Salt n Pepa

Let me take a minute or two, and give much respect due...

To people who season their (my!) food properly.

Salt...
I can't stand it when people don't put any salt in food; it tastes fucking terrible without. Some things you can get away with adding salt at the table, but others you definitely can't - stuff like pasta, rice, boiled potatoes, or other vegetables that are cooked by immersion in boiling water.

Admittedly, I do got way over the top with the white stuff, but I do curb it when cooking for others. I had a nightmare of a lodger once who detested salt. She'd stand over me while I cooked our tea and she'd ration it - in MY home! There'd be a massive pan with about 3 litres of boiling water and she'd add a pinch of salt for cooking pasta or rice. A pinch. Fuck off out of my kitchen.

This is the fucktard who put barbecue fucking sauce on everything. Fucking twot.

But what is much worse than no salt is Lo Salt. Heysusss! You might as well chew on potassium. It tastes nothing like proper salt and burns your bastard fucking mouth off.


N Pepa
I like my food hot, or picante, if I'm going to be practising for the Eternal City. Chillies - love em. Pepper of any sort? I love it! But there's a time and place for black pepper. Black pepper is OK in pasta sauces, on pasta dishes, pizze (Italian again, you see?), and other things that I can't be arsed to think about. However, black pepper needs a good grinder, or you might as well chuck whole peppercorns on your food. It's not nice, those big bits of hotness getting stuck in the back of your throat and causing coughing fits. Or even worse, hiding in your teeth until you think it's safe when they dislodge themselves and grab you by the back of the throat and throw you to the floor and choke you.

Little bastards.

I like white pepper. White pepper has a place on salads, on delicious poached or boiled eggs, on red cabbage with shepherds pie, on peas or any other veg for that matter.


Hospital canteens
Hospital canteens no longer have condiments at the table; everything comes in fucking sachets instead - that you have to pay for. Little individual sachets of salt, pepper, vinegar, brown sauce. All extra. The worst thing is the pepper is always black and it's never ground finely enough.

Fucking bastards who produce and package this shit want shooting. It's even good stuff, it's the crap that you've never heard of. Vinegary brown sauce, pure acetic acid for vinegar. Jesus help us.

Vinegar in a sachet? Are you out of your tiny, minds? You get your chips, you need LOADS of salt and vinegar, not some shitty little plastic bag that spills all the vinegar when you finally tear it open.


Henderson's Relish
Anybody who's ever had the misfortune of living in Sheffield (Yorshire) and its environs may have come across this stuff. It's produced in a factory near the hospital where I used to work and every morning I had to walk past the place - it stank.

Henderson's relish is best described as worcestershire sauce that's been watered down with the strongest, nastiest vinegar you can possibly imagine.

They even try to disguise it as Lee and Perrins

A test of whether you come from Sheffield, or whether you have the potential to be a naturalised Sheffielderite .... whatever a person from Sheffield is called - a Shite? .... is to see whether you can have this shit on your food without getting really annoyed.

Annoyed? Annoyed at having something on your food? Yes, VERY fucking annoyed that you've spent good money for a pub lunch and that you've allowed some fucking tosser to persuade you try Henderson's fucking Relish on it, thus ruining your dinner and wasting your money and putting whoever cajoled you into an emergency ambulance on their way to the Northern General with a fork in their head.

It's no wonder my blood pressure is high - it's nothing to do with salt, it's because of tossers who arse about with my condiments! Fucking fuckers.