New Miracle Diet (Honest)

I am, I confess, fascinated by the stream of often contradictory advice that nutritionists provide. Red meat is bad for you, but on the other hand red meat is good for you. Fat is the root of all evil, but perhaps fat is quite good for us. Coffee kills us, but coffee can be quite beneficial. It is I'm sure completely coincidental that the good for you side often comes from studies sponsored by those marketing an item. [Ha, a couple of years later and the experts who told us eggs are bad for us now say the opposite. Soft-boiled best, both eggs and (perhaps?) nutritional experts]

Elsewhere here I've put forward the very simple idea (and I don't pretend to be the first to do this) that diversity in what we consume is the likeliest way to eat healthily. Now I want to put forward the Pilkington Diet, not suggesting we all eat Pilkingtons, but expanding on the idea of range.

The government's 5-a-day regime (apparently the professional advice was 7, but they bottled it) is clearly short term. If we were to eat just a portion every day of the same five, say carrot, apple, rhubarb, lentils and lettuce, we would meet those guidelines, but it doesn't take a genius (thankfully) to see that it would be a very limited diet indeed, and we'd be missing out on lots of complicated things with big long names.

My solution is to use a number as arbitrary as the 10000 steps a day target about which my wife is obsessed. Why stop there? Let's make it two arbitrary numbers.

Arbitrary number the first: I aim to eat 30 different fruits, vegetables and nuts (30 combined, not of each) a week). Arbitrary number the second, I aim to eat 100 different f, v and n over the year.

In my book (unpublished, indeed unwritten) 'The Pilkington Diet - My Way to a Richer Lifestyle' (ambiguity of richer intended) I will set out the rules for combining the foods, and most importantly for establishing what a portion is. Here's an extract about portions: 'The amount of a portion varies according to numerous factors, but in most cases it can be taken as 2.7 tads, or in Imperial a smidge and a bit.' If I recall the official guidelines a portion is to do with spoonfuls of some sort. Heaped or level I can't remember.

Other than people with allergies foolish enough to ignore them, following the Pilkington Diet is unlikely to kill anybody, give them foul breath, or bore them rigid, except in counting and logging the different produce eaten.

Relais Routier as Touchstone

Much though I enjoy a wide variety of culinary cultures, like Brits many of my generation French remains the ne plus ultra. Of course French cooking covers another wide variety in itself: regional traditions; the haute cuisine of Escoffier and the like; cuisine bourgeoise; etc etc. But the sub-group to which I am drawn most is the cookery one finds (or at least used to find, my travels in France having been limited of late) in Relais Routier establishments.

The Relais Routier restaurant is a marvellously democratic institution. Along with the lorry drivers who form a significant percentage of their clientele you'll see lunch tables occupied by gendarmes, business travellers, maybe the local mayor being lashed up so he'll sign some permission or other; families en route to the coast, country or mountains. They're drawn to these places for several reasons, including that they offer great value for money; rapid turnover means the food is fresh; and the cooking is excellent (otherwise they fail and close). We counter these independent eateries with Little Chef. Worse, Little Chef after Heston Blumenthal stuck his mottie in.

I thought about Relais Routier yesterday because I cooked leeks vinaigrette, one of the great standbys of the RR buffet table. It's one of those dishes that needs no chefy spin. Good fresh leeks (in our case dug from the allotment an hour before they hit the pot) washed carefully of grit and dirt then boiled in salty water until tender; carefully drained, cooled (you can dip them in iced water to keep the green bits greener, but why bother when they get covered up anyway?), slit lengthwise and placed cut-side-up on a serving plate. Their surfaces are then given a liberal dose of chopped parsley followed by hard boiled egg grated over, and a very mustardy olive oil and red wine vinegar vinaigrette.

That buffet table would also include a regularly refilled dish of olives; cervelas or some similar charcuterie; lentil salad; tomato salad (made with tomatoes that taste of something more than water); potato salad; grated carrots squeezed until almost dry and mixed with herbs and salt; maybe salade nicoise. The list goes on, every entry on it both - relatively - cheap to make and delicious.

If a Man Is Tired of London PR....

