venta

In an ideal world people might remark, after a few day's silence, on my journal's lack of its usual quality content, fine writing, and insightful comment. As it is, I'm receiving complaints that it's at least four days since I posted meaningless drivel about tomatoes and spiders.

However, I have the highest respect for the complainer's critical faculties, and so I shall present some meaningless drivel:

Having just consumed a lunch calculated to make pretty much anyone other than me go "Ewww", my thoughts have been turning to the contents of lunchboxes in general.

(If you're interested, my lunch was based round some rather nice bready-biscuity things which, as far as I can tell, one can only buy from Ikea. They're a nice halfway house between bread and cripsbread, and don't appear to go stale. Today's contained cardomom, and were hanging out with spicy aubergine paté, cherry tomatoes, feta cheese and anchovies.)

I've never really thought sandwiches are all that practical for a lunchbox thing. Unless you're a lot more careful than me, they tend to fall apart as you carry the box around. They take time to make, and if you've constructed them the night before, they've probably gone soggy by the time lunchtime comes around.

Shop-bought triangular-pack sandwiches are a perennial disappointment to me. They're never quite as nice as the packet description would have you believe, and are usually damp, limp, and have had all the taste chilled out of them. Pret-style sandwiches are better, and deli-style made-to-measure sarnies better still; sadly, the location of my work renders both unavailable.

So, usually, I bring my own lunch in. Perversely, I call it dinner (the meal I eat at night is tea), but I'm aware that causes confusion. In the winter I munch my way through a tin of Baxters soup each day - almost always vegetarian, because they seem to do a better job of containing things like beans or pulses, and thus being filling. In summer, though, hot soup doesn't particularly appeal.

Mostly, I bring in salads. It's another perpetual source of disappointment that my idea of a salad is different from the idea of every salad-purveying emporium in the world. The last salad I brought to work: chopped ham, chopped raw peppers (that's capsicum for American viewers), cherry tomatoes, half an avocado and some cold potatoes. What do you notice ? No bloody lettuce. Lettuce is, I suppose, cheap - and, if you're carefully marking up your salads with calories, largely irrelevant. It's also bland and unfilling - if I buy a bowl of salad, I don't want to find that around 60% of it is full of chopped iceberg, which will be a pain to eat and require me to consume the packaging as well to stop being hungry. I get along OK with things like rocket and watercress, which taste of something.

elethiomel's view that lettuce only exists as a vehicle for vinaigrette is fair enough, but really not enough of an excuse for its ubiquity.

Salad vendors of the world take note: make nice stuff.

Which reminds me, ham. The joint which I grew up calling (and still do) "a boily bacon" seems to me to be a very much undervalued animal. A small, unsmoked bacon joint in Tesco will cost you £3-4. You boil it - chuck some cloves, onion, cardamom, peppers, chilli, whatever you fancy in the water with it. Take out, slice, eat - with new potatoes and some form of vegetable (and about 1/4lb. butter) it's one of my favourite meals. The remainder goes in the fridge, and will help out with your lunchtime sarnies/salads for the rest of the week.

Boiled meat seems to be terribly unfashionable, somehow. I don't know why.

And my culinary discovery for the month: limes on sweetcorn. Next time you're eating corn on the cob, instead of slathering butter all over it, squeeze half a lime over it. It's quite surprisingly good - though works better on barbecued sweetcorn than boiled. I'd suggest this as a dieters' alternative, but since most of the diet-following people I know seem to be on some Atkins variant, they're probably allowed the butter but not the sweetcorn to go with it.

The word discovery is a little unfair in the previous paragraph, since I didn't discover it at all, I was told about it at a barbecue by SpikeyNeil a couple of weeks ago.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I have to get chocolate muffin out of the keyboard.