I know why this is the case, of course. It's a misguided (and probably legally enforced) attempt to get us all to practice better portion control and, collectively, to Be Less Fat. However, we all know what actually happens: people look at that "portion" advice, then just double it (or, in some cases, multiply it by four or more) in order to calculate what they are actually eating. And I just feel like food companies could probably save everyone a lot of time and effort if they just put what the calorie value for the whole thing was.

Like, take a pizza. Buy a frozen pizza and the calorie information will probably be for half of it. Buy a takeaway pizza and the calorie information will be "per slice". Motherfucker, if I am buying a pizza of any description I am eating that whole thing, so just tell me what the damage is so I don't have to get the bloody calculator out. I will accept full responsibility for my actions. Just tell me.

Likewise, take one of those massive bars of Dairy Milk. According to those, "1 portion" is "3 squares". No it fucking isn't. The only time people buy a massive bar of Dairy Milk is when they are depressed, and when that happens they are almost certainly going to eat the whole thing while crying in front of the TV. (Ask me how I know.) So just tell me how many thousand calories are in that whole bar of chocolate so I can come to terms with the consequences at a later time when I am feeling less emotionally fragile.

I feel calorie information on food packaging might actually have more impact if it was more honest like this! "If you eat this whole quiche, that's most of the daily calorie intake for an average human being!" Great! Now I know, and I will thus probably think a little bit harder about whether or not I actually really want to eat that whole quiche, or if I'm just doing so because I'm in the middle of a binge-eating spree that is almost certainly fuelled by some combination of depression, anxiety and/or autism.

And don't even get me started on foods that are clearly portioned out, but which will only ever give you calorie information "per 100 grams". That's the point where I really don't want to start doing maths. Don't make me do fucking percentages just to figure out how guilty I should be feeling for eating the thing. Just give me the calorie information for a realistic portion, and perhaps for the entire packet of the thing just in case it accidentally ends up all taking a trip down to see Mr Tums.

To put it another way, stop trying to shame me for eating more than I "should" and help me make an actually informed decision using helpful information! By the time I am able to successfully curtail my appetite, I don't mind dividing some of these things into halves or quarters or whatever, although one would hope once you have reached a good, "healthy" weight (which is its own discussion, I'm sure) you have less need to be exacting about counting calories. But during that period where accurate calorie information is actually helpful — i.e. when you're trying to lose weight — I think it would benefit everyone to be completely honest and lay out the cold, hard facts. I think it would genuinely be a lot more effective at helping to get people to reconsider before overeating!

And stop trying to kid yourself that anyone is eating half a tube of Fruit Pastilles!

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

The post #oneaday Day 785: Portioning the blame appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

For anyone unfamiliar with a Feast, the original incarnation of them was a chocolate ice lolly with crunchy biscuit pieces embedded in the chocolate, and inside the chocolate shell was chocolate ice cream, which surrounded a hard chocolate core. Much like a Cadbury's Creme Egg, I'm sure people had their own ways of eating a Feast, but I always liked to flake the chocolate outer off, then eat the ice cream, then have the hard chocolate core as the grand finale.

Now, though, they have changed. Now you still have the chocolate outer with the crunchy bits embedded, but the chocolate ice cream has been replaced with vanilla, and the hard chocolate core has been replaced with a chocolate hazelnut core that appears to occupy a curious state somewhere between liquid and solid. It sticks to the lolly stick and retains its shape, but it doesn't have the satisfying "snap" that the old hard chocolate core did; it's more chewy and sticky.

Taken on its own terms, the new Feast is not an unpleasant experience to eat. Chocolate, vanilla and hazelnut is a good combination, and they work together. But I'm not sure they should have replaced the basic Feast model with it. The original Feast was a classic, and one of my favourite ice creams, and now it appears that it's just Not A Thing any more, because this "new recipe" has seemingly replaced the old one. At least they haven't had the gall to keep calling it "Feast Original", because, well, it's not original any more.

Apparently there is also a Feast Caramel now, which replaces the new hazelnut core with a caramel sauce centre, and I can see that being pretty good. But, again, I feel like it's not really a Feast as we once new it; the hard chocolate core was a central (no pun intended) part of the Feast's identity, and I'm not entirely sure why it has been taken away, rather than being positioned as a new variant called "Feast Hazelnut" or something. Did we have to lose the classic "Feast Original" for this?

There are, as you might expect, some people online who are absolutely furious about this. I wouldn't put myself in that category, as I found the new Feasts perfectly tasty — they're just not what I expected from a Feast, and it seems strange and confusing that they would make this change now, after so long of them being the same thing.

The common assumption, of course, is that this is an instance of enshittification, but I'm not sure that is the case; perhaps the vanilla ice cream is cheaper than the chocolate ice cream, and perhaps the chocolate hazelnut half-sauce-half-solid otherworldly substance in the middle is cheaper than a hard lump of chocolate, but I have no real way of knowing that. I'm just a bit sad to see something I've enjoyed since childhood feel the need to change fairly drastically for reasons that are not entirely clear.

Oh well. These things happen, I guess. This is, it seems, what a Feast is now. Although apparently Aldi do a good clone of the original Feast, known as Fiesta. Might have to track some of those down…

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

The post #oneaday Day 716: They changed Feasts and I'm not sure how I feel about it appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Today, though, I had I think the worst meal I've ever had from them, and possibly from any service station fast food place. I did not end up with the shits — at least I don't think so; I did have a large dump when I got in, but that is usually the case after the long drive home from work.

Anyway, I saw that they were doing "Sweet habanero tenders", and thought they sounded nice. The picture looked nice, too — some rather Wingstop-esque tenders drizzled with what would presumably be a sweet, hot sauce. Andie and I are big fans of Wingstop, and their mango habanero sauce is one of my favourite things to have on their chicken, even if it gives me hiccups every time, without fail.

I got my food and was surprised to discover that the tenders were just stuffed into a bag and not drizzled with any sort of sauce, but I thought "oh well, the coating is probably nice by itself".

What then followed is, I think, the driest meal I have ever eaten. I made the mistake of also accompanying the tenders with some nachos rather than fries, and as such the experience as a whole was remarkably akin to eating a bag of lightly seasoned sand. The only mildly redeeming part of the meal was the glazed churros for dessert; they both tasted good and brought some much-needed "wet" to proceedings with their sauce.

On the whole, though, I cannot, in any way, recommend the sweet habanero tenders at Taco Bell, particularly at South Mimms Services at the A1/M25 junction. I normally look forward to grabbing a bit of a treat on the drive home from my monthly office visit, but this time it seems I made a terrible mistake. I won't let that happen again!

At least the food I had last night was good. When I met up with my friend, we got food from the hotel I was staying at — and said hotel does pretty good food. I fancied something a bit different from the norm, so had a Hungarian Goulash, and it was delicious. A rich, flavourful, creamy sauce, well-cooked meat, fluffy potatoes and some nice squishy dumpling-like things that were apparently made from egg noodles, of all things. It was accompanied by some nice bread and served up in a little cauldron over a candle for you to ladle into the main bowl. Absolutely lovely stuff — and it basically cost the same as the shitty Taco Bell meal I had this evening on the way home.

This was followed by a lovely chocolate brownie accompanied with some decent ice cream, and all delivered with some excellent service from a waitress that my friend was rather taken with. A thoroughly agreeable evening, gastronomically speaking. And socially speaking, for that matter, as yesterday's post hopefully made clear.

Well, lesson learned. Perhaps I should just have dinner at the hotel before starting the long drive home!

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

The post #oneaday Day 684: Taco Bell regrets appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

We're having a day off the diet today to celebrate the return of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus H. Christ, then back on it properly tomorrow. Technically speaking we also had yesterday off due to HeroQuest being accompanied by party food, Pringles and some dangerously addictive little cake bite things from Tesco. But yes. Tomorrow it is back to counting the calories and doing things properly, because it seems to have been working for the both of us.

I've not done much of note over the last couple of days, as I was in need of just a break from everything. It's been a really hectic, chaotic time at work of late, and being able to just step away for a bit is exactly what I needed. The end result of all this chaos is going to be well worth it; it's just been a lot of stress getting to the point we're at so far, and I suspect there's more still to come. But we're ready for it and we're going to kick it's ass.

We had all our windows and exterior doors replaced this week. We've got a new front door that is much sturdier than the old one (the entire front fascia would bend and flex when you used the old one!) and patio doors that open like doors instead of slidey doors. Andie's also finally finished the catio to add a little tunnel from the cat flap in the back of the house into the catio proper, so once the cats figure out that the cat flap is there (which I suspect will take a little while) they will be able to go outside when they please without having to get us to open the doors for them. I suspect they will still ask us to open the doors, but it will be nice for them to be able to go outside on their own initiative.

Anyway, we're currently awaiting our 7bone burger for our Easter dinner treat. Then I might give Resident Evil 7 a go in VR after dinner… I am totally brave enough, yes I am.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

The post #oneaday Day 667: Happy Easter appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Lunch was good. The boss treated us to a meal at a local (to the office) Turkish place. I had calamari as a starter followed by lamb moussaka. It was really good, but it made me just want to nap for the afternoon!

On the way back, I listened to some stuff from Sbassbear, a musical collective on YouTube that are probably best known for their Game Grumps remixes, which are consistently hilarious and incredible in their quality.

Tonight I listened to two of their more "conceptual" albums. The first was GrumpWave, which was a series of 30+ minute lo-fi tracks with some of Arin and Dan's more thoughtful conversations overlaid. It was a rather contemplative listen, and I really enjoyed it.

The other thing I listened to was Fever Dream Radio, an ADHD nightmare of an album designed around the concept of a restless, anxious soul constantly channel flipping on the radio. It's a lot to take in but was frequently hilarious. Musical comedy is tricky to do well, because to really succeed you have to absolutely commit to The Bit, but Sbassbear has always taken even their most ridiculous compositions and arrangements very seriously. If you think you can handle it, I recommend giving it a listen in its entirety.

Oh, also we have no Internet at home so I'm writing this from bed on my phone. And on that note, time for some very well earned sleep!

The post #oneaday Day 649: Collapse appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

This is a meaningful, worthwhile step because although "1 stone lost" is also a milestone, it somehow feels more significant when your actual weight has a particularly noticeable difference in it — like the "stone" figure being different. This, to me, is a good sign that what I'm doing is working — and, more to the point, that it's something sustainable that I'm not about to get bored with and give up on in frustration.

The trouble with a lot of diets is that they become demoralising and boring. And very few things make you want to eat like boredom — at least that's the case for me. What I've found, by calorie counting each day, is that I can still enjoy all the things I like to have and still lose weight. Along the way I'm finding ways to be more "calorie efficient" with those things that I like, too, while not feeling guilty about having an occasional treat — usually within the boundaries of the daily calorie count, but I've found that having a day a week when you "cheat" does wonders for the morale.

I'm sure the challenge factor will increase as my weight lowers and the number of calories I can have per day falls accordingly, but one thing that I've found having successfully stuck to this for quite some time now is that I'm not feeling the same urge to want to overindulge that I have done in the past. I'm finding that having a modestly sized breakfast, lunch and dinner and a number of guilt-free snacks throughout the day keeps me going and well within the calorie count. Essentially it's following the principle of never allowing myself to get hungry enough to want to demolish an entire large bag of Doritos or something.

Like I say, though, the best thing I've found so far is that I'm able to enjoy things that I just plain like eating, and haven't had to turn to the sort of "success stories" you read in weight loss magazines — you know the sort of thing, "I used to have a massive fryup for breakfast every morning, now I start my day with a glass of water, half a banana and a handful of chia seeds". Nope, I can still quite happily have cereal with chocolate in it for breakfast, a bacon sandwich or noodles for lunch and pretty much whatever I want for dinner.

Of course, I might lose weight more quickly if I was having more salads and vegetables and fruit and whatever — but I have to be realistic about this. If I eat something that I don't enjoy or don't find filling and satisfying, then I just end up wanting to eat something I do like later, and I end up having much more food than I really need. Right now, with the weight I am, I need a decent amount of calories just to keep ticking over, so I'm going to continue enjoying the success I'm having the way it's working at the moment. When I weigh significantly less and will need much fewer calories per day to continue losing weight, then we'll have a look at even "healthier" options as means of keeping the weight off.

For now, this is working. And I'm pleased about that. It's making me feel like I might actually be able to do this; I might actually be able to beat this. Let's see how things are looking in a few months' time.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

The post #oneaday Day 638: Actual progress appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

One of the reasons a lot of people — including myself — find it difficult to stick to a diet is because so much "healthy eating" advice out there is seemingly designed to suck all of the joy out of anything to do with food.

I read a particularly good (bad?) example of this on BBC Food earlier, after it was linked to from the front page of BBC News. "Are we getting breakfast all wrong?" the headline asked. "How much does it matter what we eat in the morning and when we eat it?"

Having read the article a few times, I'm not entirely sure what its actual point is, because there seem to be multiple threads running at once. Firstly is the fact that here in the UK, we tend to be quite set in our ways when it comes to breakfast, while in other cultures they tend to eat "leftovers or [food] similar to [that which] you would have for lunch and dinner", according to NHS GP and chef Rupy Aujla. Then there's the question of when you should eat breakfast, for which the advice seems to be "whenever the fuck you want, or miss it completely and have a decent lunch if you feel like it".

