‮hjap‮

I made mince pies for verdandiweaves' pseudo-party on Friday. Now I'm making more of them. The previous ones were just for the guinea pigs. These ones are important: they're to go to stormsearch's parents.

I made the mincemeat myself, and the pastry, and everything.

I don't own a star-shaped pastry cutter. No matter: I have a knife and an understanding of geometry. I want five-pointed stars made out of pastry: that's easy. I can make do with circles of pastry, made with a conventional pastry cutter, and a knowledge of 72° angles.

It feels faintly sacrilegious to be carving pentagrams into pastry for Christmas-themed mince pies. No matter: I know that I've got several millennia of culture that Jesus simply wasn't born early enough for.

And if the Abrahamic religions had anything going for them, then the resultant pagan munchies wouldn't be so damn delicious, would they?

( Food porn )

Sacrilicious.

A merry Yule, or Solstice, or whatever, to you all. Goddess bless us, every one.

Hello to new readers that I've picked up during my sudden, and inevitably all-too-brief, period of Internet Fame. Hello to regular readers, too, while I'm at it. Hello, regular readers! We know each other already, sometimes even in person, and that's fantastic!

Regular readers will know that I’m a big Doctor Who fan. New readers should probably learn that, pretty damn quickly. Inspired by Emo-Doctor’s amusing whingeing in this comic (and partly by the Tam of Rassilon), I wondered today: what would Time Lords eat at a Time Lord pizza party?

This is the kind of philosophical quandary that plagues me on a frequent basis. I’m deep like that.

Behold: the Pizza of Rassilon.



More information, more glorious deathless pin-sharp prose, and more pictures, at the Kamikaze Cookery site. Those of you who are on Who fora, do feel free to link, blog, whatever. Go ahead.

I feel like I've crossed a nerd threshold of some kind.

Behold, for The Perfect Steak is now available at Kamikaze Cookery dot com.

That is to say, the episode regarding the perfect steak is now available. You can't download the actual steak through the internet. I'm still working on that bit.

Go, watch, comment. Tell your friends. Subscribe to the RSS feed. And come back next week for more.

It wouldn't be a Strange Company project without a last-minute calamity, would it?

Episode One of Kamikaze Cookery will be up this afternoon. At some point. Right now, we are frantically re-rendering at Strange Company Towers.

For some obscure reason a picture of a steak had fallen out of the last render. You can't really do an episode on steak without it, so there will be a short delay.

Apparently it's Scottish Food Fortnight. Nobody told me this, but I live in Scotland and I eat food, so every fortnight is Scottish Food Fortnight as far as I'm concerned. The BBC is putting some journalists on a week-long local diet to celebrate, and apparently the Scottish Government is doing likewise.

Regular readers may recall that I've attempted something similar to this before. And now the Scottish Government is copying me. The very concept of our legislators on a week-long blood-sugar crash fills me with dread. I suppose it's just lucky we don't have the power to declare war.

(The nice journalist informs me that it's not a very strict local diet, intended more as a showcase of excellent Scottish produce. That's all right then.)

Here's the journalists' first day, and here, for comparison, is mine.

With any luck, and focus-group permitting, Kamikaze Cookery should be out in about a month. I would just like to make sure everyone is aware that, despite the BBC's vast resources, we did it first.

For research, I am watching cookery shows on iPlayer. I've discovered The Supersizers go Victorian (available for 3 more days), a rather amusing account of a week spent on a Victorian diet.

(Spending a week on a weird diet for television? Wish I'd thought of that.)

And then, towards the end, one of the guests at the dinner party is my son from the last production I was in.

That's weird, but not as weird as boiled calf's head.

Last week I got a gammon joint from the farmer's market. I'm told that, in addition to stews and other dishes made by immersing them in liquid, you can also use a slow-cooker to dry-roast stuff. I wasn't quite ready for such a radical step without experimentation, so I half-filled the pot with stock and stuck the joint in. It did, indeed, roast properly... on the top half.

Half-way through cooking I turned it over, and all the glorious roast flavours came out into the stock. The joint itself was a bit of a loss, but I have distilled the liquid essence of Maillard reactions, which I then used to make a fuckin' amazing soup. The joint got shredded and put into a potato gratin (fantastic), and a couple of omelettes.

