So how, with such competition, can they all be so crap? Lets take a look at the vans that visit my particular building…

First up is a company I’ll cleverly rename “Souths”.

Souths are a local bakery who make average food for an average price. To compliment this, they have an average van driven by an average guy. They used to have a near monopoly on this park, and their driver used to spend every day driving around in a long wheelbase van stuffed with average sandwiches.

The thing is, I don’t mean ‘average sandwiches’ as a particularly negative term. The problem is that they’re the sort of sandwiches you’d make for yourself if you could be arsed to get out of bed in the morning. These are the sort of sandwiches that are actually a tax on your snooze button. The most exciting thing on the menu is a concoction called “corination chicken” (sic) that manages to tick all the same boxes as the curry that schools used to serve up – it’s almost a disappointment that there’s no overcooked swede in there.

The bacon sandwiches are a particular joy – never before have I seen bacon that has gone through the cooking process without the slightest hint of browning. I’ve seen black and white photos of albino goths with more colour than this stuff. The only sign of cooking is the little puddle of congealed fat that nestles in the porcine bowl that forms when the rind shrinks.

My personal favourites are the “corned beff and tom” (sic) baguettes (which manage to prove that bread + tomato = soggy + seeds) and the superb “roast beff and hors rashdish” (sic) which proves that their horse radish is about as potent as their spellchecker. They’ve even missed the apostrophe in their company name…

As the more professional companies moved in, this old guard stood firm. And lost the vast majority of it’s business. Who knew that soggy sandwiches which reminded you how lazy you are, wouldn’t sell…?

Next up, we have one we’ll call “Dudds”. Again, no apostrophe, but that’s kind of par for the course. Dudds is like Souths slightly more fashion conscious sibling – you know that they’ve got the same style and roots (and routes – badum-tish) but the makeup and a nicer frock make them really quite a bit more appealing. It’s the same “I could have made this myself” menu, but it’s made using bread with texture and without the congealing lard. It’s the safe option – the one where the taste sensation with neither delight or depress you. Oh, and like Souths, the menu will be the same tomorrow as it was today, last week, last year and quite possibly last decade. While Souths make the sandwiches that you know you could of made at home, Dudds make the kind of sandwich you think you’re making while you’re making them at home. Dudds are the uninspired dream to Souths uninspired reality.

Thirdly we have a van I was going to call “Stallions” but which would probably be better called “knackers yard”. Stallions (we’ll stick with this name because it has the obligatory apostrophe abuse) actually sell good food. Which makes it much more disappointing that it manages to be as crap as the other vans. Here we have a lovely shiny van selling lovely food, which manages to turn up with virtually no stock, after all the other vans have been and gone, and which takes the unexpectedly shitty step of putting no prices on anything – not the sandwiches, or the paninis, or the wraps, or the crisps, or the pastries or the drinks, or the chocolate. You select your food, talk to the slightly unnerving salesman, and wait for him to pick a number and double it.

Finally, we have the van I’ll call “Albert’s”. If there was any justice in the world, they’d win the sandwich wars solely because they know what an apostrophe is for, but the world is not that simple.

When Albert’s first arrived, it was a joyous thing. Every week the van would have new culinary delights on it. Sure, you’d still have BLTs and cheese and onion, but there would always be an equal number of oddities, like falafel and mango chutney, spicy cheese and kidney beans, bacon and blue cheese, or onion bajii and riata. Some of them were great and some of them were decidedly odd, but there was always variation, and you always knew that something particularly odd would be gone next week, to return 4-6 weeks later with that sandwich you couldn’t live without.

Sadly, like everything, it changed.

Every day they come by with the same selection. Every day they have an unsurprisingly large proportion of blue cheese, mayo and walnut wraps left in the rack. Every day, they’ve run out of Flaming Hot Monster Munch, so you have to resort to pickled onion if you want to put crisps on your fingers and leave greasy footprints across your desktop…

And that sums them all up – all of the vans have some guy in a room who decides that today, like every day, he’ll make 20 of each of the sandwiches. None of them have a guy who waits in that same room and wonders why there’s never any of these sandwiches coming back, but there’s still 15 of those ones sat in the tray looking lonely. None of them has a guy who thinks “we’ve sold out of Flaming Hot crisps again – maybe I should put some more on the van tomorrow?”

The perfect example of this was with Albert’s earlier this year. I love their spicy cheese and kidney bean sandwiches. They were one of those fillings that had no god-damned right to work, but somehow did. So they stopped putting them on the van.

One day I put in a special request for them. After much umm-ing and ahhh-ing, they decided that there wasn’t any demand for them, but that they’d do them next week as a one-off.

Monday came and there were no cheese and bean sandwiches. There had been wraps, but they’d already been sold before he got to us. The same happened on Tuesday. And on Wednesday. Thursday, I was told, would be different – they were making them as sandwiches – but when Thursday’s van came, it did so with no cheese and bean sandwiches, because they’d already been sold.

