It’s Sunday today, so we’ve taken our traditional day away from the reasoning-mine and, as they are often wont to do, our thoughts have turned to food. Now, some time back we brought you what we considered to be the ultimate SPAM recipe – Planked SPAM – but now we’ve unearthed something that has easily trumped Planked SPAM and knocked it into a cocked hat. Whatever that means. Brace yourself! It’s…
Yes, it’s SPAM ‘n’ Beans which is, apparently, exactly right for Saturday night (which is rather a shame as I took my wife for cocktails and to a really good concert in Northern Europe’s largest Gothic Cathedral last night (if only I’d seen this first)). It seems delightfully simple to cook, consisting as it does of two ingredients; SPAM and baked beans. Simply place slices of SPAM in baked beans and cook them on the hob, then serve in some sort of dirty brown pot with congealed sauce oozing over the side. Who wouldn’t be overjoyed to be served this? It seems that the simplest recipes are often the most delicious.*
*Sadly I’m the member of the 7 Reasons team that doesn’t eat meat and – as SPAM is a distant relative of meat – I can’t try it myself. Any readers care to give it a go?**
**7 Reasons will be back tomorrow, without any tummy trouble whatsoever.
Welcome to another Saturday. We can’t take credit for the weekend, but we can take credit for the sensational Guest Post slot. Over the last year we have had a diverse mix of guest post, but the one thing we haven’t had is someone telling us why we should go out to eat. Today that changes as we are joined on the 7 Reasons sofa by Sophie Jenkins. I say we are ‘joined’, that’s not exactly true. The 7 Reasons sofa has been abandoned somewhere between York and Kent due to snow. So Sophie is actually alone. But that’s good because she can put her feet up. Which is not something you can do if you eat out. But that’s the only disadvantage there is, as Sophie now explains. And if you like what you read you may well want to check out Bookatable. Maybe on the Bookatable website, the Bookatable facebook page or the Bookatable twitter page. They’ve got it covered.
Dirty Dinner by Cinnamon Cooper
1. Laziness. The first obvious reason is ease. Just go out to eat! No cooking, no washing up all those pans (pans are the worst, cutlery is easy), no cleaning the mess you made in the kitchen. Just book a table, turn up at the restaurant, order, eat, pay and leave. Preferably in that order. In the words of Aleksandr the meerkat – Simples!
2. Shopping. No food shopping, trudging around busy and noisy (and often freezing cold) supermarkets trying to decide what on earth to buy. Even if you have a recipe in mind, the supermarket will no doubt have run out of the ingredients you need, or they will be too bizarre to ever feature on the shelves anyway. If you do find the necessary ingredients after hours of hunting, you then have the fun of lugging heavy bags home too! None of this at a restaurant, because of…..
3. Service. These are perhaps all following the ‘lazy’ thread, but at a restaurant you are not only allowed to be lazy, you are meant to be lazy. People are there to wait on you hand and foot! Plus it’s not like at home, where your parents/partner/younger sibling/flatmate have a moan about being subjected to your orders – in a restaurant people are paid to serve you and not complain about it! Dream come true?
4. Taste. What are you going to cook at home? Spaghetti bolognaise again?! Boring. Maybe you will try to branch out and cook something new. Erm, this doesn’t taste right…Just eat out! You can eat food you would never in a million years be able to cook, try food you have never seen or heard of before! Even if you do order the usual spag bol, it’s going to taste better than what you would have thrown together at home. Do you have a Michelin star? No. Does the chef at the restaurant? Well, that depends on the restaurant I suppose.
5. Safety. Oops, is the microwave meant to be flaming? You can eat pork medium-rare, right? What happened to the hamster…? No risk of fire, flooding, and much less risk of food poisoning. It is much safer to ditch the oven and eat out every night instead. Let a professional take care of the difficult and dangerous bits, while you sit in comfort and stress-free safety.
6. Convenience. A friend/grandparent/in-law wants to see you for lunch. The house looks like a bomb has hit it from the party you had the night before. You woke up late, hungover, and definitely don’t have time to tidy the mess AND cook an impressive meal! Meet at a restaurant instead! There is no need for anyone to set foot in the nightmare that is your house, or any chance of that impressive meal becoming an inedible disaster. Eating out makes life so much easier (and if you foot the bill it still looks like you made a huge effort).
