Pitta Patter

I suppose I must have been about nine or ten when I was first introduced to the concept of the ‘acquired taste’.

It was breakfast time. I was staying with my paternal grandmother (‘Other Grandma’) down in Milford-on-Sea during the Summer holidays, and I was tentatively toying with the idea of trying some marmalade on my toast, which is what Other Grandma and Grandad Bob did.

Maybe they’d run out of the peanut butter they got in especially for me. I can’t remember. It was over 9000 breakfasts ago.

Doing stuff in the wrong order

When I was a child, my primary hobby was probably collecting Star Wars figures. Han, Luke, Leia; Ree Yees, Bib Fortuna, The Gamorrean Guard. I had them all. Well, most of them.

The hunt to find them all excited me to such an extent that until relatively recently I still purchased vintage figures on Ebay in an attempt to complete my collection, and even now I occasionally have dreams that I’ve found a shop with a rare, new figure I haven’t seen before.

Yeah, I know. Victim of commercialism. At such a tender age. Tragic.

All my childhood hopes and dreams!

What is surprising though is that I was a bit of a late arrival on the scene, only having been born in 1977.

That was the year that the first of the three Star Wars films was released (there are only three Star Wars films and if you think otherwise you are a Stormtrooper's cock) and the first that I saw was actually the final part of the trilogy: Return of the Jedi.

This was 1983. In the Streatham Odeon back when it had three proper, big auditoria instead of 138 micro screens. Good times.

It opens with the resolution of a cliffhanger from Empire Strikes Back, but, being six, this didn’t bother me in the slightest. I got to see Ree Yees, Bib Fortuna and the Gamorrean Guard brought to life and so, to me, ROTJ was Star Wars, at least until we rented the first and second instalments from the video shop and I got to see the earlier portion of the trilogy.

I was also fascinated by the first series of Monty Python’s Flying Circus by virtue of not having seen it. When I was about eight they showed series 2 and 3 on TV and I was addicted. Utterly.

But in those days there was a very strange policy that the BBC could or would not repeat programmes more than three times, which is why the first series wasn’t shown in my lifetime until the rules were relaxed in the late 1980s, by which time I was 12 and Python was 20!

It’s hard to imagine this kind of reality these days, when channels like UK Gold and Dave show the same episodes of the same programmes ad infinitium, and you can watch them on Youtube whenever you feel like it.

I swear, every time I notice that an episode of Fawlty Towers is on, it’s always The Anniversary – Series 2, Episode 5 – which includes memorable appearances from the late Ken Campbell, and strident comic actress Pat Keen who used to live in the flat above me in Ipswich!

Why am I banging on about this shit?

Anyway, one thing I concluded from all this is that there isn’t necessarily any harm in ‘doing stuff in the wrong order’. Except when there is, obviously.

This lunchtime - following a pint or three in the consistently excellent Craft Beer Company - I finally made it to Daddy Donkey in Leather Lane. And given my enthusiasm for the Craft, I must have walked past the self-styled 'Kick Ass Mexican Grill' more times than I've seen Polly pretending to be Sybil Fawlty. Which, UK Gold and Dave, is a lot of times!

There are perhaps two reasons why the order of events could be said to be 'wrong' in this instance:

a) I’d already been a couple of times to their spin-off Burger van, ‘Boom’, which appeared on the scene far more recently and;

b) Daddy Donkey actually pre-empted all the other conveyer-belt Mexican food chains, like Tortilla, which I’ve previously favourably reviewed.

The twin towers of takeaway street

Boom Burger was never going to win any prizes in my search for the best burger in London.

It's fast and cheap (£4.95 for a burger with a couple of toppings and £6.50 for the deluxe version with fries and 'slaw - toppings extra) but the quality of beef just isn't up to the mark, and the char-grilled meat has a strange, burnt, shish-kebab-like flavour.

Whack that in a bog-standard toasted sesame bun and you've got a burger that tastes like it's come from a kebab shop late at night, and if you were in a kebab shop late at night you would, surely, have a kebab, no?

Also, food that might be acceptable late at night, when everywhere else is closed and you're staggering pissed, seldom hits the spot in the cold light of lunchtime, which is the only time that Boom is open.

Burr(it)o!