Friday was my last chance…

When Friday’s van came, there were no cheese and bean sandwiches. They’d made a big batch of the mix up at the start of the week, and it had all gone, so they’d made no cheese and bean sandwiches that day. “Will they be making any next week?” I asked. The reply was somewhat predictable. “Sorry, no. There isn’t enough demand for them…”

In the 15 years I’ve worked in these places, there’s only ever been one sandwich van which never failed to bring delight… and it didn’t even sell sandwiches. Back in the days when I worked for the pr0n palace, we were visited by a lady universally known as “Hot Jan”. She drove a rusted Bedford Rascal van with a dangerous looking gas stove in the boot. All she sold were slightly greasy pastry products and huge soft, floury jacket potatoes which she smothered in any of the dozen different tasty toppings that were always on there – including a very familiar yellow coronation chicken.

It even had swede…

In the last half dozen times I’ve been there we’ve had a 45 minute wait for food despite the place only being half full; I’ve had my main course turn up before the starter; we’ve had sides missed out entirely, and; we’ve had only half the deserts turn up. Despite this, we go back because the food is good, the portions are generous and the prices are reasonable. And the pub itself is a nice place.

Tonight we did a dangerously grown up thing and booked in advance. This doesn’t happen in my world.

The reason was that they’re doing a limited run of ‘season’ food. Tonight was Game Season, with 4 small plates of food that was truly fantastic.

Wild Boar burger – when this arrived I think we both wondered what we’d walked into. The plate was mostly empty, with four chips forming a trestle, a burger the diameter of a HobNob, a fried egg and a slice of toasted bread. It looked like a comedy pretentious meal. Oh god, it was good though. The chips were right, the egg was runny yolked, and the burger was fantastically rich wild boar and caramelised onion cooked surprisingly light and moist.

Guinea Fowl and Chorizo – you know how all posh food has to be served in a ‘tower’? This was a tower. Sweet potato mash (possibly cold and then refried, like bubble & squeak), a slice of cooked chorizo sausage, guinea fowl breast, soul cream and a spot of chilli jam. Another fantastic combination of flavours.

Pheasant Chasseur – I have a love/hate relationship with pheasant. Even in the rose tinted days of my childhood, when pheasant was shot in the back garden and left to hang behind our kitchen door, pheasant was hit and miss. If you’ll pardon the phrase. This was the beautifully rich flavour I remember from good pheasant in a nice light sauce with little silverskin onions.

Venison – another meat that can be fantastic and can be rubbish. This venison was dark and gamey enough that I half convinced myself that there was a little liver in the mix. Marinaded and fried, then served with a sweet and tart cherry sauce and potato gratin.

Finish the meal off with a small rhubarb crumble and a macchiato with amaretto and I think it’s one of the best meals I’ve had this year. Not bad for twenty quid a head.

A sunny Sunday in Wellington…

It’s probably an apocryphal tale, but there is a famous story about the Brits and the Merkins playing war games in the North Atlantic against a computer controlled enemy. The theory was simple enough – one team against the other and if your ship was ‘destroyed’ you shut he hell up and played dead. The computers aim was to get supplies from one side of the battleground to the other, while the humans had to stop them.

It all went well enough, and everyone had lots of fun and drank lashings of ginger beer with their lunch. Until they tried to work out what the computer had been up to. Statistically it was getting through more frequently than it should have done. And it was always losing the same boats early on in the battles.

It took time, but they worked out what the computer had been up to.

It had ‘realised’ that its convoy was as strong as its weakest member. So it was intentionally sacrificing the same weak ships over and over again so that the rest of the convoy could hammer on ahead unhindered.

You may be wondering why I’m telling you this. You’d not be alone.

I started writing that thinking about how it was an apt metaphor for our visit to Wellington. Part way through I realised that was complete balls, but I like the story too much to delete it again.

What actually happened was a repeat of our all too frequent membership paralysis, where our decision making abilities go down as the number of people goes up.

With an extra member in our group, we were crippled. Should we get up at 8, 8.30 or 9? We discussed this (drunk) and remembered three different answers. Should we eat breakfast here, there or elsewhere? We dithered so long we walked past all of our options. Should we do this, that or something else. “Yes”. Oh dear…

After getting Steven up half an hour earlier than he wanted, we walked through the city, talking rubbish and wondering where all the people were. As the shops opened we settled down in a café and ate our breakfasts. The fact that it was fuelled by the 4th cup of coffee so far this year did not help the decision making process. It was a double espresso…

Eventually, it was decided that we would go to the Botanic Gardens and walk around in the sun for a few hours before it got too hot for our poor English skin. Which meant a cable car ride up the cliff face from a small shopping centre, past the university, to the gardens themselves.

