A fly on my kitchen wall

2007-05-15T08:49:00.000Z

Food journal: 15 May, 2002

I’m delighted to hear that Mark is going out with pals from work tonight. Not that I won’t miss him but it means that I can have fish and chips on my own. I confess that I’m somewhat fetishistic about the whole private ritual. I set the table with a knife and fork, a warm plate, a bottle of tomato ketchup and a jar of pickled onions. When I get home with my portion (large fish, large chips), I unwrap it on the plate, leave the paper in place, abandon the knife and fork, push the tomato ketchup to one side (it doesn’t go with fish and chips but I like to see it on the table), spoon out six pickled onions (not five, not seven), put some vinegar from the pickled onion jar over the chips and start eating with my fingers. The television has to be on.

What a disappointment! Mark decided that he wanted to line his stomach before what promised to be a serious drinking session later, so offered to join me in an early dinner. What could I say? I wasn’t going to be cheated out of my fish and chips but eating it with Mark at 5.30pm was not the same thing at all as doing it with Michael Buerk chatting away on the 6 o’clock news.

I tried to enter into the spirit of the occasion but somehow the excitement wasn’t there. Even getting my hands on Mark’s leftover batter and fish skin didn’t make up for it. The only consolation is that he’s going out again on Friday…

’07 update: Sadly, the fish and chip shop up the road has disappeared and been replaced by a fancy fresh fish shop. The fish is beautifully laid out and hugely expensive. The labels on each species rave about its freshness and provenance (all ‘diver-caught’ this and ‘line-caught’ that from Devon and Cornwall). I would never buy fish there because I’m so sad about the demise of my fish and chip shop.

2007-05-14T09:12:00.001Z

Food journal: 14 May, 2002

When I bought a large piece of pork recently in the farmers’ market I cut it into three small pieces, took off the crackling and froze them all separately. I’ve already used one piece of meat for the kebabs last week and I took out the second one to cook today. Although only enough for two people I thought I would try wrapping the piece of crackling around it and roasting it as a mini joint.

The crackling was damp when I took it out of its freezer bag so I wiped it thoroughly with kitchen paper and left it uncovered in the fridge all day to dry it out. The golden rule for crisp crackling is to make sure it is totally dry before it’s cooked (I’ve been known to use the hairdryer as a last-minute solution).

Once I’d tied the crackling around the joint, and two hours before we wanted to eat, I put it into a moderate oven. I wasn’t sure how long it would take to cook but I wanted to allow plenty of time for the fat to run out and the skin to crisp. Another golden rule for good crackling is not to salt it until just before it goes into the oven. Any earlier, and the salt brings moisture to the surface and undoes all your good work with the hairdryer. The third and final golden rule is to sit the joint on a rack so that the heat can circulate all around it.

I was just about to put some onion, carrot and celery chunks under the meat to provide flavouring for the gravy later, when I panicked that the steam generated by the vegetables would make the crackling soggy so I left them on one side.

I’d bought a cabbage (it’s still wintry outside but they’re promising us blue skies later in the week) and looked up a recipe in Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course for a simple stir-fry with juniper berries and garlic. I also wanted some apple sauce to dip the crackling in but only had one of the weird organic Cox’s left in the fruit bowl. I thought of baking it beside the pork but panicked again about the steam so tried microwaving it, which I’ve done before to make a quick sauce. For some reason it turned dry and leathery so I abandoned the whole idea.

Steam or no steam, it had to be roast potatoes so they went into the top of the oven an hour after the pork. The crackling was already feeling crunchy when I gave it a tap so I plucked up courage and slid the chopped vegetables underneath to brown in the fat given out by the meat for the rest of the cooking time.

Twenty minutes before we wanted to eat, I put some chopped onions on to fry for the cabbage dish and then looked in the oven. The crackling was a joy to behold – totally crisp except for a tiny bit underneath and with that puffed-up quality that means it’s not going to break too many of your teeth when you eat it (I seem to remember reading that salt has the effect of introducing air to the surface). I took it out of the oven and left it on a plate, uncovered, at the back of the cooker and put the roasting tray over the flame and boiled down the cooking juices with the vegetables until they started to fry and brown at the edges. I poured off nearly all the fat, added a teaspoon of cornflour and some water mixed with vegetable stock powder to make gravy. In the meantime I finished cooking Delia’s cabbage.

I served the joint sitting on the gravy and browned vegetables and put the cabbage and roast potatoes in separate dishes. The first thing we did was to remove the crackling and scrupulously share it out. Although most of the fat had dissolved into the roasting pan there was still a thin layer which Mark carefully removed and I removed rather less carefully (we are the original Mr and Mrs Sprat). It was delicious but sadly lacking apple sauce. The meat was tender and moist even though it was such a small piece.

Delia’s recipe, as ever, was reliable and good (I’m afraid, as usual, I’d messed about with it and added a couple more juniper berries and an extra clove of garlic but I shouldn’t have done and was duly sorry).

’07 update: Our plan is to leave for France on Friday but we have had a few administrative hiccups lately (irrelevant to this journal) and we might have to postpone. Hopefully, we will go and I’ve been running down the fridge and freezer in anticipation. Paul had some de-frosted boiled beef and carrots last night while I had an omelette as there wasn’t enough for two. I’ve taken out the last piece of frozen meat – a large guinea fowl breast – for tonight. That just leaves a few frozen peas, some sweetcorn, various lumps of bread (for emergencies!) and an enormous veal bone which I was going to use for stock but never got round to. Not too wasteful.

2007-05-13T11:10:00.001Z

Food journal: 13 May, 2002

The weather is chilly and grey so, after my unsuccessful efforts to bring some spring sunshine into our diet on Saturday, I’m back to root vegetables, which seem more fitting at the moment. As we’d overdosed on chicken wings last night, I set about making a vegetable gratin.

After cutting some carrots, celery and onions into sizeable chunks, I fried them slowly in olive oil with a lid on the pan until they were just tender. Next I added a spoonful of flour and let it cook for a few minutes before adding a good grating of nutmeg, some thyme, parsley and a small bayleaf. After that I put in enough water mixed with vegetable stock powder to make a thick sauce and then some milk to add richness and thin it out to the right consistency.

I left the vegetables simmering gently while I thought about what to serve as an accompaniment. I had a bag of potatoes under the kitchen table so thought it might be a good idea to grate some in the Magimix, squeeze the moisture out and mix them with some gram flour to make a kind of potato fritter. It was all done in the blink of the Magimix’s eye and I shallow-fried tablespoons of the mixture in some olive oil while finishing off the vegetable gratin.

After mixing a small tin of sweetcorn with the vegetables and their sauce I poured everything into a heatproof dish, scattered plenty of breadcrumbs over the top, added a drizzle of olive oil and some grated cheese and let it bubble under the grill until suitably browned.

The potato fritters provided a good crunchy contrast to the creamy vegetable gratin but the flavour was dull, even though I chopped the last of my bunch of mint over the top before serving. Mark thought they lacked salt but I think a few spices wouldn’t have gone amiss, although they might have overpowered the subtler flavour of the vegetable gratin. Maybe lots of chopped herbs would be good. Or some crumbled kaffir lime leaves. I’ll have to think further.

’07 update: The restaurant last night was bizarre – the huge hotplate in the middle of each table provided a stage for the waiters to perform all sorts of pyrotechnics with onion rings built up to look like volcanoes and giant prawns made to do a dance in the boiling heat before landing on your plate. There were plenty of children squealing and giggling but the older couples (like us) were obviously asking themselves – why?

2007-05-12T14:52:00.001Z

Food journal: 12 May, 2002

This afternoon we braved the second day of the Matisse/Picasso exhibition at Tate Modern. Feeling exhilarated afterwards, we didn’t want to go home to eat mashed potato and fried eggs, which was all that was on offer since I cleaned out my deep-fat fryer and abandoned all hope of making chips until after we come back from our next trip to Béziers. Neither did we want to go to a formal restaurant which would inhibit our need to argue at length, along with the rest of London at the moment, about WHO IS THE BETTER ARTIST?

We ended up going to a self-service Chinese restaurant near to Leicester Square. I read an article recently that poured scorn on people who couldn’t resist a sign that says “All you can eat for £x” but, by the number of customers inside, it looks like nobody could care less about the opinion of food writers. We sat at a table for two with other tables literally touching ours on either side (i.e. to all intents and purposes it was a table for six) so we felt constrained to mutter our opinions about the two great giants of 20th century art sotto voce.

The food was laid out in great vats on a round platform and as we ate we watched them being filled up over and over again as crowds of people helped themselves. The tourist season is truly upon us, and this at least meant the food was freshly cooked. There was all the usual Chinese fare but I must say that the deep-fried chicken wings with hot chilli sauce are a serious rival to egg and chips; I went back twice for more.

So far, our vote is for Picasso but we’ll be going back to the exhibition again to make sure.

’07 update: As it happens, we’re going to an oriental restaurant tonight quite arbitrarily (not just for the sake of today’s update!). It’s called Benihana in NW London. Apparently, according to the Time Out Eating and Drinking Guide, the waiters are all dressed up ‘like gunslingers’ and cook the food in front of you on a hot plate at the table. Not at all like the one we went to five years ago, where you had to queue up to help yourself.

2007-05-11T10:27:00.000Z

Food journal: 11 May, 2002

A few days ago I’d seen a large bowl of interesting-looking sausages in the local deli and went in to get some for dinner tonight. There were only a couple left and they looked a bit dried up so I just bought a loaf of bread and went to M&S later to see what they had to offer. Their Tuscan sausages had “New” emblazoned across the packet, along with the information that they contained ham, olives and white wine, which sounded irresistible (are there any packets that don’t?).

I wanted to try buying some vegetables in our local market; not the fancy farmers’ market but the common or garden market which has been going for at least thirty years to my knowledge in a Camden back street. It seemed amazingly cheap. I thought I would try an Italianate mixture of broad beans, garden peas and artichoke hearts to go with the Tuscan sausages and I’d seen all three vegetables on a stall on the way to M&S. By the time I got back, though, the garden peas had all disappeared so I bought 2lb of broad beans and three large artichokes at half the price they would cost in the big supermarkets.

I like broad beans but only if they’ve been divested of the horribly bitter outer skin which surrounds each bright green bean. It takes ages to remove them after cooking but it’s an addictive task, like biting your nails or tearing off loose bits of wallpaper. While I was doing that I cooked the artichokes.

Globe artichokes are like no other vegetable and are basically a sophisticated cousin of the ordinary thistle. They have tough outer leaves, of which only a tiny bit at the bottom of each is edible, and a larger edible part in the centre which is called the “heart”. I love eating artichokes whole, tearing off each leaf and sucking at the ends, preferably dipped in a good vinaigrette or some hot butter. It’s so satisfying arriving at the heart and scraping off the inedible hairy choke before cutting up the delicate prize and eating it slowly with a knife and fork. I even love the messiness of it and the great pile of debris at the end.

The posh way of eating globe artichokes, however, is to discard all the leaves and just use the heart. You can do this in two ways. Either the artichoke is peeled raw to reveal the heart – rather like peeling an apple but nothing like as easy – and then cooked, or it can be cooked first and then the softened leaves and choke removed from the tender heart. I chose the second method because not only could I then suck on all the leaves as I pulled them off but also because wrestling with a raw artichoke and a paring knife is almost beyond me. Artichokes need to be boiled in acidulated water to stop them turning black so I squeezed half a lemon over them and turned the saucepan lid upside down to keep them under the boiling water. They take 30-40 minutes and are cooked when you can pull a leaf out easily.

To bring everything together I fried some onions in a generous amount of olive oil while the sausages grilled and the pasta boiled, then added some garlic followed by the prepared beans and artichoke hearts cut into pieces. I also added a small amount of stock made with vegetable bouillon powder and mashed everything gently with a fork until slightly thickened. Finally I stirred in a handful of chopped mint.

The sausages were great – I ate three, which is one more sausage than I normally eat. The vegetables, however, weren’t. After a serious post-mortem I can think of several mistakes. One, I shouldn’t have bought the vegetables in the market because, although they looked in good condition, they didn’t have that fresh taste I was after. Two, maybe I shouldn’t have been so greedy and should have prepared the artichoke hearts raw – I seem to remember that top chefs on the telly do it that way and perhaps the flavour is better. Three, overheating mint makes it taste of nothing so I should have let the vegetables cool down slightly before scattering it over the top. Instead of bursting with spring-like flavours, the whole thing tasted muddy.

It worries me, this business of vegetables looking good but not delivering flavour. It’s easy to feel paranoid about irradiation and other strange treatments but I never seem to have this problem with produce from the Béziers market in France. Having said that, I bought some French shallots in a large London supermarket months ago, some of which I planted on the windowsill in the hope of getting some green shoots to use instead of chives as a garnish. They never grew and I ended up throwing them away; the ones I didn’t plant are still sitting on the kitchen table looking as fresh as a daisy. Very strange.

’07 update: I think I’ve said enough above to be going on with until tomorrow!

2007-05-10T09:29:00.000Z

Food journal: 10 May, 2002

A meal out with our friend Peter tonight. Both he and Mark work in Covent Garden so we booked a table at Le Deuxième (is there a branch called Le Premier?) which has had good reviews and does a pre-theatre menu.

The choice was fairly limited: two first courses, three mains and three desserts. Mark and I chose the sautéed wild mushrooms and Peter chose the pea and sweetcorn risotto to start. The mushrooms were plump and juicy and served on a bed of well-dressed salad. Peter’s risotto tasted good (we don’t hold ourselves back from diving into each other’s plates) but was too dry. I entirely sympathise that chefs can’t make a small portion of risotto for every single customer and have to keep it warm in large quantities, but why don’t they at least have a pan of hot stock on the side so they can stir some in at the last minute to return it to the correct soupy consistency? Might not be authentic but it’s better than offering a lump of stodge.

Peter and Mark went for the minute steak with onion gravy. One of them wanted it well-done and the other medium – I can’t remember which but they both ended up with medium anyway. Again, high points for flavour and the chips were perfect. I had coq au vin which was rather lacklustre in appearance but had been properly made and took me back twenty years to meals in small French bistros. Also on the plate was a pile of “lime-flavoured” rice which had pieces of kaffir lime leaves dotted around (so I’m not the only one to like them). The coq au vin didn’t gain anything from the extra flavour, though, and plain rice would have been much better.

I didn’t have room for a pudding but Peter had a white and dark chocolate mousse and Mark had a marmalade steamed pudding with proper custard. The waiter brought me a spoon and I had a go of both of them.

I thought the food was very, very good for the price but I don’t think Peter was overly impressed. He made the extraordinary comment (to me anyway) that he wasn’t bothered by the taste of food in restaurants but prefers an eye-catching presentation. I’m the exact opposite: I’m quite partial to a sprig of parsley but if it’s a choice between that and good flavours I’ll take the latter any day.

’07 update: If you read as many articles about food as I do you will have noted that the talk these days is about excellent ingredients, simply cooked (i.e. good food depends on taste rather than elaborate ‘recipes’). The search by top-class chefs and interested home cooks for the perfect piece of beef or the freshest organic asparagus, for example, seems endless. A steak accompanied by a sprinkling of perfect butter (look out for ‘Echiré’ – it’s the best I’ve found so far) is infinitely better than Hollandaise Sauce made with Anchor. And the same goes for asparagus. Peter might disagree with me (he likes to see ‘skills on the table’) but it’s a trend I thoroughly approve of.

2007-05-09T09:58:00.001Z

Food journal: 09 May, 2002

I make moussaka about once every ten years. It’s not that I don’t like it, it just has one too many processes in the preparation to make it worth bothering with except very occasionally. However, I bought some organic lamb and a huge aubergine and decided to take the plunge.

To make moussaka properly, you have to make a tomato-based minced lamb ragout, salt the sliced aubergines and then fry them in olive oil, make a white sauce and add beaten egg and cheese, and then assemble the whole thing and bake it in the oven. By which time, you’re wishing you’d chosen something else for dinner.

I started off by slicing the aubergine thinly down its length, laying the slices on a rack and shaking over them a good layer of salt. While they sat quietly oozing bitter juices, I ground the lamb in the Magimix and prepared the ragout. I basically followed the method I would use to make Bolognese sauce but added lots of cinnamon and dried oregano to give it more of a Greek feel. It took about an hour to cook. In the meantime, the aubergine slices had finished oozing so I rinsed them under the tap, gave them a good squeeze and laid them out on the grill pan with a coating of olive oil (they tell you to fry the aubergine slices but they absorb too much oil that way so grilling is much better). When they were charred on both sides they sat on some kitchen paper until I was ready to assemble the dish.

The recipe I looked up to give me a vague idea of proportions suggested cooking the white sauce for the top of the moussaka for 20 minutes before adding an egg and some cheese. Not wanting to give myself more work than was absolutely necessary, I reasoned that 45 minutes in the oven would cook the sauce anyway so I might as well put it on raw. I put a heaped dessertspoon of flour, a knob of butter, a chunk of Cheddar cheese, a cup of milk and an egg into the Magimix and went to look for a suitable ovenproof dish.

I had a bowl of leftover Jersey Royals from last night so sliced them up and added them in layers with the aubergines and the ragout. When everything was used up I processed the sauce ingredients, poured it over the top and transferred the dish to the oven.

Well, I can only say that Mark said it was the best moussaka ever and he doesn’t even like aubergines (actually, I think it’s the oil they’re usually dripping in that he doesn’t like). I suspect the lamb was very good, too, and I was careful to remove all the fat before chopping it. And the potatoes were a good idea. Oh yes, and another departure from the norm was some chopped mint over the top before serving, which made it smell gorgeous. It was worth those three long hours in the kitchen.

’07 update: I suspect, from time to time, we all ought to cook from scratch the things we buy as ready-meals in the supermarkets, just to remind ourselves of what they should taste like. Anything with pastry for a start (even if, like me, you’re not very good at making pastry it will taste good and, if it’s got a meat filling, yours won’t be gluey and dull like the shop-bought ones). The only exceptions, I think - but you might not agree - are curried dishes. They actually seem to improve with a few days rest on the shelf (incidentally, I always buy those that are just curry and don’t include rice – it’s easy to boil up your own rice while the curry is heating up and it’s much better value).

2007-05-08T08:38:00.000Z

Food journal: 08 May, 2002

We had to have something quick and easy tonight because we’re off to see The Tempest at the Roundhouse in Camden. Smoked haddock, spinach and, you’ve guessed it, Jersey Royals. I’d actually intended to not bother with potatoes and have bread and butter to go with the fish but we saw some in a shop on the way home and couldn’t resist temptation.

I poached the smoked haddock for a few minutes in a tiny amount of milk then kept it warm while I thought about a sauce. The cooking liquid looked very curdled so I subjected it to a few seconds of my wand mixer which miraculously turned it into velvet. It was still too thin so I dropped in a lump of butter and gave it another few seconds. It was now slightly thicker velvet with a nice sheen. A squeeze of lemon perked up the flavour.

The pale ivory of the potatoes, the dark green of the spinach, the sunshine yellow of the smoked haddock and the creamy sauce looked as pretty as a picture.

The play was very good, too.

’07 update: I’ve tried using the wand mixer to make soup but it never does it properly – there are always big chunks of vegetables floating about and I usually forget to keep it submerged in the liquid and end up with soup all over the cooker. It’s much easier to use the Magimix even though it’s a pain to clean. Having said that, I read a recipe yesterday which suggested sieving a soup three times using sieves with ever-decreasing holes. I like my soups to be smooth but not that smooth so you’d never catch me doing that.

2007-05-07T10:26:00.001Z

Food journal: 07 May, 2002

I meant to get some pork out of the freezer last night but forgot. I was wishing that I had one of those special dishes which purport to defrost food really quickly when it occurred to me that they just looked like metal trays. I usually defrost things on a dinner plate but this time put the pork in its bag on my copper baking tray which I stood on a cooling rack so that air could circulate. The pork, which was in a piece weighing about 500g, took just over an hour to defrost instead of the normal three or four hours!

I felt like making kebabs so cut the pork into pieces and marinated them for a few hours in a tablespoon each of balsamic vinegar and sugar, along with a heaped teaspoon each of dried sage and dried rosemary. I actually remembered to soak the wooden kebab sticks in water for a while to stop them burning, which I think is a first for me.

It would have been appropriate to have had last night’s apple sauce tonight but I thought that a celery purée with lots of parsley added would do just as well. I lacked celery so asked Mark to get me some when he went out on some errand or other of his own. He came back with a huge bag of spinach and a pound of carrots because they didn’t have any celery (“or celeriac” he said, very proud that he’d thought of the best alternative).

We’d had spinach the other night with prawns so I used the carrots to make a purée instead. Just as I was about to use the Magimix to chop the parsley and purée the carrots, we had an electricity power cut. Luckily I cook with gas but I had to chop the parsley with a knife and purée the carrots with a masher. I quite enjoyed it actually – a “make do and mend” attitude is always useful in the kitchen. I’d cooked the carrots in very little water with some vegetable stock powder added to bump up the flavour so I used the liquid to make the carrots almost sloppy enough to provide a sauce for the rice I served with them. When the kebabs were cooked there were some caramelised juices in the bottom of the pan so I added a couple of spoonfuls of carrot stock, stirred it around and added that to the carrots as well.

I piled the rice on an oval serving dish, spooned the carrot and parsley purée in a line down the middle and perched the kebabs on top. I’d been worried that I’d overdone the amount of herbs on the pork but the gutsy flavour was good. The sugar in the marinade gave them a deep mahogany crust and the balsamic vinegar took away the sweetness and helped keep them tender inside. A very tasty candle-lit dinner.

’07 update: Every New Year I make a resolution (along with many others that fail) to serve our dinners as attractively as possible. After about a week I revert to plonking the saucepans on the table. Apart from having to choose and remember to heat serving dishes, I’m always conscious of giving Mark more work (it’s his duty to load the dishwasher every night). I do make the effort occasionally if I’ve cooked something special – and the contrast with everyday meals makes it all the more enjoyable (I tell myself…).

2007-05-06T12:04:00.001Z

Food journal: 06 May, 2002

It’s a Bank Holiday today and Jacques Chirac has just beaten Jean-Marie le Pen of the Front National in the French Presidential elections (in spite of our part of France doing their best to elect him!). I’m sure we’re not the only people feeling relieved.

I always find Bank Holidays depressing; it’s like having two Sundays in a row. It’s not so bad these days when most of the shops are open. I wanted to go shopping for food, just because I could, but there’s a packet of smoked tofu in the fridge and various other things I’d like to use up. For example, Mark bought a large bag of organic apples from the supermarket the other day but complained that they had very little taste. It wasn’t their taste but their appearance that disturbed me: they were a uniform pink with a perfect oval symmetry which you just don’t expect from organic produce. I’m not doubting the truth of the supermarket’s claims but how do they do it? Something’s going on here. I know that it’s generally not wise to cook an apple if its flavour isn’t up to much in the first place but I thought I might be able to jolly them up somehow.

I had some breadcrumbs which I’d made in the Magimix with some stale bread a few days ago. It’s always worth making breadcrumbs if the bread is really good. After I’d given them a blast in the processor I left them on a plate near a radiator until they were completely dried. They keep for ages but I’m going to use them to coat slices of tofu to make escalopes.

I thought I’d make an apple sauce to go with the tofu and peered into my kitchen cupboard to see what extra ingredients I could incorporate. After a sift through the possibilities (rosemary? cloves? cinnamon? lime pickle?) my eyes landed on the kaffir lime leaves. I picked out three of the biggest and added them to three chopped apples, a teaspoonful of sugar and a tablespoonful of water in a pan. The apples were tender after about 15 minutes but still holding their shape so I removed the kaffir lime leaves and used the potato masher to make them into a rough purée. I don’t think anyone would have guessed that it was apple - they tasted more like an unusual vegetable with a delicate aromatic flavour of lime.

From the contents of the salad drawer I made a green salad with lettuce, lots of chopped parsley and some chopped onion. There was also one large beef tomato so I skinned that over the gas flame, sliced it into thick rounds and used it to decorate the serving dish. In the centre I put a mound of apple sauce with the fried tofu escalopes on top (and a bit more parsley).

I love anything cooked in egg and breadcrumbs, and tofu - especially the smoked version - works every bit as well as veal. Indeed, if you slice the tofu quite thinly, you’d be hard pressed to tell the difference. As well as the salad, we had Jersey Royals yet again. I can’t get enough of them and would eat them every day during their short season if I could. Asparagus, which also has a short season, doesn't do it for me at all – I usually have it a couple of times as soon as I see it in the shops and then get bored. Same with strawberries.

’07 update: We’ve only eaten Jersey Royals once this season. There are three reasons for this: a) they don’t seem to taste as good as they used to, b) a celebrity chef, whom I quite respect, said the same thing on television lately and c) there is a much larger variety of potatoes around these days and some of them taste very good indeed. I personally prefer yellow-fleshed new potatoes with a bit of deep terracotta earth still sticking to them. I’m not sure where they come from – Majorca springs to mind but it might be Cyprus.

2007-05-05T09:04:00.000Z

Food journal: 05 May, 2002

Still feeling exhilarated by Bob Dylan we went for a walk along the sea - also very exhilarating in its own way (especially with Mark singing snatches of Mr Tambourine Man – circus sands…driven deep beneath the waves etc…). We stopped off for lunch at a trendy café on the beach called The Boardwalk. As Emma pointed out, many of the fish ’n’ chips shops and ice-cream stalls in Brighton are disappearing under a welter of wine bars, which is in some ways a shame. On the other hand, we had excellent home-made char-grilled burgers with chips and a fancy salad in The Boardwalk, along with a few glasses of very passable red wine. We had to have burgers because Emma’s baby seemed to be giving a high-five under her ribs when she came to them on the menu and we all agreed that “junior” is bound to have impeccable taste!

Once lunch was over, Mark and I took a taxi to the station and Emma and Harry went home to lie down and read the papers (there’s a strange reversal of roles between them and us going on at the moment). When we got back we had very small portions of scrambled eggs on toast while reliving what we could remember of the concert.

’07 update: I could eat anything char-grilled. Unfortunately, we live in a first floor flat with no garden so it’s out of the question to have a barbecue at home. We’ve tried taking those disposable ones on picnics but they seem a bit feeble – probably because we didn’t leave them for long enough before we started cooking. They say you should leave a barbecue until the flames die down completely and the charcoal is covered with grey ash. I’m always too worried it will have gone out by then.

2007-05-04T09:36:00.001Z

Food journal: 04 May, 2002

Great excitement – we’re off to see Bob Dylan tonight in Brighton and will stay with Emma and Harry in their new flat near the sea-front.

We met up in time for a quick meal before the show but were dismayed that almost everywhere was completely full. Brighton is busy at the best of times but not only is it a Bank Holiday this weekend but it’s the beginning of the annual Brighton Festival and the venue for a concert by the world’s greatest pop legend. We ended up at Bella Pasta where three of us had a dismal rendering of Spaghetti Bolognese and Harry had a passable pizza (mostly because he asked for a variety of extra fillings to try to liven it up).

Bob Dylan was wonderful and afterwards we queued up for large bags of chips to eat as we wandered euphorically back along the sea front.

’07 update: I’m not sure if I like Brighton. It’s achingly trendy and its citizens seem to have such huge amounts of money that they can afford to eat out every night (maybe I’m just jealous). We’ve eaten several times at The Boardwalk – a café/bar which sells interesting food and is right on the beach but the very best place to eat in Brighton, I think, is a restaurant called Terre à Terre. It’s vegetarian but the meals are so imaginative and the ingredients so varied and original that you never feel the lack of meat. I’m not the only one who’s really impressed – it’s in all the guides.

2007-05-03T09:55:00.000Z

Food journal: 03 May, 2002

We had every kind of vegetable and meat last night so it’s got to be fish. Mark’s wariness of prawns and their high cholesterol content will have to go by the board because I couldn’t resist them. I also bought a net of live winkles this time. Never having cooked winkles before, I asked the girl behind the counter if she could enlighten me. There were no instructions on the label, neither were there any in a special booklet she had behind the counter. “I think it’s the same as mussels” was her dubious conclusion.

At home I scoured my cookery books but could find nothing, although Larousse Gastronomique helpfully offered the information that they are cooked in the same way as cockles. I always thought that you cooked cockles until the shell opened: not something you can do with a winkle. Eventually I unearthed an old catering manual which stated in no uncertain terms that 3 minutes in boiling water is what’s required. We wanted to eat them cold so I gave them their 3 minutes, drained them and left them on one side. While the winkles were cooking, I boiled some spinach for about the same length of time, drained, squeezed and chopped it and left it on a plate. I also peeled two large beef tomatoes by spearing them with a fork and holding them over the gas flame.

The prawns were still in their shells so I sat myself down with the radio on and peeled them, eating the odd one as I went and dropping all the heads and shells into the food processor bowl. That done, I added half a glass of water and a teaspoon of vegetable stock powder and gave it a whizz. After pressing all the debris in a fine sieve, I had some highly-concentrated stock with a good fresh flavour. I poured the stock into a microwave-proof bowl and added the chopped spinach, chopped de-seeded tomatoes, a crushed garlic clove, chopped parsley and tarragon, a dribble of hot chilli sauce and the prawns. I thought that I should have thickened the stock to make a proper sauce but the whole mixture was nicely moist and just right for coating some pasta.

We ate the winkles in the time-honoured way with two big pins from the sewing box. Mark mentioned casually as he prodded away that his dad didn’t like eating them like that so his mum used to take them out of the shells and make him a nice sandwich. I pointed out that winkling a winkle out of its shell was 9/10ths of the pleasure of eating them. Some brown bread and butter and a small pool of balsamic vinegar on the side of the plate to dip them in makes it even better.

While some pasta boiled, I reheated the prawn/spinach mixture in the microwave for a couple of minutes before serving. The winkles had been surprisingly filling so we couldn’t really do justice to the main course and sadly about half of it had to be thrown away. I hate wasting food but know that I won’t find any use for it tomorrow and we wanted to take the black bin bag out to the dustbin rather than leave it languishing in the kitchen all night full of winkle shells.

’07 update: If I wanted to know how long it takes to cook winkles today I would get straight on the Internet. I’m about to donate the majority of my cookery books to Oxfam – I rarely open any of them any more and they are just gathering dust. I’m keeping a few – my ancient copy of Larousse Gastronomique, all of Delia Smith’s books (although I use her Internet site most of the time) and, of course, my personal collection of recipes in a couple of tattered files. It would have been an unthinkable thing to do five years ago.

2007-05-02T14:39:00.000Z

Food journal: 02 May, 2002

Mark is organising a night out with a group of former work colleagues and wanted to try out a restaurant in the West End before recommending it to everyone as a fun place to get drunk and catch up on all the gossip. The restaurant is called Sofra and it does a very reasonable-sounding meze meal (an ideal arrangement for a convivial evening when everyone drinks too much and hardly notices what they eat unless it’s very bad).

We sat outside under a gas heater which was so effective that Mark thought his hair was going to melt. It was incredibly busy but we managed to catch a waiter as he flew past and asked him to turn it down. He didn’t have time to adjust it so turned it off. The menu promised 11 dishes and they were all dumped on the table at the same time with a basket of bread by another flying waiter. As we ate, a long queue of salivating potential customers glared enviously at us. The food was adequate, not brilliant and with the usual selection of hummus, parsley salad, grilled lamb etc etc. We finished a bottle of wine and then had another glass each (by which time we were oblivious to the queue glaring at us even more venomously). It was decidedly chilly without the heater, though.

As I came up the stairs from the basement after going to the loo, yet another flying waiter skimmed down in the opposite direction, bumped into me, and managed to drop his tray containing at least a million plates and glasses. I expect he would have apologised if he’d had the time.

Mark isn’t convinced that it is the right place for his night out with his pals so with any luck we’ll be going out for dinner again soon to check out another possible venue.

’07 update: Hopefully, we’ll be off to France on 18 May and I’m starting to clear the freezer. I took out a piece of braising steak yesterday which we bought at The Ginger Pig butchers about a month ago. It smells good but looks decidedly tough so I’m going to make a proper casserole today with all the usual trinities (onion, carrots, celery/thyme, bay, parsley/garlic, mushrooms, tomato/flour, wine, stock etc). I’m reckoning about three hours in a low oven. Should be good…

2007-05-01T11:15:00.000Z

Food journal: 01 May, 2002

Over to Ben and Pia’s because it’s Pia’s birthday and we are babysitting while they go out for a celebration meal. The baby had a jar of something organic for his dinner and we brought in a pizza and salad from the supermarket for us and Alexa. We were pretty sure that most four-year-olds like pizza and indeed she does but she’d had some for lunch so Pia made a special effort to make her some pasta instead. When she saw Mark and I tucking into our pizza she came to the conclusion that pizza was quite acceptable twice on the same day and pushed the pasta to one side (no wonder parents spend their whole time tearing their hair out). A year ago Alexa couldn’t get enough olives – she would eat them by the handful. Today she carefully removed every last scrap from her pizza and put them firmly onto Mark’s plate. And she was adamant that a portion of salad on the side was totally unnecessary.

Mark had chosen a horrible pastry thing for Alexa’s pudding. It was topped with a huge dollop of marshmallow decorated to look like a pig. She eyed it a bit dubiously and then carefully picked off the bits of chocolate that formed its eyes and ate them. She then ate the two jelly lozenges that formed the ears. Nothing would persuade her to eat the rest, even though it was the most gorgeous shade of Barbie pink.

’07 update: Five years on, Ben and Pia’s kids are nine and five. For the last two or three years, when we go to babysit, we always take exactly the same food: a hot barbecued chicken, salad, a ‘Tiger’ loaf (all of this is from Tesco’s on the way) plus a Victoria sponge with fresh cream and a punnet of raspberries. It’s easy for us because we don’t have to agonise over what they will eat and they seem to like the routine. Alexa requested a change once and asked us to bring Chinese noodles (she’s got a Chinese friend at school and had eaten them at her home) but she didn’t like Tesco’s version much and it was back to normal the next time.

