Soundtrack to this post.
“Kare Burosu at Wagamama Silverburn” by Douglas Ireland, licensed CC BY 4.0.
That is me lifting a piece of silken tofu out of a bowl of Kare Burosu at Wagamama in Silverburn, and yes, I am posting a picture of my tea on the internet.
I do not have much in the way of social media. What I do have is this blog, and it turns out a blog does the job perfectly well. Anyone subscribed by RSS gets this popping up in their reader the same way a photo of somebody’s carbonara appears in a Facebook or Instagram feed. Same picture, same daft caption, no middleman.
Owning the feed
The difference is who is holding the steering wheel.
On the proprietary platforms, you do not get a feed, you get a feed that has been arranged for you. The order is decided by an algorithm, the ads are slotted in between your pals, and the whole thing is tuned to keep you scrolling rather than to show you what you actually asked to see. If you follow somebody, there is no guarantee you will see their posts. If you post something, there is no guarantee your followers will see it.
RSS is boring by comparison, and boring is the entire point. You subscribe to a site, you get everything that site publishes, in the order it was published, with nothing wedged in between. No ranking, no promoted posts, no “you might also like”. If you get sick of me you unsubscribe and I never find out, which is a much healthier arrangement than a follower count.
The other bit that matters is the archive. Everything I write lives at my own domain, in files I control, on hosting I pay for. Platforms change their rules, get sold, get shut down, or quietly decide your account is no longer worth keeping. This post will still be here at the same address in ten years because the only person who can take it down is me. That is worth more than reach.
So yep, this is my Instagram now. Get used to the food photos.
The scran
Kare Burosu is a lovely bit of cooking. Thick udon noodles in a golden curry broth, silken tofu, mushrooms, shredded carrot, coriander and a fair scattering of red chillies, and it is plant based from top to bottom. The broth is the star. It has that gentle coconut sweetness underneath and enough spice coming through to make you sit up.
“Kare Burosu logged in Nourish” by Douglas Ireland, licensed CC BY 4.0. Nutrition figures are Wagamama’s own published data.
Regular readers will know I am a recovering food addict. I have written about that properly over in I’ll Start Tomorrow, so I will not go over the whole thing again here, but the short version is that eating out used to be a guessing game I would rather not play.
This is where Wagamama deserve credit. Their website has the full nutrition for every dish on the menu, so I could sit down knowing exactly what I was ordering and log it properly afterwards in Nourish, my own calorie counter. 706 kcal, 30g of protein, and all of that protein plant based. Thirty grams from a bowl of noodles is not to be sniffed at.
Restaurants that publish their numbers make life enormously easier for anyone who tracks what they eat, for whatever reason. It costs them nothing and it means people like me can order confidently instead of picking the safest looking thing on the menu and hoping.
Double spicy
Kare Burosu is Stephanie’s dish. She has been ordering it for years and she is the reason I had it at all, because I looked at the menu, remembered how good hers always smells, and asked for the same. These last couple of years she has taken to lifting the chillies out before she starts, and last night they came across into my bowl. Her broth ended up pitched where she likes it, mine ended up with double the heat, and we both got the dinner we wanted out of it.
Reader, I loved it. Nose running, but I loved it.
A great evening out, a great bowl of noodles, and a picture of it posted somewhere I actually own.