[Miso Day 1- Itsu] – Pret-ty Small – £4.84

Yesterday I laid out a new miso soup comparison challenge.  Like TravelSupermarket, MoneySupermarket and Compare.com I’ll be brining you Misoyouknow.  I ventured out to Pret where I had planned to buy the miso soup and a side sandwich to bulk it out.  I looked behind the counter at the menu and with much embarrassment given my rant yesterday I could not find the miso soup on the menu at all.  Slightly bemused by it’s absence, I was wondering if the technical difficulties at Wasabi were contagious, I exited and made my way upstairs for the Itsu Miso.

Now Itsu being Itsu don’t just sell you a standard soup, they sell you a Special Miso Soup.  Don’t know what makes it ‘special’ apart from the price at a wallet denting £1.99, a premium I believe in the Miso soup average pricing.  In line with my research though I dug deep and made the purchase.  I was pleased to see that a special soup spoon was provided rather than a standard ‘use for anything’ spoon.  Realising that this alone wouldn’t fill me up I decided to go back down to Pret to fill out my lunch with a tuna and cucumber baguette.  At the counter it was then when I realised I was right all along.

Written in clear type but in an unexpected position below the coffee list were the words ‘Miso Soup – £1.50′.  I knew they sold it.  So, with my Itsu purchase all ready to go I completed my sandwich buy and left smiling knowing that I’d be back tomorrow for the Miso soup purchase.

So how can we score Itsu today?  All prejudice aside I have graded them on the following categories:  Size, colour, flavour and price.  Itsu are setting the bench mark at:

Size: 5/10

Colour: 8/10 (a deep non-water looking colour)

Flavour: 7/10

Price: 2/10 (25% premium on Pret)

In case you were interested the Pret sandwich was predictable, bland and overpriced, I’ve written them a note.  Also of interest is that I completed a feedback form for Eat where I told them that they should stop stocking sandwiches that contain cheese; let’s see if they take my advice.

Mi-so not far away – £5.25

Miso soup is off!  That’s the basis of the argument that was in full flow at the counter of Wasabi by the time I had arrived at counter 3.  I was intrigued to hear more of this woman spewing her irate disgust so deliberately pretended I couldn’t find my wallet.  I know where it is, left pocket, where it always lives.  So the confrontation continued when the woman proclaimed ‘I get the train here everyday to get my Miso soup’.  Right, I thought, I’m going to break this down to see if I can explain away her anger.

If we were working here in the 80s I would have more of an understanding for her anger.  In the 80s Miso soup would have been more of a speciality that it is today, if it was available at all, but today it can be purchased everywhere.  I’ve been on the Wasabi website and can see that there is, to my surprise, only one Wasabi in Canary Wharf, the next nearest one being Blackwall.  Ok, 1-0 to the woman.  Thing is though it’s not only Wasabi that sell Miso soup.  I have therefore expanded my search to include Pret and Itsu.  So how does that change the score?

Within a Canary Wharf search there are 6 Pret stores, 6!  Itsu = 4.  That’s 10 more stores that sell Miso Soup.  I’d make that 1-1.  Finally heading over to the Eat website my belief that they serve a Miso soup with Udon noodles is confirmed.  2-1 to Dave.  If only the man behind the counter had been armed with my research he’d have won that argument easily.  I know what some of you are thinking, but maybe th Miso soup at Wasabi is better?  I don’t know the answer to that so I’ve decided that over the next week I will try all of the Miso Soups I can find and give you a scientific answer.

Pret Locations

 

 

Finally, we can learn something else today from Wasabi.  On the back of the chopstick packet there are instructions to create your own chopstick holder.  I have followed the instructions, realised that I am an origami wizard (check out my mountain fold) and can now rest my eating utensils safely off of my filthy desk.  Winning. Back tomorrow with Miso soup.

The spice of my life – £5.25

Roses are red,

Violets are blue,

I’ve bought a curry wrap,

It’s big enough for two.

