Friday, 29 January 2016

28 January - The Bread Head



Bread, so they tell me, is appallingly bad for you.
Never mind that it’s been the staff of life since before the Roman Empire was the Roman Empire – things have changed with our lifestyle, meaning bread is the enemy. It stays around too long in the system, is apparently quite hard to digest, and is essentially just a carb-bomb waiting to explode in your system and turn you into The Blob.
Of all things, though, the first time I did this, bread was the hardest thing to cut down or give up. And why?
Because the little bastard’s so gorgeously scrummy, that’s why. So diverse, so multi-faceted, so much a meal in and of itself, there’s practically no limit to the invention, the wonder and the sheer, unbridled joy that bread can bring. Without bread, there’s no pizza, which pretty much invalidates all the anti-bread rhetoric in the world before we even begin. Then there’s the staggering pleasure of breaking a fresh loaf open. The smell, the texture, the job it does as a delivery device for all manner of other gorgeous things. No pizza, no sandwiches. How much worse does life become at the very contemplation of a world like that. No toast – no hot buttered toast. Absolutely no point to any soup in the world. And so very much on.
I mention this because bread remains a staple part of my diet, though I’ve been forced by the good if rather wretched sense of it to cut down to two slices with a can of soup – you’ll have noticed that’s become something of a standard lunch for me.
It was today – cream of tomato soup, two slices of bread, toasted.
Which in itself, is a Disappearing crime I’m happy to commit right now. There’ll come a time when I have to countenance a world with less bread in it, but damned if that time is yet.
I mention all this because neither d nor I really felt like the dinner of poverty and leftovers that was our lot this evening on the night before payday.
‘Y’know what I could really go for?’ she asked.
‘What?’
‘Grilled cheese and tomato soup.’
‘I’m so down with that it’s not even funny,’ I told her. So – more cream of tomato soup, and the classic ‘grilled cheese’ was consumed. Or ‘scranned’ as my Scottish pal Gregor would have it. Great word, ‘scranned’ – seems to denote a wordless urgency with which any Disappearer is probably familiar.
To the non-American, a ‘grilled cheese’ is by no means just grilled cheese. That would be too simple by some considerable distance. Remember, it’s food invented by Americans, a people who accept insane complication as a matter of daily life, who add tax to the price of things at the checkout, and who add mathematics to rugby, call it football and then at least pretend to both understand and enjoy it.
Nor, to the Brits, is it simply ‘cheese on toast.’ Ohhh to the mighty fuck-no. It’s essentially what Americans think of as French Toast (indicating a not entirely inaccurate assessment of the French capacity for luxury), and which Brits tend to describe with the bluntness of purpose of its more northern inhabitants as ‘Fried Bread.’ Only with gooey cheese in the middle of a Fried Bread sandwich, because, fuck, when you’ve fried a couple of pieces of good bread in butter, you need that extra gooey fat layer to really make something, you know?
It is, quite simply, a food too good to be of earthly design. In fact it’s well known in Clever People Circles that when the Greeks claimed the food of the Olympian gods was ambrosia and nectar, what they actually meant  was Bread and Cheese (This may not in fact be entirely true). The thing about which is, allied to a cup of cream of tomato soup (I also have no idea where this pairing was first discovered to be the source of all wonder and wisdom, I simply know that it is), you can scran a hell of a lot of it before you even know your mouth has been moving.
I’m fairly sure I downed four pieces of butter-soaked, cheese-welded bread with what turned out to be a cup and a half of soup, before looking up. Added to the two at lunchtime, that’s a pretty damn hefty bread day, even for me.
I compounded the issue, such as it was, by determinedly not biking. I mentioned having days off, and while I didn’t exactly decide not to do it, I did end up, somehow, with it being later in the day than was feasible, if I actually wanted to exchange any civilised words with my wife, and so the day became a no-exercise day. Saying which, I had done about 450 calories of walking by the end of the day, so it wasn’t as though I’d been entirely sluglike and slothful. Just probably, in all honesty, not energetic enough for a six-slicer.
The point is, I’m not claiming I was led astray, or that my grand plans were dashed by time or any such thing. You can certainly do that sort of thing when you’re Disappearing. No-one’s going to stop you, and no-one’s going to disagree. The point is it doesn’t actually do you any good to dwell on it, either. You did a thing, what will be will be, and you move on, resolving to have better days coming.
Will the day of the six slicer hurt me come Tuesday? Who knows? There’s a long way between now and then. The challenge is not to let that sort of day become tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day. That’s why official weigh-ins are only once a week – if you took every morning’s weigh-in as official, you’d drive yourself stark raving mad before the week was out.
Onward, to better, less tasty days!

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