Pollo, Pizza, Butter and Wax - Another night out with young people

I like working with young people.  They've got their whole lives ahead of them, which means they're looking forward.  They're not old enough to have ballsed everything up yet, which makes them fun to be around.  They don't have very much money, and the little bit they do have, they want to spend on brightly coloured drinks and takeaways, but that's up to them.

I much prefer working with young people to working with old people.  One of the problems of working with old people is that they're looking back on everything, and to quote Inception, they are often 'full of regret, waiting to die'.  They just want to talk about how much their shares have gone down, or what scan they've just been for, or whether they'll die before or after their savings run out.

I presently find myself in that middle ground.  I'm not really young, but I'm not really old.  I don't have much money, but what I do have I've learned not to waste on coloured drinks, and although I've been for a few scans, I'm still relatively mobile, and so I haven't booked a place in the old people's home yet.

Last night I went out for a meal with lots of young people.  I had no choice.  There's only young people where I work.  In fact, 11 out of the 12 people at the meal were born after I left school, some of them were born after I got married.  It was three of the young people's birthdays, and their combined age is 68.  That's younger than my mum.  Considerate of them to cluster their birthdays together, so as to save money on having to go out multiple times.

It's the fourth time I've been out for a meal with them.  Two of the other three times were after I'd just been fired.  This time I only had a headache.  The first time was at the Copper Beech.  Massive portions of easily recognisable food at very reasonable prices.  The second time was at Cafe 85, where the food was delivered in little piles in the middle of satellite dishes after being constructed from food meccano out the back.  I wrote about that one here.

Last night was sort of a happy medium between the two.  It was at Al Forno's.  The food was slightly more expensive that the Copper Beech, and the drinks prices were astronomical, but the portions were big and the food prices were quite reasonable.  The meals also got delivered on plates approximately the same size as the food, which I always like.  I don't want to have to crawl into the middle of a plate big enough to pick up noise from the Big Bang just to go searching for the little bit of food that's in there.

Then again, I don't like the other extreme.  I don't like getting food squashed into a too small polystyrene container.  This is why I never order the special at work.  Whatever the special is, it's piled into a burger box in layers of the staff's choosing, and then you have to dig down in the style of a Chilean miner to get to the rest.  Usually with hot dinners I like to leave the best bits till last, but you can't if you veg is buried 3 feet below your steak.  Surely bigger sizes of polystyrene container are available?

Anyway, back to last night.  It was to celebrate Corinne, Natalie and Pete's birthdays (all very young and attractive, all with very good skin, at least one of them goes in for dermo-abrasion even though I have no idea what that is and they probably don't need it, as there's not a wrinkle in sight).  The table we were sat on was a lot like the picnic benches at work, but with more cutlery and less Yorkie pushers going past.

Although the food was easy to recognise, it had Italian names.  Thankfully we had brought the list, so we knew what we'd ordered.  I had Pollo Goujons followed by Pizza Piccante.  This is apparently foreign-speak for chicken nuggets and pepperoni pizza.  It was all very nice, but they must have run out of nugget sized bits of chicken in the kitchen because I got two giant ones instead that were more like chicken kievs.  Rob had a full plate of garlic bread and other people around me had ordered giant plates of potato shavings, which meant I had my own and some of other people's.  It was just as well I had 3 starters because the main course was a long time coming.  At least mine was.

The whole thing had been pre-ordered but the Andy Finn had to throw a spanner in the works by turning up late and ordering something extra on top.  As fate would have it, he'd ordered the same thing as me.

I hate that thing where most people have got their meals, but no-one wants to start until everyone has got theirs.  It's worse if the missing dish is yours.  That way, you can't eat because you haven't got anything, and the rest are watching the heat drain out of theirs while they're waiting for you.

At Alforno's they must have a special team of people who they send out to apologise to you if anything goes wrong.  I've never been apologised to, by so many people in such a short space of time in my life. And it really wasn't necessary.  I only had to wait about 5 minutes, but every 10 seconds or so they were launching somebody new out of the kitchen to apologise.  It was unreal.  They probably should have had a team meeting beforehand and agreed on the reason for the delay, but they were all just winging it.