But I can probably forgive Daddy Donkey his lacklustre beef offspring for the simple reason that the 'Kick Ass Mexican Grill' does indeed kick ass and I really wish I'd sampled it earlier.

The formula is the same as that which has been copied by Tortilla. You choose your meat and rice and veg and salsa and they wrap it up in a big, err, wrap, and you're tucking in within seconds. Simple.

Fresh, fresh, fresh

It's classic street food and fairly good value at £5.95 - certainly given the choice between a substandard burger and a good buritto at a similar price, I know which one I'd plump for, and that might explain why Daddy Donkey typically sports a lengthy queue, while Boom Burger can serve you straight away.

 
Sometimes when things are assembled 'fresh', the components taste anything but, having been lying around all day, but this isn't the case here. The charcoally flavour in the burgers is nowhere to be found, and the grilled beef here is lean, tender and nicely seasoned. 

It would be tasty enough on it's own, but it's even better with the accoutrements of sour cream and salsa - which comes at a temperature of your choosing, though even the 'medium' version is actually fairly hot. 


While the beef is probably best, you can also choose from pork or chicken, and the number of possible combinations available, depending on what exactly you want on it, is almost beyond calculation.

Beany Breakfast burritos are available from 7 to 11 AM, when the lunch service takes over. They pack up at 4 PM, sometimes earlier.

That'll do, Donkey, that'll do

For my money the quality of the food is superior to the Tortilla chain and the portion is a tad more generous. Then again, Boom burger is a one off, run by the same people, and yet it's notably inferior to chains like Byron and Haché, so there are no hard and fast rules.

I could admit now that 'Jedi' is actually my favourite Star Wars film, but then I'd probably get beaten up by somebody, or force-fed Boom Burgers or something...

Where to find it

Daddy Donkey
Leather Lane

Clerkenwell,
EC1N 7TE
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Boom Burger

Leather Lane

Clerkenwell,
EC1N 7TE
********* 

Is there anything left for me to eat?!?

So, Lent lasted approximately two weeks this year, as opposed to the more traditional 40 days and nights.

I started eating chocolate again, and that was that. Been eating quite a bit over the last few days too - since my monthly Hotel Chocolat Tasting Club selection arrived in the post.

Mind you, they are amongst the best chocolates money – lots of money! – can buy. My willpower and resolve are no match for the cocoa masterpieces crafted by the likes of Kiri Kalenko and Eric Desmet. I broke my Lenten fast with a rum glorious truffle-gianduja hybrid combination. It was worth it. Our Lord would probably have done the same.

Now, I know it’s probably not the best food choice for a newly-diagnosed diabetic and being a food blogger, there’s little point trying to hide things from the various doctors, nurses and dieticians who try telling me what I should and shouldn’t be eating.

I joked with an unsympathetic nurse the other day, ‘I don’t need to keep a food diary - just go and read Ben Viveur’. Well, I say ‘joked’…

The problem is that once you factor in all my ailments, the ‘eat’ list seems to be almost empty, while the ‘don’t eat’ list would fill ten trolleys and scoop the grand prize on Supermarket Sweep.

It’s an absolute minefield of contraindication upon contraindication. Probably with some co-morbidity if we’re doing medical-speak.

See, if I just suffered from, say, gout with no diabetes or high blood pressure or arrhythmia, it would be simple enough – though probably annoying at times – to try and stick to a low purine diet. And if it was just my BP that needed to be kept in check, there would be obvious rules to observe there too.

But having several interrelated conditions – and, not to ignore the big fat elephant in the room – being a bit of a, err, big fat elephant in room, makes it tough to know what I really should be eating. If anything.

And I don’t think my diet was really all that unhealthy to start off with – I avoid processed, instant and junk foods and always get plenty of fresh vegetables into my cooking. People don't think it to look at me, but I know for a fact my diet is healthier than that of people I know who are about half my weight and my cholesterol level is actually relatively low for a fatso.

Atkins is dead

A widely-held view these days is eating lots of carbohydratesisn’t brilliant unless you’re a pro athlete or some kind of narcissistic gym tosser. Or possibly a recovering anorexic. Carbs raise blood sugar levels and turn to fat in the body which isn’t something most people want to happen.

