Random Annoyances: Lettuce

I’ve never had *any* food that was considerably improved by the addition of lettuce. Let’s be honest, it serves no useful purpose other than a snack for rabbits and tortoises and a minor distraction for fat people who think nibbling green leaves will make them thin.

Take the humble cheese salad sandwich. Lettuce, cheese, cucumber and tomato with a dressing if you buy it from Waitrose. Ditch the tasteless soggy lettuce and you’re left with … a tasty sandwich. Then there’s the egg salad sandwich. Remove any one of the fillers, apart from lettuce, and the sandwich is about as appealing as a kick in the balls.

That’s not to say it doesn’t have its place. Chop it up finely so it can’t be tasted and add it to a salad to bulk it up, which is pretty much what everyone else does.

Random Annoyances: Piping Hot Food

What exactly is the point of piping hot food? It doesn’t matter whether it’s home cooked, reheated or a restaurant dish, when I’m hungry, the first thing I want to do is eat food and not sit there looking at it steaming away.

Sure, it eliminates salmonella poisoning and there’s nothing like taking a deep sniff to get the juices flowing before diving in but really, why do some people insist of serving food so roasting hot that it burns your tongue? I think the two worst culprits are cheese and potato dishes; freshly cooked or straight from the oven, both are deceptively cool on the service. Bite into one however, and prepare to loose the skin at the top of your mouth. I’m looking at you Mr Greggs-Cheese-And-Onion-Pasty!

The ideal scenario is to cook food thoroughly until it’s piping hot and then go make a salad or set the table. By the time the cutlery is primed and the tomatoes chopped, the food should be at the perfect temperature; hot enough to enjoy yet cool enough to eat.

A crisp connoisseurs list

Everybody has at least one food vice and mine is crisps or potato chips as they are known by our American cousins. Man, I love crisps and could easily munch through a trio of packets. I think this is because when I was a kid, crisps were very much a distant treat, something to be treasured once a month or bought from my own hard earned pocket money.

As the ultimate convenience food, crisps are difficult to beat; they are no respecter of weather (unlike chocolate which can melt), come in a myriad of shapes, sizes and flavours, are relatively cheap, widely available, go with lots of other dishes and best of all, supremely satisfying to eat with no mess or fuss.

Over the years, I’ve become something of a crisp connoisseur having enthusiastically tried virtually every variety and brand available in the UK. As a result, my sixth sense has become highly adept at sniffing out a decent bag of crisps so here for your munching pleasure are my top six favourites.

1. Roysters
Are these the ultimate crisps? Quite possibly, I love the combination of a unique bubbled texture with mouth sized crisps that deliver a hearty crunch. Best of all, the salt is not too overbearing so you can really taste the T-Bone steak flavour which is seasoned to perfection. If you like any type of beef flavoured crisps, Roysters is the benchmark to beat.

2. Waitrose Love Life Crinkle Cut
I only buy these reduced fat crisps in two flavours; unsalted and lightly salted. What makes these better than other salted brands are the uncomplicated ingredients (potato, oil and a dusting of salt) together with generously thick sliced chips that are then crinkle cut for a real mouthful of wholesome crunchy goodness devoid of oil and chemicals like potassium chloride and sugar that Walkers seems to put in all its crisps. You really get a clean taste of potato with the Waitrose, especially with the unsalted variety and the above all, these crisps exude quality with all produce having been locally sourced and lovingly cooked.

3. Ruffles
If McCoys are crisps for lumberjacks, Ruffles are most definitely the more refined and subtle variety equally at home being nibbled by the fairer sex. Like McCoys, the Ruffles are thickly sliced crinkle cut but the flavours are less strong and the crisps are a lot bigger. And if there’s anything sexier than watching a woman seductively crunch through a huge Ruffles crisp in two bites, I don’t know what it is.

4. Pringles
Available in far too many complicated flavours and I really only like the original but 5 stars for the effort. The great thing about Pringles is that you know exactly what you’re getting; each crisp is the same shape, the same size and offers the same level of crunchiness. And because they’re sold in a large tube, you can scoff half and then seal the top to finish off the rest later. Be warned though, as the advert goes, once you pop, you can’t stop and these crisps do indeed seem to have some kind of allure that makes them addictive.

5. Pop Chips
A newcomer to the market, Pop Chips are unique for the simple reason that they’re the healthiest crisps available. Why? Because these beauties are not fried but cooked using a bit of heat and pressure, just like popcorn. This results in a light and crunchy product, delicately flavoured and far lower in fat than conventionally fried crisps or even those God awful baked crisps from McVities. I’m really liking the Salt and Pepper flavour at the moment and look forward to the range being expanded further.

