John's Adventures

I’ve always been a classic omnivore with a leaning towards chocolate. That means I’d eat anything from a green salad to black pudding to a juicy steak to a Linda McCartney pie to any chocolate bar ever made. Although given the choice I’d definitely pick the chocolate.

I’ve also never been under any illusion that the neatly packaged meat I buy in a butchers or a supermarket was once a living, breathing, thinking creature and it was killed so that I could eat it. I’m rather fond of fly fishing so have killed, gutted, cooked and eaten many a fish over the years. The same with various other animals. So I’ve always been keenly aware of the industry that is breeding sentient animals purely to slaughter them and feed us. That bothered me, particularly the poor treatment of the animals, so my wife and I made sure we only ate free range egg (and real free range, not simply chickens that live in a larger cage all their life, ones that get to roam around outside) and bought only locally sourced meat that we could see in the fields around where we live.

Then around 6 months ago my wife suggested when we ate all the meat in our freezer we should try going vegetarian. I said “let’s do it” and so it began. Here’s what I expected to happen:

• I would have a bad stomach for a while as my body got used to no longer eating meat
• I would struggle with eating boring salads all the time – I loathe broccoli for example
• When dining out I would have to get used to eating bland nut roasts as the only vegetarian option
• I’d miss eating fish (having grown up on the east coast of Scotland I’ve always loved various types of fish and shellfish)
• As I play football and do weight training the lack of amino acids and protein would make me feel weaker over time and my fitness levels would drop off
• I would very much miss bacon and the smell of it would ultimately tempt me back to eating meat again

However none of the above have turned out to be the true. While my wife gave up after a couple of weeks (without going into details, it did not agree with her digestive system) I’ve found going vegetarian a complete nonevent. In fact I feel better than I’ve ever felt, fitter than before and while I now eat more than I did previously, I think more about what I do eat and so pick healthier options. Oh, and I still eat chocolate.

What I have been surprised by are the following:

• Virtually everyone I inform I’m a vegetarian assume I still eat fish. News flash: FISH IS MEAT TOO!
• A good percentage of my friends feel the need to try and tempt me back to eating meat as though it’s some sort of club to which I really should belong – the primary argument is that “meat tastes great”, but most people have the palate sophistication of a burger-eating teenager so are no experts on taste!
• I don’t miss eating meat at all and haven’t had a single craving to eat any. Given that I spent 39 years eating the stuff I expected to struggle giving it up. If I had to give up chocolate I know for a fact I’d be crying myself to sleep at night!
• As soon as you stop thinking “ok, let’s make this meal but replace the meat with some veg” and start thinking “let’s make a delicious meal” it turns out there are loads of tasty options out there
• I actually feel a sense of relief that I’m no longer a part of the meat industry and no animal is slaughtered so that I might eat it

It’s that last point that’s surprised me the most. By not eating meat I’ve had a chance to reflect on why we humans eat meat. Why we’ve turned the production of meat into an industrial process hidden away from public view to the point where a great number of people don’t associate a chicken breast in a supermarket with a chicken walking around a field. It’s a dirty secret we don’t seem to want to acknowledge and I was no different.

I think it rather sad that a technologically advanced species with its sights set on interplanetary travel still has as its primary food source living creatures that are bred, grown and killed. Take bacon. It’s no secret that I love my dog and dogs are intelligent, social creatures capable of recognising human emotions and I would never consider eating one. Yet pigs are as intelligent and social as dogs – arguably more so – but they’re food for a group of even more intelligent animals (us). That’s not tackling the fact that if population growth continues as it’s projected to do then farming animals is completely unsustainable. Not that us humans think further than 5-10 years in the future.

In the unlikely event that an alien species was to cross the chasm of space and visit us on Earth I would be very disappointed if their spaceship had a compartment containing animals they used as food for their vast journey. Surely they’d have left that behind aeons ago.

But one thing that hasn’t happened is developing a burning desire to stop other people eating meat. Heck, you can eat what you like! But me? I don’t see any reason to go back. So I guess that makes me a vegetarian. And I feel a lot better for it on many levels. Much to my surprise.

If you know me you’ll know I love coffee. If you know me and don’t realise how much I love coffee then the next time you bump into me ask and I’ll be happy to bore you for hours about it. If you don’t know me then take it from me – I love coffee.

Not just any old coffee mind. I can just about tolerate Starbucks coffee (aside: if you think Starbucks coffee is good coffee then let me assure you it’s the junk food of the coffee world – it’s ok but not a patch on the good stuff), I don’t drink instant coffee because it’s all universally terrible and if I find a place that makes great coffee – such as Bean Loved in Skipton – I stick with it.

So a few years ago we bought a Gaggia Classic coffee machine. It’s one of those ones where you get some freshly ground coffee, put it in a holder, twist it in place, hit a button to run the hot water through into a cup, put some milk in a jug, flick a switch to heat the machine up more so it can generate steam, put the jug under a pipe, fire some steam through it until it runs out of puff, wait, then run some more through until the milk’s up to temperature, then pour into the mug and job done – you have a latte. As you’ll gather it was a time consuming process, you could only make 2 cups at a time, but it made a hell of a good cup of coffee (once I figured out how to get the best out of it).

A few years and many cups of coffee later and the amount of effort it took to make a cup of coffee was starting to take its toll. If we had friends round and I made a coffee for everyone it would take an age (2 at a time you see). Sometimes I’d screw up the milk frothing or overfill the coffee loader and blast ground coffee all over the kitchen. But most importantly I’m not a morning person and when I get up bleary eyed and grouchy I find a delicious fresh latte is the only thing to bring me to the land of the living. However as I spend every second I can in bed, the last thing I want to do is have to get up 10 minutes earlier just to make a cup of coffee. Things had to change.