2007-04-30T11:00:00.000Z

Food journal: 30 April, 2002

I cleaned out the chip pan, which is one of those with a pod for the electrical parts, leaving the rest suitable for the dishwasher - the main reason I bought it. My old chip pan was disgusting by the time it was finally consigned to the dustbin, the rim covered with a kind of yellow glue which was impossible to remove. Still, it made very good chips and I’m beginning to wonder if my moans about the potatoes I’ve been buying recently making the chips soggy are misguided. Perhaps modern chip pans, with all their safety cut-outs, don’t rise to that vital high temperature needed for the second frying. Maybe that yellow glue somehow had its part to play in producing a crispy chip.

For dinner tonight we had what must be second on my list of desert-island dishes (after egg and chips, of course) - boiled beef and carrots, using half the beef we bought last week in the farmers’ market.

’07 update: I stopped using that electric deep-fat fryer ages ago and have been trying to give it away ever since. Nobody wants it – maybe because I always accompany the offer with a long moan about how hopeless it is for chips. I’d like to know the percentage of people who cook chips from scratch using fresh potatoes. Judging by the piles of McCain’s in the supermarket I suspect it’s about 0%.

2007-04-29T08:03:00.000Z

Food journal: 29 April, 2002

Still coasting on Saturday’s dinner. I’ve got a small jug of velouté sauce, which will give me the basis of a pasta dish tonight, and some mushrooms which will provide some bulk. The tarragon wasn’t much good in the first place but I can rescue a few leaves to add flavour and there’s lots of parsley to add colour. I’d also bought a packet of bacon with a view to adding some to the filling for the Chicken Turban but had decided in the end that I didn’t need to guild the lily.

There was half a bunch of watercress in the fridge which is notoriously difficult to keep but had survived very well due to my system of putting it into a plastic bag with all the air sucked out (I was always taught that you had to keep it in a bowl of water upside down but it never worked for more than a day). There wasn’t enough of it for a salad on its own so I bought an iceberg lettuce to pad it out.

I browned some chopped bacon in olive oil, removed it, and fried a couple of sliced onions. The mushrooms went in next with the last few bits of dried morilles from the cupboard, soaked, drained and chopped. When the mushrooms had given up their liquid and started to get tinged with gold, I poured in the velouté sauce and some double cream (also left over from Saturday!). I had to be careful not to let it boil because there was an egg yolk in the sauce and it would have curdled. Finally, a handful of chopped parsley and tarragon (with a bit reserved to scatter over the top). I served the salad on the side with a honey, mustard, balsamic vinegar and olive oil dressing.

We had fusilli pasta with it and Mark was moved to say that ‘squirmbles’ (as he calls them) are undoubtedly the best pasta; I must say I tend to agree.

’07 update: I do like squirmbles but also like to ring the changes with tagliatelle, spaghetti, penne et al. The only pasta I don’t like is parpadelle – those really wide ribbons which are too slithery for me. As I’ve said before, I always buy my pasta in M&S and I noticed yesterday that they had basil-flavoured parpadelle on a 2-for-1 offer. I was sorely tempted but the pieces looked huge and, imagining how much more huge and how much more slithery they would be when cooked, I walked on by.

2007-04-28T08:17:00.000Z

Food journal: 28 April, 2002

One of the good things about having a dinner party is that there are often delicious leftovers to play with. There’s enough of Peter’s Fraisier to last us for the rest of the week and Mark stashed assorted clingfilm-covered dishes in the fridge as he sorted out the dishwasher at midnight last night.

When I checked them out this morning I found a decent pile of Jersey Royals and green beans and about half a portion of Chicken Turban. The chicken tasted almost as good cold as hot but I restrained myself from scoffing the lot and decided to chop everything up together and make a kind of Spanish omelette for dinner tonight.

It was very easy: I heated the bowl of chopped chicken and vegetables in the microwave and then poured three beaten eggs into hot oil in the frying pan. The chopped mixture went on top with the surface roughly levelled. After a few minutes on a moderate heat, I peeped underneath with the aid of a spatula and, seeing it was a good golden brown colour, put the pan under a hot grill until the top was the same colour. Served in fat wedges, it was an excellent all-in-one meal with sophisticated hints of last night’s gourmet dinner.

I didn’t regret missing out on my egg and chips tonight, not only because the Spanish omelette was delicious but also because the oil in my deep-fat fryer needs changing after I burnt the chips last Sunday. It’s been on my list of things to do all week. Also, I’ve been searching out groundnut oil in all the big supermarkets but none of them seems to stock it except in titchy little bottles. We’ll only be at home for a couple more Sundays before we go to our house in Béziers on 1 June so maybe I’ll leave it until we can bring back some 3-litre bottles of arachide oil (same as groundnut oil) from France where it’s much cheaper.

’07 update: The one thing I always remember to bring back from France (apart from wine, obviously) is Maggi Fond de Veau. It’s a powder used to thicken and flavour sauces – like Bisto only a million times better. I’ve just been looking at the list of ingredients on the side of the almost-empty tub I’m currently using and it doesn’t look very inspiring – monosodium glutamate is quite high up and there’s only 2% veal – but I still like it. I’ve also just noticed that the ‘use by’ date is 11/2006!

2007-04-27T09:29:00.000Z

Food journal: 27 April, 2002

I remembered to buy some watercress to fill the centre of the Chicken Turban and also managed to get some fresh tarragon, which wasn’t in the original recipe but will go well with the chicken and mushrooms.

I made the mousse without mishap. It’s quite a difficult mixture and the cream and egg whites have been known to curdle but I stirred it in a bowl sitting in another bowl filled with ice cubes - a trick worth knowing about (the other secret is to add a generous amount of salt to the egg white). While the mushrooms were sautéeing, I cut the cooked chicken into small pieces and mixed them together with a little of the sauce I made yesterday and some chopped tarragon.

Peter arrived early so watched me build up the Turban in a ring-mould with the beaten-out chicken breast followed by a layer of mousse, the mushroom and chicken mixture (technically called a salpicon) and a final layer of mousse. Any bits of chicken breast hanging over the sides were flipped over the top.

I’d had the oven on quite high to cook the gougère mixture – whether it was because I’d made it the day before or because I’d used the Magimix, they didn’t rise up anything like as much as my hand-made choux pastry does but they did have some air in them and smelt appetisingly of toasted cheese. After I’d removed them to a cooling tray I turned the oven down and put in the Chicken Turban in another tin half-filled with water. The recipe said it would take 40 minutes so we sat down with a glass of wine and the gougères (or at least Mark and Peter sat down while I flitted back and forth to the kitchen to cook some Jersey Royals and green beans).

When the forty minutes were up I removed the Turban, poured off the juices into the velouté sauce (which I’d thickened with an egg yolk and some cream) and got everything ready to serve. The Turban looked slightly over-cooked to me and was very difficult to remove from its ring-mould. I was glad I had the watercress to cover up most of the cracks. A few pieces of mushroom and some tarragon leaves disguised the rest.

It tasted very rich and subtle, especially when coated with the unctuous velouté sauce, although I fretted that the mousse could have been less dry (“Much better to overcook chicken than undercook it” was Mark’s comment). I realised too late that the oven must have retained a lot of the heat from cooking the gougères immediately beforehand, even though I’d turned it down.

Peter’s pudding was excellent. He said it was a classic French dessert called a Fraisier but we couldn’t find any mention of it in Larousse or anywhere else. It certainly looked as if it ought to be a classic: thin layers of Genoese sponge with jam and Kirsch-flavoured butter cream in between. Half strawberries sat around the outside and there was a sheet of marzipan on the top which Peter had artistically etched with white icing and decorated with two large strawberries dipped in chocolate.

It was the most elegant meal I’ve had for years, with a hint of ’70s nostalgia about it. Even though Thai stir-frys and char-grilled vegetables are all the rage at the moment, I don’t think we should forget about prawn cocktails, Boeuf Stroganoff et al.

’07 update: Well, as you can see, it all turned out well (although it was a shame the Chicken Turban was a bit overcooked – maybe I wouldn’t have got a distinction in my exam if I’d done it like that). I pulled out all the stops for that exam, doing some very complicated dishes including home-made Turkish Delight! I seem to remember (it was a long time ago) that we all ate Turkish Delight for weeks beforehand while I practised madly.

2007-04-26T11:13:00.000Z

Food journal: 26 April, 2002

I’ve decided to cook a Chicken Turban for Peter tomorrow. It was the star dish of a dinner party meal I had to cook when I did The Cook’s Professional Cookery Certificate many years ago. I got the idea from a recipe in Larousse Gastronomique, which was my bedtime reading throughout the course.

I know that I said I’d only cook casseroles for dinner parties in future but Peter is an extremely appreciative guest so is worth the effort. I also reckon I can get a lot of its constituent parts done today anyway. The dish is basically a ring-mould, lined with very thin slices of chicken which are given a coating of chicken mousse and then the hollow is filled with a sautéed mixture of chicken and mushrooms (Larousse demands fresh truffles as well) before baking in the oven in a bain marie to be turned out with a flourish before serving. It seems to me a wonderfully sophisticated way of serving a whole chicken because every bit is used.

First of all, the breasts have to be removed and beaten out between sheets of clingfilm to provide the lining for the mould. A suitable amount of lean meat to make the mousse then has to be rescued from the legs and thighs. The rest of the carcass goes into a saucepan with the usual stock ingredients for half an hour, then the remaining cooked meat is taken off the bones and put to one side. The rest of the bones continue to cook for another hour or so to make a flavoursome stock with which to make the sauce.

I managed to do all that and also, when the stock was cooked, make a basic velouté sauce. All I have to do tomorrow is to make the chicken mousse, fry some mushrooms to add to the cooked chicken with a little of the sauce to coat, assemble the Turban, cook it, and finish the sauce with some cream. I must also remember to buy a bunch of watercress to fill up the centre of the ring to make it look really “Cook’s Professional”. I got a distinction in my exam, so I’m fairly confident and Peter, bless him, has promised to bring a pudding.

I was so impressed by my efficiency in the kitchen that I threw together a gougère mixture in the Magimix. I’m good at choux pastry but I’ve never made it in a food processor and I’ve never left the raw mixture overnight before cooking it. If it works we can have it with a glass of wine before dinner in lieu of a first course. If it doesn’t we’ll just have to do without. Gougère is a savoury choux pastry mixed with cheese and baked in the oven like profiteroles, traditionally served with aperitifs.

For tonight’s dinner Mark and I had a curry meal for two from Safeways.

’07 update: Gosh, whoever makes velouté sauce these days, let alone chicken mousse? Anyway, we’ll wait until tomorrow to see how it turned out.

2007-04-25T08:40:00.001Z

Food journal: 25 April, 2002

Our friend, Peter, is coming for dinner on Saturday and tonight I’m going to cook the squid he bought for us in Billingsgate Market so that I can tell him about it. When I defrosted it, there were about ten whole squid so I had to remove the innards and peel off the black skin from the outside. There looked like quite a lot and I thought maybe I could save some for a starter on Saturday.

I went through my usual routine of sweating the squid in a covered pan until it rendered its liquid, drained that off and covered it with fresh water (and some powdered vegetable stock) to cook slowly until tender. By the time it was cooked it had shrunk alarmingly and looked as if there was barely enough for Mark and I, let alone Peter.

I had to go to the dentist this afternoon, which happens to be next door to a Sainsbury’s so I went in afterwards, in spite of wanting to rush home to admire my new crown, to get something to go with the squid. I’m not all that keen on courgettes but have got a theory that they smell faintly of seafood and should therefore be a good accompaniment for all things fishy. They wouldn’t be too much of a challenge for my new crown, either. I picked up a packet of tomatoes with a view to making a sauce but they had that anaemic look about them so I put them back and bought a tub of sauce instead. It was called Amatriciana (where do they get these names from?) and contained pancetta to give it “an authentically complex, slightly smoky flavour”!

At home, I fried some onions, then added garlic and a slightly wizened chilli - which has been in the bottom of the fridge for ages - and then the courgettes. I like the colour of courgette skins but think they add too much bitterness, so I got out my potato peeler and took off a few strips, leaving the rest on, before cutting them into long pieces. I’d left the squid sitting in its cooking liquid so poured that off and reduced it until there were only a couple of tablespoons left. I cut the squid into strips roughly the same size as the courgettes. When the courgettes were soft and tinged with gold, I added the squid, the reduced liquid and enough Amatriciana sauce to make a good consistency for coating some pasta which I cooked at the same time.

None left for Peter, I’m afraid.

’07 update: What I would really like is to be able to make deep-fried squid rings in batter. Our local Greek restaurant (called Lemonia) does them to perfection. The batter is light with no trace of grease and the squid rings have that slightly chewy but tender quality which is, to me anyway, miraculous. They always include a few tentacles fried in the same batter which I am equally ecstatic about. I wouldn’t know where to start to make them (I seem to remember I did try once but the batter was soggy and fatty and the squid tough as old boots).

2007-04-24T10:39:00.000Z

Food journal: 24 April, 2002

Managed to make it to the farmers’ market today. We haven’t been for ages: the motivation wanes when the game season is over. We bought some lamb chops, a joint of Old Spot pork and a piece of beef “rib”. I wasn’t sure which cut of beef it was and the man behind the stall brought out a huge tome and showed me a picture of a cow labelled with all the different joints. He recommended that I should slow-roast it but it looked too close to the top of the front leg for my liking (the Golden Rule is that the more a muscle is used, the less tender it will be) so I’ll probably casserole it just to be on the safe side. With the pork joint, I removed the skin and cut it into three pieces and froze them separately – we don’t have enough friends to make it likely that I’ll need to cook the whole piece!

Yesterday, when we were in Sainsbury’s, I bought some organic fillet steak as well as some mushrooms and broccoli which would be the basis of our dinner tonight. I probably should have used one of our purchases from the farmers’ market rather than freeze everything that we’d bought but I find I like to dwell on ingredients for a while rather than cook them straightaway. That’s what freezers are for.

We had lots of potatoes left over from last night so I sautéed them in thick slices (if you cut them thinly they take forever because you have to do them one layer at a time). I started frying the mushrooms with a good grating of nutmeg and then got the broccoli on to boil. When all the liquid had evaporated from the mushrooms and they had begun to brown, I removed them from the pan and fried the steaks in the same oil. Once they were cooked (see below), I added some medium sherry and set light to it. The steaks sat on a warm plate while I quickly added some crème fraiche to the juices in the pan. The sauce looked too thick so I added a small amount of water from the kettle. Once the consistency of the sauce was right, we were ready to eat.

There are many ways of telling whether a steak is cooked to your liking. The French say that when you turn the steak over to cook the second side, it’s ready when beads of blood appear on the surface of the meat. They, of course, like it practically raw. I’ve also read that you can get acquainted with the degree of “doneness” by pushing your fingers one-by-one into the base of your thumb and feeling the resistance – index finger indicates rare, middle finger indicates medium rare, third finger indicates well-done and little finger indicates overdone. Or it could be the other way round, I’ve never managed to work it out. I always give the steak a prod but mostly it’s down to chance and a certain amount of intuition. Also, should you serve it straightaway or leave it to sit for ten minutes? Never quite knowing is what makes cookery interesting.

’07 update: Frying steak is still a hit and miss affair for me – possibly because I don’t do it very often, unlike chefs in restaurants who do it every day of their lives. Also, there are many different kinds of steak, which come in many different shapes and sizes, plus there are many different people who all have different views on a perfectly-cooked steak. And do you season it before (and when?) and after cooking? With all these variables, I never feel guilty if it doesn’t turn out quite right. If it’s a really good quality piece of meat it will taste nice anyway.

2007-04-23T10:34:00.000Z

Food journal: 23 April, 2002

Mark’s been nagging me, ever since we had some excellent swordfish while we were in Béziers, to buy some here. While we were in M&S stocking up on white wine (it’s tragic that we couldn’t bring a few boxes back with us on the train from France) we found some swordfish and bought it. On to Sainsbury’s to do the rest of our shopping, where we noticed that their swordfish wasn’t looking as pale and juicy as ours. What did look good, though, were some small Cromer crabs so we asked for one of those. There were also some fresh winkles that looked good but we couldn’t justify buying those as well and I doubted that they’d freeze.

In the vegetable section we spotted a display of ugly-looking roots which turned out to be horseradish and, as I remembered it goes well with salmon, I thought I might do something with it to accompany the swordfish. I had the other half of the jar of butter beans in the freezer that I used recently so decided to make a mash with it again but this time add the grated horseradish along with some crème fraiche and butter.

Swordfish, like tuna, is better if it is seared quickly in a frying pan, leaving the inside rare to prevent it drying up. I thought back to the salmon and butter bean dish I made last week and decided to make a dressing based on the marinade I used. This time I mixed honey, mustard, lemon zest, lemon juice and olive oil in a jar and left it on one side to pour around the hot plates before serving.

While some new potatoes were cooking, I started to heat the frying pan in the hope that it would get hot enough to sear the swordfish correctly (I should have one of those ridged pans which add pretty brown stripes but I know I’ll only use it about twice a year). After I’d heated the butter bean and horseradish mixture, I drained the potatoes, gave the jar of dressing a good shake and cooked the swordfish steaks for a couple of minutes a side in a very little olive oil. They weren’t as brown and crusty as I would have liked but I was worried that they’d be overcooked inside so served them anyway on top of the bean mash with the dressing poured around the edge so that it could warm slightly on the hot plates. I’d removed the meat from the crab earlier so arranged that in two neat piles on the side.

It was a good meal and something I will probably do again in the future. The combination of beans with fish worked well and I might try using lentils next time. The warm dressing is a new idea for me and I like the fact that it’s easier to make than a proper sauce while still providing some lubrication for the other ingredients. Talking of lubrication, the swordfish was not as good as it was in France but not bad at all for my first effort – perhaps I should heat the frying pan even longer next time; a couple of days should do it. The crab was entirely superfluous but nice anyway.

A small aside: the horseradish was bendy and brown in the middle so not of the best quality. I think it must be difficult to keep because I can remember my grandmother growing it in her garden. She would dig up a root on Sunday mornings to make horseradish sauce to go with the roast beef and then take what she didn’t use and bury it again in the garden until the next time she needed some. Her horseradish sauce was second to none.

’07 update: They adore, almost revere, swordfish and tuna around the shores of the Mediterranean. The very best bit to buy is le ventre (the tuna equivalent of belly pork!) because the under-belly has the most fat running through (like the pig!), therefore it doesn’t dry up while it cooks like the leaner cuts from the back. Unlike belly pork, it’s very expensive.

2007-04-22T09:29:00.000Z

Food journal: 22 April, 2002

Guess what I found under a postcard on the mantelpiece? A forgotten voucher for Nando’s…

’07 update: I’ve re-discovered the joys of lemon thyme. I bought some recently and have been using it regularly on lots of things. It goes especially well with fish, of course, because of its lemony scent but I’ve been casting it over mashed vegetables (potato and carrot mixed together, which it livened up no end) and a quickly-made chicken and tomato sauce to go with pasta. As it’s got such an assertive flavour I think I will probably get tired of it again soon – it will never replace ordinary thyme which I use in industrial quantities but which never seems to impose itself too much.

2007-04-21T09:26:00.000Z

Food journal: 21 April, 2002

We all had the usual cheese and salad lunch with the addition of a rice salad made with yesterday’s leftovers plus some chopped onion, nuts and dried apricots, olive oil and a smidgen of salad cream. The tarragon I bought ten days ago was ready for the bin but I managed to salvage half a dozen leaves to add an extra touch of flavour. Emma’s Aunt Genny joined us after lunch so the chocolate pudding hadn’t lived in vain.

After Emma and Harry left we offered to take Genny out for a meal but she was quite excited about sharing our usual egg and chips. I was so busy talking to her that, for the first time ever, I burnt the chips!

’07 update: I watched a programme on the telly recently about Caribbean cookery (it was very eclectic and there was a lovely exuberance in the way the two young presenters thought nothing of borrowing ingredients and cooking methods from around the world). I was deeply impressed by the hours of effort that went into preparing a selection of global ‘tapas’ for a group of friends. I was exhausted just watching it but they managed to laugh their way through all the spillages and elbow grease in the kitchen before eating, drinking and partying all night long. Infectious fun – just what a good cookery programme should be about.

2007-04-20T16:57:00.001Z

Food journal: 20 April, 2002

It’s a good feeling, when you’ve got guests, knowing that the main dish is already cooked and just needs a few minutes in the microwave to reheat. Because I had time on my hands, I decided to make that rare thing – a pudding. Deep inside my food file was a recipe for pear and almond tart which I could remember producing for a practical cookery exam many moons ago. The pastry was a tricky high-fat pâte brisée and the almond filling needed lots of creaming and folding, but as it was just for Emma and Harry (who are used to me giving them something from M&S), I wondered if it could be simplified.

I made the pastry in the Magimix and while it rested in the fridge added all the almond filling ingredients to the bowl and whizzed them together (plus half a teaspoon of baking powder to compensate for the lack of creaming). The pears had to be cored, peeled, halved and cut into crosswise slices to form a five point wheel on top of the filling. There was no need for baking the pastry blind and the whole thing took an hour to cook in a medium oven. It looked very attractive, even though I didn’t have a glacé cherry to put in the middle. I didn’t have any apricot glaze either so brushed the top with some runny honey to make it shine.

To serve with the pork casserole, I fried some onions, carrots and celery, cut into large chunks and then finished in a covered pan with a small amount of stock. At the end, to give it a Greek feel, I added a teaspoon of honey, a few chopped raisins and some of the mild peppers from the jar that Pia had given me arranged over the top to give a sweet/sour flavour. I boiled some rice with turmeric, bay leaves, thyme and cinnamon sticks (cinnamon is a very Greek spice and adds a lovely warm aroma to savoury dishes). When the pork casserole was thoroughly reheated in the microwave, I chopped lots of coriander over the top.

I’d bought over a kilogram of pork but only two tiny chunks were left over at the end. There was quite a lot of rice left though, which I might be able to turn into a salad for lunch tomorrow. The pear and almond tart was a huge success, especially with lots of good quality vanilla ice-cream on the side. I’d bought a chocolate dessert in the supermarket just in case the tart was a failure but was delighted that nobody wanted it. Have I got pastry sorted at last?

’07 update: Though I say it myself, that sounds like a nice meal – I could eat it right now!

2007-04-19T11:36:00.001Z

Food journal: 19 April, 2002

We’re booked to go to a restaurant tonight called Zilli Fish Too. I don’t like the sound of it (the title puts me off, for a start) but Mark said that it has really good reviews and it is very near to where he works in Covent Garden.

Not having to cook our dinner tonight left me time to make something for Emma and Harry, who will be here for dinner tomorrow. When I asked Emma, who is now six months pregnant, what she fancied she said “Lard, lard and more lard”. She is eating enough for six and so, bearing the lard comment in mind, I bought a huge amount of organic pork to make a casserole.

Pork is not my first choice of meat for a casserole but it would make a change. Pork Afelia used to be a great favourite in the ’70s when Mark and I used to frequent a Greek restaurant in Kilburn when we first took up together, and I remembered that it was flavoured with coriander and red wine. While the pork browned in batches in the copper sauté pan, I spooned some whole coriander seeds, allspice and lemon zest into the coffee grinder and whizzed it into a fragrant dust. When the pork had all been transferred to a casserole, I fried a sliced onion in the remaining oil and then added the spice mixture to toast for another couple of minutes. Some flour to thicken, some red wine and stock provided the sauce which joined the meat, some thyme and a bayleaf in the casserole. It took 2½ hours in a low oven to become meltingly tender. Once it had cooled, I put it into a large microwaveable bowl in the fridge and went to meet Mark.

The restaurant didn’t turn out quite as we had expected. It looked inviting but appeared to be completely empty at 7.15pm, which was odd in bustling Covent Garden. When we got inside we were told that the kitchens were without gas and there was only a very limited menu – cold starters and pizzas cooked in their wood-fired oven. We left and started to wander up the road in search of an alternative place to eat but then thought we might as well go for the pizzas. Back inside, we settled ourselves down and Mark chose his usual Four Seasons Pizza and I opted for the Zilli Fish Pizza (as the name suggests, the restaurant normally specialises in fish dishes). For a starter, we shared a plate of sushi. The sushi was fine, the pizzas adequate (the bottoms were slightly soggy, suggesting that the cooking was being rushed). The place began to fill up with the usual after-work Friday crowd so there was a good buzz and we enjoyed the evening even though it wasn’t the gourmet experience we had hoped for. Mark had a good time making jokes like “Look at that Zilli waiter” and “This restaurant is very Zilli” etc.

’07 update: I’ve always harboured a small fantasy about opening a restaurant – it can’t be that difficult, can it? Just cook what you do at home only in bigger pans. I’ve come to the conclusion now that I’m being totally naïve – every review I read (and that’s a lot) is obsessed with who designed the wine glasses, who the head chef is (i.e. which Michelin-starred restaurants he or she has worked in before) and where they source their organic miniature vegetables. The pressure!

2007-04-18T10:43:00.000Z

Food journal: 18 April, 2002

I’ve got too many herbs in the fridge – even though they are packed in my special way they will not last for ever. The tarragon and parsley might survive for a couple more days but there’s a lot of coriander which it would be a crime not to use.

We haven’t had tofu for a while and, as we’re convinced it’s good for us, I bought a packet and drained and pressed it for half an hour between two plates. I was about to add my usual marinade of sugar, vinegar and soy sauce when I remembered the lime juice and honey combination from last night and used that instead in roughly the same proportions (slightly less honey this time) plus some soy sauce.

I’d also bought a packet of mange touts and baby sweetcorn and then, in the pasta aisle, allowed myself to be deflected from my usual egg noodles by a packet of Batchelors Balti-flavoured noodles (or rather, “Balti-flavoured Spicy Super Noodles”). We like Balti-flavoured crisps so why not Balti-flavoured noodles? Nothing ventured…

I cut the mange touts into fashionable lozenge shapes, sliced the sweetcorn in half and cut a red onion into strips. Once the tofu slices were browned in some oil, I kept them warm and added the vegetables for a quick stir-fry. The Spicy Super Noodles had to be cooked in some water with a small sachet of flavourings mixed in. After the requisite 4 minutes, I added the remaining cooked Jersey Royals (cut into chunks) and rocket from last night, the stir-fried vegetables and enough chicken stock to make a substantial soup.

With the tofu arranged on top and plenty of chopped coriander, it made a filling and surprisingly tasty supper. The Balti flavourings added a kick and the potatoes and noodles helped to fill us up. It could have been a disaster but the odd combination of ingredients worked quite well. Someone more pretentious than me would have called it fusion cooking and patted themselves on the back.

’07 update: Re-reading the ’02 journal, I sometimes think I sound a bit smug. Hopefully I was just trying to be positive about cooking – something I still feel passionate about. There are a lot of good basic ingredients out there and I think it’s worth making a meal which is less than perfect rather than buy ready-mades all the time. At least you feel the fresh ingredients are doing you good. On the other hand, I’m not against Balti-flavoured noodles either – they have their place.

2007-04-17T15:14:00.000Z

Food journal: 17 April, 2002

Impressed by the results of following a recipe, albeit not slavishly, on Monday night, I found another recipe which sounded appealing in the May edition of BBC Good Food Magazine, a magazine I always read avidly while moaning bitterly about its obsession with simplicity and speed (what’s wrong with complexity and patience if you end up with something which tastes good?). Mark keeps his eye on the bookstalls and buys it for me as soon as it comes out, which is why I’ve already scoured its contents. The title “10-minute supper” emblazoned across the top of a page above “Sizzling Salmon with Bean Mash” was particularly eye-catching (and proves that I am just as easily seduced as everyone else by something easy).

I bought two organic fillets of salmon which looked a bit anaemic but was reassured by the description of their impeccable provenance on the packet. I also needed honey, a lime, wholegrain mustard, canned butter beans, butter, crème fraiche, garlic and rocket, not to mention some potatoes as an accompaniment because the recipe didn’t suggest anything.

Following the “impeccable provenance” theme, I bought a jar of Italian artisanal butter beans, some organic wild rocket and some Jersey Royals which I poked to check for flabbiness and studied carefully for green bits before taking them to the counter. Although I had honey, mustard and garlic at home, I realised that after I had done the shopping I had spent almost as much as last night’s dinner had cost at Nando’s.

As you know, I don’t follow recipes to the letter and I certainly wasn’t going to trust its promise to be ready in 10 minutes. Half an hour before we wanted to eat I assembled the ingredients. The lime needed scrubbing (to remove the wax because I needed the zest), the butter beans had to be rinsed and drained and the bag of rocket soaked in cold water – this last is not necessary but I think that vegetables and salads packed in a “protective environment” smell strange if you don’t. The salmon fillets were packed in a “protective environment” too, so precious minutes were lost trying to break through the obstinate plastic wrappings. The ten minutes were up already so I quickly put the potatoes on to cook.

Once I started to follow the recipe, though, it all happened amazingly quickly. A lime, honey and mustard mixture was poured over the salmon, which was then cooked under a high grill for 5 minutes. The butter beans, butter, crème fraiche and garlic were mashed together in a saucepan until heated through and the rocket added until just wilted. I was impressed. The finished dish looked just like it did in the picture; perhaps the salmon could have been more browned on the top but it was cooked through and the juices in the pan provided an adequate “drizzle” of sauce around the mound of butter beans and rocket. It tasted good, there was very little mess to clear up in the kitchen and only very basic equipment was called for (I used a potato masher on the beans but any old wooden spoon would have worked just as well).

Mark’s gripe was that the salmon juices were too sweet but I defended the recipe by saying that some limes were juicier than others and some honeys could be quite bitter. We solved the problem easily by squeezing more lime juice over the top. The Jersey Royals were much better than the ones we had last week but still not a patch on the ones straight from the garden.

’07 update: I didn’t buy spring greens for last night’s dinner – I got one of those pointy ‘modern’ cabbages instead. They’re very sweet and tender but have hardly any flavour – perfect for anyone who doesn’t like cabbage, which seems to be almost everyone these days. I like those ‘old-fashioned’ crinkly Savoy cabbages best.

2007-04-16T10:28:00.001Z

Food journal: 16 April, 2002

Had a last-minute invitation to go to Tate Britain this afternoon with my French teacher, Laurence, so on Mark’s suggestion we went to Nando’s again when I got back. I don’t know if I’m pleased or disappointed that we’ve used up our last voucher for a free half-chicken… I’d already bought a chicken for dinner tonight so froze the legs and breasts and used the carcass to make stock. I left it simmering while we went out which is something I’m never happy about doing but Nando’s is only five minutes away and we were back within an hour anyway.

’07 update: Still reeling from Mark’s illness but am trying to get something ‘nutritious’ on the table every night. I’ve taken some small bags of leftover cooked chicken and cooked lamb (organic, of course) out of the freezer and will probably mince them up, add some gravy and cover the lot with mashed potato – comfort food with not much effort. Need a good green vegetable to go with it – might get some spring greens (it’s spring, after all!).

2007-04-15T11:52:00.000Z

Food journal: 15 April, 2002

Well, here we go then. I managed to get gram flour in Safeways, plus a jar of concentrated tamarind paste (none in a block) but there was no sign of onion seeds which I’ll have to replace with the mustard seeds I’ve got at home in the cupboard. I’ve got some fresh tarragon in the fridge and was tempted to substitute it for the coriander I also needed but overcame it when I saw the coriander. Safeways is very good for fresh herbs and have coriander, dill, mint, parsley and thyme in big fragrant bunches.

The recipe in the Sunday Times was meant for a starter so I needed another dish to go with the Bhajia. I decided on something vegetarian as curried dishes are just as good without meat, so bought a cauliflower which always works well in a spicy sauce. I’ve got various jars of Indian pickle in the cupboard so put some ready-cooked poppadoms in my basket (after eating Ben’s Turkish meal I want as many things on the table as possible without too much effort).

At home, I gathered up all the ingredients I needed and looked out a curried cauliflower recipe in my file which I vaguely remembered doing before. The Sweet Tamarind Dip looked easy and would sit around, so I started with that. Why can I never manage to follow a recipe to the letter? As I didn’t have tamarind in a block I had to guess wildly as to how much of the paste to use. The dip was a simple mixture of tamarind, sugar, chilli and (oh dear, I hadn’t noticed before!) mint. I put a dessertspoon of tamarind paste in a bowl and added some water to thin it out a bit. I then added a dessertspoon of sugar and a chopped chilli. It tasted very sharp so I added another dessertspoon of sugar and then another until I thought the sweet/sharp balance was about right. Instead of mint I added some chopped coriander. It tasted good.

I’ve used gram flour before and found it an excellent ingredient. Made into a batter it can be fried without ever going greasy and I don’t know why I don’t use it more often. It’s made from ground chick peas so will also provide extra protein in vegetarian dishes. The most famous dish made with gram flour, in this country anyway, is the Onion Bhaji found on every Indian takeaway menu, and there was a recipe for them on the packet. My Sweet Potato Bhajia were obviously based on the same idea although I was concerned that, after comparing proportions, a much smaller amount of gram flour was required in relation to the amount of vegetables.

I decided to prepare as much of the recipe as I could, leaving out the coriander and the sweet potato, which I feared might go brown like ordinary potatoes if left for any length of time, until the last minute. I sliced onions, chopped chilli, ginger and garlic, added some mustard seeds and then the gram flour and some water to make a thick batter. I just couldn’t resist adding some more gram flour…

Putting the bowl to one side, I set about cooking the curried cauliflower. While the cauliflower florets fried in some oil, I ground up some allspice, coriander and cumin seeds. When the florets were golden brown I removed them and fried half a large onion and a chopped chilli in the same oil and then added the spices for another couple of minutes along with some garlic and ginger. After that I added two quartered tomatoes to the pan, put back the cauliflower and poured in enough water to half cover them. I also added some vegetable stock powder. The cauliflower took about 10 minutes to finish cooking and then, to thicken the liquid, I added a tablespoon of coconut powder, half a teaspoon of cornflour, a pinch of sugar and salt, all mixed with a little water. Some chopped coriander over the top and it was ready.

