Filed under: food, life | Tags: calories to lose a pound, diets that work, dorset cereals, effective weight loss, food, health, Ian marber, lose 4lbs a week, losing weight, monkey nuts, the food doctor everyday diet, weight loss
I’ve been asked a fair bit about my diet and how it works so effectively.
Here’s what I wrote earlier today. I hope it helps because it most certainly works for me.
OK. It’s really simple. And involves calories.
You consume as many as you burn and you don’t lose weight. Simple.
So, start from your normal daily burn which for men my size is about 2,500 calories. Cut that by 1,000 and do 1,000 cals of exercise (an hour vigorous workout) and you are at a net 2,000 calorie debt per day. It’s 3,500 calories to lose a pound so I reckon this equates to half a pound a day or 3.5 – 4 lbs a week.
Now, to what to eat. You need to go for slow release foods on so few calories (but you can have lots of them). Alcohol is a total no no.
No simple carbs like bread, cereal, pastry, chocolate, biscuits, crisps, potatoes, fruit juice, white rice and pasta – absolutely none at all
Instead swap those, if you must, for complex carbohydrates like brown rice and wholemeal pasta (in moderation).
Eat lots of pulses (beans and lentils) and protein (lean meat and eggs preferably).
DO NOT go on an Atkins style Protein diet. THEY DO NOT WORK.
Eat breakfast. An absolute MUST. I have 50g of high fruit and nut muesli (my preference is for Dorset Cereals – the dark green box) supplemented with a lot of fresh fruit in it like melon, blueberries and strawberries and skimmed milk (400 cals approx).
Do not go to Starbucks. Or if you do, only have an Americano with skimmed milk.
For lunch I have soup and fruit (2 apples usually) – no bread with the soup – or, if at home, a two or 3 egg omelette, no fat in the cooking (just that spray stuff). (300 cals approx)
For dinner I usually have things like stir fries with chicken or prawns or fillet steak. Loads and loads of veg and only a handful of brown rice or 70g of wholemeal pasta. If I’m hungry later on I have those roasted monkey nuts you get in shells at Tesco or another apple. (700 cals approx).
If I cycle in and out of Edinburgh and walk the bridge I’ll burn 4,500 calories and will have lost a pound in a day.
The theory is called food combining (and it’s about managing your blood sugar levels effectively). The book above is magnificent. I swear by it. The Food Doctor Everyday diet by Ian Marber.
Forget the recipes, just read the theory over and over till it sticks.
Do not get in a rut eating the same things every day.
I promise you, you won’t be hungry on this ‘diet’ – although it’s more than a diet, it’s a regime.
The worst bit is the no booze rule but an important principle in the diet is what Marber calls the 80:20 rule in which 20% of the time you relax the regime (for me that means you can have a bev!)
That’s it.
(For the record I lost 64lbs in 138 days last year. I’ve started it again this year and have lost 11lbs in the first 16 days). I lost 6 inches round my stomach and 8 from my chest. My trousers went from size 40/42 to 34 and heading towards a 32 if I keep it up for another month.
Filed under: family, food, life, Scotland | Tags: 50 for 50, Diet, weight loss
Well, it’s been a tough but exciting two months.
I’ve cycled 400 miles and walked 240.
I’ve been on a (roughly speaking) about 1500 calorie a day regime but it’s been worth t as I put on a suit yesterday that I “earned” from Smiths Menswear in 1995.
Most pleasing of all my BMI moved from obese to overweight this morning. That’s a really big thing for me as it completely re-categorises me in my own mind (mind you that’s on the halls md scale (an American model that challenges the usual dodgy findings of the existing BMI standards that take no account of muscle percentage, merely weight. NOT THAT I AM SAYING I AM MUSCULAR.
So, I have a good half stone to go on the regular measure to make that claim but in my mind I am no longer obese.
I’ve lost 13.5% of my body weight so far and am 70% towards my target of 50lbs lost by 50. (Mid May.)
I know I will get there now; it’s only a question of when?
Thanks everyone for your support so far and especially Pete and Jeana.
If you want to pledge your support for the charities that we are raising money for please sign up here.
Me? I’m off for some scran.
