Not being able to eat wheat puts a dampener on enjoying food. All prepared food seems to contain wheat. Supermarkets these days have 'free from' aisles, which supposedly have wheat-free treats. Normally 'free from' means free from flavour. Now, the 'priced like Harrods' corner shop in my housing development have started selling wheat-free cakes; if only they were free from flavour.

Mrs Crimble's honey caramel cake is one of the most utterly repulsive foods it has been my displeasure not to have avoided tasting. I didn't even swallow it so totally repellant was it. The texture was dry and powdery and it tasted like the smell of kitchen cleaner; cheap perfume and soap. I am really disgusted that I can still taste it a couple of minutes after I spat it out. The word 'horrible' goes nowhere near far enough to describe this travesty of a cake.

I used to blow up custard powder and flour when I was a youth, but this lorry driver managed a far bigger explosion than I could have dreamed of. It would have been fun to watch.

Sitting just off Edgware road Green Valley can be found; a Lebanese delicatessen of such quality it is deserving of destination-status for any lovers of Lebanese food.

We have been there many times before, but as we were coming back from Oxford via Paddington today it seemed an ideal opportunity to drop by without trekking off the path home. As ever, our visit there was most profitable.

They have a wide selection of Middle-Eastern foods to choose from. Their lamb kibbeh are always pleasing, we got six. For general snacking purposes the falafel are the best I've had in London, delicious. They have a range of prepared salads, mujadarah (lentil salad with fried onions) is a personal favourite. I have many happy memories of this dish causing me to fart like a trumpet major: this merits buying a large tub full. They have excellent bean salads and great hommous.

As well as the array of prepared goodies they have a well-stoked meat counter, which usually has such things as lamb testicles, whole ox tongue and for the more conventional diner the beef, veal and lamb look excellent.

There are plenty of Middle-Eastern canned goods and excellent flat-breads which are so good it is deeply painful that I cannot eat wheat. In the fridge you shouldn't miss out on the Power Horse energy-drink, hits the caffeine spot and sounds vaguely suggestive.

There is such an embarrassment of riches it can sometimes be hard not to splurge out excessively but, as we know, the path of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. What can I say but cruise up the Green Valley and enjoy noshing.

Contact details: Green Valley, 36 Upper Berkeley Street, London W1H 5QF. 0207 402 7385.

Those of us who have difficulties with wheat can have a miserable time choosing food; wheat is in bloody everything. However, on my last trip to our local branch of Sainsburys I checked the ingredients of two of their 'Taste the difference' range of sausages and was delighted to see they didn't contain wheat. Hooray! I love sausages and it is great that a supermarket is pandering to picky eaters like me and making some gluten-free ones. The favours of choice are Sicilian and British pork and herb.

OK, they may not reach the stellar quality of the gluten-free sausages from Sillfield Farm, but they'll do very nicely, thank you.

I have railed against the danger of salad in the past: lettuce will give you cancer. Obviously lettuce is to be avoided wherever possible, but there are ways to make it even less healthy.

Leftist-shite sloppy thinkers generally believe that organic fruit and vegetables are more healthy than standard fruit and vegetables. This is, of course, total bullshit. Organic fruit and vegetables are not sprayed to prevent them from rotting, so by the time they reach the supermarket shelf they are laced with carcinogenic fungal metabolic by-products that non-organic offerings do not have.

Now, the hard of thinking may think that the compounds used to preserve non-organic fruit and vegetables would be dangerous. This is really sloppy thinking, who would knowingly lace food with toxins that damage people? Of course, you can wash these preservatives off the surface of non-organic food, where as organic fruit and vegetables contain their carcinogenic compounds all of the way through; they cannot be washed away.

It is only organic fruit and vegetables that are dangerous, organic meat is fine (to be sought out, in fact). So, avoid lettuce, definitely avoid organic lettuce. Not buying organic fruit and vegetables will also save money; cheaper and healthier, hooray!

Last Saturday we joined the neighbours to cook a veritable feast of Thai food. We could not have done this without the truly excellent book Thai Food by David Thompson. It is much more than a cookery book; it has much to say about the food culture and history in Thailand. It is a fascinating, mouth-watering read and experience has shown that the recipes are reliable.