While the cauliflower was cooking I boiled some rice with a few cardamom pods, a piece of cinnamon stick, a clove, a bayleaf and a teaspoon of turmeric to make it a pretty yellow colour.

I couldn’t have coped with frying the Bhajia at the same time so kept the cauliflower curry and rice warm while I concentrated on the frying pan. Just before cooking the Bhajia, I grated the peeled sweet potato in my Magimix (it should have been cut into “matchsticks” but that would have taken ages) and added it to the other ingredients, realising at the same time that the starch from the sweet potato would help thicken the mixture so the extra gram flour probably wasn’t needed. It looked the right texture, though, so I shallow-fried tablespoons of the mixture, turning them over halfway until they had turned a beautiful deep shade of gold (another appealing feature of gram flour). As I drained them on kitchen paper I had another look at the recipe and saw that I had forgotten to add the chopped coriander so hastily cut some off the bunch with a pair of scissors and scattered it over the top as a garnish.

The kitchen looked like a bomb had hit it but it was worth it: the textures and colours of the different dishes were a real treat and Mark did the clearing up afterwards very willingly. The recipe for the Red Onion and Sweet Potato Bhajia with Sweet Tamarind Dip, covered with scribbled notes explaining my various adaptations, has gone into my file (thank you, Sunday Times!) and there’s a small amount of rice, one Bhajia and some dip left, which is a bonus because I can reheat them in the microwave for my lunch tomorrow.

’07 update: I wouldn’t recommend always taking liberties with written recipes but sometimes it works and, when it does, there’s no doubt it’s hugely satisfying. And if it doesn’t – oh, well. As an aside, a very large frying is essential in my culinary world – I wouldn’t have bothered with the Bhajia if I’d had to cook them ‘in batches’. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – SKK make wonderful non-stick pans. You need little or no fat so it’s not wicked to fry.

2007-04-14T15:53:00.001Z

Food journal: 14 April, 2002

I ate three pickled peppers with my cheese on toast for lunch.

We had egg and chips for dinner tonight but I’m determined to cook something more exciting tomorrow. I read the food pages in the Sunday Times and there was a recipe for Red Onion and Sweet Potato Bhajia with Sweet Tamarind Dip which sounds interesting but if I can’t get gram flour, block tamarind and onion seeds, I’ll be done for.

I’ve made a strange discovery about myself. Mark has chocolate and a cup of coffee every night after his dinner but I never have either because coffee keeps me awake and I usually stuff myself so much on the main course that I don’t feel a need for anything sweet afterwards. However, I’ve noticed that I always get a real craving for chocolate after my egg and chips. It seems odd to want something loaded with sugar and fat after a huge portion of chips but it’s been happening so regularly that there must be a connection. It’s rather sinister and I’m wondering if I should inform the experts who study our national diet – perhaps it would help them in their search for a cure for obesity (e.g. if people only eat salads, they’ll never want a pudding…).

’07 update: Can’t think much about food today – Mark has got a nasty chest infection. I did make him some home-made vegetable soup (carrot, celery and onion) for his lunch today (the doctor recommended soups) so I’m feeling very noble. Dinner won’t be up to much though – I’m exhausted.

2007-04-13T16:43:00.000Z

Food journal: 13 April, 2002

We’re going to Ben and Pia’s to babysit tonight while they go to a party. They rarely go to grown-up parties these days – most of their social occasions involve toddlers and early bedtimes. We offered to stay as long as they liked and Ben, thoughtfully, cooked us all a Turkish meal to entertain us until they left at around 9pm.

As he lined up all the dishes along the middle of the table I became horribly aware that I haven't cooked anything very special myself for ages. I must get a grip. Perhaps all will be well when I get my dental bridgework sorted out…

The meal revolved around a large bowl of couscous combined with tomatoes, onions and a big bunch of chopped mint. It smelt gorgeous and Ben, being an artist, had casually but very effectively decorated the top with a lacework of pickled mild peppers. These so effectively brought the whole dish together that Pia, seeing me help myself to most of them, gave me the rest of the jar to take home.

There were some meat koftas which were also excellent – I asked Ben where he had got the recipe but he said that he had made it up himself. Trying not to feel too inadequate I pointed out that they could have done with a little more salt. In another dish were a pile of spicy sausages (shop-bought, I think, but I didn’t dare ask in case he said he’d made those as well!).

Further along, a pile of round pitta breads steamed gently with a bowl of taramasalata and a bowl of hummus (definitely not home-made, I saw the packets) on either side. We all helped ourselves to the six dishes in no particular order and then went back for seconds and thirds. The only gripe I would have is that the fishy flavour of the taramasalata tried to overwhelm all the rest.

It’s such a good idea to have a selection of part-bought, part-home-made foods which all add up to a real feast without having to put days of effort into the preparation. Some of the chefs who tell us to spend hours boning small birds and cutting vegetables into perfect barrel shapes should take a leaf out of Ben’s book and spend more time with their offspring.

Pia made coffee and produced a large box of Turkish Delight before they set off for the party. They came back at 1.30am looking absolutely exhausted and gathered up the baby who had woken up full of beans five minutes before they arrived. Mark and I got our thing together and headed quietly for the door.

’07 update: Ben, Pia and the children live in Lewisham, which has got a really good fruit and vegetable street market. You can buy massive bunches of mint for a sensible price instead of those titchy plastic boxes in the big supermarkets. There’s also an excellent Turkish supermarket selling hummus without e-numbers (hard to come by) and pitta bread in odd shapes (tastes lovely).

2007-04-12T11:36:00.000Z

Food journal: 12 April, 2002

I’ve still got the post-holiday blues so we went to the cinema tonight to see a French film which had good reviews in the papers. I wanted a quick meal in the noodle bar opposite the cinema but the last time we went there Mark was deeply disappointed with his Thai green curry which turned out to be a watery soup with a separated layer of coconut oil floating on the top and some indeterminate pieces of tasteless chicken underneath. We both liked the idea of some Eastern promise, though, and went to Poon’s instead.

We’ve had their mixed starter before and chose that again to share between us. We’d already had a bowl of French fries with a glass of wine when we met up after work so chose the simplest dishes on the menu for our main courses. Mark had special fried r(Poon’s is too upmarket to call it that but in all but name that’s what it was) and I chose crispy fried noodles with pork and beansprouts. The starter included butterflied prawns in batter, crispy seaweed, prawn toasts, sweet and sour pork ribs and spring rolls. It didn’t seem to be as good as last time but that could possibly be explained by our mood (and the chips!). The best part was the incredibly hot chilli oil dipping sauce served on the side. The main courses were more or less the same as we’ve had hundreds times before from the local takeaway.

The film (L’Emploi du Temps, directed by Laurent Cantet) was excellent, though. It had just that right combination of philosophical angst and beautiful direction that the French do better than anyone else. Very cathartic.

’07 update: Two thoughts about eating out… First, it’s always good to eat food you can’t easily make at home – deep-fried things, for example, or a variety of starters which are easy to prepare in a big restaurant kitchen. Second, we live in a world where we’re told that seasoning (i.e. salt) is not good for us but I suspect that the secret weapon of professional chefs is to lay it on with a generous hand.

2007-04-11T09:23:00.001Z

Food journal: 11 April, 2002

Feeling depressed today even though the weather in England is much better than it was in the Med. Had to go to the dentist, as well, so couldn’t raise much enthusiasm for dinner. I bought four organic lamb chops from M&S and went to the local greengrocer to buy some carrots and new potatoes. The new potatoes looked uninspiring - the kind that you know won’t allow themselves to be scraped. I asked the man in the shop if they were the only new potatoes he had and he pointed to a small barrel at the back of the shop. Jersey Royals! Although they were hideously expensive I bought two pounds and floated home, my depression and numb jaw completely forgotten.

I’d also bought some parsley and tarragon so I fried the lamb chops, removed them from the pan and added plenty of chopped herbs and some powdered vegetable stock mixed with water to make a small amount of sauce. The carrots I just plainly boiled.

It really wasn’t my day. It was just as well that I’d bought plenty of the Jersey Royals because a lot of them were beginning to go green and the rest had that fatal rubbery quality of stale potatoes. As I picked away at the few I’d cooked I remembered the time when Mark’s cousin had served us some for lunch straight from her garden. They were the size of marbles, crisp and tasted of butter. I could feel myself falling once more into the slough of despond.

’07 update: The whole business of shopping for food is becoming a minefield. Only yesterday I read that farmers’ markets are topping up their stalls with stuff they buy in from regular wholesalers (and then charge premium prices for it, of course). I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the earliest Jersey Royals are grown in some kind of chemical gel with added seaweed essence (it’s the traditional seaweed fertiliser which is supposed to give them their unique flavour). I’ve refused to buy them so far this year.

2007-04-10T10:55:00.000Z

Food journal: 10 April, 2002

Turning off the fridge/freezer before we leave Béziers is always, for me, the most depressing part of leaving the house. Because this was a short visit there wasn’t the usual accumulation of small treasures in the freezer so it wasn’t too bad but I did have to throw away a couple of small pieces of excellent cheese, half a packet of best quality butter and the last remnants of the pigeon stock.

Our food-loving friend, Peter, had asked us to bring him back some really good blackcurrant jam so I made a final visit to the market on the way to the station to find the best confiture de cassis. The lady at the cheese stall had a large selection of home-made conserves on show and there were two customers in front of me snapping up various jars so I made my purchase from her. We also picked up two sandwiches for lunch on the train. Most sandwich stalls in France seem to offer only three choices of filling: ham, cheese or ham and cheese. We chose ham and cheese.

The highlight of the day, of course, was dinner on Eurostar. We started off with a salmon and cauliflower terrine with mustard mayonnaise, then I had chicken and Mark had veal. The main courses were good: Mark’s veal was flavoured with star anise (seems to be a fashionable spice in France at the moment as we’ve come across it at least twice in the last ten days) and my chicken had a very pleasant mushroom sauce and some excellent dauphinoise potatoes (like our mash last night, the potatoes were definitely not Maris Piper). Pudding was a rather boring tart with a chocolate and coconut filling and there was a small portion of smelly cheese which was described on the menu, in English, as “a hard cheese with an earthy flavour originating from Switzerland shaved into distinctive ruffles before serving”! I wonder what makes me think it wasn’t an English person who wrote that but a translation from the French? Not one of the best meals we’ve ever eaten but we enjoyed every mouthful because, in my opinion, there’s nothing nicer than eating on a train speeding through the French countryside; even the twenty minutes in the tunnel went by in a flash.

’07 update: Sandwiches in France are changing. Triangular ones à la M&S are becoming more and more popular, which leaves me slightly disturbed. The reason, perhaps, is that the traditional French baguette is losing its allure – many boulangeries buy in their loaves ready-mixed and ready-risen so that they just have to stick them in the oven for 20 minutes. I don’t blame modern bakers for not wanting to get up at 3 o’clock in the morning but a proper baguette, properly made by an old-fashioned baker, is still heaven on earth whether it contains ham and cheese, or just ham, or just cheese.

2007-04-09T15:46:00.000Z

Food journal: 09 April, 2002

Our last night in Béziers and we wanted something good but simple. I had various things in the fridge I wanted to use up, including a bowl of concentrated pigeon stock which would be a shame to throw away. The market was shut by the time I got around to shopping so I went to Monoprix to buy some meat. I think French housewives must do all their shopping in the morning because what was left didn’t look particularly exciting. There were some packets of steak but they all had that stringy look which indicates that they will be as tough as old boots unless you eat them virtually raw. In the end I chose one piece of entrecôte and one piece of faux filet, both of which looked very fatty but weren’t too stringy. I also bought a few potatoes.

I still had the bag of wild leaves, a giant tomato, a few sticks of celery and a tiny square of bacon. I thought the tomato would be nice fried so I got out my frying pan, which is very large, and coated the bottom with olive oil. As there was lots of room, I fried the tomatoes on one side and the chopped celery and bacon on the other. There was still empty space so I put the steaks in as well which turned out to be a bad idea because the juices running from the tomatoes began to stew the steaks rather than fry them.

When the tomatoes were ready I put them on a plate with the celery and bacon and turned the heat up high to have a go at browning the steaks. They did eventually start to frizzle but the whole of the cooker, the work surface next to it, the floor and even the back wall were covered with splashes from the spitting pan. Just what we didn’t need on our last night! Finally, I poured some stock into the pan and reduced it to make a sauce which had a very good flavour thanks to the caramelised bits of meat, bacon, tomatoes and celery. Also, I discovered a small piece of garlic butter given free in one of the packets of steak so I used that to finish the sauce.

The meat was tough, as I expected, but very tasty. The salad was too bitter for our taste and although it was obviously doing us good we could only manage a little. Mark mashed the potatoes using the rest of the stock instead of milk because we’d run out and they were very good – the flesh of the potatoes was a bright shade of yellow and I wish I’d made a note of what variety they were.

Mark very kindly did the washing-up and cleared up the terrible mess in the kitchen – he said it was the worst chore he’d ever done!

’07 update: The potatoes I always try to find in Béziers market are called ‘amandine’ – I’ve never seen them for sale in England. When cooked, they have a beautiful colour and texture which is almost like butter. I don’t usually mash or sauté them – we just eat them boiled. Lovely.

2007-04-08T18:55:00.000Z

Food journal: 08 April, 2002

It’s probably not a good idea to go out to eat tonight but it’s our last chance because tomorrow we’ll be getting ready for our departure on Wednesday. There’s a restaurant just around the corner which we went to years ago but didn’t rate very highly. It’s heavily advertised around town and when we’ve passed by and peered in the window it always appears to be busy. It seemed the most likely candidate for a Monday night dinner - it’s either that or McDonalds.

I’ve found that if I don’t eat at my normal dinner time I lose my appetite and, because we’d had a long telephone call from my daughter Emma, we didn’t arrive at the Bistro des Halles until nearly nine o’clock. I’d also had too many aperitifs of white wine and my stomach was churning unhappily. At least two-thirds of the tables at the Bistro were full and it was some time before a waiter found the time to take our order.

I chose a first-course of marrow bones, mainly because you rarely see them on restaurant menus and I was interested to see how they presented them. Mark chose a “bouquet” of large prawns with garlic mayonnaise. The prawns were arranged prettily around the outside of a plate with a small bowl of mayonnaise in the middle. My marrow bones were three monstrous towers sitting on the plate surrounded by slices of toasted baguette. A teaspoon with a very long handle was laid to one side. I really wished I’d chosen something else and was feeling slightly queasy but I ate them anyway, trying to appreciate their jellied interiors, which were gradually seeping into pools of fat in the bottom of the plate.

To make matters worse I had chosen andouillettes for a main course. Normally, I love andouillettes, sausages made with pigs’ intestines with a rather unique flavour (some people, usually English, say they smell of “piss” but it’s more subtle than that), and I often choose them when we find ourselves in a hypermarket cafeteria where they make a tasty alternative to boeuf haché. I was feeling like I never wanted to eat again but now I was faced with two enormous andouillettes, a huge mound of chips and a large salad. I picked at a few chips and looked at the sausages. It was no good, there was no way I could eat them but I was also too embarrassed to leave them. What to do? After a whispered conversation, Mark found that he had a small polythene bag in his pocket. While the waiters were otherwise engaged, he slipped one of the andouillettes into the bag and into his pocket. I spent the next fifteen minutes toying with the other one and hiding bits of it under the salad. Mark’s main course was a large portion of chicken casserole with the same mountains of chips and salad which defeated even him about half-way through.

The Bistro des Halles obviously bases its reputation on being very good value for money because the bill was extremely reasonable for such generous amounts of food. Needless to say, we didn’t have a pudding but felt that coffee was needed to aid our overworked digestions. Neither of us slept well and I, for one, wished we’d gone to McDonalds. Mark remembered the andouillette in his pocket the next morning and put it in the bin.

’07 update: The plastic bag trick is an excellent one and we’ve used it a few times since. If you’re sober enough to consign the contents to the fridge sensibly as soon as you get home, you’ve got the basis for another meal the next night (buy one, get one free!). I’ll never forget those marrow bones. By the way, I think the new restaurant in Beziers market which I mentioned a few days ago is called Le Bistro du Marché (not ‘des Halles’).

2007-04-07T14:45:00.001Z

Food journal: 07 April, 2002

I made some stock this morning with the leftover pigeon bones, adding the remains of the chicken stock from the fridge. I probably won’t use it before we leave but you never know.

Sunday is a strange day for us in France. The market is always open in the morning and packed with customers, presumably buying the ingredients for a huge mid-day meal which they eat outdoors under the shade of large olive trees. That’s our English fantasy anyway. The truth is, it’s raining heavily today and our terrace has sprung a serious leak but, nevertheless, there were some appetising smells emanating from our neighbours’ windows.

Being creatures of habit, and not having an endless supply of second cousins and other distant relatives to grace our table, we had our usual lunch of bread, cheese and salad.

A complete hush descended over the town for the rest of the day so there was no question of going out for our evening meal. I had the bunch of asparagus that we’d bought yesterday and a carton of eggs, some bacon, potatoes, celery, parsley and a leek in the fridge.

I decided to boil the asparagus for a first course and use all the other ingredients to make a large Spanish omelette. The olive oil I had to cook with came from a barrel in a shop next to the market - nobody seemed to mind when I took a half-litre plastic water bottle along yesterday to be filled up.

We ate the asparagus with some olive oil (very good - bright green and grassy with a peppery edge!), lemon juice and slices of toasted baguette. Mark picked off the best bits at the top while I chewed on the rest until there was only a pile of stringy green strands left on the plate. It no longer mattered that there was rain dripping down the windows.

As we ate the Spanish omelette, almost solid with potatoes, for our main course I realised that I had had a secret craving, it being Sunday, for egg and chips. Maybe it was because the weather was making me feel nostalgic but eggs and potatoes are a wonderful combination - wherever you are.

’07 update: Why do we feel the need for a first course when we’re in France? I wouldn’t dream of doing that at home. If we have people for a meal in England we have a few peanuts and olives with a glass of wine and then get stuck into the main course. Followed by a pudding from M&S (I think the French would appreciate that). I do put cheese out between the main course and the pudding because it makes the meal last longer - which is always lovely.

2007-04-06T14:44:00.000Z

Food journal: 06 April, 2002

I must cook us a special dinner at home tonight, if only to have something to write about in my food journal! The market is not open in the afternoon so Mark had to get himself together early to go shopping - he usually likes to potter about at home until after lunch. I like it when he comes with me because he draws attention to things I wouldn’t normally see.

After buying a bottle of wonderfully inexpensive champagne in Monoprix, we dithered about in the market looking at chickens and ducks but finally decided on two pigeons because they were unbelievably expensive and didn’t look at all like the pigeons we sometimes buy in Sainsbury’s. The man behind the stall handled them with great respect while preparing them for cooking, laying them on a piece of greaseproof paper for our inspection before putting them on the scales.

Moving on to the fish stall, we bought six plump scallops for a first course and then Mark insisted on buying some asparagus and some raspberries. On the way home we did a detour to look at another small “artisanal” market in front of a nearby church where I couldn’t resist a bunch of wild garlic and a bag of what looked like weeds but was labelled “salade”.

The habit of deciding what to have for dinner and then going out and buying the ingredients is quite different from buying what looks good and then bringing everything together to make a balanced meal. After much deliberation I put the asparagus and the “salade” to one side for tomorrow and decided to sautée the wild garlic and serve it with the scallops, seared quickly in the pan in which I would cook the garlic. The leftover bread from lunch could be sliced and grilled to provide a few croutons.

I cooked the pigeons on the rotisserie in the oven and made a sauce at the last minute with some white wine and chicken stock from the juices in the pan underneath. I’d put some small pieces of smoked bacon in the pan while the pigeons cooked to provide extra flavour for the sauce. I also cooked some pasta.

The scallops were wonderful - plump and melting - but the wild garlic was the star of the first course. The lady behind the stall had told me to use the whole plant, green leaves and thin white stalks, and it had the texture of young spinach and a delicate garlicky flavour - a real spring tonic!

The pigeons were good, too - their flesh pale had none of the bitterness we get from the darker ones we buy at home. As we ate them I kept reminding myself that it is not necessary to make complicated dishes if the basic ingredients are delicious in their own right.

We had the raspberries for pudding, sharing out the tub of yoghurt we nicked from Eurostar on the way down and which was still within its sell-by date.

’07 update: It must be confessed that writing a food journal in ’02 ratcheted my cooking up a notch. I still care about the food I cook but don’t spend quite so much time thinking about it as I did then. Which is fair enough – there are other things in life besides eating! I’d still snap up a bunch of wild garlic, though, and give it respect (i.e. quite a lot of thought) if I could find it in our local farmers’ market. Perhaps next week…

2007-04-05T12:07:00.000Z

Food journal: 05 April, 2002

Mark likes going to restaurants much more than I do. I find the whole experience, especially in France, quite stressful, especially as I always feel I have to prove that the British are not as ignorant and obsessed with the price of everything as I fear the French think we are. Mark wanted to go to a new restaurant in Béziers which is in the Michelin guide this year and which appears to be very good value(!).

The Val d’Héry is in a side street down by the station, not the most salubrious part of town but the restaurant itself looked attractive and there was a hearty welcome from the proprietor. We were the first customers to arrive at 8 o’clock and, after we had settled ourselves at a large round table and admired the paintings on the wall, Monsieur asked if we would like an aperitif. We know that Noilly Prat, a vermouth flavoured with herbs, is made locally so we asked for that but then wished we hadn’t when we saw the look of horror on Monsieur’s face. He explained that Noilly Prat was usually only used for cooking but that he had another dry vermouth which he thought would be preferable. When it arrived, each glass had a green olive in the bottom and another two on a cocktail stick balanced across the top. He smiled as he put them in front of us and said something encouraging about them being a kind of “Martini Dry” before leaving us to enjoy them accompanied by a plate of cheese straws and a dish of marinated mushrooms.

Always desirous of not wanting to appear mean, we chose the most expensive set menu. One of the two main courses was fish with an orange cream sauce, and Monsieur enthusiastically informed us that he had just one portion of swordfish left in the kitchen, implying that if we didn’t snap it up quickly it might have to be monkfish or some other vastly inferior creature. I went for the swordfish and Mark chose the other alternative main course which was roast quail. For a first course Mark chose asparagus (grown locally and just coming into season) with prawns and I chose the crab soufflé (because I know a soufflé is difficult to cook and wanted to see how they coped). We were informed that the soufflé would take twenty minutes to prepare and were given some excellent aubergine “caviare” with toast to be going on with.

We decided that white wine would be the best choice for our menu but Monsieur looked at the ceiling for a moment before suggesting a chilled light red which would, in his opinion, go with everything we had chosen. We agreed.

The crab soufflé resembled one of the clouds which, unfortunately, have been filling the sky for the last couple of days. For a brief moment after it was put in front of me it seemed to defy gravity but then subsided gently as I parted the surface with my knife and fork. I can’t say that the flavour was outstanding but as a piece of performance art it was brilliant. Mark’s cold asparagus with prawns, served with a large blob of unnecessary crème fraiche, were a disappointment (but what wouldn’t be after that soufflé, we thought).

The swordfish, as I had been promised, was extremely good: white and delicate, beautifully complemented by its creamy orange sauce. Mark’s quail was plump and tender, served with a sticky sauce (slightly over-reduced if you want to nit-pick). Both our plates had the same vegetable accompaniments: a strange “sausage” of mashed aubergine, a small potato tart and a mound of red pepper purée - too fancy but the kind of thing that’s obligatory these days,

A selection of cheeses came next, the highlight of which was a fresh goat’s cheese which Monsieur drizzled with honey from a great height - a wonderful combination.

The noisy sweet trolley caused some excitement as it was wheeled to our table because, since we had arrived, the restaurant had filled up and the other customers were interested to see what was in store for them later on. The Tarte Tatin looked dire, pale and flaccid, and the large Chocolate Gâteau was down to its last two portions. After some deliberation, Mark went for the Crème Renversée (upside-down Cream Caramel) and I chose a Nougat Glacé. The Crème Renversée was just what you would expect but I experienced a Proustian moment with my Nougat Glacé: it tasted exactly like Tutti Frutti ice-cream from the ’60s. As I dug in with a spoon I could see myself as a child peeling off the soggy cardboard carton and marvelling at the pure white ice-cream studded with the vivid reds, greens and yellows of the crystallised fruits. I wasn’t in the least bit hungry by this time but I owed it to myself to finish it all.

The food was good, the restaurant pleasant, but there was something not quite right. Nit-picking again, maybe, but the young male waiter was nervous and inconfident and didn’t really seem to like what he was doing. Monsieur was too vociferous in “talking up” the dishes on the menu while appearing to have his mind elsewhere - as if he were somehow expecting the kitchen to blow up at any moment. I’ve always been a great one for saying that good food is by far the most important requirement from a restaurant, but I’m beginning to feel a need for that elusive attribute: ambience.

’07 update: The Val d’Héry continues to feature in the food guides but I can’t see us going again this year.

2007-04-04T16:39:00.000Z

Food journal: 04 April, 2002

I made my first trip to the local market this morning. It’s housed in a handsome nineteenth century brick building with ornate wrought-iron trellises holding up the high roof. Sadly, like many other old-fashioned markets all over France, it is suffering from competition with the large supermarkets; several of the stalls are now just empty shells. The ones that remain, however, sell produce of excellent quality and I feel duty bound to support them, even though the anonymity of the supermarket checkout would be easier.

Before I made any purchases I wandered around reacquainting myself with what was on offer. The fish section around the outside walls is spectacular: creatures of all shapes and sizes are displayed proudly, some arranged with their tails in their mouths or with fierce-looking fins extended like ruffs around their heads. Huge tuna sit on wooden trestles and boxes are piled high with oysters and mussels. In the centre of the market there are two stalls specialising in North African food which cater for the immigrant population who live nearby in the old town. Sometimes I buy preserved lemons or salted anchovies from an immense barrel but mostly I just gaze at the colourful piles of spices displayed along the counter in precise heaps.

The vegetable stall I usually go to was empty - I hope they are just having their Easter break and haven’t disappeared for good like the one next to them. I passed on to the next one again and took a large plastic bowl from a pile at the front. I have watched elderly ladies in black spending what seems like hours selecting a single leek while discussing its merits earnestly with the stall-holder before moving on to do the same thing with a peach. I tend to make my choices quite quickly but have noticed that each year I take a little longer. I put some potatoes, broad beans, tomatoes, leeks and celery into my bowl, trying to choose whichever products had “Pays” written on their labels, indicating that they were grown locally. Tomatoes are not in season here at the moment and I noticed that the ones I selected came from Morocco (and were five times the price they will be in the summer!).

At the cheese stall I am always bewildered by the choice. I often pick the same as the French person in front of me in the queue on the grounds that they probably know more than I do about which is best. Today there was no-one so, after saying “Bonjour” to Madame behind the counter, I pointed at something called “Bleu Basque” and while she cut me a slice peered around at the rest. We eat cheese practically every lunchtime while we are here and like to have a choice so I bought a piece of Brillat Savarin (white and creamy with a Camembert-type crust) and a piece of Cantal (like Cheddar but sweeter). The other end of this stall has meat and bacon so I also asked Madame for a piece of poitrine fumée (smoked bacon) which comes in a big chunk and is sometimes coated with a harmless white mould. I handed over my 10 Euro note and made my way home, stopping at the boulangerie to buy a baguette.

I’d made some stock with the chicken left over from the day before yesterday so in the evening I made a simple soup with my selection of vegetables and flavoured with strips of poitrine fumée. The ingredients were not expensive or sophisticated but we felt very privileged as we wolfed it down with lots of local wine and chunks torn from the baguette.

’07 update: Since ’02 the local market is even smaller but the stalls that remain do a good trade, especially on Saturday and Sunday mornings. About a quarter of the market was fenced off when we went last year and we learned that it was going to become ‘Le Bistrot des Halles’ (‘Halles’ is the French word for ‘central market’) and should have opened by this summer. A good idea – the chef won’t have to go far for his ingredients!

2007-04-03T11:18:00.001Z

Food journal: 03 April, 2002

My French teacher from London, who has a holiday home in a nearby village, came to visit this afternoon with her daughter and grandson. After we had seen them off on one of the excellent local buses which never seem to be late we decided to eat out. The Cep d’Or is an unpretentious restaurant about five minutes walk from our house. It is mentioned in the Michelin Guide and specialises in seafood, most of it caught locally in the Mediterranean.

We chose the 17 Euro menu (just over £10) and a carafe of white wine. Mark started with chicken livers and I chose the cheese fondues. The chicken livers were sweet and tender and the fondues crisply coated with breadcrumbs on the outside and melting within. Both were presented on a bed of mixed salad dressed with a delicate vinaigrette.

Mark’s main course was roast salmon. As far as I know, they don’t catch salmon in the Mediterranean but nevertheless it was fresh and succulent with a beautiful caramelised crust on the outside. The rest of the plate was decorated with different, carefully-prepared vegetables and a couple of mussels with a tiny pool of tomato sauce in each shell.

After having asked the waiter to explain what it was, I went for a “Bouille” of mixed seafood. A Bouille, I now know, is a local version of Bouillabaisse. A classic Bouillabaisse is a soup made mainly from small fish caught from the rocks around the coast of Marseilles but my Bouille, also a soup, contained the fish and shellfish particular to our section of the Mediterranean. Sitting in a rich and aromatic broth, the pieces of monkfish, prawns, mussels, cockles and whelks looked as pretty as a picture. I had been given a lemon-scented tissue and a tiny two-pronged fork so dug in with my fingers, extracting all the juicy morsels from their shells before spooning up the soup. It was so good that I had to wipe out the bowl with a chunk of bread just like the French family at the next table.

Last year, when we went to the Cep d’Or, we had a delicious pudding which is hard to describe. It was as if pieces of cake and banana had been mixed with egg custard and baked in a flan tin until browned on the outside but still creamy in the middle. Fortunately, it was on the menu tonight so Mark chose that. I had eaten far too much already so, although sorely tempted by the pudding, contented myself with some chocolate ice-cream. Finally, we had to have small cups of strong coffee to complete our excellent meal even though the caffeine will no doubt keep us awake all night. The bill came to 42 Euros (£28).

’07 update: We’ve been to the Cep d’Or several times since ’02 and, sadly, the quality of the cooking seems to be gradually declining. In fact, this decline is happening all over France, although it might be an illusion caused by the raising of standards in the UK over the same period. Occasionally, though, we still manage to find a French restaurant which serves delicious, unpretentious food at modest prices and we instantly forget all the mediocre meals we’ve had.

2007-04-02T10:23:00.000Z

Food journal: 02 April, 2002

I felt terrible this morning. Still, the house has survived the winter - a small leak from the terrace but we can ignore that until we come back in the summer and have more time to fix it. Mark went to get something for lunch while I drank lots of water and vowed to drink alcohol in moderation in future.

Lunch was a baguette, some goat’s cheese (I can recommend it for a hangover) and some Roquefort. Mark also visited our local wine shop on the way back which sells excellent wine from the Languedoc in 5-litre boxes (le “bag-in-box” they call them). It was my duty to try a glass of this year’s vintage with lunch and, suddenly, I felt much better.

In the afternoon we went for a postprandial walk to check out any changes in Béziers town centre. There’s a restaurant which has appeared in this year’s Michelin guide so we’ve booked a table for Friday. On the way back we went to Monoprix, the supermarket in the centre of town, to get something for dinner (in my fragile state this morning I couldn’t face the local market where I would have had to have long conversations with the stallholders in my appalling French while grappling with the strange Euros in my purse). We bought an organic (biologique) chicken, a bag of carrots, a bunch of parsley and another baguette, this time covered in sesame seeds.

I’ve still to get to grips with my French cooker. It runs on bottled gas but has an electric grill at the top of the oven which also serves an electric rotisserie underneath. The gas cylinder didn’t seem very full so, as we don’t have a car to get a new one if it runs out, I used the rotisserie to cook the chicken. It’s tricky to get the chicken impaled on the big metal skewer in such a way that it turns round and round in the proper manner but once it starts to cook it fills the house with an appetising smell and needs no further attention.

I really like the French custom of serving bread with a meal as a “filler”: the potato, rice, pasta decision becomes redundant and therefore a single carefully prepared vegetable is quite enough. I boiled the carrots until very tender and then mashed them to a rough purée. The chicken had rendered up some juices into the pan underneath so I scraped everything into the carrots and mashed again. The carrots were now quite sloppy and had taken up the flavour of the chicken. A good sprinkling of parsley and we were ready to eat. The sesame bread was excellent.

I thought it was the perfect meal but Mark had a problem. When we only have bread instead of potatoes, rice, pasta, etc, he forgets to eat the bread and ends up starving in the middle of the night. At 3am he crept down to the kitchen, made a cup of tea and ate two jam sandwiches with brown bread which he had brought with him from England.

’07 update: As expected, there was quite a lot of food left over from lunch yesterday but, hurrah, most of it was put into carrier bags and taken away by our guests for later. The chicken and leek raised pie from The Ginger Pig was delicious and I kept some of that for our lunch today – which I’m just about to have.

2007-04-01T08:43:00.000Z

Food journal: 01 April, 2002

We don’t usually travel first-class on Eurostar but there was a good offer on and I was delighted to hear that a three-course meal was included in the price. Unfortunately, on the way there the meal is breakfast but on our return journey we will be having dinner. As I don’t usually eat breakfast I convinced myself that it was really a very early lunch, especially as there was wine on the menu!

