages and slow-roasted pork belly in chilli were good accompaniments for an afternoon's drinking before we had to catch the plane home, and if I'd known how long and manky the journey home would be (we didn't get back until 2:30 AM) I'd have had more to drink!

'City of contrasts' is a cliche that's been done to death, but it's probably a fair reflection on Riga. Some of the food was very tasty, but there's not a lot to see or do (a 35 minute ride on a little cart seems to cover everything) and there are other, more interesting parts of the former USSR. Like Ukraine. And Estonia.

Am I glad I've been? Yes.

Was it a good birthday present? Yes. Thank you, Mrs B-V.

Would I want to go back, or go through the experience again? Fuck, no!

Porty Pig

Continuing with the January shopping theme from the other day, I recently found, in Tesco, a sugar-, dairy- and Lord-knows-what-else-free Advent Calendar had been reduced from a couple of quid to a quid to 49p.

And now to just 6p. 

Yep. Sixpence. 

That's 24 tiny shaped chocolates at just a farthing apiece! I think.

At that price, I just had to buy it, even knowing it would probably be awful, and we’d only eat one or two of the things before throwing it away.

And I wasn’t disappointed, in that I was, obviously, if that makes sense. The chocolates were 'bland, yet strange', as many vital-ingredient-free foods often are, and duly ended up in the bin. 

Even if it were still the season of Advent and this was the only chocolate I was eating, I'd probably pass. But it was worth it just for the sense of snouting out an irrepressible bargain!

Another bargain, at just 65 pence (three and six in the old money or something, probably) was a pound of pigs liver, which set the wheels turning in my mind for a new dish – four different bits of pig, slow cooked in a port sauce, accompanied with Stilton mash.

Now, people don’t eat a whole lot of pigs liver in these offal-sceptic times, which is probably why it's so inexpensive, and I’d be the first to admit I wouldn’t want it every day, but it’s probably quite good for you and definitely has it’s place in dishes like this.

While the liver is dirt cheap, you’ll need to buy expensive sausages with a high meat content so they don’t fall apart or absorb liquid and become squidgy, and it almost always pays to buy decent, thick bacon as you probably know already.

I thoroughly recommend Black Farmer sausages, though anything with 90%+ meat content is good for this recipe.

This is a dish you can enjoy at your leisure on a long Winter evening. And afterwards you can choose between Port and Stilton or a 'free from' Advent Calendar chocolate...

Porty Pig with Stilton Mash

Four kinds of pig, Port and Stilton...

Ingredients - makes at least four big portions.

Pigs liver, about half a pound, cleaned, trimmed and sliced into bite site pieces

Lean minced pork, about half a pound

Smoked Back Bacon, 6-8 thick rashers, coarsely chopped

Pork sausages (90%+ meat), 6-8, cut into bite size chunks

Onion, two large or three medium, coarsely chopped

Tomatoes, 3-4, cut into eighths (or twelfths if very large)

Garlic, a few cloves, chopped

Cumin

Sage

Black pepper

Celery Salt

Plain flour or Corn flour to thicken

Worcestershire Sauce

Port

For the mash:

White Potatoes, cooked and mashed.

Butter

Blue Stilton
  

Method: 

Mix some plain flour with the cumin, celery salt, sage, black pepper and cumin (aiming for a 50-50 ratio of flour and spice) and dust your liver pieces. 

In a big, lidded, pan begin frying your bits of sausage in a little oil on a high heat, adding the garlic and onions after a few minutes. As the sausage starts to brown, add the liver and bacon, ensuring everything is kept moving and is evenly cooked. 

Finally add the minced pork, a good dash of Worcestershire sauce and whatever spice/flour mix you have left. 

Cook until all the meat has seen some heat and is nicely grey-brown, then chuck in the tomatoes and your first dash of port. 

Another few minutes at an high temperature, and you'll be able to turn the heat down, add a little more port and put the lid on. Let it simmer and bubble for a good hour or two, stiring occasionally with a big wooden spoon. 