Now, I love my University – Leicester, if you care – but Wellington wins hands down. The view from just above the campus is an incredible one across the city and the bay. It’s windy as hell when the daily breeze kicks in, but until then it’s peaceful and beautiful.

Wellington from the Botanic Gardens, by GB

The Botanic Gardens

As you may have guessed, the gardens are at the top of a hill. And the bottom of a hill. This made it a somewhat interesting experience for a group of three hampered by having three knees, two spines and one brain no idea where they were going. It’s not that we didn’t know where we were in the park – we had a map – it’s just that we knew we were in three different places at the same time…

So, this park is flat, right? (by GB)

He's smaller. And further away. And lower down. Honest. (by GB)

The gardens wander down the hill in long sweeps, past the most vertical lawns I’ve seen and specimen plants, before delving into an ancient native wood complete with ancient gravel foot paths and plant markers so old that they’re written in Latin…

I have no idea...

I have no idea what the tree above is now, but they’re everywhere. They appear to grow by throwing out leaves from the top. Each time the leaves drop, the root of the leaf turns into the next put of the trunk and new leaves appear just above it. It’s how I’ve always imagined a pineapple tree looks.

And then, just as abruptly, you leave the native forest when you stumble upon Ye Olde Ducke Ponde. It’s fed from the stream that we followed through the forest and which I failed miserably to take photos of because I forgot my cheap polariser has hefty f-stop issues…

This could work in the back garden...

Note to self - when shooting water, remember your tripod...

The rest of the gardens arr mostly small glades laid to beds of solid colour. It’s something that has always bored me silly, but the colours here are just incredible. Other than a little white balance correction, these are unmolested photos…

I think it’s something in my DNA, but I’ve always loved fuchsias. My dad and grandmother both loved them. My brother still does. I’ve just planted some next to my front door…

Actually, for a pointless punny detour, I always liked the idea of starting up a band with a metal flower as our symbol, just so that we could be called ‘Fuchsia-Ristic’. Sadly my inability to play any instrument at all got in the way long before the pun stopped amusing me.

We walked back through the gardens to the city centre, through the old colony cemetery, and back down past the parliament buildings.

Lunchtime had come and gone, so we walked back to the hotel, discussing where we should go for some lunch and where we could find some cool and shade for the afternoon. How this turned into us driving out to the Zealandia wildlife preserve is somewhat beyond me.

Zealandia

Before I tell you about Zealandia, however, I want to tell you about Zealandia. Yes, I know. So instead I’ll refer to it by its other name – Tasmantis…

Some 80 million years ago the Australian continent broke – with a ‘micro’ continent separating from the main slab of rock. We’re talking about a slab of rock bigger than Greenland or India here, so ‘Micro’ is something of a relative term, but split it did. As you may have noticed, there’s nothing India’s size hovering off the coast of Australia. Because it sank.

New Zealand itself makes up a relatively small chunk of this mass (there’s a couple of good maps at the GNS site) perched on the highlands of the continent. But it’s all pretty unstable here – the Maori legends tell of the northern island being a canoe from which a god was fishing and pulled the south island up with his line. It’s disconcertingly accurate too, as the south island is significantly younger than the north island.

The whole of New Zealand is a geologists dream, and it’s still doing it’s thing – just 150 years ago Wellington was hit by an earthquake that jolted the western side of the city 1.5 meters up in the air, creating a ridge that cuts through the old cemetery and is now home to the main motorway into town.

Which rather neatly links me back to the Zealandia that we visited.

Back in 1873 some bright guys decided that Wellington needed a fresh water supply, so they dammed a local river with an earth bank dam (and later a concrete gravity dam) to store water coming down off the mountains. Sadly these bright guys didn’t have much of a memory, because they built their damn right on top of the fault that had shifted 1.5 meters less than twenty years before hand.

Anyway, the dams were finally decommissioned in 1998 and the water in the top reservoir was massively lowered. With nothing much else to do with the land, it was turned into a ecological island. You see, until the Maoris turned up with rats and dogs, the islands had been completely free of any mammal lifeforms, instead being home to a vast array of birds, lizards and insects.

In 1999 they completed building a mammal proof barrier and quickly started a program to kill or remove all mammals from inside the boundary. They did a pretty good job too, with only a few house mice making it back through a couple of damaged fence links.

The result is truly incredible – within a few generations the native wildlife has lost its mortal fear of humans and behaves more as it would have when the maoris first arrived.

The lower reservoir and the pump house

Old Pipework

A Tagged Tuatara

While the lower reservoir feels like a man made lake in a valley, the upper reservoir feels very much more man made – partly because of the concrete bulk standing proud of the half drained reservoir and partly because it’s so much higher up than the first reservoir…

Walkway to the upper dam

Its worth mentioning at this point that I hate heights with low barriers. And that, at six foot five, all barriers are lower for me than they are for you…

Oh god...