Further investigation was necessary on this roast-stock concept. So this week, I dry-roasted some bacon offcuts and then boiled them into an experimental stock, which I then used to make another soup. Having got my attractive commis to peel the spuds for me, the potato content got a little out of hand. As a result it was quite a thick soup, about the consistency of baby food, or that nutrient paste they use to feed Robocop. This is okay, because soup can always have extra water added to it at point of service.

Adding extra water, stormsearch has decided, is for suckers. The soup seems to have solidified further since I made it, and it's now about the consistency of corned-beef hash (only made with bacon, not beef). Jehane wondered aloud to me what it would taste like if made into patties and fried.

She wants me to fry soup.

So, in summary:

• I try to make a gammon joint and I get stock;
• I try to make soup and I get hash;
• They all tasted fuckin' awesome anyway.

This has been rather a good week for food. I made scones again and a roast-supper-medley-type-thing, adapted from this, for which I still have to come up with a non-stupid name. And Saturday was cairmen's epic Molecular Gastronomy Banquet, which is immortalized here, here, here, and here.

I helped make the garlic-infused oil for the confit salmon course. Perhaps oddly, when I was done it was actually garlic-infused oil. I might have been less surprised had it spontaneously turned into pizza or something.

Today I was introduced to my new co-presenter on Kamikaze Cookery: Bunty, the Friesian cow.

I've worked with cows before, but that was back at school when I was Theseus to a particularly intransigent Hippolyta. I hear she's engaged now: I pity the guy, whoever he is. This, however, was an actual cow made of beef, and with udders and whatnot.

Fortunately, the fact that Bunty was female and a few years old meant that I didn't have to wrestle with terms like Buttercup is an individual unit of cattle or cattlebeast (but at least there actually is a non-gender-specific term). She was one of my more friendly and forgiving co-stars, but she did have something of a tendency to wander out of shot at inappropriate moments.

By about take four I was sounding impressively knowledgeable about where beef comes from and what you do with it, ably assisted from off-camera by Donna, who's been raising beef cattle since she was a wee slip of a lass and knows a hell of a lot more than I was able to get from Wikipedia. I'm not entirely sure Bunty knew what I was talking about, but she did have a tendency to swish her tail around with more obvious irritation whenever I was pointing out which bits on her were the most tasty.

And then there was the Clarkson Take, because there has to be.

I r srs documentary filmmaker. No, really.

I trust verdandiweaves is happy now that my position on vegetarianism has been made clear. In the pages of a national newspaper, no less.

I really wasn't expecting them to print this one, since it consists of a cheap joke and a vaguely jingoistic anti-French sentiment, but then, that's the Scotsman for you.

Su Taylor (Letters, 15 April) attempts to assert ownership of the term "vegetarian" on behalf of the Vegetarian Society. Sadly, language doesn't work that way, and there are several types of vegetarians that fall outside the society's narrow, 150-year-old definition.

To name but a few: there are lacto-vegetarians, who allow themselves milk; lacto-ovo-vegetarians, who have milk and eggs; baco-vegetarians, who eat bacon; felino-vegetarians, who are vegetarians except for kebabs on drunken Saturday nights; and the French, who make an exception for foie gras.

Unfortunately, there still seems to be no word for "sensible people who eat meat because it's tasty", but, then, there are so few of us left.

PAUL A J HAMILTON
Viewforth
Edinburgh

PS: figg, I stole your joke, then disguised it by going pretentious and Latin. Hope that's okay.

Hang on a minute, they edited me! The bastards! I said drunken kebabs on Saturday nights and they... actually improved it immeasurably. It makes a lot more sense that way around. Oh. Okay. Thanks, Scotsman editor-type people.

I forgot to put in the bit about Sue Taylor, who is so weak due to a lack of B-vitamins that she lacks the strength to press down the E key at the end of her first name, but that would perhaps have been a little cruel.

~

Stepping out of the Hotel yesterday in the cloak and the hat, I walked into an unexpectedly dramatic gust of wind. A child of five or six, who happened to be passing at the foot of the steps, dropped his jaw to the floor and declared: Who's that?!

His father gathered him close and bustled him away, beginning Ah, well. Who can say?...

I managed to restrain the maniacal laughter until I was about half a block away.