I am on the mailing list of innumerable PR companies, the idea being there might, just occasionally, be something worth writing about to which they will alert me. The problem is, for every release of interest I have to wade through about 5000 that are a) badly written (ungrammatical, poor syntax, cliched...); b) utterly fatuous; c) tell me about another daft trend/food fashion in London.

A while back it was hot dogs served with champagne. The combination of fey, arch, look at my wad, and nauseating self-regard (aren't we so daring to break the boundaries? - no, no you're cocks who follow fashions as if they are the route to salvation, though that is actually the A47).

I love hot dogs, or good ones anyway. I love champagne. The two together, once in a while, are an interesting idea. But a restaurant - dozens apparently - based on the idea? You can feel the brainwaves washing over the place - 'Is anyone seeing me here eating hotdogs and drinking champagne?'

The best hot dogs (plural, they were big but good) I ever ate were in Buffalo New York, sold by an outfit called Ted's, part of a big chain I believe. We queued at the massive outdoor stall in our business suits, waiting behind construction workers, policemen, factory hands, it was like a foodie version of the Village People. Cooked over charcoal so they had a real hint of BBQ to them, served in a simple torpedo roll with masses of onions, sweet mustard and/or hot sauce, with crispily delicious onion rings as an unmissable side they were well worth the wait. Ted's is I think a third generation business, and will doubtless last for many more; those puerile hot dog and champagne bars in London are mostly closed by now I guess. Their owners and clientele will have moved on to the next big thing, or the next after that or the next after that. Sushi and chips? Pate de foie gras smoothies? (darling I've always loved them). Snake steaks with milk shakes and cup-cakes?

The most memorably badly written PR claptrap I was ever sent btw was from Fortnum's, or at least the apparently semi-literates then handling their PR. They informed me that, and I'll try to get their precise phrasing and punctuation right, however painful: 'The Scotch egg originated at Fortnum & Mason, in the 18th century which was specially created for their high end customers.' One for the scrapbook. Happily I have no hair to pull out.

Deposits in My Taste Bank

We breakfast like kings, though with a better conscience. Nearly every such meal includes a home-made smoothie to get a flying start on our intake of fruit and veg, and because is it thoroughly enjoyable. As I took the first sip of this morning's version I was transported back to the 1970s, or even the 1960s - time travel by food - as the flavour of Vimto coursed through my system.

I'm not sure what actually flavours Vimto (natural or otherwise), but I am reasonably certain it's not a combination of blueberries, banana, peach, plum, and grapes, with lime and satsuma juice, almond milk and yakult to render it more liquid. But those ingredients combined to a moment of adult Vimto awareness.

However grown up we feel, or our roles dictate we should feel, deposits made in ones childhood taste bank are central to our experience of the world of food, at whatever age. I will confess that the flavour of bubble gum, something I have not actually eaten/chewed for decades, is very important to my appreciation of one of life's greatest pleasures, beer - it is significant in Leffe, Chimay, any wheat beer, Traquair, and many others. 'Ah, bubble gum, we love bubble gum,' says my brain (which now I notice it, sounds a tad schizoid).

Similarly with wine. Many grapes and wines hold a hint of Bazooka Joe, but the one where it is/was front and centre is/was Beaujolais Nouveau. Whatever happened to wines en primeur? Whatever happened to the pleasure of Beaj Nouveau, once raced from France to England to minimise the delay between its readiness and our drinking? Some was as rough as a Mohicanned badger's arse, of course; but every year as we took our first sip of the stuff we'd note the bubble gum (and to be accurate, the bananas too) and as jolly advanced nine-year-olds whatever our true age, we'd smile.

(Not) by Bread Alone

There are other things in my life apart from food. Fishing for one - if anyone out there is interested in publishing a book on sea fishing by someone who can actually write (that's me btw), get in touch.

Music is another. Here there's a link with food, however (but then I guess the fishing is partly to do with eating the occasional catch), as my tastes in both are decidedly broad - I really hope that the 'People who bought this also bought...' bit on i-Tunes reflects my recent purchases of clarinet and piano music by Dame Elizabeth Maconchy and Fast Shadow by the Wu Tang Clan (because I love the movie Ghost Dog, but also because it's a terrific piece of music). Both ways - fans of hard rap or whatever it wishes to call itself shouldn't shut their minds to classical stuff, nor the other way around. And Gravel Pit is also highly recommended.