Then there's the usual health scares — people who eat breakfast are "also found to be likely to smoke more, drink more alcohol and exercise less", while there is apparently "convincing evidence that consuming breakfast, compared to skipping breakfast, has positive impacts on short-term cognition and memory". So if you have breakfast, you'll spark up a fag and get pissed while lounging on the sofa, but at least you'll remember all of it the next day.

At one point the piece attempts to convince us that "a breakfast of tomatoes, mushrooms, baked beans and a glass of juice" is a "fry-up" and repeats the bizarre advice that "no matter how much [juice] you drink it will still only count as one portion", then goes on to shame the juice-drinkers because "fruit juice is basically as sugary as a typical candy bar". The piece then advises that we should "use an (environmentally friendly) straw to bypass your teeth" if you are drinking juice, but, of course, says that we should all just drink water because it's "a healthy and cheap choice" that "has no calories and contains no sugars that can damage teeth".

I get why all these things are said. We do all eat too much and do terrible things to our health, but the solution to having issues with food is not to make eating a joyless chore, because in my experience all that does to you is increase cravings for things you "shouldn't" have. And in the worst cases, that can lead to bingeing way more than you would have under normal circumstances.

As with anything, the real answer seems to be moderation. It is difficult to keep cravings under control, particularly if your brain chemistry is particularly prone to taking things to excess, but so far as I'm concerned, far better to have a good, solid breakfast that fills you up and makes you feel good first thing in the morning than a handful of nuts, berries and wood chippings that will have you reaching for the crisps and Penguin bars by 10am.

As for me, today I've eaten pretty much what I want and I still have a bunch of calories left over if I fancy something a little later in the evening. And that has happened because I have taken care with moderation in what I've eaten so far today. I don't feel deprived of anything and I don't feel like I "need" to demolish a packet of biscuits, say — but at the same time, I also know that if I do fancy a biscuit or a cake or something, I have enough calories left in the budget that I can have one if I want.

So you know what? I might just do that. I might just do that.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

The post #oneaday Day 591: Joyless healthiness appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I love a good noodle, at least partly due to my enjoyment of Paul Gannon and Eli Silverman's CheapShow podcast. And in recent times, it seems to have become much easier to find interesting noodles — not only via online ordering and specialist "Asian supermarkets", but also in regular old Sainsbury's, Morrisons and the like.

On my most recent trip to Sainsbury's, I picked up a few unfamiliar packets of noodles to give them a try — specifically, two from the Nongshim "Shin Ramyun" range. I've never tried the basic Shin Ramyun flavour that appears to have become quite widespread and accepted as yet, but these two looked intriguing, so I thought I'd give them a go. Shin Ramyun, if you're unfamiliar is just the Korean term for "spicy noodles", so most varieties of the range have a certain degree of zinginess to them.

The first one I tried was the "Toomba" variant. This didn't offer any real indication of what it was supposed to taste of other than that it was "Spicy & Creamy". Thus I had no idea what to expect — I didn't even really know if it was going to be a soup-style or stir fry-style noodle until I actually started preparing them.

As it happens, the Toomba variant is quite similar to Samyang's Carbonara-style Buldak noodles, which are a stir-fry type: you boil the noodles for about 4-5 minutes, drain them, then add a packet of sauce and a packet of powder and stir vigorously while still applying a bit of heat until the noodles turn an angry red colour. The result is a glossy noodle with a pleasantly sticky sauce, but no soup.

The flavour profile is similar to the Carbonara Buldak, also, only the spice level is somewhat milder. There's still a bit of a kick, but it's much less in-your-face than the Buldak ones, making these a much easier recommend to someone who doesn't mind a bit of spice, but doesn't want their head blowing off and their lips to be numb for several hours afterwards. I actually overall liked the flavour a lot more than the Carbonara Buldak, too — although that is a popular Buldak variant, it's one of my least favourite from the range — and can give these an easy recommend. There's a nice blend of spice, cheese and garlic, and they both smell and taste pretty great.

Why Toomba, though? Well, apparently it's a tad convoluted, but as Sporked reports, it is apparently down to a common method of customising standard Shin Ramyun noodles with milk, American cheese, sauteed onions and garlic, which is supposed to make them taste like a pasta dish served at South Korean branches of Outback Steakhouse. The dish itself is called Toowoomba Pasta after a city of the same name in Australia; it actually has no connection whatsoever to the city, as apparently South Korean Outback Steakhouses just like naming things after Australian cities for some reason. These noodles, whose packet of powder basically takes care of the "customising" for you, are called "Toomba" as a contraction that draws the mind to "Toowoomba" without running any obvious risk of upsetting Outback Steakhouses' lawyers. Clear? Not really? Don't worry. All you need to know is that they're pretty tasty.

The Spicy Chicken Shin Ramyun, meanwhile, are a soup-type noodle that come with a packet of powder and a packet of dried vegetable flakes. The result of cooking up a packet of these is a generous bowl of noodle soup that is, once again, an angry red colour. The flavour is quite nice, blending a bit of chicken, a bit of herbiness and a kick of spice. Again, like the Toomba noodles, they aren't overwhelmingly spicy to the same degree as Buldak noodles, but they have a pleasantly warming kick to them, and they'll make your lips tingle a bit.

I didn't mind these. They didn't wow me in the same way as some other noodles that I've had, but they're a perfectly acceptable bowl of noodle soup — a nice winter warmer, and I can imagine them being very pleasant if you're fending off a mild cold. I wasn't overly enamoured by the herbiness of the flavour, though; it overwhelmed the chickeniness of the broth somewhat in a way that I didn't completely love.

In summary then, these were both good bowls of noodles, but in future I'd feel a lot more inclined to go for the "Toomba" ones again; the Spicy Chicken ones were all right, but I don't feel immediately inclined to rush out and buy more of them. They do make me curious to try the regular ol' Shin Ramyun flavour, though, as apparently a lot of people rate those quite highly. I will be sure to report back on my findings when I've given them a go.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

The post #oneaday Day 590: Noodle Report: Shin Ramyun Spicy Chicken and Toomba Flavours appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Hello. I couldn't think of anything to write about today — at least not without threatening to be depressingly topical, which I'm keen to avoid — so I thought I'd fall back on something completely inoffensive and not at all controversial, which is my ranking of the regular-ass crisp flavours that you get in an average multipack.

For clarity, this means the following flavours:

• Ready salted
• Salt and vinegar
• Cheese and onion
• Roast chicken
• Prawn cocktail
• Smoky bacon

Now, the exact "goodness" of each of these varies according to manufacturer, but based on a sampling of two ends of the market — Walkers (a "prestige" brand of sorts) and Lidl "Snaktastic" own-brand — I feel pretty confident in my rankings. So let us begin immediately.

6. Cheese and onion

I will grant that I am biased in this regard, because I do not like onion or onion-flavoured things, but it continually mystifies me that this is, supposedly, the most popular crisp flavour in the United Kingdom, according to multiple surveys.

I wouldn't mind if it was a little bit cheesy, but I've decided to give these a chance on multiple occasions and simply cannot get past the revolting onion-ness of them, with the "cheese" part seemingly being totally overpowered by it.

By contrast, I absolutely love the sadly defunct beef and onion flavour crisps that Walkers used to do in the brown packets. Those, to me, didn't taste oniony at all, but the artificial beef flavour (which doesn't really taste like beef at all) came through perfectly well. But I don't think you can get those any more — I haven't seen them for a good while, anyway — so they're out of the rankings for now.

5. Ready salted

These may be ranked low on my list, but not because I don't like them; on the contrary, sometimes it's nice to have a simple salted flavour. They're just a bit dull though.

To my shame, on one occasion at primary school where I found I had a packet of ready salted crisps in my lunchbox, I became so inexplicably furious that I didn't have one of the "good" flavours that I crushed them angrily rather than eating them. I don't really know why I did that, and it's a memory I firmly wish I could eject from my long-term storage.

These days, I am not infuriated by ready salted crisps. But they are usually the last to go. Andie ranks them quite highly, though, so it's not as if they go to waste.

4. Smoky bacon

The next few are all a tough call to rank, as I specifically like all of them, but out of all of them, I think I'd probably put smoky bacon flavour at the bottom of the heap.

There's nothing wrong with smoky bacon and, like ready salted, the intense saltiness of the flavour is sometimes exactly what you're looking for in a crisp. But, when presented with an array of different crisp flavours to choose from, smoky bacon is rarely the one I reach for first.

3. Roast chicken

Likewise roast chicken. I rank this flavour slightly higher because it feels like you don't see these as often as you used to, and thus sometimes I will pick them as a "novelty" option.

There are also some truly excellent "luxury" roast chicken options available, with the one most people are likely familiar with being Walkers Sensations. To my recollection, the roast chicken flavour of these was the first to become widely available, and they are very good crisps.

They don't taste anything like chicken, of course, but very few crisp flavours do actually taste like their name — with the exception of ready salted and salt and vinegar, for obvious reasons.

2. Salt and vinegar

Salt and vinegar is one of my favourite crisp flavours. I particularly enjoy a strongly seasoned salt and vinegar crisp — the kind that is surprisingly, intensely sour. Regular old Walkers are decent in this regard, but I think the best salt and vinegar flavour outside of explicitly luxury brands like Kettle Chips is probably the Walkers Max ridged variants.

Crinkly crisps tend to have stronger flavours anyway, and when you have something that is already fairly pungent, like salt and vinegar, crinkling them and putting them on a thick crisp makes them even better.

It was a close-run thing between this and the top spot, I can tell you. But ultimately this is where the results fell.

1. Prawn cocktail

Another crisp flavour that has the dubious honour of not tasting anything like what it's supposed to, prawn cocktail crisps have always been, for me, the ultimate flavour. They combine everything I like about an artificial crisp flavour. You've got the saltiness. You've got the sourness of vinegar. You've got a touch of sweetness.

It all comes together to create a flavour that makes my mouth water to imagine. Prawn cocktail is an awesome flavour, regardless of what type of crisp it is applied to, and is pretty much always my top pick when given an array of different flavours to choose from.

So there you have it. Those are my rankings, and nothing you can do will change my mind. If you're lucky, I might rank some "unusual" flavours tomorrow!

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

The post #oneaday Day 576: A ranking of the regular-ass crisp flavours appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

One of my favourite things about Paul Gannon and Eli Silverman's hilarious Cheap Show podcast is Eli's obsession with noodles, and Paul's performative weariness with this obsession. The result is that, on a semi-regular basis, the pair provide some reviews of a wide variety of different noodle products, and these have helped me — and doubtless many others — to discover things so far beyond the humdrum Pot Noodle that you wouldn't believe. It's a wild and wonderful world out there, so I thought today I'd share some personal favourites.

Samyang "Buldak" noodles

These are the famous Korean "fire noodles" that were probably some stupid TikTok trend a while back. They're a stir fry-type noodle, which means you boil the noodles without adding any seasoning, then drain most of the water and add sauce and a sachet of goop before "frying" (actually just stirring around in the pan a bit for about 30 seconds while the heat is still on) and serving immediately. The result is a generous portion of glossy, medium thickness noodles, an angry red in colour thanks to the notoriously hot sauce, with no "soup".

These noodles come in a variety of different flavours. All of them claim to be "HOT chicken flavour", plus something else in the case of anything other than the regular ones in the black packaging. Don't be too concerned with that, though; a bit of investigating revealed that the "Buldak" part of their name is a reference to a Korean street food dish that involves chicken served with incredibly hot sauce, and the sauce is based on… well, the sauce, rather than the chickeny bit.

I've tried a few different flavours of these. The basic black ones are nice enough, so long as you can handle the heat, but my favourite remains the first one I tried: the "curry" flavour. Sadly, this particular flavour appears to have been discontinued, which is immensely disappointing, but the "Spicy Seasoned Chicken" flavour was also very nice, and a tad milder than the regular black ones. I have not, to date, tried the "2X spicy" ones that come in a red package, but apparently these are so spicy they are banned in Denmark. I don't know if that's actually true or not, but given that the regular ones will present quite a challenge for the uninitiated, I suspect a "2X" version will blow most people's heads off, and I've heard rumours of a "4X" variant, though I'm yet to see those anywhere.

On the milder end of the spectrum there are flavours such as "Cheese" and "Carbonara", both of which come with some cheese powder to mix in along with the spicy sauce. These were… okay, but I didn't love them. The Carbonara seems to be a favourite of a lot of people, but I didn't personally rate it that highly. The cheese one also absolutely honks while you are preparing it, leading my wife to brand them "Feet Noodles" and prohibit me from cooking them any time she was in the house for a good few months. She eventually relented because she was fed up of seeing them in the cupboard.

I also tried a habanero and lime flavour variant. These are my least favourite of the range to date, as the lime flavour is quite artificial. They weren't unpleasant, but I wouldn't choose to have them again when other flavours are so much nicer. From the currently available range at the time of writing, I recommend the Spicy Seasoned Chicken ones above all the others.

