With weather that would have had Shackelton quaking in his Ugg boots and asking for more lip balm, we’ve all been slip sliding our way about the UK this week like students after Happy Hour in Freshers’ week. Over the past few days I have fallen more often than Heidi Fleiss, the notorious Hollywood madame now putting her feet up in Channel Four’s Celebrity Big Brother house.
I confess that I haven’t been watching the show, but I feel I know what’s happening as I’ve heard Davina’s pieces to camera echo across London as she shouts louder than Concorde with bronchitis. Any more excitement from her and we’ll be having avalanches.
But there have been more important things to do than sit in front of TV ogling a collection of would be celebrities whose face is their plastic surgeon’s fortune. My priority this week has been given over to comfort eating.
Whenever it’s icy or there’s snow I get this uncontrollable craving for stodge, real school dinner type food piled up on my plate like a Desperate Dan cow pie with steam coming off it and heaps of seconds waiting in the wings. For all the advancements and finesse of modern cuisine, Jamie’s hand rolled cannelloni with truffle oil can’t beat a homemade shepherd’s pie can it? And to Gordon with his Fettucine with Fava, Figs and Fennel, I have just two words to say, the first one also beginning with F. It’s “Fry Up!”.
This weather takes me back to my school days, coming home through snow and sometimes fog, ignoring the girls giggling on the other side of the bus because I had a dreamy date in mind with mum’s mince pie and flaky pastry when I got home. As dates go, flaky pastry beats flaky girls.
Don’t get me wrong. Girls are great, in fact most of my ex girlfriends have been girls (I exclude the one who was so addicted to her sport she carried rugby boots in her string bag on the off chance she may get a game while we were out walking. We’ve lost touch but I like to think she’s happy in her dungarees, running a shipyard somewhere and proving her love for her husband by beating him at arm wrestling.)
My fantasy winter menu would include mince pie, shepherd’s pie, gravy, creamy mashed potatoes, cauliflower with white sauce, and hot rice pudding with raisins in for afters. If the Queen served this at State banquets there would be fewer wars.
Of course Debbie, my wife, thinks I’m immature beyond words and that I should be grateful for Tesco diet range quorn. She cannot understand my obsession at this time of year with custard and, I promise you this is true, has been telling me that supermarkets no longer stock the powder and I have to make do with the ready made. For me this is like having Piers Morgan over to dinner rather than Michael Parkinson. One’s the real deal, the other just thinks it is. So I bought a packet myself and, after two days, it has disappeared. I know you think I’m making this up but Debbie has taken it and hidden it where I can’t find it.
I’ve just seen the new George Clooney movie Up In The Air where he plays a single man who thinks relationships suck the soul out of people and that the only way to be happy is to stay footloose and fiancée free. I’m not saying I agree with him but at least no one can steal your custard when you’re solo.
It’s why Desperate Dan never married.
Showing posts with label Food Fads. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Food Fads. Show all posts
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Healthy Eating
www.paulcoia.com
As I sit here, bloated from the massacre of chocolate Easter bunnies and tired from undoing my trousers to let my expanding gut out to meet the neighbours, I’m reflecting on the fact that we live in health obsessed times.
I quite like living in this millennium because unlike when rickets, scurvy and the workhouse meant you were dead before your father had hitched up his baggy pants and returned with his flat cap from the fields, we will all live now to be one hundred and eighty, have skin that glows like a saint’s halo and our regular visitor, Mr Constipation, will be so yesterday. At least that’s if the diet devils are right.
No one can escape the all pervasive advice on what’s good and bad for health just now, and it’s made communal meals a nightmare. Host a dinner party and one friend will be avoiding red meat while another will be going cold turkey on starch – that’s cold, organic and corn fed, turkey of course. A further mate will want low carbs whilst yet another will be on some diet that means they can only eat buffalo that grazed on a west facing slope and must be washed down with Holy water bottled by Evian at Lourdes.
These supposedly good food days have spawned the likes of Gillian McKeith, the woman who definitely isn’t a doctor but is allowed to poke around on TV in other people’s poo. Funnily enough, when her name comes up I always think of back passages as I’d love to lure her to a dark one and send in the boys to sort her out. I can’t decide whether she really does get people to live longer or it just seems long because of her being so relentlessly annoying. Don’t you just want to smack her chops with a sackload of organic peaches, preferably still in the tins?
Even the less ghastly health witches in her coven make me feel life’s not worth the effort.
This week I read one of them giving some advice for how to tackle Athlete’s Foot. She wrote in a national newspaper, The Daily Mail since you ask, that we should crush cloves of garlic, smear them between our toes, and then wrap our foot in a cloth before going to bed. Now just stop for a moment and think about this. Can you imagine the smell or the comments from your bedmate? It would be a great form of contraception but just picture the dreams you’d have as giant Italian sausages, dressed as Dracula, chased you through town. Unless you work in a pizzeria might the pong hovering around you next day cause problems much worse than Athlete’s Foot? Perhaps it would clear a seat or three on the train to work, but what a completely useless, impractical, idea.
Another guy I interviewed on radio, after asking me to move our chairs closer to the window to let in good vibes, demanded to know what medical problems I had, saying he was going to use his powers of ancient herbal remedies to cure me. Despite knowing better and realising these happy clappy, dippy, hippies are a con, I mentioned my sinuses and, of course, he said he had already guessed that was the problem. His internet bought certificate presumably boasted a degree in Herbology, Feng Shui and Mind Reading.
