Cutting out the additives

It was something of a shock to discover, not so long ago, that table salt often contains aluminum hydroxide, which is added to make the salt pour better. Yet this is something that has been suggested as a potential cause of Alzheimer’s.

The source for this discovery (which I suspect a load of you out there already know) was Raymond Blanc.

There’s always a tub or bag of table salt in the cupboard: I’ve tended to use it for cooking vegetables and pasta, and for when I salt cod.

No more. After reading that information, I lost any remote sense of appetite for such a product. I was already using Maldon sea salt for the table (ironic, eh?) and there was a tub of course sea salt in the cupboard too, so it was hardly as though I was suddenly sans salt.

I haven’t touched the table salt since that time and, last night, the remaining salt itself was poured down the drain and the tub tossed into the recycling crate.

It makes me feel that I’m rather dopey not to have known already. Or rather, I knew that such salts had additives in to stop the salt caking, but it hadn’t really crossed my mind to find out just what they were or to consider that they might be linked to such a serious health condition.

It’s not the only thing I’ve stopped using – or am attempting to do so.

I’d heard years ago – although have scant memory for the detail – that artificial sweeteners have all sorts of questions hanging over them too. Some time ago, I stopped using any in tea or coffee, concluding that it was better to use straightforward granulated sugar.

At the same time, I started drinking more Earl Grey, which I need nothing added to, and camomile, which is also just fine neat. In recent weeks, I’ve stopped taking any sugar in drinks.

The biggest difficulty is Diet Coke or Pepsi. It’s not that I’m addicted, but there are times when I really do want a can of fizz and I’m used to picking up a diet variety.

A quick Google search for ‘health issues aspartame’ reveals a lot of links. There have been claims, over a number of years, that artificial sweeteners can even contribute to weight gain.

Research has suggested that it’s safe, but various governments (at local and national level) have considered banning it, while some supermarket chains have stopped using it in their own-brand foods.

Now, I’m no expert, so I don’t know the rights or wrongs of the claims and counter-claims.

But it does make one think: ‘why risk it?’ Or even if there’s no risk, why bother adding something so completely artificial to one’s food?

I don’t want to get obsessive, but the more I read and the more I think about such things, it seems sensible to maintain as much control over what you consume as possible. And I even have some anecdotal experience to back this up.

Some years ago, a colleague and I did an experiment. The pub over the road from where we worked served Carling on tap. That was what we drank after we'd got the paper away, in the face of the best efforts of a computer network that crashed regularly and with no warning.

But a discussion one evening revealed that both of us suffered headaches or, in my case, odd dreams after even a pint.

We resolved to spend a month drinking the bitter – even though it was from a keg. In all that time, the symptoms that we'd noticed ceased.

I haven't drunk Carling since and, in the years since then, I learned about the Reinheitsgebot, the German purity law of 1516, which said that the only things that a brewer could put into beer were barley, hops, malt and water. What a fantastic (and amazingly obvious) idea – and it's still around, which is why you can drink Becks and never get a really bad head.

Not that the Germans – who know a thing or two about beer – are unique on this score: Czech Budvar is the same: strong and with a serious taste, it still doesn't leave me with any unpleasant dreams or thumping heads.

And after all, it’s hardly as if un-processed food and drink with no additives are boring or bland!

The best laid plans of mice and cooks …

There were plans for Monday night – food plans. The reduction of a small amount of Sunday’s chicken stock, with the addition of a couple of things, including fresh orange juice and zest, and tarragon, which would act as a dressing for some of the cold chicken.

That was going to be served with new potatoes (possibly roasted and crushed with oodles of garlic) and some fine beans that I found on Broadway Market on Saturday – the first English ones of the year.

But it came to pass that, only a short while before my scheduled departure from the office, the word want out that our presence was required in the bar at 5.15pm.

Now, this was, to say the least, unusual, since the staff social club’s bar only opens on Tuesdays to Fridays. What was going on?

You may recall that the bar, in its current incarnation, is nearly at an end, as we ready ourselves to move into a new building, where a café bar will be run in the early evenings, not by volunteer bar staff, but by the same people who run the staff ‘deli’.

Tomorrow night is the final, FINAL hurrah, but since several of the regulars are, even now, en route to a brief sojourn in Sicily (hopefully not to run into any dodgy Godfather types), Monday provided the sole remaining opportunity for a final get together – on the pretext of making presentations to Sam and Ben, the club treasurer and chief bar steward.

