Take me to the border

To Tortilla with Number7 to celebrate a very successful week at work for her after quite a number of months of great effort preparing for an inspection. Some time ago she had noted that a Tex-Mex war had broken out on Upper St as two new places had opened up within months of each other, and last night we tried Tortilla, which is reputed to be winnng the battle of the bandidos.

This was an especially good choice as only this week I was thinking to myself how much I had enjoyed eating at Chilli's in the Emirates, and how nice it would be to have a no-nonsense Tex-Mex diner me. Well now I've got one! It is very much a diner or cafe rather than a restaurant, with utilitarian benches and a fast-food style counter, but it's a far from unpleasant place to be (the walls could lose the red paint I guess), especially once you've started to eat. I had a large burrito (£5.50) full of black beans, Spanish rice, cheese, guacamole, sauteed peppers and onions, and some truly delicious hot sauce. It was a monster dish and went straight to the part of the soul that deals with food. On the side we had nachos, some very good guacamole (you could see the evidence of it having been made with real fruit) and some super sour cream. Drinks were Diet Coke and Sprite, with bottomless cups from the self-service machine, which also had an ice dispenser (fun!). I can't think of much else to say about the food other than that it was just damned delicious and it really is a pretty fantastic addition to the suddenly burgeoning Mexican dining scene in London.

Afterwards we went to see Women of Troy at the National (more on this once b has been) and saw the nifty neon display on the South Bank.

Dinner with Rabs

I sent out an urgent text to b and Number7 on Tues asking for dinner suggestions near Paddington as Rabs was taking a train home from there and wanted to eat close to the station. Unfortunately I will have to save the excellent ideas of Mandalay and other Edgware Road places for the future (the very near future I hope) as we in the end settled on an Indian place called the Golden Shalimar which is less than 5 mins from the station (good for those who fear they may miss their train, and that evening's epidode of Spooks). Anyways, I would say that the resto is completely unremarkable and all the better for that: the food is as yummy as you would expect in a decent neighbourhood Indian restaurant, the staff are very polite, and the feeling of well-spiced staisfaction at the end was just what was called for.

Lunch with Rabs

Quite pleased with this salad of rocket, pear, rocquefort and hazelnuts. The chipsticks weren't bad either, but I don't want to give the impression that we had crisp sandwiches for lunch...

Perhaps losing weight isn't so bad after all

Earlier this week I may have given the impression that my having lost weight was something of a personal tragedy. On reflection, and having viewed a lot of photos of me when I was tubby, it is quite nice to have lost weight, and while I still conflicted about the importance of all these things, in a simple way it does feel good to be lighter. After writing earlier in the week, one thing that I did notice was that in spite of all my proclamations about learning to disassociate guilt from food, I felt really bad about having a pizza for lunch on Thursday and then having a massive dinner. I convinced myself that this was the start of a slippery slope and I was back to being fat, which is rather an extreme reaction to one day of gorging, but I just don't know if I'll ever be the kind of person who can be svelte-ish and have a guilt-free relationship with food. In the meantime, I'll try and enjoy having just one chin, and places like my fave riverside pub in the picture (the Angel in Bermondsey).

Complements II

Damn, these sides were good. Forget the clunky main dish which was couscous with red pepper, chickpeas, artichoke hearts and feta, and check out the spinach with yoghurt, nutmeg and olive oil; and the big field mushrooms just cooked with olive oil. I believe it was Nigel Slater's take on food porn which first led me to realise just how incredibly delicious well-cooked, big field mushrooms are, and one of the great things about fruit and veg markets is that the quality of 'shroom you get there is invariably way better than those from supermarkets. A good one like this basically a meal in itself and its warmth much to be recommended in these days of gloom and bleakness in which the weather's so dank that the raindrops themselves are little icerdrops when they land on you.

Complements

One advantage of having gone to the market at the weekend is that I have loads of vegetables in the fridge and, rather than simply making some carb dish which has veggies and cheese chucked in, I can make a dish with something on the side, which I reckon makes for a more enjoyable meal. This was rice with red wine, spring onions, peppers and radicchio, with a salad of avocado, tomato, feta and olive oil, and a big dollop of Total. Nae bad at all, and it was the salad which was by far the nicest element, though tough for a fan of carbs to have just that by itself, and I suppose its flavours and weight were really a complement to the stodgy rice. I think I shall stop now before I start bigging myself up any more (I have had some real cooking disasters of late which haven't made it up here...).

