It was described as turkey “with all the trimmings” and came with gravy, roast spuds, stuffing, sausages wrapped in bacon, carrots and… brocolli. I like brocolli, but surely this is an occasion for sprouts! I am not a great one for traditions, I would happily have a stir-fry on xmas day, but if you are going to do the turkey thing then you must have sprouts. I had been looking forward to those sprouts, and to releasing them back into the wild at intervals throughout the rest of the day.

At least I got to wear a paper hat for an hour or two. That is something I suppose.

Cat food comes in various flavours: beef, duck, lamb, turkey, salmon, chicken, tuna.  None of this is part of a cat’s natural diet and the obvious question is why we don’t make cat foods in rat, squirrel, and starling flavour but that has been asked many times before.  What I am wondering is why I haven’t seen pork flavour cat food.  Or dog food.

Maybe I just haven’t been paying attention.  Has anybody ever seen a tin of pork-flavoured cat food?  If it doesn’t exist then why doesn’t it exist?  And if it does exist why is it so relatively rare?

I have a theory, but it isn’t nice.

I think that was backed up by blind taste tests too, but this new test has rather different results, leading to a conclusion that maybe people don’t prefer Heinz, they just think they do, and original suspicions that Heinz’s success owes more to the bottle and label than to the contents are looking likely again.

I’m not really a fan of the ketchup myself.  I use it to smother the taste of things I’m even less keen on like the whites of fried eggs or sausages.  I certainly wouldn’t put it on a roast dinner like somebody at my table in the canteen at work did yesterday.  It also works well to liven up a re-heated bolognese.

Back to the taste test though.  The winner was Sainsbury’s own brand, which only slightly surprises me.  Quite a few years ago I found a ketchup that I did really, really like.  It was less vinegary and more tomato-y than most and I used to sometimes use it in cooking – it was Sainsbury’s own brand Italian ketchup.  Bloody brilliant, so of course they stopped making it.

I still look on the shelves in case it magically re-appears.

Looks like I will have to do it myself.

I have had a look around for satay recipes and they look like a lot of work, involving dried chillies, ground peanut, tamarind juice, candle nuts and all sorts of stuff.   I don’t even know what a candle nut is let alone where to get them.  The first recipe I found listed “4 candle nuts”.  I can’t go in a shop and ask for that without feeling like Ronnie Barker – I’ll come out with a pile of fork handles won’t I?

Before I resort to that I might try a few of the supermarkets’ sauces or see if the Asian food store in town has anything that might do the trick.

I shall miss having it cooked by an expert though.

There were about twelve of us and a few had been working, in one case up until 8:30pm, so we didn’t go out until quite late – nearly 9:00pm.   The basic idea of the menu is to choose a main meal (i.e. steak, chicken, etc.), a sauce to go with it, a ‘side’ (which really means type of potato: chips, mash, jacket or new) all of which includes as many trips up to the salad bar as you like.  Nothing too complicated.

I quite like indulging myself with the salads, though perhaps you wouldn’t guess that from the size of me, to the extent I have often found myself struggling to eat whatever I have ordered becasue I am full of salad.  For that reason I didn’t bother with a starter, despite the temptations of potato skins and decided to just have a steak with jacket potato.

When our order was taken we were told there was no jacket potatoes left and no mash either – so half the ‘side’ options were unavailable.  I was a bit miffed by this, having been looking forward to the jacket potato.  One reason why I haven’t seen the inside of TGI Fridays for a long time is that they stopped doing jacket potatoes, which used to be the highlight of a meal there and the only reason I would put up with the racket and forced jollity of the place.

Anyway, orders taken I went off to grab a bowl of salad, already thinking about the creaton I would put together: lettuce first with some French dressing on it and then some cucumber, capsicum and tomoto, potato salad, onions, beetroot, grated carrot, and to finich it off some bacon bits raisins and a small quantity of pineapple.  I feel hungry again just thinking about it.  What I found was a whole world of empty dishes.  There were a few manky peppers and cucumber, but no potato salad or lettuce or onions or much else at all.  I just grabbed a couple of brown rolls to keep me going until everythi8ng was topped up.

After demolishing the bread rolls I went back up to find that even the option of another bread roll wasn’t there.

So.  A place which has the main advertising point of as much salad as you can eat had no bloody salad, and half the ‘side’ choices unnavailable.  When the waitress asked if we were going on anywhere afterwards I was very tempted to say we would be going to the drive-through MacDonalds because I was still hungry – but didn’t really want to sound as if I was hostile to her: it is not her fault if a her employers can’t provide what is on the menu.

OK it was late.  I can see that they don’t want to put out loads of fresh lettuce that might have to get thrown away, but if you are not going to have a full menu available, or even an adequate menu available after 9 then don’t stay open until 11!

As I said, there is no point in taking out on the staff.   I shall just not go there again.

The writer should appreciate that anybody can make a mistake: these are new staff learning a whole new range of foods.  It is not like they are a professional writer who uses “bought” when they mean to say “brought” or anything like that…

Wabi is the kind of place you’d go for a treat. Today, there’s a special Father’s Day lunch, so I have bought my 16-year-old daughter, Maya.

The substantive criticism is that you pay over the odds for what you are getting, but in a way that is a sort of selling point for the more up-market places in Horsham so probably won’t do them any harm.  Wabi will fit right in and probably thrive.

Imagine Boris Johnson taking an Oompa Loompa up the wrong ‘un whilst listening to Alan Titchmarsh sings Radiohead. Convert that to a taste and you’re nearly there.

Full details at fatuous.co.uk but be warned – there are photographs!  Could well be the missing cure for chocaholism that medicine has been looking for.

You would want to be sparing with the Branston on that wouldn’t you?

Seriously, I would love to taste it, just like I would love to taste that Japanese Kobe beef, just to see if it really does taste hundreds of times better.  My limited experience with upmarket booze has been that once you get above supermarket own brand quality something costing twice as much only tastes a little better at best.

For me it is a bit like high-end audio, where you spend thousands for each incremental improvement on a distinctly flattening curve – best left to the fanatics with more money than sense of proportion.

One day I told them that I preferred how it tasted at their old place in Three Bridges and they said they would have a word with the owner.  He didn’t change it, but they said they would get the chef to do it differently for me, so now when we order we ask for chicken satay and say “its for Andrew” and get it done just the way I like.

This has been going on for a while now, and Jayne has mentioned it to some of her friends.  The other day one of them was in the takeaway and decided to ask for “Andrew’s chicken satay”.  He said he really liked it.  I wonder if it will catch on?  I can see a few possibilities:

1. The boss will decide to change the recipe
2. The boss will decide to add “Satay Andrew style” as an option on the menu
3. The boss will get annoyed and tell the chef to stop indulging me

I’m hoping for No 2.  I would like to be imortalised on the menu of a Chinese restaurant.