Throughout Food Month we will have a daily “Guilty Pleasure” feature where well-known faces share their secret treats, from the delicious to the daring to the downright strange. And you can win a great prize if your share your guilty pleasure with us. See below for details
“The Christmas food catalogues are blowing my mind again this year. Everything looks so amazing. It never ceases to astound me how they can make the 24-piece snack selection (12 chicken nuggets, 12 onion rings) look like something you would serve to a president on his birthday.
"Most tempting of all these delicacies is the prawn ring; for the uninitiated, that's a big load of prawns in a ring. All the prawns a man could ever want! Everywhere does them, and they're dirt cheap. Lidl do a ring of 50 prawns for four euro! A sandwich would cost you that!
“That was my thinking, a few years back, when I was working in retail. I said hey, I’m getting a chicken roll out of Spar for four quid, why don’t I treat myself and go to Lidl and get a whole prawn ring? I can eat it in the car. Pure classy like.
“I’d talked about it for weeks, building up to it. I’m gonna do it, I’m really gonna do it! People have put less planning into murders than I put into buying a prawn ring from Lidl. I was convinced it was the best idea I’d ever had.
“Even writing this now, I don’t know what I was thinking. I do not recognise myself in that person. I want to reach back through time and say don’t do it god damn you don’t you dare get those prawns!
"Anyways I went down to the Lidl after getting the last of the lunchtime customers out of the shop and bought a prawn ring and a can of Lidl brand Red Bull. I had change out of a fiver. Out I went to my 2001 Renault Clio that only started if you held the central locking button while you turned the key, and cracked open my 50+ ring of prawns right there in the car park.
Once I got the cardboard packaging off, I saw that the prawns came on a plastic plate, with like another plastic shell on the top, like a flan case or… no, exactly like a flan case. I don’t need another example.
Opening this was tricky, and it caused the brine that the prawns were sloshing around in to spill out all over my lap and over the car. So I had to open the car door and lean out and spill out the brine onto the ground, holding the top like the lid of a saucepan. I remember having my seatbelt on for some reason.
“There was no sauce with the prawns and I had forgotten to buy any and the Lidl was rammed so I didn’t want to go back in. So I just sat and started munching through the whole thing, working my way clockwise around the ring.
“Five prawns in, I knew I was in trouble. This was not the lavish feast I thought it would be. This was more like a punishment for something. Fifty prawns is too much for any man. My folly was apparent.
“I wanted to throw the whole thing out, but I didn’t want to be the type of person who really, really wants a meal then doesn’t eat it when they get it. What am I, six?
“Anyway, I ploughed joylessly through prawn hell sitting in my car with the heat on to stop the windows misting up, doing my best to wash them down with a can of ‘energy fuel’.
I nearly lost it on prawn 36 but managed to keep them down somehow. I noticed that I was going to be late back to work, so prawns 37 through 50 were eaten off the plate on my lap while I drove back to the shop.
“Nobody would have faulted me for leaving them behind, but it had become a quest at this stage. These prawns were my white whale. I think I must have had brine dementia. I was not acting like a rational human being. I was eating the last four prawns out of the palm of my hand while standing waiting for the shutters of the shop to lift at two o’clock and let me in.
“The whole experience was macabre. Plus I left the empty plastic plates in the car when I went back into work and they stank the car up till May the next year.
“I guess what I’m trying to say is enjoy prawn rings responsibly.”
Gerry McBride is a stand-up comedian and writer for Waterford Whispers News. Follow him on Twitter @GerryMcBride, or catch him supporting Tom O'Mahony in the Workmans Club this Friday at 8pm. Details and tickets here
To win an overnight stay for two with breakfast at Kelly's Hotel in Dublin plus dinner for two at L'Gueuleton French bistro, just tell us about your guilty pleasure. Whether it's tasty and tempting or odd and embarrassing, we want to hear about it. Email your entry plus your name and phone number to guilty@irishtimes.com and the winner will be announced at the end of Food Month.
November is Food Month in The Irish Times. You will find food-related content in all of our sections. We will also have reader events, competitions and lots of exclusive content at irishtimes.com/food