While the piggy goodness is cooking away, absorbing the richness of the liver and port, you can prepare your mash as you see fit, adding butter and stilton to taste. 

For added portiness, add a final dash to the meat shortly before serving, and if the sauce is too liquidy, a little flour to thicken won't do any harm.

Enjoy!

The A-Z of BLTs

The annoying thing about 'little-known facts' is that they tend to do the rounds until everybody knows them, which seems to defeat the object really.

A surprising number of people know that Mike Nesmith’s mum invented Tipp-Ex, but fewer know that my father invented the BLT.

That might be because he didn’t actually invent it, obviously, but as a hungry child I believed he had invented the BLT, and in many ways that’s more important.

Back in the 1980s and early 90s, we often drove out into the countryside – or at least as far as Mitcham Common which almost felt like the countryside in them days - to catch pond life, walk disused railway trackbeds and extinguish forest fires.

Spartan by name...

We’d sing folk songs as we jauntily sped along in his Spartan Roadster or whatever eccentric vehicle he happened to be driving that month, armed with a picnic hamper full of apples, fruitcake, beer nuts, those little stubby bottles of Ruddles County they used to do back when it was still good, and, of course, BLT sandwiches.

(Another little-known fact, and one that's actually true this time: Dad sold his Spartan to one of the puppeteers from Spitting Image!)

It's commonplace these days, of course - the BLT, not the Spartan Roadster - and quite possibly the most popular sandwich filling in the world, but to a growing and excitable lad back then, they were a revelation.

Bacon had hitherto been something eaten hot for breakfast or cooked with liver in a thick sauce. Sandwiches contained ham, jam or peanut butter and that was that. But cold bacon? In a sandwich with lettuce, tomato and mayonnaise?!? This bold new invention blew my mind and instantly became my favourite sandwich.

The Father Christmas moment

It was at least a couple of years before I realised that Dad hadn’t invented it at all – not that he’d ever actually claimed as much, mind – and that people all over the world were enjoying BLTs and had been doing so long before I existed.

Maybe it was watching Trading Places a lot that did it – eventually I’d have realised that the scene where the old boys explain pork belly trading to Billy-Ray refers to a bacon, lettuce and to-may-to sandwich, and as such, it probably wasn’t confined to my father’s picnic hamper.

Randolph and Mortimer didn’t quell my enjoyment of the BLT too much though and I’ve continued to eat them regularly for the last 20-odd years, which has been singularly unchallenging because availability is, to put it mildly, widespread verging on ubiquitous.

And whoever actually invented it, the little-known fact I want to establish is where to get the best BLT within five minutes of 1 Canada Square. With plenty of options to choose from the only thing for it was to try and eat my way through every BLT available on The Wharf – not in one sitting, mind – and see if any of them can hold a candle to those I consumed eagerly as a boy.

The ambrosia of nostalgia means that they invariably won’t, but there’s no such thing as a really bad BLT, though some are quite a bit better than others - and I should know as I've eaten BLT for lunch every day for the last week…

  

B to the L to the T

Pret Beech Smoked BLT, £2.89 (or £3.45 eat in!)

First up, we have the most widely-available BLT on the Wharf, due to the sheer number of Pret outlets. Their reputation ain’t what it was a decade ago, and the BLT demonstrates just why this is the case!

The Pret BLT looks the part but fails to deliver on taste. The granary bread is sliced too thin, making the sandwich dry on the outside but fall-aparty in the middle due to a surplus of tomato juice.

There is lots of smoky bacon, but it’s a bit greasy, and the Romaine lettuce isn’t a good choice to cut through this.

It could also have done with a good, sharp mayo, but instead the whole thing lacks flavour, and it’s very poor value compared to most of the competition.

Rating: Disappointing

Tesco BLT. £1.80 (or cheaper as part of meal deal)

The mainstream supermarket option boasts a decent amount of filling and ticks all the boxes for a classic BLT.