This is particularly true for diabetics – apparently a baked potato is the single worst thing to eat, worse even than pure sugar, because it turns quickly into glucose and opens a veritable sweetshop in your veins within seconds.

Carbohydrates are absorbed less quickly, however, and are therefore less likely to spike you’re blood sugar if they are eaten with fat, making chocolate and croissants seem like a healthier alternative, in a way. And a pain au chocolat would be even better, presumably...

I've never completely accepted the scientific classification of carbs anyway. I can just about buy the idea that chips, rice, bread and pasta are all the same type of food, but never that beer and chocolate are also both members of the family.

But, if we accept that having too much is bad, and lots of mine are going to come from beer, the alternative is eating a higher proportion of protein… only eating lots of protein is said to be bad for gout. Too much meat, seafood or mushrooms can trigger an attack – though I’ve never particularly noticed a correlation between my diet and the throbbing bastard pain that occasionally immobilises my joints. 

Mind you, I didn’t have any symptoms of diabetes either, even when stuffing my face with potatoes.

Fresh fruit, traditionally promoted as ‘healthy’, is very high in natural sugar which is bad from a diabetic perspective. Bananas are the most carby fruit of all, making them particularly bad, except that they also happen to be the best foodstuff for potassium, of which I’m trying to eat more because that can have a positive effect on the irregular heartbeat… What to do, what to do?

I’ve been told to avoid caffeine, because it could make my irregular heartbeat even less regular or something, but there are theories that caffeine stimulates the metabolism and promotes activity, which leads to weight loss, which is meant to be good for your heart.

Super? Yes! Food? Yes! Superfood?

So is oily fish, apparently, only that’s very bad for uric acid levels, which causes gout. And the oiliest fish, the anchovy, is also the saltiest and high sodium is bad for my blood pressure. We’ve come full circle.

Acai berries or pigskin?

A theory doing the rounds in the last year or two is that pork scratchings are some kind of superfood. No, really. Pretty much zero carbohydrate, and most of the fat – of which there is undeniably rather a lot in your average pigskin – is the ‘good’ type of fat rather than the bad, saturated kind.

But scratchings, delicious as they are, are also very high in salt, and the only time I’d want to eat them is while drinking lots of beer, something else I should probably cut down on.

Pound-for-pound they’re also somewhat calorific, which means I won’t lose weight, and being overweight makes me more likely to suffer from things like, ooh, I don’t know, diabetes, gout, high blood pressure… Full circle agian.

So, I’ve concluded that almost all foods are bad for something and good for something else, which will probably pretty much even itself out, so I’m tempted to carry on more or less as before but without any 'good for nothing' foods, if indeed there are any.

*Waves to the doctors, nurses and dieticians reading*

Not that I was really eating 'good for nothing' foods in large quantities anyway. As least not since I was a teenager. Oh welly-woo...

GBBF 2011 - the BV Review

Little tip to everyone with murderous intent who has been offended by my controversial brand of journalism over the years - if you're looking for an opportunity to bump me off, this is the week when my movements will be utterly predictable.

 

The most exciting few days in the beer calendar are finally upon us, and I'll be spending every day at the GBBF. And if you like beer and are anywhere near London between now and Saturday, so should you!

Outside...

Last night's first night began with the Champion Beer of Britain announcement, which coincided with the beautiful feeling of putting my 'out of office' on and hitting the road - and by 'road' I mean 'Jubilee and District lines', obviously.

I won't be partaking of the overall winner, Mighty Oak Oscar Wilde Mild at the festival, simply because I've had it many times before and it was a staple of mine when living in East Anglia, but it's an interesting choice, and the award probably inspired me to incorporate some mild into my opening night's drinking.

It begins

With thirsty enthusiasm coarsing through my veins, I grabbed a pint from the bar nearest the entrance, recognising Rudgate Jorvik Blonde as a beer I'd seen at festivals previously but not got around to trying.

A low strength but fruity pale bitter seemed instinctively to be the best thing for quenching ones thirst and attaining instant refreshment, and I wasn't disappointed. An eminantly quaffable starter for ten, and I began to wander around the festival, 'casing the joint' as it were. (People planning to kill me - you'll need to do this too, so pay attention!) 

Inside!