Filed under: family, food, life, science, Scotland, stories | Tags: 50 for 50, campbells meat, complex carbohydrates, Cube Hyde, food combining, food combining diet, low carb diet, mark gorman, mark gorman think hard, nike, Nike Plus, Pete and mark.wordpress.com, pete the meat, peter Flockhart, rachel Apppolinari Fund, steve appolinari, think hard
My friends on facebook will be aware of the challenge my next door neighbour, Pete Flockhart (aka Pete the Meat) and myself set ourselves in the depressing dog days of 2011. Both of us had piled on the weight in the last couple of years as a result of lack of exercise, overeating (or eating the wrong stuff to be more precise) and over drinking.
We’re both 50 in May, ten days apart in fact and the prospect of our local GP carrying out rectal examinations whilst lecturing us about our obesity was too much to contemplate.
So we decided to set ourselves a challenge.
We’d both lose 50 lbs by our 50th birthdays.
Our good pal Doug Cook offered to design us a campaign logo. This is it…
And we set up a blog to follow the journey.
We’ve dramatically reduced our alcohol intake (bar a few binges).
We’ve put ourselves on really good diets. Pete’s a bit heavy on the rabbit food but I’ve been following a food combining approach which consists of Muesli and fresh fruit for breakfast, salad with lots of protein for lunch and a good mix of protein and complex carbs for dinner.
No pies, no crisps, no sweets, very few, virtually none in fact, simple carbs (white rice, white bread, white pasta, potatoes – in fact none of any of them in a month), no butter, reduced fat (the one cal spray you can buy is excellent), no chocolate, no biscuits, no visits to Greggs AT ALL.
And of course, the exercise. I have a Nike Plus wristband which acts as a GPS device, pedometer and calorie burn measurer which is calibrated (extremely accurately I have to say) for stride length and distance walked plus weight.
Our regime has been walking 2 out of every three days across the Forth Road Bridge and back. That’s about 5.7miles (9km) and we have a slightly longer route that’s 7 miles (11km). In January I walked 190km ( 118 miles) and Pete was about the same. However I’ve also recently bought an amazing, really really amazing, new bike – a Cube Hyde Pro – that’s carried me 200 miles in and out of town this month.
We’re taking the opportunity to raise funds for two very deserving charities as we go and you can pledge your support here if you’d like to help us. They are the Rachel Appolinari Fund which has been set up on behalf of a young girl, a friend of my family, who died, aged 19, of a brain tumour at Edinburgh neuro-oncology unit at the Western General Hospital. Her Dad and sisters have already raised £50,000 for the hospital in Rachel’s name. The other (Pete’s choice) is the Chest, Heart and Stroke Foundation in Scotland for obvious reasons. I hope you will support us.
The results are encouraging.
In the first month, which ended today, I lost 22lbs and Pete lost 30lbs. That’s 9% of our combined body weight. Our BMI’s have tumbled but there’s a long, long way to go and to be honest 50lbs may have set the bar a little too low.
We realise the easiest bit is over and we really do need to dig in now, but we’ve been saying that since the end of week one in which Pete lost a staggering 16.5 lbs, so maybe we’re striking the right balance.
A big thing about this, to my mind, is the value of attempting a challenge like that with others. Doing it solo is very difficult indeed. So, to Pete the Meat, Slainte! Onwards and upwards. Together we shall prevail!
Anyway, follow our exploits here. You can sign up for updates on the left hand side of the blog and please support us as best you can.
Filed under: creativity, family, food, humour, life | Tags: Diet, mark gorman
Filed under: bbc, food, life, Scotland, stories, tv | Tags: bird conservation, gannet, gannet as food, gannet conservation, gordon ramsay gannet, guga, guga cull, guga on the menu, guga recipe, lewis, lewis tradition, rspb, scottish food tradition, the guga hunters of ness, traditional food
Landing salted Guga. Honestly, it would give you the heave but what a fascinating tradition. Keep it up boys.
I just watched a superb documentary; The Guga Hunters of Ness in which a bunch of Western Islanders cross the North Atlantic to a remote rocky island to cull Gannet “ducklings” .
Beautiful, serene and awe inspiring.
But it would gie ye the boak eating them.
This is what the BBC website says about the documentary…
Ness is the last place in the UK where young gannets, known in Gaelic as guga, are hunted for their meat. The hunting of sea birds was outlawed in 1954 in the UK, but the community of Ness on the Isle of Lewis continues to be granted the only exemption under UK and EU law allowing them to hold the annual hunt.
