Why cooking for vegans needn't be a hassle, with Colin the emotionally unstable chef

VEGANISM’S hot right now, so let’s celebrate healthy, plant-based diets! It’s not like vegans are holier-than-thou twats who deserve their soy protein rammed up their arses, is it?

Chilli con carne

Made with kidney beans, tomato puree and paprika, although for a vegan version you’ll need to pop out and buy some Quorn mince. Once you get home, discover it’s not vegan because it’s got egg in it. For fuck’s sake. Eggs aren’t animals. Chickens just shit them out. Go out again and trawl the shops for overpriced vegan mince. Fucking sanctimonious timewasters.

Stuffed avocado with spicy beans and vegan feta

Looks great, with the contrast between creamy avocado and spicy chilli-and-cumin beans. Not that hardcore vegans will touch it because, as Portia explained, they use bees to pollinate the avocados and it’s an ‘unnatural use of animals’. Christ on a bike, bees are exploited now? Why not get them to unionise, Portia, you delusional cow?

Vegan toad-in-the-hole

Straightforward enough, if you don’t waste hours wondering why anyone would shape bland soy protein into sausages. I thought they rejected meat but it turns out they can’t wait to tuck into pretend Peppa fucking Pig. I’m not overly fond of broccoli, but I don’t demand a substitute made from fried chicken. You know why, vegans? Because I’m neither entitled or mental.

Chickpea curry

Without doubt the blandest thing I have ever tasted. After this bread seems spicy. Kimberley, my 15-year-old vegan niece, says it’s ‘delicious’. It’s not. She’s lying to herself, the brainwashed idiot. She’d have done well in the Cultural Revolution. I can just see her laughing as she beat pensioners with a stick in a carnivore re-education camp.

Banoffee pie

Looks fantastic. It’s a digestive biscuit base with bananas and – here’s the important thing – whipped coconut cream instead of dairy. Expecting high praise from my vegan friend Alan, I served it up and he wouldn’t touch it because the bananas might be treated with chitosan, a pesticide made from shrimp and crab shells. This is getting beyond a fucking joke. Do these picky bastards eat anything?

Water soup

I’ve had enough of vegans’ shit, so I invented this recipe myself. There’s not one ingredient vegans can take issue with, and it comes ready-made out of the tap. Had your gas cut off? Call it gazpacho.

I invited Portia over to get a rise out of her, but she said it was ‘yummy’ and asked for second helpings. Christ, I give up. Perhaps let’s not celebrate vegan diets. Let’s strap these fucking freaks down and force-feed them mince until they go back to normal.

Let’s move to a grim Yorkshire city famous for cutlery and The Full Monty! This week: Sheffield

What’s it about?

Famous for its history of heavy industry – steel and spoons mostly – and for a film about desperate unemployed men, with no industry left to work in, stripping for money. Which was treated as a feelgood 90s comedy fun.

Right next to the Peak District and of such steep gradient the residents are perpetually breathless, which at least stops them calling each other ‘duck’, Sheffield is like Paris in the Belle Époque compared to neighbours Rotherham and Barnsley.

Any good points?

A thriving cultural scene built mostly around The Full Monty and Pulp – both over 25 years old – and bugger all else. The former’s being revisited in a Disney sequel to answer the key question of whether Robert Carlyle’s ballsack now reaches his knees.

Music remains important to the city, with Arctic Monkeys exploding onto the scene in 2006 and remaining relevant right until their lead singer started talking like an American. For cool points, pretend you saw them at the now-closed Boardwalk before they were signed, or indie club The Leadmill, a historic venue that’s about to be sold up for flats.

Sheffield also spawned Tony Christie, singer of (Is This the Way to) Amarillo, which you’ll now have stuck in your head all day. You’re welcome.

The local delicacy is Henderson’s Relish, which the locals put on everything from cheese on toast to fish and chips. Try not to say it’s a shit version of Worcestershire sauce. Just think it.

Wonderful landscape?

The hills, oh god, the hills. The pints might be cheap but the hills are steep. Looming over the city on one of its seven hills is the brutalist Park Hill estate, a hideous inner-city landmark used as slum clearance in the 60s and then unsurprisingly a no-go area by the 80s.

It’s been saved from demolition so that a new generation of Sheffield residents can try to ignore this massive fucking eyesore, and so arty students can take wanky black-and-white snaps for their poverty porn final-year projects.

From there, take a spin around Park Square, a colossal fucking roundabout, and into the city centre while trying not to get run over by one of its many trams, which it’s easy to forget exist because this isn’t the 1900s. Imagine having ‘run over by tram’ on your death certificate.

Hang out at…

The Crucible, a venue features everything from classical music to experimental theatre which is chiefly known for hosting the World Snooker Championships. Year after year, snooker nerds descend on the city to listen to their little radios, drink halves of bitter in the pubs and generally be boring as fuck.

Endless bars on Division and West streets are there to cater to pissed-up students, whether clever ones from the University of Sheffield or ones doing sports science at Sheffield Hallam.

Fans of rough families in tracksuits should head to the Meadowhall, the super-sized and dated shopping centre. If you like the cheaper end of the high street and a food hall that stinks of flatulence while being impossible to get a table in, you’ll love it.

Where to buy?

If you’ve got a few quid, you might be able to afford a flat in an old knife and fork factory near the city centre. If you do, the cone-stealing antics of hammered students will delight you seven days a week.

Hipsters buy in new creative area Kelham Island, which has a microbrewery and somewhere that does fancy pizzas. There’s plenty of good living out of the city, but remember if you get to Rotherham you’ve gone too far. Far too far.

From the streets:

Helen Archer, aged 30: “Nah then. When people slag off Sheffield it makes my reyt mardy. Do tha not think so, duck? Sorry, I’ve actually only lived here six weeks and I don’t know what came over me then.”