Happy Valentine’s Day, a day when people exchange passionate notes, declare interests of lust towards each other and then seal the deal after a number of love inspired alcoholic cocktails sold at half-price to encourage ‘conversation’.  This evening I will be enjoying a romantic dining at the Modern Pantry in Clerkenwell with my personal lady interest but for lunch I am accompanied by my colleague on a trip down to Kanapina Indian Street Food shack.  Romantic. 

Immediately striking about the shack is the colour system in place.  This has to be the brightest shack in The Wharf sporting a 60s electric green which makes the seats in McDonalds look dull and boring.  The excitement in the colours is continued through to the food.  On offer are 5 different mains including a paneer option which is Indian for ‘horrible cheese’ (direct translation).  I avoided that and stumped for the Beef Pondicherry, a curry named after a city in southernIndia.  Wrapped into a roti and then finished with salad the flavour is bold and explosive.  A slightly over dominant exposure to cardammon and capsicum flavour on the beef has made me repeatedly reach for the water but when combined with the roti and salad it works well.

My only real problem comes in the delivery.  Supposedly a wrap mine came anything other than wrapped.  On opening from the outer packaging a staining stream of oil rolled off my desk requiring immediate attention, a situation which didn’t improve as the layers were removed.  I had to resort to the knife and fork from the off and am already down to my last napkin.  Still overall, good flavour, large size and an optimistic , smiley colour scheme has made for a rewarding lunch.  Let’s hope that I’m not still full when I get to the restaurant tonight, think I’m going to have the duck.

Tags: Curry, spicy, Valentine, Wrap

FIT, HEALTHY, BETTER THAN YOU – £3.35

First off I received a £2.90 refund off TfL over the weekend for a delayed journey.  Feel like a winner.  Anyway…

Remember the falafel bar?  There’s another place that go one step further in an attempt to associate their brand and products with health and wellbeing.  I was taken to Crussh today, tagline ‘Fit Food, Juice Bars’.  Great.  They specialise in salads, soups, wraps and detox juices all designed to make you feel good by providing you with a low calorie, high flavour, carbon neutral, dolphin breeding, environmentally friendly product made by people who only wash their hands with lemon juice, probably.  You know that the smoothie juices they have on offer are going to be good for you because they’re called things like ‘The Detoxer’ and ‘Healthy Carrot and slim pear in your mouth’, at £3.00 a go though I’d rather stay unhealthy.

I think I was a little overwhelmed when I entered which is fuelling my pessimism and dislike of Crussh.  It seemed like everyone else in there was a trained Crussh item purchaser knowing exactly what they wanted before setting foot in the door.  The combination of colours and descriptive labels made it harder for me to make a decision due to information overload but as I was in the way of the pros who were in and out in seconds I picked up a wrap with something green in it and started to queue.  In the queue I started to un-wrap (pun intended) the mystery of what I was about to purchase. So, here goes:  A Sweet Potato and falafel salad wrap with watercress, hummus, cucumber, red pepper, alfalfa and lettuce on a multigrain wrap. Dairy free.  At £3.35 it wasn’t breaking the bank but also wasn’t go to fill me up; too late though I was already at the till and sliding my card into the card reader.

 I’ve had to eat my words a little having finished the wrap, it was good, very good.  The quantity of ingredients was well balanced and I get the genuine feeling that more feeling and care had gone into the creation of this wrap than anything from the generic coffee shop setups.  I’m hoping that if I become a little more confident I can soon be one of the health people that go in there knowing what they want and making a flawless, effortless purchase.  Only other issue though is the price.  To qualify as a suitable sized lunch I’ll need 2 wraps totalling £6.70, that’s too much for me.

It seems Crussh that we won’t be meeting again until I get a pay rise.

Something fishy going on – £4.00

It’s busy in Canary Wharf today.  I’m not too sure if it’s because I went for my lunch later than normal or because of the snow, but there were too many people for my liking.  First off I saw children, small ones, the ones that have 15 teachers tirelessly trying to keep them in single file and hold each others hands, these very nearly interrupted my route to the escalator.  I was lucky and managed to push a few of them aside, assert my dominance and descend the escalator with minimal time damage. 