The first course was an organic raspberry yoghurt which we didn’t want and slipped into our bag when no-one was looking. A croissant and a Viennese pastry came next and while I ate my croissant Mark put his pastry in his bag to have later for his tea. We had one each of the main (third!) courses: mine sounded very impressive in French and included boudins blanc et noir, champignons Provencal, omelette au fromage, etc, but turned out to be more or less an English breakfast with a cheese omelette, slices of ordinary sausage and black pudding and mushrooms mixed in with a bit of tomato sauce sitting on a slice of bacon. It wasn’t bad, especially when accompanied by an individual bottle of white Chardonnay. The train was bound for Brussels and Mark chose what we realised afterwards was the Belgian option: two slices of cold turkey breast with some apple salad and a cherry tomato (again, it sounded rather grand in French).

Just before we left the train at Lille for our connection to Montpellier we were offered a glass of champagne which neither of us refused. As we had an hour or so between trains we had been meaning to have lunch in Lille but we weren’t hungry so sat outside a bar in the sunshine and had another glass of wine. The next stage of the journey passed quite quickly due to our extremely animated conversation. Mark had a bag of crisps, a sandwich and his Viennese pastry but I just felt like another glass of wine - fortunately we had bought some along decanted into a plastic bottle.

By the time we arrived in Béziers at about 10 o’clock at night (only 9 o’clock to our English stomachs), expecting to get something to eat, we were dismayed to find just about everywhere deserted. Even McDonalds was closed. Thankfully, Mark, who never goes anywhere without emergency supplies, had persuaded me to put a pack of smoked salmon and a small brown loaf in my bag before we left England. At the time I had been quite cross that my clothes might reek of it for the rest of our holiday but I was extremely glad when we finally let ourselves into our house and collapsed at the table. It tasted like the best smoked salmon I’ve ever eaten (who was it that said that hunger is the best sauce?) and there was even some white wine left to drink with it.

I knew that I was not going to feel too good tomorrow.

’07 update: Haven’t got time to say much today – busy preparing lunch!

2007-03-31T09:25:00.001Z

Food journal: 31 March, 2002

We’ll leave the freezer on while we’re away in France but there’s some fillet steak which we bought a few weeks ago from the farmers’ market that I want to use up tonight. In the fridge there’s a packet of tomatoes and an iceberg lettuce. The obvious answer is to have the steak with a salad but I must have been feeling perverse because I decided to use the vegetables to make a sauce for some pasta.

Still in a funny mood, I decided to see what happened if I cooked the tomatoes in the microwave. While I fried some onions I cut crosses in the top of my six tomatoes, put them in a bowl and gave them three minutes. At the end of that time the ones around the outside were starting to collapse but the one in the middle was still hard so I gave them another two minutes. I now had a bowl of tomato purée with six skins floating around which were easy to fish out with a fork.

When I’d fried some onions, I added a chopped clove of garlic and the sliced iceberg lettuce which took only a couple of minutes to wilt and soften. Next, I tipped in the tomato purée along with some thyme, a bayleaf and a pinch of allspice. The tomatoes had given off a lot of juice in the microwave so I had to boil the mixture hard for a while until everything had thickened to a sauce consistency. It tasted slightly bitter which I immediately blamed on the microwave but it could be that the tomatoes were unripe. Either way, half a teaspoon of sugar improved the flavour greatly.

While the pasta was cooking, I cut the steak into thin slices and fried it quickly in some oil. There was a dribble left in the bottom of a bottle of sherry so I added that to the pan and flambéed the steak, which meant I had a tiny amount of meaty juices to further improve the flavour of the sauce.

Not one of the greatest meals we’ve ever eaten, I must admit, especially as the pasta I used was pappardelle - very large ribbons which were thick and unwieldy and seemed reluctant to mingle with the sauce. Never mind, as my old cookery teacher used to say, it was “a learning experience”. I learned that we should have had steak and salad.

’07 update: I hate wasting food and get quite sentimental about turfing out bowls of aging fat and bits of wrinkled cucumber from the fridge. Because we’ve got visitors this weekend I’ve bought vast amounts of stuff and I know with certainty that some of it will have to be thrown away. Although I will enjoy urging everyone to eat as much as they can, the sight of the gigantic bowl of fruit on the table in front of me is causing mild depression already.

2007-03-30T12:24:00.000Z

Food journal: 30 March, 2002

I made salmon and cucumber sandwiches and egg and onion sandwiches for lunch with Ben and Pia and the children. Mark’s mum used to make brilliant egg and onion sandwiches and I’ve copied her formula ever since. I boiled six eggs and got my fork out to mash them but noticed the Magimix gathering dust on the work surface. I could have used it to chop the onion, mash the eggs and even mix in the salad cream but couldn’t face washing up all the bits and pieces afterwards so ignored it and carried on with my fork. It’s very easy to cut up an onion into tiny cubes by hand, anyway. Cut a peeled onion down through the root and lay it cut side down on a board. Using a sharp knife, cut parallel lines the length of the onion, stopping just short of the root. Then, at right angles to the original cuts, slice across the onion to make the dice. One medium onion makes the right amount for six mashed eggs. It has to be Heinz salad cream - mayonnaise wouldn’t be right at all - and the sandwiches have to be made with good quality, packet white bread.

The salmon and cucumber sandwiches are just drained tinned salmon mashed with a fork and with just enough of the liquor added back in to make a nice mushy consistency (but not so mushy that it makes the bread soggy). Some black pepper is essential and the cucumber must be peeled. I used brown bread.

I’m happy to report the cries of “Ooh, these sandwiches are really nice!” and it just goes to show that simple things made with good ingredients are as good as anything. I used free-range eggs, wild red tinned salmon and organic butter and it was worth it. I also arranged the sandwiches, cut into triangles, on my largest and most handsome oval platter and cast a handful of cress over the top (an old catering trick but a good one).

We all went Nando’s, the Portuguese chicken restaurant tonight. I’ve written about it before but should add that they are an object lesson in how to be nice to children. Alexa (4) got a yellow balloon filled with helium which is now trying to escape through the ceiling of our living room (the manager went and blew it up for her himself) and they were happy to wait a very long time while she decided on what flavour ice-cream she wanted. One table was served a birthday cake complete with lighted candles carried in by a group of loudly singing waiters who managed to look as if it was the best celebration they’d ever attended. No wonder we keep going back.

’07 update: It’s Friday in ’07 and the family are coming again for lunch on Sunday to see their aunt who is staying with us for the weekend. I was just thinking about what to do for lunch. I must be getting richer because I thought it would be nice to go to our favourite butcher, The Ginger Pig, and buy some ready-made stuff. They do extremely handsome (albeit expensive) pork pies - I’ve never bought one before but I did taste a sample and it was delicious. They also do Scotch eggs and a selection of own-made patés and I even saw some of their own corned beef for sale once, which I’d love to try. All that with lots of salad and really good bread.

2007-03-29T09:05:00.001Z

Food journal: 29 March, 2002

We’ve got a busy day tomorrow: Ben and Pia are coming here for lunch and Mark and I will be baby-sitting in the afternoon. Sunday will be taken up with packing for France so I feel entitled to have an easy day today. It has also been the sunniest Good Friday in living memory so I went for a long walk in Regents Park.

We went to M&S to buy some fish and actually had some skate wings in the basket before I decided I didn’t feel like fish. Putting them back on the shelf we looked along the ready-meal section to see what was on offer. Some Moroccan filo pies looked promising but didn’t seem as if they’d be enough for two so we chose some pasta with roasted vegetables and goat’s cheese as well. Mark obviously did feel like fish because he suggested we get some Orkney dressed crab for a first course.

The crab was pleasant but the flavour was unexciting, probably because there was only white meat (what do they do with all the brown meat, I wonder?). The shells didn’t look like normal crab shells: I think they were from spider crabs which, legend has it, the French fight for but the British like to toss back into the sea (or sell to the French!) because of their lack of large front claws. With the crab we ate a small tub of sweet chilli sauce which we’d picked up from the fish counter. It certainly perked up the flavour of the crab but had a nasty gelatinous texture.

The Moroccan filo pies were a good choice because they were the kind of thing that would take hours to make at home - they tasted pretty good, too, especially with the little tub of minty yoghurt provided to “drizzle” over the top. The pasta was OK but as you had to stir it after being microwaved, the goat’s cheese got lost and made the pasta stodgy. I think there is an art to choosing ready-made meals which I haven’t yet mastered.

After dinner, for want of anything better to do, we conducted a blind tasting of olive oils. I only had two sorts: my new unfiltered Italian and last year’s French made exclusively from Lucques olives and said to be the best that the Languedoc has to offer. I was interested to see if we could taste any difference and if we liked one much more than the other. There is a difference and we liked one much more than the other! The Italian won hands down - the flavour was lighter, fresher and, as Mark said, “much less oily”.

’07 update: We eat goat’s cheese quite often when we are in France but only very rarely in England. Our preferred cheese here is always mature Canadian Cheddar which is widely available in supermarkets. We have it in a sandwich for lunch – mine with sliced tomato and Mark’s with Branston Pickle (which I can’t stand the smell of – must be related to some forgotten childhood trauma). If the bread is really fresh, I’ll have a thick slice, heavily-buttered, with a chunk of Canadian Cheddar on the side and up to six pickled onions.

2007-03-28T13:35:00.000Z

Food journal: 28 March, 2002

Easter weekend coming up and then on Monday we’re off to our house in France for ten days. The weather in England is chilly but beautifully sunny so fingers crossed for high pressure over the Med next week!

When we’re in France we seldom feel a desire for a curry or anything Chinese. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s because the ingredients there are so good that they need little spicing up. Our house is in a very traditional little town so there’s also the fact that I don’t want to shock our next-door neighbours by allowing the powerful smells of dry-fried cumin and coriander or Five Spice Powder to waft out from our permanently open window.

It’s a different matter at home and “tasty” was what I was looking for tonight. I defrosted a small joint of belly pork overnight and thought I might try a two-pronged technique which I’ve read is common in China. First of all I put the pork into a saucepan, covered it with cold water, brought it up to the boil, drained it and rinsed it. It was then re-covered with cold water, brought to the boil and simmered for two hours. To add more flavour, I put in some thyme, a bayleaf and a couple of teaspoons of vegetable stock powder.

When the two hours were up, I took the pork out of the stock and left it to drain and cool. The next stage was to make a marinade which I’ve used many times for spare ribs and involves mixing sugar, vinegar, tomato purée, sherry, chilli, star anise, ginger, soy sauce and garlic. That might sound complicated but nearly all the ingredients come from the store cupboard and mixing them together is simple enough. This time, I also added a couple of kaffir lime leaves because they were there and I like the flavour. I cut the cold pork into slices between the bones, turned them over a few times in the marinade and forgot about them for a few hours.

Half an hour before dinner, I brushed the pork slices with oil and put them in their heatproof dish under a very hot grill. Because the pork was already cooked there was no problem with the outside being burnt before the inside was cooked, something which always bothers me when I make this dish with raw meat. It’s ready when the slices are well browned (slightly burnt is best to offset the sweetness) on both sides.

There was plenty of stock from cooking the pork so I poured off about a pint into a bowl for making a sauce and used the rest to cook some rice. I was surprised that the rice took longer to cook than usual, presumably because it was affected by the density of the stock. When the pork was nicely charred, I kept it warm, poured off all the fat from the dish and added the reserved stock. Scraping up all the bits of marinade, I quickly stirred the contents over a high flame until it had reduced by about half and thickened slightly. Because of the sugar in the marinade, it gave the slices of pork an appetising shiny coating.

I let myself down by serving runner beans with the pork and rice - they spoilt the Chinese theme. I should have bought pak choi or at least mange-touts. The pork was very fatty but the sweet and tender nuggets of meat in between were very good, improved greatly by being twice-cooked.

’07 update: Luckily, I didn’t put any Worcestershire sauce in the noodles last night – I put it on the table instead so that we could try some with the first mouthful. The delicate flavours of the seaweed, coriander, tofu (and pak choi!) were completely overwhelmed by just a couple of drops. I’ll stick to putting it on top of Welsh Rarebit in future.

2007-03-27T10:02:00.001Z

Food journal: 27 March, 2002

In spite of my mother’s example (or, with a shameful rebelliousness, because of it), I feel the need for something predominantly vegetarian tonight, preferably with lots of olive oil and garlic.

I found a package in the freezer with four pancakes, put them out to defrost and sat down to ponder what I could do with them. There was a small cube of pancetta and a red chilli in the fridge and onions and garlic under the kitchen table. Some sort of filling and a sauce were required for the pancakes. Nothing sprang immediately to mind so I decided to see what was in the shops (suivre le marché as the French say) and set off for the supermarket.

Passing swiftly by the sections filled with lamb joints and individual puddings, I idled along the vegetable counter to see what there was. Into my basket went some sprightly-looking spinach and a monster tomato. Taking a few more turns up and down, I decided to do a spinach and potato filling for the pancakes and use the tomato for some sort of sauce. I also bought a bag of new potatoes (no Jersey Royals yet, unfortunately).

With a sigh of relief at being back in front of my own cooker, I put the potatoes on to boil and blanched the spinach for a couple of minutes before sluicing it under the cold tap and leaving it to drain. In another pan I fried the chopped chilli and pancetta with lots of onion and lots of garlic in plenty of olive oil. When the potatoes were cooked I cut them into small chunks and mixed them with the squeezed and chopped spinach. I then added them to the onions with a good grating of nutmeg. The mixture seemed a bit dry and there was some milk in the fridge so I made a small sauce in the pan with half a teaspoon of cornflour and a few of tablespoons of milk. I stirred in some vegetable stock powder for good measure. It tasted really good.

Rather than make a complicated tomato sauce, I skinned the tomato over the gas flame (something else you can’t do with an electric cooker!), removed the seeds and cut it into small cubes. In a bowl, I mixed the tomato cubes with a large pinch of sugar, some black pepper and a generous slug of my new, unrefined olive oil.

The filling was still hot so I divided it between the pancakes, just flipping them over once, and arranged them in an oiled dish, then they went under the grill with some grated cheese on top for a few minutes to crisp the tops. Just before I took the dish to the table I poured the tomato sauce/salad around the outside to warm slightly.

It tasted like heaven. Why? I’ve got two theories: one is that it was exactly what we felt like eating (for the first time since last Thursday) and the second is that my new olive oil has magical qualities in spite of Mark’s rude comments.

’07 update: After reading the above I’m feeling in a vegetarian mood tonight. I fancy tofu with noodles – Thai-style. I must remember to add Worcestershire sauce as a substitute for Asian fish sauce. I just tasted some and I don’t think it’s going to work…

2007-03-26T11:07:00.000Z

Food journal: 26 March, 2002

Mark and I have been shopping and filled up my mother’s fridge with more or less what we found when we arrived but with slight variations (“wafer-thin” topside of beef instead of “wafer-thin” ham, for example).

For our final dinner, after our great success at Diana’s, we bought a ready-prepared lamb joint. This time the counter was stocked with supplies of fresh sauces and gravies and we selected a red wine sauce which said it went with lamb. When my mother used to cook a roast dinner for the family she would prepare at least three different vegetables as well as boiled and roast potatoes. With the vagaries of her cooker in mind, I’m afraid I settled on a bag of organic frozen peas and some new potatoes.

I can’t say I enjoyed preparing the meal but was pleased when, even with extremely wobbly bottom teeth, my mother cleaned her plate and managed an individual raspberry trifle afterwards. I hope Mark and I have such robust digestive systems in our old age. Our generation, with its obsessions with monounsaturated oils and vegetables five times a day should perhaps take a leaf out of my mother’s book. Her father worked in a chocolate factory (with all the obvious perks) and, as she is happy to tell you, the whole family “lived out of a frying pan”. She’s never taken a vitamin pill (or any other kind of pill for that matter) in her life.

When Mark and I got back to London we bought a loaf of bread and made crabsticks and cucumber sandwiches.

’07 update: Until recently I only used olive oil for frying as I believe it is better for our cholesterol levels than butter. Still, I like the flavour of things cooked in butter but Mark, although he likes the taste in the finished dish, hates the smell of it cooking. Anyway, I’ve been re-introducing butter on a small scale. For example, when I cook a steak I start it off in a pan with some oil but when I turn it over I slip in a small knob of butter. I have to keep the kitchen door firmly shut while I do it but it really does make a difference.

2007-03-25T11:47:00.001Z

Food journal: 25 March, 2002

For lunch (“dinner” as it’s called in this house), we had the cold roast chicken. Although she is in her ninetieth year my mother still has a great enthusiasm for her food and was concerned to ensure that we took the chicken out of the fridge a couple of hours before we ate it (“There’s no taste to it if you eat it straight from the fridge”, she said firmly).

I’m not quite sure how much cooking my mother actually does. If you ask her, she says that she does quite a lot but her memory is not totally reliable. If she doesn’t do any, I don’t blame her because she has the most unsympathetic cooker I have ever encountered. There is no gas in the area just outside Bristol where she lives so she has no choice but to have an electric cooker. I use gas at home and it drives me mad when I’m at her house having to wait for hours for a saucepan to come to the boil and then for hours waiting for it to stop boiling over after I have turned down the heat. Even cooking some new potatoes had me tearing my hair out. There weren’t any green vegetables in the fridge and if there had been I probably would have refused to cook them, so we had salad again.

For tea we had some “wafer-thin” ham and a layered salad from a plastic tub which involved cheese, pasta, lettuce, sweetcorn and grated carrot. It made a change from the salad we had at dinner. We have to leave tomorrow and I’m resolved to cook us all a proper roast dinner before we go.

’07 update: I always find it baffling when other people say they would like a new cooker. Knowing your oven well in terms of the temperature and the timing for baked dishes takes years of trial and error. I once had an old-fashioned (it was second-hand when I got it) Cannon cooker and I got to know its vagaries really well. When I had to get rid of it (the gas man muttered something about it being dangerous because the flame was the wrong colour), the new one was a flimsy thing in comparison. The heat never seemed to penetrate the food properly like it did in the Cannon and I still look back on its grubby ugliness with nostalgia. By the way, it took two big men to carry away the Cannon but one of them managed the new one on his own!

2007-03-24T09:31:00.001Z

Food journal: 24 March, 2002

On to spend a few days with my mother. I am beginning to feel strangely disorientated food-wise and it’s probably going to get worse before it gets better. Now that my mother is unable to do her own shopping, my sister keeps her stocked up with ready-meals and other easy-to-prepare ingredients. I wonder what elderly people did before they were invented? And do the supermarkets realise how important they are for people with busy lives who need to provide a reasonable diet for those who can’t cook for themselves? I used to think that ready-meals were mostly for the lazy and inept but I’m changing my views.

I knew that my sister, Mary, would have left a well-stocked fridge but my mother loves fish and chips so we picked some up on the way over to her house at lunchtime. She is of the generation that is happiest having the main meal in the middle of the day. Mark and I would really have preferred a cheese and salad sandwich but it was a pleasure to see her working slowly but surely through a huge piece of cod in batter and a sizeable portion of chips, not to mention a side order of pickled onions.

After the meal my mother dozed off while I explored the contents of her fridge to see what Mary had left. There was a whole roasted “sugar-marinated’ chicken, a packet of “wafer-thin” ham, a Quiche Lorraine, some puff pastry Cornish pasties, cheeses, a selection of salad ingredients, a tub of fresh mayonnaise and an array of individual puddings. As the nearest supermarket is some distance away by car I was pleased that there was plenty to keep us going until we could replenish supplies again before we left.

At “tea-time” we had the Quiche Lorraine, heated up in the oven, salad and bread and butter. And a nice cup of tea!

’07 update: My widowed father-in-law depended almost entirely on ready-meals for the last few years of his life. I used to worry that there weren’t enough nutrients in the ready-meals and would regularly cook up a huge pan of boiled beef and carrots which was then divided into portions and stored in his freezer. Unfortunately, after the ‘mad cow’ scare he couldn’t face eating beef and I stopped doing it. For a while before he died he didn’t want to eat meat at all and ate ‘salmon in a sauce’ from M&S nearly every day.

2007-03-23T10:14:00.000Z

Food journal: 23 March, 2002

Although Diana is a good cook she is a very reluctant one so I offered to provide dinner for us all tonight. Her children, Anna and Joe, are thirteen and twenty-two respectively and we discussed their pudding preferences before going to M&S to fill our trolley with goodies. Although Diana is not a complete vegetarian she doesn’t cook meat very often so, of course, Anna and Joe see it as a huge treat and are desperate for it.

I didn’t want to spend hours at the cooker so headed for the section where they have joints of meat ready to put straight into the oven. I liked the look of a lamb joint with rosemary and it said on the packet that it would serve five people. When I sneaked a look under the cardboard sleeve it didn’t look very big so we bought a small gammon joint with a mustard crust as well, which purported to be enough for three. I’ve never tasted the fresh gravy that all the large supermarkets sell these days but, to make life easy tonight, I looked around for some to try. The shelf was bare and as my heart sank at the thought of having to make a sauce from scratch Mark spotted a long-life jar of chicken gravy in another section so, although I couldn’t imagine it would be much good, we put some in the trolley.

My plan was to cook the two joints of meat in the oven along with a selection of roasted vegetables raided from Diana’s fridge. That would just leave cooking some new potatoes on top of the cooker and reheating the gravy. I wasn’t happy about the gravy but hoped that Diana might have some herbs or something to jolly it up a bit.

During our earlier discussions, Diana had expressed a preference for a lemon-flavoured pudding but Anna and Joe had said they wanted something really chocolatey. We love Anna and Joe so selected the largest, most luxurious chocolate tart we could find and then, because we love Diana just as much, bought two small lemon cheesecakes. Also some double cream because, as Diana had said earlier, we all wanted to have “a feast”.

Hoping that the unfamiliar oven wouldn’t be temperamental, I decided to trust the instructions on the joints of meat and put them in at the appropriate time before dinner. My choice of vegetables for roasting looked very promising: aubergine, red peppers, onions, carrots, bulb fennel. Cut into large chunks and rubbed with olive oil, they went on a baking tray above the meat. Cooking the potatoes and reheating the gravy was easy while everyone sat catching up on news around the big kitchen table.

It all turned out perfectly well. The gravy tasted a bit dull and the texture too gelatinous for my liking but after I’d spooned the fat off the juices from the lamb and mixed them in it tasted surprisingly edible. Cooking for people with good appetites is always a great pleasure and everyone attacked the food with gusto. The lamb and gammon served together in alternate slices looked quite special and, although it was supposed to be enough for eight, there were only a few tiny crumbs left on the plate at the end of the meal. The roast vegetables had charred to a perfect sweet chewiness (more by luck than judgement, I must admit) and the potatoes, which I hadn’t bothered to peel, disappeared in respectable amounts.

While everyone helped themselves to large portions of chocolate tart and lemon cheesecake with huge dollops of cream, I sat back in my chair drinking wine and feeling very happy.

’07 update: Can’t think about food today – we’re having new carpets fitted. So a ready-meal from M&S tonight – it would normally be curry but Mark went out for a Thai meal last night and had something ‘very hot’. While the fitters are here I need to get out of their way so I’ll have a good browse before I choose.

2007-03-22T11:10:00.001Z

Food journal: 22 March, 2002

I’m writing this account of our meal at The Fat Duck two days after the event and I’m still reeling. Heston Blumenthal, who has made it famous, is a self-taught cook with a passion for the science of food and for combining unusual, not to say outlandish, flavours.

After choosing our first and main courses we were brought three little dishes to sample while we waited. The first one was a small glass of green tea and lime foam which we were sternly instructed to eat immediately before it separated. The second was an olive-sized blob of mustard ice-cream in a tiny pool of red cabbage gazpacho. The third was another glass, this time containing layers of pea purée and quail jelly, topped with langoustine sauce. It was all exquisite and beautifully presented and I was already pronouncing it the best meal we’d ever had. As we ate I frantically scribbled notes in my diary until the waiter spotted me and came over with a copy of the whole menu for me to take home.

Our first courses were scallops for Mark and squid for me but, as we expected, they were far from straightforward. Mark’s huge scallops were accompanied by oloroso jelly, ceps and cauliflower purée. My squid were made into immaculate sausages filled with duck and served with a maple syrup and parsley sauce. Strange as some of the combinations might sound, they all blended perfectly together and made the bottle of moderately-priced Burgundy Aligoté taste expensively complex. By this time, we were declaring the man a genius.

We nearly always find that starters in restaurants are better than main courses and, sad to say, that was the case with my main course of sweetbreads “cooked in a salt crust with hay and crusted with pollen”. The sweetbreads, slightly overcooked, came in a thick fried batter which tasted of old cooking oil to me. There were bits in the batter which could have been hay or maybe pollen but didn’t have any discernible flavour. Everything else on the plate was excellent, including fabulous parsnip purée and two cockles cooked “a la plancha”. Mark, however, had no complaints about his slow-cooked lamb flavoured, we guessed, with star-anise and sitting in a pool of the lambiest sauce I’ve ever tasted.

Choosing a pudding was particularly difficult because the descriptions were so tantalising - I wanted to try them all. A chocolate sorbet was flavoured with cumin, a pineapple mille feuille came with chilli jelly and there was something described as smoked bacon and egg ice-cream! I finally succumbed to a “chocolate coulant with blue cheese and coffee fromage-blanc ice-cream, Sichuan pepper and wine pear” and Mark, feeling cowardly, chose a “Tarte Tatin, bay leaf and almond foam, vanilla ice-cream”. Again, three little dishes arrived while we waited (all three were conversation pieces but I will be talking about the red pepper lollipop for years to come). Both puddings were excellent and I made a mental note to serve chocolate sauce when we next have some Stilton!

As we took a postprandial walk along the Thames afterwards we continued to mull over all the weird and wonderful things we had tasted. I was so impressed by the standard of the cooking that I began to convince myself that it was my fault that I hadn’t enjoyed the sweetbreads and that what tasted like stale batter to me really involved a culinary subtlety which was lost on my woefully unsophisticated palate.

When we arrived at our friend’s house in Bristol we duly bored Diana and her children with the details of our extraordinary meal. Diana is no gourmet, and doesn’t want to be, but she listened indulgently as I raved on about red pepper lollipops.

’07 update: Heston Blumenthal has practically become a household name since ’02 and his restaurant was recently voted best in the world!

2007-03-21T09:29:00.001Z

Food journal: 21 March, 2002

We have planned a few days in Bristol, starting tomorrow, partly to be around to help my mother while my sister is away on holiday and partly to catch up with an old friend who lives in the centre of the city. To get the break off to a good start we have booked Friday lunch at The Fat Duck, a famous restaurant at Bray. We don’t usually like eating large lunches but have wanted to try The Fat Duck for a long time and it happens to be on the way to Bristol.

Something low-key was required for our dinner tonight. Nothing looked particularly exciting on the wet fish counter of the large supermarket (we’ve been spoiled by the farmers’ market) but I chose a large fillet of haddock which looked reasonably moist and shiny. I was wondering what kind of sauce to serve with it when I noticed some live oysters and remembered a trick I’d discovered when we were in France last year. I bought two. New potatoes and a packet of sugarsnap peas were my other purchases.

Although my trick with the oysters is very simple, opening them is definitely not. Oysters are farmed in a big way in the salt-water lakes near our house in France and we are used to seeing stall-holders and local restaurateurs opening them at break-neck speed. It looks easy but when you actually get one of the creatures in your hand, even if you’ve got a proper oyster knife in the other, bafflement inevitably sets in. I usually give up and get Mark to wrestle with them as best he can but he was otherwise engaged during the preparations for tonight’s dinner so I had to rise to the challenge.

I found a cookery book with some rather vague instructions and took a good look at the first oyster. There appeared to be a tiny hole between the upper and lower shell near to the pointy end. I inserted the point of my strongest knife (we do have a proper oyster knife but it’s sitting in our kitchen in France, 800 miles away…) and twisted. Nothing much happened except a few shards of shell fell off and landed in the bowl I had ready to catch the oysters and their juices. I pushed harder. Nothing except more bits of shell in the bowl. I pushed harder still and suddenly felt the shell loosen. Cooking, I find, is full of minor achievements which provide disproportionately large amounts of pleasure. Feeling extremely proud of myself, I scraped the oyster into the bowl, fished out as many small pieces of shell as I could, and turned my attention to the other. Once I had located the hole between the shells it was quite straightforward and it soon joined its pal in the bowl.

While the potatoes were cooking, I grilled the haddock, skin-side up and dotted with butter, for about ten minutes. By the time the skin was crisp and lightly browned, the underneath was cooked so I didn’t have to turn it over. The peas only needed a few minutes so they cooked while I finished the sauce.

Now for my trick. Some juices had run from the fish into the grillpan, and these were transferred to an electric whizzer (a tiny one which can be used with my wand mixer). These were joined by the oysters and their juices. A quick blast and the oysters were reduced to a pulp (I’m sure they didn’t feel a thing) and the butter and juices emulsified. This elixir was strained through a fine sieve over the hot fish.

What excited me about this sauce when I first made it, apart from the ease of preparation, is that the oysters lend their beautiful sea flavour which is quite unlike any other. I’ve never enjoyed eating raw oysters on their own and they lose all their appeal for me when they are cooked so it’s an ideal way of using them, especially as any fish served with the sauce seems to taste as if it has come straight out of the sea.

Heston Blumenthal, who runs The Fat Duck, is known for his unusual and innovative cooking. If I get a chance I might share my oyster sauce recipe with him tomorrow.

’07 update: Every year, soon after we arrive in France, I force myself to eat some raw oysters. Because the French in our town buy them in such huge quantities (the oysters are grown nearby), I tell myself they must be good for me, but I must confess I don’t like them. Mark won’t go anywhere near them – he says they taste too ‘oily’. My father loved them with a glass of Guinness but he issued dire warnings that if you drank whisky while eating oysters they would turn to stones in your stomach. Apocryphal or not, I wouldn’t dream of it.

2007-03-20T10:52:00.000Z

Food journal: 20 March, 2002

It’s a long story but we found ourselves having to have a ready meal again tonight. It’s another long story but I found myself alone in a Wetherspoons pub having a glass of white wine in the early evening while I waited to meet Mark. I actually went in for a cup of coffee because the only alternative in that part of London was McDonalds, but at 5.30pm everyone else seemed to be drinking beer or wine so I ordered a glass of their house white. As I sat in a corner, a lone female trying not to be noticed, I studied the menu. You can have a main course for £5.50 for two people and a bottle of wine for £5.29. That seems pretty good to me. I maybe wouldn’t choose the Beef Lasagne or the Chilli Con Carne but the “Fish ‘n’ Chips” and the “Caesar Wetherwrap” (“salad leaves with Italian-style hard cheese, Caesar Salad dressing, flour tortilla wrap and Twister fries”) sounded quite appetising. If I buy ingredients from the organic section of the supermarket I can easily spend £5.50 for one dinner for two at home – without the entertainment value of eating out.

Mark had bought the ready meal - prawn curry, vegetable curry, two tubs of rice and a packet of ready-to-eat poppadums. I forgot to ask him how much it all cost but I bet it was more than £5.50. When we got home we ate it, hastily and without much enthusiasm, as soon as it came out of the microwave. It makes you think, especially as the pub was sumptuously decorated with comfy chairs, solid wooden tables and well-trained staff who provide service with a smile. I haven’t got shares in Wetherspoons but sometimes I wonder why I spend hours at home making soggy pastry.

’07 update: Women sitting alone in a public place drinking a glass of wine seem much more common now. I don’t know about pubs because I rarely go into them but it’s certainly true of wine bars. It’s thanks to places like Carluccio’s (qv) which provide good wine as well as excellent coffee and food if you want it. Based on European principles, they are there to please the customer, not to glare disapprovingly at what some people would see as a dangerous moral decline.

2007-03-19T10:24:00.000Z

Food journal: 19 March, 2002

I’ve got to bite the bullet. Pastry tonight. After some deliberation, I decided to make a chicken and tarragon quiche. There’s a couple of drumsticks left from the packet I bought yesterday and a few final sprigs of tarragon in the fridge.

The first thing I did was to take a look under the cooker where I keep my baking tins. It was not a pretty sight. Two hours later, having cleaned out the hell-hole and put everything it contained into the dishwasher, I selected a small, not-too-rusty flan tin. I had flour and butter for the pastry and everything I needed for the filling so I didn’t need to shop. I also had a packet of watercress I bought yesterday and some small potatoes which I could bake above the quiche. Right, off we go.

At about five o’clock, I measured out 150g of plain flour and put it into my “new” Magimix with a pinch of salt. Next, I dropped in 75g butter, cut into small pieces. A few quick presses on the pulse button and it looked liked breadcrumbs, which is how the books tell you it should look. I’ve also read that it’s best not to add water to the processor but to bind the dry mixture in a bowl. Which I did and all was well. It looked slightly streaky but I know it’s not a good idea to over-handle pastry so thought that having a few streaks was better than over-kneading it. The pastry sat in a plastic bag in the fridge for twenty minutes to rest while I restrained myself from having a glass of wine to relieve the stress which I could feel beginning to build up.

After twenty minutes exactly I rushed to the fridge, took the pastry out and rolled it into a circle to fit my flan tin. It didn’t crumble like it usually does and didn’t even look streaky any more so I began to feel almost confident. I remember Gary Rhodes on the telly advising viewers to leave some pastry hanging over the rim and then trimming it off after it was cooked. This was to stop it shrinking and, as I have had that problem before, I took his advice. I put the lined flan tin back in the fridge to relax while I turned the oven on and prepared the filling.

It was now six o’clock and the oven was hot, so I put some potatoes on the top shelf to bake. The flan needed to be baked blind before the filling was added so I looked in the cupboard for some baking beans which I knew full well weren’t there. Instead, I lined the base of the tin with some silicone paper (a bit old, but still OK, I think) and placed four small ramekins on top hoping they would have the same effect as baking beans in stopping the pastry from blistering as it cooked. The flan needed fifteen minutes in the oven and I drank a glass of wine as I watched the clock.

After the fifteen minutes were up, the pastry still looked quite pale but appeared to be set so I removed the ramekins and paper and put it back for another few minutes. Everything was going really well, I told myself, and poured another glass of wine. At half past six I put the filling into the flan (chicken, tarragon, 1 large egg mixed with 4 fluid oz of milk) and returned it to the oven for a further half an hour. Meanwhile, I washed the watercress and got the plates and serving dishes ready and, to calm my excitement, drank another glass of wine.