That the book club were also meeting to discuss their reading for the past month, while assorted national executive committee members also popped in over the course of the evening ensured it was a lively affair.

But by the time we got home, I was hardly much inclined to much in the way of food prep – buttering two slices of bread, slapping a load of cold chicken in between them and sprinkling with salt (chicken sandwiches absolutely require additional salting) was the height of culinary endeavour.

Tonight, because this is the first of two planned final bashes, I have no concrete plans. We shall just have to see.

But in the meantime, if any of you are curious enough, here is a little pictoral homage to the almost-closed-for-the-last-time bar, as appeared this afternoon on the blog of our club icon, Colin.

It may explain why Cloud Nine will be missed. Or then again, it may not!

The end of an era

Well, last night’s Italian experiment – a dish combining fennel and lambs’ kidneys – didn’t really produce a sense of culinary excitement, so there isn’t really much to report on that front.

If I manage to cook much this evening, it’ll be late and simple: in other words, probably pasta.

The reason for this is that after a little swap to help out a fellow bar steward, I have a shift in the staff bar this evening. Not just any old shift, though: my final full shift before we all move to a bright and shiny new building with a café-bar that will be run by the same people that currently run the ‘deli bar’ here and will running a rather more ambitious food service over the road.

The new kitchens are incredible – I had a chance to look around a couple of weeks ago. And it will certainly give the team vastly improved facilities. Having just a single hob at present is ridiculous.

But I remain sceptical, and not vastly encouraged by scatty little back-slapping comments on a company Facebook page about the new ovens meaning that they can bake bread and cakes: for goodness sake, they cannot currently ensure that the slices in a bag of factory bread are not stale when they get them out to make a sandwich! And they spread pizza bases with marg – a piece of knowledge that makes me tremble in horror every time I recall it!

I feel a kind of guilt complaining about the canteen, because I don’t want to seem to be ‘nasty’ to the staff, who are themselves close to being colleagues.

But that’s actually rather poor, because however well-meaning and pleasant they themselves are, the service that they provide is generally pretty dismal. I did raise much of this in a survey that I mentioned here last year, but have had no feedback on that and have seen no indication of positive change.

And it’s not just me. A colleague observed earlier today that she won’t even have a basic sandwich from there now as they’re so poor, even when made in front of you, while another colleague noted recently that, if one of the staff goes to open a new bag of bread to make him a sandwich, he asks for the third and fourth slices down in order to avoid the stale ones that invariably seem to be at the top.

If things really do not improve, then complaining will have to happen.

But back to my bar shift. I may have an odd hour to do next week when we bid our final farewells to the bar with a couple of big socials, but this is the last time that I will spend three and a half hours (if I have customers!) playing my choice of music.

This is often an eclectic selection, ranging from pop/rock at the beginning of an evening, when I’m more conscious of what the majority will appreciate, to show songs as sobriety recedes and bursts of Wagner, played loud, as an aid to clearing the place at closing time.

For anyone who has not been visiting this part of cyberspace long, here’s a little description of a typical Friday night in the bar. It gives a useful flavour, I think.

So we will miss the place – and have to find ways to put our stamp of bonkerness on to the blank, corporate space that awaits.

In the meantime, tonight I shall blast the air full of a variety of tunes – including some that possibly should be classed as ‘guilty pleasures’. But I shall do so with nary a note of embarrassment – armed with a bottle of proper Czech Budvar close to hand.

An ordinary Saturday night in Manchester

Saturday evening. After plodding around galleries and streets – the latter in preliminary search of photographic locations for a conference next June – I was knackered. Well, my feet certainly were. They’re rebelling against being shoved back into restrictive footwear after spending the overwhelming amount of the last five months in Birkenstocks or flip-flops.

So there I was, after a day spent thinking artistically. What to do for the evening? While I contemplated this – and gave my feet a break – I sat alongside the canal on Canal Street, outside Churchills, a diet Coke and ciggy at hand, watching the world go by.

For those who don’t know, Canal Street is at the heart of ‘The Village’ in Manchester; the centre of the city’s LGBT community and life.

Churchills is a spectacularly camp – it even hosts drag karaoke – and plays the sort of music that I enjoy (by way of an illustration, there was even Ute Lemper singing All That Jazz from Chicago on Saturday night).