Every August, ten men from Ness set sail for Sula Sgeir, a desolate island far out in the Atlantic. Following in the footsteps of countless generations, they leave their families behind to journey through wild storms and high seas to reach the remote hunting ground.
The men live on the island for two exhausting weeks, sleeping amongst ruins left behind by monks over a thousand years ago. They work ceaselessly, catching, killing and processing 2000 birds using traditional methods unique to the hunt.
It’s a great piece of filming and the music by the Dead Rat Orchestra really makes it haunting and beautiful. Highly recommended if you get the chance.
I also watched a programme a few years ago featuring Gordon Ramsay cooking Guga. (I think it was The F word). It created a furore at the time because some people got all uppity about conservation; but they are entirely self sufficient as a species and in no danger of being hunted to extinction.
Here’s a Guga recipe I found on the BBC website
‘First catch your guga..and keep it a year in light diesel oil- if unavailable tractor paraffin will suffice. Drain the guga in a pale of water from the well and rub down with a strimmer as you would with Peking Crispy Duck. Put now clean bird in baking tray overnight on low heat in the Raeburn 1O0 degrees or three peats. The smell will now have cleared your house of mice and earwigs. Remove oil from top of pan in morning and fill tilley lamp with it. Bird should still be tough. Cut half into goujons and place under the grill and serve covered with crowdie. Remove reaminder and peg it out on the washing line. When it’s dried out in the breeze see whose shoes need resoling the most in your family and the guga will do the job better than anything any cobbler on the mainland can provide.’
Filed under: business, creativity, food, humour, jokes, life, Scotland, stories | Tags: Buckfast, buckfast pie, buckfast pies, Drip Rd, food, Hair of the dog, hangover, hangover cure, haute cuisine, meat pie, michelin food, morning after, Raploch, scotish cuisine, scottish hangover cure, Stirling, Stirling butcher
I read about Rendall’s the Butchers in Drip Rd, Stirling in a paper last week so, as I was passing this morning on the way to a meeting at Stirling University, I took some time out to buy my lunch.
The subject of the recent journalistic expose, and some hilarity, for the butchers was their new line of pies guaranteed to cure any hangover (Hair of the dog I suppose).
Note 28% meat, 2.5% Buckfast
My worry is what the remaining 69.5% consists of.
Nonetheless they were delicious.
Filed under: food, Restaurant reviews, Scotland | Tags: best places to eat in edinburgh, edinburgh best restaurants, edinburgh restaurants, food awards, missoni hotel, ondine restaurant, roy brett, scottish restaurants, seafood restaurants
Wherever chef Roy Brett goes he seems to pick up the accolade of Seafood restaurant of the year.
For the last two years he held the title at Dakota’s South Queensferry Hotel Restaurant where my daughter Amy works. Now he’s gone and done it again at his own place.
The restaurant is named Ondine, after a mythological water spirit and reflects the emphasis on seafood and shellfish.
It’s a cool, chic and reasonably priced (for top end) place, located in the Missoni Hotel complex, and boasts one of my friends, Craig Grierson, as its Maitre D.
The recognition is not really a surprise given the slew of outrageously good reviews the restaurant has garnered since opening last year.
Clearly it’s worth a try and if your feeling particularly fishtastic you’ll want to head for the sumptuous crustacean bar for a real maritime treat.
Filed under: advertising, food, humour, jokes, life, stories | Tags: fat, weightwatchers, weightwatchers sweden
In a terrible case of “fatricide” (def. A load of fat bastards dying en masse) the floor of a Weight Watchers clinic in Växjö in south central Sweden collapsed on Wednesday night beneath a group of about 20 participants in the weekly weigh in. That adds a new dimension to Weightwatchers’ “Discover Plan“.
i.e.Discover the floor below them.
Filed under: Arts, food, humour, jokes, life, Scotland | Tags: Aleksandra Mir, collective, collective gallery, cookery, cooking, Edinburgh, Recipes, The how not to cookbook
At last.
I wrote a story that was accepted for this book that arived in the ‘post’ today.
So, if you want to know how not to cook, give me a ring… I’ll pass you on to Jeana.