Next there are many ‘people’ around.  The type of people who stop in the middle of single width thoroughfares and push doors that say ‘automatic door, do not push’.  I was stuck behind one as I approached the bottom of the escalator, but a short sharp elbow to the back meant that she was soon out of my firing line.  People crisis averted, on to the food.

So I ventured the length of the shopping centre because I was making my way to Kruger.  I’m not too familiar with the food so was just going to see what took my fancy whilst I was there.  I was confronted by a vast array of wraps.  After passing over all of the usual combinations a Satay Chicken and Bacon seemed to be ticking all the boxes for me and I moved one step closer to purchasing by picking it up. 

On my way to the counter to pay though I saw another fridge filled with salads.  Normally I would have no interest in this but the variety and number of option s available made me think that there might be something there for me.  Duck and orange?  Imitation prawn? (no idea what that is) Salmon, Prawn and Crayfish?  I had made my choice and for the reasonable price of £4.00 I marched over to the counter, having ditched the satay chicken wrap amongst some Walkers crisps, armed with the seafood salad.  So was £4.00 worth it?

Well the prawns were tasteless and there wasn’t enough lemon.  Kruger really should pay more attention to their seafood: Lemon ratio.  That aside there was a great deal of fishy meat and once I had overcome the lemon problem by collecting some more from the canteen we were on for a good meal.  A sprinkling of black pepper only made things better.  Would I go back to Kruger?  Yes I would but I’d probably make sure that the Seafood salad ended up with the crisps rather than the chicken satay wrap.

Guest Lunch – Bonus

Fired over last minute from The City was this guest lunch from obligated reader and personal lady interest, Miss Fern. If you’re the head honcho of tortilla wraps then get your fill with Poncho No. 8 in Paternoster Square. Noel Fielding said that you can’t be unhappy whilst wearing a poncho, he can extend that to whilst eating one because this is a winner. Having eaten here before I can say that this was a good selection. A reader success story.

Tags: fish, guest, salad

What a difference a Dhia makes – £5.00

We close down on Mr. Bond and his mystery food delivery today as we call a random set of digits to select the meal of the day.  Yes, we’re with our Thai delivery friends over in Limehouse today, or as we have now established are based inGreenwich.  Furthermore a reliable source close to the provider informs me that the elderly lady who we meet at the drop-off point is actually called ‘Dhia’.  We’re starting to uncover the secrets behind this business like those pesky kids from Scooby Doo uncover the villain.  I get the impression that this company have realised that they get more business when people know who they are and today I was actually shocked to be offered the ‘food hotline’ number so I could place my order personally next time rather than going through a proxy.  I politely declined; I need to do more research first.

So anyway, Dhia arrived during my 11-12 meeting but was met by my colleague who then left my lunch for me on my desk.  There is nothing better than having your food waiting for you on your desk as the clock strikes midday and I was met with marinated chicken, fried vegetable, standard rice and boiled egg in chilli.  Hmm, non-standard.

I went straight in for the curious looking egg side; I was intrigued to see what it was and how it would be delivered.  What awaited was a full hard-boiled egg sat in the middle of a homemade chilli sauce.  Whilst initially nervous I soon grew to love the sauce and the way that it worked with the egg.  The marinated chicken was more obvious in its flavour and to be honest lacked anything to jump up and down about.  I realised though that what works for an egg will work for a chicken and used the rest of the sauce on the chicken sections.  This versatile sauce did the chicken wonders and when offset by double mouthfuls of rice it made for a filling meal.  My lips are still tingling, that stuff is hot, but as soon as that subsides I’ll be smiling in the knowledge that lunch was a success.

Meanwhile if you’re over in the City and are looking for your own falafel shack then head down to the King of Falafel on Leather Lane.  Here’s a photo of the regal quality product that you can pick up.  Photo provided by full-driving license holder and reader Blajam.

Tags: Bond, Chicken, hotline, rice

Peripheral Vision Problems – £2.90

Late lunch today as some meetings took precedence.  It’s been far too long since I’ve heard the demanding request for my £2.90 from the non-smiling robot who sounds like she was built with the soundboard from a SNES, so today it’s Bene Bene.  Pick 3 items (maximum 1 bread and 1 fruit) from the fridge for the bargain price of £2.90.  The only problem with this though, is that 2 out of 3 of the items always taste awful.  I arrived late as well today which meant that I was more restricted in my options than usual.  This wasn’t going to be good.