At seven o’clock I took the quiche out of the oven and trimmed off the overhanging pastry (not as neatly as Gary does but I expect he doesn’t drink three glasses of wine before he tackles his). It was quite crumbly, which I took to be a good sign, and I transferred it safely to its serving dish and carried it proudly to the table to join the potatoes and watercress.

As I cut it up I could see immediately that the bottom was indisputably soggy and if there’s one thing Mark hates it’s soggy pastry. I’m not that keen on it myself - let’s face it, who is? I felt like that woman in the famous cartoon who climbs out of an upside-down car in the middle of a lake and says to her driving examiner: “I’ve failed, haven’t I?”. We scraped off the filling (which was rather good) and ate that along with any crispy bits of pastry we could find around the outside of the flan. At the end of the meal, several pallid pieces of pastry sat accusingly on the bottom of the serving dish waiting to be scraped into the bin.

Was it wilful, I pondered tipsily to myself afterwards? Was there a part of me that didn’t want it to work? I know my oven and know that it is quite fierce so it can’t have been on too low. Mark suggested that it might be because I cooked potatoes in the oven at the same time and the steam they generated stopped the pastry cooking properly - maybe he’s right. Perhaps if I’d cooked it for another ten minutes it would have been perfect. All I do know is that my sister makes fabulous pastry and our friend, Peter, makes fabulous pastry and I don’t. So far, anyway.

’07 update: Whenever I use tarragon I always think it’s my favourite herb (although I sometimes think the same about parsley, rosemary or thyme). It’s famous as a partner for chicken, of course, but is also excellent with fish. Rick Stein’s fish pasty, which I mentioned a while back, was flavoured with it and I used it recently to make a pasta sauce with smoked trout which worked really well. Added to boring supermarket mushrooms they suddenly become much more exciting too.

2007-03-18T11:06:00.000Z

Food journal: 18 March, 2002

Last week I bought a butternut squash which has been sitting around in the kitchen being given the occasional pat as I pass by. They are such beautiful objects it’s almost a shame to eat them.

I picked up a packet of cooked chicken drumsticks from the supermarket today and decided to have them with rice and stuffed butternut squash. After a wash and a final pat, the squash was halved lengthways and divested of its pretty seeds. I brushed it all generously with the cricket bat olive oil and put it into a medium oven to bake. While it cooked, I fried chopped onions, celery and pancetta, and added some tarragon which I was amazed to find still fresh thanks to my special storage method (I bought it 10 days ago!). After about an hour, when the squash was nicely browned at the edges and soft inside, I scooped out the flesh, mixed it with the other ingredients in the pan and then refilled the two halves. I put it back into the oven with the chicken, which needed to be reheated, while I cooked some rice.

Plain rice would have been dull so I stirred some raw long-grain rice around in olive oil for a minute or two and then added a tablespoon of tomato purée and some vegetable stock. When it had absorbed the stock and turned a pretty pink colour, after about 12 minutes, I mixed in the remains of the rouille sauce which we ate recently with fish soup (as it’s mostly garlic and chillies, rouille keeps very well).

The rice and the squash filling seemed rather dry so I made up a cup of vegetable stock (the make is Marigold and it’s much the best bought variety) and mixed some into the squash, prodding it around gently with a spoon, and rather more into the rice so that it was risotto-like rather than pilau-like. Finally, I scattered a good coating of breadcrumbs and a drizzle of olive oil over the squash and gave it a blast under a hot grill until crunchy and brown. After arranging the four chicken drumsticks artfully over the rice, we were ready to eat.

Mark was moved to comment on how good the meal was and I pointed out that it might be due to the copious amounts of the new olive oil but I could see he wasn’t convinced.

’07 update: Chickens, cooked or otherwise, are still remarkably cheap in the big supermarkets – even organic, free-range ones can be had for about £7 (ie £1.75 per portion plus a carcass for making lots of lovely stock). Battery chickens can cost less than £3. Yesterday, however, I saw a chicken in Borough Market in London with a price ticket of £18! I didn’t buy it but have been obsessing mildly ever since about how wonderful it would have to taste to justify that much money. I might buy one next time I go – just the once, just to see.

2007-03-17T09:38:00.001Z

Food journal: 17 March, 2002

Still had the pancetta in the fridge that we bought last Wednesday so while I had my usual fried eggs with chips tonight, Mark had a pancetta omelette. The best way to keep pancetta is to leave it loosely wrapped, preferably in greaseproof paper, so that air can circulate around it. Even if it dries up, it should still be perfectly edible after a couple of weeks - that’s presuming you can get the knife through it! If it’s wrapped tightly in plastic, it will sweat and even go mouldy within a very short time.

I’ve been reading a book about olive oil (Olives, The Life and Lore of a Noble Fruit by Mort Rosenblum) and realise I know practically nothing about it. I sometimes look at the array of upmarket oils on offer in the shops but never know how to choose between them. I usually end up buying one of the mass-produced bottles displayed next to the corn oil. In France, we take along an empty wine bottle and get it filled up from a large vat in the corner of the local wine merchants. It seems to be good but then everything tastes good in the south of France.

I’m only half way through reading the book but, if anything, I’m more confused. What with big business, the Mafia and all sorts of minor corruption, it seems unlikely that we ever get what it says on the bottle anyway. It does, however, matter that the oil is fresh, so I will be looking closely at sell-by dates in the future. It has to be extra virgin, of course, and also unfiltered, if possible. So when I recently spotted a murky-looking oil in a plain rustic bottle with a not-too-ridiculous price-tag, I bought it.

I explained why I had bought it to Mark and let him have a sniff. “Is it grassy,” I asked, using my newly-acquired vocabulary, “or peppery?”. He applied a nostril and said “Smells like the stuff they put on cricket bats.” I used it to fry the eggs and they tasted fine.

’07 update: I still can’t decide on the best olive oil to buy but I have discovered that I prefer the yellow ones to the green ones. The bright green one I tasted at The River Café in London was delicious but they do meticulous research to find the best (as reflected in their restaurant prices!). The green ones in the supermarkets taste bitter to me and some can almost take the roof off your mouth. At least the yellow ones are generally softer on the palate. Having said that, lots of olive oils are sold in tinted bottles to protect them from the light so it’s impossible to see their colour anyway.

2007-03-16T11:01:00.000Z

Food journal: 16 March, 2002

Before I started writing this diary, I would have sworn that I cooked the vast majority of our meals at home. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that I don’t. We’ve all got used to reading in the media that the British are eating out in restaurants more and more often or, when they eat at home, choose ready-meals or a takeaway. I’ve always taken it for granted that all those articles applied to young people, rich people or people who can’t cook but, as I am none of those, it’s coming as rather a shock that I might be another statistic in the “average” column. After a quick tally, since 1 January we have eaten out on thirteen occasions and had ready-meals or takeaways on seven - that’s 27% of our main meals.

The reason for my calculations is that we had yet another meal out today. We went to Brighton to see Emma and Harry, who have just moved into their new flat. Not wanting to sully Harry’s impressive DIY work in the kitchen we took a stroll along the beach to find somewhere for lunch. I should have known from my research (see above) that everywhere would be full and it was. We eventually found ourselves a table in a pub where, for some reason, all four of us found that we had a craving for veggie burgers. They were a bit strange (Paxo stuffing sprang to mind) but there’s nothing like a veggie burger to make you feel virtuous, so we felt at liberty to drink quantities of mediocre Chardonnay to wash them down (except for Emma who is pregnant and needs to stay totally virtuous at the moment). The chips were good and the salad had lots of different sorts of seeds in the dressing, which I thought was a nice touch. I always think of the chef when four customers all choose the same thing - I bet he was really pleased with our easy order.

When Mark and I got home, we didn’t want another big meal so I opened a tin of salmon and made sandwiches. Tinned salmon for sandwiches has to have some finely chopped onions, a dash of vinegar and lots of black pepper added - as least as far as I’m concerned. You also need proper white sliced bread in a plastic bag, which we had to pick up from the corner shop by the tube station. When we got in I searched for ages for my tin opener and realized I very rarely use it. I can’t remember the last time I did but it was probably for sweetcorn or red kidney beans, both of which I think tin quite well. I know everybody else uses tinned tomatoes but they are not for me if I can possibly avoid it. I am partial to mushy peas from a tin but never think to have them. And Mark has baked beans sometimes for lunch but they’ve got those ring-pull things on the top nowadays.

The salmon sandwiches reminded me of when I was a child and we used to have them every Sunday for tea. Unlike when I was a child, though, I was allowed to leave all my crusts.

’07 update: I reckon that our eating-out statistics have stayed quite constant over the last five years. Mark likes to eat out because he enjoys the service as well as the food whereas I find I can’t get rid of the guilt of having other people do my cooking for me and bring my food to the table. I’m always worried, too, that I’ll get more than I can eat and never feel comfortable about sending uneaten food back to the kitchen (poor, sad chef, I think). My sister who, of course, was brought up by the same mother feels like I do and has perfected the art of hiding piles of remains under a single lettuce leaf before the waiter comes to take her plate away.

2007-03-15T09:04:00.000Z

Food journal: 15 March, 2002

Went to Ben and Pia’s to see the grandchildren at tea-time for a couple of hours. Cuddling babies and choosing outfits for Barbie dolls is surprisingly tiring so we had a Chinese takeaway as soon as we got home. As usual, we ended up with the same old choices: I had “Special Chow Mein” and Mark had “Special Fried Rice”. We did deviate slightly because we felt particularly hungry and ordered “Spare Ribs with Barbecue Sauce” as well. Is there anyone out there who doesn’t know what they are and what they taste like? I won’t go on.

After we’d finished eating, I settled down to catch up on some cookery programmes on video. I rarely watch them live because I like to skim if they get boring. I sometimes wonder why I watch them at all as I can’t remember the last time I ever cooked anything using a recipe I’d seen on the telly. It’s irritating that the cooks always have their ingredients (which you know must have taken hours to chop, bone, weigh or otherwise prepare) laid out in front of them and, because you rarely see anything made in real time, it’s impossible to know whether they are cooking something that can be thrown together after work or requires a whole weekend in the kitchen. Professional chefs are the worst culprits, presumably because they have minions rushing around after them at work all the time. Still, it’s quite good fun to watch, criticise and, occasionally, feel smug about the fact that you can do as well if not better than they can in the privacy of your own home. As they say, it’s just pornography, really.

’07 update: I’ve sort of set myself a mental target recently. If a meal can’t be on the table within 40 minutes of chopping the first onion, then I don’t do it. I think that’s quite enough toil considering that the planning and the shopping take extra time on top of that. I’ll occasionally cook boiled beef and carrots or a chicken dish, for example, that has to be started earlier but I still vaguely stick to the 40 minute rule – it’s just divided into 2 x 20 minute slots (the first to get the meat on and the second, just before dinner, to cook the vegetables). That way, I’ve got more time to watch cookery programmes on the telly.

2007-03-14T11:45:00.000Z

Food journal: 14 March, 2002

Mark’s spring jacket seems superfluous because it’s freezing today - it could snow.

In the summer, in France, I sometimes make a fish soup with a pile of odd-looking Mediterranean fish which they sell in the local market for that specific purpose. The paper they wrap the fish in is printed with recipes - a nice touch - and I always follow the one for fish soup. I haven’t got a copy here (too smelly to keep!) but I can remember the gist of it and tonight, with the help of suggestions from cookery books, I cooked up a rough approximation.

They have specific fish in France for making soup (mostly the tiddly ones too small and bony to be used in other dishes) but I had a bag of bones, some pieces of rock salmon and a fillet of smoked haddock in the freezer which wouldn’t make an authentic soup but might make a good one. The other essential ingredients I needed were potatoes, root fennel, garlic, tomatoes and saffron.

To start with, I made a fish stock with my bones, adding some white wine, parsley, thyme, bay and some peppercorns before covering everything with water and simmering gently for twenty minutes. Twenty minutes is the maximum time for cooking fish stock; any longer and it takes on an unpleasant, muddy flavour. While the stock was simmering I sliced some potatoes and boiled them until just tender.

To cook the soup itself, I fried some onions and fennel, chunkily sliced, in olive oil. When they had softened, some chopped garlic went into the pan along with some halved cherry tomatoes. I used cherry tomatoes in the hope that they would be sweeter than the hard, pale-coloured ordinary ones that are on offer at the moment. I also didn’t bother to peel them as I would have done with larger ones but wished I had when I found myself picking out tough little bits of skin later on. When everything had thickened up to a purée, I poured in the sieved stock and added some more thyme, bay and parsley.

I’d cut the rock salmon and smoked haddock into bite-sized pieces and these were added as soon as the stock came to the boil and then allowed to simmer gently for a few minutes until tender. Finally, the cooked potatoes and a half-teaspoon of saffron, previously soaked in a tablespoon of hot water, were stirred in. The colour was a beautiful yellowy orange and cried out for a sprinkling of roughly-cut parsley, which I duly scattered over the top.

No Mediterranean fish soup is complete without some toasted croûtes (large croûtons) and a small bowl of rouille, a piquant sauce made with chillis and garlic which is smeared on the croûtes and dropped into the soup before eating, sometimes with the further addition of some grated Gruyère cheese on top. The soup tasted good on its own but I was proud of the fact that I’d managed to make some surprisingly authentic-tasting rouille to go with it. Some of the recipes I’d consulted for making the sauce had suggested mixing pounded chillis and garlic into home-made mayonnaise but one of my favourite cookery books, “Cuisine du Terroir” - a collection of recipes from the Maitres Cuisiniers de France collected by Céline Vence - suggested a simpler version using stale bread soaked in stock and olive oil instead of mayonnaise. I followed the recipe to the letter (most unlike me!) and was immediately transported to a restaurant overlooking the port in Marseilles where, last year, we treated ourselves to the perfect, authentic Bouillabaisse.

It wasn’t actually snowing outside but we didn’t care about the weather because we were indoors basking in the flavours of the Mediterranean. The fact that the smell of the copious amounts of raw garlic in the rouille hung about for days afterwards didn’t matter either.

’07 update: The fish soup is another of those good recipes I’d forgotten about. The last five years have definitely seen a simplification of the meals I cook. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because the basic ingredients available now are better and don’t need to be messed about with or maybe it’s because I’m getting older and lazier. I like to think it’s the former.

2007-03-13T09:54:00.001Z

Food journal: 13 March, 2002

After my rice with bits in I was feeling much better and Mark and I spent his afternoon off making a groove between John Lewis and Selfridges trying to find him a suitable spring jacket. We failed and found ourselves beginning to feel hungry at 5.30pm. Mark’s solution was to go and have a drink and then eat at Carluccio’s (a small Italian cafe/bar just behind Oxford Street) but I wanted to go home and relax. The cafe/bar also has a deli section so I suggested we buy a tub of Bolognaise sauce and take it home to eat with some spaghetti - I promised it would all be on the table within fifteen minutes. The Bolognaise sauce (labelled “Ragu”), plus a big piece of Parmesan cheese for grating, plus a thick slice of pancetta which caught my eye, probably cost more than we would have spent eating there but at least the wine at home is cheaper. Also I reasoned that some of the Parmesan cheese and the pancetta would keep well in the fridge and form the basis of another pasta dish in a few days’ time.

My own recipe for Bolognaise sauce has evolved over a very long time. It’s definitely not authentic because it includes tomato ketchup and omits chicken livers and cream which I believe true Italians insist on. Years ago I would have put lots of grated Cheddar cheese on top and browned it under the grill - no bad thing - but nowadays we think it’s better with freshly-grated Parmesan (in the good old days, grated Parmesan came in cardboard tubs and tasted of sick). We like our home-cooked version a lot.

I tasted some of the cold “Ragu” before I put it into the microwave and it reminded me of something out of a tin. We’ve eaten in Carluccio’s before and the food has always been excellent so, as I put the spaghetti on to boil, I started to wonder. Perhaps the “Ragu” really had come from a tin or maybe food which is kept for a few days, even if it had an impeccable pedigree to start with, starts to taste stale and “tinned”. Several famous chefs have been called upon in recent years to try to make meals in large institutions more palatable and I’m sure they’ve done their best but I’m beginning to think it can’t be done. Food must be freshly prepared; keeping it for any length of time, even in the most hygienic and temperature-controlled environment, does it no good at all.

It wasn’t that bad, and we ate it all (shopping is very exhausting and guaranteed to produce an appetite even if you don’t buy anything) but we did begin to think we should have stayed in the cafe and had their chicken in breadcrumbs with rocket salad, which we’ve had before and is delicious (and presumably freshly cooked).

’07 update: As you can see, my rice dish cures a cold quicker than anything you can buy in Boots! I haven’t bought any more Ragu from Carluccio’s but I still buy their Parmesan cheese and pancetta. Since ’02, Carluccio’s has expanded greatly and it’s eponymous owner has done much to influence the current passion for Italian food. The French are having to eat humble pie – for the time being, anyway. Personally, I still prefer French food but, like everyone else, tend to produce speedy plates of pasta instead of meticulously-reduced, cream-laden sauces or lengthily-cooked casseroles.

2007-03-12T10:04:00.000Z

Food journal: 12 March, 2002

Still sniffling and feeling extremely sorry for myself. What I needed tonight was comfort food. I’m sure everyone has food they like to eat when they’re poorly. Perhaps it will be something their mother dished up during the final stages of some minor childhood illness or maybe something that is so simple and good it sends the nasty germs running off to invade other victims. For example, my daughter, Emma, always grabs the tin opener and a can of Heinz tomato soup at the first sign of a sneeze.

My favourite comfort food is a kind of distant relation of fried rice. I’ve been cooking variations of it since the 70s and basically it’s just rice with bits in. There are, however, certain rituals in its preparation which must be observed if it’s to hit the right spot and bring about instant recovery. First of all, the rice (always long-grain) has to be cooked and left to get completely cold. This is vital because if hot, freshly-cooked rice is fried it will turn lumpy and stick together. Next, the rice should be fried in only a very small amount of oil in a frying pan - greasy rice doesn’t come under the category of comfort food - and tossed gently with a fork as it cooks to keep the grains separate.

The “bits” are prepared in another pan and can vary according to the whim of the patient. The one essential ingredient for me, believe it or not, is cucumber. I normally hate cooked cucumber but in this dish, unpeeled and cut into small cubes, it adds a flavour and aroma which are really special. Also very welcome, but not essential, is meat of some kind (chopped ham is my favourite) and a small, thin omelette sliced into strips. Finally, there must be other vegetables to add vitamins and pretty colours, so tonight I fried some chopped onions and carrots in a little groundnut oil until soft and then added the cucumber and some frozen petit pois, stirring them around for a couple of minutes until hot.

And that’s more or less it. No garlic, no ginger, no lemon grass, no sprinkling of coriander. To finish the dish, the ham and omelette pieces are stirred gently into the rice as it fries, just long enough to heat through, and then the rice and vegetables are combined in a serving dish (or, if you’re feeling particularly fragile, into whichever of the cooking pans is big enough to contain everything).

I always put soy sauce and Worcestershire sauce on the table but they are not at all necessary. Mark had plenty of Worcestershire sauce on his and I added the merest hint of soy sauce to my first helping but not the second. I’d made a vast amount so there was some left over and I finished it off later before I went to bed, standing at the kitchen table. It’s just as good cold.

’07 update: Mark drinks loads of M&S Freshly Squeezed Orange Juice and takes Vitamin C pills every day in an attempt to ward off colds but he still gets more than me. When the sniffles commence he buys First Defence from Boots (which hasn’t worked so far) and makes himself a big bowl of lokshen soup (which, as far as I can see, doesn’t work either but he loves it so much that it turns the cold into something to be almost welcomed).

2007-03-11T11:21:00.001Z

Food journal: 11 March, 2002

Yes, it is a cold and I feel rotten. Mark offered to get some ready meals from the supermarket for dinner but I felt that I would be up to making egg and chips.

I installed the Magimix on the work surface in the kitchen, ready for a pastry session, and was looking for somewhere to store the attachments when I thought I might try cutting up some onions with the slicer - I could use them to make an onion omelette. I have owned a food processor before, many years ago when I bought the cheapest one on the market, which used to start slicing quite merrily but would then suck everything into the gap between the slicer and the lid until the whole thing juddered to a halt. The Magimix reduced three large onions to a glistening mass of perfect slices with very little mess in three seconds flat. A promising start.

I fried the onions in some groundnut oil, intending to get them browned around the edges which is how I like them. They seemed quite wet and, instead of browning, sweated to a pale golden mass - almost a purée. Not what I like at all. I used them in the omelette anyway along with some chopped fresh tarragon which I still had in the fridge.

Someone told me they wouldn’t use a food processor to slice or chop vegetables because “it knocks the life out of them” and I used to wonder what they meant. However, I really do believe that these onions didn’t have as good a flavour as the ones I cut by hand. It could, I suppose, be that my taste buds are affected by my cold but I don’t think so.

Cleaning up the bits and pieces of the machine afterwards was just as bad as I remembered it too, especially with a runny nose. The pastry had better be good.

’07 update: A good thing about having a dinner party is that there’s usually something left over for the next day. There was enough parsnip soup from last night for our lunch plus some caramel oranges at tea-time. Mark had a couple of Florentines with his coffee after dinner. What’s left of Peter’s apricot cheesecake has gone in the freezer for a future treat.

2007-03-10T18:06:00.000Z

Food journal: 10 March, 2002

I think I’ve got a cold, which is a nuisance because I don’t want to pass it on to my aged mother. I can’t not celebrate Mother’s Day because everyone will be disappointed so I convinced myself that I was probably just having an allergic reaction to too many pickled onions last night and off we went.

Mum is getting a bit frail and unsteady on her feet and my sister Mary had warned me that she might not want to join us for lunch. When we got there, however, she was sitting with her tights on and some newly-applied lipstick which we took to mean that she was up for a social occasion. After a glass of sherry, she was definitely game and we drove her the few yards up the road to Mary’s house.

Mary had wisely made a simple meal of roast chicken, salad and baked potatoes - easy to eat while we dutifully listened to stories about the War etc. Anything more elaborate would have been wasted anyway because Mum’s memory is getting very erratic and I suspect she forgot what she’d eaten the minute she put her fork down. My brother-in-law, Charlie, plied me with large quantities of delicious red wine so even I can only remember the first few mouthfuls (Mark sadly could only have one small glass because he was driving).

Pavlova with raspberries for pudding, which was good, but I was disappointed that Mary hadn’t made something with her famous pastry. I’m supposed to be the cookery expert in our family but Mary’s pastry beats mine every time. I’m convinced you can’t learn how to make pastry that good - it’s something you’re born with, like brown eyes or big ears (she’s got neither, by the way).

While we were clearing up, Mary showed me her new Magimix which she got for Christmas and asked me if I’d like her old one which is still in good working order. Now I know for a fact that she’s been making pastry in that old machine for ten years, so of course I would like it! It’s sitting on my work surface and I can’t wait to rustle up a batch of shortcrust. Perhaps good pastry is down to having the right food processor and not innate ability at all - I’ll let you know.

’07 update: I’ve still got the Magimix. It’s rarely used but I like to know it’s there. Last night we had friends for dinner and I used it to purée the parsnip soup I made for a first course – if I’d had to push it through a sieve I wouldn’t have made it. Parsnip soup might sound a bit dull for a dinner party but I dolled it up with cumin, allspice and fresh coriander and then scattered bacon pieces over the top. Salmon to follow and, afterwards, caramel oranges and home-made Florentines plus a fancy apricot cheesecake brought along by our friend Peter (an expert patissier).

2007-03-09T10:31:00.000Z

Food journal: 09 March, 2002

It’s Mother’s Day tomorrow and we’re going to Bristol to visit my mum, who is in her 90th year, and to have lunch with my sister and her husband who live nearby. As I will have to eat everything that Mary, my sister, puts in front of me out of good manners (and because it’s usually – somewhat annoyingly – delicious!) I abandoned any thought of calorie-counting for the weekend and persuaded Mark that we should have fish and chips tonight.

While I laid the table with a bottle of brown sauce by one plate and a jar of pickled onions by the other, Mark went off to the chippie. He likes to do the buying because he thinks that if I go I will just ask for cod and chips and get fobbed off with fish which, horror of horrors, might have been cooked earlier in the day. On past visits he’s made a point of noting where they put the most recently cooked portions and makes his choice based on that rather than any particular type of fish.

Our local chippie is very traditional, ie the portions are huge. I always turn the whole of my portion onto my plate, ladle on at least six pickled onions and lay in with my fingers. Mark puts out his fish, adds a sensible amount of chips and a pool of brown sauce and then eats with his knife and fork, helping himself to more chips if he’s still hungry when the first lot are gone. It drives me mad. He also opens out the batter and eats forksfuls of fish with only a small amount of batter attached. And he leaves the skin!

I ended up eating all mine and most of Mark’s leftover batter and skin (as I told him sternly, everyone knows that the skin is the best bit and very good for you). I would have eaten the rest of his chips as well but I found that I couldn’t move and had to slump in front of the telly for the rest of the evening feeling like a boa constrictor digesting a sheep.

’07 update: Apart from chips (which I think I’ve said enough about already!), I rarely deep-fry anything and have never discovered a really good recipe for batter. I’ve read plenty of opinions on the matter, though. Some people swear by adding whipped egg whites at the last minute while others insist on using beer or fizzy mineral water to give a light texture. I’ve even heard of a chef who uses Birds Custard Powder (which doesn’t contain sugar so is not as mad as it sounds).

2007-03-08T15:05:00.000Z

Food journal: 08 March, 2002

Leafing through my “guaranteed to work” file today, looking for inspiration, I re-acquainted myself with a recipe for pork tenderloin which is stuffed and wrapped in bacon to make a small roasting joint. I’d written a note at the bottom saying it worked for salmon fillets wrapped in bacon too. I seem to remember that it was quite easy so I didn’t see any reason why it shouldn’t also work with the two organic chicken thighs I wanted to cook tonight.

It’s quite satisfying to do some fiddly preparation for a meal early in the day and then forget about it until it’s time to cook. I pulled the skin off the chicken and took out the bone, which left me with two lopsided but stuffable squares. The recipe in my file called for a stuffing using breadcrumbs but I had a bag of mushrooms and decided to make a duxelles filling instead. Duxelles sounds grand and it is used a lot in classic French cuisine but it’s really only finely chopped mushrooms cooked very slowly with onion or shallot until it is almost like a purée. To add some interest to the supermarket mushrooms I added a couple of soaked dried morilles, also chopped, some nutmeg and some tarragon. I haven’t used tarragon for ages and one sniff reminded me why the French always pair it with chicken.

While the duxelles was cooling, I stretched my bacon. If you use bacon straight from the packet to wrap things in, it tends to curl up in the heat and makes a very messy parcel, but if you lay the rashers on a board and run the back of a knife firmly along their length, stretching them out as you go, there will be no danger of them shrivelling. I used rindless streaky bacon.

Once the duxelles mixture was cold, I divided it between the chicken thighs, squashing in as much as I could without overburdening them. The next stage is to wrap the bacon around and around the parcels so that they are completely covered. There’s no denying that this is a messy business but it’s not as difficult as it sounds because the bacon tends to stick to itself quite conveniently. I don’t think it’s essential to tie them up with string but I did anyway just to make sure they wouldn’t fall apart after all that effort. They looked very sweet - plump and stripy from the bacon with a tiny bit of almost black duxelles peeping out at either end.

I had salad ingredients and some new potatoes left over from last night (Mark rescued them and left them in a bowl, covered with clingfilm, on the work surface - not in the fridge, because I’ve told him often enough that it would spoil their flavour). There was no point in putting the oven on just to cook the chicken so I fried the parcels in my copper sauté pan, turning them over and over and adjusting the heat so that they were cooked through and golden brown after about half an hour. At the same time I sautéed the potatoes, cut into slices, in a large frying pan. It’s never a good idea to rush sautéed potatoes and they need constant vigilance to ensure the correct crunchy surface on each slice, so it worked out rather well that I was able to attend to both pans at once.

I’d prepared a salad of lettuce, rocket, celery and chopped shallot earlier and also a dressing with balsamic vinegar and olive oil, so when the chicken and potatoes were cooked I put them on some kitchen paper under a very low grill while I thought about a quick sauce. There wasn’t any need for a large amount of sauce but I deglazed the pan with half a glass of port and, when it had reduced to a couple of tablespoons, added a further spoonful of dry white wine to balance the sweetness. There was just enough to give the parcels a shiny coating. A few tarragon leaves on the top and they were ready to serve with the salad and sautéed potatoes.

It was good - you can’t go wrong with a combination of chicken, bacon, mushrooms and tarragon, and the extra effort in the preparation of the parcels was well worth it. It almost felt like we were eating in a restaurant.

’07 update: I’ve been following a programme on television called ‘Masterchef Goes Large’ – a competition to find the best amateur cook in the UK. In almost every episode, one of the cooks wraps some kind of stuffed meat in bacon. Apart from the flavours, the presentation is so camera-friendly that I can see why the competitors go for it. I would never have the nerve to enter such a competition but if I did I would choose to cook my stuffed chicken wrapped in bacon (although poshed up with black truffles in the stuffing and using the very best British bacon).

2007-03-07T11:03:00.001Z

Food journal: 07 March, 2002

We’re going to our house in Béziers for a spring break at the beginning of April. The thought of having to wait until June was getting so depressing, especially as everyone else we know seems to be going here, there and everywhere at the moment. We’ve booked our train tickets to leave on 1 April and come back on 10 April.

I was so excited I couldn’t give much thought to dinner tonight and spent most of the day fantasising about all the spring goodies I would find waiting for me in the covered food market just up the road from our house. In the meantime, though, we had to eat - lamb chops, new potatoes and mange-touts would have to do.

Simple cooking is extremely boring and I can understand why people who don’t like cooking and do it as quickly and straightforwardly as possible are surprised by people like me who insist on turning it into a creative opportunity. It’s horrible just standing in front of two saucepans full of boiling vegetables watching something going slowly brown under the grill. In my view, if you put thought and effort into preparing a meal it’s not a matter of prolonging the boredom, it takes away the boredom altogether.

I put the chops under the grill and got the potatoes cooking then twiddled my thumbs for quarter of an hour while they cooked. I managed to spread out putting the kettle on to boil for the mange-touts and chopping their stalks off to about 1 minute. That left fourteen minutes for sitting at the kitchen table staring out of the window. Very dull, especially as there is a railway line just outside our flat.

When I was cooking the mange touts, however, I couldn’t resist one small twist. Nothing much but it made me feel a lot better. There weren’t many mange-touts, not really enough for two, so I had the idea of adding some frozen petits pois just before they finished cooking. Not only did the combination of mummy peas and baby peas mixed together appeal to me, but adding the frozen peas to the boiling mange-touts appeared to turn them all a much brighter shade of green (presumably on roughly the same principle by which professional chefs plunge their cooked green vegetables into iced water to set the colour). And cheaper than using two packets of mange-touts.

’07 update: I’m struck, when re-reading my ’02 journal, just how few good ideas or successful meals I repeat. The mange-touts cooked with frozen peas is an example – I don’t think I ever did it again. I do keep a ‘guaranteed to work’ file (see tomorrow’s posting) but am prone to laziness and, unless it’s really spectacular, tend not to record stuff I should. Five years on, I’m re-learning a lot. We treated ourselves to two fillet steaks in Fortnum and Mason yesterday (£13.40!!) so we’ll have them with mashed potato and the mange-tout/frozen pea combo tonight.

2007-03-06T17:30:00.001Z

Food journal: 06 March, 2002

Someone (Mark swears it wasn’t him but I’m not so sure) left the freezer door ajar all night. Luckily everything was still frozen solid but there was a thick covering of snow on top of all the packages and a thick slab of ice had formed on the door jamb. Time to defrost.

Taking the opportunity to sift out the stuff I would never use, I started filling a plastic bag to throw away - and then started fishing everything out again as I decided it might come in handy one day. In the end I threw away two pork chops which I couldn’t remember freezing, a huge bag of ham stock from cooking a bacon joint well before Christmas, a tiny bag of turkey gravy and some tomato purée which had been near the front of the freezer and felt a bit soft, and some chitterlings (don’t ask) which I bought from the farmers’ market. All right, you can ask – chitterlings are cooked pigs’ intestines and my mother used to love to eat them with vinegar and lots of black pepper. Personally, I’ve never been able to face eating them even though I love French andouillettes which are smelly sausages, also made from pigs’ intestines. Everything else from the freezer sat around for an hour wrapped in newspaper while I turned the power off and ran back and forth with bowls of hot water so that I could get it all back in again as soon as possible.

I also left out to defrost a codling which I bought recently at the farmers’ market, some smoked salmon and some cooked butter beans (I’d put the latter in the rubbish bag at first but thought I might as well defrost them in case I could use them tonight). We haven’t had pasta for a while so I decided to make a fishy concoction to serve with it. I bought some purple sprouting broccoli as a vegetable because it’s in season and a tub of low-fat cream cheese (flavoured with “cracked pepper”) from M&S to use in the sauce. I filleted the codling (not very well as the flesh seemed very delicate) and used the bones to make a stock with some white wine, water, shallots and two kaffir lime leaves. After straining, I poached the fish fillets in the stock and then, removing them to a plate, flaked the flesh into small pieces. The smoked salmon, cut into ribbons, joined the cod. There was too much stock so I reduced it for a few minutes and then added a large pinch of saffron strands which I’d soaked for half an hour in a tablespoon or so of hot water.

Before finishing the sauce, I put some pasta on to boil. I always seem to have packets containing small amounts of pasta in the cupboard which are not quite enough for two people. I’m sure no Italian would mix two different sorts of pasta in the same dish but I did anyway - some green tagliatelle and some red chilli-flavoured sticks which I’ve mentioned already. At the same time as the pasta cooked, I boiled the broccoli.