The first guy said it was 10 seconds away, but that it was overdone, it had been in the oven too long, so if I wanted I could send it back. You should have brought it first instead of last, I suggested, I've not worked in a restaurant, but I've got an oven, I know that much.  The 10 seconds came and went and no pizza, and I was starting to get anxious.  How overdone was it going to be, and how bad would it have to be for me to send it back?  By this point I was hoping it was going to be a tiny charred black disc, so that it would be obviously inedible, as I hate having to return stuff.

Anyway, as the staff continued on their sponsored excusathon, the reasons for the lateness kept changing, until eventually they came out and pointed at Andy Finn, and blamed him for ordering the same thing.  They tried to make a case for only being able to get one pizza in the oven at once, and Andy had taken my spot, but as at least another 5 people on the table had pizzas, I think it's more likely that they just made what was on our original list, and somehow Andy's order had got lost, but he'd got mine.

I didn't actually mind any of this.  Because I really liked the restaurant, and I really liked the food, and the company and there was a nice atmosphere, and although the drinks were expensive, they are everywhere.

By the time my pizza came, it was so hot, I didn't know whether to eat it or use it as a sunbed.  Unfortunately, I'm not sure if the same can be said for the others.  But if they want to let their food go cold out of social politeness, that's up to them.

One of the things about crowded restaurants and long tables is that you can't always hear what other people are saying, but you can hear the odd word, so you just chip in when you can.  For some reason Pete had come dressed as Mr Sulu from the original Star Trek, and he seemed to be very interested in talking about different types of butter.  Apparently if you have too much of it, you can go numb.  Have you tried Lurpak spreadable I suggested, it's usually on offer from Tesco?  I've often eaten multiple slices of toast with that stuff on, and I've never had a numb face afterwards.  He didn't seem interested in my knowledge of supermarket deals and he just carried on talking.

Another conversation was about how dangerous it can be to get amateurs to rip strips of wax off your undercarriage.  After listening to that one, the chances of me getting wax removed from my delicate downstairs areas went up from a long shot 1000 to 1, to a mathematically almost non-existent 15 billion to one.  I'll keep the hair thanks.  As far as I know, no-one ever ended up in A&E just from having hair, so I'd like to keep it that way.

Despite the expensive drinks, and the huge variety of apologies I got in an Italian accent, the restaurant was actually really good, and I would definitely go there again.  The only down side was that I felt a bit crappy as I'd had head and neck ache all afternoon.  The good news is after dosing up on painkillers, and putting a heat pack on my neck I feel a lot better this morning.  But aches and pains are just part of getting old I suppose.

The good news is that unlike last time I went out for a meal with the same young people, I haven't been fired this week.  So there may well be more birthday meals to come.

Alphabetising my spices and other misadventures

Over the years it's fair to say I haven't done very much cooking.  I have mostly avoided this by sticking to 3 mains food groups.  Frozen, tinned and takeaway.  Some of what I have done might have been loosely termed 'warming things up', but cooking ie mixing different things together to make food. No.

Well, it's come to my attention lately that I make terrible food decisions when I'm hungry.  Also, I keep getting texts and emails from Domino's when I'm at my most vulnerable, and even worse, I keep answering them!

Anyway, two things have happened over the last couple of weeks.  I've been working late and I don't have any money left.  So, instead of having a day out last Sunday Ruth and I went shopping and made all the meals for last week in advance (I did help a bit, I threw peelings in the bin and washed up and stuff).  I can't tell you what a help this was when I was getting in after 7 at night last week.

To try and follow her good example, and as she's on nights this weekend, and also because I'm starting another new job involving late nights this week, I thought I'd do likewise today.

People who know me might think I've been kidnapped by aliens, but no.  I looked up some recipes yesterday, and I went out in the fog and I bought some ingredients to make proper meals.  This week will probably be stressful enough, so I don't want to fall into the Dominos' trap again (you won't get me this week Phil, with your tempting BOGOFs, you see he even uses his first name on the texts, how underhand is that?, it's like he thinks we're friends).