There were Rugby League fans getting ready for that evening’s Grand Final, in noisy but robust good humour.

And then a large group of women arrived, in black t-shirts bearing the gold legend: ‘Lady Gail’s hen party Manchester’. They were, it became rapidly clear, from Liverpool. I hadn’t realised that there was that much hair bleach in the whole world.

Before long, having claimed three tables just along from where I was sitting, two of the more senior members of the troupe got up to perform their version of a robot dance. When one of them bent over, she couldn’t get up and had to be pulled back up by her belt.

Everywhere, onlookers were in hysterics. Men crowded to the window of Queer, next door, and joined in the laughter. I was nearly crying.

They flitted in and out of Churchills for the next hour or so, quaffing heaven alone knows how much vodka and Coke, and occasionally partaking of the services of the drag queen DJ inside, taking to the stage for a spot of karaoke – some of which could (unfortunately) be heard outside in the street.

One of the street performers, wearing vast green curlers in her blonde hair, borrowed my lighter and explained that they’d arrived at 11am in the morning and not stopped drinking since. Their hotel rooms for the night were well stocked with, err, plenty of vodka. I hate to think what their heads will have felt like the following morning.

As dark drew in, I pottered down to Vanilla, an all-girl bar nearby. I say “all-girl”, but men are allowed.

It’s run by Mary, a sort of lesbian version of the tough northern barmaid with a heart of gold.

It’s on two tiny floors, with a dinky pool table downstairs – and unlike at least one other such establishment I have visited (in Amsterdam), it is not non-competitive pool.

“Non-competitive pool?” repeated Mary back to me, the first time I visited and decided to check first in case it was some sort of universal thing. “Non-competitive pool!”

Reassured, I stuck around. It was on one visit last year that I had my first taste of absinthe in Vanilla. On a remarkably quiet early Saturday evening this time around, I was adopted by five teenagers as a mascot.

Given that I was, by some margin, the oldest person in the establishment, they were tactful enough to nickname me ‘Mother’ instead of a rather older female relative that I might actually have been old enough to have been to any of them.

It appeared that they needed advice on relationships and careers, wanted to discuss politics and general and the nature of feminism in particular.

And they did assure me that ‘you’re never too old’ and that I have ‘beautiful eyes’.

I admit having felt just a teensy weensy little bit like a dirty old (middle aged) woman receiving such flirty attention. And even though I have never been a cradle-snatcher, I admit that, as I knocked back a shot of some very brightly coloured liquid and winked at a rather pretty tomboy, I was really rather enjoying myself.

Nights in northern cities can be darned good fun!

Just an ordinary Friday evening

Allow me, if you will, to introduce you to Colin.

Colin works for the same organisation that is currently my number one client, and is the life and soul of the staff sports and social club.

This group runs a bar on the ninth floor of our ten-storey example of concrete brutalism. Volunteers staff the bar from 5-8.30pm, Tuesday to Friday, thus ensuring that the price of booze is kept helpfully low.

A bottle of proper Czech Budvar, for instance, costs just £1.50.

But back to Colin. Let me give you an example of of the man himself at play.

On Friday night, he was one of the first to arrive in what we affectionately call ‘Cloud Nine’. Ben, bar steward for the evening, had gone downstairs to collect a case of wine. So Col, who does his fair share of shifts, nipped behind to serve himself.

There he discovered an open bag of cola sweets, left by a customer earlier in the week after, apparently, having spent two months in her handbag. In the interests of science, these details are important.

Colin joyfully crunched his way through a couple. And then, as other regulars drifted in, came up with an idea. Well, it was a question really – or an idea of how to answer a question.

How long would it take to dissolve a cola cube in a glass of booze?

A shot glass was pulled out and given a nice measure of neat vodka. A bright pink cola cube was dropped into it. Nothing very much happened.

By this stage, Dicky and Tim were enthusiastically joining in too, although Jon looked far less convinced.

There followed lots of boy talk about what might do the trick. Another shot glass had lemonade added to it (well, the chemical excuse for lemonade that shops retail cheaply). The sweet brought forth quite a lot of fizzing and froth, but still determinedly sat at the bottom of the glass stubbornly refusing to dissolve.

At this point, Colin decided that the only way forward was to drop one in his own pint glass of Swedish cider, to sit at the bottom with loads of ice. It still didn’t dissolve, but apparently tasted yummy when he’d quaffed his libation and fished it out from amongst the remaining ice to eat.

