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Now: 3 February - 9 February 2025
Led a lesson on space at Scouts on Tuesday; was very nervous leading up to it but it turned swimmingly. With a little guidance kids will basically teach themselves, it feels like. Maybe it’s just the good kind of kids that go to Scouts.
On Wednesday night I was feeling a little peckish so I made an entire bag of sugarfree cookie dough mix. The cookies tasted like chemicals and the sugar simulate made my insides roil. At least the mix is no longer in the cupboard, tempting me.
I got a new pair of running shoes at the end of last week, and spent this week breaking them in. Road shoes! Not to be found on my Footwear Bingo card for 2025. I took them out for a long run at the weekend as a sort of dress rehearsal for an upcoming marathon and was pleasantly surprised. The Shoe Industry will make a conventional runner of me yet.
Spent the rest of the weekend eating—first a Jamaican takeaway (from Easington of all places!) and then a homemade barbecue out of the 4 Rivers cookbook. I consider a ruined baking tin a small price to pay for better pork than most British people will eat in their entire lives.
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Waffle House - FFSR
Fast Food, Slow Reviews - Sam's ongoing mission to review all of the USA's fast food establishments, one at a time, over the course of years of trips to the States.
We’ve been before but not done a FFSR so we returned to the notorious breakfast diner joint. It was a bacon, egg and cheese hashbrown bowl for me and an all-star special for Charles (eggs: scrambled, toast: white, waffle: plain, meat: bacon, side: grits with cheese).
I thought the hashbrown bowl could have been better seasoned and the cheese could have been either more plentiful or more powerful. But the bacon was really tasty and was the standout item. The hashbrowns are something I just can’t get at home so it’s always a pleasure. And of course the eggs were cooked just right.
I had some of Charles’s cheesy grits and yum yum yum! Again the cheese left something to be desired but grits have such a wonderful texture. Smooth and creamy but with a little bite in there too. I think I’d like to try adding grits to a Full English back home and see how it works. Maybe include some American diner-style hashbrowns to complete the melange.
Pecan pie was our dessert (which we needed like a hole in the head but when in Rome 🤷🏻♀️). Sara Lee does some fantastic things with sugar. The texture is of molasses or tar or something but with a deep sugary, nutty flavour. And then there’s the candied, crunchy pecans on top. A real treat :)
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Belgian beer, French cheese
We traveled to northern France for a little less than a week of touring by motorhome (or camping-car, as it's called over there). We saw plenty of the countryside, but more importantly: we drank a lot of beer, and ate a lot of cheese.
This is what I thought of it.
Beer
When you go to Belgium, you drink Belgian beer. It's almost offensive to see Heineken and Desperados on the shelf. Best drunk out of a fancy glass with gold leaf on the rim.
- Tripel Karmeliet. Good and Belgian. Nutty notes. Good pub beer I reckon. Lighter coloured than I was expecting. 8.4% is a good spot to be. 3/5.
- Trappistes Rochefort. Very sweet, thick in the mouth like fudge. An excellent beer to have just one of. You can get 750ml for like €6 at any corner shop in Belgium, or 250ml for £15 at the Head of Steam in Durham. 5/5
- Straffe Hendrik Brugs Quadrupel 11. Putting "quadrupel" and "11" together in the name of a beer constitutes a promise that the beer itself sort of fails to fulfil. Lots of Belgian character, but it lacks the sauce. 750ml of it will make you feel pretty good though. 4/5
- Maredsous. Blond, drinkable. "Only" 6.5%, which makes it session-able, I guess. I don't know why you'd want to. 3/5
- La Goudale ambrée. I think that this is a sort of proletariat kind of Belgian beer. The Belgian proletariat clearly drink well. 4/5
- La Corne des Bois des Pendus. Darker than the rest but almost totally characterless. It's recognisably beer. The label's a bit corny. 2/5
- Barbar bok brune. Very idiosyncratic, packed with spices and, apparently, honey. I don't think that it's quite my thing, but I like the bottle. 2/5
- Chimay Bleue. This is the classic. Available pretty much everywhere, always very nice, especially in the iconic Chimay glass. Best consumed with a tiny terrine of salami and the secondhand tobacco smoke of six or seven men in sunglasses and polos tucked into their shorts. 5/5
Cheese
The tragedy of trying to eat as many cheeses as you can is that cheesemongers always assume you'll be sharing with between four and six other people. Which makes it very hard to go through enough cheese to get a representative sample of what's available. To get this far, we ate multiple meals of just cheese and bread.
- Galet du boulonnais. Soft and creamy in texture, with an extremely bitter orange rind. Might be good with a sweet jam to balance the bitterness, but not very pleasant on its own with bread. 2/5
- Écume de Wimereux. Almost crumbly, with a slightly tangy taste and a chewy rind. That makes it sound worse than it is. 3/5
- P'ti frais ail - Fromagerie de la Semois. Now this is a cheese you get out of bed for. Creamy and covered in garlic. Just enough to polish off between two people. 4/5
- Le Carré - Bons mayennais. A popular camembert with almost no discernable flavour at all. Pleasant on bread but would benefit from another topping to give it some oomph. 2/5
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Popeyes - FFSR
Fast Food, Slow Reviews - Sam's ongoing mission to review all of the USA's fast food establishments, one at a time, over the course of years of trips to the States.
The classic chicken sandwich. 
Nugs, fries, and biscuit—sauce not pictured. Classic chicken sandwich
The reviews I read said this was the best item on the menu. Don’t get me wrong, it was nice, but nothing exciting. The best things about it were the soft bread and the breading on the chicken. I ordered extra pickles and that added a bit of interest to an otherwise bland burger.
Cajun fries
I tried Charles’s chips and they were tasty and had a nice texture. My only vexation is with the naming of the chips. Cajun is too generous. They had a tickle of seasoning on them.
Nugs
The nugs appeared to be the same composition as the chicken sandwich just smaller. They were more satisfying than the sandwich I’d say. Purer. Plus you get interesting sauces to choose from.
Biscuit
Soft and buttery and warm and well seasoned. Nothing much to say on that one. Only negative is I would have loved a dipping/smothering gravy option.
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Flavour of the Now: hot honey
Back in 2016 I made a note of some short-lived Flavour Trends that I'd noticed in convenience stores across Japan: every couple of months, all of the different brands would agree on a certain flavour, and start producing snacks in that flavour. Mostly it was candies, and mostly it was fruit flavours. (I ate a lot of fruit-flavoured candies back then—whereas the candies that I eat today are mostly colour-flavoured than fruit-flavoured, e.g. this is a red-flavoured candy).
Anyway, I've noticed it happening again, this time in Britain: the Flavour of the Now is: hot honey.
A variety of hot honey-themed processed foods at Pizza Hut... 
Hot honey cashews: a source of protein! Okay two items does not make a trend—but I also had a hot-honey themed burger at Fat Hippo in Durham the other night. It was good but didn't really taste that much like honey and wasn't particularly hot. I did not take a picture of it because I'm Not That Kind of Person 😌
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Stockholm kanelbulle ranking
16All of the kanelbullar I ate on my trip to Stockholm in 2023, ranked from best to worst.
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