Unprocessed Day 2

Breakfast: wholemeal bread with butter and salted salmon, coffee. The bread is baked, the salmon cured, the coffee roasted, but it all counts as unprocessed, bizarrely.

Snack: More of the bread with some cheese and a pint of homebrewed stout. The bread was heavy and dense and smelt of malty bran flakes, but it’s quite good with savoury things like the cheese and salmon.

Dinner: mushroom curry with polished white basmati rice. I guess the rice counts as processed, but I don't care.

#Unprocessed Day 1

A bit difficult today as I spent the night at my mum’s.

Breakfast: fried bread, eggs, bacon. Maple syrup and brown sauce (not unprocessed). Coffee.

Dinner (at cafe): wrap with lamb kobba, salad, baba ghanousch. Processed tortilla chips on the side which I gave to my friend.

When I came home I had a few slices of salted salmon and made bread dough to be baked in the morning.

#Unprocessed

I’ve been humming and hawing, trying to decide whether or not to take part in #Unprocessed. It’s a virtual event designed to enable people to feel smug about their diets by eating nothing “processed” for the whole month of October.

The name is a misnomer, of course, as many foods are processed in some way: bread and beer are some of the oldest processed foods. But in this case a very liberal notion of “unprocessed” applies.

But can I do without Nutella for a month?

I eat (or think I do, at any rate) relatively little “processed” (in the sense of October Unprocessed) food anyway, so it will be interesting to see what difficulties I encounter. What I don’t make from scratch passes the “kitchen test” in most cases: bacon, jam, pasta ... things I could make in my kitchen if I really wanted to.

So while I have my reservations about the concept and am aware there are likely to be a lot of food faddists on board of the sugar-is-poison school, eating more whole grains and fewer things packed in plastic can’t be bad.

I have already slipped this morning and had brown sauce on my bacon and eggs. So I’m not going to be a purist and will be guided more by common sense than someone else’s criteria. I’ll still choose a home-baked white loaf over a wholemeal one from a supermarket.

At the moment I’m thinking of what to do with the box of mushrooms in my fridge. I would make risotto, but I don’t have any stock, and stock cubes are out of bounds. When you make risotto with stock cubes it just tastes like packet soup anyway, so perhaps #unprocessed is doing me a favour.

London Review of Bread (reprise)

Down in That London last week, I am now able to confidently go into bakers’ shops and say “Is it alright if I take some pictures of your bread, as I’m a bread nerd?”

Cut loaves on sale at a branch of Gail’s in Crouch End.

I love huge loaves cut into halves or quarters.

This is the one I bought, white sourdough. But it looks better than it tastes.

Good looking baguettes in a café in Brockley, made “somewhere in Tottenham”

Beigel in Brick Lane, seen here with a salt beef filling

Breakfast bread

I’m quite happy with the way this loaf has turned out. Rather thick crust on it so best eaten as fresh as possible.

Call for homebrewers

After last year’s Glasgow Beer and Pub Project, a group of drinkers was inspired enough to get together to organise the first Glasgow Beer Week. Homebrewers are wanted to come along to a night of the homebrewers next Friday and produce beer for a pop-up pub during Beer Week. You can sign up here.