The ideas about how to make a cola cube dissolve completely continued. It was suggested that heating the liquid that it was in might do the trick.

Perhaps it would work if you set light to some alcohol containing such a cube? Perhaps – this was a Colin special – you could take a bottle of that never-seen-a-lemon lemonade, put a cube in the bottle and screw the top back on tightly, then put it in the dishwasher and set the machine going so that it would be heated up.

Ben refused to countenance either experiment – the first, because nobody wanted to pay for the booze required, and the second, because he thought the plastic bottle would probably explode in the dishwasher.

But thus was born the social club’s science project – a whacked-out meeting of Brainiac and beer and boys. What better combination could be imagined?

Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder

Drunk by the very best of Parisian artistic society in the late 19th century, absinthe is a drink that has fascinated me for some time – well, at least since its revival in the last decade and it's unbanning in many European Union countries.

What is it? Why is it so awful that it was banned for years?

Those are the sort of questions that run through one's head.

Even the traditional preparation is about as Bohemian as it's possible to imagine.

Take a glass with a shot of absinthe, then place a special slotted spoon across the top, with a sugar cube on it. Drizzle ice-cold water on the sugar, so that it slowly dissolves into the absinthe, thus making a cloudy mixture as the herbs in the spirit are brought out. There's even a word for the cloudy look – louche, which rather adds to the mystique.

Well, there I was in Manchester, feeling not remotely grim up north and having discovered Vanilla, a most conducive lesbian bar just off the legendary Canal Street.

Having an evening to kill, I was attempting to look sophisticated by drinking G&Ts (apparently, my desire to have the Gordon's gin rather than the house standard was a sign of poshness) and trying to make myself generally agreeable to a very friendly crowd.

Now, lesbian bars and I have a history, which goes back to Amsterdam some years ago, when I visited Saarein. Delighted to see a pool table, I came instantly unstuck when it was made clear that hustling was out – this was uncompetitive pool. Which was a bit like suggesting I visit Manchester to watch City play uncompetitive football matches – although some might say that's been the reality for years.

I made an effort – which itself seemed oddly opposed to the idea of an uncompetitive game – but I readily confess to being utterly hopeless at not trying to win. Suffice it to say that I impressed nobody.

So, fast forward to Vanilla. The pool was competitive (but played in a perfectly well-mannered way) and the clientele and staff were open and friendly.

A few G&Ts down the road, I happened to notice a sign in the toilets, advertising 'flaming absinthe'. So I enquired. It materialised that the 'flaming' bit was off the menu, since it was well gone 9pm (I remain in the dark about this reasoning), but that I could have a shot of the stuff. I took the opportunity.

Canal Street may not quite be Montmartre, but it's quite Bohemian, in it's own fashion. The LGBT crowd are joined at weekends by hen parties and groups of straights, eager to enjoy the sights and get a fix of the party athmosphere.

The little plastic shot glass was full of la fée verte.

Here we go.

"Oh my God! Is that absinthe?" shrilled a girl next to me at the bar, sighting the glass. Another girl chipped in.

"I had some of that one night and I was so ill the next morning."

Now or never: I'm the daring one here.

A sip. Just a very small sip. 

Boy, has it got a kick. You know how whiskey has been called 'fire water'? Well this stuff makes whiskey feel like mere water.

A man behind me, thinking he wouldn't be outdone, ordered a shot too – and gulped it back in one. He was gasping, clutching at his throat for several moments after.

A sip. Just a small sip. I'm not a total fool.

Very aniseedy. You need the iced water and the spoon and the sugar to bring out the other flavours of fennel and grande wormwood. But very pleasant none the less.

Recent research has debunked the claims that absinthe is a powerful psychoactive drug – but it's still a powerful something. The warmth spread rapidly to my limbs, but my mind stayed clear (well, as clear as those G&Ts and an absinthe allowed).

I decided to melt into the night while I could still think about doing so.

Did it make the heart grow fonder? Well, it did nothing to quench my extreme horniness. But since my chances of pulling had decreased with the arrival of a very loud gang of straight women celebrating one of their number's 21st birthday, I popped into a nearby CloneZone and purchased a cheap and nicely proportioned dildo. It was enough to help make the rest of the evening, in a bland hotel room, very pleasant. And even appropriately louche.