When the pasta was almost ready I whisked two big spoonfuls of the cracked-pepper cream cheese into the reheated stock, folded in the cod, salmon, some chopped parsley and finally, simply because it would look nice, a tomato cut into tiny dice. There didn’t seem to be a place for the butter beans so they went into the bin where they should have gone in the first place.

What with the yellow of the saffron, the pink of the salmon, the white of the cod and the green and red of the pasta, the dish looked as pretty as a picture and the dark-green broccoli set it off beautifully. So did the bunch of spring daffodils on the table. The purple-sprouting broccoli, by the way, had an intense flavour quite unlike the heads of ordinary broccoli we can buy all year round - and much better.

’07 update: Having lots of small amounts of different pastas in the cupboard is an ongoing problem. I usually just guess the amount of pasta to cook for two people and nearly always end up with too much. (I pathologically cook too much of almost everything in the dread of not cooking enough.) Anyway, we had pasta last night and I calculated, as I opened a new packet, that one third of 500g is 170g-ish so I weighed it out and cooked it (I couldn’t be bothered before because until recently I only had old-fashioned scales that meant fiddling about with weights – now I’ve got digital ones). There was more than ‘enough’ for our meal but not a vast amount to throw away. Problem solved at last.

2007-03-05T11:09:00.000Z

Food journal: 05 March, 2002

Try as I might, I can’t get excited about purely vegetarian food. Still, we are trying really hard not to slip into the meat and two veg syndrome every night. One of the solutions I’ve found is to use just a small amount of meat, usually bacon, to create a “demi-veg” option which stops me worrying quite so much about the lack of protein (not to mention flavour!). Cheese is also useful in beefing up the taste (forgive the pun) of vegetables, so I built tonight’s dinner around that old classic, Cauliflower Cheese.

Millions of words must have been written on the subject of roux sauces so I might as well add mine. For a start, I don’t do brown roux sauces - I think they should be left to the professional chefs who have the patience to cook the flour and fat until the required caramelisation occurs. White roux sauces, on the other hand, are easy to do, as long as you don’t weaken at the thought of them turning lumpy. Some cooks recommend the “all-in-one” method, which consists of putting the flour, fat and liquid into a pan and beating everything together until it boils. I’ve never tried this because I was taught to make a proper roux by heating the flour and fat together before adding the liquid. The trouble with this method is that there are many opinions as to whether the roux should be hot or cold when the liquid is added and whether the liquid itself should be hot or cold.

The way I do it is as follows: melt the fat in a pan, add the flour and stir for a minute or so, then add the cold liquid gradually over a medium heat. That’s it. The only thing I have noticed which is worth recording is that ideally the liquid should have time to heat up slightly after each addition before you start stirring. That means pouring some onto the roux then forcing yourself to become distracted for a few seconds, perhaps by admiring the colour of your kitchen walls or pouring yourself a glass of wine - anything will do. Then start stirring until all is mixed together before adding some more liquid and repeating (don’t pour yourself wine between every addition, though, or you’re in danger of passing out by dinnertime). If you add a few tablespoons at a time the whole process shouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes. The sauce then needs to simmer gently for about 15 minutes to cook out the rawness of the flour.

You don’t have to add anything else to a white roux sauce for Cauliflower Cheese except some seasoning but I like to put in a bay leaf, a sprig of thyme, a clove and a small chopped onion to improve the flavour. The proportion of flour and fat to liquid is quite important because there’s nothing worse than a thick, gluey sauce. I like mine quite thin so 30g each of fat and flour is enough for 568ml (ie one pint) of milk.

Once the cauliflower (top cut into florets, stalk and leaves cut into small chunks) was cooked, I mixed it with the sauce and put it into a shallow dish and covered the surface liberally with breadcrumbs and grated cheese (the shallower the dish the better because then you get a generous amount of topping for each serving and it also sits more easily under the grill for browning).

To accompany the Cauliflower Cheese, I fried some (not much, honest!) chopped bacon in a little oil until crisp, removed it, then added the three baked potatoes left over from last night’s dinner, roughly sliced. When they had browned I returned the bacon to the pan along with a finely chopped shallot, lots of chopped parsley and a skinned and chopped tomato (the latter because I happened to have one lying around).

We enjoyed our meal and felt very virtuous. Well, demi-virtuous.

’07 update: Back from our weekend in Brussels feeling slightly queasy. Apart from a small salad in a bar for lunch yesterday, we didn’t catch a glimpse of any vegetables the whole time we were there (apart from chips!). We ate out twice. The first night, in a lively brasserie, I had prawn croquettes followed by moules frites because that’s what the guide books tell you to have. All very filling… The second night, we went to a restaurant attached to the main art gallery. We shared a mixed hors d’oeuvres which consisted of four dishes containing: a) the ubiquitous prawn croquette, b) a mound of raw minced beef, c) a dish of bright green sauce containing slivers of smoked eel, d) a dish of cream sauce containing two mussels. Mark’s main course was steak (the cut was onglet which I’d warned him would be tough – and it was) and chips. Mine was a huge vol-au-vent submerged in a creamy mixture of shrimps, chicken and veal sweetbreads. It was one of the oddest things I’ve ever eaten but I managed to finish most of it out of politeness – hence today’s queasiness. I wouldn’t recommend Brussels to anyone with a sensitive palate but their draught dark beer is delicious.

Food journal: 04 March, 2002

Took some beef fillet out of the freezer last night. It was in one piece and weighed about 300g and I wondered if I dared roast it. The juiciest, most tender roast beef, we are led to believe, comes from a joint which takes three strong men to lift it into the oven so I wasn’t very confident about my tiny morsel. The reason I was thinking of roasting it was because I wanted to try baking potatoes in my earthenware pot and didn’t want to have the oven on just for them. Whenever I use the oven I try to cram everything into it I need to cook for one meal and feel that I’ve failed if I have to use the top of the cooker as well.

I didn’t have a clue how hot the oven needed to be for baking potatoes in my pot or how long they would take to cook so I went for the middle road and chose Gas 5. I put them on at 5.30pm telling myself that they would probably take the same time as normal baked potatoes, ie about an hour with a bit to spare. The pot is quite large and took up the whole of the lower shelf, so I was left with one shelf on which to cook everything else.

While I still dithered about whether to roast the beef, I cut some onions and carrots into large wedges, coated them with olive oil and put them on the top shelf to cook in a small baking tray. At about 6.15pm I gave the potatoes a squeeze but they didn’t budge so in a panic I turned the oven up to Gas 7. The carrots and onions were giving off a very appetising smell and turning dark brown at the edges so it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to sit the beef on top of them and allow the meat juices to mingle with the vegetables and improve them even further while at the same time protecting them from burning. The beef was almost touching the roof of the oven so I thought half an hour would probably be plenty of time to cook it through.

At 6.45pm there was a slight give to the potatoes but as I like my baked potatoes soft and fluffy I was mildly distressed. Mark was on the phone to Emma so I made a sign to let him know there was no hurry to finish his conversation. I removed the meat and the vegetables from the oven and turned it up to full blast, hoping that the earthenware could take it.

In the meantime, I put the meat and vegetables on a serving dish and covered them with foil to keep warm. There were some lovely brown juices in the bottom of the pan and I added some port and set light to it while stirring up all the residue. I could see I had the basis of a good sauce so I took a chunk of chicken stock out of the freezer and stirred that in until it melted and reduced. Idly looking into the fridge while that was happening, I noticed half a jar of horseradish sauce and decided it was just the thing to help thicken my sauce. If we were having it on the side of the plate we would probably have had about a heaped teaspoon each so I put that amount into the sauce base and stirred it around off the heat. It looked at first as if it had curdled but then I saw that it was the tiny shreds of grated horseradish which were making it look a bit strange. It tasted good, though, so I poured it over the beef and vegetables on their serving dish and added some chopped parsley to mask its odd appearance.

It was now 7.20pm and we had to eat. The potatoes were just about edible but could easily have had another half an hour in the oven. I’d cooked five but we only had one each so I can’t say they were a huge success, but the flavour was good. The skins certainly could have been crisper too. The beef, on the other hand, was a great success and I would definitely use that cooking technique again, especially as an alternative to frying on the top of the cooker with all the inevitable cleaning up afterwards.

Food journal: 03 March, 2002

The first thing I thought of when I woke up this morning was breakfast. We never, ever, eat a cooked breakfast at home. In fact, I never have any breakfast at all and Mark only has some ghastly sawdust which he thinks will do him good. Today, though, we were going to have The Works.

I wonder why eating breakfast with a group of strangers in a B and B dining room is so excruciatingly embarrassing when eating dinner in a restaurant with that same group of people is no bother at all? Our landlady had had the sense to put some music on but we still found ourselves flinching if a neighbour’s chair scraped along the ground or falling silent if someone caught our eye. Also, our conversation, which would have sounded perfectly normal to other ears last night, now seemed full of inanities and bordering on the imbecilic.

I kept telling myself to sit back and think of England (its breakfasts in particular) but it was no good. Along it came, though not nearly soon enough, in all its bountiful glory but it was impossible to relax and enjoy it. We ate everything in sight within ten minutes and bolted off to our room still chewing the last piece of toast.

Another walk along the beach, this time in the opposite direction, and we townies felt we’d had enough and it was time to head back to the city. It was clouding up as well. Mark had read of a pub on the way back which did good lunches so, although we weren’t in the least bit hungry, we stopped off to have a look. The car park was full and even though there were no yellow lines we didn’t dare park in the lane outside so decided to give up on that and get something at the services on the M2.

There’s no point in describing what was on offer at the motorway services but I’ll just say that we ended up with a spicy beanburger and a bag of chips between us. The chips were more or less edible. Back home to the Sunday papers and a ragbag of culinary memories, some very good, some unbelievably bad. All I could think of to come up with for supper when we finally got hungry again was baked beans on toast.

Food journal: 02 March, 2002

Not a cloud in sight in Whitstable and no wind either. Feeling extremely privileged, we left our bags in the B and B and went for a long walk along the beach. We then went for another long walk around the town, after which we were more than ready for dinner.

The restaurant is on the front and we’d already had a peer in through the window at lunchtime to see if we liked the look of it. It was large and packed with people obviously having a good time. When we arrived in the evening it looked even better with lots of flickering candles reflecting off the rustic brick walls. The young couple at the table next to ours were already half-way through a huge plate of oysters and a bottle of champagne (they kept leaning over the table to kiss each other and left within an hour - proving that what they say about oysters is true).

Mark and I don’t like oysters and were therefore in no great hurry to get back to our room, so settled down for a leisurely read of the menu. It was a relief that there were no meat choices. We’ve often found ourselves in restaurants wanting a combination of fish and meat courses which means that we need both red and white wine. A whole bottle of each is usually (not always!) too much and not all restaurants serve wine by the glass. No problem tonight, though, and Mark chose a Pouilly Fumé so that we could start on it straightaway while choosing our food.

Our first courses were langoustines with mayonnaise for Mark and chargrilled sardines for me. Both were fresh and simply served although I must confess I prefer eating sardines in the south of France (where I always try to eat them in the open air with the sun beating down on my head, which seems to add a lot to their flavour). Mark’s langoustines were plump and tasty and the mayonnaise was obviously home-made.

We were concerned that we ought to be trying local fish for our main course but I couldn’t resist the Canadian lobster, even though it must have travelled a long way to get to Whitstable. My argument was that if they knew a lot about seafood they would have good, if not local, suppliers and I turned out to be right because my lobster was large and meaty - not like the ones they sell in the supermarkets which often seem not much bigger than a prawn. Mark chose baked halibut with cheese and chives. We should have enquired about its provenance but, unlike our friends across the Channel who seem to think nothing of taking up half an hour of a waiter’s time discussing every item on the menu, we just kept quiet and hoped for the best. Local or not, it was very good halibut with an interesting topping which we think was fetta (again, we couldn’t bring ourselves to ask!).

Mark shared his halibut, which was hot, with me before we each ate a half of my cold lobster with more home-made mayonnaise. We were surprised to see that we had finished our bottle of wine before starting on the lobster so had to order a couple of glasses of champagne to accompany it - it seemed churlish not to. The champagne went so well with the lobster that Mark had to have another glass (which I shared).

I was feeling quite full but by the time we’d finished discussing how well lobster goes with champagne (and a number of other topics I can’t quite remember) but Mark thought he could manage a pudding with the last few mouthfuls of champagne - he chose a maple syrup brulée. I tried a tiny bit and pronounced it much inferior to one I made at home about twenty years ago (the wine talking, I’m afraid) but Mark managed to eat every last little bit.

2007-03-01T10:08:00.000Z

Food journal: 01 March, 2002

It says on the forecast that the weather will be beautiful this weekend so we’ve decided to go to Whitstable. All the hotels we rang were fully booked but we managed to find a Bed and Breakfast where we can stay on Saturday night. We’ve been to Whitstable several times before but never managed to have a meal at the Whitstable Oyster Fishery Company, a restaurant specialising in fish and seafood. It’s very highly thought of in the guidebooks so we’ve booked a table for Saturday night. Just what the doctor ordered.

With one eye on tomorrow’s feast and the full English breakfast which we shall be forced to have on Sunday morning, I decided to make something vegetarian tonight. There was a bag of cooked chickpeas in the freezer which would make a good main ingredient for a vegetable stew. They’d frozen very well.

Last week I bought an earthenware pot in a charity shop which is meant for baking potatoes. I’m still looking for an alternative to metal saucepans for cooking vegetables and wondered if I could use it on top of the cooker as well as in the oven. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, I thought, and it only cost two pounds fifty. First I soaked it in water for an hour (I’m not sure how but I read somewhere that it would stop it cracking) and then filled it up with quartered tomatoes and set it over a very low flame. I checked it after a few minutes and the tomatoes were simmering nicely and the kitchen smelt of biscuits, which I took to be a good sign. The phone started to ring and it was my brother in America so I settled down for a nice long chat...

Half an hour later he said goodbye and I remembered the tomatoes. The kitchen still smelt of biscuits but slightly burnt ones. I gave the tomatoes a hasty stir, and found that a couple of them had stuck on the bottom and started to burn. Not too much harm was done though, and the charred flavour was actually quite good. What was more important, the earthenware pot was still in one piece, although the gas flame had turned the bottom of it black. Greatly encouraged, I pushed the tomatoes through my mouli-legumes to make a purée and cleaned out the pot so that I could try cooking brown rice in it to go with the chick pea stew.

A mug of long-grain brown rice and two mugs of boiling water went into the earthenware pot and were brought to the boil over a low flame. The rice took forty minutes of gentle simmering to become tender but it didn’t stick and smelt very good - very earthy!

For the stew, I fried onions, carrots and celery, added some garlic and chopped chilli and then added the chickpeas along with enough tomato purée to make a sauce. I also added some dried savory, which is a classic flavouring for pulses. There was still enough fresh coriander for a garnish, although we’ve had something of a surfeit of it this week.

I was considering serving grated cheese on top of the stew to make it more substantial when Mark rang on his mobile and said that he’d had a sudden craving for smoked haddock and should he buy some for a first course? Not something I would have gone for but I agreed on the grounds that if he had a craving he must need it. The cheese went back in the fridge. There was too much smoked fish for a first course so I froze half of it and poached the other half in milk for a few minutes in a metal pan (ie one that wouldn’t absorb smells!). We ate it with some toast.

Both the chick pea stew and the brown rice were very good and I’m convinced it’s all down to my earthenware pot. I don’t know quite how to describe it but everything seemed to have a deeper, fuller, more natural flavour. Mark said the brown rice was delicious, which is high praise indeed from someone who doesn’t really like it that much. I spent the rest of the evening wondering what else I can use my pot for while Mark worked out the route to Whitstable.

’07 update: I’m afraid I was too busy yesterday to post the journal but it has gone on today. There might be a slight lapse this weekend as well because we’re off to Brussels for a couple of days. I’ll make sure I catch up when we get back. As far as my earthenware pot is concerned, we’ve moved a couple of times since ’02 and somewhere along the line it got lost and I forgot all about it. Must look out for another one.

Food journal: 28 February, 2002

Last day of February and the weather is horrible. At about this time I start to dream of our summer in France. We try to spend June, July and August every year in our house in Béziers (Mark is lucky in that he can work wherever there’s a plug for his laptop) although this year will be a bit different. Emma’s baby is due at the end of July and we want to be at home when it’s born. That means we’ll have June in Béziers and, if all goes well, possibly September as well. We haven’t spent July and August in England for years and, although I’m not looking forward to the (inevitable?) lack of sunshine, it will be good to have some proper English runner beans in season!

I must have been looking down in the dumps because Mark suggested we should go out for dinner tonight. He’d read about another pre-theatre menu which we hadn’t tried (they’re a Godsend to people like us who want to eat early, theatre or no). I wasn’t that keen because I’m still on a diet. I’ve been very abstemious over the last few days though, so felt I could allow myself a break.

As I let myself out of the front door of the building which contains our flat at about 5.30pm I noticed that the door jamb was cracked. It looked as if someone had tried to get in. When I met up with Mark and told him about it he thought that we should abandon our plans for the evening so that he could go home and check the damage. He had a look and was dubious about my break-in theory, although there was no doubt that something hefty had been forced against the door.

A boring story and we still can’t work out what really happened but will have to repair the door and increase the security in our own flat. However, we were now starving, I didn’t have anything interesting in the fridge, and we didn’t want to go back into the West End. Somebody in another flat had left their offer of a free bottle of wine with dinner at Nando’s in the hall (we used ours last Thursday) so we picked it up and had our second meal there within a week. For a change, we had spicy rice instead of chips and coleslaw instead of green salad to go with the barbecued chicken on our “Full Platter”. We didn’t feel too bad about stealing our neighbour’s offer when we noticed that it ran out tonight.

’07 update: We’re hoping to go to France for a whopping four months this year. Apart from the climate and the friendly people (it’s not true that all the French are arrogant and hate the English), the best part is watching the fruit and vegetables changing and ripening in the local market as the summer develops. This year I should be in time to sample some of the spring goodies (primeurs as the French charmingly call them).

2007-02-27T11:34:00.001Z

Food journal: 27 February, 2002

Our foodie friend Peter came to lunch today. He arrived armed with a jar of his home-made marmalade (made with proper Seville oranges) and a pack of frozen squid which he’d purchased on one of his early morning sorties to Billingsgate market. He also had some fresh bread rolls which he’d made that morning. We were very pleased to see him!

Mark had rung me from work yesterday to say that a new shop had opened recently in Covent Garden selling nothing but Cornish pasties. He’d asked around his colleagues and several of them had pronounced them excellent so we agreed that he should bring some home for us to try for lunch today. The bag they came in said that they were made in Helston, Cornwall and to my expert eye they did indeed look like the real thing as I remember them. All my childhood holidays were spent in Cornwall so I must have eaten hundreds and hundreds of pasties in my time and just the smell of these brought back many memories.

Pasties are a meal in themselves so don’t need potatoes or a side salad or anything else to detract from the all-in-one experience. Indeed, rumour has it that in the olden days a real Cornish pasty had meat at one end and jam at the other so the fishermen and farm workers didn’t even need a sweet course to follow their main course (a little pastry sign would make sure that they started at the right end!). I couldn’t just serve Peter something bought from a shop, however perfect, so made a carrot soup flavoured with the rest of yesterday’s bunch of coriander. Peter’s bread rolls were just what we needed to go with it.

I reheated the pasties in the oven while we ate our soup and then Mark divided them up so that we could all have a taste of the three varieties he’d chosen. The pastry was excellent - what we used to call “rough puff” in cookery classes. There’s no doubt in my mind that the traditional filling was the best but the Beef and Guinness and the Lamb and Mint went down very well. We’ll be seeing more of them in the future, I think.

While Mark sliced a few strawberries over an M&S trifle, Peter told us that he’d spent the day before working in Anton Edelmann’s kitchen at the Savoy Hotel! He’d written to say that he’d love to see how a large-scale kitchen functioned, expecting at most to be given a five-minute tour, but he’d been invited to spend a four-hour shift in the bowels of the hotel churning out cheese soufflés. He’s got a few cookery and food hygiene certificates gained over the years at evening classes and a complete set of chef’s whites so off he went. His usual job consists almost entirely of sitting down and he admitted that he had never felt so tired in all his life when he emerged onto The Strand afterwards. I really envied him the experience, though, and listened avidly while he recounted the secrets of cooking for vast numbers of customers. His final verdict was that he was pleased he’d done it and lived to tell the tale (there was definitely a bit of smugness there - he’s fifty six years old) but never wanted to see a cheese soufflé again as long as he lived.

When he left, I meant to give him the rest of my tub of Thai green curry and some kaffir lime leaves to play with but after the wine with lunch I forgot. Mark and I had sardines on toast for supper.

Note: Although I love traditional Cornish pasties, I must admit that the best pasty I have ever tasted was a fish one we bought from Rick Stein’s shop in Padstow about ten years ago - I’ve never forgotten it and wish I had the recipe. Maybe if I wrote asking him if I could do a shift in his kitchen...

’07 update: Cornish pasty outlets in London (and elsewhere, probably) have proliferated since ’02 and I love them. Whenever we take a train trip from Charing Cross or London Bridge stations, I always try to make them coincide with lunch-time (ie any time between 10.30am and 3pm!) so that I can buy a hot pasty to eat on the train. If the train is late I’ve been known to gobble one down while standing in the middle of the station concourse. I prefer the pasties at London Bridge to the ones at Charing Cross.

2007-02-26T12:20:00.000Z

Food journal: 26 February, 2002

Even though we had Thai food on Sunday, the ingredients I bought in the oriental supermarket last week needed to be addressed. I know that if I don’t use them soon they will get nudged to the back of the cupboard and forgotten about. I also want to make friends with tofu again.

I bought my usual brand of firm tofu from the health food shop and, after pressing it under a weight for a while, marinated it in my favourite mixture of soy sauce, sugar and vinegar. Out shopping again later, I was on my way to the end of a supermarket aisle to buy a packet of mange touts when I saw some pak choi on a shelf halfway along. It looked perky and a very pretty shade of pale green so I got two heads and a red pepper to provide a good colour contrast. A big bunch of fresh coriander would give me some dark green as well as lots of flavour (I tasted a leaf while no-one was looking to make sure).

When I got home I wrote a list of ingredients I would try to include in the meal and the order in which I would cook them. I often scribble down a recipe before I start cooking, especially when I’ve got various ingredients that I want to use up. I find it really focuses my mind and helps me to discard combinations that I can see on paper really won’t work; it also simplifies cooking procedures by sorting items that can be cooked or prepared together. I highly recommend it.

I had a tub of green curry paste which would form the basis of a vegetable dish to go with the fried tofu but thought I would make a paste of other ingredients to freshen it up. I put the following into the whizzer all at once and blended them to a paste: one piece of lemon grass; one clove of garlic; one piece of ginger in syrup; one heaped tablespoon of fresh coriander; two kaffir lime leaves; one inch of lime zest; one red chilli and half an onion. Don’t ask me how I decided on quantities - I just thought about what seemed right for two people in each case.

I fried some onions and the sliced red pepper in some oil in a heavy pan until toasted at the edges and then stirred in my blended mixture, which immediately gave off a lovely aroma. While that cooked gently for a couple of minutes I opened the tub of green curry paste. I didn’t much like the smell of it so only added a dessertspoonful instead of the two tablespoons recommended on the packet. After that had mixed in with everything else in the pan, I slowly added a mugful of coconut stock which I had made by adding a teaspoon of stock powder and a couple of tablespoons of powdered coconut to a mug of water. While that simmered away, I fried the slices of tofu, kept them warm, and in the same pan stir-fried the pack choi, cut into chunks, until wilted but still crunchy. The cooked pak choi was then added to the curry sauce.

I’d looked up how to cook rice noodles and was informed that I had to put them in a bowl, cover them with boiling water and leave for ten minutes. I did that and they were still rock hard, so I had to quickly transfer them to a saucepan and continue the cooking for a while. In the end they took about as long as normal pasta and even then were a bit stringy.

I piled the noodles on to a serving dish, spooned over the vegetable curry, lined up the tofu slices down the middle and topped everything with some more fresh coriander. The reds, whites, golds and greens looked very appetising and I was quite pleased with the result. I thought it might need some soy sauce so put the bottle on the table but it was quite tasty enough as it was.

On thinking about it afterwards, the green curry paste really wasn’t necessary and even, I suspect, dulled the flavour. I would have got a fresher taste using more of the blended mixture. The kaffir lime leaves are a real find and I’m already thinking about how to use them with fish to bring out their lovely lemony/limey flavour. I wouldn’t use rice noodles again for this type of dish - they might be good in soup but I prefer the egg noodles I’ve always used. A successful meal, though, and well worth the attempt. I’m feeling better about myself already.

’07 update: As I said recently, my enthusiasm for kaffir lime leaves was short-lived and I’ve finally thrown away the jar (still at least half-full). I also once bought a bottle of nam pla (Thai fish sauce) but that went in the bin the very next day. I just didn’t like the smell or the taste so my attempts at Thai food will never be truly authentic. I read somewhere that Worcestershire Sauce (which is based on anchovies) is a good substitute and intend to try it in my next noodle dish.

2007-02-25T12:05:00.001Z

Food journal: 25 February, 2002

Eased myself back into home cooking tonight by making egg and chips. They don’t taste half as good on a Monday as they do on Sundays.

’07 update: Our new freezer is installed and contains various meats (including two pigs’ trotters and two enormous veal bones!) purchased from The Ginger Pig butcher yesterday. We stopped off at Morrisons supermarket and bought a bag of frozen peas and some frozen sweetcorn. I tried to buy rosti and frozen broad beans (which freeze very well) but couldn’t find either. There were all manner of frozen green vegetables on offer but I wouldn’t dream of buying those.

2007-02-24T10:41:00.000Z

Food journal: 24 February, 2002

Went to visit my son’s partner, Pia, and the two grandchildren. Ben has been in America for a week doing job interviews and Pia has been coping single-handed. It was pouring with rain so we suggested taking four-year-old Alexa to the supermarket to buy yet more ready meals for dinner. Pia thought that was a brilliant idea and retired to bed for a couple of hours with the baby in her arms.

Alexa loves the supermarket. We sometimes feel guilty that we don’t take her to educational places like the Science Museum but the supermarket appears to be a four-year-old’s idea of heaven, especially when her adoring grandparents are willing to play endless games of hide and seek up and down the aisles and to spend half an hour (at least) discussing which is the best packet of sweets.

Believe it or not, two hours passed in a flash and we had to rush to get our dinner before the 5pm Sunday closing took effect. Curry was not an option and not much else appealed. I don’t like Shepherd’s Pie and Mark doesn’t like Lasagne so the compromise had to be Chinese. Then we spotted the Thai section and picked out a few of those as quickly as we could while Alexa went tearing off out of sight.

Pia hasn’t got a microwave so I reheated everything in her oven while Alexa laid the table and Mark entertained the baby. We’d got three different dishes (chicken in a coconut sauce, pork balls with pak choi, Thai fishcakes) and a big tub of rice but the portions were very mean and there didn’t seem to be enough to go round. Luckily, Alexa just chased a few grains of rice around her plate (too many sweets earlier!) while I contented myself with a very small taste of everything in the hope that I would get my reward on the scales tomorrow. I also sat and watched while they all ate a toffee cheesecake for pudding.

’07 update: Trying to provide food for children is quite tricky. As grandparents, we’ve found the perfect answer, which has now been going on for years. We see Alexa and Max, on average, every couple of weeks and provide their ‘tea’ and put them to bed while Ben and Pia go out for the evening. We go to Tesco’s on the way and buy a ready-cooked roast chicken, a bag of salad, a tub of coleslaw, a loaf of bread, a Victoria sponge and a punnet of raspberries. We’ve tried to vary it from time to time but children seem to like consistency.

2007-02-23T13:06:00.000Z

Food journal: 23 February, 2002

I can’t believe I’ve put on 2lbs in one day. Never mind, it was in a good cause.

When I’d taken the tofu out of the packet on Thursday I’d transferred it to a bowl, covered it in clingfilm and left it in the fridge. Lots of liquid had drained out of it but it was still very soft. I tried putting a weight on top in the hope that I could induce it to give up even more of its liquid but it immediately started to cave in and split. I abandoned that idea and went and looked in a couple of cookery books to seek advice. Although there were some interesting recipes involving the more solid tofu, the only ones for “silken” tofu suggested adding it to soup at the last minute. I went back into the kitchen, cut off a small corner and tasted it. I might as well have been chomping on air, it tasted of absolutely nothing. Soup was not the answer.

As I’ve said before, I always cut the solid tofu that I usually buy into slices and marinate them in soy sauce, sugar and vinegar to give them flavour before cooking. Finding my thinnest, sharpest knife, I tried to do the same with this wobbly block. Imagine trying to cut neat slices from a half-set jelly. I ended up with a few largish blobs and many tiny bits sliding around the plate. I spooned over my usual marinade plus a spoonful of the Hoisin sauce which I’d also bought in Chinatown on Thursday. It looked awful and I didn’t like the smell of it very much, either - I think it was a mistake messing about with Hoisin sauce on a breakfastless stomach and suffering from a mild hangover.

“I can’t face that tofu tonight”, I said to Mark when the smell of the Hoisin sauce had pervaded every corner of our flat. He came and had a look. “I should throw it away”, he said “and those sprouts”. I was more than willing to scrape the unhappy tofu into the rubbish but it was a shame about the sprouts which I’d been intending to stir-fry with the tofu. They’d been sitting on their stalk under the kitchen table since the trip to the farmers’ market on Wednesday and were admittedly looking rather yellow. It was all very depressing.

After my measly lunch of half a sandwich, we set off to the supermarket for alternative dinner ingredients. I felt like I never wanted to cook again. Mark is very sympathetic on occasions like this and suggested that we get some ready meals to put in the microwave. We homed in on the curry section and, having had a surfeit of chicken last night, picked out one with fish and one with prawns. Neither of them included rice but it would be an easy matter to boil some up while the curry heated in the microwave and I resent paying for the “filler” in ready meals anyway. Mark picked up a tub of Bombay potatoes and slid them into the basket - I hope he hasn’t lost faith in my culinary skills completely...

I actually enjoy orchestrating ready meals in the microwave. Most of them tell you to cook them for a couple of minutes, give them a stir, and then cook for another couple of minutes until “piping hot” (whatever that means). I’m not convinced that the stirring is necessary because I just shake the dish about a bit, which seems quite adequate. Perhaps they like to give you something to do. There’s a story that when they first brought out packet cake mixes they included everything except water. Not many people bought them but when they brought out a second generation which required the addition of a beaten egg, and sometimes butter as well, they sold much better. They’d discovered that people felt ashamed at making so little effort.

I had three dishes to heat up so I put the first one in for two minutes, took it out, put the second one in for two minutes while I shook the first about, took the second one out, put the first one back in, shook the second one about, took the first one out and left it on top of a warm grill and put the second one in. The third dish, the Bombay potatoes, needed 4½ minutes straight off, so the second one joined the first one on top of the grill while the third one cooked. I make that 12½ minutes in all, which just gave me time to cook some rice.

A very satisfying exercise and it tasted fine with lots of mild lime pickle, mango chutney and a big box of ready-cooked poppadoms.

’07 update: We’ve eaten firm tofu many times since ’02 but never the ‘silken’ sort again. I still like my marinade (equal parts of vinegar, sugar and good soy sauce) and then to fry it until crisp and caramelised on the outside. Frying some smoky bacon in the oil beforehand improves the flavour (unless you’re a vegetarian). I hate throwing food away, even yellow sprouts, but sometimes it has to be done. We’re having a new freezer delivered today and it breaks my heart to get rid of some small treasures which have been lurking around for months. However, we’re off to The Ginger Pig butcher in Marylebone tomorrow to re-stock. I’ve got my eye on some pigs’ trotters to freeze – never know when they might come in handy.

2007-02-22T10:30:00.000Z

Food journal: 22 February, 2002

Dinner at Nando’s tonight with a free bottle of wine.

I’ve been on a diet recently which consists of no breakfast, half a sandwich for lunch and a smaller-than-usual amount of our normal dinner. I’ve been dieting all my life on and off (I’ve promised myself that I will give up worrying about my weight when I’m sixty) and have found that this is the one that works for me. I cannot understand how people can eat cabbage soup or bananas for a fortnight in order to lose weight - if that was the alternative to being fat I would be as big as a house.

Even though I’ve still got a couple of pounds to go before I’ll be happy on the scales, I wasn’t prepared to forgo my half of Nando’s “Full Platter”. A massive plate arrived with a whole barbecued chicken, an immense pile of chips and a green salad. The menu cheerfully instructs you to use your fingers and they even provide a washbasin at the back of the restaurant in case you need a quick hose-down halfway through your meal. Mark, in fact, has got a thing about dirty hands and used his knife and fork but I rolled back my sleeves and made up for both of us in the mess department.

The wine wasn’t Chateau Lafitte but it went down very well in spite of my glass getting disgustingly greasy as the evening wore on. The bill was so refreshingly low that we felt entitled to go to the bar up the road and have a couple of Cointreaus on ice to round off a very enjoyable evening.

’07 update: I reached the sixtieth birthday milestone recently and have been trying to stop fretting about my weight. I don’t jump on the scales every day like I used to and I’m definitely eating more but still get anxious if my waistband feels tight. Old habits die hard and I don’t suppose I’ll ever be able to wolf down cream buns without feeling really guilty. I looked up how many calories there are in a glass of wine the other day and it’s a surprising number. I fear that’s mostly where those ‘few pounds’ have come from.

2007-02-21T12:28:00.000Z

Food journal: 21 February, 2002

Found ourselves in London’s Chinatown today and I was reminded of the Thai recipe I’d looked at yesterday so went into one of the big supermarkets in Lisle Street to stock up on some Oriental ingredients. It’s great wandering up and down the aisles peering at packages covered in hieroglyphics - I always want to buy everything just to have a taste. I wouldn’t know what to do with most of it but picked up a few treasures that I’d heard of. Actually you can buy quite a number of Oriental ingredients in the big British supermarkets these days but I noticed that they are very expensive compared to what was on offer here.

