I’ve been thinking a lot about protein, largely because I’ve spent the last year working my body hard on a building project and yet don’t appear to have put on any muscle. I wasn’t doing it for the physique, you understand, but I did think it might be a pleasant by-product. Not to be.
People I know who ‘work out’ in gyms tell me it’s no good pumping your muscles if you’re not eating the protein to replenish them. This resonates with me to an extent. At the same time, my daughter, who is very knowledgeable about fitness and also has a vested interest in my longevity, keeps telling me I need to eat more protein if I’m to avoid becoming frail in my old age and falling over and breaking bones and dying a lonely death in a hospital corridor. This also resonates.
I do eat meat, but I’m actually trying to cut down on it, not eat more, in order to save maybe a bit of the rainforest and curry some favour with the world’s livestock in case there is an afterlife in which vindictive chickens rule the roost. So I’ve been looking at alternative sources of protein.
I began with an elephant – not to eat but to learn from. The elephant eats a vegan diet yet has no problem bulking up. How? It does so by consuming vast quantities of vegetation and having the stomach to digest it all. I don’t have the amino acids to break down tree bark, but I can eat spinach. A quick calculation (daily protein requirement divided by amount of protein in spinach) reveals that I would have to graze on spinach all day, every day to get the protein I need.
So what else is there? Peas are good. (Peas are good. They’re Ebeneezer Good). One cup of peas would give me about a seventh of the protein I need. So seven cups of peas a day. I like peas, but not that much. Lentils? Four cups a day. Tofu? Nnnah.
And so, for the last couple of weeks I’ve been eating a boiled egg every morning. While this may not be solving my protein challenge (I’d need more than 10 a day), it has become a cooking obsession – how to cook the perfect soft boiled egg? I began with the classic four-minute boil and, like all new recipes, it worked beautifully first time but not the next. The white was glassy. That difficult second albumen syndrome.
The method I’ve settled on is this: seven minutes in the air fryer (yes, the air fryer) on 180, left for as long as it takes to hum the intro to Stay Free by the Clash, then into cold water for the duration of verse one, and then into the egg cup. It gives perfect results every time – firm white, runny yolk, beautiful.
Funny things eggs. And even funnier to be described as one. But what greater accolade is there than to be called ‘a good egg’? This phrase was actually preceded by its opposite, ‘a bad egg’, used to describe someone who is rotten. And that is a great choice of image, as you’ll know if you’ve ever had a close encounter with an actual rotten egg. I have.
I was young, about 19, and walking to the house of a girl for whom I had what you might call ‘feelings’. With me were my friends, Nose and Dog (“we met when we were at school”), and they were in playful mood. We’d been throwing things around to each other, as young blokes did in those days, when Nose found an egg on the ground and, with a “catch this!”, tossed it to me. He expected me to duck out of the way but I thought it was a stone and instinctively put out my hand to catch it. On impact, it exploded through my fingers and showered me with rotten egg.
By the time we arrived at the house of my heart’s desire, I literally had egg on my face and stank like a food bin in a heatwave. Not the way Casanova would have done it. Her mother appeared in the hallway and suggested I strip off so they could hose me down… or did I dream that bit?
If anyone has any tips on bulking up without eating meat or being an elephant, please reply with your comments. There’s a good egg.