(Actually, the book is a lot of fun and you can buy it here…)
Here’s what the Collective Gallery, that supported the idea had to say about the concept…
While the typical cookbook format gives you a recipe for obvious success it does not take into account the many ways in which its execution can fail due to the cook’s lack of experience. Based on Aleksandra’s personal history of cooking disasters, the project invites 1000 people from all around the world to give their advice of how NOT to cook. With this volume, any reader will be more than well equipped to avoid making the same mistakes in their kitchen.
Aleksandra is interested in how we are taught or teach ourselves through trial and error. By making our guilty failures public we may even be creating an original and subversive form of art, rather than simply be aspiring to obvious and repetitive results.
I’m afraid this post will only appeal to those of a certain age and from a certain geographic base.
When I was a kid bread came in hauf loafs and the king of the hauf loaf was the Milanda.
Indeed my late father drove a Milanda van for some time, delivering to bakeries.
The reason for my post is that I met a bloke in Glasgow today who told me a brilliant story about Milanda (The advertising catchphrase, in the 60′s, was “Demand a Milanda”)
His story is that he met a lady in Ireland recently called Milanda and he was surprised by this. Asking the derivation of her name she told him that her older sister had been tasked with naming the newborn and that she had taken a shine to the wee lassie in the bread ad (of the 60′s) “That wee Milanda lassie.”
Apparently she’d thought the girl, as opposed to the bread, was called Milanda.
Thank god she wasn’t watching the Ronseal ad.
Filed under: Arts, family, food, humour, life, tv | Tags: cookery programmes, heston, heston's victorian feast, the fat duck
I reluctantly tuned in to Heston’s Victorian Feast for what I feared was as contrived a programming idea as could conceivably be conceived.
I was wrong. This was vintage TV. The fact that he laughed in the face of food poisoning in one section of the show was quirkily ironic; as 400 of his devotees were probably viewing it with their arses on the pan. But fret not, nobody died at the Fat Duck last week.
His idea was to create a modern day Victorian banquet, drawing extensively from the fictitious foods of Alice in Wonderland but what made the programme sparkle was its delicious denouement. An Absinthe jelly, (Absinth one moment, Absanth the next; the continuity people were probably having Mock Turtles listening to him) huge and wobbly with the wobble attained with the aid of four vibrators – themselves a Victorian invention.
My 14 year old son, Tom, was quite amused that they had been invented to treat hysteria and that doctors regularly masturbated their patients to relieve said ailment. Not exactly what we’d expected from a cookery programme.
Good on ya Heston.
The ultimate out-take of this programme? I really want to eat at the Fat Duck.
Filed under: advertising, business, family, food, humour, jokes, life, photography, Scotland, stories, The Scotsman, work | Tags: bunter, fat, fat boy, fatty, fitness, Gerry Farrell, health ads, health club ads, health clubs, Leith, mark gorman, tangible, the edinburgh club, the leith agency
I am inedbted to Doug Cook for spotting and sending me this. It’s a recruitment ad for the very early days Leith Agency. I was an account man there at the time. The shot was taken from an award winning press campaign (I was the account handler) for The Edinburgh Club. The original ad that the photo derived from featured an exaggerated ‘before and after’ comparison. Naturally, I was the ‘before’.
Anyway the Leith recruitment ad was essentially saying we want account handlers who are prepared to get their tits out.
It worked.
I left six months later to set up 1576 with Adrian and David.
That’ll teach ‘em to give me a public profile!
Here it is at a more browser friendly size.
How I love my gang so much. Christmas Dinner. 2008.
the moment
Originally uploaded by mark gorman.
Filed under: advertising, Arts, food, humour, jokes, life, photography, Scotland, stories | Tags: dundee, grafitti, pie
This kind of grafitti has a real resonance in the home of the slogan…
“Ah’ll hae a pae an’ an ingin in an’ a’.”
Filed under: family, food, humour, jokes, life, Rants, Scotland, stories | Tags: anchovy fillets, baxters, complaint, food, rant, salmonella
I’ve been away. In Perthshire. On holiday. Hence the neglect to my blog.
But I’m back and I’m gonna start with a rant.
The letter below, that I wrote to Baxters, should be self explanatory…
The Managing Director
Baxters Food Group
(Retail Division)
Fochabers
Moray
IV32 7LD
Dear Sir/Madam
I enclose a package of what your delicatessen in the Baxters Food Store in Blackford laughably describes as edible.