This was hell for me. Seriously, I’d have rather spent an hour in the dentists chair than an half an hour stood on this thing. I know it couldn’t have been swaying in the breeze, but my senses were telling me otherwise. I’d have held onto the barriers if it hadn’t meant walking closer to the edge.

Apparently these things are strong enough to let to look in through a blonde woman's bedroom window...

The views from this place are incredible – partly because you’re effectively hovering 100ft in the air. (And every muscle in my body tensed and I wrote that…)

View from the upper dam

Panorama from the upper dam

Finally, a misleadingly long range shot back towards the lower dam and the city beyond. Remember at this point that a major fault line runs right through these two dams and down into the city…

Water lotta... no, I can't finish that 'joke'

You might have noticed something about the reservoirs that says something rather significant about our planning skills – there’s a distinct lack of shade or lunch. Which wouldn’t have been a great problem if we hadn’t headed off to Zealandia in an attempt to shelter from the hottest part of the day. Or if we’d eaten lunch. Never mind.

By this point it’s about 5pm and Zealandia is understandably concerned about letting people wander its grounds after they close. We head back through the shadiest paths we could find. We get taunted by Tuis who refuse to pose for the camera and little sparrow sized fellows who actually follow us through the wood, keeping a safe distance but clearly trying to work out what we were doing.

This was an armada of disappearing ducks. But they... disappeared...

The last thing I’ll share with you are the disappearing ducks. There were about two dozen of the Scaup when I first saw them. Two seconds later, they’d all gone, diving to the bottom in search of food. The thing is, they don’t do a dramatic lift and dive like English ducks do – they just vanish as if someone has grabbed their webbed feet and pulled. To add to the confusion, they dive down three metres to the bottom of the reservoir and stay there for up to 30 seconds, grazing the plant life. Now, 30 seconds is an incredibly long time to wait when you are trying to convince yourself the ducks really exist…

Anyway, it’s time to move on and to return Fanny to her subterranean hidey-hole under the Ibis.

Evening…

I promised that I’d not bore you all with the minute details of what we ate. It’s not exciting to read about and it would just show up how little I remember about these things, but Sunday was a good night.

After various attempts to get rid of the grime, suncream and memories of cave wetas from our skin, and headed back out of the hotel. We made it three doors down before the decision-making paralysis kicked in again…

The Featherstone Bar & Grill did a damned good job of filling us with bloody good food. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think we ever had bad food in New Zealand, and even little roadside cafés had great food selections that shied away from our all too predictable panini selections, but this was special.

I can’t speak for the others, but I had a huge hunk of lamb rack (with lamb medallions just in case there wasn’t enough food) cooked to perfection in a fennel seed rub, with garlic mash and asparagus. This was followed by a frankly incredible steamed lemon pudding that the waitress proudly told me was by far their best selling desert. Oh, and it was served with Hokey Pokey ice cream. Throw in a pint of Mac’s Gold, and my wallet was lighter by an entire £15.

How does any Kiwi ever cope in the UK? Ignore the countryside – the food just can’t compare to what they have at home. If nothing else, how does a Kiwi in the UK cope without Hokey Pokey?

The theory behind Hokey Pokey is simple – it’s a vanilla ice cream (made with cream mind you) with little fragments of cinder toffee scattered through it. That’s it. I had it in my life for less than two weeks, and I want it back godamnit!

If I’ve got to go cold turkey, I think I need a sponsor.

What was I talking about? Oh yes… the restaurant also gave me another fantastic opportunity to embarrass the waiting staff by offering them a tip…

View larger map

If, of course, you don’t think it’s impressive, don’t bother. I’ve already said “Woo!” enough times to make up for you unimpressed types.

Right, moving on…

For reasons most (all) would associate with masochism, we decided to go play in the traffic again. Specifically, since every country claims that its roads grind to a halt, we decided to go play in rush hour traffic.

There was a small but significant hole in this theory – neither of us know what time rush hour is in Auckland. Working on the principle that evening commute seemed to be at about 5.30, we scoffed our scrambled egg breakfast and hit the main motorway at 8.15.

Most of you will know what a traffic jam is like… London, LA, Paris, Baldock… they’re all famous for their traffic jams. So too is Auckland. And it’s possible that Auckland traffic gets really horrific, but for us it was the most relaxed city gridlock we’d ever seen, with the main motorway flowing smoothly enough that we were on the harbour bridge before we realised we’d driven through the traffic…

The roads are something I’ve spent a lot of time talking about since we got back – the scenery, the length, the altitude, the terrifying corners – but first I want to talk about the motorway and how fecking sensible people are.