This is what I bought: rice noodles; dried kaffir lime leaves; lemon grass; dried coconut powder; pickled ginger; pickled cucumber; shrimp paste; Thai green curry paste; Hoisin sauce; tofu. When I got home I put everything away in the cupboard to await inspiration, except for the tofu and the lemon grass. The lemon grass will keep for a while but the tofu is fresh and will have to be used within a couple of days. The kind I usually buy from the health food shop is quite solid but this variety is very soft like junket and I’m not at all sure how I’m going to use it. I’ll worry about that later.

In complete contrast, we had grilled pork chops, mashed potato and frozen peas tonight! I wanted to make chips because I didn’t get my ration last Sunday but we’ve got an offer of a free bottle of wine at the Portuguese restaurant down the road for tomorrow night and they do wonderful chilli-flavoured chips so I’ll have to wait another day. Mark is an expert masher so he dealt with the potatoes. We weren’t having gravy so he added quite a lot of milk and then used his special whipping technique with a fork to make them light and almost verging on the sloppy.

Gloucester Old Spot pigs certainly provide tasty pork chops, especially if eaten with a dab of wholegrain mustard, and the bones were excellent gnawing material. The frozen peas to accompany them were not just any old peas but Birdseye’s best petit pois - we’re pea snobs, I’m afraid.

’07 update: I’ve still got some of the dried kaffir lime leaves at the back of the cupboard – they should have been thrown out years ago. I never buy fresh lemon grass these days because you have to buy a pack of three and only one ever gets used. If I need a shot of lemon flavour, I’d rather pare a piece of zest from the lemon which is usually sitting in the bottom of my fridge. I wasn’t that keen on the ginger or cucumber pickles either, so haven’t bought them since (home-made ones are probably much better). I continue to have an ambivalent attitude to food from other cultures – I really want to get to grips with it but also secretly like the unattainable mystery of it all.

2007-02-20T11:05:00.000Z

Food journal: 20 February, 2002

The fish stall at the farmers’ market is a beautiful sight. It doesn’t have the huge variety that we’re used to in the big supermarkets but everything sparkles and gleams. This week there was a huge pile of sea bass so I picked the one that was giving me the boldest glare. I also took a fancy to something that looked like whiting, which has a lovely flavour but a great many bones. The man explained that it wasn’t whiting but codling (he did have some whiting and spent five patient minutes pointing out the different markings) so I bought one of those. There was a small selection of fish heads, bones and bits of rock salmon on one side which I asked if I could buy to make a stock, but he put them in the bag for nothing. When I got home there was plenty of flesh on the rock salmon so I’m planning to make a fish soup in the near future. I froze everything except the sea bass which we’ll have for dinner tonight.

The game stall didn’t have much to offer this week - I’m not sure about the seasons for game but perhaps they are being left alone at the moment to work themselves up to their spring mating sessions. The meat stall was another matter. Some of the stalls have their meat in vacuum packs which I avoid because I don’t know how long they’ve been stored but one man just puts his into normal polythene bags to keep them away from prodding hands. There was an embarrassment of choice with fascinating labels like “Gloucester Old Spot” and “Angus Limousin” so I picked out some fillet steak, 2 pork chops, 4 lamb chops and a joint of belly pork.

The vegetable stall wasn’t so inspiring, it being such a dismal month, but I bought some potatoes, onions, a stalk of Brussels sprouts and some Jerusalem artichokes.

I intended to plainly grill the sea bass (I did look up a few recipes and there was one that sounded good with lots of Thai ingredients but it seemed such a shame to mask the flavour of such a magnificent fish). I could have just done some boiled potatoes to go with it but haven’t worked out how to stop them falling apart at this time of year so decided to make something with the artichokes.

I’ve not cooked Jerusalem artichokes for ages but seem to remember they always cook unevenly, leaving their centres almost raw when the outsides have turned to mush. I’m sure there are ways of getting around this but the safest option for me was to make a soup. I’m also aware that we are getting near the end of winter (hopefully) so need to have warming soups at every opportunity. I followed my usual method of sweating some onion, carrot and celery before adding a chopped medium potato, the artichokes and some stock. The artichokes were a nightmare to peel but, for that very reason, I’d bought quite a lot. I made a large panful of soup - I’ll be able to have some for lunch for the next couple of days instead of my usual cheese sandwich.

The sea bass was excellent, as expected, grilled whole with a few slashes cut into the thickest part of the flesh and a small amount of butter to crisp the skin. We ate great slabs of bread and butter with the soup and the fish.

’07 update: Five years ago, the information that a pork chop came from a ‘Gloucester Old Spot’ pig or that a burger came from ‘Aberdeen Angus’ beef was a revelation – now it seems almost commonplace. Phrases like ‘product traceability’ and ‘traditionally-hung’ are all over the labels on packs of supermarket meat yet I’m left feeling slightly suspicious. ‘The public gets what the public wants’, as the old pop song goes, but I wonder why the ‘outdoor-reared’ pork chop still has so little fat on it and why the ‘Scottish’ beef seems to have so little flavour.

2007-02-19T12:46:00.001Z

Food journal: 19 February, 2002

We want to go to the farmers’ market tomorrow to get more supplies so I took two pigeons out of the freezer last night which have been there since the last time we went.

Even though it’s only a Tuesday I thought that a proper grown-up wine sauce was called for. If it had been a Saturday I might have used claret, which goes well with the slight bitterness of pigeon but had to settle for our normal red which at the moment is a Vin de Pays des Collines de la Moure. I try to avoid using really cheap plonk in cooking - it’s a waste of effort - but this is from 1998 (a good year) and has a vaguely clarety flavour so was quite appropriate.

I wanted to roast the pigeons and made a sauce base in a pan on top of the cooker to mix in with the juices when they were cooked. It involved no less than five trinities! First of all, I fried chopped onion, carrot and celery (trinity 1) in some oil until brown around the edges, then added chopped tomato, garlic and soaked dried mushrooms (trinity 2). When the moisture from the tomatoes had disappeared, I mixed in a heaped teaspoon of flour followed after a couple of minutes by a large glass of wine followed after a further couple of minutes by some chicken stock (trinity 3). Finally some parsley, bay and thyme (trinity 4). That all simmered away for at least 20 minutes to cook out the flour (trinity 5 comes later).

Because I had the oven on high, I cut some potatoes into very large chip shapes and tossed them in a plastic bag with olive oil and lots of dried rosemary (an Italian lady who used to work with Mark said that you should never roast potatoes without rosemary) and put them in the oven to cook. The pigeons took about 20 minutes on the top shelf and then sat under a tent of foil while I finished the sauce and cooked some carrots.

About twenty years ago I stopped cutting carrots into rounds and started doing batons. My mother never cut her carrots into anything other than rounds but someone told me it was “common” so from that day on it had to be batons. It was probably around the time when it also became “common” to overcook vegetables (which my mother also did with a vengeance). I’ve only recently dared admit to myself that I hate undercooked carrots and quite like the look of them cut into rounds.

The pigeons had given off some brown juices so I was ready for the final trinity. I strained the sauce base into a jug, removed the fat from the top of the juices in the roasting pan and added the sauce base, a spoonful of cranberry jelly and a knob of butter (trinity 5!). A quick stir and it was ready.

The roast potatoes and a nice pile of soft round carrots went onto a serving dish and the pigeons and their wine sauce onto our plates. Mark enjoys pigeon more than I do because he is sensible enough to eat only the breast meat while I try to eat the legs as well. The legs are really a waste of time; there’s very little meat on them and they have a much stronger taste than the breasts, but I like gnawing bones. The sauce was well worth the effort.

’07 update: The same Italian lady who told Mark that you should never roast potatoes without rosemary also told him that you should never bake a cake without adding some coconut. I rarely bake cakes but I do quite a nice carrot cake occasionally and since I’ve been adding a handful of desiccated coconut to the dry ingredients it seems to stay moist for longer. I think it tastes better as well.

2007-02-18T13:17:00.001Z

Food journal: 18 February, 2002

I looked in the fridge this morning and pulled out all the bits and pieces left over from the weekend and lined them up on the work surface. Salad stuff mostly, but apart from that there was half a packet of bacon, some posh Stilton, a cup of lamb sauce and some extra thick cream.

I’ve got a head like a sieve for most things but can remember meals from decades ago. I thought of a meal I shared once with a colleague when I was teaching cookery part-time at a London Adult Education Institute. We had a couple of hours off in the middle of the day and she asked me back to her place for lunch and threw together a pasta dish using bacon, blue cheese, cream and lots of chopped fresh sage. It was a marvellous combination which got filed away with all the other nuggets of culinary information at the back of my mind. I also seem to remember that we shared a bottle of white wine with it which perked up our last lesson of the day no end.

I had the bacon and the cheese, I had some dried sage which I chopped up with some fresh parsley to bring it back to life, and I had cream so it was very easy to fry some sliced onion and chopped bacon together then add the crumbled blue cheese and a dollop of cream. The mixture looked a bit gloopy so I threw in the lamb sauce as well. Finally, I mixed in most of the chopped sage and parsley and sprinkled the last teaspoon over the top.

While I was doing that I cooked some fusilli (the corkscrew-shaped pasta which Mark, for some reason, calls squirmbles). It would have looked better if I had mixed the sauce in with the pasta before serving but I tend to cook too much pasta so if we can’t eat it all, some of the sauce gets wasted. Serving the pasta separately, however, means that it sometimes sticks together in the serving dish unless oil is mixed in with it. Mark doesn’t like oily pasta so my solution is to drain it very, very briefly so that there are still a couple of tablespoons of cooking water in the serving dish. I don’t quite know why but this seems to work as well as oil.

I thought that adding the lamb sauce might spoil the taste but the faint port and lemon flavour went rather well. Using up disparate leftovers is always going to be a dicey business but when it works it’s much more satisfying than the most slavishly followed recipe.

I made a salad from lettuce, green pepper, celery and shallot with a balsamic vinegar, mustard and olive oil dressing. The dressing was unnecessary because the pasta sauce went just as well with the lettuce etc as with the squirmbles - after all, a hot bacon and blue cheese dressing makes one of the best salads I know.

’07 update: I wish I hadn’t confessed in ’02 to drinking wine before a cookery class. For the record, it was a theory lesson so no hot pans to knock over. I don’t know about you, but I think lettuce is really interesting. In salads, of course, but I like the way the French slice up the outside leaves and cook them with their peas. I also like shreds of Iceberg in a stir-fry. And whole Little Gems braised in butter are surprisingly sophisticated. And there’s nothing nicer than a good Cos lettuce which is just beginning to wilt under the hot juices of a fried steak.

2007-02-17T09:56:00.000Z

Food journal: 17 February, 2002

After our usual bibulous lunch of cheeses, salad and bread, Emma and Harry set off back to Brighton and Mark and I went for a quick walk around Primrose Hill to catch the last rays of a feeble February sun.

We felt too full for egg and chips tonight so had scrambled eggs on toast (or rather, I had scrambled eggs on toast and Mark had scrambled eggs beside toast because he doesn’t like his toast to have even the teeniest hint of sogginess).

I don’t enjoy making scrambled eggs. I don’t like the constant stirring and having to get the timing right so that it isn’t too runny or too dry. Should it be knobbly or smooth like custard? How much butter and milk is needed? Does the salt go in at the beginning or at the end? And what saucepan? Everyone probably has a memory of making scrambled eggs in a cheap, thin saucepan. That horrible, tough, intractable layer that builds up as the eggs cook can never be forgotten. Even when the pan is soaked for hours, it’s still there, resistant to any number of clogged scourers. Non-stick coatings must have been invented specifically with scrambled eggs in mind.

I have one small good-quality non-stick pan now for making scrambled eggs and I can’t recall ever using it for anything else. For browning meat, fish or vegetables, I use an 8-inch tin-lined copper sauté pan which I’ve had for about twenty years and can’t imagine living without. It’s the only piece of kitchen equipment I religiously take to France with us every summer and if I left it behind I’d have to get Mark to take me back to fetch it. I have to get it re-lined every few years and I’m shockingly bad at cleaning the outside so it’s not exactly decorative but there’s nothing like it for sealing and browning.

Apart from my scrambled egg pan and my sauté pan I’ve got four stainless steel pans in various sizes which are strictly for boiling. I used to have aluminium ones but someone said they were bad for you (I’m not convinced). Also, I made the mistake recently of buying one of those white glass casseroles which they say can be used both on top of the cooker and in the oven because I got it into my head that the metal of my pans might be affecting the taste of the food. It was a total disaster - even boiled potatoes stuck on the bottom and burnt! Be warned.

Our scrambled eggs were a bit dry because a final vital question to ask when making them is when to put the toast on and I left it too late.

’07 update: I was just sitting here trying to remember the last time I had a boiled egg and I can’t. We don’t even possess any eggcups. In my mind’s eye I can imagine a perfect boiled egg – white firm and yolk runny – but I can also see one with a rubbery white and hard yolk or, much worse, one with uncooked gloopy white seeping into a tepid yolk. Ugh. If I could only see the inside of the egg while it cooked to perfection, I would rush out and buy some eggcups immediately. But I can’t so I won’t.

2007-02-16T12:09:00.000Z

Food journal: 16 February, 2002

Emma and Harry arrived at 6pm loaded down with maternity clothes which they’d just bought in the West End. Emma’s about four months pregnant now and blooming. She’s also eating everything in sight so is a pleasure to cook for (I can remember her taking about an hour to eat one lettuce leaf in her I-want-to-be-a-supermodel days).

By the time they arrived I’d put the lamb joint in to roast and also a huge potato gratin on the shelf above it. If it had just been for two people I would have made the potato gratin in the microwave and finished it under the grill but, as I’m not sure of the timing for a big one and had the oven on anyway, that’s how I did it. That meant I could sit down and talk to them for an hour before having to do the vegetables.

It’s funny, I hardly ever think to buy leeks but the woman in front of me at the greengrocers bought some so I found myself asking for four big ones, some broccoli and a bunch of mint. What with Emma’s new appetite, I’d worried that there wouldn’t be enough meat to go round so I’d bought some bacon with a view to arranging it over the potato gratin for the last twenty minutes of its cooking time. In the end I chopped the bacon up and fried it in a pan on top of the cooker before adding the sliced leeks, which were then cooked slowly for about ten minutes with a lid on.

When the lamb and the potatoes were cooked I turned the oven down low, covered the lamb with foil, and applied myself to making a sauce to go with it. There were some gorgeous sticky brown juices in the meat pan but also quite a lot of oil that I had been basting the meat with from time to time so I poured it all into the gravy separator and then syphoned off the juices into some chicken stock which I had defrosted in a bowl in the microwave. I quickly fried a sliced onion in a bit of the oil in the meat pan (the reason I always do this when making a sauce is that the onion makes it much easier to mix in some cornflour, which is in danger of going lumpy if it’s added to plain oil). Then some cornflour and, after a quick stir, a glass of port. When that had reduced almost to nothing, I added the meat juices and stock. Finally, I squeezed in some lemon juice to balance the sweetness of the port - as I did it I remembered that my grandmother’s favourite drink was port and lemon so it’s obviously a good combination.

That left me with my bunch of mint. I had half a jar of cranberry sauce left from the Lamb Shrewsbury the other night so I put it into a pretty bowl and added lots and lots of chopped mint. It tasted good but was too thick so I added a little hot water from the kettle until it was almost runny. I put the broccoli on to boil while Mark laid the table - I know from experience that broccoli turns to mush in the time it takes to find a tablecloth.

Four very clean plates were my reward at the end of the meal - there’s nothing better. The leeks and bacon were the surprise hit - everyone liked them and Emma said “I don’t know why we never think to buy leeks”.

Guests means a pudding so Mark had picked up various individual sweet flans from a French patisserie in Covent Garden last night which we shared out with some extra-thick double cream.

’07 update: I’ve been away from home and computer-less for a few days so have posted the missing entries today. Apologies. We have been in Hastings – a lovely town and a Mecca for all things fishy. One day we sat outside The Mermaid Café opposite the beach (in February!) and had wonderful fish and chips while seagulls wheeled and squawked overhead beneath a clear blue sky. Next door to The Mermaid they sell home-smoked fish which is actually prepared in the back of the shop. I bought a fillet of dill-coated salmon and a whole trout, both of which are now in the freezer awaiting my attention. Hastings has a small fleet of beach-based fishing boats and sometimes the shacks along the shoreline sell their catch incredibly cheaply. Go there if you can.

Food journal: 15 February, 2002

Emma and Harry are coming tomorrow for the weekend so I took a lamb joint which we bought a couple of weeks ago in the farmers’ market out of the freezer. I didn’t really want lamb twice in one week but it was a beautiful joint made of two rows of loin chops, boned and neatly tied, which would have been too much for Mark and I to eat. Also, I’ve got a feeling that Emma and Harry don’t eat lamb very often, probably because it doesn’t go with pasta, which they seem to live on.

Mark offered to get us something for dinner tonight on the way home from work and said he’d get some fish. I knew before he walked in the door that it would be Dover sole. Sure enough, out they came from his bag although he did say that he’d been tempted by some skate because he’d read in a newspaper article that they were being over-fished and soon wouldn’t be available. I was pleased he hadn’t because if the poor things are in danger of becoming extinct they need us to leave them in peace to get their numbers up again. He also bought some asparagus and some brown soda bread.

I had an avocado which felt just ripe (ie slightly soft around the stalk end) and which I really had to use, although I knew it wouldn’t go with grilled Dover sole and asparagus. Guacamole is the only thing I can ever think of to do with avocado, apart from filling it with prawns, so I mashed the flesh up in a bowl with a chopped tomato, chopped shallot, chopped chilli and lemon juice - and some chopped basil in lieu of coriander. By the way, the tomato needed to be peeled and I’ve found the best way is to stick it on the end of a fork or skewer and hold it over the gas flame, turning it round and round for about half a minute until the skin splits.

I’d intended to serve the guacamole as a first course but that would have meant keeping the fish warm while we ate it. I used to serve first courses quite often - it’s a nice way to prolong the meal - but it meant that the main course would often be past its best by the time we’d eaten it, so I abandoned the habit. It’s OK for restaurants who have people in the kitchen watching the meat on the grill or the vegetables in the saucepan while you dally over your starter.

Mark had a forkful of the guacamole before settling down to the difficult task of dissecting his sole (if he’d only put on his reading glasses I’m sure he’d find it a lot easier). I used the guacamole as a dip for my asparagus but it wasn’t a great success and most of it was left. I pressed some clingfilm over the surface in an attempt to stop it discolouring and left it in the kitchen in the hope that one of us would eat it for lunch tomorrow.

One small discovery: I had some lemon juice and grated zest left over from last night’s chickpea patties so put them together in a cup and left them in the fridge overnight. The mixture went extremely well with the grilled sole, much better than plain lemon juice.

Food journal: 14 February, 2002

Something vegetarian needed tonight after all that meat yesterday. When I get to the end of the year I’m going to tot up how often we have meat, fish or vegetarian dinners. I kid myself that we only have meat about twice a week but fear it might be more often than that, largely because I find it quite difficult to do really good vegetarian meals.

Delia Smith received a lot of criticism a few years ago for allegedly saying something disparaging about vegetarians but she has made up for it since by including interesting meat-free dishes in her recent books. I’d put some chickpeas to soak last night with a view to making some sort of stew with them but Delia’s recipe for Spiced Chickpea Cakes (How To Cook, Book 3) looked interesting.

First, I had to cook the chickpeas on their own and, as I’d soaked twice the amount called for in the recipe, I divided them into two batches after cooking and froze one (the soaking and the lengthy cooking of pulses is very tedious so I’ll be able to whisk them out at a later date and throw something together in minutes).

Basically, the recipe involved processing the cooked chickpeas and mixing them with other ingredients before making them into patties. Although I had the required onion, garlic, green pepper and chilli, I didn’t have the coriander so, as usual, I cheated and used the basil I bought on Monday. I had lemon juice and zest but didn’t have the Greek yoghurt for binding the mixture so Mark had to run up the road and buy some.

While I was pressing the patties into shape I deliberated about whether to make them heart-shaped, it being Valentine’s Day, but thought it would be a bit soppy. The last stage of making the patties was to coat them with egg and flour but, just to be different, I used oatmeal.

Delia suggested a red onion and coriander salad to go with them but I had a lovely big mango so made a salsa by chopping it up and mixing it with chopped shallot, red pepper, red chilli, ginger, lemon juice and some more chopped basil. I also needed a filler and found a bag of mixed rice (long grain brown, Carmargue and wild) in the cupboard.

I worried that the patties would fall apart when I fried them but they worked a treat (sorry to doubt you, Delia!). I even suspect they would have worked without the egg and oatmeal coating, which was a job I could have done without. The rice took much longer to cook than I’d allowed for and the patties had to sit under a low grill for an extra fifteen minutes but they were very good and the salsa provided extra flavour and essential moistness. We all know that Delia is a genius but I thought my adaptations were pretty good, too.

Food journal: 13 February, 2002

When I taught cookery, one of my students’ favourite dishes was Lamb Shrewsbury. The recipe I taught was a casserole of lamb chops flavoured with a mixture of redcurrant jelly and Worcestershire Sauce. The redcurrant jelly made the sauce unctuous and shiny and the Worcestershire Sauce provided a lively flavour and sharpness. It was also easy and reliable and nine out of ten of the First Years chose to make it for their end-of-year exam. Since then I’ve come across variations on the basic recipe in several magazines and cookery books so I’m obviously not the only one to have succumbed to its charms. One of them suggested adding grated nutmeg, which is a very good idea.

I bought four organic loin chops and took off every scrap of fat. I hate lamb fat and I can see why in the olden days they thought it only fit for making candles (they must have stunk the place out, though). In a small bowl I mixed together one dessertspoon of Worcestershire sauce and two of cranberry jelly (from a jar left unopened from Christmas). All right, it wasn’t the more correct redcurrant jelly but it was all I had and, anyway, most redcurrant jelly these days seems to have very little taste. I also sliced a small onion and a clove of garlic.

I didn’t want to put the oven on and decided to fry the chops and then keep them warm while finishing the sauce in the pan. I had some chicken stock in the freezer and a pack of baby carrots so I melted the stock in the microwave and simmered the carrots in it on the normal cooker while frying the chops – I was rather pleased with myself about that because the carrots added flavour to the stock and the stock added flavour to the carrots.

When the lamb chops were cooked, I kept them hot under a very low grill and quickly fried the onion and garlic. Then I added a very small amount of cornflour which, as far as I’m concerned, is the best way to thicken a quick sauce. Ordinary flour takes a long time to “cook out” (ie lose its raw taste) and gravy powders have too many strange ingredients so, as long as you don’t add too much and end up with glue, cornflour is best. I much prefer thin sauces anyway, so a level teaspoon was all I needed.

When the carrots were tender, I strained the cooking liquid into the bowl with the Worcestershire Sauce and cranberry jelly and added it to the pan along with some nutmeg. As soon as it came to the boil it was ready. I had a taste of it and decided it needed a squeeze of lemon juice which it wouldn’t have done if I’d used high-quality redcurrant jelly which has enough sharpness of its own.

As I had the lemon in my hand and some parsley in the fridge I thought that a sprinkling of gremolata on top would be nice for a change. Gremolata is a mixture of parsley, lemon zest and garlic which is chopped together with some salt and traditionally served over Osso Bucco (an Italian dish of braised veal shin bones). I love it on practically any meat dish.

I’d cooked some new potatoes so I put the lamb chops on a serving dish, surrounded them with the potatoes and carrots and sprinkled the gremolata over everything. It looked very elegant and tasted as if I’d been in the kitchen all day. If you ever do a cookery exam, bear Lamb Shrewsbury in mind.

Food journal: 12 February, 2002

Bought a big bunch of parsley and couldn’t resist a big bunch of basil as well.

I had kitchen withdrawal symptoms and decided to make a pizza tonight because it’s very hands-on and fiddly. I also had some of the “Domesday” flour in the cupboard and was interested to see if it would be better than the packet mixes sold for making the base. I’ve used these occasionally in the past but making the dough from scratch with “easybake” yeast is so simple that I wouldn’t bother with them again.

The yeast came in little sachets, each one enough for about 650g flour, so I mixed about 1/3 of a sachet with about 250g flour (no need to be too exact, dried yeast is easygoing as well as easybake). The only other ingredients are some salt and enough hand-hot water to make a soft dough. I know that hand-hot water is a relative term but if you can imagine washing your hands in it without going “ouch!” then it’s OK - any hotter and it will kill the yeast, any cooler and the dough will take hours to rise.

Just as I was settling down for the pummelling stage, Mark came in and told me about his day. By the time he’d finished, the requisite 10 minutes kneading stage was up and the dough needed to rise. The best way I’ve found to speed up the process is to boil an inch of water in a large saucepan, turn the heat off and sit the bowl on the top covered tightly in clingfilm. It’s best to rub some oil over the dough because it stops the surface drying out and cracking.

I’d bought some bits and pieces for the topping: tomatoes, olives, mozzarella, salami. I also had my bunch of basil, half a jar of anchovies and some onions. While the tomatoes, cut roughly into four, simmered away in a pan, I halved the olives, chopped the mozzarella, sliced a large onion, cut the anchovies into strips, separated the salami slices and tore up some basil leaves. When the tomatoes had reached a jammy consistency I put them through the mouli-légumes to get rid of the skins and seeds and added them to the sliced onion which I’d been frying in olive oil.

The dough by this time had gone mad and was more than doubled in size so I gave it another knead for a couple of minutes and spread it over an oiled baking tray. I’ve got a heavy tin-lined copper baking tray which I bought in a sale many years ago and which I love more than almost anything else in the world. Spreading the dough was a bit stressful - every time I pushed it against one side of the greased baking tray it slid away from the other - but eventually it gave up the struggle and relaxed into a fairly even layer which I spread with some olive oil.

I spent about ten minutes artfully arranging the topping ingredients, which also allowed the dough to rise slightly again. As long as the tomatoes go on first and the mozzarella on last, the rest can go where you like. More olive oil on the top and the pizza, looking very beautiful, went into a pre-heated hot oven. While it cooked I made a quick salad with lettuce and torn-up basil leaves.

I knew at the back of my mind that it wouldn’t turn out like the pizzas from the takeaway and it didn’t. It was more crunchy, less oily and didn’t have those delicious crispy black edges that the best professionally-made ones do. The mozzarella turned brown and crunchy, too, instead of staying white and stringy the way I like it - next time I’ll add it five minutes before the end. Nevertheless it was very tasty (the posh flour helped, I think) and much better than the worst professionally-made ones with their soggy bottoms and meagre toppings. Much cheaper, too.

2007-02-11T12:46:00.000Z

Food journal: 11 February, 2002

When I made a squid stew a few weeks ago there was too much for one dinner so I froze half of it and that’s what we had tonight with pasta. Mark kept saying to me “I’m starving, shouldn’t you be getting on with the dinner?” because I was still sitting around reading a book fifteen minutes before we were due to eat.

I put the kettle on to boil for the pasta and then looked in the cupboard. I counted six different sorts of pasta: fusilli (corkscrews), penne (pointy macaroni), pappardelle (wide ribbons), spaghetti (you know), green linguine (skinny spaghetti) and the red-hot chilli stuff I bought on offer recently. The Italians are fussy about serving the appropriate pasta for a given sauce but I couldn’t recall any advice on what went with squid stew. As the squid was cut into long thin strips I thought a similar-shaped pasta was called for and dithered between the spaghetti (too thin) and the pappardelle (too wide). The spaghetti was open so I chose that.

If you remember, the squid had originally been frozen in its raw state and then defrosted before making into a stew. The leftovers were frozen again until tonight. People are often frightened to freeze food twice but as long as it’s thoroughly cooked in between, I think it’s perfectly all right. What mustn’t be done is to take raw meat or fish out of the freezer, let it defrost and then freeze it again in its raw state. Not only does this allow time for bacteria to multiply but the texture will probably be ruined as well.

The squid took five minutes to reheat in the microwave and we were ready. I can honestly say it was just as good the second time around, although it could have done with some fresh parsley on the top. I ran out ages ago and must get some more tomorrow.

’07 update: Every time I double up on quantities when I cook, say, a Bolognese sauce and then freeze the excess, I vow to do it more often. Same amount of effort – twice the pleasure. Bolognese sauce is particularly useful because you can use it in other dishes. Making the meat sauce and the Béchamel sauce for a Lasagne is tiresome but if the meat sauce is already prepared it’s a doddle. De-frosted Bolognese sauce is also brilliant for stuffing pancakes (a faff to make in themselves) and for stuffing vegetables (mixed with some leftover cooked rice – which also might have come out of the freezer…).

2007-02-10T14:05:00.001Z

Food journal: 10 February, 2002

Egg and chips tonight and I feel moved to say something more about home-cooked chips.

According to the Observer Food Monthly, February 2002, 61% of people who live in the south of England say they never cook chips at home from scratch. What do people do with all those electric deep-fat fryers the shops sell? I never use my fryer for anything else but chips. I’ve tried cooking other things like breadcrumb-coated fish but had to throw the oil away because it smelt of fish and had millions of little burnt breadcrumbs in it. If I want to deep-fry anything other than chips I scoop out a few ladles of oil and transfer it to a large saucepan and use that, then if the oil doesn’t smell and there aren’t too many bits in it, I put a sieve lined with kitchen paper over the electric fryer and filter the oil back in afterwards.

Perhaps what puts people off is that we are often told to change the oil when it’s only been used a few times, which makes cooking chips an expensive process. Each summer I lug back a few 2-litre bottles of arachide (groundnut) oil from France, where it can be found in every supermarket, and give my fryer a good clean before filling it with the new oil. Apart from topping it up from time to time, I use the same oil until the next summer - in fact, it seems to improve the flavour and colour of the chips as the winter progresses. If you think that’s bad practice, I refer you to my mother, whose chip pan sat at the back of the stove for years having any old bit of fat left over from the Sunday roast chucked into it and none of the family ever suffered (and my mother will be 90 in November).

Having tried frozen chips and oven chips a couple of times I feel sorry for that 61% and would like to give the other 39% a pat on the back.

’07 update: I’m extremely bored with the chip saga – I’m sure you are too!

2007-02-09T10:37:00.000Z

Food journal: 09 February, 2002

I always turn to the cookery section first in the newspapers and I’ve noticed several references to verjuice in savoury dishes recently, so when I saw some in the supermarket I bought a bottle. The label was fulsome in its praise of the contents, using words like “extraordinary”, “indispensable” and “sublime” which, of course, made me immediately suspicious. It’s made from unfermented grape juice which is matured in barrels much like wine. I’m never that happy about using wine in cooking; it often makes sauces quite bitter and I find myself resorting to a spoonful of honey or redcurrant jelly to balance the flavour. Apparently verjuice is less acidic than wine so for that reason alone I was persuaded to give it a try.

I actually bought it on the day we had grilled sprats for dinner so we tried a few drops on them but decided that, although it tasted quite good, sprats really do need the acid that lemon juice provides.

Last night I took the penultimate bag of cooked turkey out of the freezer to defrost (there’s still some sliced breast left but I suspect it won’t be up to much and will probably be thrown away unless we have a famine over the next couple of months). I cut the best chunks of meat from the thigh and drumstick and threw the raggedy bits away. It seemed sensible to make a simple stew in order to assess the extravagant claims on the verjuice bottle so I fried a sliced onion in some olive oil, stirred in the turkey until it was lightly browned then added a small sprinkling of cornflour to absorb the oil and help thicken the sauce. Next I added a good slug of verjuice and reduced it for a couple of minutes before adding some turkey stock (yes, I’ve still got some!) and some thyme and bay. I then left it all to simmer for about 45 minutes so that the meat would be really tender.

Mark is going through a health kick at the moment and wants to cut down on salt. We’ve tried removing the salt cellar from the table but I thought, for a change, I would try not using salt in the cooking but put the salt cellar back on the table so that we could add exactly what we each wanted to our food.

To go with the turkey (without salt) I cooked rice (without salt) and runner beans from Kenya (without salt). I was quite worried about the beans because I’ve always had it drummed into me that it is essential to add plenty of salt to the water when boiling runner beans in order to retain their colour. In fact, it didn’t seem to make any difference - I suspect that leaving the lid off the pan is much more important.

It all tasted a bit dull and adding salt at the table didn’t work at all because it just sat on the top of the food. The beans were OK but the rice tasted really bland and not very nice. Also, it wasn’t fair to judge the taste of the turkey stew but, as far as I could tell after some hefty wielding of the salt grinder, the verjuice worked quite well. I wouldn’t exactly use the word “sublime” but it was pleasant and I would use it again. Not knowing how long it would last in the bottle, I turned the rest into ice cubes and then transferred them to a plastic bag and put them in the freezer until further notice.

’07 update: I can’t remember ever using the verjuice again and I certainly didn’t buy a second bottle. Come to think of it, I haven’t noticed any on the supermarket shelves for a long, long time. I haven’t found much use for balsamic vinegar lately, either – something else which was on everyone’s plate a few years back. I don’t like the way it turns everything brown. Recently, though, I bought some apple balsamic vinegar which is very good and a beautiful golden colour – it’s just right for salad dressings (with a touch of whole-grain mustard and honey added).

2007-02-08T13:34:00.000Z

Food journal: 08 February, 2002

I can’t believe we’ve never had sushi before. We went to a Japanese restaurant years ago when they first became popular in London but found the food unimpressive except for the wasabi paste which came with a plate of raw salmon and was so pungent we’ve never forgotten the experience. I made the mistake of taking a great sniff of it and was instantly reminded of having gas at the dentist when I was a child.

Now, of course, trays of sushi can be found in every supermarket on the shelf under the sandwiches but our Japanese friend, Kiko, assured us that we would have to go to a proper Japanese sushi bar to find the real thing. The restaurant we chose for our sushi initiation ceremony was small, unimposing and packed to the gills with people staring avidly at the revolving counter, piles of empty plates by their sides.