Were I in need of a quantity of rubber fish (perhaps to use as a prop in a Pantomime or even, more grandly, a movie) I’d have found the £2.70 I spent in Blackford a very worthwhile and economic investment. After all, to fashion such life-like facsimiles of the common or garden Anchovy fillet (Engraulis encrasicolus) would be no mean feat for such a price (no doubt the Chinese would have to be enlisted for their outstanding skills in mass producing machine-tooled ephemera).
Were I in need of a full colonic cleansing treatment I may have eschewed the four market leaders shown below and opted instead to actually consume these anchovyesque ‘things’ that you sold me.
As it happens my suspicions, which were aroused at point of sale, that this produce would be unfit for human consumption were sadly proven to be justified. They were raised upon observing your super-inefficient sales lady dousing the aforementioned Anchovy-like, gut churning, rubbery specimens in the ancient oil in which they lay, in a vain effort to breathe elasticity into their tired and dehydrated bodies.
Because, on opening the packing a few hours later her elaborate deception unravelled quicker than you can say ‘Salmonella’.
To say these anchovies were past their best would be an understatement of gargantuan proportions. These anchovies are so ‘past their best’ that I suspect they may have been caught by a trawler thrashing around in the wake of the Titanic. I may even go further than that and suggest they are the discovered remains of an orgiastic party held by Nefertiti.
Sir; because I have enclosed these vile beasts you will be able to see for yourself what these monsters of the deep could have done to me and my young family before you decide how best to unbesmirch the previously pristine reputation of the Baxters Food Group.
Yours faithfully
Mark Gorman
UPDATE
Yesterday I received a very straightforward letter in response to my own, bereft of humour, enclosing a £10 voucher and an apology. Ok, fair enough, they took it on the chin, but I’d have liked a bit of repartee (and a hamper).
Filed under: food, motors, Restaurant reviews, Scotland | Tags: a9, ballinluig, cafes, caff, greasy spoon, grill, grills, Inverness, motor grill, motorway services, restaurants, the A9
Travellers of the A9 will be familiar with this magnificent treasure. It’s not likely to be picking up any AA rosettes in the near future; nevertheless it is exquisite.
The staff are solid gold, friendly, efficient and determinedly local (even if half of them are Polish these days).
The food is strictly of the greasy spoon variety, but grease-free.
Situated just north of Dunkeld it is the ideal spot to break a tr ip between Edinburgh and Inverness, indeed I would almost go as far as to say it should be a destination in its own right.
I had breakfast there on Tuesday. Scrambled egg on toast and a mug of tea.
Simply the best
Filed under: advertising, business, food, humour, jokes, life, Rants, Scotland, stories, work | Tags: every little helps, tesco, tesco direct, tesco stores, tesco wines
I noticed in my bank statement yesterday that two payments for £41.16 had been paid to Tesco on the same day. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to establish that something was wrong so I phoned my Bank, Lloyds TSB who swiftly washed their hands of it and pointed me in the direction of Tesco.
Never mind, I thought, Tesco’s legendary approach to customer service. Every little helping and all that, will sort this out quicker than you can say “It’s not my fault.”
Nah.
Call 1 To Tesco.com. “What’s the store code on the statement?” I was asked. I told them and they washed their hands of it. “Not our problem sir, that’s A Tesco Direct store code. Here’s the number.”
Call 2 To Tesco Direct. “Sorry Sir that’s not our code. You’ll need to call Tesco Stores.”
Call 3 To Tesco Stores. After the phone rang out for 20 minutes I hung up.
Call 4 To Tesco Stores. Got through this time . Again refusal to acknowledge the store code and a grudging acceptance that they should establish exactly what store code 3538 really is. After holding for 5 minutes as “the computers are running slow and I have to search all our store codes in the UK” I had to hang up as I was running late for a meeting.
Call 5 Spoke to a nice guy in Wales who asked me “What’s Occurin’?” (nah I made that bit up. He actually tried to resolve the issue and said he’d call me back in 5 minutes.
Call 6 Nice guy proclaimed triumphantly that he’d sorted it. “It’s Tesco Wines!” he exclaimed with glee. “I’ve never used Tesco Wines.” I told him. “ah… Well I’ll put you through to Tesco Wine and they’ll sort it for you.”