The bacon is sweet rather than smoky, the ratios are right, and while it’s not exceptional, it’s good value and does the job.

Rating: Acceptable

Tesco ‘Light Choices’ BLT, £1.50

At only 290 calories and with over 30% less fat than Tesco’s standard BLT, this is an appealing option that could do well in the Satiety Index.

The ‘formed’ bacon has a processed feel to it, is unsmoked, and there’s not much of it. Suprisingly for a low-fat offering there’s not much salad either, but the malted granary bread doesn’t taste like a cut-down option.

The low-fat dressing in lieu of mayonnaise tastes of very little, and to add a little something, the sandwich contains a lot of black pepper.

The whole thing is a bit weedy, but then it’s meant to be a healthy option.

Rating: Disappointing (but OK in a low-calorie context)

EAT Handmade BLT, £2.89 (£3.45 eat in)

EAT are the new, smaller, Pret and appear to have copied their business model almost to the letter, not to mention their prices.

The difference is that EAT’s BLT is far better.

The sandwich is well-filled with a good balance between the perfectly char-grilled and very meaty back bacon and the salad components. A mix of lollo rosso and frisee (I think!) lettuce adds interest to the texture, and the tomato comes through nicely.

The bread is again malted grain, which seems to be the standard BLT holder, and my only criticism is that there could have been a smidgen more mayo.

Rating: Tasty

Waitrose/Boots British BLT. £2.45 (or cheaper as part of meal deal)

Branded as ‘Waitrose’ but on sale in Boots next door, this is a visually appealing sandwich, with a lighter bread, crisp iceberg lettuce and plenty of tomato and mayonnaise giving it a fresh and colourful appearance.

The bacon is smoked and fairly salty, and I like a little more gravity to my bread, but this is a very strong contender and would be particularly enjoyable outdoors in the height of Summer.

Rating: Pleasant

Kruger ‘Really Fresh’ American crispy bacon with tomatoes, lettuce & mayo, £2.40

Kruger’s speciality is fresh juices and smoothies, but their entry into the BLT fray is an interesting one.

There’s plenty of filling and the bread is a decent, fresh granary with lots of bits.

The salad is fine but the bacon is strange - unsmoked, dry and brown and broken up into little bits, almost like the soya-based ‘bacon flavour’ topping you put on salads. They have a tendency to fall out and make the sandwich less satisfying to eat.

It might be ‘Really Fresh’ but it’s also ‘Really Salty’ – way too much sodium and not enough mayo. It’s a shame because if they kept the bacon in whole slices and added more mayo to cut through the salt, they’d have a good sandwich. 

Or maybe I've just overdosed?

Rating: Frustrating

Birley hand-made BLT, £3.85

The plan was to save the best until last, and this is the only place on The Wharf (of which I’m aware) where there’ll assemble the sandwich in front of you. Fresh is good, and the freshness is evident immediately, particularly in the crunchy lettuce and juicy tomato.

They offer a choice of white or brown bread and various options, but to ensure a fair comparison with the other sandwiches in the test, all of which are served on granary, I went for brown and mayo only. It’s very nice brown bread too, full of nutty grains.

It’s the most expensive BLT by some distance, but it’s a big doorstep fucker, with loads of filling and therefore the most substantial. The bacon is of the streaky variety, and I usually prefer back, but it’s tasty and there’s lots of it, while the mayo has the right balance between creaminess and sharpness.

Even after several days of lunching on BLTs, this went down a treat and it’s the only one that really took me back to the golden age. Next time I want a BLT at lunchtime (which probably won't be for another couple of weeks) I'm coming back to Birley.

Rating: BriLlianT

The Linguine Experiment?

Like the proverbial physician, my bacon-burnt mouth healed itself, though not without a thirst for breakfasty revenge.

Bacon, Eggs, Sauce of brown; O how may I demand satisfaction of thee?!?

Well, the idea came to me while shopping for ingredients for two seemingly unrelated meals: Let's cook a pasta dish containing only the staple ingredients of an English Breakfast (and pasta, obviously). Yeah, that'll learn 'em.