Of course, to make Thai food you need the correct ingredients. We are extremely fortunate to have an Oriental supermarket just down the road from us; a trip to See Woo (known as See Woo Run for those of us who grew up with Janet and John books) provides all one needs. We cannot be alone in cooking Thai food in South-East London as See Woo is generally heaving with shoppers.

We started off with pla hoi shenn or raw scallop salad. The scallops were quite lovely with all of those fresh lime, coriander, mint and chilli flavours, but we didn't have quite enough scallop meat to keep the dish balanced. Good of Daniel to try preparing something new; we shall probably re-visit this recipe.

Our second course was a dish we've prepared before: goong cha nam pla or raw prawn salad. This is always a real roller coaster of a dish with all of the garlic and chillies keeping you interested, not to mention in pain. Chilli pain is good, though, gets those endorphins flowing. A top dish prepared with plenty of skill by Daniel.

Our final effort on the salad front was nahm dtok, grilled beef salad. This is a dish which deserves a damned-good piece of beef and grilling it only until it is very rare. David Thompson suggests this could also be made with pork, venison or hare, but I like the rare beef path.

We then had a soup course: dtom yam gung - hot and sour prawn soup. There are two tricks to making this. Firstly, the soup broth is made by boiling up all the the prawn heads and shells; this makes a powerfully flavoured stock. The second trick is not to cook the raw prawns directly over heat, but put them in the serving bowls and let them cook very slightly by pouring the hot soup broth into the bowl. This makes for a lively, exciting soup with perfectly (under-)cooked prawns

Moving onto main courses we started off with neua pat nahm prik pao kaek - stir-fried beef with spices. This is a powerfully flavoured dish, even though it doesn't have much chilli. The combination of beef and the spices makes this very reminiscent of cooking from the middle-ages in Europe. Well done Jeff for pulling off this dish so successfully.

A Thai meal at home would not be the same without Dan cooking a green curry. He has mastered the art of cracking coconut cream, a necessary step in the production of a first-rate green curry. I was very pleased that the chicken he cooked it with was thigh meat which is just perfect for this kind of dish.

Daniel prepared the final dish: pla meuk tort gratiam prik thai - deep-fried squid with garlic and peppercorns. The squid we chose was pretty big, as you can see in the picture, and it was perhaps a bit leathery. This was the least successful dish of the meal.

Overall, the boys did well. It was a great meal, filled with all of those exciting, fresh, pure flavours of Thai food. If you wish to follow our example, Thai Food by David Thompson is a must buy: recipes, history and (let us be honest) a pleasing degree of food porn.

Pravda is having a go at vegetarians, calling them a freak of nature. I particularly liked the paragraph:

Furthermore, cosmetologists say that a typical vegetarian has dry and fragile hair, dull eyes and unhealthy complexion. They can hardly stand criticism and have a low boiling point. They raise their voice, swing their arms and splutter when arguing. They are weak even in their logic. They exemplify their righteousness with the cow, a herbivorous animal, and say that nature originally made a human being as a vegetarian creature.

Of course, there is something slightly suspect about vegetarians. Anyone who can deny themselves pleasure for completely arbitrary reasons shows they are misguided at the very least. Cooking for vegetarians is always a pain, even vegetable soup needs chicken stock to make it good. Strange people. And if any vegetarians are offended by reading this just remember we have been told that "They can hardly stand criticism and have a low boiling point".

My packet of Lurpak butter has this to say about wonderful, wonderful mashed potato:

When it is made properly it is a marvellous thing. I wouldn't make it with Lurpak Spreadable, though.

I may have had a shitty time at Quick in France, but that made me more depressed than angry. I've just witnessed the true anger fast food establishments can generate at Doubting Dan's completely hilarious site. There is a man who is in touch with his anger; almost makes me want to go to Burger King with him. Almost... KFC is right out, though.

OK, my blog entry title is copied from here, but:

Three hundred grams of quite ripe Gorgonzola Dolce slapped a satisfied smile across my face, even though it required wiping the excess cheese from it in order to discern the smile. I do like cheese, it is one of those partially-spoiled foods that can provide so much pleasure. Sigmund Freud had a bit of a problem with cheese, we are told, some problem with the symbolism relating to his lactating mother in a rancid, solid form. Weirdo.

For breakfast today I had bacon chops from Sillfield Farm.

