Topomax

Today an interesting gentleman was in the practice promoting some sort of wonder drug for those moaners who get migraine headaches. He was interesting because he was clearly from Ireland with a stereotypical accent which made for an amusing pitch. I could not take the guy seriously. His accent instantly made me think of leprechauns dancing around drinking Guinness. If his pitch was in the form of an Irish pub jingle with a bit of highland dancing involved it would have been greatly improved.

Anyway after my initial amusement at the Irish man I moved onto the main motivator behind my presence in the staff room-the free food. On offer today were Afghans the size of Frisbees, a sample of fruit, some basic club sandwiches and a variety of cheese and crackers. No Guinness on offer, nothing green. This guy wasn’t doing himself any favours. I tried all the cheeses and was impressed with the variety on offer-some camembert, blue cheese and some other random cheese I didn’t know. The Afghans had sacrificed taste for size proving the age old cliché that size doesn’t always matter. The sandwiches were your typical free morning tea/lunch ones of which you can always seem to eat about 8 of them with no satisfaction.

So a standard lunch provided by the Topomax Irish man. I think because of the variety they are ahead of the fibrate company but due to its lack of glamour it does not overtake Crestor which is still leading.

The list now.

1. Crestor

2. Topoxax

3. The Fibrate company

Pharmacy company challenge

Crestor and the fibrate company

A free feed that used to make me cum in my pants at the Wellington clinical school would barely give me a semi now after being in the Rural programme. I have had so many fantastic free feeds I literally didn’t know where to start in regards to reviews. Instead I thought I would try something different and rate the food provided by the drug companies..

Oh the joys of drug companies. They may be a pain in the arse with their endless jabbering about patient outcomes or whatever but they do usually put on a good feed. They also give you free shit like staplers so not all is bad. I thought it was a good thing to start a ranking system between the drug companies on the basis of the free food that they provide. I aim to motivate the companies to provide practices with a higher quality of food which may in turn lead to their drug being prescribed. Hopefully I will get enough of these feeds to create a decent competitive list between the companies and host a masterchef show where drug reps are the contestants. The reps will be able to see this list in the Masterton Medical centre when there is enough on it.

The way a company will rank higher on this list will be if they provide food that is original, tasty and presented satisfactory. We are dealing with real Doctors now so they better have their shit together.

Since starting at the centre I have had two reps visit both providing food. The first company was trying to sell a new state of the art cholesterol drug which had fewer side effects apparently. I can’t prescribe anything so the reps marketing pitch was as useful as a new box of condoms in this town. I was also too busy sussing out the food on offer.

There were ham and cheese croissants, filled wholemeal rolls with either roast beef or ham, swirly buns with chocolate chips and Danishes. No drinks, no fruit, no staplers. The croissants were tasty but they could have been a bit more inventive with them. Ham and cheese is what I would expect from a flat in Dunedin. The rolls were satisfactory. Had lettuce meat and cheese with a bit of sauce but it was like a Pak and save roll not a New World roll.

The Danishes looked like they had a raw egg on them which intrigued me rather than repulse me. It did not taste of egg but just like a sweet apricot Danish but again just standard Danish nothing special.

The second company would have performed a lot better if they went to a kindergarden or a rest home at afternoon tea time. It was all sweet stuff-gingerbread men, ginger kisses, fudge and some cake with some grapes on the side. This was all on one plate, who did they think they are? Coming to a medical centre with one plate of food all in the sweet category! Would it kill them to have some chicken pasties or some crazy savoury dish as well? Plus they had two things in their already limited selection containing ginger. It likes serving potato bake with a side of mash potato to the flatties. Despite the narrow selection the stuff on offer was very tasty, and the staffs were particularly amused by the gingerbread men. I was not amused.

Since these are the first two drug companies feeds I have encountered there will be only a first and second place for today. So top of the list today will be Crestor and second will be the fibrate company. Crestor had more on offer and their food was presented nicer than the fibrate company who seem to have a shortage of plates.

The list so far

1. Crestor

2. Fibrate company (sorry will get the proper name soon)

Sorry for the delays between blogs I have been suffering from a bad case of writers block.

Larry

thoughts go out to those in christchurch

To all those in Christchurch affected by the quake exactly a week ago, my thoughts go out to you.
Larry

Jitzu review from a free trip to Dunedin

Wow what a weekend good to be reliving the memories of Dunedin! And it was free trip! One particular thing I love about Dunedin is going to BYOs. There is nothing like polishing off a bottle of $6.99 Shiraz over an Asian meal and using it to justify your lonely walk home in the morning. The venue tonight was the popular Jitzu BYO restaurant. I was looking forward to the new experience and seeing my friends.