I'll never have a six-pack

At the age of 36 I feel quite confident in saying that I'll never have a six-pack. I may never own a silver BMW like the dude who splashed me on my way to work. A second home in Bulgaria seems unlikely. But I don't give that much of a shit.

Such thoughts have been crossing my mind for two reasons. The first is that I am coming towards the end of this year's blog (I will be back in some form in '08!) and I have been reflecting on the reasons as to why I started blogging. One of them, you may well remember, was that I thought that writing about food might help me lose weight. At the time this seemed a rather odd claim to make, but this connects to my second reason for not worrying that I'll never have that six-pack that the man in black-and-white with the cheesy grin has each month on the cover of Men's Health magazine, which is that I have lost quite a lot of weight, and in some ways I've been wondering why this hasn't cheered me up; for in fact it's done quite the reverse.

So this may be a slightly unusual blog entry, of a more personal nature than most I have written, which is, I suppose, to say that it may be more like a conventional blog. You have been warned!

Let me, though, begin with some try to assess how I think I have lost weight, before moving onto good things about losing weight, and then the stuff about how it's all a bag of sand, or whatever they say (and I guess it is a bag of sand off my back because I'm now 73kg, having been 85kg for ages, and up to 89kg at times). "Now here's the deal", as a favourite Alabaman of some of our acquaintance used to say: I reckon each of us has their own way of losing weight, so there's possibly no transferability from my method. Would basically stopping eating bread be a big deal for you? I guess that it has been for me because I bloody love that stuff and find it reasonably hard to describe how much pleasure the sight of a new loaf and packet of unsalted butter would give me after a hard day at work. Anyways, I just don't have bread in the house much these days, so that was part one for me. Part 2 was getting into a breakfast routine because I like breakfast, but veered between wildly abstemious breakfasts (OK, there weren't many of them) and just wild breakfasts (mmm, pizza in the fridge; mmmm, curry in the fridge; mmmmm risotto in the fridge). I can actually picture myself laughing as I tuck into a breakfast of pasta or risotto from the fridge, and in many ways it's quite sad to think that every single day I now have a bowl of cereal (usually maple and pecan crunch, which is yummy) and a yoghurt. Actually, it's quite a fine breakfast, with a double espresso and a Berocca on the side.

Part 3 is the key for me which is that when I am at work - and therefore most stressed and hassled - I just have fruit and vegetables for lunch. It doesn't seem a hardship because there's so much going on, and it is by no means as regimented as breakfast for when I work in the library or it's a weekend, then I allow myself whatever I want, including real treats like giant baps from King's or a sandwich from Mr Felafel. For dinner I have the kind of meals I post on here, which are hardly ultra-healthy, and if I walk past a shop with amazing cakes I have one (or, more like it, if I'm in Budgen's, as I was yesterday, and there is a bag of four white chocolate chip cookies going for 49p, I have them). I exercise plenty, but then I always did that, and I basically don't eat any junk food whatsoever - no crisps, choccie bars etc - but that's simply because I don't want 'em. Chips, on the other hand, I want on a fairly regular basis, and I have them.

In some ways, you may be coming to appreciate that it is actually a slight mystery as to how I've lost a lot of weight, and I guess it's quite conceivable that a button will flick and I'll put most of it back on. We'll see. I recall promising to talk about some positive aspects of losing weight. I guess the main thing is that you come to quite like parts of your body which you didn't much like before. Second, in some ways losing weight can be a way of really enjoying food when you choose to enjoy it, for it cuts out the guilt as you eat into a fudge doughnut, as you know that you've earned it. This, though, is dodgy logic in my book because food offers so much damn pleasure in life, where we might not find it otherwise, that to get caught up in any of these cycles of guilt about food is a dangerous thing. I suppose that what one can say is that moderation offers a pleasure in itself, but even writing that I think of times when gluttony does that too, and I don't think we value being absolutely bloody gorged in our culture. The third thing is that losing weight allows other people to compliment you, for they invariably say that you look younger/healthier for having slimmed-down. In truth I feel no healthier these days and I am evidently rather older, but I do quite like getting compliments, though even this is somewhat double-edged for I am increasingly coming to the conclusion that we should damn well compliment people we like and love whether they like it or not. Do people really need earn our compliments through 'achievements' like losing weight? I think the next time I see a friend looking rough after a cold and a bad night, that's the moment to show the love. Anyway, you know what I mean.

And the grim news is that I haven't even got onto the bad aspects of losing weight yet!