Having been sceptical when the event moved from Olympia to Earl's Court, I have to admit that the new venue has grown on me, and it's sad to think that this will be the last GBBF here before the vast hall in all its concretey glory is demolished. I've got used to the layout, and will miss it not being like this.

I like the interesting, triangley shape of the venue too - a little like a Ram's Head (which would have been useful free advertising for Youngs before they pretty much abandoned the Ram motif) or perhaps even a taperingly thick cock and balls.

I went to one of the bars in the 'left testicle' to get my next pint, and successfully concluded some unfinished business.

At last year's GBBF I was drinking silver award winner, Amber Chocolate Orange Stout and very tasty it was too. Like a chocolate orange in a glass of beer.

Trouble is, I spilled my pint half-way through, and when I went back to the bar to get another half, they had sold out. Arggh.

Chocolate Orange Stout

I should explain at this point that for a beer to count, I feel I need to drink at least one pint, or whatever the largest available measure is, so without the rest of my drink, I couldn't count it as a tick. I'd been waiting a full year to enjoy the chocolatey, orangey goodness again and finally be able to say I've had full measure.

Yeah, I know. I'm a sad, anal twat who gets hung up on self-imposed rules'n'shit. The beer is delicious though.

As a 'ticker', the event for me is largely about drinking as many new beers as I possibly can, so I hit the CAMRA member's lounge to enjoy the stout and check the festival programme against my records to identify beers I fancied and make sure I hadn't had them before. A Tweet from Fuller's brewery gave me some food for thought too.

I tried Sadler's 'The Spig' which is another tasty and easy-drinking blonde ale, and grabbed some of the legendary pork scratchings from the crusty pie company - surely the best-tasting and most natural pig fat snacks in the world (and their pies are damn good too).

My fourth beer was a bit special, not least because it's extremely rare and very strong. As the tweet explained, Fuller's 'Brewer's Reserve No. 3 - Whisky cask' was only available for a limited period of an hour or so, and was only sold in third-of-a-pint measures, which means I only had to drink a third to count it, but I'd have happily drunk more - the whisky notes were incredible.

Food

One of my plans this year was also to check out as much of the huge range of food as I possibly could, and the seafood stall intrigued me, offering a range of cockles, mussels, prawns, squid etc. with seafood sauce - the kind of stuff that you used to get from a van outside pubs but now hardly ever see, except by the seaside.

I had a little snack-sized tub of the mixed seafood cocktail and it brought back memories of eating seafood and drinking beer in old Leigh on Sea. Obviously, it had to be a dark beer to accompany this, and White Dog 'Born to be Mild' didn't disappoint. 

Interestingly though, the White Dog brewery is actually in Italy, and is the only Italian brewery that regularly produces real ales - another rarity on the tick list. Roasty and strong (for a mild) it drank more like a stout, which made it a natural bedfellow for the seafood.

Brewdog might have lost their brewery stand, but nobody would have noticed - and one of the more intriguing brewery stands was for 'William Worthington' - the Worthington's brand that was run into the ground by Bass during the 90s and 00s but which seems to be set for a revival under the Coors group who have brought Worthington home to Burton on Trent, using the old Bass Museum brewery. 

Some of the beers on the stand haven't existed for many years - Worthington 'E', famous in the 1960s, and a cask version of the famous bottled 'White Shield'. I'll be trying these later in the week, but I went for the Mild, last available regularly in cask form in the 70s I believe.   

It certainly isn't as tasty and complex as the Italian take on the style, or indeed Dark Star's excellent Victorian Ruby Mild (6%) which I had in Wetherspoons the other day, but as a snapshot of the kind of milds our fathers and grandfathers might have drunk in the middle of the last century, it's a classic example.

Wanting something more substantial to eat, I tried the intriguing 'Beef and Scrumpy' pastie from 'Proper Cornish Pasties' and, unlike most of the food and drink at the festival, it was, it has to be said, pretty awful.

Beef and Cider DOES NOT WORK. I've yet to try a single dish in which those flavours have successfully gone together. Beef and Ale, yes. Pork and Cider, yes. But beef just doesn't complement cider any more than it complements white wine.

So I left half my pasty, and though I quite felt like another beer or two, I decided to call it quits and pace myself, knowing that there is a whole week of drinking ahead of me.

That was last night, I'm now off to begin a second day of drinking. and realising that I didn't get around to trying a single American beer last night, I think I know which bar I'll be mostly hanging around today.

