Advent and the Art of Indulgence

Posted on December 10, 2014 by Chloe Daniel

Forget John Lewis’ penguin, a new seasonal madness has gripped the nation – well, the nation’s health food bloggers at least. Wherever you turn, you are earnestly called to sprinkle your porridge with wheatgrass, add turmeric to your tea and slather your face with coconut oil. Advent is a feast of supplements, a sort of religious devotion to external and internal perfection, presented as your only hope of hanging up your Christmas stocking muffin-top free.

At this juncture, it is interesting to look at the ingredients in Asda’s Rich Fruit Mince Pies (12.5p per pie) – a mouth-watering mixture to be washed down with cheap sparkling wine at many a Christmas party …

Sugar, Apple, Glucose Syrup, Currants, Sultanas, Raisins, Glucose-fructose Syrup, Vegetable Oil, Orange Peel, Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil, Preservatives (Acetic Acid, Sodium Metabisulphite, Potassium Sorbate, Sulphur Dioxide), Malt Extract (From Barley), Lemon Peel, Invert Sugar Syrup, Apricot, Mixed Spice, Sugar Syrup, Dextrose, Citric Acid, Gelling Agent (Pectin), Acidity Regulator (Sodium Citrates), Natural Flavouring, Wheat Flour, Vegetable Oil, Glucose Syrup, Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil, Sugar, Dextrose, Salt, Raising Agents (Diphosphates, Sodium Bicarbonate), Preservative (Potassium Sorbate). Continue reading →

Spoiling

Posted on July 2, 2014 by Chloe Daniel

When a child throws himself on the floor and wails because he cannot have what he wishes for, we wrinkle up our noses and mutter to ourselves disapprovingly, “spoilt brat”. This is no compliment; look up “to spoil” in the dictionary and you’ll find “to diminish or impair the quality or character by excessive indulgence.” But why the lesson in language?

Cast your eye over your Facebook feed until you find that frequently used post-birthday refrain, “Thanks everyone, I had a lovely day and feel well and truly spoilt”. In being spoilt, it seems, we feel loved and cherished. The act of spoiling is something to be celebrated – and it’s this new, positive use of the word, which I believe is so revealing about our relationship with food. Continue reading →

An ode to strawberries

Posted on June 17, 2014 by Chloe Daniel

We have been feasting on strawberries. Each day, I walk to the strawberry seller at the end of our road and buy a kilo for 5 euros. A third of these I take with me for the children to eat on the way home from nursery. The rest we devour at the end of our evening meal – a great bowlful in the middle of the table, green stalks cast off on our dirty plates.

One of the most evocative fruits (though pedants among you will say they are not really fruits at all – bearing their seeds on the outside and being only accessories to these), summer without strawberries is hard to imagine. Quartered and sugared with a dollop of cream, or rinsed and left with the stalks on, the sight of these plump red jewels conjures up an array of images: a hot day in the fields with friends; the cool shade of the living room with the thwack of the tennis ball on the telly; scones with Granny as the summer rain drips down outside the art gallery window; pudding in the late fading light in the back garden; one more glass of warm Pimm’s by the river before the university holidays start. Continue reading →

In the children’s play centre

Posted on June 3, 2014 by Chloe Daniel

Being away may make me neglect writing this blog, but not thinking about it. Its original intent guides me through most days and leaves me scribbling notes on napkins. One such stained and biro-covered beauty, which I shall recount here, happened to be from a children’s play centre we visited out of desperation on the very wettest day of our recent trip. Big bumpy slides, snot-smeared ball pools, luminous cushion-covered climbing frames – you know the scene.

On arrival, despite their mother’s preference for back gardens, my two four-year-olds went racing off with excited screeches to clamber over squashy purple triangles and throw themselves head first down the least terrifying slide they could find. I chose a seat and took out my book, only to be too distracted to read. Continue reading →

Tales from the soda stream

Posted on March 27, 2014 by Chloe Daniel

In the office space I share with a collection of other freelancing nomads, we are equipped, beyond the desk and chair, with a soda stream and a coffee machine. There is a small kitchen too, but here I am mostly concerned with the gadgets.

