Tue 24 - Acceptable in the 80s

I was actually going to be on time today, until the Northern Line intervened, so was only to grab a half BLT sandwich from Pret to start Tuesday off with.  It was better than last time, with softer bread and mayonnaise within the sandwich rather than smeared all over the crust and the box.  I like it that Pret do half sandwiches, though having said that most branches seem to have scaled down their range.

I was later tempted by a Cornish pasty from the food trolley at work.  It was unauthentic, having been made with puff pastry, including carrot but excluding swede.  Eating a pasty at my desk, from the food trolley, I felt like I'd gone back in time circa 1982.  Not a good thing.  Helped along by some HP sauce, it was extremely filling and put me out of eating action until supper. 

In celebration of Chinese New Year, (which was actually the night before, doh!) I wanted to cook something Chinese to celebrate.  I'm not Chinese, and was conscious that this particular urge made little sense.  It turned into a late evening at work though, so bereft of many Chinese ingredients at home and running out of time, I settled for black bean sauce from a jar courtesy of Marks & Spencer, combined with the leftover onglet steak from last Friday.  The steak, and the crunchy peppers that V added - i.e. the parts that M&S weren't responsible for - were the only acceptable parts of the dish.  The sauce was gloopy, had a bitter, almost alcoholic after-taste, and contained some strange indistinguishable vegetable parts.  I will not buy this product again.

A bad food day, the only positive being the discovery that onglet will work really well with oriental flavours.