And while we're on music: to my tiny little mind there is only one answer as to what should replace God Save the Queen (atheist republican here who hates that dirge for its unmusicality apart from everything else). Let's begin the campaign to select (We Don't) Need This Fascist Groove Thang by Heaven 17 as the new national anthem. It makes a political statement about our attitude to extremism; while enjoying a great beat it is relatively slow, so easy for even footballers to sing; it is anti-pompous - every other bloody national anthem is po-faced and humourless; and I would love to see the great and the good having to mouth the word 'thang' at gatherings of the greedy. You saw it here first.

What Do You Cook?

At a social gathering some time back it came out that I am the family cook. Someone of the female persuassion very patronisingly thought that meant I'd mastered one or two dishes for when The Dear Leader was taken up with plans for world domination and didn't have time to fend for us. This person asked the stupid (in the circs) question: 'What do you cook?' Inevitably my reply was sarcastic, but a more considered one would have been that I cook from a repertoire learned over years, to which new things are occasionally added.

Yesterday's main meal was from the tried and tested list, stuffed cabbage Troo style (there should be a circumflex over the first 'o' btw, but I can't figure out how to do them on this). Slice a savoy or similar across as thinly as possible, plunge the greenery into boiling salted water for five minutes, drain, then layer cabbage, sausagemeat, cabbage, sausagemeat, cabbage in a buttered casserole with a good lid and cook at 140C - 150C for 120 - 150 minutes. Each layer of cabbage is seasoned; I add a clove or three of garlic; and the top is dotted with butter before cooking. But it is essentially simple (thank you the late great Jane Grigson).

Such dishes allow me, immodestly, to consider myself a cook (and specifically for that one, an austerity cook once again). In that case it is justified by the making of something really good (there are never any leftovers) for a small outlay (£2 for Sainsubury's Toulouse-style sausages, carefully skinned, 69p I think for the cabbage, pence for the butter and garlic. Cookerhooddomness is reniforced by the fact that I only make it once a year, or even every other year - contrary to that lady's thought, my repertoire consists of hundreds (thousands? I never counted) of dishes. It's something that satisfies in more ways that one - quite filling, but also (contrary to what might be expected of slow-cooked cabbage) enticing beforehand, the savoury sausagey smell filling the ground floor.

It's good, and healthy, to add new stuff to the list too. Midweek I made us something that definitely gets added to the roll of honour for repeating. It was essentially a salad, with rocket as the leaf, plus toms, spring onions, and yellow pepper to bulk it out. To make it more fillling and interesting I added little scallops fried in salty butter, and chunks cut from half a Galia melon. Dressed with lime juice and olive oil, and seasoned with the emphasis on pepper, it was delicious, the salty seafood and sweet melon a lovely match. Not exactly an austerity plateful, though the melon and rocket needed using up and the bag of frozen scallops set up back £4, cheaper than a burger meal for one. And, perhaps because it was so flavoursome, we needed nothing else afterwards.

Good Stuff

Much to SC's annoyance I make the same pronouncement at every Christmas lunch: I'd rather have the accompaniments than the meats, if it came down to a choice. Not that it did, this year we got outside much of a turkey crown and a double wing rib of beef (the latter supplied from the fine Aberdeen Angus cattle of Henry Rowntree). Both were excellent, but it was the stuffing and the bread sauce that will live long in the taste memory.

Whisper it softly, but the bread sauce was an improvement on the blessed Delia's, whose recipe I followed in the main. The quantity of onion and pepper in the steeping milk was doubled, however, left longer, and removed and binned before the breadcrumbs were added, not returned (until it's nearly time to serve) as she suggests. I always make it with nutmeg rather than cloves which are far too medicinal for me. It tasted wonderful, and was as white as the snow that one fears we may never see again.

The stuffing was equally simple: 2oz of breadcrumbs, a medium onion chopped very finely, six sage leaves ditto, the meat from two butcher's sausages, a handful of walnuts reduced to crunchy nibs for texture, seasoning, and an egg to bind it all together. Cooked at 160C for an hour in a dish as deep as it is wide the top was brown and the inside still moist.

To prove my point, at least partly, the turkey and beef made fine sandwiches and snacks for several days; the few bites of bread sauce and stuffing went before Boxing Day was done.