It's not quite as good as Who was that masked man?, but it's a shade better than Who was that masked halfwit?, so I'm going to consider this a success.

Sunday Times columnist Rachel Johnson doesn't get blogging:

I don’t get blogging. It’s not only that I’m reluctant to write for nothing. There are all those people who ask, Do you blog? at parties (our own sad neutered version of the Do you swing? question), and who warble about wikis and web presence. Still, a few weeks ago I started to write one. It’s very easy - even a middle-aged woman can do it. I wrote about what I was making for supper that night. And food shopping in the Portobello market. Then I checked to see the global response to my debut. Nothing. On my next five posts? Zero comments.

I shall refrain from making any obvious comment, because that would be cheap of me, and after all I am writing for nothing here. It's important for we poor slovenly non-professionals to maintain some dignity.^[0]

Nonetheless, this leads me neatly on to something I actually wanted to talk about.

Saturday was the first Farmers' market since the Fife Diet week that I've had any money (the Fife Diet is expensive). stormsearch and I picked up a cheap gigot roast and a couple of packets of 40p bacon offcuts, and a bunch of organic vegetables. None of it was from Fife. As far as I know it was all from East Lothian, which actually has food in it.

It was a huge relief just to be able to go to stalls and not have to say are you from Fife?, but instead to simply look at produce and pick what I wanted to eat. Everything was still organic, locally-sourced and from small producers, but without any ridiculous artificial restrictions.

Likewise, whenI got into the kitchen it was a huge relief to be able to use stock cubes. I made a random soup with potato and parsnip, and I could add extra stuff like smoked garlic and nutmeg. The result was bloody marvellous, hearty and warming with texture and flavour. Hello, taste buds! Long time no see. You've had a nice holiday, now let's get you back to work.

~

stormsearch and I have been talking about getting a weekly organic box delivered, and doing something like this regularly on the cheap. Bloody hell, I think this might be getting serious afer five years.

~

I've been thinking about Bouvrage, the Fife Diet-approved raspberry drink that was pretty much all I was allowed last week. I don't actually like Bouvrage that much. I'll drink it if it's there, but it's always had this really harsh alkalinity to it that spoils any enjoyment I might otherwise have got.

Last week, though, I really started to develop a taste for it. After a few days with a choice between Bouvrage and tap water, it became delicious nectar, sweet and refreshing. I'd bought five bottles of it for the week, and had one left at the beginning of the post-Diet frenzy of consumption.

Frenzy completed, it's back to the status quo. I've got a bottle of this stuff left. Better drink it before it goes off. Good thing I like Bouvrage these days, huh? I raised the sweet elixir to my lips, and drank... harsh, brackish, regular old-fashioned Bouvrage from the bad old days before I'd learned the value of vegetables.

Hypothesis: my standard, non-Diet blood sugar is so high that Bouvrage doesn't register as sugary. My body chemistry is naturally sweet^[1].

This is because I naturally have a shitty diet high in sugar and saturated fats.

This raises Gastronomic Implications (wbaenfarb). If taste is dependent upon preexisting body chemisty, I won't taste the same things as someone who ordinarily eats a lot of vegetables or is on a different diet. The restaurant experience is partially determined by what I had to eat for the rest of that week.

It seems obvious, but this sort of thing becomes really significant when the tasting menu at the Fat Duck costs £125 a head.

--
[0] Although I should observe that the lassie's blog, rachelsjohnson, has a somewhat unfortunate title that could be read as Rachel S. Johnson or Rachel's Johnson. If it's the latter then I'm not surprised that she's not getting many comments, because that sounds like a really specialist type of blog. The Internet can be a complex place for the traditionally-minded, the mainstream, the professionals.
[1] Just like my personality, then.

I received a bit of bad news the other day. An email came through at work from one of those corporate auction-houses $BOSS_1 is subscribed to, announcing the sale of items from A C Skelton of Hull (in administration).

Skelton's were my bakers when I was a kid. They had a shop in Hessle Square just across from the bus stop. My nana used to send me there for 'alf a dozen breadcakes. They had one of those big steel slicing machines with a many-toothed maw into which they'd drop a crusty bloomer loaf, and it would go juggadajuggadajuggadaJUGGADA and out at the other end would emerge a neatly-sliced transduction of the input. Sometimes the heel of the bread was a great chunk that you could spread dripping on, and sometimes it was a wafer-thin mote that would blow away.