That, essentially, is that we are all so wrapped-up in a body-image obsessed culture that, no matter how blase we think we may be about such things, we think that there's some happiness waiting at the end of a successful diet. Maybe there is for some people, and I guess this is super dependent on all sorts of other variables, but I guess that I am now the lightest I've been in years and I am filled more with a sense of futility at having been suckered by the diet myth than by any genuine sense of satisfaction. I want to be well, I want to look good, and these things have some connection to weight, but I have to say that there's little happiness to be found in dieting. Pleasure in the end, I've concluded, can be found in biting into that triple-layer of fudge icing, doughy doughnut and custard filling, and happiness is about a whole load of things, but it ain't about weight. Dieting is essentially about the self and happiness, it seems to me, is more about you and other people, about the great reflectedness of our world as we see the wonder of who other people are and they reveal the goodness they see in us.

So don't be surprised if I now do a pretty good impersonation of De Niro in Raging Bull as he moves from being a lean fighter to a fat pasta addict. He's supposed to be a loser at the end, but, damn, eating all that pasta must have felt good.

To make a point, I may have overstated some things in this entry, and I know that it doesn't feel nice when one feels fat, and it can feel good in a small way when one loses weight, and I shan't deny that happy medium, but I'm coming to conclude that it's quite nice to simply hover up and down around the weights we are, getting pleasure from food and the people we eat with, and the small ups and downs that thinking about weight can bring, rather than the grand claims that I thought it might hold. I may even come round to like my pot-belly in time, because no matter how light I get, it'll stay, and I'm pleased that six-pack'll never be mine.

Myths and realities of the saints

So St Pancras is now open and I'm afraid to say that some of the foodie hype seems somewhat misplaced at present. The publicity had led one to believe that this was a station unlike other places, where there would be no MaccieD's, no chains (I'm sure I read that each outlet would be run by a firm which had five shops or fewer), the longest champagne bar in Europe, and a daily farmer's market. Well, when I went yesterday, there was no sign of a farmer's market, there was a an M&S Simply Food + equialent outlets, and while the champagne bar was indeed very busy, it didn't look that long.

The good news is that these are, after all, mere peripherals and the station itself is just gorgeous, grand, exciting, beautifully-restored, and a fantastic addition to some of the lovely stations we already enjoy in the Smoke (Euston you are not included in that list, but Paddington you most certainly are).

Chapel V

I've been working quite hard lately and had noticed that one of the consequences of this was that I never went to Chapel Market anymore. This was rather depressing for it meant both that I was missing out on one of the real joys in my life - checking out what's in season, looking for deals, and enjoying a bit of banter with the Cokney traders - and that all of my fruit and vegetables were coming from Tesco. Anyhow, I've made a conscious decision that no matter how hard things are at work, I must make time to go to the Chapel to get my solace there. The attached photo show, I hope, just why I like the place so much, and it helps that those mangoes were three for a nugget, the bunch of English spinach was 60p, and the giant field mushrooms were about a pound; also, thatgoing there encouraged me to buy something like radicchio so that I can get out of the cooking trough I've been in which seems to consist of simply adding yoghurt, cheese, garlic and rocket to either pasta or rice (OK, it's kinda tasty and Edo likes it, but enough...).

Pearl again

I hadn't had a take-away in quite a while, or at least I didn't remember having had a take-away in quite a while (I'm willing to concede that these are two different things...), so I popped into Pearl, which I'm afraid I'd been avoiding as the last time I'd gone there the chips had been under-cooked: not nice. Anyhows, the good news is that Seyhan is back to his best and a bean-burger meal with minty-garlicky-yoghurty chips is still a real treat.

Pasty solace

I had a cold, I was at a nasty train station, I was heading to Chichester to give a paper I didn't want to give, I wished I could just turn round and go home to bed, but at least they sell West Cornwall Pasty Company cheese and onion pasties at Waterloo. They're not the world's best, though they're pretty good, but at the right moment they can really deliver as soul food.

Wahaca

It is fair to say that Wahaca in Covent Garden was one of the most eagerly awaited new openings in Londinium amongst readers of this blog. The publicity promised authentic Mexican food at reasonable prices in a 'Wagamama-style' atmosphere. I have no idea as to whether the food is in any way authentic - more on this soon - but can report that it delivers in the other regards as it is not too pricey and has a funky kinda vibe (I'd say the seating is considerably better than somewhere like Wagamama as not everyone is condemned to benches, though the noise levels are possibly even higher). The one disappointment on the night was that poor b has had a cold lately and was not really able to taste a great deal which, given her championing of Tex-Mex, was a damn shame.