 Item 1 – I need a solid start if I’m to be able to make a decent go of an edible meal here so I move towards some branded items in the second fridge.  Muller.  I recognise that name and quickly identify an in-date exotic fruit yoghurt, Mango and Passion fruit to be precise, which makes up the first third of my basket.

 Item 2 – After my good start I was buoyed up to continue on this form and started dreaming about collecting a perfect trio for lunch.  My hopes were quickly dashed though as I returned to the first fridge to collect my bread product.  What I had thought was a chicken and bacon sandwich in my peripheral vision had disappointingly morphed into a chicken and mushroom by the time I went to pick it up.  I quite like mushrooms but they’re no bacon, and when the total price is always going to be £2.90 I would feel that I had been robbed if I went for the mushroom.  So with that faller I had to move quickly onto other breaded items.  Looking straight past the cheese based disasters I ended up staring at a Peri Peri Chicken roll.  A less than acceptable second item to make it 2 out of 3.

 Item 3 – It was important to make a good recovery.  Fruit salad is always a saviour in this instance even if it does only consist of dying grapes and browning apple, but the dangers of turning up late were confirmed when I didn’t even have that option left available to me.  It was time to go bold.  I approached the Chicken breast, smoked ham and spring onion pasta with caution.  The words were working for me, I like all of these things, the view of the contents though was making me queasy.  Pasta crammed tightly into a transparent box which looked like they were all being held against their will desperate for escape.  I know it’s only pasta but this pasta did actually look sad.  It was probably a sense of sorrow that made me complete my 3 out of 3.

Well as you’ve probably already guessed lunch was rubbish but on the plus side my man-flu is clearing, it’s over half way through the week and I have a prawn curry waiting for me at home.  Spicy.

Tags: Yoghurt

Don’t suffer in silence – £3.25

Nobody knows what causes it or what the remedy is, all I know though is that I’ve got it.  This Baltic weather has brought with it a dangerous strain of flu and I have fallen victim. I am of course referring to H1M1, or Man-Flu as it is colloquially known.  Very little is known about this emasculating affliction but I am showing all the symptoms of having caught it.  Yesterday I was unable to post my lunch because I did not have any lunch; no-one was around to make it for me.  Man-flu is unique in its energy sapping properties.  It takes all of the energy that you normally use for things like cooking, cleaning yourself and being generally not-pathetic, but leaves you with just enough in the tank to take yourself from your bed to the couch in order to play Modern Warfare 3.  I know I must be on the mend because today I have made it in to work armed only with 30 Berocca, 16 Anadin extra tablets, 10 Lemsip and 30 Centrum Advance vitamin tablets.  Let the battle commence.

Now they say that you should ‘Feed a cold and starve a fever’, or possibly ‘starve a cold and feed a fever’, I can’t remember which way round it is but it doesn’t matter because man-flu is uniquely both, probably.  I have therefore been both starving and feeding this illness.  I ‘feed’ during the hours that I am awake and ‘starve’ during the hours that I am asleep, a perfect plan which I highly recommend all sufferers to follow.

Part of the feeding process is to make sure that you have something hot, filling and not salad.  I have gone for the New York Soup co. Chicken Jambalaya Soup from a pot from Tesco, supplemented with a baton (not baguette, I’m ill) of bread.  Half way through and I’m starting to feel better already. 

Hopefully one day more research will be completed into H1M1 so that the full impact and suffering that I am going through can be understood by all and a remedy can be found.  For now though the best known cure is demanding a lot of sympathy, some Lemsip and a Chicken Jambalaya Soup which contains no less than 60% of your daily salt allowance (how this thing can be sold without a warning label I’ll never know.)

In other news, for those interested in last weeks Sprite challenge, well unfortunately Sprite won.  I gave in and had Chicken Katsu Salad from Wasabi.  Massively over budget which was unfortunately not offset by the volume and flavour.  £3.20 Sprite has won the battle but not yet the war.