7. Surprise. When you pop into a restaurant, you never know who you will meet – Johnny Depp might be sat at the table next to you (fingers and toes crossed)! He is, however, less likely to turn up at your house for your spicy chilli, no matter how infamous it may be (have to cross your toes as well as fingers for that one).
It’s Russian Roulette Sunday again (and ordinary Sunday too) and we’ve realised something: We’ve never given our readers a recipe before. We’ve requested them when under pressure; we’ve offered general lifestyle advice on how to do food correctly; and on how food should be consumed, but we’ve never been specific about how to prepare it. Until now.
This isn’t our own recipe, it’s one that we stumbled across on the internet while doing something else. But it’s safe to say that we were amazed by it. Flabbergasted. Dumbfounded. It’s a perfectly genuine recipe that features in an advert for the main ingredient and we haven’t in any way made it up.
In the past, we may have created and altered posters and passed them off as genuine, but we did that because we didn’t think that anyone would believe us, and we certainly didn’t imagine that thousands of people around the world would download those posters, presumably to use in essays and school projects. In fact, we feel fairly confident that, as World War II recedes further into history, and internet content becomes ever-more readily-accepted, those posters will come to be seen as genuine, and we – in our usual hapless manner – will have inadvertently caused a revision of history. We’re actually dreading the day that one of our posters turns up in a newspaper, or a book. Anyway, we’ve learned our lesson, and this poster is categorically not one of our creations.
You’re probably feeling a little peckish by now so, Ladies and Gentlemen, discerning readers of 7 Reasons (.org), we present to you, without any further ado…Planked SPAM.
Now, to some people, a meal consisting of SPAM on a plank might seem a little unconventional or unappetising, but rest assured: When you unveil this culinary master-stroke with a flourish, it will be “…greeted with cheers” by your jubilant dinner-guests. The advert says so, so it must be true. We’re not sure what wood the plank should be made from, though pine would probably be nice and fragrant, and less tough than oak. But you can experiment with your own planks, we wouldn’t want to ruin the fun. Let us know how you get on.
1. The bad-egg. At any dinner party, at least one person will behave badly and annoy all of the other guests. It’s always a man. Often it’s me.
2. Multi-tasking. Women can multi-task – they demonstrate this by talking during films. This means that they approach both hosting and cooking for a dinner party with confidence, which makes it all the more tragic when your tearful hostess returns from the kitchen bearing a foul-smelling tray containing something black (possibly the charred remains of a flan) and a bowl of something green and unidentifiable (no idea). If you want to see a grown-woman cry, you don’t have to go to a dinner party. You can just hide her chocolate – which is a lot easier.
3. Candles. There are always candles on the table at dinner parties but no one knows why. I don’t want to singe my arm hair every time I pour some wine or pass the salt. Why would you want to put a fire on the table?
4. Wine. Guests always bring wine with them, and it’s always the wrong one – a Barolo when the main course is a delicate fish dish, or a New Zealand sauvignon blanc to go with lamb. Why can’t guests just do something useful and bring dessert with them? Or not come?
5. Cheesecake. A plain, unadorned cheesecake is one of the best desserts ever. I don’t want cheesecake made with Baileys, I don’t want cheesecake made with fruit, nor do I want cheesecake made with chocolate. What I would like is cheesecake made with cheese. And cake. Don’t tell me that I’m getting a cheesecake for dessert and then bring me something made with gooseberries and covered in sauce! Why can no one hosting a dinner party resist cocking up a cheesecake? Is it the law?
6. Children. I was brought up in a house that often hosted dinner parties – at least one a month – but I don’t think that my siblings or I even caught sight of one until we were eighteen years old. No one has ever successfully explained why children are banished from dinner parties to me. Is it because of the candles?
7. Restaurants. There are places where a group of people can sit around a table and eat wonderful food – made to a higher standard than they could manage themselves – they’re called restaurants. The diners don’t have to get up to fetch courses, drinks or cutlery and they don’t end up with candle-wax on their carpet. You can choose what you want to eat and drink rather than have your courses compromised by your friends bizarre and varied dietary requirements, children don’t have to be hidden – they can be taken with you or looked after by a babysitter – and you don’t have to wash-up afterwards. I sincerely hope they catch on.
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