They'd put the loaf into cellophane and press it down into one of those other machines that went ka-CHUNK and left a neat strip of red sticky tape—always red—sealing the neck of the bag. The last time I saw one of those machines was in Doncaster market, when I was with my then-girlfriend's family. They were all looking for fabrics and sewing stuff, but I sloped off and found the dog food stall. Got a big bag of dog biscuits, sealed up with a neat red ka-CHUNK, and took them home for Emma. I'd been away all day and she deserved a present.

Emma really loved those biscuits.

In Skelton's they had little cakes and gingerbread men with icing on. Everything was painted in that 1980s institutional marigold yellow. The shop girls all wore white aprons and those little paper hats. On the other side of the shop was the deli counter, but I took meat for granted when I was young. The smell of bread permeated the shop and spilled out in to the street, rich and warm and crusty and smelling of home.

Skelton's was probably where, aged about five or six, I learned to appreciate good food. It's a lesson that I'm grateful for at least once a day.

The Diet, she is over. After midnight last night I ate a pint of ice cream in under twenty minutes. This morning I had three mocha lattes, just because I could, and this afternoon I am relearning old lessons about overconsumption and the consequences thereof.

21st-century modern conveniences are available to me once again. After shooting at the Farmer's Market today, we went into a coffee shop, sat down and reviewed the footage. I was like a country yokel on his first trip to the big city, gawping wide-eyed at the pretty lights.

xenophanean's post here pretty much sums up my reaction to the Diet. But I'd like to add a few points:

1. It's impractical if you live in a city, or have a job, or don't own a car.
2. It's expensive.
3. It lacks seasonings, spices, and flavourings.
4. It lacks fibre, necessary fats, calcium, and nutrients necessary for moral stability.
5. It probably doesn't actually help save the planet at all.

On the other hand it's taught me a lot about how to be inventive with limited (and often bland) ingredients, how to avoid wastage, and the origins of our dinner. And I'm eating vegetables now, which is probably a good thing.

More details will be available in the episode, coming soon to an Internet near you.

Some of the Hotel guests have given me two slices of artichoke, olive and jalapeno pizza. And I've been nabbing the bar snacks, which have paprika on them. Dis is livin', I tell you. Aaapril in Pareee....

White flecks have started to appear in my fingernails. The calcium deficiency is getting to me.

Breakfast this morning was a success. I had Toast.

Well, not exactly.

I thought I'd try experimenting a little further with the McMuffin™ I invented the other day. Made up some porridge last night—using proper porridge oats is a delight after four days of the wrong stuff—and, since I still don't have a porridge drawer, left it to set overnight in a frying pan.

Woke up this morning to a a thin disc of porridge cake. Toasted it crispy under the grill and spread jam on it. Marvellous.

It's still porridge, but to at least get some variation in texture was strange and wonderful and glorious.

I cooked lunch and dinner at the same time so we could film them. Apart from having to do everything at a 60-degree angle so that I wasn't blocking the shot, it all went largely according to plan. Lunch was another fantastic omelette. Dinner was a cottage pie made with pork mince, carrot, swede and mashed potato.

The mince was a couple of days out of date, bought at the Farmers' Market on Saturday. To live on the Fife Diet you really need to go shopping at least twice a week, and it's worth noting again that all the shops are miles out of town and you need a stay-at-home partner who can be available during the working day to take the family's second Chelsea Tractor and drive around farm shops. We've just about managed by doing all of our shopping at the beginning of the week, but only at risk of slight poisoning.

With no milk and no butter, the potato did not mash to my exceptionally high standards. I added all the rest of the dripping and some cheese, and the result was palatable, but not worthy of the Mashed Potato King. The mince with added vegetables was filling enough, but it was crying out for some seasoning. Just some dried mixed herbs would have made all the difference, but what I really wanted was some Worcestershire Sauce.

Also, had I not been on the Fife Diet, I would have deglazed the pan with sherry and added the leavings into the gravy. Gravy. I never thought, on starting this, that one of the things I'd miss most would be Bisto Granules.

As I write this, the clock ticks languidly past midnight, and my 178 168^[0] hours on the Fife Diet draw inexorably to a close. I'll be back with some Final Thoughts some time after the orgiastic frenzy of consumption that begins tomorrow morning.