Tags: bread, Man-flu, Soup

[Challenge Day 4] – Have you seen my manwich? – £3.20

Still busy but I had to find the time to let you know how the Sprite challenge went today.

I took a trip over to the Tesco which commands a position which sits directly on the platform for the DLR, perfect for a last minute sandwich before heading in to the City. Lunch time though isn’t really about last minute sandwiches.

I have been disappointed in my sandwiches recently and have found the need to supplement them with side items. Go to Tesco though and they have a build your own section. Actually they only provide the components but I converted my desk into a workshop for the building process. A full baguette (not a baton) of French Bread (not Giraffe bread), 10 slices of salami, some really quite ropey looking ‘garlic sausage’ and 70g of rocket filled my basket and I was ready to start the manufacturing process.

See the photo below for how I converted all of the ingredients above into a manwich. The size is obscene. All of the ingredients were used apart from about 20g of rocket that I just couldn’t fit in. I’ve been realistic and gone for the ‘eat me, keep me’ approach and chopped it in half. That’ll be gone before the end of the day.

So how did it compare against my can of Sprite? Well at exactly £3.20 for this meal (best not to ask what percentage of that was the ‘garlic sausage’) I’ve given it a 10 for price. Volume = 8 as it’s just not quite 14 packs of crisps and taste = 6 as it was a little dry. Total score of 24 though means that it has wiped the floor of the Sprite. That makes it 2-2 and leads us into a Friday photo finish.

I’m off for a packet of Hula Hoops (8 remaining).

Tags: manwich, Sandwich

[Challenge - Day 3] – Worth the wait -£4.93

Hard deadline.  That’ s the reason for no post yesterday.  You wouldn’t have been too interested in it anyway, I had sushi.  I guess in terms of my challenge that Sprite won yesterday that’ll make it 1-1.

So where are we today?  Well the hard deadline that I speak of has morphed into a soft deadline and I’ve made it out of the office to pick up some lunch.  With no time to think about my selection I found myself at Waitrose playing adult pick and mix.  The great thing about going shopping for lunch at Waitrose is that you will inevitably leave with your lunch… and something that you didn’t intend to buy.  This trip was no exception.  The mystery purchase today was 14 bags of Hula Hoops.  Some deals are just too good to ignore.

I’ve not done well on the price though.  Even with my strict budget of sub £3.20 I’ve not been able to rein in my purchasing.  The break down: £1.75 for a Chicken and Mayo sandwich, £1.59 for some fruit (classic fruit salad) and £1.59 for 14 bags of Hula Hoops.  I’m starting to learn why many people suffer from weight problems, if you’ve £1.59 to spend you can pick up enough Hula Hoops to feed you for a week (me 2 days) or 4 strawberries, 3 segments of orange and 3 tiny slices of melon.  It’ll take a strongly willed person to take the non-fat path.  I took both.

My gripe today though comes on the prices, or should that be mispricing of Waitrose sandwiches.  Whilst picking up the Chicken and mayo sandwich I was alerted to the fact they also sold the same sandwich but with sweetcorn included.  I think they called it the Chicken and sweetcorn sandwich with mayo.  Apt.  What was not so apt though was the increase in price.  The added sweetcorn shot the price up by 65 pence to £2.40, an increase of over 37%.  I like sweetcorn but like the ‘gwak’  a 37% premium for yellow things wasn’t ticking the right boxes with me.

I’m gonna have to leave my desk now as the person next to me has decided to have a block of cheese for lunch.  Nasty.  His cheese, like all cheese including ‘general cheese’, makes for a bad smell in my area.  On my guessing of the price of cheese too, he could have got 20-30 bags of Hula Hoops for that.  A bad decision in my mind.

So tallying g up the scores: Price = -6 (I spent£4.93), Taste = 5 (no sweetcorn) and Volume 10 (er…14 bags of Hula Hoops) final score = 9.

That’s Sprite 2 – Lunch 1.  And 12 packets of crisps left.

Tags: Hula Hoops, Sweetcorn