The waiter was in fact very keen to point out that this was not a Tex-Mex place, but instead offered real Mexican 'street food' (as shown on wine-stained menu which someone took home as he had sillily forgotten his camera). Having not been to the Mex, I have no idea if people hang out on street corners enjoying quesadillas with summer smoky aubergine, potato and goat's cheese - my head says probably not, even if my heart says that perhaps they should. Equally, I don't remember many of the characters in Amores Perros or Y Tu Mama Tambien saying they'd die for a taquito with crema, Lancashire, fresh salsa, aubergine, potato and goat's cheese, but, all this said, I have read a fair bit about Mexican food here lately - http://majbros.blogspot.com/ - and for all my cheekiness, I do get the impression that Wahaca accurately conveys the idea that a lot of Mexican food is starchy, cheesy and spicy, and that while some of the ingredients used here may differ from those used there, there is a real attempt to get at a spirit of Mexican cooking which you won't find elsewhere in London. I should say that this also seems to have something to do with an attempt to source lots of good food from Britain, and I shan't knock a place which gets its heat from the South Devon Chilli Farm, one of my fave Devonian outlets, run by chilled-out cool dudes. One final note on the 'down home' theme is to say that the food here quite reminded me of the kind of Mexican food we might make if we had a go at home - and indeed N family tacos came to mind - and this was no bad thing at all.

We had been forewarned that none of the dishes are especially spicy and that you must take responsibility for adding heat, which isn't really a problem, though I don't quite see why they needn't up the heat notch overall, because I tend to think a restaurant should be a better judge of these things than its customers, even if it is trying to make sure it doesn't scare people off. All of the dishes were very tasty I thought and the best were perhaps two sides of 'green rice' (brown rice blitzed with garlic and coriander appara) and frijoles (black beans cooked twice, with cheese), though the very thick nachos were vg, as was the guacamole that had clearly just been made, and I thought the quesadillas were really yummy, though any restaurant that mucks up a quesadilla doesn't really deserve to succeed, such is the inherent deliciousness of Mexican cheese toastie.

Whetstone wanderings

Friday morning saw me a'wandering around London on my mini break, catching some very good art in Fitrovia, walking through Regent's Park in the bright autumn sun, and then heading up to Barnet Homes HQ for lunch in the working hood of Number7. The first picture show the interior of Mogador and through the window one can see most of HQ, though not the top floors reserve for the higher-ups. The second picture shows a very yummy Moroccan felafel pancake, served with excellent potato and beetroot salads, which it was observed was rather more paratha-y than pancake-y, or indeed burrito-y I might say, and all the better for that. Here's hoping this blog is able to venture further into Totteridge and Whetstone in the future!

Cafe 72

Cafe 72 in Tetbury, or perhaps it was 73?, is evidently the place for ladies who lunch in this pretty Cotswold town which has the distinction of being the closest place to Highgrove (the real highlight of the town is the magnifique church with stunning interior, where Charles worships). In spite of some of the most forgetful service I've ever had (the owner actually forgot what she had forgotten - and I'm kinda not making that up), it was a nice place for lunch and it reminded me that a goat's cheese salad can really delicious in the middle of the day, esp when accompanied by a bowl of chilli chips (and I discovered that one of the advantages of said chips is that the heat stops them from being utterly moreish).

The Old Spot

I have a new fave cosy English pub which is the Old Spot in Dursley: warm - check, lots of wood and general down-home decoration - check, friendly service from staff who clearly like their customers - check, tasty food that does what it says on the tin - check, many local beers... you get the picture. Actually the beer was the best thing of all. We had Reverend Janet, a beer brewed in honour of a local minister who's currently recovering from a serious illness, and it was a deliciously toasted, fruity bitter, served much colder than usual, which made you feel warm and well-disposed towards the world after a couple of pints.

Cotswolds lunch

The Cotswolds have their charms: rye bread, a good spicy chutney, some Single Gloucester, and some charming locals with whom to lunch.

Quick and easy supper 47

If ever I wake up in the middle of the night and really fancy something, I just pop downstairs and raid my secret stash of chocolate in the larder. No, hang on, I don't have any stairs and I don't have a larder, do I? Anyway, this quick dinner was brown rice, field mushrooms, a bag of rocket, garlic, onions (fried with thyme) and cheddar. The nuttiness of the rice works well with the mature cheddar I reckon, and you have to hope that the rocket adds some kinda healthy element.