Anyway, whether or not you will like these noodles is entirely dependent on whether you can handle the spice — and, perhaps more relevantly, whether you enjoy the spice. My wife can handle a spicy dish, for example, but she doesn't enjoy anything over a certain heat threshold, and as such these noodles were not to her taste. Although the flavoured variants are noticeably milder than the regular black version, they're still pretty danged hot, so you better be ready for that.

If you are on board with the spice, however, an enjoyable noodle experience awaits. The sauce goes glossy and sticky with barely any provocation, lending a nice sweetness to the overall dish, and most come with a little sachet of miscellaneous dried bits to add a bit of texture. You can, of course, also customise these as you see fit; I've never actually done this, but I can imagine dumping a fried egg on top would be rather lovely.

A conditional recommend for these, then.

MAMA Shrimp Creamy Tom Yum Noodles

MAMA noodles provide a complete contrast to what we've just described. These come in a somewhat smaller package and thus provide a slightly smaller portion, but they make up for this by being soup-style noodles. For the noodle newcomer, this means that you add the various seasonings to boiling water when you're cooking the noodles, and this means you infuse the noodles with flavour and have a delicious soupy broth to enjoy both with and after you have consumed all the noodles.

MAMA do several flavours of noodles, all of which that I've tried are very nice indeed, and curiously they have two separate "Tom Yum" versions — one comes in a silver packet, and the other comes in a shiny orange packet. We're concerned with the shiny orange version today, whose sole distinguishing feature is that it is, supposedly "creamy Tom Yum" as opposed to just "Tom Yum", but the silver variant is nice, too. I think the orange one has the edge, though.

These noodles come with a sachet of powder and a sachet of goopy paste. As everyone knows, the best noodles have at least two pouches of Stuff with them, and this is certainly true for MAMA noodles, because they are delicious and flavourful. The creamy Tom Yum flavour is ostensibly "shrimp" flavour, but its more of a hot and sour, vaguely Thai curry-esque flavour with hints of lemongrass and a thoroughly pleasing richness to it that combines sweetness, sourness and saltiness together in each mouthful.

My top tip for these is to ensure that you put enough water in the pot for there to be some nice, vibrantly coloured soup along with the noodles. When cooking noodles, it's very easy to accidentally boil off all the water, and with noodles of this type, that means the majority of the flavour goes with it! Give them about 300-350ml of water, boil it, immediately bung in the noodles and flavourings, then serve after just 3 minutes of simmering. The result is delicious, and comes highly recommended for those who enjoy Asian flavours.

We discovered a while back that one of the side streets in the town centre now plays host to a wealth of "Asian supermarkets", and this is a good source for trying new varieties of noodles. I will be trying plenty more in the near future, and will do my best to report on my adventures as and when they occur. Until then, happy noodling — and if I catch you settling for the dirty pond water that is "Naked" or "Kabuto" noodles, we are going to have words. Words that conclude with me boiling up a big pot of MAMA Tom Yum for you.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

The post #oneaday Day 548: The noodle chronicles appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

We all have a Thing That We Can Cook, even if you're not someone who is particularly culinarily minded. If you're really good at doing omelettes or fried eggs or bacon sandwiches, that 100% counts; even a cheese toastie can be your one Thing That You Can Cook really well.

For me, it's a chilli con carne. This was one of the first things my mother taught me to make, and wrote, by hand, in a little red notebook that she gave me to take to university with a bunch of her recipes. My mum is a good cook, though to my shame I only cooked a few of the things in that little red book, and I'm not entirely sure where it eventually ended up.

Anyway, my Flawless Every Time (Unless You Burn It) Chilli con Carne recipe is probably loosely based on what my mother taught me, but it's been adapted and refined over the course of probably the last ten years or so in particular. So I thought I would share it with you today. You may note the absence of some ingredients such as onions and garlic; I don't put onions in 'cause I don't like them, and I don't put garlic in because I don't think it's necessary. Aside from that, this should be fairly as-you-expect, but read on anyway:

Ingredients

• 500g minced beef. If you're trying to be vaguely healthy, go for the 5% fat option. It works just fine.
• 1 x 400g can of kidney beans in chilli sauce
• 1 x 400g can of chopped tomatoes
• 1-2 teaspoons of red chillies in a jar (or you can use fresh if you can be arsed)
• 1-2 teaspoons of chipotle paste
• 1 teaspoon of cumin
• 1 teaspoon of paprika
• 2 teaspoons of smoked paprika
• 1 teaspoon of cayenne pepper
• 1 teaspoon of chilli powder
• Pinch of salt and black pepper
• Rice to serve

Method

1. Mix all the spices together in a little bowl and set them to one side.
2. Begin frying the minced beef in a little oil. When it starts to brown, dump in the spice mix and stir well so the beef is nicely coated in it. It should go from grey-brown to having a nice red-orange tint.
3. When most of the red of the beef has turned brown add the chillies and stir well.
4. After 1-2 minutes, add the chipotle paste and stir well again.
5. After 1-2 minutes, add the kidney beans and sauce and stir well yet again.
6. After another 1-2 minutes, add the chopped tomatoes and stir well.
7. Once everything is mixed together nicely, lower the heat a bit and simmer for about 20 minutes.
8. While the chilli is cooking, cook the rice. If you're using a rice cooker, allow about 1.5 cups of rice for 2 people and add about 3 cups of water. Use the rice paddle to agitate the rice off the bottom of the rice cooker to minimise it burning/toasting on the bottom.
9. Serve.

Easy, right? The only way you can feasibly fuck this up is if you forget to turn the heat down a bit and you burn the damn thing. You can optionally tweak it a bit, also; add 2 tins of tomatoes and simmer for twice as long for a richer sauce, but if you can't be arsed to wait that long, this method makes a nicely flavourful, spicy and probably not-at-all authentic chilli con carne with ingredients you can easily find on supermarket shelves.

Gourmet? God no. But it is tasty and comforting. And that's what you want from a quick and easy meal, right?

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

The post #oneaday Day 380: My Flawless Every Time (Unless You Burn It) Chilli con Carne Recipe appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I'm not a particularly amazing cook or anything, but I do make a decent chilli and curry. Over the years, my wife and I haven't been super-extravagant in the things we've bought for our kitchen, but in the last couple of years or so in particular, we've come across a few things that are pretty much essentials, and which I recommend anyone who spend any amount of time in the kitchen, regardless of ability level, should invest in.

The first is simple: non-stick pans that are actually non-stick. We'd been working with the same pans for a long time, but a few trips to Lidl ago, my wife picked up a couple of new frying pans that she thought looked both decent and reasonably priced. Reader, they are a marvel. I do wonder how long they will remain this way, but certainly right now, frying anything in them is an absolute pleasure.

Absolutely nothing gets stuck to the bottom, even with my typically rather aggressive approach to heat management (somewhat unavoidable with induction hobs, in my experience) and this, in turn, means that they're very easy to clean. And as we all know, chipping burnt-on crap off the bottom of pans is no fun at all. So save yourself the hassle; spend the money and get some decent non-stick pans.

The second is an air fryer. I know it's a haha funny meme (for some reason) to enthuse about air fryers, but seriously, if you don't have one, get one. Not only is it good for "frying" stuff without immersing it completely in oil, it also makes an excellent substitute for your oven if you're cooking small stuff, like, say, a portion of chips or some breaded chicken breasts.

It will take you a little experimentation to convert "oven" times to "air fryer" times (you generally need quite a bit less time — in my experience, anywhere between 50-75% of the stated oven time) but once you've nailed that, it's so much more convenient. And, like the non-stick pan approach, air fryer trays are a lot easier to clean than a whole-ass oven.

You can get cheap air fryers, but I would recommend you splash the cash a bit and go for a good one, preferably one that has multiple baskets. We have a Ninja one and it's great. The two baskets can be set up independently, and even "synced" with one another so the second one comes on after the first one has been cooking for a certain amount of time. No more bunging everything in the oven for the same amount of time and hoping for the best!

I will also note that an air fryer makes a surprisingly good toasted cheese sandwich. It's not quite up to Breville standards, but it's a whole lot less messy to clean up afterwards. If all you care about is that your cheese sandwich goes "crunch" a bit, then air frying a cheese sandwich is a great thing.

The third thing is a rice cooker. These come in all manner of levels of complexity, but ours is a super-simple one: you just pop in the amount of rice you want, add an appropriate amount of water (in my experience, roughly twice as many cups of water as you have rice) then turn it on and leave it. Pretty much perfect rice every time, though ours does have a tendency to stick a bit to the bottom. It's easy enough to clean, though, because the main pain is removable and can even be stuck in the dishwasher if you're super lazy.

Between these three things that I've outlined above, we cook almost everything we eat. They are, without a doubt, the best kitchen investments we've ever made — and if you're lacking any or all of them, I highly recommend adding them to your kitchen, too.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

The post #oneaday Day 317: Kitchen essentials appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I'm aware that the following is going to make me sound painfully middle-class, but I'm going to say it anyway, because it's important to the story.

When I was a kid, the ultimate treat for enduring a shopping trip with my parents was not a trip to McDonald's or a big bag of sweets. It was going to the Marks and Spencer food section, getting a prawn and mayonnaise sandwich and a can of Caribbean crush, and enjoying both of those in the car park before the drive home. I'm not exaggerating when I say those sandwiches were delicious, and I'd give anything to experience them again.

"So just go to Marks and Spencers and get one," you may well say. And to that I would simply say… they're not the same. Just as so many other things are not the same as they used to be; just as so many other things have been gradually, subtly, almost imperceptibly enshittified over the years, so too have Marks and Spencer prawn and mayonnaise sandwiches.

In fact, pre-packed sandwiches in general have been on a downward spiral for many years now. When I was a little old to be dragged around Cambridge shopping with my parents, my friend Plummer and I would often go out for a drive of an evening, perhaps stopping by a nearby "old man pub" that we enjoyed, then swinging by the 24-hour Tesco petrol station to enjoy some midnight sandwiches before going home. While those sandwiches were never quite of the same quality as the mythical Marks and Spencers prawn and mayonnaise sandwiches, they were still pretty good.

Nowadays, every time I stop by a shop and think "oh, I'll get a Meal Deal" I also accompany that thought with "maybe the sandwiches will be better this time". But they never are. The bread is always soggy and too cold, the fillings are always underseasoned, nigh-flavourless in many cases, and as someone who physically retches if he can taste raw onion, my options are often a bit limited, to boot.

The possibility had occurred to me that perhaps I was nostalgically romanticising the concept of pre-packed sandwiches, and particularly the Marks and Spencers prawn mayonnaise sandwich. But then I consider all the other things which are indisputably worse than they used to be, and it's hard not to feel like everything now costs more but is also considerably worse.

Take a Kellogg's Variety pack, for example. I used to love these, because it was a bunch of little cereal packets, one portion each, that meant you could have a varied breakfast each day. Some of them were "healthy" (and I use the term loosely with regard to breakfast cereal, I'm aware), such as Corn Flakes and Rice Krispies, but there were always some "treats" in there too: Frosties, Ricicles, Coco Pops. I used to love getting a Variety pack when I went to go and visit my Nan; she'd always get them in for me because she knew I enjoyed them, and she'd always make me jelly and ice cream. I miss her and my Grandad.

A while back, Andie and I went for one of our occasional holidays at Center Parcs. While I was there, I thought "hey, I'll get a Variety pack! I haven't had one for ages." I was disappointed to discover that not only to Ricicles just flat-out not exist any more, but the balance in the Variety pack was now overwhelmingly in favour of Rice Krispies, one of the most boring cereals on the planet. Two packets of regular Rice Krispies and a packet of Rice Krispies Multigrain Shapes, whatever ungodly abomination of the breakfast table those might be. (They're not awful. But they're also not interesting.)

Crunchy Nut Corn Flakes, too, used to be my all-time favourite cereal, but the last box of them I've had has been immensely disappointing as has the box of Weetos I got alongside them. Neither of them are so bad as to make me want to throw them out completely, but they're also both considerably inferior than they once were. They just seem to lack a lot of the flavour that they once had.

I know the answer, of course: it's sugar. Everything has far less sugar in it these days, because sugar is the great sin that has made us all fat. And perhaps there's some truth to that — but then I also find myself thinking that numerous previous generations had full-sugar, full-fat diets and came through the experience without ballooning into an obesity epidemic. So what went wrong? How is it that our bland, flavourless, low-sugar, low-fat, joy-free food of today is still making us fatter than we've ever been in our lives?

Reflecting on things, I think part of the problem might be that the lack of sugar in "staples" such as the everyday breakfast cereal specifically makes me crave some actual sugar. And that's when I go out and get a chocolate bar or a cinnamon bun or whatever. And because I feel that so frequently, and so often indulge myself, I am, not to put too fine a point on it, a fat fuck.

