Away from the fairly unhealthy food of last week, there are some meals that I know how to make that won’t absolutely kill you from either sugar or fat content. They are, however, few and far between. The Beef And Cheese Tortilla is the best of them:

• Get some Tortillas, preferrably with a light sprinkling of flour.
• Buy some fresh beef ham. By that I mean, go to a real butchers. I know, fresh ingredients; crazy. You may need to specify that you don’t want any spices added, depending on how your butcher sells the stuff.
• Get some peppers.
• Get a block of strong cheddar. Or, if you don’t like the finest cheese known to man, pick something else. Your choice.
• Dice the beef ham and peppers.
• Grate the cheese.
• Prepare a thick gravy. It should not be watery at all. That would cause a mess later.
• Fry the beef ham until nearly done (frying pan or wok), then add the gravy to coat it a bit. When it’s all bubbling and nearly done, add the peppers for the last minute or so.
• Lay out the tortillas flat and add a few drops of the grated cheese.
• Fill with the contents of the pan, add more cheese and wrap.
• Enjoy.

And some people think I can’t cook anything without a hundred calories. Bah! Next time, how to make a pot noodle.

Google, in all their wisdom, have created a web-based feed reader, imaginatively titled Google Reader, and, as I mentioned in my del.icio.us links, it is rubbish.

In the past, the big G have been the Technic of the Lego family. Robust, complicated and well-designed toys reduced to the simplest UI that could possibly work. Every cog and brick has been perfectly placed to add the right functionality to the right audience, and these systems have been slowly built up into a collection that has become the cornerstone of most people’s web toybox.

Google Reader is Duplo: big, chunky and useless. The UI is far from intuitive. All the best features are hidden behind tabs and button pushes. Why should I have to go through several (confusing) steps to find the add feed button? It’s one of the primary use cass, it should be a permanent fixture! Who thought that item-level menus was a good idea? It just greatly slows down the time it takes to get through hundreds of feeds. I want to click on a feed (or group of feeds) and see everything all at once. I do not want to navigate to the item level for each feed and then have to navigate back to the main menu, then to the next item level, then to the main menu. No feed reader has ever done that, and for good reason: it’s slow. Every feature is accessed through ugly blocks of design and disparate widgets. They should have made up their mind.

Bloglines is your bog standard Lego. It’s functional, but not brilliant. There’s so much more that it could be done with it if it was just a little nicer (for example, I hate the page load of the menu frame when saving or unsaving items. Very unnecessary.) It’s still a lot better than this latest Google effort. I’d have expected more.

Someone, yesterday, asked me what “ennui” means. While it has a dictionary definition (listlessness), it is hard to convey the precise meaning of the word, for me.

• Lethargic dissatisfaction,
• Life dragging pointlessly into a grey stupor,
• A melancholy drudge of indefinite length,
• Apathy in the extreme.

Not that I’m currently feeling any of the above, but I think we’ve all experienced that level of nothingness before. In fact, it’s a good way to be to truly appreciate the better parts of life.

It was quite some time ago that, as part of an inebriated challenge, I made it my goal to significantly improve the plain cheeseburger. I have relatively simple tastes. If I’m eating a burger, I have the burger, some cheese and the bun. That’s it. Mayo or other sauces are out, leafy green crap (I believe we’re calling it lettuce these days) is in the bin, and gherkins… well, no sane person likes gherkins anyway. Nice and simple.

Some people don’t like that though. It’s boring, they say. Those people are wrong and missing out on the beautiful simplicity that is the plain cheeseburger. However, I did take them up on a challenge: to find an ingredient, a single addition, to make the plain cheeseburger rival a burger with the works in their eyes. It would be hard work, a lot of burgers would need eaten but, damn, someone had to do it.

I started where any sensible person with a knowledge of junk food would begin: the humble pizza. Yes, pizza. Master of toppings, mixer of random flavours. Ham would be cheating as it’s too close to a bacon cheeseburger. Pineapple was a bad idea on pizza, it wasn’t going to be better on a burger. Smaller. Sweetcorn!

Sweetcorn is an interesting vegetable. A lot of people really like the taste and the texture, the slight squirting sensation as your bite into the main section and the watery goodness inside. It is, however, a terrible idea for burgers. It just makes the taste seem an out-of-date lumpy. Bad.

Another choice: beans. Everyone likes beans. Juicy, tomato tinged and just the right side of “I’ve got some in the cupboard”. The beans were interesting. Although it did work to an extent, some couldn’t understand the bean/burger combo. The beans were dripping out of the side in ways they couldn’t stop, and more ended up on the floor than anywhere.

Damn.

Another look in the fridge revealed something so simple, so lowgrade, so brilliant that it would have to work. And it did. The secret ingredient was barely noticeable but it tasted fantastic, the perfect counterpoint to cheese and the minced flavourings. What was it? Another kind of beef: corned beef. A slice of that in your burger and you’re set.

Challenge accepted and won.

Food. I like it. You probably like it too, everyone does. So a short series on food seems like the right thing. I’m going to go over a few very unhealthy recipes (that sounds a bit formal for the kind of thing I mean but alas there are no better words), and possibly diverge a bit. To my knowledge (ie from recall, rather than from looking through the archives), this is the first post I’ve done on food since the ill-fated omlette incident, way back at post number six. Anyway, the best place to start when it comes to food is the dessert.

‘Now’, you’re wondering, ‘what culinary masterpiece is Gary going to teach us how to make today?’ Today, today, we make mars bar melts. Here’s how:

• Buy a Mars bar.
• Put it in the fridge for a day. You want it to be cold to the touch and rock hard.
• Unwrap, put it on a plate, and microwave it for 20 seconds.
• Enjoy! If you’ve done it right, the chocolate shell should still be relatively solid and the middle should have melted. Warm goo! Nummy.

If you’ve got any masterworks of the black art of cooking that would make Mr Grossman envious, I encourage you to take this opportunity to post about them. Another, more savoury, treat in a day or two.