Went out for lunch today with people from work, we went to The Crown & Punchbowl in Horningsea. I'd heard that it had changed hands and been done up and was now more of a gastro-pub than a straight pub. The décor was really nice and I can confirm that it is really a gastro-pub rather than a pub.
The lunch menu was quite compact, but it is backed up by the fresh fish board and the sausage and mash matrix. None of the sausages were vegetarian or vegan and I think I'm going to make more of an effort to not eat fish again, so that left just the main menu for me to choose from.
As I still eat eggs I plumped for the wilted spinach and poached egg with red pepper coils started, which sounded nice. Main courser was a bit tricky as there were only two vegetarian options on the menu, one which was covered in dairy the other had filo pastry held together with a little butter.
I ended up deciding that a little butter wouldn't kill me so I had the pumpkin curry in filo pastry on some of sort of aubergine stuff (I can't remember what they called it). It was really, really nice and the aubergine stuff was quite nice too as you couldn't tell it was aubergine.
I washed it all down with a pint of Hobson's Choice which was very fruity, although I think it was getting near to the end of its life. It's good to see somewhere selling good real ale with food, it's just a shame they only had one beer. I suppose they are more restaurant than pub, so they need to be commended for having any real ale at all, but it would have been nice to have a choice.
The last few days have been a bit weird from an eating point of view as I think I'm nearly over the initial hate period of durians. For those of you who don't know what a durian is, it's a big expensive fruit that grows in Asia and is eaten by Orang-utans. It stinks to high heaven, tastes like onion ice cream and is band from the Kuala Lumpur underground system.
So why have I been eating it...? In raw foodist circles the durian is highly prized, you can't understand why until you've tried it. On Sunday Karen and myself were round at Karen and Pete's, they run the Fresh Network a raw food support and supply network. We were also joined by Shazzie, of shazzie.com (who lives round the corner) and David Wolfe, raw food author, speaker and general nice bloke.
So we ate some food, chatted, went for a walk and then the durian came out for pudding. Karen's bought durian in the past but I've never really liked it as I get this nasty gag reflex on the first bite due to the taste. So I had a couple of bites from a bit that Karen had and didn't really get on with it too well, so I didn't have any more.
Monday night we ended up round at Shazzie's house for a bit as there were loads of people round whom were all going off to Germany to give talks and play in a raw food rock band - The Healing Waters Band. So more durian was split open and again I tried some, it wasn't as bad this time, although that nasty gag reflex was still there. I was starting to feel torn; half of me really wanted to try more, but the other half wanted to run a mile. I think this meant that I was starting to get over the initial distaste period, which means the full on addiction period is just round the corner.
With all this durian activity going on Karen had ordered one, so on Tuesday night she cracked it open. I was really quite full from dinner and didn't really want to eat anything else, but the half of me that seems to want more durian kicked in and I had a few bites. I wasn't overly impressed, so I just went back to potting up some seedling for the garden.
Last night Karen cracked open the final part of the durian and handed me a whole segment. Now segments of durian and a pale ivory colour and they look sort of look like human organs and I imagine they feel just how a rotten kidney or spleen would feel, so not really that pleasant to look at or hold. I was sort of surprised at myself as even though I was repulsed by the look and smell of the thing I couldn't help but take bite after bite.
I only managed about half of the segment though as I was really full and the creamy taste was starting to get to me a bit. So next time we're in London I'm sure we'll be stopping off to buy some durian on the way home. Evidently there's a god place in the North that you can drive to, which will be quite convenient as you get funny looks when you take them on the tube...
Karen cracked open the durian we bought on Friday, it was really stinking out the cupboard at the top of the stairs. I tried a small piece, it wasn't quite as revolting as I'd feared, but it was pretty awful! It was soft and squishy and looked light some bizarre internal organ gone wrong. It sorted of tasted like mild onion, but not, I can't quite describe it. I wont be rushing out to buy any more, certainly not since you don't get much for £5 a kilo.
I sit here listening to Coldplay muttering about smiles on faces and realise that I can't get any happier after eating some food than I am right now. The endorphin rush from the Thai Green Veg Curry with extra chillies has kicked in and I'm going to float through the rest of the afternoon on a cloud of bliss. There's nothing wrong in my world at this particular moment in time, I'm not looking forward to the comedown back into reality. However, I intent to make the most of this small period of tranquillity for as long as it lasts, the weekend has started.
Our friend and ex-work colleague Shazzie was on the telly last night, totally bizarre seeing someone your know on national TV. The programme was called Diet Another Day and was supposed to deal with the journalist and actress Maria McErlane who went in search of inner cleanliness when she said goodbye to wheat and dairy products, coffee, tea and alcohol for a month.
The first half of the programme was more of a this is what people try when they diet and detox, than full description of what Maria's detox was goiung to involve. This was also the only part of the programme that Shazzie appeared in, normally followed by someone else going "Eh...?", "Not good for you..." "Bonkers!", you get the idea. They introduced her with the on screen caption Extreme Detoxer, which was when I started to get the feeling that they were lining her up as the programme's weirdo.
Apart from Shazzie, they also had a load of other serial dieters (the vast majority of which were overweight women) and a load of magazine editors and reviewers, who all had a chance to mutter something or other. They did all seem particularly scathing about detoxes and diets in general and some of the points they put across, while being true, weren't fully expanded on.
