You’ll probably be familiar with the Water Cycle: rain falls onto land and rivers, flows to the sea, evaporates, forms clouds, which in turn cool and condense and fall as rain, thus starting the cycle all over again.

The carbon cycle–or at least the idea of a carbon cycle–is also known to many of us, thanks largely to its role in global warming.

The Cheese Cycle, however, is a total mystery to almost everyone. In fact, I only discovered it on Tuesday morning after throwing some out-of-date cheddar out of the window to the local seagulls. A low-wattage bulb clicked on in my head and I had the whole process worked out in an inst. Here’s how it works.

1. You go to the fridge to get some cheese for a sandwich. On opening the door, your olfactory senses tell you, by way of a complex chemical interaction known to scientists as a ‘whiff’ or ‘pong’ that your cheese is off and that eating it would probably be deleterious to the efficient functioning of the fragile human digestive system.
2. You throw the whiffy cheese (as I did) outside to the local seagulls/pigeons/dumpster divers (if printing this post, please delete as appropriate).
3. Seagulls eat the cheese, covering their nostrils owing to the ‘pong’ but otherwise enjoying the gustatory sensation. (Fools!)
4. Not to put too fine a point on it, later that same morning the gulls convert the cheese into, erm, guano.
5. The guano (tons and tons and tons of it) is harvested partly from rocks on the seashore and partly from car roofs in supermarket car parks, and becomes a valuable raw ingredient of fertiliser.
6. Fertiliser makes farmers’ fields lush and green.
7. Dairy cows eat the lush green grass and (long story short) produce milk…
8. …some of which is turned into cheese. Note: next time, read the use-by date and stop wasting food.

Too technical for you? Then study our handy infographic, “The Cheese Cycle” (aka “How Nature never lets anything go to waste”).

Black turtle beans and adzuki beans: try as you might, you can’t, to the best of our knowledge, find either of them ready tinned in any of the major supermarkets. So, as we’ve taken to beans in a big way over the last few years, we decided to buy some dried ones and prepare them ourselves. We’ve done it before. Lots of boiling, simmering, froth skimming and clock watching. You’d hate it.

As I say, we’re highly experienced bean boilers. Black turtle beans are a new variety to us, though, and the soaking stage (several hours in cold water to get rid of the beans’ natural toxins) was a revelation. After a short while the water turned black. It was as if an octopus or squid had let off its entire ink ammo all in one go.

I also thought it looked alarmingly like an evil wizard’s scrying bowl.

Which reminds me: this afternoon’s Friday matinee (feel free to pencil in your own acute accent to the first ‘e’ if printing out this post) will be Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, part five of our cheapskate way of catching up on popular culture — i.e., we taped the first five HP films off ITV recently rather than buying them on DVD. I have made my own faux broken ‘Weasley wand’ out of a surplus venetian blind wand and a piece of sticky tape. Maybe if I tap the saucepan those black beans will boil a little quicker. I’m not looking in the water though: I’ve no idea what I might discern there.

Spooky….

Meat has featured less and less in our meals this year, and, apart from tuna and the occasional tin of sardines or salmon on my part, both Shana and I are now virtually complete vegetarians. A fish-eating vegetarian is known as a ‘piscatarian’, but if anyone asks why I still eat fish and not only vegetables I usually say “Well, fish are vegetables too, aren’t they?” This is meant more as a crude attempt to derail the question than as a serious philosophical position, though. The fact is, it’s my lunch and I like fish, so there!

My own reasons for cutting out meat and poultry were more to do with reducing my consumption of saturated fat, which in turn helps to keep my suspected dodgy gallbladder from whingeing at me too often and giving me stomach cramps. With Quorn products (particularly their bacon-style slices) and both Asda’s and Tesco’s delicious own brands of vegetarian minced beef, the conversion to virtual vegetarianism has not been at all difficult.

Like the determined smoker, however, who quits but is keen to prove his willpower by keeping one last pack of ciggies in a drawer and adamantly refusing to give in to the temptation to light up, I have one tin of corned beef (or cornèd beef, which, for fun, we always pronounce ‘cor-ned’ rather than ‘cornd’) left in the cupboard, but I have so far always found an alternative sandwich filling at lunchtimes. Can my resolve last? Time will tell, I thought, so I went to check the best-before date. “It’s good till halfway through 2015,” I announced. “That means it’ll still be ok to eat even after then next football World Cup.”

I have therefore devised a plan which will enable me, a virtual vegetarian, to eat my last tin of bully beef with a clear conscience. “If England win the next World Cup,” I said, “I’ll break open that beef and eat it by way of celebration.” I might even use a black felt tip pen to draw a little picture of the Jules Rimet trophy on one of the can ends. My promise is only good for the 2014 World Cup, though. I can’t just keep waiting forever for that elusive England win; I mean, who ever heard of a tin of corned beef being still edible after a hundred years!

While tidying the kitchen cupboard this morning, I spotted a chance for a quick game of Supermarket Scrabble. For the uninitiated, it’s a good way to improve your spelling and get turfed out of your local minimarket at the same time. Much safer sometimes to try these things at home first. So, with no further meandering, what’s the best thing to do with fresh herbs?