FRIDAY

Breakfast with Stephen King - bacon and scrambled eggs.

So, day one of eating no bread and absolutely no sandwiches!

I made bacon and scrambled eggs for breakfast while the dogs ate theirs, and their stomachs could settle before their walk while I was eating. I would usually love a slice of toast with eggs and bacon, but I found that once I got started with my brekkie, I didn’t miss it that much.

Since I had no fruit (except a glass of OJ) at breakfast time, I had a banana on my morning break.

Lunch was very simple salmon roulades with a side salad. Again, I would usually have a slice of crisp bread or soda bread with something like this, so it felt a little insubstantial on its own, and I sneaked in a small Dairy Milk chocolate bar to keep me going.

Dinner was early because I had an agility class in the evening. I had rice porridge, which is a Finnish dish traditionally associated with Christmas and more of a dessert than a main course – unless you have rye bread and ham with it, which of course I didn’t. In the rest of the world, rice pudding is probably better known, but rice porridge is cooked on the hob and takes about an hour to make, so there was no way I was going to go to that trouble after the class.

After the class and giving the dogs their evening feed and walk, I was a little peckish again because I hadn’t had a heavy dinner. This was one of those times a cup of tea and some toast would just have done the trick, but instead, I had an ice cream followed by some tortilla chips and salsa with a gin and tonic (Gordon’s Pink, in case you’re interested) while watching Life after People. It's a fascinating documentary about what will happen to our planet after we're gone. I had seen it before, when it first came out, but I wanted to watch it again as research for a short story I'm writing. As for all the snacking, there's one thing you need to know about me: whenever I have ice cream, I need to have some crisps or something salty afterwards. It’s an odd thing, but hey, a bag of crisps never hurt anyone, except perhaps the weighing scales…

THE ANTI-SANDWICH EXPERIMENT - an introduction

I just want to make a few things clear to begin with. I’m not about to start blogging, and I’m definitely not about to start blogging about food. Plenty of people already do that, and they do it much better than I could. I also can’t see my friends, readers and followers interested in a food blog by yours truly. 

I do, however, have to eat every day, in fact several times a day, like the rest of the human population. The western world in particular seems to be obsessed with sandwiches. Let’s face it: we have sandwiches for breakfast, for lunch and even for dinner. If you’re on the go or in a hurry, you’ll tell your friends or workmates that you’ll just grab a quick sandwich. 

All of this is fine. What I have problem with is having a sandwich every single day, sometimes more than once a day, because it’s the easiest, quickest, cheapest or only option. It really is. I often travel with my sister, who is a coeliac, and for her, grabbing a quick sandwich is almost never an option because she can’t have those ordinary sandwiches sold at every petrol station containing such lovely fillings as ham cheese, chicken and stuffing or cheese ploughman’s. The thing is, because I can eat sandwiches, I feel like I should eat them when I'm travelling. 

After 36 years on this earth, I must have had hundreds if not thousands of sandwiches. I’m sick of them. It’s time to do something about it. I have looked up alternatives to sandwiches, and they are still very bread based. I don’t really care if I put the same stuff between two slices of bread or inside a wrap; it’s more or less the same thing. 

I’m not saying that I have a problem with sandwiches in particular. I love pizza, but if I had to eat pizza every single day of my life, I’d get pretty sick of that too. Likewise, I enjoy Chinese food and Mexican food, but I don’t want to eat them all the time either. Variety is the spice of life.  

For the next week, I’m going to go breadless. I will have no bread products or nothing resembling bread. That includes pizza, biscuits, pastries, buns and bread rolls - you get the idea. There are no hard and fast rules in this, but if it contains flour, some raising against and has been baked, I probably won’t eat it during the week. 

I'm not doing this for health reasons or as a diet. I have no special dietary requirements. I have no food allergies or intolerances. I’m not vegan or vegetarian, and I mostly eat anything and everything. Eating is just something that I get on with. The only factor that limits my eating is my irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), which is fairly easy to live with, if occasionally a pain in the bowels. The main thing with my IBS is to eat regularly, so I snack a lot and try to eat something approximately every three hours. 

This week happens to be one where I’m primarily at home and by myself while my partner – a fierce defender of sandwiches – is away. This gives me the freedom to experiment with meals that aren’t sandwiches. I’m sure there will be lots of salads – at the end of the day, a sandwich without bread is a salad, isn’t it? – but I’ll try to mix it up. I want to find those alternatives so that after this experiment, I will be in a better position to avoid sandwiches. 

I will keep track right here of what I eat every day so that anybody else interested in giving up on or reducing the number of sandwiches can get some ideas. 

For all you sandwich lovers out there – do not be insulted. There is still a place for sandwiches in this world. It’s just not on my plate – not every single day. 

Finally, if anybody out there is in a band that’s still looking for a name, I think The Anti-Sandwich Experiment would be a pretty cool name. Just let me know when you’re playing at a venue near me…