When I first arrived I was dumbstruck. They had cut the legs off our table so that it was about 30cm off the ground and eliminated the chairs. I couldn’t see the reasoning behind it. It was like being a kid at Christmas not being allowed to sit at the table with the adults so you go sit on the floor and eat. Due to the number of people transferring from one side of the table to the other had to be done army style underneath the table with people reemerging on the other side like they had just escaped from being stuck in a Chilian mine. Standing up made you feel like you had a large amount of authority, kinda like a motorcyclist in a scooter gang.
So anyway onto the food side of things. I ordered a bento chicken box with a miso starter. This was my first time trying miso and honestly I am not a fan. It tasted like juice drained from a sardines can mixed what felt like whale blubber. But hey this is a Japanese experience and a fishy dish is vital for that. The Miso was not for me which is crazy because I go crazy over sardines on toast which used to rat out my previous fussy flatmates. The others had the complete opposite opinion and rated it.

The bento box however was a taste sensation and also an awesome idea. Each ingredient is separated into its own compartment so it’s up to you to mix and match. The main body of the box was the chicken nugget with mayonnaise and a restaurant special tomato sauce, the rest of the box consisted of rice some onion things, a random sushi roll and some other sauces. Sorry the details are quite hazy as my fine red was nearly finished. I tried every compartment individually in order to gauge how I was best going to mix everything into a mouthful that was worthy of a samurai honor. The flavors of each individual compartment were amazing; it was like a journey through Japanese food culture. On my first mixing attempt I failed dismally mainly because my chopstick dexterity was the equivalent of someone with Parkinson’s. I probably should have performed seppuku right then and there. I slowly got the hang of it and made some pretty worthy mixes but would have been better with proper cutlery. I thoroughly enjoyed the meal and the whole chopsticks debacle meant I actually took time to appreciate it rather than adding more food to my mouth in-between chewing.

Overall this is a great BYO to go to in Dunedin. You can’t get as rowdy as in chopsticks and there appears to be no basement where you can go exploring but the food is ten times nicer and comes in cool mix and match boxes. The sitting room out back has the potential for many fun challenges e.g how many people can fit under the table? because you can definitely get two layers of people lying under there. There is however no potential for a sneaky under the table gobby or handy.

Rating

Setting-4/5 could had some more Japanese stuff like samurai swords
Taste-4/6 the miso caused this to be lower others might have a different opinion
Presentation-4/5
Service-4.5/5
Total-16.5/21

To all those in Dunedin I love each and every one of you

Cheers
Larry

The Picnic challenge!

Hey guys sorry I have been really slack with the blog lately mainly because got some much shit to learn. Here is a new challenge which involves me and ash trying to eat a picnic bar in under a minute. take a look!


so yeah exactly a minute! first challenge I actually have beaten! gutted for ash but nice try tho!

The Saltine cracker challenge

This is a well known challenge across the world. It involves eating 6 5 by 5cm saltine crackers in under 1 minute. There is even an article on wikipedia for it.
It's not as easy as it sounds.


Sweet so yeah I failed but I reckon I might be able to do it one day if I practice a little bit.

Masterton surg trip

Masterton hospital surgery trip

7.50am start after end of run, a bus driver who enjoyed driving over the Rimutaka’s a way too much and an incredibly annoying 5th year whose voice is like one of those bugs off the mummy that get under your skin and go mental all added up to a hangover that could take down an elephant. I was relying on two things to get me through this day-free food and coffee.

We arrived at Masterton hospital to a provided morning tea which was cheese scones, juice and coffee. Not much variety here, a few savouries would have been a nice inclusion mainly because that’s all I felt like. Coffee was standard, after three I was getting over it slash starting to seizure. The juice was fantastic and helped clear away my toxin flooded blood. Hopefully lunch offers more.

Lunch

I was so hungry by lunch I had began to hallucinate. Needles became dried noodles, syringes were little sausages, and the training mannequin became a pig on the spit. I’m glad they didn’t put me on suturing first or else I would have eaten the pork belly. Lunch saved me, it was glorious. Chicken drumsticks, club sandwiches, assorted wraps, fresh fruit, slices and mini spring rolls and samosas with sweet chilli. I ate copious amounts at a speed that didn’t allow chewing. They had all the bases pretty well covered with respect to a free lunch. Probably needed more samosas and spring rolls as they disappeared faster than those eels on eel soup. My friend commented that the chicken was too greasy and on any other day this would have bothered me. Today I would have happily bathed in the greasy goodness.
The sandwiches were some sort of egg salad and tasted amazing. Being the foundation of any lunch it is important that the sandwiches are decent, and luckily for the hospital they were. The wraps were of a good size as it took two bites to eat them.

After the typical first course of sammies, wraps and chicken I moved on to the sweet side of things and tried a slice. It was clearly brought, but had a good icing to rest of the slice ratio. The fruit gets kudos because it was cut up and included mango, you know a good fruit assortment when it has mango in it.

Overall this was your bog standard free lunch that definitely satisfied me. It didn’t really push the boundaries in terms of creativity and presentation but hey it’s Masterton. There was leftover food that was handed out at the end of the day so they deserve a shit load of credit for that. Let’s see how they rated.

Taste- 4.5/6 stars
Appearance- 2/4 stars
Originality-1.5/4 stars

Overall- 8/14 stars

Larry