Under normal road conditions (as best I can fathom) Kiwi roads work like British ones: you get on; you travel in the right lane for your speed relative to other vehicles; you try and stay left. And that’s how it works when it’s quiet. When it gets busy, someone changes the wiring inside Kiwi drivers’ heads, and they seamlessly change driving styles. Suddenly the three lane motorway has turned into a marvellous contraption where lane 1 is for people leaving the motorway at the next junction (or joining it); lane 2 is for people who are planning on leaving in the next few junctions, but not this one; and lane 3 for people who are going some distance. I’m not even sure people were aware that they were doing it.

Traffic over the harbour bridge is also rather impressive. The bridge, when it was built, was just four lanes wide – four lanes of tarmac with no central divide. Ten years later, it was already handling many times the anticipated traffic load, so two more lanes were bolted on to either side of the bridge (if you trust Wiki, these Japanese made units are known as the “Nippon clip-ons”). The central four lanes have always had a ‘tidal’ lane system, where more lanes were given over to the heavier flow of traffic. Originally this was done with overhead lighting rigs telling you which lanes were open – nowadays it’s done with concrete barriers that are shuffled back and forth across the traffic by specialist rigs that pick the barriers up, redirect them down an s-shaped channel and dump them back down on the other side of the carriageway.

Does it show I’m a bit of an engineering nerd?

So, first stop on our second day was Army Bay. I’d like to suggest that there was some special reason for us going to Army Bay but, in reality, we were heading up the motorway and discovered the next bit was a toll road where you had to phone in your details within 24 hours to avoid punishment – rather like the congestion charge in London – and we turned off. Much of the holiday was like that actually – drive in a previously agreed direction, then turn off as and when we felt like it. It’s a strangely relaxing way to tour a country. You know that you aren’t going to see all the tourist sights you might have wanted to, but you get to see a lot of random stuff you would have otherwise missed. Like Army Bay.

Now, I have no idea how Army Bay got its name. What I do know is that the Kiwi Army apparently learnt a lot from the British Army, and decided that the incredibly scenic bit of land right next to it would be a perfect place to run around shouting bang and throwing bloody great lumps of metal at each other…

Army Bay rock pool, by GB

Army Bay beach

It’s another of those beaches that seem impossible to my British brain – crystal clear water, thick grained sand, rocks to wander across, trees for shade, and no other buggers around.

The trees fall into two categories – dead and sun bleached or gravity defying…

Dead tree on Army Bay

Knot of exposed tree roots

On the other side on the peninsula (which is, at this point, about quarter of a mile wide) are incredible views across clear water to a scale model of Auckland (1:1 as it happens) with, again, no obvious massive over development of land.

The sun gets hotter very quickly, and we’re suddenly aware that our pasty white legs aren’t covered in sun cream in the way that our arms and faces are. The sun is disarmingly evil and even I, who shuns sun cream whenever possible, am covering myself in the stuff. It’s the second day and already my yearly sun allergy is kicking off, leaving an itchy trail of red pinpricks down my arm.

So we decide to head off and investigate the old road back round the bay – the route that would have been taken before the bridge was built. Except, in a masterpiece of misunderstanding, we end up heading 15 miles to far north west towards Helensville.

This is beautiful country… agricultural land with mountains in sight; the sea just over the horizon; and a pace of life that’s slow to a fen-dweller. It’s my idea of heaven. As if anticipating my thoughts GB contradicts me – “I could never live here”. Why not? “I couldn’t live in Helen’s Ville. Jean’s Ville maybe…” Ah, sibling rivalry… there’s nothing like it.

Our aim, right now, is to find food. It’s gone lunchtime and my stomach is rumbling. The problem is that everywhere is smaller than our SatNav (and the road signs) imply. The town in 10K turns out to be a handful of houses and a closed pub. The beachside village turns out to be couple of holiday homes and a dozen hippies somehow surviving on sand that’s too hot to touch. The sprawling metropolis suddenly vanishes as the quiet suburb turns out to be the entire town. That’s how we drove through Helensville – while wondering if there’s somewhere to park up we run out of town and find ourselves back in open countryside.

Finally we stop. On the roadside. In a layby.

There’s no food here. There’s just another car, a small pile of broken glass, and a sign pointing down a footpath to Fairy Falls. At this point we’d not yet wised up to the wonderfully misleading nature of Kiwi tourist signs, so we decided that a wander down a shady path to a waterfall would be rather pleasant.

We learnt our lesson.

The rainforest we walked through was beautiful, don’t get me wrong, but it was clinging to the side of a hill. The signs said 40 minutes, so we decided to tackle the route. After 30 minutes walking down a slope that no-one from the plains of Cambridgeshire should be made to experience, we found a sign. 20 minutes to the falls. This was not a landscape where maths had any hold. The problem was that my knees were already aching – and so far we’d only walked down the slope.

Your intrepid explorer, by GB

Banishing all hopes of a nice little National Trust tea shop (and yes, I know how old that makes me sound) we turned our back on the falls and headed back towards the car. There are different estimates on how long it took to walk back. The signs claim it took 20 minutes. Some claim it took nearer to 45. Some claim it took a week and a half and a pack of pit ponies. I lean towards the latter. By the time we reached the top we were knackered, in pain, and wondering where our lunch and water had gone.