--
[0] I blame the blood sugar for having got that wrong. It would never have happened under normal circumstances. No.

Still indexing from zero. One day to go.

I managed to get hold of real porridge oats, porridge, for the making of. Breakfast this morning cooked in a third of the time and I even managed to eat it all while it was still hot. This was a bonus.

Filming in the pub today involved the consumption of two bottles of Fifeshire elderflower wine. Lunch was just oatcakes with pate and rowan jelly, but I was glad of it. Accidentally ate some mouldy pork as well: threw the rest away.

For dinner, omelette.

( .jpg, 110K )

I really like these omelettes. It just goes to show what you can do with high-quality free-range stuff (and cooking fat). I'mma have another one for lunch tomorrow.

In the pub today, we were talking about Fife Diet-approved booze. Listed on the website are Fraoch, Cairn O' Mohr and the Fyfe Brewery. The Fyfe Brewery is in Fife and I'm told it's very good, but they don't seem to supply anywhere except for a couple of pubs in Kirkcaldy. Fraoch are based in Alloa and Cairn O' Mohr are in Perthshire, neither of which are in Fife.

Bouvrage are listed on the Fife Diet Site as well, and they're based in Alloa too. The lady on the Bouvrage stall at the Market on Saturday told us that the raspberries themselves were from Fife. Fine, but if they have to be taken out of the county to be processed and bottled, and then brought back in, how local are they really? And where does the glass come from?

Fraoch and its associated historic ales from Scotland (such as Grozet, which I was drinking on Sunday despite it not being the season for it, because I couldn't get any Fraoch) are made somewhere close to Fife, but I'm fairly sure that the barley and the hops come from Elsewhere—particularly in the case of Grozet, which is a wheat beer and, as we've already established, you can't grow wheat in Fife. But apparently it's allowed on the list because it's a local brewery quite close to Fife.

We know of another type of booze made in Fife, from ingredients that may be from Fife but probably aren't. By the rationale established by the Fife Diet site, it should be permitted also. It may be known to you. Its name is Carlsberg.

Not that I'd drink that shit even if it was allowed on the Diet.

And, now I come to think of it, Smirnoff is made in Fife from ingredients that may or may not come from Fife. So why is one thing allowed and another not?

We've tried to be very strict about consuming only things that can be proven to be from Fife, made in Fife, grown in Fife and sold in Fife. We've also allowed things that are expressly permitted by the Fife Diet website list of approved suppliers. But there doesn't seem to be any reason why some things are excluded and some aren't.

Our Fife Diet, it seems, is better than theirs.

One hour of filming in the pub today.

Then we remembered to turn the microphone on.

I think it's time for one of my blood sugar-mediated mood swings.

Two more days of this.

Here are some of the things that have happened, or not happened, this week:

1. I seem to have spent my entire time at work recommending restaurants to guests. Restaurants, I should add, that I'm not allowed to eat at.
2. Can't go to the pub, can't go out for dinner.
3. No coffee in the morning, no valerian at night.

4. stormsearch: Let's go to Oloroso and have cocktails!
   Yr. corresp.: Can't.
   stormsearch: ...Oh.

5. Can't grab a sandwich while I'm out.
6. Can't think fuck it and just get a takeaway this evening.

I'm eating somewhat less than usual and having trouble climbing hills and stairs. Last night I fell asleep in my clothes. Without sugar I'm cranky and irritable—I'm forming a theory on why Mike Small always seems so angry and poorly-spelled on his Fife Diet blog.

Yesterday was hectic: I had a fam trip around Edinburgh all day, as a result of which I had my one permitted non-Diet business lunch. I went a bit mad on chicken curry with chips and rice and a chocolate crispie for dessert. The other guy who had a crispie was trying to convince me that they were unacceptably chewy, but I wasn't complaining. Then I had a market research meeting in the evening.

In between the two appointments I had to do something about dinner. I slapped a venison casserole into the slow cooker with some potatoes and a carrot and a parsnip. Plenty of stock, a little jellied venison stock for luck, and sloshed in a bit of Bouvrage. Ordinarily I have to be in the right mood for venison, but this week I don't have a lot of choice. Then off to debate the finer points of spring water bottle designs for two hours.