These are really just thick-cut pieces of back bacon, but I found them quite delicious. They just require frying for a few minutes so are terribly easy to prepare. Of course, they wouldn't be the same without being made from high-quality Sillfield Farm bacon.

We have a couple of friends from Oxford days coming around for dinner tonight; there will be some hilariously fine wine consumed. Our starter will be salad with confit of goose gésiers dressed with my favourite dressing. Gésiers are the gizzard muscles of ducks and geese, they are delicious little bundles of meaty goodness. 'Confit' means they have been preserved in the bird's own fat. We will then have Tolosan bean stew with bacon served with Sillfield Farm black pudding. The stew is cooking as I type and the entire flat is filled with a wonderful aroma of beans and garlic. We will finish off with some British cheeses from Neal's Yard Dairy: Cheshire, Lancashire and Caerphilly.

Once again, Sillfield Farm have provided quality pork products that fill one with pleasure when eating them. Namely, last night's dinner of Sicilian sausages:

You can tell they are meaty because they go pink when cooked. Sicilian is one of my favourite flavours; they are flavoured with chilli, Parmesan and Chardonnay wine. However, if you should ever find yourself buying Sillfield Farm sausages and they have gluten-free Cumberland rings available then these are the ones to go for.

This news story on the BBC is reasonably interesting. Apparently research has shown that chillies have been cultivated, exported and used in cooking for over six thousand years. That is pretty much the dawn of agriculture, so nice to know that even ancient man enjoyed fiery food and would go to great lengths to make it.

I roasted a goose for Christmas dinner tonight; it did not work out exactly as I had hoped. Roasting meat in a fan oven is always difficult, but I failed to take enough account of its drying effect, cooked it for too long that resulted in quite a dry bird.

Tip of the day: Don't roast a 4.5kg goose for two hours at 180°C in a fan oven.

Sadly I didn't take a picture when the chicken was just out of the oven. It looked good, but sadly turned out to be a bit dried-out. Still had a reasonable flavour, though. My advice is that to cook a 4.5kg you need to do it for less than 2.5 hours. Maybe I could have turned the temperature down a bit as well.

The Christmas goose and chicken were delivered today. Here is the chicken:

It may not look it in that picture but it is a monster. Over four and a half kilograms. My recipe books give instructions for cooking chickens weighing up to two kilograms... Hmmm...

Today is my birthday and I am having some friends over to help ease the pain of becoming even more knackered and crapulent. I don't want to spend the evening tied to the cooker so I have made something where all the preparation can be done in advance: a daube. This is beef and bacon stewed up in white wine and beef stock with a few vegetables added for extra flavour. I started cooking it this morning, as stews are often better if they are cooked a long time. All it needs now is to be warmed up when my guests arrive and served with some pasta. The recipe I used comes from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's excellent River Cottage Meat book. I highly recommend this book as a great source of recipes and philosophy on cooking meat.

David.

Even though I am an atheist I still think that Christmas is a good excuse to have a blow-out meal of lovely meat. I cannot stand turkey, it is so dry and flavourless, so I cook a more traditional Christmas bird: goose. I recommend as a good source of free-range geese this place. I got a wonderful goose from them last year that was full of flavour and quite delicious. They also sell huge free-range chickens that are similarly lovely. I've just put my order in for a 4.5kg goose and a 4.5kg chicken; this should keep us full for a few days.

David.

My lunch today was Sillfield Farm Bury-style black pudding. These are sold as whole sausages that you can slice up and fry. Jolly good they are too. They have a reasonable content of grain and fat, but stuffed with rich, cooked blood. This is the best black pudding I've had, and I heartily recommend that you head off to Borough Market or go to Sillfield Farm's website and pick some up.

David

Spring has arrived in the UK, and this means some good food is available. At Borough Market last weekend we purchased some of the first Lincolnshire asparagus of the season. It was quite expensive, but very good indeed. We also got some Jersey Royal new potatoes. We cooked these both up with some quail for Sunday dinner. It was perhaps the only meal we have cooked in which the vegetables were more expensive than the meat. The potatoes were the best we've had in some months.

Here is the quail barded with goose fat and bacon ready for roasting.

Ready to eat.