Onwards to Arataki.

The road we drove is a beautiful road called “Scenic Drive” despite the fact all you can see are trees, tarmac and black rubber snakes from where teenagers go to show off their mad driving skills. I mean “skillz”.

Arataki, however, is incredible…

View from Arataki, by GB

Here we met two large milkshakes, and a man called “Mike from London” – who came from Nottingham. We decided it was probably best not to ask.

Mike gave us a wonderful overview of what he, as a Brit, saw New Zealand to be. And that could, as he put it, be summed up by the word “easy”. We agreed. We’d have agreed even if he wasn’t feeding us free wafers as they came out of his ice cream cone making machine.

Mike was working the stand because someone else (a member of his staff possibly) had called in sick and he’d been lumbered with the job himself. But, if we were around tomorrow, he’d love to show us around. Sadly, we were planning on being on the road, so instead he told us to head off to Peha Piha, where there was a lion in the surf and the surfers all grew (and smoked) a huge amount of dope.

The Piha Lion

With a little imagination (or maybe a lot of that dope) you can see how the Peha Piha Lion got its name.

Sadly, hunger and annoying sunlight got to us, and we headed off towards our food, so I shall leave you with this – why is it that we are so insistent on serving battered cod as our national dish? It’s a boring fish that is being fished to dangerously low levels. It’s expensive too. Why don’t we eat haddock (a far superior fish, to my mind) or something just as dull but more populous, like Hake or Hoki?

Failing that, we could do as the Kiwis, and deep fry anything that comes out of the ocean. Our dinner that night was deep fried red snapper and chips. With the wreckage of the previous night’s salad we were stuffed on under £5 of the best fish and chips I’ve ever had…

I don’t think I’ve ever made two batches that are the same. It’s beans, meat and sauce after all. So… here’s the one that we just spent the last two days eating…

• 1 x 5.5 litre slow cooker
• A huuuge number of beans. Traditionally Haricot beans but the ones we get in the UK are tiny, so…
  • 3 x tins Butter beans (Lima beans?), 260g drained
  • 2 x tins Haricot beans, 290g drained
  • 1 x tins Black beans, 260g drained
• A crapload of meat, preferably fatty. Confit of duck is traditional but expensive, so…
  • 200g paprika spiced sausages (not an air dried Chorizo, but a fresh Chorizo or Merguez type)
  • 700g pork belly rashers
  • 2 big duck breasts (gresingham duck ftw)
• Then some tomato type sauce
  • 2 x 400g tins of tomatoes
  • 4 x tbsp tomato puree
  • 1/2 litre of vegetable stock
  • couple of glasses of wine (red, white, whatever… I tend to use cheap port actually…)
  • couple of teaspoons of paprika (I heart La Chinata smoked paprika)
  • two bundles of bouquet garni
  • a couple of bay leaves

Right…

Brown the sausages. Cut them into 2 inch lengths.

Fry the belly slices fat side down ’til it crisps up a bit, then seal the sides. Cut into 2 inch lengths.

Fry the duck, fat side down ’til it crisps, then seal the sides and cut into 3/4 inch thick slices.

Throw it all into the slow cooker.

Wash all the beans in fresh water. Throw them into the slow cooker.

Take all the sauce items and throw then in too.

Go to bed.

When you wake up, go to the bathroom, get dressed, turn on the slow cooker, go to work.

Come home with a stick of French bread and eat it with hot cassoulet.

15.5oz / 440g can of unsweetened chestnut puree
6oz / 175g unsalted butter
4oz / 115g castor sugar
8oz / 230g plain chocolate (75% works well)
2 tbsp brandy

Melt chocolate over simmering water.

Beat butter in a bowl ’til creamy. Add sugar and beat it ’til light & fluffy. Add chestnut puree and beat it until thoroughly mixed.

Add melted chocolate and brandy. Mix thoroughly.

Get a 2lb loaf tin. Display just enough incompetence that your wife lines the tin with greaseproof and rub with butter.

Pour the whole lot in the tin, put some more paper on top, put some foil over the whole lot and stick it in the fridge for at least 8 hours.

Give the bowl & spatula to wife to clean as apology…

In unrelated news, while searching Flickr for a picture, I discovered this. Why did no-one tell me about this…?