At the meeting I asked for water and was given Volvic. It's not from Fife, but I'm refuse to turn into that guy who sends stuff back because it's Not Local Enough, so I drank it.

Back home to a deliciously slow-roasted venison casserole. Only, not.

The potatoes were rock-hard, so I left it in the slow cooker for another hour. Still underdone. Doled out a portion and cooked the fuck out of it in a pan. Still underdone. Microwaved it. Still underdone. Fuck it, I have to eat something, so I added some pureed raspberries (should be redcurrants, but I don't have any of those), steamed some spinach, and got on with it.

( .jpg, 38K )

Looks good, huh? Wasn't.

The venison was lovely and tender, and the sauce was a meal in itself. The vegetables, though, were crunchy and raw. The raspberries just added seeds to an already disastrous combination of textures: on the other hand, towards the bottom of the bowl, the extra flavour was quite welcome.

Under normal circumstances, I would have given up about four paragraphs back, got a takeaway, and left the slow cooker on overnight in the hope of rescuing it tomorrow. I don't have that sort of freedom on the Fife Diet, and I was hungry.

Today is Leftovers Day. Porridge for breakfast (chewy, again), soup with gammon for lunch, and more casserole tonight. I'm hoping the extra cooking has redeemed it, but I'm not hopeful.

Traditionally, leftover porridge was placed in the porridge drawer (I am not making this up) and left to set into cakes. These cakes were less brittle than oatcakes and easier to transport.

I don't have a porridge drawer, but I do have leftover porridge in the pan. Lesser minds might consider it merely congealed porridge, but it has indeed set into a cake. It is round and flat, like the bottom of my saucepan. You could take it into the fields with you and munch on it while you plough, or do whatever it is you do in the fields.

But I'm not gonna.

Ten minutes under the grill to crisp it up on the outside, cut it in half, and put bacon and a fried egg in between the two bits.

The Fife Diet: Putting the Mc back into McMuffin™.

Probably as a result of some experimentation with Fifeshire beer last night, I slept late this morning and, as a result, my porridge oats had soaked for longer than they did yesterday. This may be the reason why today's porridge was a marked improvement on yesterday's. It cooked in about a quarter of the time, and—most importantly—actually displayed a willingness to be swallowed.

...that's what she said. No, wait.

Moving on.

It also helped that I've recovered my Fifeshire bramble jam from Hugh's flat. I'm not sure quite how authentically Fifely this is, since the sugar and the pectin have to come from somewhere, but Alex has been eating the equivalent, so it must be all right. This has been my first refined sugar since Friday, and my headache instantaneously dissipated. On the way out to the museum this morning there may, or may not, have been hopping and/or skipping, which naturally I could neither confirm or deny.

The jam was delicious, too, and really made the porridge into a breakfast.

~

Alex and Hugh have been concerned about the amount of fat they have available for cooking. I roasted a pork joint on the first night and a decent chunk of gammon yesterday, both of which have released large quantities of delicious juices into the stock. Once they've cooled I've been skimming the fat off and decanting it into a jar, so I have plenty of dripping to use.

Here's the gammon, and the jar in the back of the photograph is full of the solid fats.

( .jpg, 86K )

Lunch, then, was a two-egg omelette with bacon and cheese. I had reservations about this: I have no idea what the smoke point of my dripping is, and indeed it turns out to be completely the wrong one for cooking eggs in, but these problems were surmountable.

The eggs were fantatsic, rich and tasty with deep orange yolks. I was sparing with the cheese because cheese is a precious resource, but this was okay because the cheese was sharp and crumbly and flavoursome (and bloody well should be, given what I paid for it). I was a little concerned about the egg sticking to the pan, but I needn't have worried. With a little encouragement the omelette came off in one glorious piece, the cheese wonderfully browned and the bacon lusciously meaty.

Best. Omelette. Ever.

I was tempted to have seconds, but I'm still somewhat limited in eggs. I think I shall be having omelettes a few more times this week.

~

The gammon I'd cooked off yesterday was intended to be eaten cold, but that's not the only thing I can do with it. Tonight:

Fife Diet Gammon Steak and Chips

1. Scrub and chop up a potato and a parsnip.
2. Part-boil until almost done, but take them off the heat before they get mushy. Drain.
3. Heat up delicious dripping in a pan. Fry the chips until crispy.
4. Slice gammon, brown in the same pan on both sides, and serve.