From my modest desk in the middle of the room, I have observed an interesting and perhaps more than anecdotal trend. To excuse my apparent lack of attention to my work, I should add that both machines whizz and fizz so loudly that they are near impossible to ignore. Crouch behind my laptop and stare furiously at the screen as I may, I cannot help but notice the comings and goings. Continue reading →

Chia and me

Posted on March 17, 2014 by Chloe Daniel

When I started this blog at the beginning of the year, I was full of ardent intent to create a simple and sensible guide to eating and living well. It started off as planned: alongside the blogging, I ate three sensible and delicious meals a day with the odd nutritious snack (almonds, an apple, a couple of dried apricots) thrown in for good measure. Generally, I felt light and happy.

But at some point between then and now, I became seduced, and utterly so, by the roguish promises of health food blogs. Admittedly, this fate is hard to avoid if you spend your evenings scouring the internet for interesting and nutritious recipes because most of these are on health blogs promoting (probably paid to promote) all sorts of faddish ingredients. Both my ongoing penchant for ‘clean’ foods and hard-to-shake-off habit of looking for magic-bullet foods had weakened my resistance. Continue reading →

A bad habit turned good

Posted on February 24, 2014 by Chloe Daniel

When we talk of habits, mostly we mean bad ones – not quite so bad as the excessive consumption of narcotics, more the as a one-off harmless, but done every day pretty harmful type, so engrained in your behaviour you barely notice it.

A few food-related (as befits this blog) bad habits? Sugar absent-mindedly stirred into your morning coffee, a croissant on your way to work, the crisps you don’t need but free with your sandwich at lunch, a Twix dipped into a mid-afternoon cup of PG Tips, that splurge of ketchup next to your sausages and mash, or the two glasses of wine you don’t mean to but will inevitably drink in front of the telly. Continue reading →

My Valentine …

Posted on February 14, 2014 by Chloe Daniel

Now, imagine a card factory before Valentine’s Day: a never-ending line of pink-hearted, teddy-bear headed cards filing out of a printing machine, before being neatly slotted into a cellophane envelopes. Or the chocolate factory: great vats of vegetable oil, sugar and lactose swilling around before being dropped into little heart-shaped moulds and wrapped in red shiny paper. The thundering machines, the sickly smells of rancid fat … Romantic, no? Continue reading →

The Snickers cure – a lesson in temptation

Posted on January 22, 2014 by Chloe Daniel

A wise man once told me how he cured himself of a Snickers’ addiction in an afternoon. All sweet treat lovers, take heed: the story goes like this. Having always had a taste for chocolate, the man became increasingly fond of Snickers. This predilection evolved, until there came a point that every time the man yearned for something sweet, only a Snickers could satisfy this craving – cakes and other chocolate bars no longer interested him. And the craving had become self-feeding. Not only did he crave them at his usual sweet snack time – around 4pm – but at all sorts of other moments in the day and evening. A rational type, one day, Snickers in hand, he totted up just how many he was consuming in one week and how much this sweet vice cost him financially. He realised he had to act. Continue reading →

Returning to the straight and narrow

Posted on January 11, 2014 by Chloe Daniel

I was at a birthday party a few weeks ago, and, after a couple of civilised hours chatting, sipping wine and swaying elegantly (or so I liked to think) on the dance floor, I found myself alone beside the buffet table. Despite having eaten a balanced evening meal only a few hours before, I was inexplicably and irresistibly drawn, in my two-glasses-of-wine haze, to what seemed to me to be a resplendent cheese board and accompanying tapenade. I started modestly – just two small slithers of cheese, one thin slice of baguette and a spoonful of tapenade. So far so good.

But with no-one there to observe my greed, I soon returned to the table and re-filled my plate more generously. The food was tasty, but far too rich for a midnight snack. It was on my third and greediest trip, as I plugged a large chunk of bread slathered with cheese and tapenade into my mouth without even putting it on my plate that I had a moment of clarity: no longer an interested taste, this had become a fully fledged gorge. I wiped my lips and stopped there. Continue reading →

Of Slender Means

eating thoughtfully and effortlessly

Category Archives: indulgence