Anyway, I started with a chilli, because I've made that before, and I can do that without looking at a book.  Except, could I find the chilli powder?  No.  I knew it was in there somewhere but it was hidden in amongst about 100 other little jars of powder.

The first thing I took out was Star Anise.  What the hell is that?  Anyway, that was fine because it didn't expire till 2013.  I then took about another 80 jars out of the cupboard, and although I didn't go so far as to enter the dates onto a spreadsheet, at a rough approximation I would say the average expiry date across all the spices was somewhere around mid 2009.  Not only that but some things had four or five duplicates.  I can't remember eating much cinnamon in the last 10 years but I must have intended to at some point because there's five jars of the stuff in there!

Anyway, I started off throwing away everything over 2 years out of date (I figured that the dates are only a guide), but then I had so many duplicates that I had pretty much at least one of everything I might use that was still in date.

After I'd done this, I was momentarily seized by the insane impulse to alphabetise what was left, but then I realised about 20 of the 27 jars that were left were all things beginning with C, so that seemed a step too far.

But the really good news was this.  I found the chilli powder.  And it's still in date!

And now I'm off to do some cooking!

Is this a restaurant? For a minute there I thought I'd wandered into a toy shop

Tonight I had my second leaving do in the last 3 days.

Tonight's meal had twice the number of people in attendance but it was also twice as much money for half as much food, which is a big consideration when you're unemployed.  That Copper Beech place we went to on Wednesday, the dinners were huge, and even with drinks you still got change out of a tenner.  The mince and dumplings I had could have fed a village, and the parmos were so big you could have used them as liferafts in the event of a flood.

But for all the cheapness on Wednesday, the food was still excellent.  Also, I understood the menu.  I knew what every dish was.  Parmo, check.  Mince and Dumplings, check, Fish and Chips, check.  I had a pretty good idea in my head what each of those things might look like, and when they got delivered to the table, I had no trouble telling them apart.  And neither did the waiter.

The restaurant tonight was a lot posher than the Copper Beech, but it was one of those places where they build stuff out of your food.  Dan Footy's dessert looked like a scale model of the Black Pearl out of Pirates of the Caribbean, and as for me, I got served a stack of something that looked like a replica of the paperwork I used to batch.  It even had orange case separators made out of carrot.  The veg was advertised as being hot pot potato, but it looked more like potato that had been hit with a hammer, mixed with some carrot and then assembled into a square in one of those car crushers.

I didn't have chips, and I was glad I didn't, but some other people did and they were those big chips that you got about ten of and that you could have started a game of Jenga with.  If I'm going to order chips, I want them to look like chips, not building blocks.  I'm not a child, I haven't played with blocks and bricks and that type of shit since I was about 9.  I just don't get what the appeal of this kind of food is.

The choice of food on offer played havoc with poor old Deano.  He'll only eat traditional British meals, so he ordered sausage and mash which you would think would be a safe bet, but they'd even tried to cut the sausages in half and build something out of that.  And instead of good old Bisto on it, it had some sort of black sauce, and they couldn't just slip him a wadge of mash, they had to mix it with some green stuff so it ended up being the colour of mint chocolate chip ice cream.  For God's sake, just give us food we understand!

Not only could we not tell what the meals were, neither could the staff.  Nothing looked like you thought it would, and it took about 10 minutes of swapsies before we got the right dinners.

Also, the gap between the courses was really long, and I think at least some of this was probably because of all the time it took to assemble the stuff out the back.  I've put IKEA bookcases together in less time than it took to fetch our desserts.

It was £13.95 for two courses tonight, plus drinks, so £15 each near enough whereas on Wednesday I was almost embarrassed to walk away after only paying £8.40 for what I had.  Not only embarrassed, I could only just get out of there under my own steam.  I nearly had to put my stomach in a wheelbarrow to get it out to the car, it was so full.

Maybe there are some people out there who want to pay extra to have their dinners made to look like stuff you might find in a 3 year old's bedroom, but I'm not one of them.  Just give me a proper dinner, that looks like a dinner please, and not one that looks like a Lego house.