Would I feel differently if my everyday food had more sugar, more fat, more flavour to it? I don't know. I know that I have gradually gained weight over the course of the last 25-30 years or so, but the vast majority of that weight has been in the last five years, since COVID. In those last five years, I've felt far more cravings for things that are bad for me than ever before, and I think that's a big part of the problem. When your everyday foods are leaving you feeling unsatisfied and craving more, you're tempted to binge on the things you're craving just to try and feel a little more fulfilled.

It's a more complex situation than that, of course; as I've alluded to numerous times on this blog, my relationship with food is more akin to an addiction, and is tied closely to my mental wellbeing. But I do often find myself wondering that if our everyday food and drink was a bit less artificially bland, we might all paradoxically be a bit better off.

No way to know, really, I guess. All I'm left with is the absolute certainty that if I get a prawn and mayonnaise sandwich from Marks and Spencer today, I will be left disappointed thanks to soggy bread, flavourless prawns and reduced-fat mayo. Not a patch on the real thing from 30+ years ago. And I don't think we're ever getting that back.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

The post #oneaday Day 262: Just a little bit worse appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Take a green packet of crisps, for example; you know that depending on if it follows the Walkers or Golden Wonder model, it will be either salt and vinegar or cheese and onion flavour. Red packets will be salted. Crimson will be smoky bacon. Orange will be chicken. Brown will be beef.

But it's not just crisps. You can generally identify tinned fish by its colour: sky blue for tuna, pink for salmon, sardines and mackerel can vary, but often red or dark blue.

And it's not even food for humans that follows these conventions. The packets of cat food we have follow a similarly recognisable system, too: sky blue for tuna, pink for salmon, red for beef (outside of crisps, this is a common assignment), orange for chicken.

These often make a certain degree of sense. Onions are greenish, for example, so it makes sense for them to be assigned the colour green. Bacon is pink and goes a bit darker when you cook it — particularly if it's smoked — so crimson makes sense. Blue makes sense for tuna because it's from the sea and the sea is commonly represented as blue, and salmon is iconically pink, so its packaging is pink. Brown and red both make sense for beef based on its colour after and before cooking, and its status as the most common "red meat".

I suspect we're at a point where we can directly associate tastes with colours in an almost synaesthetic manner, even outside of the examples that have some logic behind them. If someone says a fizzy drink "tastes like red", I bet you know what they mean, don't you? And interestingly, a drink tasting like "red" does not mean it tastes like either salt or beef. This even progresses into areas that make no sense, like "blue raspberry". Raspberries aren't blue. And yet if I say "blue raspberry" to you, I bet you know what it tastes like. (Very little like raspberries, as it happens.)

I've mentioned in my writing and my videos before that I feel like I have a certain degree of synaesthesia. When I'm playing a video game, for example, sometimes on-screen actions will be satisfying in a way that I can only describe as them "tasting" nice or having good "mouthfeel". I wonder how much of that is something that has happened independently of all this, and how much is a result of how much, today, we directly associate colours with flavours.

Apparently from a casual Google, I'm not the first person to feel like this. There's a paper from 2015 published on Biomed Central that is "on the psychological impact of food colour", for example. Their hypothesis was that "colour is the single most important product-intrinsic sensory cue when it comes to setting people's expectations regarding the likely taste and flavour of food and drink."

I've only skimmed the study so won't go into detail, but one interesting thing that was picked out was how these colour-flavour assignments can have different cultural meanings. For example:

The paper's "conclusion" section seemed remarkably inconclusive, though it did admit that "colour cues influence our food and drink-related behaviour in a number of different ways" and "food colouring undoubtedly plays an important role in driving liking and the consumer acceptability of a variety of food and beverage products".

It also noted that "identifying consistent colour-flavour mappings and training the consumer to internalise other new associations is one of the important challenges facing the food marketer interested in launching new products or brand extensions in a marketplace that is more colourful than ever."

So basically, a lot of it comes down to marketing. I still think it's interesting how obvious "standards" have developed, though — and it's interesting to consider that those standards might not be universal from one country to another.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

The post #oneaday Day 78: The Colour of Flavour appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

All you can do in this situation, though, is hold up your hands, admit you made a mistake (or a few) and try to right the ship from hereon. What has already happened can't be changed; what's important is what you do next and what you learn from that mistake.

I've already started taking positive steps with the exercise. I made it out of the door and to the pool for a decent length swim this morning, after what was a surprisingly good night's sleep. I woke up a lot of times, but every time it was because I was convinced it was 7am and time to get up, only to get the very pleasant surprise when I looked at my bedside clock and discovered that "time to get up" was still several hours away.

What I need to do is focus on some of the things that Slimming World talks about in the sessions, rather than just nodding along. Probably the key thing I need to focus on is "triggers" — in the slimming sense, these are the things that aren't the greatest for you which you eat then immediately want more of. They are one of the biggest barriers to weight loss, because they are the things that are most likely to send you catastrophically "off plan".

In many respects it's like an addiction. I have some experience of dealing with people who have struggled through addiction to substances more harmful than food — thankfully, those addictions appear to be in the past for the people concerned — but I recognise some of the same behaviours in myself when I "lapse". A desire to make myself "feel better" through the thing that is the source of a lot of my troubles; an inability to stop once I've started that "self-medication" process; the mental association between feeling like I "deserve" something that is bad for me for [insert justification here].

Part of my trouble is not having what I think of as "safety nets" in place — and the fact I'm somewhat inclined to think negatively of those safety nets. My immediate reaction to seemingly obvious advice like "don't eat a bag of sweets, have a piece of fruit instead" is that this is an absolutely laughable statement, even though I know fruit can be perfectly satisfying and even delicious. I need to get out of that mindset — and to have those pieces of fruit readily to hand so I can start making positive associations with them.

There are countless other examples, but there are days when it just all feels like work. And it is work; work with tangible benefits over the long term. It's those long-term benefits I need to keep my focus on, because it's short-term factors — i.e. the way I'm feeling right now — that is causing me difficulties.

I don't need advice or anything. I know what I need to do, and putting it down on "paper" will likely go at least a little way towards fixing some of those things a bit further forward in my mind. I know I can do this — I've done it once before — so I just have to knuckle down and actually do it.

For now, though, bed. Without biscuits.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

The post #oneaday Day 18: Attempting to Reset appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

For instance, when I was a kid, I distinctly remember thinking of bread as being "boring". After all, a joking "threat" by a parent at the time could be "you won't get any dinner, you'll just have bread and water". (I hasten to add for anyone new to this blog that my parents were not in any way abusive, nor did they ever refuse me dinner and just give me bread and water.) But nowadays, I find it thoroughly pleasurable to sometimes just have a bit of bread with some spread or jam on it.

It doesn't even necessarily have to be good bread. Sometimes I'm quite happy with the mediocrity of a shop-bought sliced loaf — I'm particularly fond of toasted wholemeal bread with raspberry jam — but a nice crusty loaf, be it from a bakery or the breadmaker, is a genuine treat now.

It's kind of disappointing that bread isn't particularly brilliant for you, particularly white bread. I find this kind of strange, given how much of a staple food bread has always been considered — and I'm sure in years gone by, this was even more the case. Whenever I think of, say, medieval folks, I'm sure bread was a significant part of what they ate. It's a potentially winning strategy in Agricola to focus on bread-making, after all.

I always find it interesting in Japanese media when students talk about simply "buying some bread" for their lunch, though I suspect this more commonly refers to some sort of sandwich. I am especially fascinated by the concept of the yakisoba pan, which is a noodle sandwich in a hot dog bun, and melon pan, which is a sweet bread that always sounds delicious when people describe it. There's also anpan, which is a bread roll stuffed with sweet red bean paste that I'd personally say veers more towards the "cake" or "doughnut" end of the spectrum, but it still counts.

I don't know if any of those can be made in a breadmaker — thus far we've just tried simple bread recipes and shop-bought ready mixes (there's a cheese and sun-dried tomato one that is lovely) — but it might be interesting to experiment. We'll have to see, I guess. In the meantime, I've got a loaf to polish off.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

The post #oneaday Day 6: Best Thing Since appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I've been wracked with stress and anxiety of months now, largely due to relentless feelings of inadequacy, worthlessness and uselessness due to the seemingly never-ending job hunt. I've described these feelings before, but they bear repeating: I know I have so much to offer the world, and it's inordinately frustrating that it seems nigh impossible to convince the people who hold the pursestrings of that fact.

All that said, just before we left on Monday morning, I was contacted by a recruitment consultant for a job that I feel I can do, and I also put in an application for another job that I felt quite confident about. I'm not going to get my hopes up too much for either of them, but, well, they're something at least, which is in stark contrast to the fat lot of nothing I've heard from a variety of employers for the last few months.

The time away has been nice, though it's made me realise quite how much I carry stress in my body as well as my mind. Today in particular, I've just been absolutely exhausted, and all I've wanted to do is sleep. Quite a lot of today has been taken up with napping, to be perfectly honest, but it's been nice; Andie could evidently do with a break, too, so it's been thoroughly pleasant to be somewhere that we can just rest without having to worry about anything that we were supposed to be doing. Our only commitments each day have been getting up in time for breakfast, and getting somewhere in time for dinner service.

The hotel we're staying at is really nice. It's got a very 1950s Art Deco feel about it — including the stereotypical Art Deco font — but it doesn't feel "old" at all. It's in good condition and clearly very modern, but the overall aesthetic of it is clearly inspired by Art Deco.

There's a poncey restaurant here, too; on our first day, we were fortunate enough to win a £25 voucher for it, so we had dinner there last night. The restaurant, I feel, struck a good balance between the "modern cooking" that I find so unsatisfying and providing actually flavoursome, generous portions of good food. I had some scallops for a starter, an excellent burger for a main and possibly the best trifle I've ever had, ever for dessert. (The custard clearly had cream in it, there was a big dollop of clotted cream on top and there were plenty of strawberries throughout.)

Tonight, meanwhile, we went to the hotel next door for dinner; as well as a fancy restaurant, they have a pub, so we enjoyed some hearty traditional British pub food. Even that was really good, though; I had a macaroni cheese that clearly had actual proper cheese in it rather than being a microwave jobby.

Back home tomorrow, and while I'm not sure I'd say I'm revitalised and refreshed — I still feel pretty tired — I do feel a little more inclined to face the challenges ahead. One day at a time, I guess.

The post 2457: Time Away appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Andie's been watching a show called Great British Menu, and that show frustrates me in a number of ways. Firstly, it's one of many, many shows that overuses the "Great British" thing. It's okay to just say "British" sometimes. (You definitely don't need to say it at all when talking about the "great British public". It's just "the public".)

The main way it frustrates me, however, is I just don't understand the appeal of the food these people are cooking. The show claims to celebrate the "total transformation of British cuisine during the Queen's historic reign" (and they don't let you forget that, repeating it roughly eleven thousand times each episode) but all I see is food that has become less about, well, food and more about, as they put it "theatre".

I'm a simple man when it comes to food. I like a good ham, egg and chips. I like a chilli. I like a spaghetti bolognese. I like a steak. I like a good roast dinner. Those are all good dishes that taste nice. They may be "uninteresting" to the refined palate, but they do fine by me, and more importantly, they are easily scalable according to how hungry you are and how many people you're catering for.

The "total transformation of British cuisine during the Queen's historic reign", meanwhile, seems to be all about compressing and pureeing everything, then sticking it in a box with some dry ice underneath so the plate of food ends up resembling a rather sparsely populated '80s rock concert more than, well, a plate of food.

One of the things the chefs on the show are fond of doing is offering "a new take on [x]". In the last episode I saw, there was "a new take on bacon and eggs", and "a new take on Eton Mess". Again, both of those things are fine as is. I certainly don't need an onion puree and an onion tuile, whatever the fuck that is, with my bacon and eggs — even if I did like onion, which I don't. And I definitely don't need my Eton Mess to be "interactive" by being hidden inside a meringue shaped like a cricket ball.

I don't know. I'm probably just being grumpy about this, although I have had food with "theatre" and enjoyed it — when I went to the Ninja restaurant in New York, the food there was served with plenty of theatrics and dry ice, but importantly, they gave you an actually decent plate of food as well. The stuff the chefs on Great British Menu come up with looks like something you'd serve as a starter to a Spartan.

If this is how British cuisine has transformed during the Queen's historic reign, then I'm just grateful that the local chippy is still open for business.

The post 2440: Baffled by Food appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

"Some people eat to live, while others live to eat. What about you? How far would you travel for the best meal of your life?"

The Daily Post, February 7, 2016

Some time ago, I wrote about how I'm not a foodie. Things haven't changed all that much, but I mention this now because it's relevant to the Daily Post prompt for today.

For me, food is something I very much enjoy — hence my weight problems, to be perfectly frank — but not in the same way as people who really enjoy food enjoy it. No, I'm not one who is keen to have a delicate bouquet of flavours exploding on my tongue as I take a miniscule mouthful of something that looks more like a piece of modern art than an actual meal — I'm someone who likes to have a big ol' gobful of something that tastes good, and preferably a lot of it. If the thing that tastes good is also reasonably not-awful for you, then so much the better, since if there's one thing I learned since starting Slimming World, it's that there are a lot of tasty things out there that you can eat completely guilt-free.