He decided that my cure was contained in a jar of supermarket beetroot juice. I wasn’t to drink this red vinegar but, rather, gargle with it and instead of spitting the stuff out, I should expel it by forcing the gunk down my nose. Stupidly I tried and it not only blew my few brain cells to smithereens but for weeks I had a red tip to my nose that looked like I was on a permanent bender.
If you think it’s difficult to set yourself up as a health and fitness expert, think again because the papers can’t get enough of this rubbish. One of them printed this week the following tip. “When mixing ingredients in the kitchen, don’t use an electric blender but do it manually. This will use four calories per minute and give your wrist muscles a workout.” When I read that, I wanted to find the writer and give my wrist muscles a workout by making a well known gesture right under his nose.
But this modern day witch doctor stuff continues to gain momentum and take hold. My well meaning pal at the gym has been studying food intake and allergies and despairs at my belief that good food went down hill after school dinners. He reckons we are all either Protein or Carbohydrate people. Find out which type you are, he says, then stick to your food type and you’ll live forever, fly like Superman and all your kids will become beautiful millionaires.
I filled in his exhaustive questionnaire only to find I’m exactly half way between the two types. The last thing these people want is to be stuck without an answer so, after admitting he’d not come across this before and, after careful examination of his books, he advised that I should only eat porridge - for breakfast, lunch and dinner. So, if you’re thinking of inviting him and me over for dinner, don’t say you haven’t been warned.
Mind you, invite me on my own and I’ll eat any old shit you serve up. Unless, of course, Gillian McKeith’s been poking around in it first.
As I sit here, bloated from the massacre of chocolate Easter bunnies and tired from undoing my trousers to let my expanding gut out to meet the neighbours, I’m reflecting on the fact that we live in health obsessed times.
I quite like living in this millennium because unlike when rickets, scurvy and the workhouse meant you were dead before your father had hitched up his baggy pants and returned with his flat cap from the fields, we will all live now to be one hundred and eighty, have skin that glows like a saint’s halo and our regular visitor, Mr Constipation, will be so yesterday. At least that’s if the diet devils are right.
No one can escape the all pervasive advice on what’s good and bad for health just now, and it’s made communal meals a nightmare. Host a dinner party and one friend will be avoiding red meat while another will be going cold turkey on starch – that’s cold, organic and corn fed, turkey of course. A further mate will want low carbs whilst yet another will be on some diet that means they can only eat buffalo that grazed on a west facing slope and must be washed down with Holy water bottled by Evian at Lourdes.
These supposedly good food days have spawned the likes of Gillian McKeith, the woman who definitely isn’t a doctor but is allowed to poke around on TV in other people’s poo. Funnily enough, when her name comes up I always think of back passages as I’d love to lure her to a dark one and send in the boys to sort her out. I can’t decide whether she really does get people to live longer or it just seems long because of her being so relentlessly annoying. Don’t you just want to smack her chops with a sackload of organic peaches, preferably still in the tins?
Even the less ghastly health witches in her coven make me feel life’s not worth the effort.
This week I read one of them giving some advice for how to tackle Athlete’s Foot. She wrote in a national newspaper, The Daily Mail since you ask, that we should crush cloves of garlic, smear them between our toes, and then wrap our foot in a cloth before going to bed. Now just stop for a moment and think about this. Can you imagine the smell or the comments from your bedmate? It would be a great form of contraception but just picture the dreams you’d have as giant Italian sausages, dressed as Dracula, chased you through town. Unless you work in a pizzeria might the pong hovering around you next day cause problems much worse than Athlete’s Foot? Perhaps it would clear a seat or three on the train to work, but what a completely useless, impractical, idea.
Another guy I interviewed on radio, after asking me to move our chairs closer to the window to let in good vibes, demanded to know what medical problems I had, saying he was going to use his powers of ancient herbal remedies to cure me. Despite knowing better and realising these happy clappy, dippy, hippies are a con, I mentioned my sinuses and, of course, he said he had already guessed that was the problem. His internet bought certificate presumably boasted a degree in Herbology, Feng Shui and Mind Reading.
He decided that my cure was contained in a jar of supermarket beetroot juice. I wasn’t to drink this red vinegar but, rather, gargle with it and instead of spitting the stuff out, I should expel it by forcing the gunk down my nose. Stupidly I tried and it not only blew my few brain cells to smithereens but for weeks I had a red tip to my nose that looked like I was on a permanent bender.
If you think it’s difficult to set yourself up as a health and fitness expert, think again because the papers can’t get enough of this rubbish. One of them printed this week the following tip. “When mixing ingredients in the kitchen, don’t use an electric blender but do it manually. This will use four calories per minute and give your wrist muscles a workout.” When I read that, I wanted to find the writer and give my wrist muscles a workout by making a well known gesture right under his nose.
But this modern day witch doctor stuff continues to gain momentum and take hold. My well meaning pal at the gym has been studying food intake and allergies and despairs at my belief that good food went down hill after school dinners. He reckons we are all either Protein or Carbohydrate people. Find out which type you are, he says, then stick to your food type and you’ll live forever, fly like Superman and all your kids will become beautiful millionaires.
I filled in his exhaustive questionnaire only to find I’m exactly half way between the two types. The last thing these people want is to be stuck without an answer so, after admitting he’d not come across this before and, after careful examination of his books, he advised that I should only eat porridge - for breakfast, lunch and dinner. So, if you’re thinking of inviting him and me over for dinner, don’t say you haven’t been warned.
Mind you, invite me on my own and I’ll eat any old shit you serve up. Unless, of course, Gillian McKeith’s been poking around in it first.
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