Call 7 After a five minute wait I was put through to Tesco Wine. “Don’t know what he’s talkin’ about.” said Tesco Wines guy “That isn’t our code. But you’ve come to the right place. We’ll sort it out for you. I’ll call you back in 5 minutes.”
Call 8 Twenty minutes later. “We haven’t sorted it out sir but we will. I promise you. I’ll call you back later. We’re too busy just now…”
He didn’t.
Call 9 Well, actually there was no call nine because the Tesco Wine guy was just too busy, after all I’m just a pesky customer, and a complaining one at that.
Call 10 Imagine my surprise when the comment below appeared on my blog. Someone at Tesco Dundee had obviously read my blog and felt a need to do something about it and asked me to call her the next day. So I did. She was in a meeting.
Call 11 The lovely lady, Helen from Dundee, called me back six hours later and promised to sort it all out within minutes, took my details and said she’d call me back. She was astonished that the staff didn’t know what code 3538 was.
Call 12 She did. Soon thereafter. Only to tell me that I was indeed correct and that in fact my card had been “compromised” ie some sneaky cyber thief had nicked it and was ordering as much as he/she/it could get its hands on as quickly as inhumanly possible. In fact a further four transactions were in the pipeline for £160 or so.
Sooooo.
Call 13 To Lloyds TSB to report the fraud. That led to
Call 14 to Lloyds TSB’s Credit Card division. Where they told me I should be speaking to the Debit card division via
Call 15 To Lloyds TSB’s Debit Card division who passed me onto
Call 16 Another snipey bloke in their debit Card Division who said he’d “send me a form.”
Why can’t they all be like wee Helen from Dundee?
Filed under: dad, family, food, life, Scotland, stories | Tags: eggs, ham, ham and eggs
While I was a regular visitor to St Columba’s Hospice seeing my Dad I posted this.
“If I had some eggs, we could have ham and eggs; if I had some ham.” my Uncle Christopher declared this afternoon.
Wise words.
But my mother violently disagreed with this because she retorted
“If we had some eggs we could have eggs and ham; if we had some ham.”
Not sure about that. In fact it’s total bollocks – because what she really meant to say, and did, was…
“If we had ham, we could have ham and eggs; if we had eggs.”
You know what…
…I don’t give a monkey’s uncle!
My first draft said “I don’t give a flying fuck” but I thought I should be more thoughtful and sensitive than that.
Anyway, the way tinternet works it has become a strangely popular post, having been read 500 or so times by people googling this lame image, which was the image I nicked to put in the original post. Strange .
I’M GOING TO HAVE TO WRITE THIS IN CAPITAL LETTERS TO REFLECT THE TONE OF THE TWO GEEZERS WHO PRESENT MASTERCHEFF THESE DAYS.
What was wrong with the lugubriousness of Lloyd Grossman?
ANYWAY, AFTER AN ENTHRALLING FINAL (BUT A NOT GREAT FORMAT OVERALL) THE GORMAN FAMILY AGREED THAT THERE WAS NO DOUBT JAMESY DESERVED THE TITLE.
HURRAH!
Filed under: advertising, Arts, books, food, life, Scotland, stories, work | Tags: Alistair Mcleod, burns, burns supper, Charlie Mclean, NABS, newfoundland, novels, poetry, robert burns, short stories
In my spare time, when I’m not writing this drivel, I sit on a fundraising committee for the advertising and media industry in Scotland called NABS (National Advertising Benevolent Society). It pays for the repair of broken Ferrari axles and so on. (That’s a joke!)
Last night was the inaugural Burns Supper for said charity and despite doing bugger all in terms of organising it I found myself on the top table clapped in as we followed the piper into the the main suite at the Roxburgh Hotel in Edinburgh. Then, to my delight, I found I was seated next to wit and raconteur, Charlie Mclean, one of world’s greatest authorities on Malt whisky and allegedly the most famous whisky writer in Macedonia.
He can certainly lay claim to having one of the more distinguished moustaches in Edinburgh.
It transpires that all that nosing, swirling and spitting out of whisky to “taste” it is a load of bollocks. You just neck it and move on. That was an interesting and reassuring insight. Between us and not many others we “nosed” a bottle of Old Poulteney.