I was particularly conscious of my feelings towards food when Andie and I were watching the recent series of Masterchef: The Professionals. I found the programme a bit tedious, to be honest, because every episode was very similar to the last, and very little of the food actually looked appealing to me. These chefs — who I'm sure are at the very pinnacle of their craft — were taking things that would have been delicious in their most basic forms, then complementing them with bizarre crap like "pea puree" and baffling combinations of herbs and spices. Even on desserts. If there's one thing I can't abide, it's putting weird combinations of herbs and spices on desserts. Rosemary is for lamb in a pinch — though I prefer it without — not cake or ice-cream.

The most peculiar thing I think I've eaten and actually enjoyed was when my friend Tim — who emphatically is a foodie; you can tell this by the fact he has a favourite truffle oil — made a Heston Blumenthal (I think) bacon ice-cream for us to enjoy one evening. I wasn't entirely convinced that this was going to be nice when it was first posited, but then I thought about it — and thought about how nice bacon is with sweet things like maple syrup and pancakes — and realised it might not be that bad. And indeed it wasn't that bad at all — indeed, I'd go so far as to say it was genuinely nice. Would I have it in preference to a nice bowl of Cornish vanilla slathered in chocolate, caramel or strawberry stickies, though? Of course not.

So in answer to the question above, then — how far would I go for the best meal of my life? — I guess I would have to say "the kitchen". Or, at a push, "the pub" or "Tesco". Because although I enjoy my food, I can't say it's something I seek a life-changing experience from. And I know from experience that no amount of Michelin Star-winning chefs will make me enjoy nouvelle cuisine or whatever you're supposed to call that bollocks now; give me a nice hearty chilli, or a lump of pork with some nice potatoes, or a rack of lamb, or anything that just makes you feel full and happy to eat, and I'll be satisfied. And you can keep your pea purees.

The post 2210: Live to Eat appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I have a couple of weaknesses that contributed to my weight gain in the first place: firstly, I very much have a weakness for sweet things (such as the aforementioned cake and wine gums) and secondly, I have a tendency to eat when I'm depressed (which is quite often) or when I'm bored (which often leads to depression). These habits are fundamental parts of my character that I can't eliminate entirely, but which I can act upon in a more… responsible manner.

As such, here are some of the diet-friendly snacky things that I tend to make sure I have in the cupboard or fridge at all times, so that any time I'm feeling peckish for whatever reason, I can grab them and enjoy them without guilt that I'm ruining the hard work I've been doing.

Laughing Cow Little Cravings

These things were a revelation. I wouldn't call myself a particular cheese addict — in stark contrast to my wife, who loves a bit of cheese, despite technically being lactose intolerant — but I do like cheesy things now and then. What Little Cravings are is small, bite-size cubes of Laughing Cow cheese spread, optionally flavoured to taste a bit like "real" cheese — in the case of the pack shown on the right, cheddar, smoked processed cheese and blue cheese.

They're surprisingly tasty and satisfy a craving when one comes long. Plus at half a Syn each (you can have 5-15 Syns per day) on Slimming World, they really are pretty much guilt-free, which is exactly what I want from a snack.

Metcalfe's Skinny Popcorn

I love popcorn. My favourite is toffee popcorn, which obviously (probably — I haven't checked) isn't at all diet-friendly, but Metcalfe's range of "skinny popcorn" (sometimes found branded as "skinny topcorn" for some reason) is really tasty, comes in a variety of different flavours (I'm a particular fan of the sweet and salty variety pictured here, along with the cinnamon and honey flavoured ones) and is very low on the Syns, at 2.5 Syns per small bag or serving (a little under 20g, which in popcorn terms is actually a reasonably generous portion).

While it's not quite the same as a bag of crisps, a bag of popcorn, I find, satisfies that similar urge for something crunchy and/or salty (or, sometimes, sweet, depending on the flavour) so I'm going to make sure I have plenty of this on hand when I can.

Muller Light

I was never a big yogurt-eater while I was growing up. I had that childish thing where I didn't like "bits" in my yogurt, and while I don't mind it now, I still generally prefer a smooth dessert of some description.

Enter Muller Light, then, which is not only Syn-free for most flavours (there are a couple of exceptions) but which has a range of very tasty smooth flavours, some of which even have sprinkles of dark chocolate on them, helping to satisfy chocolate cravings. It's not a lot of chocolate, admittedly, but it's better than nothing — and it's completely guilt-free, which is just wonderful. I particularly recommend the vanilla with chocolate, orange with chocolate, coconut with chocolate and skinny cappuccino flavours, the latter of which I am disappointed that I haven't been able to find recently.

Fish

I eat a lot more fish than I used to. A quick and easy lunch for me these days is a bowl of rice with some smoked mackerel in some kind of sauce stirred into it. Most of these are Syn-free, too (there are exceptions, but none of them are particularly high — you're safe with the tomato and spicy tomato varieties, which are both Syn-free) and between them and the rice (which is Syn-free if you cook it properly, one Syn if you're lazy and use the Uncle Ben's pouches thanks to the oil in them) they satisfy hunger for a good long period, making them ideal for either lunch or just a snack if you're feeling particularly hungry. You will smell of fish, though, so be prepared to explain that.

The post 1995: Diet-Friendly Snacky Things appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Fogo Gaucho is a place that I've been curious to try for a while, as it sounded like an intriguing dining experience. It's a place where you pay a flat rate for your meal (plus drinks) and then simply sit at your table while you have lots of different bits of meat brought to you. In between said carnivorousness, you have the opportunity to visit a buffet and fill up your plate with some other bits and pieces like veggies, potatoes, rice and Brazilian stew, but the highlight of the experience is undoubtedly the meat.

And it was a fine selection of meat, too, running the gamut from spicy chicken thighs to some wonderful cuts of beef steak and lamb. At the start of the evening, the serving staff ask how you prefer your meat (rare, medium and so forth) and remember it, cutting pieces of meat from giant, majestic skewers that are according to your liking and then inviting you to pull them off the skewer with a pair of thoughtfully provided tongs.

The meat was delicious. It was all seasoned in various ways — pork ribs had a tasty, sweet coating, for example, while one of the cuts of lamb had a garlicky flavour to it. The spicy chicken thighs, meanwhile, were, well, spicy, and the beef steak cuts were wonderful, with the varied cuts provided really allowing you to appreciate the difference between different types.

The most common criticism of the place is that the meat is all a bit salty, and I'd concur with that; I don't know if that's a hallmark of Brazilian-style cooking or if it's a deliberate choice intended to get you having more drinks — drinks cost extra, remember — but either way, it didn't bother me too much. It was a great meal — and great value if you make sure to go when you're really hungry — and I'm pleased to have discovered this place. Now I have somewhere fun to take people who come to visit!

Now I'm very tired, so I will call it a night there. More games tomorrow!

The post 1943: Meat, Meat, Meat appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Unfortunately, it's also 10.30pm and we've been here since 8pm. We've only just sat down, only just ordered, and God knows how long it will take for the food to actually arrive at our table. This has, as you can probably imagine, soured the experience a little.

I should have seen it coming, of course. It's Friday night in the city centre, and that was a busy time back when I was at university. Over the last few years in particular, the city centre has undergone extensive regeneration — the restaurant we're currently sitting in is part of one of these new and restored buildings. With new and shiny buildings — and an expanding student population at both of the two city's universities — come hordes of people, of course. But I hadn't realised until now quite how ridiculously busy it gets in town.

This is probably nothing new to those of you who live in busy, bustling cities around the globe. But for me it's quite surprising. Southampton never felt like a particularly big deal, and Going Out used to be something you could do on a whim. It was often quite enjoyable to do so — friends and I would often take impromptu trips to local watering holes like Lennons and Kaos, and we'd always be able to get in and have a good time.

Not any more. Going Out appears to have become something that needs to be planned well in advance, that involves lots of standing around waiting, and that, frankly, just isn't particularly fun any more.

Perhaps it's my age. Perhaps it's the fact I've practically been a hikikomori for the past few years (and am largely comfortable with this). Or perhaps it's the pitiful organisation of this place that saw us waiting for more than two hours to sit down, let alone eat. Whatever it is, I don't count on myself doing it much more in the future, unless the occasion is very special indeed.

On the plus side, however, between writing the last paragraph and this one I've eaten a plateful of whitebait for the first time in about 20 years, and it was every bit as delicious as I remember. So at least the food is good. Worth the wait? Questionable, but at least the tedious and rubbish part of the evening is over.

The post 1866: Going Out, and the Perils Thereof appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Pretty well, actually. I've lost over a stone since I started, and while I do occasionally feel like I'm "missing out" on some things that I previously would have grabbed and enjoyed without question — I'm talking about obviously awful-for-you-but-delicious things like cakes, anything involving pastry, McDonald's breakfasts and all manner of other dreadfulness — on the whole I don't feel like I'm starving myself, because there's usually something around that I can eat and enjoy without feeling hungry.

And I think that's the key part of this. Often I'd eat something just because I was feeling hungry, and there was also a certain degree of using it as a "coping" strategy, too; I'd reward myself with something tasty if I felt I "deserved" it, and it was never particularly difficult to think of a reason that I "deserved" it, whether it had been a good day or a bad one.

The nice thing about the Slimming World programme is that I can actually still do this if I want to — I just have to reward myself with something that isn't a cake or a sausage roll or something. Fortunately, there are plenty of things that I do like that are "free" on the programme, so that's not too much of an issue.

There's also the fact that there's quite a few pleasant surprises in terms of recipes and things that count as "free". You can have as much meat as you like, for example, so long as it's lean, and stuff like pasta and rice is also free. (Microwave rice is not completely free, mind you, as there's a bit of oil in there; it's still only 1 "syn", though, so it's not super-terrible, as you're supposed to have between 5 and 15 "syns" per day.) I like meat, so it's good to be able to just snack on some nice chicken pieces or something; better for me than crisps, for sure, and maybe possibly nicer? I'm not sure.

Andie also looked up a recipe for a Slimming World-friendly dessert the other night. The website has an impressive collection of these (along with various main courses), so we chose the Apple Betty. It came out really nicely, and tastes great. It's not syn-free, but it's fairly low on the guilt scale, with just 2 syns per slice. Best of all, it "feels" like a "proper" dessert. I love desserts; they're probably my biggest weakness. So to be able to still enjoy them and stick to the programme is great.

I've also been really impressed with the Slimming World ready meals that recently launched, exclusive to Iceland. They're good quality food and substantial portions; I've certainly never finished one and felt like I could eat another one, which is a criticism which can be levelled at other "healthy" ready meals, particularly the rather stingy portions from Weight Watchers. I've also been impressed to discover that it is indeed possible to produce a "syn-free" sausage, and they taste pretty good, too. I have no idea what they've done to them to make them syn-free, but they make for a great and guilt-free sausage sandwich, which is something to be celebrated.

Anyway. I'm glad I've been able to stick with it even with all the unpleasantness that's occurred recently. It would have been so easy to just give up and slip back into my old ways, but knowing that weekly weigh-in is coming every Wednesday helps jar me back to "reality" and make me think that I don't really need to eat something awful for me just because I feel a bit crap; I can eat, by all means, I just need to be more mindful of what it is that I am actually eating.

Success so far, then, but I still have a long way to go before I get to where I want to be. Hopefully this journey will continue in the right direction.

The post 1862: Eat Well appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

One of the most frustrating things in this latter category is my dislike of onions.

I have hated onions for as long as I can remember. Initially dismissed by my parents as me just being a fussy eater — like most children, I was fairly fussy about a lot of unfamiliar foods when I was young — I continued to insist that not only did I simply not like onions, but they actually made me want to be sick.

That's not an exaggeration, either; even today, if I can so much as taste a bit of raw onion, it makes me retch and completely puts me off whatever it is I am eating that has turned out to be stuffed full of onion. I won't even eat something that has had raw onion on it, because I remain convinced that raw onion infects the flavours of everything around it, making everything else taste of onion even when the offending slices themselves have long been removed.

The strange thing about my violent dislike of onion is the fact that, in many cases, I'm absolutely fine with it if it's been cooked into something. I don't mind a pasta sauce that incorporates a bit of onion, for example — so long as it's not too much — and I don't mind a curry or Chinese dish that has a bit of onion in it — though again, not too much. Basically if I can taste it, it's out; I cannot think of a single dish that is improved by the presence of onion, but handled correctly I can at least tolerate it.

What's even stranger is that over the last couple of years or so, I've started to find even specifically onion-based things more palatable than I have done in the past. I can eat and even quite enjoy an onion bhaji, for example — though in most cases these have been deep-fried to such a degree that any resemblance to actual onions is by that point purely coincidental — and I have been known to have battered onion rings with steak and the like, too — though I will add to that that I usually smother them in so much sauce that it becomes impossible to discern their oniony origins.

Despite these changes in the last few years, though, I'm doubtful I'll ever be able to eat onion in the same way as a lot of other people I know — and I certainly doubt I will ever get to a stage where I like it enough to specifically want to add it to things. This is frustrating, because it's surprising quite how much food out there — particularly stuff designed for lunchtime consumption like sandwiches, wraps and the like — is absolutely rammed full of onion, in many cases ruining what sounds like an otherwise delicious item of food for me and, more often than not, making it completely unpalatable.