There’s one thing that Starbucks has done that will forever benefit the world – it introduced me to the wonders of Chai Lattes. Okay… maybe that doesn’t benefit the entire world…

So, you’ll need:

• 6 cups water
• 6 good quality black tea bags (but nothing ‘scented’ like Earl Grey)
• 2tsp ground cinnamon
• a dozen cloves
• ‘some’ grated ginger (accurate quantities are for the soft :) )
• 2 bay leaves
• 12 peppercorns
• 10 cardemom pods
• ‘some’ honey (Last time I added a frightening 10 tbps of lime blossom honey, which seemed about right)
• 6tbsp vanilla essence (and don’t look at the price label)

Following the tradition of easy ‘recipes’:

• Put the water in a pan and bring to the boil
• Throw the teabags in
• After 5 minutes or so, add everything but the vanilla
• Simmer (and stir) for half an hour
• Hook everything out and add the vanilla
• Leave to cool

Use to taste, but I’ve been adding 3tbsp to a pint of milk for chilled lattes. If you’re making it hot then you may want slightly more syrup, but you may want to cut down on the honey (because cold food tastes less sweet than hot).

Today was a good day.

The cats levered us out of bed just before lunch, demands for breakfast merging with demands for the lunchtime meal that they never get.

For lunch we went off to the incredible King William pub in Heydon. It’s a pub embedded firmly in the past (even it’s website is lingering in the mid 90s). It’s exactly as it was when I first went there 15 years ago – the gloom in the in entrance hall, the beams threatening to brain me, the horse brasses on every wall, the hanging tables and the huge fireplace. The menu is the same too…

I know how dull it is to listen to someone else’s food choices, but this was beyond all descriptions… Beef sashimi with chilli jam; local sausages with bubble and squeak; and a jaffa cake bread and butter pudding. I’ve possibly never eaten any better.

Bread and butter pudding is traditionally a thick stodgy mess or carbs and fat. This horrifically rich sounding version was actually the lightest bread and butter pudding I’ve ever had, almost having the texture of a light but rich moist cake.

And by god, it’s perfect weather for a pint of Adnam’s Bitter to go with it all.

Then over to Wood Green at Heydon to be tempted by cats looking for a home. I can’t say enough good things about Wood Green – they’re everything that the RSPCA should be, but aren’t. They ignore the politics that the RSPCA has embraced, and instead dedicate their time to looking after animals. They went even higher in my estimation when I discovered that they never put down an animal just because they can’t rehome it. They have one pair there who have lived with them for over seven years. They got our yearly anniversary gift this year…

Then, this evening, we travelled in to Cambridge to watch “Cloudy with a chance of meatballs” – a truly wonderful film – and to eat ice cream for dinner.

Who needs to be a grown up…?

Still, if I can make it work, I’m guessing anyone can…

2/3 cup (115g) butter, chopped
6 ounces (170g) chocolate, chopped (I used a mix of G&B 70% and G&B Butterscotch)
1/4 cup (25g) good quality cocoa powder
3 large eggs
1 cup (200g) sugar (I prefer an unrefined caster or demerara sugar)
2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup (140g) plain flour
1 cup Dulce de Leche (or Cajeta)

Heat the oven to 180c.

Line a 8-inch (20 cm) square pan with non-stick baking parchment with two strips at right angles to cover the bottom and sides of the pan.

Use a bain marie to melt the butter and chocolate.

Remove from heat and use an electric whisk to whisk in the cocoa. Then do the same with the eggs, one by one, then stir in the sugar, vanilla, and the flour. [I've been told that I should have used a hand whisk to make them lighter - I have no idea if this is true, but they tasted good attacked by a 'leccie whisk...]

Pour half the tasty gloop in the pan, then drop dollops of the dulche all over the pan. Use a knife to smooth it across pan, not getting too close to the edges. Then pour the rest of the mixture across the top.

Bake for 35 to 40 min.

The brownies are done when the centre has a slight crust and just starts to feel firm. Without letting the brownies cool, use the parchment to lift the brownies out of the pan and onto a cooling rack.

At some point, the book made it upstairs and hid itself under the bed. Presumably someone, consciously or not, decided to hide it.

Buffy made her opinion known much more clearly.

Placed delicately on top of the cookbook this morning was a freshly slaughtered blackbird…

I got bored at the weekend and made some muesli. 7 1/5kg (16lbs) of the stuff.

Oat flakes, wheat flakes, barley flakes, malted wheat flakes, bran flakes, crimson raisins, apricot, papaya, corn flakes and crunchy nutty things…

900g minced pork
1 large onion
4tsp tabasco sauce (I prefer chipotle tabasco)
75g fresh breadcrumbs
1 beaten egg
salt and pepper

2 tbsp mustard powder
1/2 cup tomato puree
2 tbsp malt vinegar
2 tbsp brown sugar
1 cup pineapple juice
1/2 tsp dried rosemary
2 tsp golden rum
1 cup water

Mix the pork, onion, chilli sauce, egg, breadcrumbs, salt and pepper together and make it into a loaf shape in a baking tin.

Mix the rest of it together in a jug and pour it over the top.

Cook it for 1 1/2 hours at 180c. Baste it with the sauce on a regular basis.