So, snipers, come to Earls Court and take your pop shots at me. Just wait until the end of the week so I can down a few more beers, OK? 

The Great British Beer Festival runs until Saturday

Where to find it...

The Great British Beer Festival

Earls Court Exhibition Centre, 

SW5 9TA

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Silly season in the world of crisps

It’s that time of year when Walkers Crisps introduce a range of ridiculous flavours, only temporarily, thank God, and this time it’s in aid of Comic Relief. 

I'm not going to officially critique the four comedian-inspired varieties, because that would insult both our intelligences, but suffice to say that all four varieties bear absolutely no resemblance to the foodstuffs they purport to be, because, well, crisps very seldom do, do they?

I tried ‘Steak and Al pie’ (basically a subdued beef and onion flavour) and ‘Jimmy con Carne’ (subdued chilli flavour) a couple of weeks ago, and yesterday the spirit of Red Nose Day compelled me to complete the set, so I tried  ‘Steven Fry Up’ (subdued smoky bacon flavour) and ‘Frank Roast Dinner’ (subdued roast chicken flavour with the addition of sage and rosemary). 

God knows why I wasted my time eating these ridiculous crisps, just as I did with the ‘Cajun Squirrel’ and ‘Builder’s Breakfast’ flavours they inflicted on the world a year or two, but I really should have learned my lesson by now.

Comic Relief stopped actually being funny about 20 years ago when that bloke kept saying 'The Belgians' anyway didn't it?

Breast milk ice cream might be courting controversy at the moment (my personal squeamishness around lacto-cannibalism means I'm not in a hurry to sample it) but at least it's made using an authentic ingredient, albeit one that came out of some attention-seeking housewives' tits. 

You suck, and your product sucks

But back to Walkers Crisps, and why my view of them has become increasingly negative over the years:

Properly-coloured crisp packets are teh good.

Firstly, they’ve got way too big for their boots, taking over smaller (and arguably tastier) crisp makers, rationalising the product folio they inherited along the way.

Secondly, they unashamedly sponsor Leicester City,

And thirdly, not only did they get all the colours monged up (it should be dark blue for Ready Salted, Light Blue for Salt’n’Vinegar, and Green for Cheese and Onion, you fuckwits) but they also became so ubiquitous in the potato snack sector that an entire generation of youngsters have now grown up believing that this tuberous abomination is completely normal.

I wish Golden Wonder had fought their corner for proper, blue, Ready Salted, but they were too busy making Pot Noodles instead, and, like the Smiths and Rileys crisps I enjoyed as a child, they are now hard, if not impossible to find. (Oh, and my favourite chilli flavour Zweifel crisps that came in the bag made of the same stuff that you used to get wrapped around Lucozade bottles. Them were proper yummy!)

I’ve become way more fussy over the last 20 years or so. I used to eat Prawn Cocktail flavour all the time as a child, but I tried a packet the other day for nostalgia purposes and found the syntheticness unpleasantly overbearing.

Keep it real

Nowadays, I just wish they’d keep crisps simple and honest.

I hardly eat anything other than sea salted, and when I do, it’s likely to be in the ‘sea salt and black pepper’ or ‘sea salt, garlic and herbs’ ballpark – you know, something where the actual ingredients actually reflect the stated flavour, rather than, say, ‘Chicken’ crisps that have seen no trace of fowl but plenty of tarragon and paprika.

Even before sampling them, I know that the only constituent part of Frank’s theoretical roast dinner that made it into the actual product is the potatoes, which renders the whole concept moot in my view.

Any crisp that purports to be flavoured with some kind of meat or fish will usually be pretty horrible, with the possible exception of bacon flavours, which are sometimes acceptable, though hardly authentically bacony, obviously.

And until this time next year when Walkers will launch their breast milk flavour, ‘Chicken’ and ‘Beef’ are probably the worst offenders.

At least if they fried ‘Beef’ crisps in actual beef dripping rather than sunflower oil, they might be able to produce something that actually tasted like the description, but then, I guess children and vegetarians would complain that their beef flavour crisps actually tasted of beef rather than of beef flavour crisps.

Of course, then there would be a whole new market for 'Beef flavour crisps' flavour crisps...