The more I thought about it, the bigger the challenge seemed. Instinctively linguine (or tagliatelle or spaghetti or whatever) is just crying out for a sauce of onions, basil, oregano, red wine, red peppers and Parmesan - all things I'd have to do without.

Instead, I got to use bacon, sausage, table condiments and, as a radical gamble, pink grapefruit juice. It just felt right, and besides, there are plenty of dishes that call for lemon, lime and occasionally orange, so why not give the black sheep of the citrus family a rare outing?

And the recipe works. Pretty much. Just not as revenge.

It seemed obvious to whack a lightly poached egg on top and let the gooey yolk run into the linguine as a final flourish, so that's what I did.

But egg-poaching is fiendishly hard to get right, with a very poor effort-to-reward ratio, which is why I hardly ever attempt to poach eggs unless absolutely necessary.

Consequently, being all out of practice, I somehow managed to get a load of eggshell in the pan, reached in to remove it and succeeded in not only destroying the egg, but also burning my finger...

They fucking got me again.

Full English Breakfast Linguine

Ingredients - serves any number

Linguine, fresh, as much as you need
Smoked sausage, a couple, chopped into bite-size bits
Smoked Bacon, chopped
Eggs, one per person, to be poached at last minue
Mushrooms, a few per person, chopped
Tomatoes, about one large per person, chopped
Black Pepper

Tomato Ketchup
Brown Sauce
Pink Grapefruit juice
Olive Oil
Butter


Method

Heat the oil and butter in a big sautee pan, and fry the bacon, sausage and mushrooms until lightly brown.

 

It's like two meals in one!

Add the tomatoes and cook for a few more minutes, before turning the heat down, adding black pepper, ketchup, brown sauce and grapefruit juice to taste, then cover and leave to simmer for 20 minutes.

Cook your linguine in a big pot in boiling water until done, then drain, and pour in your sauce, tossing vigourously so that the pasta is covered with the strange, breakfasty concoction.

Finally poach each person an egg. Carefully. And don't overdo them. You need a runny yolk.

Plate up the pasta, put the poached egg on top, prick it with a fork and then maybe sprinkle some black pepper on top of it all.

Be very careful when eating this meal: it combines breakfast and dinner ingredients, so you might get all confused and end up going to bed in the morning or something. In fact, fuck it. Do exactly that. It's a free country'n'shit. See if I care (which I don't, obviously).

Typically you'd expect to serve a sausagey, bacony pasta dish with an elegant Italian Red, but due to the breakfastyness, this would probably go quite well with a glass of fruit juice or a strong black coffee.

Enjoy!

Seared tongue and snapper

Frying the brunchtime bacon last Saturday, as I frequently do at around brunchtime on a Saturday, I allowed myself the luxury of eating a little piece that had stuck to the (non-stick) pan. Big mistake.

Extra crispy and sizzly, I scraped it off with the spatula and popped it straight into my mouth to enjoy the smoky, salty goodness before I whacked the tomatoes to the pan to cook them in the bacon juices, as one does on Saturday brunchtimes.

At the time it didn’t seem like a big deal. Having glued itself to the pan at a high temperature, it scalded my mouth, and I should have fucking learned my lesson by now I know, but I thought nothing more of it, and it certainly didn’t stop me cooking, eating, and enjoying my Saturday brunch. Or watching the FA Cup final. Or Eurovision later that evening.

But fast-forward a couple of days to when the brunchtime payload reached it's zenith, and my mouth is suffering horrendously. What’s more, I can’t really taste anything but the strongest, most pungent flavours.

 

The antiseptic effect of cask-strength Ardbeg last night may or may not have healed my blistered tongue and palate a little, but my failure to appreciate light, delicate, subtle flavours extended, unfortunately, to today’s business lunch at Curve.

Which is a fish restaurant - possibly not what your remaining tastebuds would choose when most of their brethren have been burned away by a tiny morsel of hot pig!