6. McCoys
The original thick sliced crinkle cut chips and still one of the best although I find a lot of their flavours a bit too strong. Nevertheless, their Flame Grilled Steak deserves a special mention as does Salt and Vinegar which is simply magnificent as a savoury accompaniment to pretty much any sandwich. Very satisfying to crunch through, they’re not called man crisps for nothing.

 

So there you have it. Agree or disagree? Let me know and let’s debate the merits of Cheese and Onion over Prawn Cocktail.

Ice Cream Wars

A turf war has erupted between ice cream vendors with rivals using their ice cream trucks as battering rams.

Police say the damage could run into hundreds and thousands.

The ultimate food

Question: What’s low in fat, low in salt, low in sugar, low in cholesterol and tastes great?

Answer: Nothing!

Stingy tight-fisted Mancunians queue 3 hours for £1 fish and chips

A local chippy in Manchester celebrating its first birthday by offering a special promotion of fish and chips for a quid led to a huge queue of stingy tight-fisted saddos lining up 3 hours just to save a fiver on the normal price. Fair enough, the chippy (Fosters Fish and Chips in Didsbury) is an award winning place but really, have these people got nothing better to do than queue hours for fish and chips? FFS get a grip people, you’re an embarrassment to Northerners (and that’s saying something).

A Mars a day helps you throw up

I bought a Mars Bar recently out of curiosity. I’d forgotten how bad it tastes, a foul combination of warm cough medicine and a sickly sweet dollop of gooey Pepto-Bismol guaranteed to make you feel sick. Reminded me exactly why I stopped eating this crap excuse for chocolate thirty years ago.

As for the laughably rubbish tagline, I doubt there’s any person for whom a Mars a day helps them work, rest and play. Unless they’re the type of idiot who thinks hot women sit around in their undies all day eating Cadbury’s Flake.

Forget Marmite unless you were reared on it

I’ve just tasted Marmite for the first time and it’s bloody awful. If you haven’t had this stuff and liked it before you reach puberty, forget it.

A glass and a half for sleazy Cadbury CEO

Now that our lousy traitorous Government has allowed Cadbury, one of our last remaining independent British companies, to be sold for peanuts to crap plastic cheese giant Kraft, no time has been wasted in shutting the UK Cadbury factory with the loss of 400 jobs so that production can be moved to Poland.

Dimwit PM Gordon Brown insisted that Cadbury workers would be protected from any job losses saying "we are determined that, at a time when people are worried about their jobs, that jobs in Cadbury can be secure". Of course, when The Bottler insists that he’s determined to do anything about anything you can bet your last Dairy Milk that it will be of absolutely no benefit to UK workers or the economy.

And so it is that just a week after the hostile takeover and Kraft promising to keep the UK factory open, a key factor in persuading clueless shareholders to vote for the takeover, the plastic cheese eating American slobs have announced that 400 Cadbury’s workers will be sacked and the Cadbury factory in Somerset closed so that Polish workers can benefit from the British Jobs for Foreign Workers policy of Brown and his EU obsessed cronies.

Professional toad and ex-Cadbury CEO Todd Stitzer, a man with a face that could scare flies off a manure truck, could barely contain his glee at having sold off Cadbury cheap and appeared grinning on TV as he collected a bumper package consisting of £2mil bonus, annual salary of £1mil, an obscene £12mil pension and the right to cash in shares worth almost £9mil. Yes folks, you heard that right, this despicable pasty faced American spiv responsible for the loss of 400 UK jobs and selling off Cadbury shares at 30% less than the market value will swan off with over £20mil.

You can expect the quality of Cadbury’s chocolate to slide downhill very rapidly once production shifts to Poland. In the meantime, if anyone see’s Stitzer running away with his bag of swag, do feel free to set the Cadbury’s gorilla on this leering overpaid dirtbag.

When sugar is not so sweet

Was in the supermarket today to do some grocery shopping and was annoyed to see that more and more food seems to have stupid levels of sugar in it for no apparent reason.

Take Walkers for example. Why on earth do their Beef and Onion crisps have sugar in them for f***s sake, this is supposed to be a savoury potato snack not a bloody pudding? I did a quick scan of their other flavours and more than half of all Walkers crisps inexplicably had sugar in them. What the hell is that all about?

And then there’s bread. Warburtons and Hovis will be more than happy to sell you a wholemeal loaf providing you don’t mind it being stuffed with caramelised sugar, additives and God knows what other crap they can put in to extend the shelf life by a few more days. Last time I checked, bread was a simple matter of flour, water, yeast and a pinch of salt so why on earth do the ingredients found in a standard loaf resemble the contents of a chemistry set?