Peppered Steak

I have never been much of a fan of steak. I guess it goes back to my upbringing. I am not saying that we were poorer than anybody else but when society was starting to put everything on credit my parents instilled in me the virtue of restraint. So expensive things like steak were just not something we had, and I grew up in a world free of people talking about how great it was. By contrast my wife is american. She decided we were to have steak recently and I was like, "really?" I pointed out that they are expensive, bad for the environment and not particularly healthy. She pointed out that they share all of these failings with minced beef to a lesser or greater degree, and I quite happily eat minced beef. This forced me to consider my stance on minced beef. (The other option would be to enthusiastically start spending loads of money on luxury beef and get high-cholesterol as a reward.)

Maybe I should say more about each of my concerns.

1. Expense. Probably the most obvious (and quantifiable). Meat costs a fortune, and nice steaks cost a lot more. I am led to believe that minced beef isn't that much more expensive than a like-for-like substitute of quorn or similar. If you know better then I invite you to comment on the matter.

2. Health issues. A quick browse of the internet tells me this is not such a simple topic. With some reports linking eating red meat to health benefits and other linking it to health problems. I guess you just need some excitable people who don't understand science to stand up and say, "I eat meat every day and I am as fit and healthy as they come." Wikipedia seems to point out that eating red meat is linked to all sorts of cancers and unpleasant sounding diseases. I guess on reflection, if you have a certain sort of lifestyle then you can benefit from eating lots of meat. For example if run 30 miles a week or regularly enter "world's strongest man" competitions. However, if your week's exercise doesn't extend much beyond chasing the 37A down the road then you would benefit from only eating meat two or three times a week.

3. Environmental concerns. This is not a simple topic either. What is clear is that cows live quite a long time, and eat a lot. When you consider how much energy it takes to produce one kilo of beef and compare this to how much energy it takes to produce the same mass of food lower down the food chain then you quickly see the problem.

One cow

Lots of grain

And that is just one factor. Somebody, (nobody knows who) is quickly chopping down huge swathes of Brazilian rainforest to create pastures to raise beef-cattle. (Insert statistic here about number of football pitches per hour.) This is a terrible idea on many levels: I don't think it is an understatement to call the rainforest "irreplaceable" and the land they produce doesn't even do a good job at raising cattle and only lasts a few years. Obviously no right-thinking British retailer would use beef raised on what was formerly lush rainforest. But when I keep complaining about how expensive the luxury local cows are I am not so sure. But either way, we keep eating burgers and steaks like they are something to aspire to. Then we go and force our culture on the rest of the world and put a burger restaurant in every city. (I don't know, maybe they actually want these things.) This massively increases demand for these products. If everybody on the planet ate as much beef as I do then we would need an awful lot more farms.

It seems I have talked myself out of eating meat. Of course I live in a town full of people who don't agree. I can but try.

In completely unrelated news, I am now the proud owner of a new pepper grinder. It's amazing how it makes food taste better.

Food critics have a lot to learn from me. Obviously the correct way to rate an indian restaurant is by how many pickles they have on their pickle tray, and the way to rate an italian restaurant is by the size of the pepper grinder. My new one has at least two inches on its predecessor, which is why my spaghetti is now more awesome.

And how do you know it has pepper in it when you can't see inside. Oooh, they have already thought about that...

Snooker Re-Rewind

It's snooker season again. Yay. Which has prompted me to think again about nicknames in snooker. In the past only the best or most popular players got nicknames.

• The Nugget - Steve Davis
• Alex "Hurricane" Higgins
• The Whirlwind - Jimmy White
• The Rocket - Ronnie O'Sullivan
• Alan "Angles" McManus
• Psycho - Peter Ebdon

My research has just turned up Alain "Scoobie" Robidoux.  That's a nickname. 

But for whatever reason, every player who gets onto TV these days needs a nickname. And they are really scraping the barrel with some of them. There are some apalling examples that I will spare you. Here are a couple of typical nicknames of modern players.

• The Captain - Ali Carter
• The Jester from Leicester - Mark Selby

... which naturally prompted me to give players my own nicknames. Here are my own suggestions.

• Gypo - Anthony Hamilton
• Stephen "Pies" Lee
• Pizza Face - Steven Hendry
• Pinhead - Graeme Dott
• The greatest player never to win the world championship - Jimmy White

Sometimes, they come up with hilarious names for players in this modern era. Here are some of my favourites.

• The Sherriff of Pottingham - Anthony Hamilton
• Marco "Cue-man" Fu
• Wenbo selecta - Liang Wenbo

He Is Risen

What better way to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ than by having your child throw up at the table in Pizza Express. Yay!

In other news I treated myself to a new kettle. It's clean, it's boils water, it's got a fancy light in it and it's got a window so you can see the light and the boiling water. However it doesn't fit under my tap, which is a bit inconvenient.

Rhubarb: Part 3

My rhubarb arrived a few weeks ago. Not sure I have mentioned that yet. I planted it at the first opportunity, and it hasn't died yet. In fact it even has some little green bits on it, which can only be a good thing.

Rhubarb! In my garden!

Today marked the first day of the ice-cream making season. Or maybe last night if you want to get technical. I was inspired by a show about an ice-cream restaurant on the Food Network and kicked the season off with a completely improvised mojito ice-cream. It seems to have gone rather well. I started by making myself a custard base, but with brown sugar instead of white. Then I mashed up a load of mint leaves and let them infuse in the custard overnight. Then this morning I strained the leaves out, whisked in some rum and double cream and whacked it in the ice-cream maker. And can you believe it, it turned it into ice-cream. Amazing.

Then I remembered that mojitos have lime juice in them. Shit. I guess it was only a practice anyway.

Here are some pictures from my garden. Although there are a few weeds, and the ground is far too dry for this time of year, it actually looks sort of okay.

I like trees. In my time as a garden owner I have personally chopped down three, and got the professionals in to extract an equal number of massive conifers. On the other hand, I have planted this one tree. So I guess I have a net result of negative five trees.

Apparently this is what a peony looks like. I planted three, and one is growing. That is almost a  33% success rate.