Irony.

OK, this is the situation. It is serious. I must have chickpea cutlets. I have the whole meal planned out in my head and I am salivating. But! To make chickpea cutlets I need something called Vital Wheat Gluten. I thought this was the same as high-gluten flour which is bread flour but I have googled and apparently not, and you cannot get it very easily in the UK! So I poke about on the net to find a UK supplier and I have found one! But! They will only take orders of £10, and then postage and packing is £6.95 and I may just as well pay for Isa Chandra Moskowitz to come from America and make the bloody cutlets for me!* So I look pathetically at the online shop and I ask myself, where is this based physically? Where does it have its corporeal presence that lucky souls can just pop down the road for a bag of ‘gluten powder’ and make chickpea cutlets to their hearts’ content? Family…shall I come up in September for a happy weekend of chickpea cutlets and MacArthur Glen?

On the plus side. I have been to the CVSIC meeting today. As stated before, CVSIC is the Cambridgeshire Voluntary Sector Infrastructure Consortium and we have all sat together happily in a workshop as a glowing example of cross-platform working, which is marvellous, natch. I was sitting being jealous of someone who was talking about their allotment although, I have a lawn which I do not mow and a hedge which shames the neighbourhood so there will be no coveting of allotments at this point, when Dave from The Social Enterprise People mentioned that he had used some very good vegetarian caterers for meetings. These are the people, they are called Mouth Music* and apparently they are an excellent example of a Social Enterprise in action. They also do the lunches at Arjuna without which I do not know what I would eat, although I am glad to see they have gone back to their original tofu recipe as I did not like the recent breading. Anyway this was exciting to me, as vegetarian catering at meetings I go to is normally execrable. I do not think I am overstating the point. It is terrible. Recent highlights for me have included: a Legal Services Commission gathering where all I could eat was a breadstick and a doughnut, and I wouldn’t have put it past them to have slipped lard into the doughnut: apparently vegetable pasties with bacon concealed within: egg mayonnaise sandwiches. Indeed, this is my plea to caterers. 90% of the population is funny about egg mayonnaise, honestly, and when it has sat out on a platter and had people breathe on it this does not increase its appetisingness, and I would not see why vegetarians are any less funny about it than anyone else, even ovo-lactos. Indeed I would think more so. One word, caterers: houmous. Obviously having only houmous to eat at every single catered meeting/ event may become a little repetitive but really, I cannot do warm egg mayonnaise.

* I don’t think she would do that.

** I can’t decide if this is a really knowing reference or if I am the only person who has ever read The Joy Of Sex. Which, in the early edition I have got, has some very questionable advice for us girlies about how not to get yourself sexually assaulted. I do not know if this has been edited out in the later editions. It is like Superwoman by Shirley Conran. I once borrowed a very early edition of this from Cambridge Public Library and it had a strange chapter about only eating 800 calories a day and knowing you were thin enough when if you lay flat on your back you could balance a ruler on your hipbones without it touching your stomach.