POST 3, PART I: THE VEGETARIAN OPTION

So I’d been seeing this vegetarian... I know, I know. Hitler was a vegetarian, right? This doesn’t bode well. But I’m a sucker for a pair of big, brown eyes. And he was an architect, which is one of my top five favourite professions for a potential husband. So bear with me.

Adolf (am I really going to nickname him Adolf? Yeah, I think I am...), Adolf was coming round mine for dinner for the first time. What to cook? Fish, obviously. But – gasp – upon checking, I discovered that he was a bona fide vegetarian and didn’t eat fish or even bacon sandwiches, which is just silly. It was then that I knew Adolf and me could never be, but seeing as I’d just been waxed to within an inch of my life I figured why waste it?

Fortunately, I have a few good veggie recipes up my sleeve. My mum was a strict vegetarian and sometime vegan right up until she got pregnant with me. She was in a restaurant with my dad when she had a sudden, overwhelming urge to stab her fork into the rare, bloodied steak he’d ordered and wolf it down that my very existence was confirmed. Says it all, doesn’t it?!

Crazy fool that she is, she tries to return to her non meat-eating ways every now and then, so I placate her with this gorgeous mushroom and Madeira risotto recipe I’m going to share with you as well as a few other favourites... Then bore her silly with chickpeas and lentils until she caves in and has a burger come the first barbeque of the summer, mwahaha!

Sorry, but I don’t have a lot of time for all this vegetarian rubbish, myself. Of course I care about animal welfare, so I’ve tried to cut out meat before but, for me, that just isn’t sustainable and I’m an all or nothing type of girl. It’s the special occasions that get me – nut roast come Christmas morning? No, thank you. A feast just isn’t a feast unless something has died. So I do my best to buy responsibly and only eat meat once or twice a week.

But what bugs me about many veggies is their pseudo-ethical philosophies for not eating meat... Skinny girls who are just on a perpetually tedious diet. Or take my mum, who subscribes to the 'it's mean to eat animals' philosophy, presumably working toward some crazy utopia where we all keep chickens and sheep just for the pleasure of their company. I ask you, have you ever met a chicken? They’re pretty dull and kinda dumb, so what the hell else are we going to do with them. “But think of the poor little lamb-ikins”, she implores me. Why, mother? Why? They’re full-grown sheep when they go to slaughter, not cute little balls of wool bouncing round a field.

I do get the pig thing though, what with them being all friendly and intelligent like dogs. Wagging their tails... And even though I did threaten to eat my ex-dog Jack (RIP) a few times when he was misbehaving, I probably never would have. So I figure so long as I don’t go off befriending swine willy-nilly, I should be able to enjoy my bacon sarnies in peace.

Anyway, I digress. Not sure why Adolf was a vegetarian – he did mumble something about it being greener once... My boyfriend – saving the world one cow fart at a time! Brilliant. I suspect it was actually because he was a fusspot as he claimed he didn’t like fish because it “tasted fishy” this one time, the massive baby. Clearly he had to go. After I'd got some.

Next post: recipe and conclusion...

Best picture yet from Bex! Thank you!

POST 2, PART II: HOW DO YOU LIKE YOUR EGGS IN THE MORNING?

Don tried to make me this sandwich one day... Now, I confess to eating my fair share of cheap, convenience crap – I’ll happily hoover up the cruddiest of cakes, for instance – but I was (and still am, just) in my late 20s and so had the means to make and consume decent sandwiches. I don’t eat value white bread. I don’t eat cheap processed ham made from 17.7 percent meat. I don’t eat industrial marg. Don did. So I didn’t eat his sandwich. He was most displeased.

So when it was my turn to make Don a bacon sarnie, I wanted to see how he’d react to brown bread. I took my time to make sure the bacon was beautifully crisp. I used butter instead of spread because good, English butter is what real cooking is all about. It was a brilliant bacon sarnie, served to him in bed with a glass of orange juice after a particularly fine blowjob courtesy of my good self. And whaddya know, he whinged about the brown bread. The big baby!

The results of this test made me realise three things. 1) He would turn me into a mother-figure as I tried, in vain, to fool him into eating Mighty White or Hovis Best of Both. How about a yoghurt with bits? Yikes, I was dating a 12-year-old boy! 2) He was wholly unsuitable husband material because he would make our children fat by feeding them nothing by crappy white bread, before dying a horrible death of colon cancer himself. 3) He was a selfish fucker because he almost never returned the favour when it came to oral sex.

Yep, the writing was on the wall for that relationship. Shortly after the prawn debacle, I sat Don down and informed him that it wasn’t him, it was me, that I was super busy for the foreseeable future and all sorts of blah, blah, blah. Anything but confess I was breaking up because, no matter how much I wish life were more like the movies, I didn’t want my love life to mirror 80s Tom Hanks romcom ‘Big’. So it was so long, Don!

Moving swiftly on, here’s that recipe I promised you – oaty banana and date smoothie.

INGREDIENTS

30g porridge oats
1/2 pint milk
1 banana
3 Medjool dates
1 to 2 tsp honey

METHOD

1) Soak the oats in the milk overnight – this ensures the smoothie is super creamy, even if you’re using skimmed milk as I do. That said, you could probably get away with just an hour or two of soaking if you forget.

2) Plop everything in a food processor and blitz. This is where using good-quality Medjool dates pays off as cheaper, older ones tend to have that white husky bit inside that is a bastard to blend and leaves you with big lumps.

3) Divide between two glasses and serve. Maybe add a drizzle of honey for presentation. Simples.

Next post: Something to keep those crazy vegetarians happy...

Thanks again to the terrific Bex Barrow for the illustration!