( .jpg, 108K )

Look at the Maillard Reaction on that.

And it tasted better than it looks.

Of course, gammon steak is pretty pointless without pineapple. Or tomato ketchup. Even some peas would be nice. It only occurred to me after I'd inhaled it that I could have fried an egg.

And that was my third potato of the week. I have a huge bag left, three-fifths of a swede, and carrots and parsnips, and plenty of green stuff.

Today was a good day. I still have no herbs or spices, but as long as I have the Maillard reaction I'll be okay.

(NB: I index from zero)

I've been thinking about my five-a-day. Five portions of fruit and vegetables they tell you, but they never tell you what a portion is. Just considering fruit alone, which has a tendency to come in handy carrying-sized portions due to the miracle of Nature, we've got grapes and we've got pineapples. Which one is a portion? How many strawberries equal a melon? We don't know and the dieticians aren't telling us. I think the Government is covering something up.

I say that we've got grapes and pineapples, but naturally I don't. Fruit in Fife appears to be somewhat limited. They're very good for raspberries, but I only bought one box because a) I'm a moron and b) I don't actually like raspberries very much. I like raspberry flavour in Angel Delight or Ice Pops. The fruit itself is somehow fundamentally other, with an unpleasant texture that squeaks against the teeth.

I know you can get apples in Fife—my boss lives there and we often have windfalls from his garden to give to guests—but I don't have any.

Also, my raspberries defrosted on the way home and leaked juice everywhere, so now I have raspberry-flavoured oatcakes and a lot of paper bags with structural integrity that is dubious at best. Raspberries, it would seem, don't like me much either.

Nonetheless I've been a little worried about my sugar intake—and I've had a three-day headache to bear me out—so it was time for some fruit at breakfast.

Porridge

1. Put water into oatmeal.
2. Make porridge with it.
3. Porridge on its own is pathetic. Add something to it, anything, whatever you've got.

I soaked the oats overnight, which is supposed to make them cook more quickly. It didn't work. I was using pinhead oatmeal, which some people apparently like, but it makes a chunky, fibrous sort of porridge that never really stops just being solid oat bits in water. I cooked the crap out of it, eventually gave up hope of it ever turning into actual porridge, and ate it.

I think I expended more energy chewing it than I gained from the carbohydrate content. The raspberries and their associated juice added some colour, but even that was really offputting to anyone who's seen The Golden Child.

Total time elapsed from getting up to finishing breakfast: an hour and a half. Good job I work nights.

Lunch was more promising. I made a soup. I've made soups before, but only from recipes which I've then instantly forgotten. This time I was guided by the lovely stormsearch, who was taught the esoteric art by her grandmother. It turns out that making soup is absolutely piss-easy and I have no idea why I don't do it more often.

Random soup

1. Get two rashers of bacon, diced fine, and heat them in a pan^[0] until they start releasing fats.
2. Add some stuff to the pan. In my case this was a carrot, a parsnip, and a hefty chunk of swede, all diced up.
3. Sweat the vegetables. Sweat is pretentious cookery-speak for heat them slowly until they look a bit damp on the outside.
4. Add some stock from last night's roast, a smidgeon of jellied venison stock for luck, and water.
5. Simmer with the lid on^[1] for half an hour or so. Simmer is pretentious cookery-speak for keep it bubbling, but not too much. Not that much. That's too much, turn it down. More. There.
6. Use a blender to reduce the result to a nutritious mush.

So nutritious was the resultant mush that it solidified in the jug before I could eat it. I had to add as much water as there was soup before I could get a spoon in. There wasn't enough meat in it, so I added some diced pork as croutons. It was marvellous and I went back for seconds. This is a dish consisting almost entirely of Things I Don't Eat.

Dinner was leftovers from last night's roast pork and vegetable medley, although I had spinach this time instead of kale. I will eat spinach, but usually this is for definitions of eat that include pick at it a bit so that it looks like I'm eating the green stuff. This spinach was meaty and tender and delicious—slightly bitter, but that's probably because I'd overcooked it. I overcooked everything else as well, because I wasn't paying attention, but still the pork was fantastically juicy and flavoursome, and the vegetables were tasty in a way that actually made them taste of food rather than that stupid crap your grandmother made you eat.