The event was a triumph and Keith Crane should be knighted or something for his efforts.
My highlight of the evening was, on telling Charlie that he must read a sublime Newfoundland collection of short stories by Alastair Mcleod, called “The lost Salt Gift of Blood” which had been recommended to me by Simon Scott he told me that he had recommended it to Simon Scott.
Now, this is a book that is beyond reviewable. It is possibly the finest book I have ever read (pre blog days) and concerns itself with life in Newfoundlanfd. Taut, sparingly written and seemingly monochromatic it is a bleak but intense insight into human life.
It’s been out of print for years but second hand copies are available through Amazon. Sadly, I lent my copy to some bastard who never gave it back to me but I urge you to read it.
(If you are the bastard I leant it to could you give it back please.)
I played golf in the winter league this morning. I think the “nosing” affected my performance a tad. Four 7′s on the back nine not being the basis of great success, although my partner, Jon Rough (good name for golf), pissed it and won the medal.
(PS. I gave the book to the Mrs, so forget the above random accusation.)
I think I’ve raved about Kismot before but, if so, I am going to do so again. It is a family run Indian restaurant in St Leonards Place in Edinburgh, described by some as the new “old” Khushis.
New, old, whatever. It boasts the finest food and the best service in an Indian restaurant in Edinburgh.
When I say good service, I mean spectacular. This family is brilliant. Dad is the chef. Mum bakes the exquisite nans. The son is head waiter and has a truly authentic Edinburgh/Indian accent, and the daughters are the waitresses.
The food is abundant, authentic, delicious and stunning value.
To top it off it’s a BYOB joint.
I promise you, you will not find a better Indian restaurant in Edinburgh.
And, if you don’t believe me read this…
Night Out With Friends
The Kismot in St Leonards St, Edinburgh is a treasure of true ethnic Asian eating, whether eating in or taking a meal home. Spotlessly clean, this family run restuarant is the best we have sampled in the whole of the UK. Mum & Dad do the cooking, the rest of the family give the friendliest, most welcoming ambiance you could wish for. Yes often in Kilts!!!! We had arrived back in Edinburgh 18months ago from India and having nothing in the house went out for dinner-it was the night of the opening of The Kismot. So spotting a new place we gave it a try – no regrets whatsoever – the food was just as we had been having 2 days previously IN INDIA!!! We have been back to the Kismot many times and often with friends, others we have told about how good it is have all thanked us for the info. No drinks licence, so if you eat in – Take your own bottle(s) with you. The Menu is Typical of Indian/Bangladeshi Restuarants, however, the standard of the cooking, ingredients, presentation and taste are way way above anything we have experienced anywhere else in the UK.
Or this…
| Claire |  |
| An absolutely wonderful restaurant! The food is delicious, probably the best Indian food I have ever tasted. The atmosphere is perfect for any occassion and for large or small groups. The price is very reasonable. But, the best thing about this restaurant is the family who run it – they are very friendly, lovely people and can not do more to please you! | |
Filed under: food, Restaurant reviews, work | Tags: Crispy belly of pork, Thai, Thai restaurant
Tony Harding told me I would have the finest meal of my life in a Thai restaurant in Manchester, where I am working just now. It was pretty nice but Dusit in Thistle Street kicks its arse.
Filed under: dad, family, food, life, Restaurant reviews, work | Tags: food
Four of the handsomest chefs on the planet cooked a three course meal (with three or four choices per course) for 60 of the ladies of Holy Cross Parish on Saturday. Given that I was at it from 10 am to 11pm the day after the hedonistic Scottish Advertising Awards it made for a tough gig.
My dad did it for years, so I took his place this year.
But we made at least £500 profit for charity so can’t really complain.
At least we looked good.
Nae. Great!
I always moan that I have all sorts of bird feeders in the garden and no birds appear.
But the last couple of mornings I’ve enjoyed my morning cup of tea watching the to-ing and fro-ing of lots of little birds. So I just wanted to remind everyone that as the weather is changing and getting colder, make sure you’re feeding all the little birdies.
I buy my bird food at the wholesalers, Lawson Donaldson, at Calder Road. A 20kg bag of wild bird feed for £9.00 lasts me a year and the two bird feeders were only £5.00. So get yourself along for all your garden paraphanalia before the 31st October as it is closing down.