Oh well. I've survived 33 years without onions; I'm pretty sure I can probably go the rest of my life without them, too.

The post 1712: Les Oignons appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Take coffee, for example. Now, my past resilience to caffeine — I've long been able to drink a cup of joe in the evening and not have it affect my sleep patterns, though this is perhaps due to the fact that my sleep patterns are already somewhat questionable — can perhaps be attributed to the sheer amount of the stuff I've put into my body on a regular basis ever since I was quite young. Coffee is seen by some as a "grown-up drink" — perhaps because of its bitterness, and the fact that, without milk, it's an acquired taste — but I've been drinking it in various forms for as long as I can remember. Okay, for the first few years of my life it was milky Nescafé, but as soon as the world discovered fancy, expensive coffees I was right there with everyone — though I must confess I don't go as far as some people, largely because I have no idea what a "wet latte" is.

Anyway. The fact is, I've always drunk a lot of coffee — and buying a nice coffee machine a while back certainly didn't help me cut back, not that I particularly wanted to. As such, my body has apparently grown somewhat accustomed to caffeine, and thus a simple coffee never felt like it had a huge amount of effect on me. Sure, if I drank too many coffees and Red Bulls in a day, I'd get the shakes and feel a bit sick — as bad a feeling as any hangover, that, let me tell you — but for the most part, I never felt like caffeine made me any more "alert" or gave me a buzz as legend had it that it was supposed to.

Recently, however, I've cut back on coffee somewhat, largely due to the fact that it costs money to go and get a decent coffee at work (I could take instant, but, frankly, I'm a snob about coffee now and find that most instant — with the possible exception of Nescafé Azera, which is actually pretty good — tastes like crap) and thus I drink far less on any given day. And, as a result, I feel like caffeine is having more of an effect on me. I know a morning coffee certainly feels like it helps — and if I need to pep up a bit in the afternoon, another cup feels like it helps too. It's possibly psychosomatic, of course — which is what I've long suspected when it comes to caffeine — but, well, it's working for me.

An area where I have less doubt is in the matter of baked beans. Now, those of you with fond memories of the schoolyard will doubtless remember the short piece of juvenile poetry that taught everyone that while beans were indeed good for one's heart, they had a habit of also afflicting one with a certain degree of flatulence.

I've never really actually considered this to be true, despite the popular perception of eating beans being akin to allowing a Northern mining town free rein to hold brass band rehearsals somewhere within the cavernous expanse of your rectum. However, once again, just recently I have discovered that there may, in fact, be a degree more truth in this piece of popular wisdom than I had initially anticipated.

I had a jacket potato for lunch the other day, you see. My workplace canteen boasts some of the largest baked potatoes I've ever seen, and they're cooked nicely so that there's a bit of crispiness to the skin while they remain fluffy and not dried out within. There are few fillings available for said baked potatoes, but one of them is the old staple baked beans, optionally with the addition of cheese. I indulged in this classic combination, then went back to work in the afternoon. Upon reaching the end of the day, I found myself feeling a little bloated, but thought little of it and walked the 15-minute walk back to my car.

Upon reaching my car and sitting down inside, it happened: an attack of flatulence that bore an uncanny resemblance to distant — but rapidly approaching — rolling thunder. Starting subtly but quickly building in a crescendo of gaseous overtones, the entire affair lasted a good ten seconds or so, after which the feeling of being somewhat bloated had magically passed. It took another ten minutes for me to stop laughing enough to be able to drive off safely.

Naturally, upon discovering that the canteen's particular brand of baked beans had such a dramatic impact on me, I had to try again. And so it was that today I indulged in another gigantic jacket potato with beans and cheese — and a jelly for afters, because who can resist a jelly? — and so it was that once again, upon returning to my vehicle after a long day staring at my computer screen, I erupted in a cacophony of full-bodied guffs that I can hardly deny were extremely satisfying to release. I was even a bit sorry that no-one was around to hear them.

So yeah. Beans, beans, good for your heart; beans, beans really do… you know.

The post 1703: Beans, Beans, Beans appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

This may not sound all that tiring to those of you who have happily been holding down nine-to-fives for the last umpteen years, but it's been something of a culture shock to me.

Actually, that might be a slight exaggeration. But after four years of working from home, often in my pants, there have been a number of adjustments I've had to make. And, you know, aside from the whole "getting up early" thing (which I still loathe thanks to my body's uncanny ability to be extremely tired in the morning regardless of whether I go to bed early, timely…ly or ridiculously late) these adjustment haven't been all that bad — and I think they'll have a positive effect overall.

The biggest change is, of course, the fact that I am no longer working from home and consequently have to 1) put clothes on and 2) travel to work. The former's not really an issue — I joke about working in my pants, but in reality more often than not I did get dressed to do work, because it put me in the right mindset to do useful things.

The latter, however, is a noteworthy change. I have a drive of about 45 minutes or so to my place of work, followed by a 10-15 minute walk from where I park my car to the actual office. This means that I'm getting a bit of very light exercise every day, which is probably a good thing. I can't say it's particularly strenuous exercise, given that I tend to walk quite slowly — a trait I have apparently inherited from my mother without noticing at some point — but it is exercise of sorts, and it's every day.

There's also actually a gym on site at my new workplace, which I will probably join at some point soon, since it's a lot cheaper than the one I'm currently a member of. (Plus I walk past it on the way out of work every day, so that makes it a lot more difficult to ignore… and it has the advantage of meaning that if I stay late to do even a short workout, I'm less likely to run into rush-hour traffic on the way home, which will be very nice indeed.)

The fact I'm working in an office rather than in my own house, which, to put the following in context, is approximately 5 minutes' walk from a Tesco Express, means that I'm less inclined to wander out and purchase various snacks and sugary drinks when I'm feeling hungry, too. Instead, I'm drinking a lot more water, I've cut down a fair bit on the lattes — no more than one or two a day, usually just the one to pep me up a bit in the morning — and I've almost entirely eliminated fizzy pop from consideration when I think about what I'd like to drink. I take my own lunch when either Andie or I remember to prepare it the night before (because let's face it, neither of us feel inclined to do so at that ungodly hour in the morning) but even when I don't, the work canteen is pretty good, with a selection of decent food rather than the usual "chips with everything" situation I typically associate with the word "canteen".

So on the whole, then, things are going well and I hope they will have a positive impact on both my physical and mental wellbeing. It's too early to say right now, but I'll certainly be keeping an eye on things as I continue to settle in.

The post 1697: Adjustments appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

It's not that I can't appreciate food that has had care, attention, time and effort expended on it to make it look, taste and smell great. It's just that I don't think these expensive restaurants are significantly nicer than something simple. If anything, I find fancy food too fussy — there are too many flavours for me, when I much prefer something simple, homely and enjoyable.

Take steaks. I love a good steak. Steak is one of the most delicious meats there is when just cooked nicely and served up by itself, perhaps with some chips and/or a bit of salad. Smother it in some sort of sauce or marinade, though, and it becomes considerably less appealing — the delicious taste of the steak is, more often than not, overwhelmed by the taste of the sauce, and that's not the reason I wanted to have steak in the first place.

The menu this evening had a lot of delicious things on it — steak, fish, chicken, pasta, gnocchi. And yet I found it very difficult to pick something I actually liked the sound of, because for every item that was based on something I enjoy — steak, fish, chicken, pasta, gnocchi — it was promptly made far too fussy by rubbing rosemary all over it, festooning it with onions or incorporating herbs and spices I'd never heard of.

This may sound like being a fussy eater and I guess it sort of is — my longstanding violent dislike of onions precludes me from eating a lot of fancy food, which is often riddled with them — but more than being fussy, it's simply the fact that I just don't really enjoy food that's too "complicated", for want of a better word. I don't know whether this is because I don't have a particularly refined palate, or because I'm not used to food of this type, or because it's just my particular tastes, but regardless of what the reason is, I think I would, in most cases, much rather have a pub lunch or a nice roast dinner than anything that been anywhere near the word "jus".

I wonder how you refine your palate for things like this? I often contemplate this question when confronted with an impressive-looking cheeseboard, none of which I have the slightest inclination to eat, or am invited to appreciate a salad as being anything more than just bland leaves… or, indeed, as with this evening, am presented with a number of individual ingredients I like by themselves that are smothered with things that I either actively dislike or don't really appreciate in conjunction with the things I do like.

So there you have it. I'm not a foodie. Consequently, I'm something of a cheap date, too.

The post 1300: I'm Not a Foodie appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I don't mean that they're hard to find — they're still everywhere, and still the second-best flavour of crisps (the best being, of course, prawn cocktail) but rather it's increasingly difficult to find a bag that just says "salt and vinegar" on them.

No, these days it's all "sea salt" and either malt, cider or, in extremely pretentious cases, balsamic vinegar. Granted, each of those does have a distinctive taste from the others, but it's a distinction we didn't used to make because no-one knew what the fuck balsamic vinegar was.

Crisps aren't the only type of food that has undergone gentrification, though. We now have "fruit terrine" rather than "jelly with fruit in"; "artisan bread" rather than "crusty bread" (or, you know, "bread"); and almost everything that involves chocolate that isn't a chocolate bar has suddenly become "Belgian chocolate" as if its Flemish origins somehow make the poor-quality chocolate sauce you get with a chocolate pudding magically better.

There's probably some sort of deep-seated sociological reason for all this happening that marketing people have picked up on. At a guess, I'd say it's something to do with people having aspirations towards being "middle class", and what's more middle class than balsamic vinegar? Slap that on your bag of crisps and you immediately no longer have crisps — which are clearly a working class food — but instead you have posh crisps or, more accurately, "nibbles". The sort of things you pour into a bowl because eating them out of the bag is just so frightfully common.

Where does it end, though? Wagon Wheels become Alloy Rims? (with Jammy Alloy Rims being marketed as "a delicate berry jus nestled in a bed of delectably fluffy mallow, all encased in rich, smooth Belgian chocolate") Cheestrings launch a new "Cheestrings Pro" range made out of suitably pongy blue cheeses? Cheetos complement their Pepsi flavour (yes, it totally exists — see?) with an array of flavours based on popular wines and ports?

I jest, of course. I'm not annoyed about all this; I just think it's an interesting cultural phenomenon that appears to have been growing over the last few years in particular — or perhaps it's been going on for a lot longer and I just never noticed. When I was a student, for example, I didn't go looking for pretentious crap like balsamic vinegar; I bought value goods. (Actually, that's not so bad; cheap crisps are frequently the best due to the sheer amount of flavouring crap they cover them with. Plus you'd never get Tangy Toms rebranding themselves as "Sundried Tomato Flavour Bites".)

Anyway, I'm off to enjoy a cool glass of triple-filtered cow beverage, and perhaps a Belgian chocolate chip Snack Disc.

The post 1291: The Gentrification of Snack Foods appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

This evening, then, we went out in an attempt to start rectifying this situation just so, on the off-chance that friends from abroad do come and visit, we'd have somewhere more interesting that Burger King or a Wetherspoons to take them.

We actually visited two different establishments this evening. The first of these was La Cantina (or just Cantina as it appears to be known now) in the Bedford Place area of the city, just on the outskirts of the city centre. This is a Mexican place that I'd heard good things about in the past, but had somehow never made it to. They serve you standard Mexican platters like nachos, burritos and whatnot, but they also do tapas servings of tacos and various other tortilla-based dishes whose names I've forgotten. Andie and I had a sharing platter of nachos with beef mole and two of these tapas dishes each, and that was plenty of food for the pair of us.

It was some tasty food, and a good level of spice — just enough to get you sweating a bit, but not so much that your tongue goes completely numb and you can no longer actually taste what it is you're eating. The beef mole had a bit of a kick, though I suspect this came from the seasoning of the meat rather than the slices of chili pepper that were in it, which actually turned out to be pleasantly mild-ish.

After dinner, we decided to drop into a brand new establishment that has just moved in almost next door to Cantina — Tutti's Gelato. This is, to my knowledge, the second dedicated gelato shop that has opened in Southampton — the first being Sprinkles in "student central" area Portswood.

Tutti's offers a wide variety of gelato flavours, available either as scoops in a cone or little bowl, or as part of a bigger dessert. Said bigger desserts — crepes, waffles, sundaes — all look like they'll probably give you a heart attack, but I most definitely intend to give them a try at some point in the near future, perhaps when I haven't filled myself up with Mexican food beforehand.

My only real criticism of Tutti's — which was clean, looked good, served delicious desserts and had some comfortable seating — was that their menu was riddled with spelling and punctuation errors, and wasn't even consistent about the mistakes they made. If you can correctly pluralise "crepe" into "crepes", then why the fuck did you put an apostrophe in the word "sundaes"? And don't even get me started on how they spelled "raspberries" (hint: it involved an apostrophe, and did not involve the correct "-ies" ending.)