I think I am actually getting something close to this nebulous five-a-day, and for the first time in my life. Admittedly it's mostly from root vegetables, but I think that's to be expected on the Fife Diet.

I've just drunk two litres of water and I'm not entirely sure why.

--
[0] My Trusted Co-presenters have apparently been having some problems with the lack of cooking fat and its implications for getting bacon back out of the pan. Not so for me: I have plenty of dripping from last night's pork roast. The tiniest smear on the surface of the pan, dotted on with a fingertip, was sufficient.

[1] Keeping the lid on also saves energy and helps reduce your carbon footprint.

On the train over to Fife on Friday, we encountered the first—but, I suspect, by no means the last—infestation of mindless jobsworth officialdom to plague Three Guys Argue A Lot About Cookery (title subject to change).

We were filming ourselves sitting at a table talking about the Fife Diet while Fife itself rolled into view beyond the window. Because we are Professional Televison People, the camera was balanced precariously on top of the bike rack across the aisle. And every time one of us tried to say anything, the bloody recorded woman decided to announce again that the next stop was Inverkeithing, as indeed it had been for the last twenty minutes.

INT. TRAIN CARRIAGE. DAY

Our Heroes are sat around a table, talking about the Fife Diet. Enter stage right THE TICKET INSPECTOR.

THE TICKET INSPECTOR
You can't film in 'ere, mate.

OUR HEROES
Why not?

Beat.

TICKET INSPECTOR
Because... there are people walkin' past.

OUR HEROES
Okay.

Exit THE TICKET INSPECTOR, satisfied. HOLD on OUR HEROES as the CAMERA continues rolling uninterrupted.

(TELEVISION SCRIPTS always have some of the WORDS in CAPITALS, usually PROPER NOUNS but also sometimes VERBS. This is because it helps DIRECTORS to CONCENTRATE after they've DONE all of that COKE.)

The mind of the bureaucrat is a simple one to understand, if not always this simple to subvert. You can't do that invariably translates as you are doing something slightly different, therefore Strange and Frightening to me, and you must be destroyed.

~

Most of the discussion on the Fife Diet has been going on over at cairmen's LiveJournal. This is because he has a vastly greater number of friends than I do, and as such is a comment on the quantity, not necessarily the quality, of such friends—although it wouldn't hurt if you buggers commented every once in a while. You know who you are.

Most of the commentary seems to be along the lines of:

But why are you doing this?
But you don't live in Fife.
But that's not what the Fife Diet is about.
You should be doing something completely different, or better still, nothing at all!

Fortunately, the response to all of these queries is the same one:

SHUT UP!

I am doing this for Science and, as already discussed, for you, the entertained viewer. As a result I am already looking forward to ten more swede meals before Saturday. The last thing I need is an existential crisis on top of my critically low blood sugar levels.

The only way to explore a concept is to push at its boundaries. The most popular, highly-publicized and critically-acclaimed experiment in local sourcing is The Fife Diet, so we decided to investigate it and use it as a stepping stone to explore the wider concepts of food miles and local sourcing. Thus, we've taken a strict interpretation of the Fife Diet in order to see just what, exactly, local produce actually means.

To take an early example: followers of the Fife Diet as set out in their press releases are allowed bread, for instance, as long as they make it themselves. We found out on Day -1 that the flour may be local, but the wheat that makes the flour is from Canada. This raises serious questions about what constitutes local, what we're all going to have to learn to deal with when the oil runs out, and—perhaps most important of all—how much hypocrisy we're all willing to put up with from hippies.

We could, theoretically, invent our own diet and call it the Edinburgh Diet and test that, but that wouldn't prove anything about the Fife Diet. Doing so would be irrelevant and pointless. Doing this instead has the potential to enlighten, and to inform and entertain. And I'm getting to eat vegetables, which may or may not be a good thing.

When the entertained viewer gives every impression of merely being a playa-hater or, worse, a bureaucrat, then I start considering quitting my diet. If I quit it now, then I've spent eighty quid, pissed off my managers, and eaten leaves, and none of us will have learned anything as a result.

(Although I have learned what happens if you make porridge with the wrong kind of oatmeal.)