A couple of years back a good friend of mine (who likes coffee even more than I do) decided to buy a fully automatic Jura coffee machine. If you take a look at their range you’ll see that they are very expensive. At the time I thought that while I’d love to have one, I just couldn’t justify spending what would buy two round the world airline tickets and only made a hot beverage. However I do feel very rough and get very grumpy in the morning so I started, foolishly, by asking my friend if he thought his coffee machine was worth it. Turns out it’s a brilliant piece of kit that makes the perfect cup of coffee every time, is very well engineered and can easily handle making the copious amounts of coffee he drinks.

I then resorted to the web and found the Seattle Coffee Gear channel on YouTube where I watched loads of reviews and demonstrations of many different machines. I wanted a fully automatic one that ground the coffee, heated up the milk, and basically did it all for you at the touch of a button. Oh, and preferably one that wasn’t expensive. Turns out that there is no such coffee machine and you get what you pay for. And that the Jura ones are very highly recommended.

Normally my wife would be the voice of reason and talk me out of such an expensive appliance purchase, but you see if anything she’s more of a coffee addict than I am so it was like asking a car salesman if I should buy a new car. Soon after we found ourselves in Peter Maturi in Leeds (the only place around that stocks such hideously expensive coffee machines) trying out the various Jura machines (we needed to see if the top of the range one really was that much better than the bottom) and several cups of coffee later walked out with a shiny new Jura Impressa J9 machine.

This was a couple of months ago so we’ve had a good time to see if it really is worth the money and if I’ve been able to make myself a cup every day. The bottom line is yes and yes! So to make a perfect latte you get a milk bottle out of the fridge, run a tube from the machine into the milk, put a cup under the nozzle and press a button. Walk away for a minute, come back and you’ve got the perfect latte ready to drink. My wife prefers stronger cappuccino’s – no problem! You can program each button to your exact tastes and job done. Switch it off and walk away while it cleans itself out. Fantastic!

It does seem a bit more demanding though as it tells you when to put more water in, when to empty the drip tray, when to put more coffee beans in, when to give it a deep clean (you just put a tablet in and press a button though) and when to replace the filter (no limescale here). However it doesn’t do it very frequently and is a small price to pay for one-touch operation. The only problem is that it’s so easy to make a great cup of coffee that you end up drinking more than you used to. Still, it keeps our local coffee bean shop in business and I’m all for supporting the local economy!

So next time you’re round my way, drop by and I won’t grimace when you ask for a cup of coffee – it’s only the press of a button away!

Pain is something that’s very difficult to describe. Many years ago I got a filling and decided to have it done without anaesthetic. My thinking was that the pain of a dentist drilling into my teeth would remind me to brush my teeth so I wouldn’t need another one (plus it wasn’t a deep filling so I was assured it wouldn’t be too bad). It was, perhaps predictably, very painful. I remember realising at the time why torturers liked drilling holes in teeth as the pain was excruciating and there was no escape from it. But trying to describe that pain – what it felt like – to someone else proved particularly difficult. No amount of description could really do justice to the sound and sensation of the drilling and the electric shock-like shooting pains that you just couldn’t prepare yourself for.

And it’s exactly the same with the other end of the spectrum describing intense pleasure. Like, for example, eating an amazing meal.

This weekend to celebrate my birthday, my brother’s birthday and our anniversary, my good lady, brother and I went to Gordon Ramsay’s Maze Restaurant in Grosvenor Square, London (England) for dinner. We’d given my brother a voucher for Christmas to go for a meal there and he reported afterwards that the whole experience was superb and the food was sublime so it was time to find out for ourselves if that was the case.

The first thing to note is that while the restaurant may bear Gordon Ramsay’s name, the executive chef is Jason Atherton so really the menu is designed, selected and created by him. Anybody who follows the world of chefs knows that Jason (a Michelin star chef) is straight out of the top drawer, and the fact that he’s a Yorkshireman makes him even better since that’s where I live!

Anyway, the restaurant itself was beautifully decorated, a real quality look without feeling overly posh (i.e. I didn’t feel completely out of place!). The service was probably the best I’ve ever experienced. Having been a waiter myself during my student days I can appreciate a slick operation when I see it and at the Maze they were like a well oiled machine. You never even thought about topping up your glass as it was perpetually filled, the food seemed to appear and disappear, we never felt like we were being hurried out at the end and there was none of this spending 15 minutes trying to attract someone’s attention to pay the bill!

And so to the food. This is where it gets tricky to articulate. We all went for the set 7 course meal where you had a choice of a couple of options on 3 of the courses. Each course was small, beautifully presented (like pieces of art on a plate), the ingredients were all top quality and the flavours were out of this world! Each course seemed to complement the previous one and we kept marvelling at how ingredients were put together in unexpected ways to create a taste sensation. Heck, one of the courses had mini shepherd’s pie and I’ve never tasted one like that in my life!

We quickly lost count of how many courses we’d had and how many were left. It was like eating the most amazing tapas one dish at a time and soon enough we got to the dessert (which I really should have taken a picture of) and our culinary adventure was over. As is always the case with tapas-style food I felt I could have eaten more but when I stood up later I realised I’d actually had enough.

Overall the experience was fantastic. The ambiance, the service and the wine were all tip top. But the food was indescribably good. It wasn’t like eating a meal, it was more like being injected with a cocktail of pure class A drugs. No wait, that’s a terrible analogy! Let me try that again… It wasn’t like eating a meal, it was like… Eh… You see, it’s not easy to describe what it was like, nothing I could say would do it proper justice. Let’s just stick with a single word – divine. If you find yourself tempted to go to one of Ramsay’s restaurants but think “that’s a lot of money”, I can assure you it was worth every penny!