David and Daniel

Black pudding is really decadent. The cooked blood of animals prepared for our deep viceral satisfaction make it a real treat. Silfield Farm make an array of black puddings and this is one of the best:

Yorkshire Sliced Black Pudding - Breakfast Fry.
It's quite grainey with noticably sized lumps of fat. It's really good. This is an incredibly hedonistic expression of black pudding, bettered only by Silfield Farm's Bury-style. I'll have that tomorrow...

I cooked a chili last night. This is a really simple thing to make, but it is a rich, satisfying meal. You can also cook enough so that there is some left for lunch the next day.

Key ingredients in a nice, but I am sure completely non-traditional, chili are:
Streaky bacon; quite a lot of this, fried before adding to the chili
Plenty of fried onion
Dark chocolate; a few squares, I have some 85% stuff that works fine.

The chocolate adds richness and complexity to the flavour. It was really nice.

David.

Yesterday I roasted a rib of beef. It was an excellent piece of meat that came from the Wild Beef Company who visit Borough Market here in London. Their cows are allowed to roam free on Dartmoor so they gain extra flavour. The meat is then dry aged until properly mature and ready to eat. They are suppliers of the best beef I've had.

It was a 1.8kg rib so I roasted it for a total of 55 minutes; 20 minutes at 220°C then 35 at 160°C. This made sure the beef was nice and rare.

It is very important to allow your meat to rest at room temperature for half an hour after roasting. This ensures all of the juices are evenly distributed in the meat and it is nice and moist. This was a great piece of meat and I look forward to having some of what remains in sandwiches today.

David.

Tonight I am cooking a cut of beef that is not terribly highly prized: shin of beef.

The trick with these lesser, tougher cuts of meat is slow cooking and so I am making a daube. This is a meat stew with beef, bacon, carrots and celery cooked in wine and beef stock with some thyme, bay leaves and orange zest in it. In order to make sure the meat is tender it has to be cooked for a long time. Ideally it would be left overnight and re-heated the following day. Slow cooking uses the minimum temperature possible to ensure the meat is cooked. In this case I will simmer the daube on the lowest heat possible, so the surface of the stew just quivers with heat. Given enough time this reduces the tough cut of meat into melting tenderness. I'll be very un-traditional and serve it with gnocchi. If its any good I'll post a picture.

David.

I really hate salad, they are generally incredibly depressing. Worst of all are those salads one finds in minor English restaurants and pubs: limp iceberg lettuce, half a tomato and a few slices of cucumber all served at fridge temperature with hardly any dressing. Dreadful stuff. Yet, over the past year I have served many salads that have been edible largely thanks to the power of decent salad dressing. My recipe for decent dressing is:

One part balsamic vinegar
Four parts good extra-virgin olive oil
Dijon or English mustard to taste

These can be beaten together with an electric whisk. This combination often goes quite thick when whisked together. Due to the hideous nature of general salad ingredients you need quite a lot of dressing to make them palatable. As I've suggested, bacon bits are a useful improver. Cheese is frequently useful too; I like thin slices of Parmesan.

I should point out that salad is actually incredibly unhealthy. When I was an epidemiologist I attended a lecture that included a mention of carcinogenic (cancer-causing) foods. Apparently, per unit serving lettuce is the most carcinogenic food there is. Cucumber is third most carcinogenic. When I tell people the risks of eating salad they immediately say it is due to the chemicals on supermarket vegetables. Not so, it is due to the Caffeic acid naturally present in lettuce and cucumber. Lettuce is really very carcinogenic and I really should continue to avoid eating it regularly. If you'd like to read more about naturally-occuring carcinogens then this holiday menu has some more information.

David.

The best bacon I have ever tried comes from Sillfield Farm; they have a stand at Borough Market near London Bridge. Best of all are the dry-cure streaky bacons, both smoked and unsmoked. You can tell it is good bacon because when fried it does not foam with hideous white phosphates as supermarket bacon generally does. The flavour of this bacon is second to none, very powerful, porky and not too salty. Gently fried these bacons are quite marvellous for breakfast, lunch or chopped up in a salad. Also, this bacon can be obtained in un-sliced blocks, which can be cut into cubes for an excellent addition to any stew. Sillfield Farm also make excellent sausages and black pudding.

That bacon was a bit too cooked for my tastes, I don't like it too crispy, but it was top bunny nonetheless.

David.