Samuel Muston: On the Menu

Lobster Mac and Cheese from Mr Buckley’s in east London: 'together they are almost excessively lovely'

This week I've been eating... Lobster Mac and Cheese

Has any dish been as fought over as macaroni cheese? The French have claimed it. Mrs Beeton had a go at Anglicising it. And the Americans renamed it mac'n'cheese and insisted founding father Thomas Jefferson invented it. In fact, there was a creamy Roman dish called maccheroni alla carbonara before America even had that name.

Today it's global in its tread, a culinary trope as ubiquitous on menus as burgers and malbec. The meeting of pasta, cheese and a hot oven is always likely to be happy, but it's especially so at Mr Buckley's in east London, where the mac and the cheese are joined in a menage by little hunks of lobster.

Together they are almost excessively lovely: tender pasta is suspended in just-setting molten cheddar and crowned with a chewy, browned-cheese top. Who cares who invented it when it tastes this good. mrbuckleys.com

Weight watch

Do you know what your recommended calorific intake looks like? I reckon most of us probably haven't an idea what 2,000 calories for women and 2,500 for men amounts to. You'd need a calculator and a whole lot of patience to add up the figures on all those little tables on the back of our food packets.

Buzzfeed has done the maths, however, and made this video (link below) to show us just what our daily bread amounts to. It's quite reassuring to see that on the odd day you could, should you choose, eat 50 rashers of streaky bacon. http://bit.ly/109UKqB

Bagging it

The "wine handbags" on sale at Firebox have clearly been created with tongue firmly in cheek. According to the website, "only the finest French vino" (aka cabernet sauvignon, chardonnay and rosé) go into the 1.5l bags that are "crafted from sturdy, high-gloss cardboard". It's all very nice and silly. However, an unscrupulous colleague on The Independent who has more than a passing interest in oenophilia points out that with the price of alcohol at music festivals as high as it is, it might be her preferred way of sneaking booze past the bouncers on the gate this year. £29.99, firebox.com

Loco for cocoa

The best chocolate company you've probably never heard of? Cocoa Hernando. Inspired by his travels through India, the Himalayas, Mexico and Morocco, chocolatier Paul Tomlinson has created four lovely bars with ingredients from each place. There are two milk chocolate bars on sale, one with masala chai and the other with pink salt. While lovers of darker chocolate get the choice of spearmint or tongue-warming chipotle chilli. £4, cocoahernando.com

Foodie tour

Table Laden, the nomadic restaurant hosting a dinner a month at different foodie locations around the UK, has announced its next pitch. True to its aim of staying close to the food it uses, attendees will be dining at Shepherds Purse Farm (of yummy cheese fame) in Yorkshire on 27 April. Tickets: £32, theladentable.com

Twitter: @SAMuston

s.muston@independent.co.uk