Non-alcoholics Anonymous

When they first went mainstream back in the late 1980s, non-alcoholic and low alcohol beers swiftly became the butt of jokes. They were right up there with Eastern Bloc cars and straight-to-video horror films on the International Crapness Scale.

Apparently you can still buy this stuff

Barbican. Kaliber. Possibly a bottle of Clausthaler if you were in an upmarket wine bar and wanted your non-alcohol imported. It was all woeful.

Maybe you're lucky enough to be too young to remember. Unfortunately I'm not. And because they were non-alcoholic I recall them with greater clarity than any other beers I drank as a teenager.

Even then, it wasn't just about the not-getting-drunk either. They tasted so extraordinarily bland that they didn't even qualify as a good soft drink. An afternoon drinking Kaliber and skipping school left one yearning for a can of Quatro. Remember that? Quatro?

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...

Ten food trends I suppose I ought to have an opinion on

People occasionally come up to me and ask my opinion on various things.

Usually it's something along the lines of  'where's the best vegan restaurant in North Dakota that's open after midnight on Sundays?' or 'which pubs in London serve a hemp and raspberry stout and do a full breakfast -  as a child's portion?'

I give them the best answers I can, and then try to veer the conversation towards a topic where I have strongly held, staunchly right-wing opinions, in the hope that they'll run away like a simpering jackal.

You already know what I think about some of the big issues. Like tank beer, the horsemeat 'scandal', and why it's a fucking Marathon bar, not a S**ckers.

So, for a change, here's my take on some less important stuff. The trivialities that don't keep me awake at night.

It'll save you having to come up and ask me!

The miracle that didn't happen

I'm not exactly an investigative journalist, am I?

Too lazy. Too languid. Probably too self-absorbed (or at least, too absorbed in the stuff I like and a reality with which I'm comfortable).

But since I've been doing the 5:2 diet I've heard a fair few whispers about these 'ere new-fangled 'Miracle noodles', and so a little investigating really had to be done.

Just a teensy bit, mind. Basically just trying the product and then writing about how amazingly great / shittingly bad / soul-numbingly indifferent it is. (It's the middle one.)

After all, I'll try pretty much anything once. I've eaten alligator... ants... silica gel... a meal in Spaghetti House...

Would 'Salmon rush tea' be the worst pun ever?

I'm not the kind of person who looks at a menu, sees a warm salad and thinks 'Wow! Fuck yeah! Warm salad, baby! No way on God's own earth that I'm going to choose anything other than that bad boy!!!' 

And I'd guess that there aren't many people who are - possibly those on certain diets or who have overdone rich, heavy food over the last few days, but certainly not many people.
 

You just wouldn't, would you? I mean, it's not something that appeals in the same leapy-outy way that 'beef and ale pie' or 'chocolate gateaux' does, is it?

Nothing fishy about this - apart from the fish, obviously

And salad is supposed to be cold and crispy and juicy'n'shit, for, like, Summer days, right?

But stick with me on this one. Occasionally, just occasionally, you might want to eat something light, something different, something exactly like a warm salad of baby leeks and courgettes with pan-fried salmon in fact.

And you might want to know how to make one too.

Souper New Year

I'm sure it's been woefully remiss of me not to have wished everybody a Merry Christmas or indeed a Happy New Year, but here we are already in 2013, and to be honest, this year I'm just glad to have got through it.

It was never going to be a hugely enjoyable Christmas, and being somewhat chronophobic I've never much cared for all this 'New Year' nonsense (although these days it has an altogether different celebratory tone, what with New Years Day being Mrs B-V's birthday).

On the food side, the cheese, rare breed ham and game pie from Borough Market was, as expected, totally fucking awesome, and the excellent Glenmorangie Sauternes cask a very pleasant discovery.
 
But it was a challenge was sticking to the 5:2 diet throughout the festive season, but we managed to average two fasting days each week by making the pattern just slightly less regular than the usual 'every Monday and Thursday'. We've avoided having to do consecutive days too, though there have been a few 'one-gaps' to counterbalance the 'five-gaps' - we're fasting today (Wednesday) and there's another one coming up on Friday.

If anybody has been wondering what we've been eating on the days when we've been restricted to just 600 calories (500 for Mrs B-V) the answer is... mostly soup.

Goats Cheese and Cherry Salad - the cure for gout?

It's probably a bit early for an update on how my new diet is going, but the good news is that I'm not finding the fast days too much of a struggle and, dare I say it, I quite like the feeling of getting really hungry and eagerly looking forward to the binge days.

Alright, the non-fasting days.

I never knew this combination worked either

Mrs B-V is now on board as well, and between us we're going to lose over 1000 lbs by the end of the month. Maybe.

Anyway, while the 5:2 diet might - if wild, unproven theories are to be believed - reverse my diabetes, I've not yet read any whimsical speculation that it can do the same for gout.

There is, however, plenty of  'evidence' that cherries are a miracle cure for 'the disease of kings', and that's a good enough excuse for me to come up with a simple cherry-centric recipe.

Dairy products are generally considered to be good for gout too, so the recipe more or less writes itself.

The Fast track

It's day 2 of my 5:2 diet today.

Or maybe it's day 4?

Technically, I could argue that it might be day 7.

Confused? Good. But I know perfectly well what the fuck I'm talking about, which makes me feel superior, and being on a diet is all about feelings of superiority, obviously.

Yes, I've succumbed to the latest fad diet doing the rounds. I know - who'd have thought it? But I'm fully bandwagoned-up and ready to go.

Big news, no?