Thank you.  Rant over.  Now I'm off to make some toast.

Moffat - Host City for the World Eating Championships 2012

Last time I went to Moffat I took my wife and a bike.  This time I was travelling light.  I even managed to lose my job the day before I went, so I you could say it was extra light.

If you're going to lose your job, what you really need is a holiday at 1950s prices, and the church 'Hostel Takeover' to Moffat is the ultimate recession proof holiday.

I managed to get my own room (with two plugs in it) for just over £8 a night, and then for the ridiculously cheap price of £5.50 I managed to get two evening meals of incredible quality courtesy of Sarah, the second of which left me physically unable to bend for approximately 12 hours.  Even if you're me, and even when you know crumble is coming, if seconds and then thirds of mince and dumplings with veg are available, there really is no way of saying no.  The night before it was lamb curry followed by about 19 kinds of chocolate.  It might have been the most calorie dense 48 hours of my life.  My stomach couldn't feel any heavier if I'd been eating dark matter (to be fair, that might have been one of the flavours of the chocolate we had).

I hadn't seen Ruth for 3 days until about 5 minutes ago and when she got in from work tonight she looked at me as if to say 'You look the same only wider' (or was that just my imagination?).  That's how much I ate.

In the absence of Ruth in Moffat, my choice of daytrips was perhaps a bit questionable.  I went on a day trip to Lockerbie on Saturday and then I went on a 'strenuous' walk with Graeme on Sunday.

Whether Sunday's walk was in fact 'strenuous' is debateable but we managed to make it so by walking about 3 times as far as necessary and being totally unable to find the spa we were looking for.  It didn't help that we didn't know even what a spa was, and even if we'd been able to find it, we apparently would have needed a torch to see it, so I'm not sure our chances were that good anyway.  Graeme didn't want to give up quite as easily as me, and this led to him clambering around on some rock face for about half an hour while I stood eating ham sandwiches and getting cold.  I wasn't as well equipped in the waterproofs department as Graeme and when we got back he kindly told me I looked like a tramp and he made me sit on a plastic sheet in the car to get back to the hostel.  As with all trips I go on with Graeme, I was just happy to get back alive.

As usual on these hostel trips, the highlight for me was the shared meals.  Not just because eating is one of my main hobbies, but also because it's really nice to hang out with old friends and also to get to know some new faces too.  I think I got to know who all the adults were, but I had some trouble telling all the children apart, especially all the small blonde ones.  The one small blonde one I did get to know was Henri, and I wish I'd had a dictaphone with me to record his musings for posterity.  I've seen less funny acts on Saturday night at the Apollo, he should probably get his own show.  One of my favourites was his prayer that all the dinosaurs should stay alive (I take it he hasn't seen Jurassic Park).  His geography needs a bit of work though as he seems to think that England is the smallest country in the world, and yet is still bigger than a planet.  I'm happy to give him the benefit of the doubt though, because I did confuse him utterly by trying to explain the intricacies of custard to him, when he simply wanted a yes or no answer.

I generally don't like card games or any other game where rules need explaining to me, but I managed to be taught two card games by two children aged 8 and 11.  They were called Poo and Speed (the card games, not the children).  I almost got the hang of both, and I almost understood the rules.

Even allowing for the incredible cheapness of the trip, and the ridiculously good value of the food, the best bit is still the chance to hang out with such lovely people for 3 days.  Seeing all the children running around and screaming so happily, and seeing all the adults neither running around or screaming but happily peeling vegetables and speaking kindly to one another, it makes me want to go and do likewise (well, except for the peeling vegetables part).

As an added bonus, I also got to recite my entire life story on the way up and down in the car.  One of the advantages of being in a car with people for 2 and a half hours each way is that they're a captive audience.

And as if all that wasn't good enough, Ruth came in from work and she's bought me a Wii Fit for Christmas, but she couldn't wait to give it to me, so she's given it to me already.  It's got one of those boards with it that you can sway around on to lose weight.  I think I need to get that up and running as soon as possible, before I have to go out and buy the next size up trousers.

But before I do that, I'm just off to eat some more chocolate....