This aside, though — which, after all, isn't really the most important thing (yes, I winced a bit writing that, but it is true) — Tutti's was a great place to go, and I've been all for the "late night dessert" thing ever since I was taken out to a shop that specialised in chocolate-based desserts in New York several years ago. (I can't remember the name, but by God it was amazing. They had a chocolate pizza that looked like instant diabetes.)

Anyway, my rambling point in all this is simply that now, if someone comes to visit, I have two places I can take them. And hopefully we'll discover some more in the near future.

The post 1231: On Your Doorstep appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

We've had a lot of Asian cuisine of various descriptions since we've been here, as I noted the other day. Today I added to the range of Asian foods that I've experienced by having a taste of okonomiyaki. I had no idea whatsoever what okonomiyaki was prior to today, but I had at least heart of it — the character Kirari in the visual novel Kira Kira (which is eminently worth your time, by the way) is obsessed with it.

I was half expecting okonomiyaki to be something similar to takoyaki — the small fried rice flour balls filled with octopus meat and other goo, then drizzled with Japanese mayonnaise. Okonomiyaki is, as it turns out, absolutely nothing like takoyaki. No; rather than being small bite-sized thingies like takoyaki, okonomiyaki is instead somewhat akin to a cross between a potato cake and an omelette, with lashings of a rich barbecue sauce-style substance slathered all over the top of it. I forget exactly what the omelette-type-thing was made from and am far too tired to actually research it at this hour in the morning, but it was quite tasty. Like an omelette, it could also be made with a variety of different fillings, ranging from beef to shrimp or squid. I had a squid one to make up for the fact I didn't have a squid taco at Banh Mi Boys the other day, so I now feel suitably guilty about devouring some of Ika Musume's relatives.

I wasn't quite sure what I was going to make of okonomiyaki, as I was aware going into it that it was made with onions, which those who know me well will know are a vegetable I despise with a great passion. (I had terrible trouble growing up convincing my parents that I really genuinely didn't like onions, despite actually retching at the dinner table when I could taste them on several occasions; the fact that being able to taste onion today still makes me retch makes me feel somewhat vindicated that I wasn't just being an awkward child about them.) Fortunately, however, the onions were shredded up to such a degree (not to mention having had the shit fried out of them) that they were inoffensive to my palate's delicate sensibilities, and consequently there was no retching.

Actually, I enjoyed the okonomiyaki very much. I'm pleased I tried it; I'm not sure it's my favourite of all the Japanese food I've tried to date, but I am happy that I've tasted it and now know what to expect should I find myself ordering it again.

Now all we have to do is complete the "Japanese trifecta" by having sushi one night this week and we'll be all Asianed out.

The post 1209: Further Adventures in Fudz appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Anyway, what I actually wanted to talk about in last night's post was one of my favourite aspects of travel: food. I'm not necessarily talking about sampling local cuisine — which here in Toronto would probably be poutine, I guess — but wandering around and having a chance to sample some local eateries, and eat some interesting food that you might not be able to get back home.

Toronto is particularly good for Asian eateries of various descriptions. Yesterday we sampled two of them: the Banh Mi Boys sandwich shop, and Kinton Ramen.

Banh Mi Boys is a pokey little shop that often has queues extending out of the door. They serve a variety of Vietnamese-inspired food that includes Asian-style tacos — floppy rather than crispy — and steamed rice flour buns known as bao. They also do Vietnamese-style baguettes, the titular banh mi, which are a decent meal in themselves. We tried the tacos and the bao, both of which were delicious. I had pulled pork in my bao and some sort of spicy beef in my taco — there were several different options on offer besides these, including squid tacos, which I sort of regret I didn't try now, even if eating them would make me feel a bit guilty towards Ika Musume-chan.

Kinton Ramen, meanwhile, is fairly self-explanatory. It's a ramen shop. All they do is ramen and a few side dishes. They do do several different types of ramen, to be fair, but if you don't want ramen this is probably not the place to come. I must confess to not being overly familiar with ramen, as it's something we don't seem to get all that much of back in the U.K., but the couple of occasions I have had it in the past have been thoroughly enjoyable.

For those unfamiliar with Japanese cuisine, eating "ramen" generally involves getting an enormous bowl full of broth made from pork bones (with the amount of fat used in it determining how "rich" it is) which is then filled with ramen noodles, vegetables such as beansprouts, nori and various other bits and pieces, and typically topped with a lump of pork. Some also have a whole egg in them — sometimes this is served chopped, but at Kinton, there's just a whole egg dropped in it, which is quite amusing. You then proceed to consume the whole bowl using a combination of chopsticks and a wooden Japanese soup spoon. At Kinton, they take your photo if you finish the whole thing, which is actually quite an achievement — there's a lot of food there, and due to the way it's structured, it often looks like you're not making any progress with it for a very long time. Like the Persona 4 beef bowl, if you will.

Anyway, that should hopefully make up for last night. And hopefully my headache will fuck off and die now.

The post 1207 Part 2: Food Travels appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Bovril

You've probably heard of Marmite, the thick, brown, goopy substance that supposedly you either love or hate. Well, its bastard sibling is Bovril, which rather than being made from "yeast extract", whatever that is, is apparently made from beef. What you end up with is a thick black tar that supposedly tastes of beef but more accurately tastes "of black" and has a propensity to burn the roof of your mouth off if you have too much at once. It's good on toast. It's especially good on toast when dipped into Heinz tomato soup. You can also make it into a drink, which is inadvisable unless you like a mug full of black, salty, slightly beefy water.

Biscuits

What you know as "cookies". You may have the awesomeness that are Chips Ahoy! but we have a wide selection of biscuits that are firmly ingrained into our culture. We have the bourbon cream, for example, which is two chocolatey biscuits with a layer of chocolatey creamy stuff in between and no actual Bourbon involved. We have the custard cream, which is like a bourbon only more square and vanilla-y. We have the jammie dodger, which is another two-layer biscuit with jam in the middle. And we have Rich Teas, which are rubbish until you dunk them into a hot beverage or squish melted marshmallows between them.

Fish and Chips

Plenty of places in the States sell fish and chips, but you haven't had it the truly British way unless you follow several steps in the process. Firstly, get a portion of chips that is enough for at least three people and put it in some paper. Then smother it in enough salt to give a midget an immediate heart attack. Then drown it in vinegar. Then slap a large, greasy, wet battered fish on top of it. Then wrap it up into a neat little parcel and admire as the grease seeps through the paper. The key element of British fish and chips is the size of the portion. If you can finish a portion, the portion wasn't big enough. There is also generally an inversely-proportional relationship between the price of a portion of chips and the amount they will give you. The cheaper the chips are at the chip shop, the bigger the portions will be.

Curry Sauce

Companion to the above, the slightly-lumpy brown-green-yellow curry sauce that is on offer in most chippies is the perfect companion to your carb overload. It may look like someone has just blown chunks over your bag of chips, but it's a one-way ticket to spicy heaven.

Indian Takeaway

British takeaways are something else. You may have had a curry from your local Indian, but you haven't had it properly until you've had it from a dodgy British takeaway — the kind of place that sells dishes like the entertainingly non-specific "meat curry". Also, when a dish says it's "hot", it means it. A vindaloo will probably blow your head off. And having a drink won't help.

Proper Chocolate

You have chocolate, sure. But you don't have our chocolate, which is just better. From the immensely calorific Yorkie bars (which still somehow manage to get away with marketing themselves as "not for girls") to the legendary Cadbury's chocolate, we sure know how to do it properly.

HP Sauce

HP Sauce is the perfect condiment that goes with pretty much anything and even makes a good sandwich by itself. (On bread, obviously.) It has a taste that is impossible to describe except through the word "brown". It tastes like brown sauce. Because it is brown sauce. Try it on bacon or sausage sandwiches for the perfect breakfast, or dribbled over baked beans to give them a pleasingly spicy kick.

I hope that's educated you on British cuisine. Next time you pay us a visit, remember to give them a try.

The post #oneaday Day 566: The Top Arbitrary Number of Quintessentially British Foods appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I'm not a fantastic cook, really, despite having spent a memorable period working alongside my friend from university and beyond Mike Porter in a pub kitchen. We made a mean prawn cocktail and only occasionally accidentally deep-fried an Ultimate Combo when no-one had ordered one in order to have something delicious to munch on ourselves. (There was also the memorable time that a bunch of food was being thrown out and Mike ended up with a ridiculous number of rib-eye steaks, finding himself eating them for breakfast, lunch and dinner for some time. And the time we had an apple sauce fight that culminated with the pouring of apple sauce into each others' chefs hats and a strong temptation to pour it down the hairy and perpetually-visible bumcrack of our (female) companion in the kitchen.)

My one redeeming trait in cooking is the fact that I'm willing to experiment and improvise. I've made some delicious spaghetti sauces, curries and chilli con carnes using said talent, and they're never quite the same as each other.

All those foods are staples, of course, and pretty much anyone who's been away to university knows how to prepare all of the above as a means of dining reasonably nutritionally well on a teeny-tiny budget. But over the years, it's become clear that the interpretation of each recipe varies enormously according to each person. I, for example, never put onion in anything because onions are actually little Satan poos, and no-one wants to eat Satan's poo. I may have made that up, but onions still taste like shit (not actual shit) and make me retch if I can taste them, so I avoid them at every opportunity.

I was quite happy with my simple chilli recipe, too — tin of tomatoes, packet of mince, tin of kidney beans, bit of chilli powder — until I went over to a friend's house one evening and he made a chilli that was somehow infinitely, indescribably more delicious than any I'd ever made. His secret? Using twice as many tins of tomatoes as you "need" and then allowing them to reduce over a much longer cooking period. Also, adding bacon and/or chorizo.

Even within relatively simple foods, then, there is a huge amount of variation. This goes right down to the simplest of the simple dishes. Take two people who enjoy Bovril on toast, for example — one may put a thin film of the beefy, yeasty black stuff on top while the other may enjoy the curious enamel-stripping mouth-burning sensation inflicted by putting slightly too much Bovril on a piece of toast. (Incidentally, try Bovril on toast dipped in Heinz tomato soup. It's amazeballs. Assuming Bovril doesn't make you gag.)

I'd like to cook better, and once I get back into my own place again I have every intention of exploring and trying things out. Cooking can be a pain in the arse, but it's also immensely satisfying when it goes right — to look at, to hear bubbling away in the pot and, eventually, to taste. And if you fuck up, well, you've learned from the experience — plus hey, the Chinese takeaway is only just down the road if the worst comes to the worst.

"Healthy" food can eat a dick, though. At least the interpretation from a lot of people, which is either "undressed, extremely dull garden salad" or "fat free, flavour free bullshit". I'm fully aware that it is, in fact, possible to make delicious and healthy foods — the BBC Good Food magazine have a range of low-cost books with some excellent recipes designed around this very principle for example. But with healthy eating it's all too easy to fall into a bland, boring trap of flavour free nonsense and forget how amazing it is to eat something with a bit of sugar or salt in it.

Food, then? Delicious when prepared correctly, enough to make you wonder if it was worth bothering with if prepared incorrectly. This has been a message from the Ministry of Stating the Obvious.

The post #oneaday Day 544: Om Nom Nom appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

And so it is that you, like me, may have come to believe such rubbish as the following facts, which are clearly true. And all food-related, oddly.

Coke tastes better in a can.

It just does. Cans get colder than bottles and stay colder longer than bottles. Plus something about the metal particles makes the Coke taste better than the plastic particles of a bottle. There are people who will say that a glass bottle is the best way to enjoy a Coke, but they are wrong.

Sandwiches taste better when cut into triangles, unless they are bacon sandwiches.

This is also true. Eat a sandwich that has not been cut in any way and it tastes clearly inferior to triangular sandwiches. And don't even get me started on people who cut rectangular sandwiches. There's nothing even a little bit right about that.

Bacon sandwiches taste better when cut into small squares.

The exception to the sandwich rule is the bacon sandwich rule. Try it. Next time you have a bacon butty, cut it into quarters and you'll see that it's clearly better.

McDonalds chips taste better when consumed by the handful.

See also: crisps.

Milk tastes better swigged from the bottle.

As everyone (who enjoys milk) well knows, having an illicit glug from the bottle is far nicer than pouring out a glass. I fear that some of the Coke Science may be coming into play here.

It's impossible to make a good cup of coffee for yourself.

Make yourself a coffee. Taste it. Put up with it because it's "all right". Now get someone else to make you a coffee. Taste it. Enjoy it. Accept their making you a coffee that one time as acceptance of a non-verbal contract to make you a coffee whenever you want.

Tea only tastes of something if you believe in it.

I don't believe in tea, therefore it tastes like hot water — particularly the herbal teas. They smell great, but I never believe that they're going to taste of anything, so they don't.

Ketchup and HP sauce are opposites, and if they touch each other they will spontaneously combust.

What other reason could people possibly have for putting dollops of each respective sauce on opposite sides of the plate?

You are not allowed to have soup on a hot day.

It's not that you don't want soup on a hot day, your brain tells you that you must not have soup on a hot day.

If a piece of food you don't like touches a piece of food you do like, the food you do like is forever tainted.

