Please help stop this disgraceful practice.

[likelysuspect]

Greenery on things where it doesnt belong

Ordered baked beans on toast (we'll come back to that) today.

Came with a clump of greenery on top. Salad garni.

What person in their right mind does this?

And OF COURSE it was bloody sourdough. Because NO other bread exists these days. And it was not toasted. It was barely within sight of the toaster I reckon

So it turns up with its green clump and then, to make matters much worse, it came with some butter pats but THE BEANS WERE ALREADY ON THE UNTOASTED TOAST.

So I scraped off my beans to try to spread the butter but of course this was a wasted effort because the butter wouldnt adhere to the untoasted toast due to the bean juice so I ended up just smearing it around while it stuck to my knife.

Anyway back to the greenery. I cant tell you how many bits of rocket have gone flying down the road before when served atop something, because of course a bit of wind will pick up salad and send it flying into the face of an unsuspecting pedestrian.

And dont get me started on bloody pea shoots.

#endgreeneryoverload

YANBU - Garnishing perfectly adequate meals with frilly extras is a performative nonsense to make something out of nothing

YABU - I really like bits of salad on top of a full English and you're only posting this because your OH has the football on anyway and you're bored.

Love sourdough . Our kids make it loads...delish ! And beans on toast esp with some melted cheese in them ...ambrosia , food of the gods !

Ah now you've lost me OP, I love a savoury cream tea with cheese scone, cream cheese and chilli jam at our local Blue Diamond garden centre.

But we do get proper china plates.

I would be very annoyed about the bread being untoasted (awful and soggy, with beans?!!), but I LOVE sourdough, butter on my beans on toast, and I don't mind a peashoot or rocket garnish (a bit redundant on beans on toast, but then how else to dress it up?).

There's all sorts of reasons why people might want/need to eat in a cafe. I am sure the OP is well aware she can make it at home.

Even worse if it is nice bread.

Great butter and great bread is possibly one of the best items in the world.

I mean its due to this thread that Ive just discovered you can buy baked beans in the shops. In tins so very easy to carry home.

Im glad I started this thread.

I make my own bread - have for years - and I agree. The smell of the baked bread in the kitchen makes the eating experience even better. Great bread, a good spread of cold butter and an ice cold beer to accompany. Doesn’t get much better than that.

Not wanting to derail but I’ve tried making sourdough to no avail. Anyone got a recipe they can point me to ?

It's so annoying when people say stuff like this

I casually commented on a thread elsewhere once about how annoying it is that I can't ever get a decent poached egg in a cafe, it's either got an undercooked white or an overcooked yolk.

So many smug sarcastic comments "If only there was a way to cook it at home for a fraction of the we price"

Bugger off.

🤣🤣🤣

😂👏

Greenery on baked beans would seem odd to me but not outrageous. I don't care for baked beans myself, but that's because the tinned sort are a travesty. If you take haricot beans and actually bake them yourself in a sauce with molasses and a proper cocktail of spices the contrast will astonish you. I've only ever done it once, because they need 8 hours in a slow oven: I had to get up briefly at 03.00 specially to light the oven. (Interviewer: do you ever give your children baked beans? Jane Grigson: Very seldom - they take too long to cook.) Interestingly, tinned baked beans I've had in the US are a good deal nearer the real thing.

I am vegetarian, but I dislike the phrase plant based. It seems to imply we should get plaudits for saving the planet (which I haven't earned; I'm just eating the kind of food I like best), and everyone else should feel guilty if they don't follow suit.

Tinned baked beans are 'the real thing', though, when you have never known different.

I remember having 'real' cheesecake for the first time, a proper baked one. I hands down preferred the Green's packet mixes my Mum used to make for us on Sundays.

I've had fresh made custard, and it's not a patch on Ambrosia.

You know why? Because it's what I know and recognise. It's what beans, cheesecake and custard taste like to me, and I liked them for tasting the way they did. Not as imitations of something else, but as what they were in and of themselves, IYSWIM.

The 'real thing' of baked beans I haven't tried. And it might blow me away taste wise, but it won't be tinned baked beans. It will, to me, be a different dish, just like home made custard isn't ambrosia, and home made cheesecake isn't Green's packet mix. And I will still like tinned baked beans because they taste like tinned baked beans and I like that taste.

I admit, I have a 70s working class palate that I have never grown out of despite my best efforts.

It's not the recipe, it's the starter. I used to make, though I say it myself, great sourdough bread, perfect every time, easiest type of bread I ever made, always came out great. It was from a starter I got off a friend. I had that starter for two years. I lavished love and attention on that starter. Fed it, nurses it, it had a name and everything.

Then we moved and I had to, reluctantly, give it to someone else. I have never managed to achieve the heights of bread making with any other starter since.

I’m sorry but your post did make me laugh. Be done with useless greenery! I will say that I’d be more pissed off by the unbuttered (non) toast. Also sourdough is highly overrated. Give me a crusty white loaf any day.

Well, I'd only known tinned baked beans until I tried the real thing, but I still prefer the latter...

As to Green's cheesecake mix, I think Green's products are probably a cut above most convenience foods. Georgina Horley, in that neglected classic Good Food on a Budget, said that she enjoyed the 'carefully arranged faces of some purists' when she told them that she hardly ever now served proper creme caramel because she found Green's Carmelle so good: 'Well I do, and there it is'.

Hate the slate
Put it on a plate!
As per this song

😂love it!

@MrCollinsandhisboiledpotatoes I’ve just discovered the Lakeland microwave egg poacher. Have a look at their site. Honestly wouldn’t go back to the traditional method as these turn out perfectly every time. The secret is to use very fresh eggs - the yolk sits up and doesn’t go rock hard before the white is cooked.

www.lakeland.co.uk/products/good2heat-2-egg-poacher

My problem isn't cooking poached eggs. I can cook a poached egg at home perfectly fine.
My problem is not getting a decent poached egg when I'm eating out.
Thanks though

I saw a programme yesterday featuring fields of rocket grown by French farmers, destined for the British market. I couldn 't help thinking it was such a shame that at least half of it would end uneaten in kitchen bins.

That's pretty much a complete menu in my opinion.

And I bet they didn't put chives all over it like the stupid B**s around here.

Yes, but surely you realise it's a mad thing to order out, especially somewhere big and busy? They'll have half-poached a stash in advance and stored them in water, so what you're going to get is a reheated one which looks adequate but isn't.

The X men.
or
A Bunch of Bastards

I agree no to greenery but yes to vinegar on the baked beans and white toasted bread with lots of butter

Yes to vinegar on baked beans and also lots of vinegar on mushy peas too.