Today is vegetarian day in the canteen which for one lucky diner meant a big plate of chips and coleslaw. Eeesh – what a weird combination. I think it’s more the concept of the hot chips next to the (hopefully) refrigerated coleslaw. I am having a delicious bean salad as per : butter beans, broad beans, kidney beans, flagelot beans, green beans, bean sprouts and sweetcorn.

Whenever I see the phrase ‘bean sprouts’ I always think “yes but sprouts of which bean?” If you’ve never sprouted your own let me tell you that the sprout of, say, the aduki bean is as different from the mung bean as the mung bean is from the black bean. I guess that when they are commercially produced they grow them until they’re all sprout and no bean so all you get is a rather watery white tube, whereas I tend to eat mine soon after they’ve germinated so you get all the flavour and texture of the bean itself.

Bean technology today.

Still on the wierd combinations front fm1 swears by 'chips and cheese' - a plate of oven chips with cheese melted on them. I've had em and they're really not bad, even though I'm not a big fan of the whole potato/cheese nexus. Carbs and cheese seem to be paired together pretty universally if you think about it :

Bread and cheese - the classic cheese sandwich or a pizza
Pasta and cheese - mac and cheese. Need I say more.
Potato and cheese - Baked potato with grated cheddar
Rice - errr - hold on a second.

You never get rice and cheese together do you? Why not?