POST 2, PART I: HOW DO YOU LIKE YOUR EGGS IN THE MORNING?

Actually, I’m way too much of a coward to cook eggs for someone I’m attempting to impress. Boiled or fried, I have a knack for cocking up the apparently foolproof tasking of cooking an egg. Scrambled is always over-cooked. Soft-boiled is hardboiled. Fried ditto. Omelettes – see scrambled.

Poached is by far the worst. I’ve tried all the tricks – shallow pan versus deep saucepan of water, a dash of vinegar and/or swirling the liquid around before dropping the egg in. Whatever, I wind up with the white parting company with the yolk, leaving me fishing for a lonely yellow ball amidst the froth of white that I just know I’m gonna burst before I get it on my toast.

What is the secret to successfully poaching an egg?! Answers on a postcard please...

Still, the song seemed kind of apt... But my staple boyfriend breakfast is, in fact, the bacon sandwich. Now, while I believe a bona fide bacon sarnie should be made with perfectly fresh white bread – with that pleasingly crisp crust and preferably still slightly warm from the baker’s oven – if you’re buying the constituent parts the day before (as this is the morning after, remember) you are better off, in my humble opinion, investing in a nice, sliced brown bread. Something malted and seeded. Not just boring wholemeal.

A risky move, you might think – but hear me out...

The unusual choice of brown bread, you see, allows you to conduct a crucial boyfriend test – a little something I like to call The Bacon Sandwich Test. I developed this a few years ago when I was dating someone I can only loosely describe as a ‘man’ a couple of years younger than myself – well, four to be precise. ‘Getting some cash back’ as a mate of mine calls it. Names have been changed to protect the innocent, so I’ll refer to him as ‘Don’. (But as he’s not that innocent, I will tell you that ‘Don’ is only one vowel away from this real name. And since no one is called ‘Den’, ‘Din’ or ‘Dun’, you will doubtless deduce that his name is ‘Dan’. Well done, Sherlock.)

Now, I knew full-well Don, 24, was immature – that was a given. Boys lag a few years behind us girls, so I figured he’d be around the 19- or 20-mark in female years. I had my reservations, but I think I’d recently read a magazine article in the hairdressers – let’s blame Cosmo – about how refreshing and baggage-free younger men are. And I must admit I liked the idea of training someone up to suit my specific requirements. So when he asked me out after what I’d chalked up as yet another ill-advised one-night-stand, I decided to give him a go.

However, I soon started to suspect Don was especially childish. The fact that he didn’t have a bed when we first met was a dead giveaway, in hindsight. Just a broken futon, a duvet with no cover and an old sleeping bag. I really don’t know what I was thinking. Standards, Amy! Standards! There were also the World of Warcraft sessions that lasted late into the night (though not while I was there, I hasten to add). His grotty bathroom that never seemed to be stocked with items such as toilet roll, soap or towels. Oh, and the shower didn’t work either. Not that this bothered him, because personal hygiene is overrated. He was in a band, too. Yawn.

And then there was the food thing. I want to say he ate like a baby, but that’s not quite true. He liked to please me by taking me to fancy-ish restaurants and trying new things, but I suppose, to my mind, he put food together in a totally random and unrefined way. But what bugged me about this was the ballsy way he’d pass off his God-awful creations and combos as delicious and superior, subjecting me during the course of our five-month relationship to some of the worst meals I’ve ever ingested. In short, he believed he was a better cook and foodie than me, the cocky little sod.

This was war.

Cooking is my thing, see. It’s what I quite literally bring to the table. And, in this case, I’d clearly demonstrated to Don, time after time, that I’m a kick-ass cook while he, on the other hand, was not. But rather than roll over and accept defeat, dear obstinate Don kept on cooking for me. I can chart our relationship’s demise through three truly hideous meals he made for me, all of which I’ll share with you some day. But, for now, here’s by far the best/worst...

I turned up to Don’s one week night after work, tired and hungry. I’d been bugging him about what he planned to cook as the last time he’d had the genius idea of making lasagne, from scratch, at 7pm on a Wednesday... Which we didn’t eat until gone 11pm, and even then the pasta was still crunchy. But he was insistent it was a surprise. His treat.

“You can help me get it ready,” he told me on arrival. ‘Geez, thanks’, I thought, wondering why we couldn’t just get a takeaway if that was the case. “I’m making chilli prawns with mango and red onion salsa,” he boasted as I rolled up my sleeves.

Red onion..? For two people with a passing interest in kissing later on..? R-i-g-h-t... Another fine choice, Don. He gathered his ingredients – a packet of pre-cooked prawns and, um, that was about it. “I couldn’t get a mango,” he muttered. “Or a red onion,” he added, passing me an ordinary onion. An ordinary onion? There. Are. No. Words. Any rational person would have abandoned this recipe when they realised the shop was all out of mangos. But not our Don, no. Here was a man happy to chow down on raw – raw!­ – onion rather than admit he was a total halfwit when it came to cooking.

“So you’re planning on serving us pre-cooked prawns with some raw, white onion?” “Yeah.” “Raw onion?” “Yeah. It’s the same. They’re just different colours. They’re the same thing.” “No, they’re really not. You’re seriously telling me you’re going to eat raw onion? Really..? Where’s the chilli?” He presented me with some chilli powder. I scowled. “Maybe we could fry the onion?” he offered.

At which point I stormed to Tesco for a pizza. And that, boys and girls, was the last time Don was allowed to cook for me.

As I have spectacularly failed to get to the bleedin’ point, I will have to tell you how Don fared in the bacon sandwich test in my next post. And I also promise to put up a proper breakfast recipe for my favourite smoothie as my random thoughts on bacon sandwiches really don’t count. Sorry!

Next post: recipe and conclusion...