Another simple one…

Take a few cups of frozen cherries and put them in a blender with a shot of Amaretto, a couple of teaspoons of ground almonds, and a little soft brown sugar (depending on how sweet the cherries are).

Blend them til it goes relatively smooth and then stick them back in the freezer for a while. Stir it a bit. Freeze it a bit longer…

Despite my best intentions, it would appear that I’m filling this with stupidly simple recipes. Today, we have a coleslaw recipe that is so simple that I’ve never bothered to write it down. A recipe that I tend to make in large enough quantities that there’s enough for dinner, lunch and then the next dinner. Hohum…

• 1/4 head red cabbage
• 1/4 head white cabbage
• handful of radishes
• 2-3 large shallots
• 1 large carrot
• half cup very low fat mayonnaise
• juice 1/2 lime
• salt and pepper
• Some olive oil

Now, this gets complicated, so try to keep up…

Put all of the vegetables through the shredding bit of your food processor. Or get handy with a big knife. Either way, you want to make sure that everything is sliced up really thinly. Stir it all about. Add the juice, a glug of oil, some salt and pepper, and the mayonnaise. The exact amount will vary depending on your personal tastes and how thinly you’ve cut the veggies. The idea is to leave a layer of mayo across the veggies that’s so thin it’s almost invisible but still sticks them together…

Complex eh?

There’s probably nothing better with some good blue steak and baby new potatoes…

There is a thing called a Cuban sandwich. It’s a delicacy that involves Cuban bread, pig, pickles and seven kinds of wonderful. The problem is that you can’t get it in the UK. We don’t have the bread. The pickles are somehow different and the cheese is just simply not the same.

So what we have left is a sandwich that’s about as Cuban as I am. Thankfully, however, it’s made from things that are available in the UK. Just don’t feed it to a Cuban. They’ll probably cry.

It’s a bit grand to call this a recipe, so we’ll dispense with the ingredients list…

• Get yourself some bread that’s somewhere along the lines of a panini. If you can do it with sourdough then all the better. Slice it in half, lengthways.
• Butter one half. For a good Cuban sandwich add some good thick ham and some thick cut roast pork or a little hog roast meat. Or, if we’re already too Cuban for you, maybe some roast chicken instead of pork.
• Put on some sliced cheese. Jarlsburg seems to work well. As does Port Salut. Good Cuban cheeses…
• Add sliced dill pickle. Or pickled cucumber. Or gerkin. Or whatever the hell you call them in your part of the world.
• Then, on the other half of the bread, you should smear some of that travesty that is American Mustard. You know, that bright yellow crap that is as spicy as yoghurt. Alternatively you could do as I do and use some Branston Lime and Chilli Mayonnaise…
• Put it together and stick it on a panini grill. Or wedge it in a Foreman grill. Or stick it in a fryingpan and hit it with a hammer. Whatever your preferred method it should end up thinner and warm, with the cheese going melty.
• Eat.

Churros have been made and they were good. They were so good that it’s time to put the recipe up here for you and for me. Yay for the internets – I can publish things for you guys and make sure I don’t lose things at the same time…

• 240ml water
• 2 tbs brown sugar
• ¹/₂ tsp. salt
• 75g butter
• 160g white flour
• 2 eggs
• ¹/₂ tsp. vanilla extract
• 150g icing sugar
• 1 tsp. ground cinnamon

Get some oil up to about 190°c in the deep fat frier or frying pan.

Put the water, sugar, salt and butter in a decent sized pan and get it boiling. The butter has to melt.

Remove it from the heat and stir in the flour. Keep mixing it until it’s solid.

Beat the eggs and add the vanilla. Mix them in to the buttery floury mixture.

Once it’s gone back to being solid again, put it in to a biscuit press and squeeze it into the hot fat.

Let them fry until they look like the ones in the picture (turning part way if you need to), hook them out and let them drain a little before you drop them in the mixture of cinnamon and icing sugar that you have.

You can only cook a few at a time, so try not to eat one batch before the next batch is cooked. If you do then you’ll have no idea how many you made and will be unable to tell your adoring web fans how many this lot makes. I’ll just say that GB and I didn’t eat any dinner after stuffing our faces… :)

I tried to make pastry last night.

Okay, that’s a bit grand. I tried to roll out a block of ready made pastry so that I could line a pie dish. And I failed. I ended up with a wedge of pastry, ripped into shreds and half wrapped around the rolling pin.

Five minutes later GB has turned it into a thin sliver of pastry that filled a pie dish.

I poured in some beans to blind bake with, and put it in the oven at the prescribed temperature.

15 minutes later, the top of the pie crust is black and the beans are welded to the bottom of the raw pastry case.

It’s fecking Voodoo, I tells you…

By my estimates that’s 47% sugar and oil, and 330Kcal/100g. Honey, for comparison, is 310Kcal/100g.

Yeah… go Tescos…