Conditioning

The season has ended, and with a good few months before I contemplate racing again, chocolate has once again entered my diet (along with beer, coffee, fry ups and biscuits (though most of these were enjoyed in a single day as I attempted to get myself through a two-day audit of our shiny new Environmental Management System with my sanity and sense of humour intact)).

My preferred 'session' chocolatier, Green and Blacks, are no doubt enjoying resurgent profits, and my waistline is blooming. It's difficult not to over-indulge slightly when there are so many delicious flavours to choose from. Maya Gold (the orange, slightly spicy one) is my favourite and, being organic and fair trade, I can kid myself it's not a hideously unethical purchase. I try not to think too hard about the food miles whilst chomping my way through a bar or two. I'm rather a fan of Green and Blacks and their butterscotch, raisin and hazelnut, cherry, almond, mint, ginger, milk, white, dark, etc. varieties of chocolate. Mind you, I was most perturbed to see a sign in the Whole Foods Market (posh food shop in Kensington) advertising a special offer on Green and Blacks Olives with Garlic.

Ugh. Olive and Garlic chocolate?? It'll never catch on, I thought, as I picked my way through the store to see in the flesh this chocolate chimera. I'm a veteran of bizarre food combinations, a victim of the so-wrong-yet-so-right mixture of free alcohol and people trying to sell delicious and flavoursome foods which is the Good Food Show. Garlic ice-cream? Yup, tried that. Grim. Not to be recommended. Garlic sausage and strawberry jam - tried that one too. (Not at the Good Food Show, I might add. This was a favourite sandwich combination of a former colleague. I forget his real name, but his nickname was Doom.) Anyhow, much searching later, I failed to find the olive and garlic Green and Blacks.

I was a little disappointed. I was rather looking forward to feeling justifiably outraged that a company I credit with having reasonable taste would generate such a foul and ultimately wrong flavour of chocolate. I therefore felt only slightly stupid to notice on my way out that the same sign stood next to a display not of chocolate, but of olives. But of course. Green and black olives with garlic.

D'oh.