#oneaday Day 380: My Flawless Every Time (Unless You Burn It) Chilli con Carne Recipe

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

Mix all the spices together in a little bowl and set them to one side.
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.
When most of the red of the beef has turned brown add the chillies and stir well.
After 1-2 minutes, add the chipotle paste and stir well again.
After 1-2 minutes, add the kidney beans and sauce and stir well yet again.
After another 1-2 minutes, add the chopped tomatoes and stir well.
Once everything is mixed together nicely, lower the heat a bit and simmer for about 20 minutes.
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.
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.

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#oneaday Day 317: Kitchen essentials

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.

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#oneaday Day 262: Just a little bit worse

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.

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#oneaday Day 78: The Colour of Flavour

I think it's kind of interesting how specific colours have very much come to be associated with specific flavours — and that those colour assignments are almost (albeit not entirely) universal, at least when it comes to packaging.

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:

A diagram of cross-cultural colour-flavour associations, demonstrating a dark red drink and a sky blue drink.

Beneath the images are Taiwanese and British flags indicating the perceived flavours of those colours in the different territories.

In Taiwan, the red drink is assumed to be cranberry. In the UK, cherry or strawberry.

In Taiwan, the blue drink is assumed to be mint; in the UK, raspberry.

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.

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#oneaday Day 18: Attempting to Reset

I put half a pound on this week. This is not, in the grand scheme of things, a huge amount of weight, but I am a little disappointed and not at all surprised. I have not been particularly rigorous about taking care to be sensible with what I eat, and that somewhat laissez-faire attitude is being reflected in a lack of positive results.

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.

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#oneaday Day 6: Best Thing Since

My wife Andie bought a breadmaker a little while back. We didn't need one — no-one needs a breadmaker — but I have to say, the bread that comes out of it is really nice. And it's got me thinking that as I've grown older, I've grown more and more fond of simple pleasures.

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.

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2457: Time Away

Andie and I have spent a couple of days in Bournemouth, not for any particular reason, just to "get away" from it all. I won't speak for Andie, but certainly in my case, it was much needed.

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.

2440: Baffled by Food

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.

2210: Live to Eat

"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.

1995: Diet-Friendly Snacky Things

Since starting Slimming World, I've had to make a number of adjustments to my lifestyle to ensure that I continue to lose weight. And it's been a lot easier to do than I thought it would be; while there are days when I still miss cake or really, really want a whole bag of Wine Gums, for the most part I'm pretty much okay. And the reason for this is that I've found a number of acceptable "substitutes" for those times when I just want to eat something as a snack — not a full meal, but just something to munch on for whatever reason.

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.