We sat down feeling self-conscious and had a look at what was going on. In front of us on the counter were jars and bowls of what were obviously accompaniments to be eaten with the sushi. There was soy sauce, pickled ginger, ground chillis and a tub of something which I stupidly took a big sniff of. Wasabi again.

I can just about cope with chopsticks but Mark hates them and can’t understand why a country with the third best economy in the world has never managed to invent the knife and fork. They didn’t appear to be an option so we did our best with the chopsticks.

As we didn’t know what anything was or how much it cost, we just helped ourselves to what we liked the look of from the revolving counter. We tried some salmon in a sticky brown sauce which was delicious and some brightly-coloured nuggets of we-know-not-what surrounded by rice and sheets of green seaweed which were a bit disappointing. A little dish of vegetables was tasty and very hot and some large prawns had the crispest batter I’ve ever encountered. There was some more fish in a soy broth, some very good fried chicken and a large seaweed pouch filled with vinegary rice and vegetables which, thankfully, we could pick up and eat with our fingers.

The trouble was, we didn’t feel that we were having dinner. It was quite uncomfortable perched side-by-side on high stools and we didn’t find it conducive to conversation, although everyone around us seemed to be managing to chat away at the tops of their voices. It took all our concentration balancing on the stools and trying not to drop our third set of chopsticks on the floor while grabbing the plate we fancied before it disappeared over the horizon.

What to drink was a problem, too. I had green tea which didn’t seem to quench the thirst brought on by the saltiness of the food and Mark appeared to be the only person there drinking white wine.

Just before we left, we spotted some different coloured plates hanging on the wall with prices on them so we were able to tot up what we’d eaten. We felt faintly smug that we’d had the good taste to choose the more expensive dishes but alarmed that what felt like a few small starters could add up to a fairly hefty bill.

It would have been brilliant for lunch but when we left we both found ourselves longing for a large carton of chips from the McDonalds at the end of the road and I had a terrible craving for a diet Coke.

’07 update: Although I’ve never totally mastered using chopsticks, I can’t help thinking that they are a good way to eat food. Bamboo utensils feel so much nicer than the hard metal knives and forks we use in the West and they look so pretty lying on their little porcelain rests. Mark has never managed to catch more than one grain of rice at a time and doesn’t even attempt slippery noodles. Our Chinese friend Mok, on the other hand, holds his bowl close to his mouth and shovels away merrily, making the whole procedure look like the easiest thing in the world – I think Mark should try harder. Plastic chopsticks are an abomination and should be banned.

2007-02-07T11:04:00.000Z

Food journal: 07 February, 2002

What haven’t we had for ages, I asked myself as I wandered round the supermarket? I stopped at the counter piled with haggis. Although the sell-by date was OK I thought they might be left over from Burns Night on 25 January so went on past. Just along from the haggis were some packets of black pudding which we can’t have eaten for at least a year, so I put one in my basket. I find a lot of black pudding in one go is too rich so I bought a packet of sausages as well.

The haggis made me think of swede which, made into “bashed neeps”, is its traditional accompaniment - I found a whopper in the vegetable section. I love black pudding with fried apples and picked up two apples as well (I can’t remember what sort they were but they came from Italy, which sounded promising).

Two things about swedes. First, they need to be peeled really thickly - when you cut into them with a knife you will see that there is a definite change of colour between the tough outer peel and the more delicate flesh. Second, when I first tried cooking mashed swedes they turned a bit watery, so since then I’ve added a couple of potatoes, which gives them a much better texture. Swedes and potatoes cook at more or less the same rate so they were boiled in big chunks in the same pan for about 20 minutes. I mashed them with a big knob of butter, no milk.

I grilled the sausages for a few minutes before adding the slices of black pudding, as this doesn’t take as long to cook. I didn’t need all the sausages so froze half the packet although I don’t suppose I’ll ever use them.

I peeled and cored the apples and cut each one into six segments, then mixed them with a teaspoon of sugar in a bowl. Mark doesn’t like the smell of butter cooking so I fried them in groundnut oil until golden brown, although I think they would have had a better flavour with butter. The texture was very good, very smooth - I must find out what they were called.

We had two sausages and two slices of black pudding each plus six apple segments and a big dollop of mashed swedes. The blandness of the swedes and apples went brilliantly with the rich, peppery black pudding. The plate lacked greenery, though, and a couple of sprigs of watercress would have been ideal if I’d thought of it.

’07 update: Reading about those ‘bashed neeps’ is making my mouth water. I’ve got some leftover roast lamb so I might finally get around to fulfilling my promise (on 4 Jan ’02!) to make a Shepherd’s Pie tonight for Mark – using the swede/potato combo for the topping. PS The chips last night were another disaster and I did EVERYTHING right. They turned dark brown as soon as they hit the oil for the second frying – it MUST be the way the potatoes are stored (ie too cold so that the starch turns to sugar). I was SO disappointed.

2007-02-06T10:46:00.001Z

Food journal: 06 February, 2002

Not many people know that the latin name for a rat is “rattus, rattus” and for a sprat is “sprattus, sprattus”. Honestly.

When I was younger and poorer I used to buy sprats quite often, mostly because they were cheap but also because I liked them. Men, though, don’t generally like fish that are fiddly to eat and Mark is no exception. However, having listened to my long lecture on how oily fish are good for preventing heart disease due to their omega 3 oil content, he let me defrost the bag of sprats that we had bought in the farmers’ market a few weeks ago.

When we go to the south of France in the summer the air around our house is thick with the smoke from our neighbours’ barbecues every Saturday morning without fail. Grilled sardines for Saturday lunch is de rigueur and even the people who haven’t got a terrace or garden set up their barbecues in the street outside their kitchen windows and pass the cooked sardines onto the waiting plates inside. I wish I had a barbecue for grilling my sprats (they are very similar to sardines, after all) but we live in a London flat so it’s out of the question. Wish we had some sunshine as well.

I don’t have one of those hinged, metal contraptions that the French use to make turning the fish easier, either, so I threaded them through the heads onto kebab sticks, about a dozen on each. Before that I’d shaken them about in a plastic bag containing porridge oats which I’d whizzed for a few seconds in the grinder to make fine crumbs. Lacking bacon fat, which would have given them a good flavour (the Scots like to coat their herrings in oatmeal and fry them in bacon fat), I turned them over a couple of times in olive oil in the bottom of the grill pan and laid them on the rack so that they didn’t overlap too much.

I was quite happy to eat the sprats with a squeeze of lemon and some bread and butter but Mark wanted some potatoes. Old potatoes are beginning to get horribly sprouty and discoloured at the moment - roll on Jersey Royals - so I left him to cook them. I’m not good at boiling potatoes, probably because plain-boiled potatoes remind me of school dinners or possibly because they usually fall apart on me before the inside is cooked. Mark has various theories about why this happens. One is that the heat should be turned off before they are quite tender and the potatoes left in the hot water for up to half an hour before draining. I must say they always turn out better than mine but I’m not prepared to start thinking about boiled potatoes an hour before I need them.

Today Mark wanted to have a go at another method that he’d just read about in the paper which involved leaving them to sit in hot water for half an hour before cooking them. The temperature of the water was supposed to be 165 degrees F but as we haven’t got a thermometer Mark poured a kettle of boiling water over them in the pan, put the lid on and left them for the required time. This procedure was supposed to do something vital to the starch molecules. They then had to be boiled as normal. I’m pleased to say that they fell apart just as much as when I cook them so at least I won’t have to go through that palaver in the future.

The sprats took about five minutes on each side to grill (the kebab sticks made it very easy to turn them over) and were delicious with a good squeeze of lemon. I ate all mine with my fingers, including most of the bones and tails as well (but not the heads). Mark started off using a knife and fork, gave that up almost immediately, spent ten minutes trying to get nice clean fillets off the bone of one sprat with his teeth, and ended up just nibbling the best bits along the top of each one and tossing the rest onto my plate to be finished off.

’07 update: I’ve just borrowed a book from the library called ‘Food & Cooking’ by Harold McGee – nearly nine hundred pages of everything you need to know about, er, food and cooking. I got it mostly to read about potatoes and the frying thereof (more about that tomorrow) but have just looked up ‘sprats’ in the index and immediately learned that ‘sprattus, sprattus’, when smoked, is called a ‘brisling’. In passing, I also learnt that a whole cold-smoked herring is called a ‘bloater’ while a hot-smoked one is called a ‘buckling’. Don’t forget.

2007-02-05T11:11:00.000Z

Food journal: 05 February, 2002

I rarely use my microwave for anything except reheating food. It’s one of those complicated ones that have a built-in grill and oven facility as well. When I first got it I read the instruction leaflet avidly and even tried out a couple of the recipes but nothing tasted remotely as good as it would have done if cooked in a conventional oven.

Apart from baked potatoes, which are reasonably edible if we’re in a hurry, I’ve only found one dish I use the microwave for quite regularly. It’s a potato gratin made with thinly sliced potatoes layered in a dish with chopped onions and covered with milk, which cooks in about 15 minutes (as opposed to more than an hour in the oven). I could, I suppose, use the grill in the microwave oven to brown the top when the potatoes are cooked but I’ve found it much easier to use the one on my normal cooker where I can keep an eye on it.

I bought some potatoes in the local greengrocers but then spotted some huge sweet potatoes and thought they might be interesting in a gratin so bought the biggest one they had. I followed the same procedure as I do with ordinary potatoes.

We wanted a meal without meat for a change and I had some salad stuff left over from the weekend but nothing to provide protein. We couldn’t have eggs two nights running and I didn’t feel like tofu so I bought a packet of Halloumi cheese. Halloumi is a very salty cheese from Cyprus and distinguishes itself from other cheeses in that it can be grilled; any other cheese would drip through the grill and end up as a pool of fat in the bottom of the pan.

While the sweet potatoes were gratinating themselves in the microwave I arranged some lettuce, baby tomatoes and spring onions on a big plate. I added some olives but decided against anchovies in case it all ended up too salty. The best bit was finding half a packet of fresh mint in the bottom of the fridge left over from last Friday (still fresh as a daisy as a result of my patent method for storing herbs in a plastic bag with all the air sucked out). I ate a couple of the leaves and tore up the rest and added them to the salad.

The next step was to grill the sliced Halloumi cheese on both sides: it takes slightly longer than toast. I needed to brown the top of the gratin but thought I’d add some extra crunch to the top first. I could have whizzed up some breadcrumbs in the grinder but I’ve found that if you just break stale bread into lots of little bits with your hands it produces a much more interesting topping than the dull uniformity of a layer of machine-made breadcrumbs. I tipped the bread bits into a bowl and drizzled a small amount of olive oil over the top and stirred them all about gently before spreading them over the top of the gratin. The grill was already really hot so it only took about a minute to turn golden brown.

I still had some dressing in a jar in the fridge so poured that over the salad and arranged the grilled Halloumi cheese on top.

This is my favourite kind of food - not too taxing to prepare but with lots of interesting flavours. The gratin was excellent and the mint in the salad was a revelation.

’07 update: The chips last night were not a success but I don’t want to bore you with another sob story. I think I know what went wrong. Mark is off to a farewell party at work tomorrow so I’ll have another go in secret on my own. Must keep an eye on my weight…

2007-02-04T12:05:00.000Z

Food journal: 04 February, 2002

Because I was deprived of my egg and chips last night and because there was still some ham left over from yesterday, we had ham omelette and chips tonight.

There’s no end to the lessons learned from making chips at home. Although I sometimes buy anonymous “dirty” potatoes from the local greengrocers, I usually try to get Maris Piper, as I’ve said before, because they tend to crisp up the best. The ones I used today were Maris Piper but they seemed to have a different texture from usual. They were very watery, almost like an apple. I used exactly the same technique for cooking them in the electric fryer as I did last week but it was as if they came from another planet.

Last week’s Maris Piper chips were pale gold and crisp whereas these turned brown very quickly and were very soggy. It’s a mystery. Afterwards, when I was mulling it over, I wondered if it was the way the potatoes had been kept. From my somewhat limited food science knowledge I know that potatoes should never be kept at a very low temperature (ie the fridge) because the starch turns to sugar and they tend to go black. I hadn’t kept my potatoes in the fridge and they weren’t showing any signs of discoloration but I wonder if somewhere along the line the starch had somehow turned to sugar. That would account for their eagerness to turn toffee brown within seconds of hitting the hot fat. It might also account for their watery texture.

Goodness knows what happens to our vegetables between the field and our plates via the supermarket shelves. Perhaps somewhere in some vast warehouse where my bag of potatoes had been laying, someone absentmindedly turned the temperature gauge down a notch. If so, I hope they discovered it later and are feeling bad about ruining my chips.

’07 update: It’s Sunday today and I realise that my obsession with cooking chips is beginning to make me repeat myself but I can’t stop now. Tonight, for the first time, I’m going to use my non-electric deep-fat fryer (just a big saucepan with a mesh basket which goes on the hob). I’ve got a thermometer at the ready, plus several litres of groundnut oil, a bag of Nicola potatoes from the farmers’ market – and a very small amount of optimism.

2007-02-03T10:25:00.000Z

Food journal: 03 February, 2002

My son, Ben and his partner, Pia and their two children, Alexa and Max, for lunch. In the old days, pre-children, we would have sat around the table for hours with Ben and Pia drinking wine and talking about this, that and the other. Nowadays it’s a matter of piling everything on the table and letting everybody grab what they want and eat it on their laps. Alexa, who’s four, likes to climb on a chair, take what she wants then carry on with the serious business of playing with her Barbie dolls. Max, who’s only 2½ months, might or might not be awake. If he is, Pia has to juggle him and her plate as best she can.

I usually do salady things and I laid out assorted bowls of greenery, tomatoes, cucumber etc along with some dressing in a jam jar (easy for shaking and pouring). I had ham and the rest of the salt beef, with mustard and horseradish sauce to go with them. There were also three sorts of bread: our usual big round white loaf from the deli up the road; an oval brown loaf containing walnuts and raisins, also from the deli, and a pile of slices from Mark’s Turkestan bread which is very high in fibre and which he eats for its regulating properties.

It was a cold day, though, and salad seemed insubstantial so I made a soup to start us off. I had some carrots and parsnips but, whatever the vegetable, I always use the same method to make soup, which I like to think tastes exactly the same as that slapped down in front of every French routier when he takes his lunchtime break from driving his lorry, since time immemorial.

Onions, carrots and celery (the last is optional - a pinch of celery seeds from the cupboard is fine) are chopped and left to “sweat” in some butter or oil in a covered pan for 15 minutes (“sweating” is not a nice word but refers to the rather lengthy process of simmering the basic flavouring vegetables in fat to bring out their sweetness; this is essential - no pain, no gain). Next add the chopped main ingredient(s) in an appropriate amount - in my case, two large carrots and six baby parsnips - plus two medium diced potatoes. Medium is a relative term and you would need to add a large medium potato for, say, a watercress soup and a small medium potato for a parsnip soup, which will depend more on the parsnips than the potatoes for its thickness. Don’t leave the potato out altogether, though.

Give everything a stir and add salt and pepper and some water or stock. Don’t give yourself a hard time if you haven’t any stock - there are those who think that vegetable soups are much better made with pure water. Lid on again and simmer until the ingredients are very tender, then purée by whatever means is available. Because I usually only make soup for 2 people I used to use a small liquidiser but I’ve recently acquired one of those wand things that you just put in the pan and switch on - it must be switched off before taking it out of the pan, though, or the soup ends up on the walls. A sieve and a wooden spoon to push everything through it would do or, if you like all things French, a mouli-légumes perched over a bowl.

Whichever you choose, it’s nicer if you leave a few lumps in it for texture and stir in some butter and chopped parsley at the end (again, don’t feel bad about the parsley - if you haven’t got any, leave it out, or use coriander etc). There are millions of other flavourings you might like to add to your soup but curry powder goes very well with parsnips. Because of Alexa, though, I added just a tiny pinch of allspice to give it a faint spicy but non-curried touch (she wouldn’t eat it anyway and just had a slice of bread before the lure of Barbie got too much for her).

Pudding was an M&S cherry tart with cream.

Much later, baby-sitting duties over and the crumbs hoovered up, Mark finished off the rest of the soup and made himself a ham sandwich. I had six crab sticks and a packet of Balti-flavoured crisps.

’07 update: As I’m known as a bit of a foodie, my friends’ jaws often drop when I confess that my favourite sandwich contains crab sticks, ice-berg lettuce and Heinz salad cream. On white bread. I tried a Marks and Spencer seafood cocktail sandwich once which contained crab sticks (among other seafood), rocket and mayonnaise on fancy brown bread. I didn’t like it at all.

2007-02-02T11:54:00.000Z

Food journal: 02 February, 2002

My son, Ben and his partner, Pia and their two children are coming tomorrow for lunch and to take advantage of our offer to baby-sit, so last night I took out a piece of salt beef from the freezer that I bought recently in Borough market. It was too big for Mark and me to eat on our own so I thought that if we had some tonight there would be plenty left over for tomorrow.

I couldn’t remember if I’d ever cooked boiled salt beef before and looked it up in my old Mrs Beeton cookery book. Her method was the same as for unsalted beef except that at the end of the recipe she quotes an extraordinary tip for “preserving the gravy in salt beef when it is to be served cold”. She got the idea from Alexander Soyer, a famous French chef in the 19th century. I quote: “Fill 2 tubs with cold water, into which throw a few pounds of ice; when the meat is done, put it into one of the tubs of ice-water, let it remain 1 minute, then take it out and put it into the other tub. Fill the first tub again with water, and continue this process for about 20 minutes; then set the meat upon a dish, and let it remain until quite cold. When cut, the fat will be as white as possible, and the whole of the gravy will have been saved.” How’s that for dedication?

As it was an old-fashioned kind of dish, I simmered the beef in water into which I’d crumbled one Oxo cube. It took two and a half hours to cook so is not a dish to be thrown together at the end of a long working day.

Carrots were the obvious choice for a vegetable and I had plenty of time to prepare my favourite caramelised carrots. To start the dish, they have to be cut into batons about the thickness of two matches and it takes ages, especially as we can easily eat a pound of them between us. The cooking is quick, though. The carrots go into a heavy pan with a couple of tablespoons of water, a dribble of oil or butter and a small spoonful of sugar. The heat must be kept high and the lid on while the carrots cook so that they are tender when the last of the water has evaporated and they can then start to colour in the remaining fat. They have to be watched during the last few minutes of cooking because if they are not brown enough they will be too sweet and if they are burnt they will be bitter. A bit stressful but well worth it. Only add salt at the end.

When the beef was cooked I poured off some of the liquid into a pan and used it to reheat the potatoes left over from yesterday, then poured them around the meat to serve. The liquid was very salty - too salty really. I was left wondering whether, if freezers had always been around, would salted meat have ever been invented? Just imagine, though - no bacon!

Horseradish sauce was essential; we tried a spoonful of mustard each but it didn’t cut it...

’07 Update: Horseradish sauce in jars never tastes very good to me. My grandmother used to grow long hairy roots of horseradish in her garden and when she wanted to make some sauce she would pull one up, cut a piece off the bottom and then shove the root back into the ground until she needed it again. After the knob of horseradish was peeled, grated and folded into lightly-whipped cream, her sauce was ready for the table. I can’t remember the taste but I wish I had a garden so that I could try it too.

2007-02-01T11:57:00.000Z

Food journal: 01 February, 2002

I removed the chicken that’s been in the fridge for two days from its marinade and put it in the bottom of the grill pan with some oil over the top. Grilled chicken takes quite a long time to cook; it’s easy to think it’s ready when the outside is golden brown but after twenty minutes it will still probably be too red for comfort inside. I like grilled chicken - especially when it’s been marinaded in yoghurt and spices - to be a bit “caught”, ie burnt in places, so I kept cooking it for half an hour, moving it around and turning it over to distribute the “caught” areas.

While the chicken grilled I boiled 2lbs of new potatoes. I also racked my brains for something exciting to flavour them with. In the end I fried some mustard seeds in oil and, when they starting popping maniacally in the pan, added a sliced onion and a chopped chilli. When the onion was brown I ground up some coriander seeds and added them. It still seemed to lack something so I added, rather daringly, some of the Moroccan spice mixture I bought recently (remember Ras El Hanout on 9th January?). Half the cooked potatoes were added (I kept the other half back in a bowl so that I won’t have to cook a ‘filler’ tomorrow) with a little water, and the whole simmered for a few minutes to get the flavour of the spices into the potatoes.

My friend Baskaran had shown me a quick and easy accompaniment for Tandoori chicken which involves slicing a large onion and mixing it in a bowl with lemon juice, sugar and chopped mint. It should sit around for an hour or two to soften but it’s still good after a mere half hour. Also, I’d only used half the tub of yoghurt for the marinade so I chopped up some cucumber and mixed it with the remainder to make a raita. Finally, I found a pear which was beginning to go soft at the stalk end so I peeled and chopped the best bits and put them in a bowl with a spoonful of mango chutney and stirred it around. Thus I had three interesting pickles to go with the chicken and none of them took more than two minutes to put together.

I served the chicken on some iceberg lettuce leaves, like they do in Indian restaurants, with a wedge of lemon on the side. It would have been nice to have had a set of those stainless steel bowls on a twirly stand for the pickles and a CD of Ravi Shankar to put on the hi-fi but it was quite a feast nevertheless.

’07 update: I really like the idea of food which is ‘caught’. It tastes better – as long as it’s not overdone. Think of those French tartes aux pommes where the edges of the pastry and the tips of the apple slices have tinges of the darkest brown, bordering on black. Or think of the fat on a grilled lamb chop – the slightly bitter burnt bits cutting through the richness of the inner morsels. Delicious. Compare these with pallid pastry and pale, rubbery fat and you’ll see what I mean.

2007-01-31T10:50:00.000Z

Food journal: 31 January, 2002

There’s a film on we want to see tonight. Before we go to the cinema we’re going to have an early dinner in a restaurant, so the rest of the chicken will have to wait until tomorrow.

Because the chicken will sit around in the fridge for another day I decided to marinate it with some yoghurt and spices like Tandoori Chicken. When we go out for a curry I nearly always have Tandoori Chicken with Naan bread (and Mark nearly always has Mutton Madras with boiled rice). I’ve tried making Tandoori Chicken with spice mixes from the supermarket but they are a pale shadow of the real thing. However, I like the way that yoghurt tenderises the meat and the way it chars under the grill so have taken to making up my own spice blend according to what I have in the cupboard.

I used to teach an aspiring Indian chef, called Baskaran, who advised me always to include plenty of lemon juice, garlic and ginger along with the yoghurt and spices in my marinade. So these ingredients all went into a bowl except for the spices. I rifled through my cupboard and lined up all the jars I could find. Trying not to be too over-the-top I chose the following: coriander; cumin; black peppercorns; turmeric; cinnamon; allspice; fennel seeds; green cardamoms (and the ratios were: 2:1:1:1:1:half:half:half!). The special coffee grinder I keep for the purpose ground everything up and the mixture joined the yoghurt etc in the bowl. Baskaran would probably throw up his hands in horror at this concoction but then I threw up my hands in horror when he revealed that the redness of his Tandoori Chicken came from food colouring.

The chicken needed to be slashed a few times with a knife to allow the flavours of the marinade to penetrate. This was easy to do on the legs but not so easy on the wings which I hadn’t managed to skin very well either. The best way to mix the marinade with the chicken is with your hands but don’t do that with bought Tandoori mix - even after you’ve washed them you will still end up looking like a mass murderer. As it was, my hands turned daffodil yellow from the turmeric. At least it’s dark in the cinema. I put the bowl (covered with clingfilm to avoid spicy eggs, spicy butter, spicy everything) in the fridge, put some perfume on, scrubbed my hands again, put my gloves on and went to meet Mark.

I never complain in restaurants. Never, ever. I’m English. But I must have been reading too many Winner’s Dinners columns because now I’m a complainer, official. The first course was fine - frisée lettuce with croûtons, bacon and a poached egg. We both chose braised rabbit with mustard and oregano sauce from the set menu for our main course and were presented with an enormous leg each which smelled and looked extremely good. When we tried to get a purchase on it with the knife, however, it just bounced straight off. We kept trying for about ten minutes but I eventually gave up, put my knife and fork together on the plate and sank back in my chair, exhausted.

A waiter came rushing over and asked what was wrong. We apologised profusely (!) and said that we couldn’t eat the rabbit and that it probably needed cooking for another couple of hours. He was very nice and said we could have anything else on the menu that we wanted. We were in a hurry by this time and had lost our appetites so I had another starter of chicken and avocado salad and Mark had some roast vegetables with goat’s cheese.

I’m still in two minds about complaining; there’s no doubt it casts a pall over the evening, however well it’s handled, which is a shame - but it also seems scandalous to pay lots of money for something you can’t eat. Just have to hope it doesn’t happen again for a long time.

’07 update: I won’t tell you the name of the restaurant because it might have improved over the last five years. On the whole, I think British restaurants have improved, I suspect mostly because there is now such a lot of competition. Every time a shop closes near where we live, it becomes a restaurant or a café. And when we want to go out for a meal, the huge choice is so confusing that wherever we end up going we think we should have gone somewhere else (“I think that other one would have been better/cheaper/livelier…”).

2007-01-30T13:02:00.000Z

Food journal: 30 January, 2002

It seems ages since we had chicken. I bought a whole chicken but didn’t want to cook it all at once because it’s difficult to think of ways to use up the cooked leftovers. I took the breasts off and skinned them, then removed the legs and wings and skinned them. That left me with lots of ragged bits of skin and the carcass to make stock.

When I’ve mentioned stock before, it’s just been a matter of taking whatever scraps were available and boiling them up in enough water to cover them for an hour or so but, of course, there is more to a proper stock than that. The perfect stock has to be well-flavoured and, above all, crystal clear, and there are vital steps in its preparation. I must have made hundreds of gallons of chicken stock in my time and this is how I avoid the murky and the muddy. Beef stock is another matter and involves roasting the bones in the oven first, which is a bore - I’ve only made that a few times.

There are three trinities to be added to the basic raw bones and skin: a) chunks of onion, carrot and celery, b) sprigs of thyme, parsley and bay, c) vinegar (or white wine), salt and pepper. These can all go in at the beginning. The vinegar/wine is essential because it does something scientific to the albumen in the bones and helps to prevent cloudiness - you only need a dessertspoonful of vinegar or a quarter of a glass of wine. Salt is not essential and should be added with a light hand, especially if you intend to boil the stock down to make a sauce at a later stage. Peppercorns are better than ground pepper because they get strained out at the end.

When everything’s in, fill the pan up with cold water, give it a stir and bring to the boil, not stirring. As it comes to the boil, there will be a lot of scum on the top. Most instructions for making stock will tell you to skim off the scum and by all means stand there for twenty minutes with a tablespoon taking off every scrap (along with half the flavouring ingredients) but I don’t bother. As long as the heat is turned down as soon as it boils so that the liquid is simmering very, very gently, the scum solidifies enough to be strained out with the rest of the ingredients. Whatever you do, don’t put a lid on.

I cook chicken stock for two hours, having a look at it from time to time and adding some boiling water gently if the level has gone down too much (if it has you are probably boiling and not simmering it). I’ve tried doing it for longer in the hope that I will get extra flavour out of the bones but it seems to end up tasting stale. At the end of two hours, put a sieve over a large bowl, use a saucepan lid to hold back most of the contents of the pan and pour the liquid gently through the sieve. There will be a few bits of solid matter which will sink conveniently down to the bottom and some fat which will float equally conveniently to the top. In the middle will be your clear, golden stock.

If you put it in the fridge until it’s cold, the fat will solidify on the top and can be lifted off and saved for frying eggs or for roast potatoes or for something else. I’m not that keen on having big bowls of stock hanging about so, once I’ve removed the fat, I pour it off the sediment into a pan and boil it down to a more manageable amount - it will probably then set to a jelly when re-cooled, which is handy because you can’t then spill it all over the bottom of the fridge.

Stock stored in the fridge should be boiled up every other day for ten minutes to keep it fresh but it’s easier to keep back what you will use quickly and freeze the rest in small portions for future treats (although a word of warning: it will lose its gelatinous qualities in the freezer and won’t make such unctuous sauces). I love making stock and when it’s in its bowl ready for the fridge I always start dreaming about how I’m going to use it and smiling idiotically to myself.

Back to the chicken. I decided to use the breasts tonight and keep the legs and wings until tomorrow. I bashed them out between two sheets of clingfilm and left them in a bowl with some lemon zest, lemon juice and ground black pepper for half an hour. I made a sauce to go with pasta using some mushrooms, courgettes and onions. It wasn’t really a sauce - I just fried up the chopped vegetables, added some garlic and a few tablespoons of stock which I nicked from the pan bubbling away at the back of the cooker.

I brushed the chicken breasts with olive oil and grilled them for as short a time as I dared but they were still a bit overcooked (five minutes a side maximum next time). For some reason I opened a jar of anchovies and draped a couple over each chicken breast - they weren’t essential but tasted nice and helped hold the sprigs of parsley in place.

The pasta was from the supermarket but looked authentically Italian and was a pretty bright red. It was so authentically Italian that it didn’t have the ingredients listed in English on the packet but it soon became clear as we ate it that the red colour came from the many chilli peppers used to flavour it. I can now speak Italian - peperoncino piccante means very, very hot. After we’d got our breath back we agreed that it was quite interesting.

’07 update: As I said above, chicken stock which has been frozen loses its gelatinous texture (sweet jellies do the same so beware of creating a bowl of liquid when you were hoping for a wobbly mass). My answer is to keep a packet of leaf gelatine in the store cupboard and dissolve some in the de-frosted and heated stock before I use it. This is not really necessary for everyday sauces which are thickened with starch (eg flour, cornflour - even Bisto if you like it) but for special-occasion, reduced stocks which are thickened with butter (montée, in French) it vastly cuts down the chances of the sauce separating.

2007-01-29T11:41:00.001Z

Food journal: 29 January, 2002

Mark went out with people from work tonight. Normally when I am on my own in the evening, I rush out at an embarrassingly early hour and buy a huge portion of fish and chips which I eat with loads of sweet pickled onions. Mark likes fish and chips from time to time but I’d like it more often.

We had fish last night so I went for my second favourite option, which is a fried egg sandwich. I did two very large slices of white bread and butter, spread one slice with copious amounts of tomato ketchup, arranged two fried eggs on top, broke the yolks and spread them about a bit, put the other slice on top and cut it into four so that I could eat it reasonably decorously (with a roll of kitchen paper beside me, just in case) in front of the telly.

’07 update: Our local fish and chip shop was very good. Alas, it’s there no more - the huge deep-fat pans, the welcoming fug, the jars of gherkins and pickled eggs on the counter have all disappeared. In their place is a pristine wet fish shop run by a man who sounds as if he went to Eton. The fish he sells is amazingly fresh and extortionately expensive. How I miss the fish and chip shop…

2007-01-28T12:38:00.001Z

Food journal: 28 January, 2002

Smoked haddock. A real Finnan haddock. I wasn’t really sure what a Finnan haddock was until I looked it up, and very exciting it is (to me, anyway). It’s a whole fish split down the middle before smoking. Most of them come from Aberdeen but some come from London and to tell the difference, it all depends on which way they hang, so to speak. I had a look at mine and the backbone was on the left which meant it was a London cure. Fascinating.

That ersatz risotto I made recently has obviously been preying on my mind because I felt the need to make a real one containing lots of butter and Parmesan cheese to go with the smoked fish. The recipe I looked up had almost as much butter and Parmesan as rice so I cut the first two down a bit but did use Arborio rice, saffron and lots of proper stock.

Turning the radio on, I glued my slippers to the floor and stirred patiently for twenty minutes, adding the hot stock gradually as I was instructed. After the twenty minutes were up the rice still felt hard in the middle so I persevered for another ten minutes. Still hard. It took forty minutes altogether and a few additions of water from the kettle because I’d run out of stock before the rice was the correct consistency - soupy but still firm.

I hadn’t dared stop stirring during the forty minutes but had managed to poach the fish with a little milk in another saucepan at the same time. Before I started on the risotto I’d cooked some asparagus which were now cold - I hadn’t very high hopes for them anyway because I’d bought them cheap in the market and they looked a bit grizzled at the tips.

When I’d added the final lump of butter and handful of grated Parmesan to the risotto it looked beautiful - fragrant with saffron and spreading lazily across the plates. The trouble was I hadn’t had time to heat the plates properly and had to leave it while I frantically pulled the flesh off the smoked haddock and piled it on top. The asparagus had to be served cold.

Even more of a disaster, Mark was on the phone and couldn’t get to the table for another agonising couple of minutes so, although the first few mouthfuls were sublime, the risotto soon stopped moving about and became a rather intractable lump. In the end we almost needed a knife as well as a fork to eat it. Still, it was greatly superior to my other risotto, which I’ve now decided to call my pilaff so as not to insult the real thing (I’ll change it again when I get round to making a proper pilaff). The asparagus weren’t bad (just very cold).

I know the first Golden Rule of the kitchen is to make sure that plates are well-heated but occasionally, just occasionally, I forget. Mark’s mum used to put her cold plates in the washing-up bowl and fill it up with hot water from the tap to heat them up. It works surprisingly quickly. You can also buy gadgets, I think, to put in the microwave or plug into the electricity if you can’t put the plates in the oven or over the grill, but you still have to remember to do it.

’07 update: That smoked salmon and risotto sound very appetising but it’s a Sunday in ’07 and we all know what that means for us tonight. The chip problem. I’ve got three choices: a) dash out and buy a saucepan big enough to accommodate my new chip basket, b) have a look in the supermarket to see if they’ve re-stocked the frozen rosti we like, or c) make some sautéed potatoes at home. I’m not prepared to go for a) because I don’t like being rushed into kitchen purchases, and I’ve got no faith at all in b), so it’s not really a choice at all. Sautéed potatoes it is then.