So picture the scene, some woman is muttering something about people who do detoxes as just being attention seekers, and then she mumbles something about cutting out types of food and raw food, etc. etc. They then cut to Shazzie, who is explaining that she now follows a raw food diet, do they give her a chance to say she's been doing it for three years, so it's not exactly a fad or attention seeking? No, of course not, they cut immediately to someone with their face screwed up making a disparaging comment about a raw food diet.
Not a particularly well made bit of TV in my opinion, especially as they started on some of the side effects of detoxing, lethargy, lack of energy, actually getting more toxic, but didn't allow any come back on them. So some woman's sitting there and says something along the lines of "and do you realise that when you detox you actually make your body more toxic!", of course she has a look of feint surprise on her face as she says it. While this might be true, it's only because your body is burning fat cells that have toxins in them, once they cells are gone, your toxicity drops again. Did they mention that...?
It seems to me that the word detox is the new word for diet, they seemed to using it interchangeably at points. For me, if you say you are on a diet then you are trying to loose weight. If you say your on a detox, your trying to cleanse your body, of which weight loss is a side effect, not the goal, if your goal is to loose weight, then go on a diet. It's quite simple really, watch what you eat, do some exercise and you'll loose the weight, it wont happen overnight, but as long as you stick to it, it will happen.
This brings me on to another point that they managed to gloss over to a degree, the reason why people generally all the weight, or more, back on after they stop a detox or a diet. Again it's pretty simple really:
- You've either got no self-discipline or will power and can't stick to the diet or detox that you've set yourself.
- You didn't do it for long enough, as you thought you were going to loose 4 stone in a week.
- You ate the wrong things and too much of them, thinking that they were good for you.
- You didn't do any fat burning exercises.
- When you finished, you went straight back to eating all the foods that made you fat in the first place.
A diet or a detox isn't something that you should do for a month, as that just leads onto serial dieting and the yo-yo'ing of your weight, which isn't good for you. The only true way to loose weight and keep it off is to permanently change what you eat and how you exercise. That doesn't mean you can't have the occasional poke of chips, or fry up, it just means that you can't eat chips every night or have a full English for breakfast every day.
Since doing a detox at the start of last year, I've changed what I eat, although I still don't do any meaningful exercise. At the end of 2001 I weighed in at 14 and a quarter stone, I'd been cultivating a rather fetching beer belly. Immediately after the detox I weight in at just under 12 stone, which was always going to go up, as I hadn't had any solid food for a few days. Now, just a year since we started that detox, I weighed in at 12 and three quarter stone this morning, I've put on half a stone through out December.
I don't go to a gym, go running, do aerobics or any of that stuff, and I've still managed to keep my weight down. If I was still eating what I had been before the detox, I'm sure I'd be pushing 14 and a half stone by now. I eat the occasion poke of chips, the odd curry, Green & Black's dark chocolate and far too much beer, but generally I eat good healthy food. It's not rocket science to loose weight, or successfully complete a detox, but it does take will power and determination and to truly succeed a permanent change in diet is required.
Programmes like the one on channel 4 last night, don't really do any favours by portraying perfectly healthy people as nutters who're really just attention seekers. They could have made quite an informative programme about detoxing and what not, but choose instead to go down the easy route and debunk it all as just another fad. I shouldn't be surprised really, but it would make a refreshing change if just for once, one of these programmes concentrated on someone who's changed their life after a detox, rather than using some tired old 40 a day chocoholic, who's got no intention of ever changing.
Karen and I went out in Edinburgh this evening with my Sister and Brother and did one of the Capital’s longstanding walking tours. The Witchery Tour has been running as long as I can remember, but I’ve just never got round to doing it. It was Karen’s idea, as she’d seen an advert for it in the in-flight magazine during the trip up from Stanstead. So we booked ourselves on and also booked a vegetarian restaurant for after, but more about that later.
The Witchery Tour takes you through a load of Edinburgh’s old closes, which are long narrow and steep little passageways that run from the Royal Mile down either side to the roads at the bottom of Castle Hill. While you’re wandering after your guide, who just happens to be a ghost, you are regaled with tales of old murders and mad old women. Your are also surprised along the way at various stages, but if I told you where and how, it would spoilt your fun if you ever get round to doing it.
It’s definitely worth doing and takes between an hour and an hour and a half to complete. When you’re finished, especially in winter, you’re in dire need of a pint and a hot meal, so we hotfooted it round to Bann’s vegetarian restaurant on Hunter’s Square. Wow, is all I can say, why can’t we have veggie restaurants like that in Cambridge? You should have seen the menu; I could eat practically all of it! It got even better though, as they had some really cushty beer in bottles, so I didn’t even have to drink shite lager.
The food was so good that I had to go up to the chef at the end and thank her profusely for producing such excellent food. Apart from Le Manoir aux Quat' Saisons, I’ve never been to a restaurant where you can get vegetarian food of the highest calibre. It’s also made me even more set in my ways about good beer in restaurants as well, it’s not that hard and it improves the dinning experience for those who’d rather not drink wine.
If you’re ever in Edinburgh and you’re looking for a good place to eat, then you could do a lot worse than going to Bann’s. I know that next time I’m up, I’ll be doing everything in my power to get back there and see what’s on the menu.
Our friend and ex-colleague Shazzie is staying the night, while she visits loads of people during her latest stay in the country. Since she’s a rampant raw foodie person, she was out in the garden picking loads of herbs to go into the salad for tea. Between the pair of them, Karen and Shaz managed to produce quite a nice tasty salad that had – avocado, red onion, tomato, garlic, water cress, chives, parsley, marjoram and dandelion amongst others. I was well impressed, as it tasted pretty good and is definitely the best salad we’ve had for a while.