Cafe Corfu

After we had had a hot tip about the place, Number7 and I went to Cafe Corfu in Camden on Sunday evening. The tip had suggested that it offered seriously good Greek food in a somewhat idiosyncratic atmosphere and I have to say that it didn't disappoint on either count. Starting with the rather less important question of the ambiance, let me say that we were quite charmed by the Disco Classix (or similar) CD which accompanied the first half of our meal, the George Michael which followed, and then some even more authentically Greek tunes. Apparently they have belly dancers on Fri and Sats and I can imagine it's a really fun place to come with a group. Still, I was glad that we were there on a quiet night because it was the seriousness of the food which had whetted our appetite, and it is damned good. We began by sharing some halloumi and a slice of creamy spinach filo pie (I'm sure the Greeks have a better way of putting that): the halloumi was extremely thick and delicious, and, as the photos show, very well griddled, while the pie was one of the single yummiest things I've eaten all year. Mmmmm, spinach, and mmmmm, as Number7 observed, really well-made filo pastry. It was quite hard to compete with that, and the excellent 'pitta', which was lovely griddled flatbread, but the mains were also very good. N7 had a lamb dish which she noted was a very well plated (a rare meat photo for this blog) and my stuffed peppers also looked v nice. They weren't an exceptional dish, but they were very tasty indeed and about the nicest stuffed peppers I've ever had in a restaurant. For pudding N7 had baklava and I went for honey puffballs, or somesuch, and both were vg. Unfortunately they came with chocolate ice cream rather than the advertised yoghurt and honey, but we shall know to be insistent next time. Next time we will also have a clearer idea of the place and its menu and a resto that ranks A- in my book may rise still higher. It's not cheap, but then why should really excellent food be cheap? God, that spinach was good. Looking at the photo again, I realise that it also came with delicious yoghurt and this was another really good thing about the place, because the accompaniments with all the dishes were well thought-out and really added to the eating experience. N7 suggested going back there to eat mezze style and I believe this to be a very good idea. Oh, and the photos also remind me that the peppers came with some yummy feta.

Ice cold in Autumn

Hampstead's charms this autumn are really plentiful because the colour of the trees is really magical or, I guess, after today's rain, was really magical. Still, Sunday walks can still finish at Kenwood house with the reward of a Marine Ices ice cream. This time I went for chocolate and it is a high compliment indeed to say that it tasted really like a good chocolate mousse.

Cinammon futures

I had a hot tip last night that the Nordic Bakery on Golden Square in Piccadilly is the place where one can buy London's best cinammon buns. c.3pm today I was there and... the man in front of me bought the last bun. Well, I could have waited for another batch to be baked but I decided to go back another day as it seemed like it would be nicer to eat in there anyhow (though apparently the coffee is the strongest in London). I caught a glimpse of the bun and it looked good but can it really beat a Cinnabon? Ah hae ma doots.

Don't let the funk mess with your menu selection

SoS for lunch and I was so into all the funky house and the general vibe that I sillily ordered the bean burger with houmous and baba ghanoush again, when I know that it is a rather mediocre thing with bland approximations of real Middle-Eastern mezze. Ah well, next time I will remember how good the veggie breakfast is, and I shan't complain because the chips were as delish as ever and any place that plays spacey trance in the morning at a volume which is loud but which still allows for conversation is A-OK with me.

Language games

I believe that the verb used in Arabic for shisha is that which is also used for drinking, so on that basis can I present my new shisha - or rather, my feet, the shisha coals and Manhattan in the background. It's a dinky number called a 'pumpkin shisha' because of its shape, so I guess there's kind of another food reference there too. Since acquiring the shisha on Thursday evening (the need was urgent because I had to forget a two-hour grilling I'd had at a philosophy of history seminar), it has seen much action, though tonight it must lie unused as I am feeling a tad fragile after perhaps one too many smokes and one two many wines last night (happy birthday OB1!).

Lazyboy healthy pudding

I needed to make a quick, healthy and substantial pudding for the Namba King and myself the other night, and I opted for something which was really not very me at all, but which served as a reminder that making something you think will be a bit rough or bland can sometimes be a good idea! The picture tells the story really: Tesco's maple and pecan crunch cereal (we get through 2.5 boxes a week!), some black cherry yoghurt, sliced banana, satsuma segments, and a little lime juice over the top. I shan't pretend that this is a super-moreish dish, but I'm coming to think that it's quite a good standby when you need a pudding which is filling but not too unhealthy.