This one is actually true. I hate onion — particularly raw onion. Even the slightest hint of a taste of it makes me retch. This includes if a salad once had raw onion on it and said raw onion has since been removed. It leaves a flavour residue that makes anything the onion once touched completely unpalatable.

Cheese sauce can be used as the strongest adhesive known to man.

If you've ever burnt cheese sauce onto a saucepan, you'll know that this is also true.

The most exotic-sounding sandwich on the menu is always the best.

This one is, unfortunately, not always true. Many's the time I've had a chicken tikka sandwich hoping for a gorgeous curried revelation and walked away disappointed, wishing I'd gone for the tuna and sweetcorn.

The dessert that mentions chocolate the most times is the best.

Also not always true, since too much chocolate can lead to becoming completely gummed up with sticky, gooey goodness. And while that can be fun, it can also lead to feeling a bit sick. And no-one likes feeling a bit sick.

If you don't have some sort of sauce on a kebab, you are Doing it Wrong.

Because why on Earth would you eat that shit if it wasn't covered in chilli sauce that can strip paint, or garlic sauce so strong it can be used as insect repellent?

The post #oneaday Day 153: Things That Make No Logical Sense But Are Clearly True: Food Edition appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Following an event I attended which I can't talk about (yet) we were recommended to head to an area called "Brick Lane", with the assurance that "if you like curry, you can't go far wrong". I like curry, so it seemed like a sensible choice.

I wasn't ready for what our party was confronted with. Imagine, if you will, the Las Vegas Strip. Now imagine the street is only one car-width wide and one-way. Now, instead of casinos and strip clubs, imagine every single establishment on the street is a curry house. Now, instead of people in fancy uniforms looking for valet parking and/or prostitution business, imagine every establishment has at least one overly aggressive Asian gentleman outside offering increasingly ridiculous deals in order to get you to frequent his establishment. (The best we heard was 2 free drinks and a 95% discount, which led us to believe that even breathing in the food's fumes would lead to immediate food poisoning.)

It was quite an experience, the likes of which I've never seen anywhere else. The whole street was lit up like a red light district, with curry houses hawking their wares with increasingly outlandish neon displays the further down the street you went.

I've only gone and forgotten the name of the place we ate at, but it was quite good. We were recommended by someone who knew Brick Lane's idiosyncrasies to look out for two things: restaurants that were full, and restaurants that didn't have anyone hawking their wares outside. Sadly the latter was impossible as every place had someone outside badgering people with crazy deals and discounts that I doubt very much they would have honoured come bill-paying time. But the one we picked was pretty full the whole time we were there.

The toilets smelled absolutely awful, though, like a fetid stench-pit from the very bowels of Hell. Fortunately you couldn't smell them from the eating area. Probably for the best.

So there's your tourist attraction of the day. In London? Like curry? Don't mind being harassed by what are essentially curry-pimps? Then Brick Lane is for you.

The post #oneaday, Day 54: Travels of an Angry Jedi - Brick Lane appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I'm serious! I like your food. You sure know how to do a good breakfast. It's a breakfast worth getting up for in the morning. Sure, a typically British bacon sandwich is all very well and good, but there's little that can beat a stack of pancakes, some waffles, some French toast or indeed the wonder that is Eggs Benedict, which I discovered the other morning after spending the night with you.

You know what else? And this is going to sound a bit weird, 'cause I wonder how many people compliment you on this, but I think your bread is awesome. Sure, you can get fancy-pants bread from fancy-pants bakeries in the UK, but your everyday sort of bread, the sort that you make everyday toast and sandwiches from? That's functional at best, dry and sawdusty at worst. You make me appreciate a good sandwich. And I like sandwiches at the best of times. But you make me appreciate them more. I like that.

You also seem to have the art of the takeaway down to a fine art. We Britons of Britainland believe that we are the masters of the Chinese and Indian takeaways, but I can honestly say that I think yours are better. Your Indian curries are creamy and smooth and delicious, and your Chinese meals are full of flavour and they come in those awesome little cardboard boxes with the lids that are a good shape to eat the food straight from with a pair of chopsticks, instead of those foil trays with the cardboard lids that are always way too hot to put on your lap.

Since we're being honest here, I don't like how you use the word "an" before words that start with an "h", which isn't a vowel, and you spell "aluminium" wrong, not to mention your seeming aversion to the letters "u" and "s". Also, as our beloved comedian Eddie Izzard says, "herb" is pronounced "herb" because "there's a fucking 'H' in it".

But you know what? I don't care. I can accept your flaws because they make you more colorful (see what I did there?) and interesting. I can accept that you use the word "momentarily" different to the way I do, and I think it's charming. All your sweet, nutty bread and pancakes and Hollandaise sauce on eggs and love of good coffee and ability to put free Wi-Fi hotspots in places other than Starbucks just make me think that, you know, you're pretty sort of kind of cool and I think it'd be, you know, nice if we could, um, spend a bit more time together. If you know what I mean.

The post #oneaday, Day 328: Hi, America appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Despite this, we had a great day yesterday. We visited the Natural History Museum which, despite getting up the earliest we've managed all week, we somehow didn't manage to get into until after lunch. This may have been partly due to our practical demonstration of the difference between "local" and "express" Metro trains – the latter of which was the first one we boarded today, then wondered why it sailed past the station for the Natural History Museum, then streets beyond it until we were well over 40 blocks away from where we wanted to be!

We're going back to the Museum today to see some other bits because we didn't have a lot of time to see things in the end, though we got a chance to see the dinosaurs and an interesting section on Asian peoples. We got kicked out at closing time though – 5:45 – so we decided to head down to the south end of Manhattan to take a look at Bodies… The Exhibition. I think most people know about this by now, but for the uninitiated, it's an exhibition showing how our bodies work via the means of real-life dissected bodies.

This wasn't as gross as I was expecting, interestingly. It was, however, interesting to see the different body parts, how they interact and what they actually look like. There were also some interesting displays on the blood supply to various parts of the body, where they had injected the veins and arteries with a special dye and then chemically "decomposed" the rest of the body, leaving only the blood vessels.

The other great thing about Bodies which I hadn't really considered before was its stunning use of lighting. The whole exhibition hall was very dark, with pools of light surrounding each major exhibit, but also focusing very tightly on small "body trivia" signs on the wall. The overall effect was very distinctive and memorable, and lent a huge amount of atmosphere to the whole exhibition.

Finally, once we had done this, it was time to go out for dinner to a restaurant I'd heard a little about from a few people and was intrigued to try, though it had a reputation for being expensive. I am referring to Ninja New York, a themed Japanese restaurant where you are served by ninjas and the food is self-proclaimed "high-end Japanese cuisine". The food was indeed tasty, and the "interactive" dishes, which often involved something exploding or having to pull a sword out of something followed by it emitting an atmospheric mist were great. We also got an after-dinner magic show by "New York's tallest ninja" who displayed some Derren Brown-style tricks to us which he admitted were inspired by the performer, and that he secretly hoped Derren Brown didn't get too popular in the States because he'd then be relegated to the status of "Oh hey, you're that guy who does stuff a bit like Derren Brown". His mastery of manipulation and misdirection was excellent though, and it was a great display to finish the meal with.

The only things with the Ninja restaurant was you need to be 1) really hungry (we had a five-course banquet…) 2) really rich (…for $50-$70 each) and 3) not mind that "recommendations" sometimes turn into "orders" without you remembering having ordered them (and to counter this, if something unexpected arrives, simply tell them… they're ninjas, they can handle it). All in all though, it was a fantastic meal that is worth experiencing, particularly, I would imagine, if you have kids.

We're flying home at 10pm local time tonight. Neither of us want to go home. We've started to feel "settled" here now and are coming to terms with New York's own little idiosyncrasies, although the Metro still occasionally bamboozles us. We'll definitely be back, without question.

The post A Jedi in New York: Day 5 appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Now we're over in New York for our honeymoon – yes, it's the land of Papapishu and Lord Regulus, and we arrived last night, so today was our first full day here. I've decided to blog the experience (most of it, at least…) as a nice record of what we got up to. Like the wedding, there will be photos to follow upon our return – watch this space for details of where to find them.

So what did we get up to today? Quite a few things, actually, considering the fact that we decided today would be a day of "wandering" and discovering things rather than setting out to specifically do something. The only task we had to complete today was to pick up our New York Pass, a cool little card that Jane found out about before we left. Essentially, it's a card that allows you free or discounted entry to a lot of the popular New York attractions such as the Empire State Building, the Guggenheimer, Madame Tussauds and numerous others, as well as money off Broadway tickets and food at various restaurants.

We began our day with breakfast at the Ritz Diner on East 62nd Street at 1st Avenue (or whichever way around you're supposed to say them), a pleasant little dive that we found on our first night here. It's a 24-hour traditional American diner with a huge menu (the kind that Gordon Ramsay would immediately want to set fire to and jump up and down on) and cheap prices. I had a stack of pancakes with eggs (sunny side – partly because I can never remember the American expressions for the different types of eggs except that one) and Jane had some waffles with bananas and blueberries. The breakfast was so enormous we theorised that it would be enough to sustain us for the whole day's activities… and we weren't wrong.

After that, we glanced at our guidebooks to attempt to work out which way we had to go to pick up our New York Pass. We knew it was somewhere in the region of Times Square but didn't really know how to get there. It turned out we had to head vaguely West. So we did, crossing 1st, 2nd and 3rd Avenue and being momentarily confused by the lack of a 4th Avenue and instead having a Lexington, Madison and Park Avenue before we reached the famous 5th Avenue.

Upon reaching 5th, we had a stroll down it to look at the man shops, including, of course, the striking exterior of the Apple Store. I resisted the temptation to go in but took some photos of the outside of the building because, after all, it's interesting to look at. But enough of that. We continued along 5th until we came to the corner of 45th Street, down which we turned because we'd noticed earlier on our guide map that we could pick up our Passes from Planet Hollywood which just happened to be on 45th Street and Broadway.

Down 45th Street I came across a sight which made us both chuckle a little – the Big Apple Hostel. Now, the location of this place is amazing – about 2 minutes' walk away from Broadway – but from the outside it looks like the least inviting place in the history of ever. The fact that it stands right next to a distinctly pleasant-looking coffee house makes it seem all the more out-of-place, particularly given its proximity to the glitz of Broadway and Times Square.

Finally we reached Planet Hollywood and picked up our Passes. We stopped at the bar to have a milkshake – by this time, it was lunchtime, but given the enormous size of our breakfasts we weren't feeling hungry in the slightest, so we settled for a simple drink and an ogle at the cheesiness that is the interior of that place.

Upon leaving PH, we strolled down Broadway. The sun had come out now after a dull start to the day with a few minutes of rain, so I took the opportunity to take a lot of photos. I'm finally starting to work out what the different settings on my still-quite-new Nikon D40 DSLR do, as will hopefully be evidenced by the photos I've taken. The photos certainly look nice on the camera's built-in LCD – I guess it remains to be seen if they still look good on a monitor!

Jane led me down Broadway to an unknown destination – to me, at least. Said destination became immediately apparent once we reached East 34th Street and we saw the Empire State Building rising majestically into the skies. We decided that now would be a good time to ascend the gigantic building and also to take the New York Skyride simulator tour. Yes, we are doing gratuitously touristy things, and I'm sure those of you who live in or know NYC will be groaning at what we've done so far, but what the hell. The last time I came to New York I was four years old and can remember precisely jack shit about it, while Jane had been more recently but had ascended the tower on a very cold day when visibility wasn't great.

The view from the top of the ESB was predictably fantastic (and yes, there were yet more photos taken) but the other thing which struck me about the building was the sheer number of queues you had to join in order to get to the top. There's a queue to get through security. There's a queue to get your tickets. There's a queue to get in the elevator to the 80th floor. There's a queue on the 80th floor to get in the elevator to the 86th floor, where the observation deck is. Once you've finished viewing the, err, view, there's a queue to get down to the 80th floor, then a queue to get to the elevator to the 2nd floor… you get the idea. The whole experience, which was, let's face it, getting in an elevator and going to the top of a really tall building, took over 3 hours altogether.

This sounds somewhat cynical. I don't want to give the impression that ascending the ESB is a worthless experience – far from it, as the view at the top is spectacular. However, one shouldn't go into it with the foolish assumption that I had, which was that it would be relatively straightforward to get in and get to the top!

Following our visit to the ESB, we decided we were hungry and decided to return to Planet Hollywood for dinner, as our two New York Passes gave us $20 off our meal there. While Planet Hollywood may not be the classiest cuisine in town, it was certainly very tasty and gave us the energy we needed to get back to the hotel.

It was a long walk around, but we covered a lot today, and I developed my "feel" for the area enormously. Before today, my knowledge of New York geography was extremely sketchy, despite playthroughs of Project Gotham and Grand Theft Auto. Incidentally, Grand Theft Auto has the "feel" of New York pretty much perfect (in my outsider's opinion) and I recognised Times Square from both Project Gotham and Forza Motorsport 2. Kudos. No pun intended.

No idea what we're covering tomorrow, but I'll post if I get a moment! In the meantime, for those who are really, really interested, here's a Google Map of today's trip.

The post A Jedi in New York: Day 1 appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.