james mckay dot net

We went out this evening to Smith & Western, our local American restaurant, to celebrate Mum’s birthday. A truly blessed occasion, with much more food than I could eat.

I’ve been there several times in the past, and usually I can manage everything that’s set before me. On Iain’s stag night in 1997, I had a 20 ounce steak, followed by a massive chocolate belly buster pudding. I managed it all, but the following day I felt rather unpleasant. It’s not often that I pig out like that.

When we moved house, I decided to get my diet under control, and instituted a spending cap for myself of three pounds a day on food. This meant an end to Dr Pepper, Pringles, Coca-Cola, doughnuts, McDonald’s and all sorts of other junk food that I was wasting an absolute fortune on. This was prompted mainly by the fact that I was tipping the scales at twelve and a half stone, and at my height and build, that means overweight. The first few days were pretty difficult: I kept feeling shaky, but by the end of the first week I was beginning to feel a good bit better.

I have always been a pretty fussy eater, and although I’m not as bad as I used to be, I still have a considerable catalogue of food dislikes. I won’t touch mince, margarine, butter, custard, eggs, milk or fried bread, and for many years the list included at various times things such as sausages, beefburgers, cheese and battered fish. I think some people were a bit bemused at my food faddishness, but now that I think about it, it was actually quite a healthy diet, because my main dislikes were for fatty, greasy or processed food. I think I must have been a bit on the sensitive side to some things too: the smell of boiling milk made me want to vomit, for instance. For that reason, if you ask me to make you up a milky drink, I will probably try to offer you a non-milky alternative. Or at least, something that doesn’t involve boiling the stuff. In the absence of a chemistry lab fume cupboard, at any rate.

In recent years, though, my eating patterns have been becoming much more indisciplined, and as they did so, I seemed to build up quite a tolerance for some of these foods that formerly made me feel woozy. Cheese and sausages were no longer a problem, for instance, nor was greasy chip shop batter.

However, now that I’ve cut back on my spending on junk food and started to build up some discipline, and some of the toxins have been cleared out of my system, I’ve begun to find some of my childhood dislikes coming back with a vengeance. A couple of months ago I’d have thought nothing of munching my way through a whole packet of dark chocolate Kit-Kats and a tub of Pringles in an afternoon, washed down with a bottle of Dr Pepper, and then eating a ten ounce steak and chips for supper.

I don’t seem to be able to do that any more.

I wasn’t feeling particularly full when the steak and chips arrived this evening, but the taste of the grease in the chips made me want to throw up. This was pretty surprising: Smith & Western chips aren’t particularly greasy. I think that at the moment, sausages, beefburgers and deep fried battered stuff are likely to be a pretty firm no-no.

Drinks are another big issue. I have a strong dislike for milk, coffee and pretty much all alcoholic drinks, and I find tea too bitter to taste without an exorbitant amount of sugar. Over the years there have been occasions when I’ve gone for months or even years at a time without taking any caffeinated drinks of any nature. When I drink tea for several days in a row, it makes me feel rather strange, and when I come off it, I get a pretty nasty headache after about a day or so. Fortunately, I’m in a bit of a non-tea phase at the moment. I’ve tried hot Ribena in the past, but that too seems to have a saturation point, beyond which I can’t take any more. It’s a bit annoying really, because I like to have a nice hot relaxing drink from time to time when I’m working.

Herbal infusions seem to work well. My current favourite drink is a Twinings lemon and ginger one, which is pretty refreshing. The best thing of all about it is that it tastes great with only a small amount of sugar, much less than any other tea or infusion that I’ve tried.

Hopefully all this will settle down to a nice healthy diet.

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Posted at 22:27 on 15 November 2006.
Tagged: food

The idea behind ready meals is that you put them straight in the microwave, press a couple of buttons, wait ten minutes or so for the beep, and you’re done. Unfortunately, things are never quite as simple as that.

The ideal microwave meal should be suitable for home freezing, so you can buy them a week in advance. (Some aren’t.) It should also be suitable for cooking in the microwave from frozen, so you can decide at the last minute what you’re going to have, bung it straight in the microwave from the freezer, press a button, and come back in ten minutes when it beeps. (Some demand that you defrost them first, or cook them in a conventional oven, which isn’t all that helpful if you don’t have such a thing in the office kitchen.) And it shouldn’t require user intervention halfway through cooking, such as peeling back the cover and giving it a stir, so you can get on with something else while it’s chuntering away.

It should also be easy to dispense. Some meals come in a tray that is divided into two sections. This makes it impossible to just pour out the contents into a bowl or a plate without making a mess all over the place — you have to spoon the contents out, which takes half a minute or so longer. If your meal does come in two halves like that, they should be easily separable. And it should be easy to remove the cover without having to hunt around for a pair of scissors and then scald your fingers in the process.

Finally, it needs to taste good and present you with a balanced, healthy diet, rather than a whole lot of stuff concocted in some undergraduate chemistry lab or other. It shouldn’t be so smelly that it annoys everyone down the corridor from the kitchen. And when it says that it’s chicken casserole, it should contain a decent amount of chicken, and not be 95% dumplings.

When you’re a stressed out programmer working to tight deadlines, every little thing like that helps.

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Posted at 13:44 on 16 June 2006.
Tagged: food