Make that salt mine

It would be easy to think, based on general media coverage, that salt was one of the biggest enemies you can face in the search for a healthy diet.

Funnily enough, my mother – who, as a physiotherapist, had first to undertake basic nursing training – has always found the advice on cutting salt to be contrary to what they were told.

The thinking then was that you would consume as much salt as your body required.

Of course, that was at the end of the 1940s and was before these halcyon days of vast amounts of processed foods stuffed with hidden salts and sugars.

Indeed, a few years ago, I read comments from a GP who was visited by a lady who was worried about her husband.

He apparently put what she thought was a lot of salt on his meal at dinner.

The doctor stressed that that was not a problem: the problem was those hidden salts.

Now I eat very little processed food. And I’m careful about how much I use in cooking – some in, say, casseroles etc, and some in potatoes, pasta or rice, but little else. I’d rather add later – sometimes as a specific garnish, as the French do with fleur de sel.

However, in the last week, there have been no starchy carbs – the weather ensures I have no inclination for them. So, a pretty much perfect diet from the perspective of salt advice.

Yesterday, an hour or so after a light lunch – some left-over boerevors and salad – I felt exhausted; really shattered.

The germ of an idea occurred to me.

I’d had no caffeine for several days, as a measure against dehydration in this hot weather (and I am not complaining about the weather, by the way).

I’d also been making more than usually sure that I was drinking plenty of water – probably little less than two litres by that stage yesterday afternoon.

So, all-round sensible stuff, combined with not spending too much time in the direct sun.

The inkling was really quite simple, although on the surface, slightly less sensible. I suddenly had the sense that I wanted – no: that I needed – salt, so I picked up a bag of ‘salty and sweet’ popcorn, into which I tossed extra salt, together with a can of diet Pepsi for the zip of some caffeine.

Half an hour later, I felt restored.

It seems that, in being so careful, I’d probably flushed away vital salts and minerals over the course of a few days, and not replenished these.

It’s easy to forget, given media coverage of health issues, that salt is essential to our good health.

We need it. It is not an optional extra. We don’t need sugar. But we do need salt.

And perhaps, because I usually have some caffeine in a day, my body was objecting to none.

So today, some caffeine, and a pot of cottage cheese for lunch, to which could be added salt – indeed, it’s bland enough that it benefits fro that, and a twist of pepper. Fruit to follow and plenty more water – this should be more balanced.

In the evening, Nigel Slater’s quick version of that Moroccan classic, chicken with lemons and olives. No rice, but a little salt in the cooking of this, plus, of course, the natural saltiness of the olives.

And at 8pm, I'm still feeling quite lively.

I can’t help but wonder, though, how many other people are experiencing anything similar.

A thought occurs. Some years ago, we were in Barcelona and The Other Half got a mild case of sun stroke. We only really realised when, later that day, he was exhausted and without an appetite, but found himself licking salt off his finger in a restaurant.

Somehow, he realised, with a salt cellar in front of him, that he needed it - and he's not a salt head.

My mother's tutors were probably right. What has changed, I suspect, is simply that the quantity of salt shovelled into processed foods has changed the equation. We need salt. Our bodies know it - and processed food exploits that.

Doesn't make the behaviour of the food industry any nicer, does it?

Remember to love your local market

Radishes, Paris style.

With The Other Half away for the weekend, following his beloved Castleford Tigers to Perpignan for their league game against the Catalan Dragons – an act of great personal sacrifice on his part – the opportunity presented itself for personal culinary indulgence.

And with a few days to eat nothing but exactly what I want, a Friday evening visit to Borough Market was the perfect way to get the weekend up and running.

This itself seemed apt, coming as it did just days into Love Your Local Market Fortnight: a time to promote real food and real producers; food that looks and tastes like proper food, and is sold by people, often, who produce it themselves, and certainly care about it.

Given The Other Half's tastes, the menus for such a weekend are easy: seafood and offal. Although not together. Obviously.

It started, on Friday evening, with scallops, pan fried briefly, with canellini beans, chili and lamb's lettuce. River Café Two Easy is the bible for these weekends.

Other purchases included asparagus, plum tomatoes, Jersey Royals and the first English strawberries of the year.

Borough was busy with, as ever, a combination of tourists and bright young things enjoying the start of the weekend.

The market prides itself – and rightly so – on being twinned with the legendary La Boqueria in Barcelona. The tragedy is that the London prices mitigate against everyone being able to use it. In that wonderful market off La Rambla, you'll see little old ladies carefully picking out produce. Not here, sadly.

Where good food in many parts of the Continent is available to all and considered a birthright, there is much more of a class divide in the UK, as with so much else.

Much the same can be said of Broadway Market, although not to quite the same extent: I know that I'm not the only local who shops there, although first thing on a Saturday morning, I'm always convinced that half the 'hipsters' sitting outside cafes with coffee have come straight from Hoxton nightspots with nary an encounter with sleep.

And on Saturday morning, it was straight to Matthew to see what offal he had, with a lovely piece of lamb's liver, thinly sliced, going into the bag.

Next up, fish.

Unfortunately, Vicki had nothing that I wanted, so Fin & Founder had to do the business. I bought a Dover sole and a squid.

"Shall I fillet it?" said the young man of the sole. I demurred. He seemed surprised and offered to at least trim the fins. I demurred again. He almost begged to be allowed to rinse it. I allowed him to do so.

My refusal to let him do anything with the squid appeared even more shocking. "It can make a mess," he offered rather lamely.

"Oh not if you do it properly," I returned, adding that I enjoy doing it - and that it's easy. I left with squid and sole intact in the face of someone who appeared to have the love of knife work that would have delighted a mohel.

Selection vegetables in Barcelona.

I understand that this is part and parcel of the Fin and Founder routine; that it's their way of 'adding value' (and thus helping justify their prices).

And of course there's also an expectation that many customers will lack the skills to prep fish.
Requiring no cutting at all, I also bought a handful of the season's first samphire.

Back at Mark's Ash Green Organics, which is increasingly becoming my go-to greengrocer, fine beans, a courgette, oranges and rhubarb were added to the mix.

The simplicity of approach continued with Saturday lunch. Jerseys were scraped and boiled, to be served with briefly boiled asparagus (four minutes – they were quite thick), and four slices of the liver, pan fried in a very little olive oil.

A 'gravy' was made by melting a teaspoon of redcurrant jelly into the meat juices while it briefly rested.

The only other things required are salt, pepper and good butter.

For evening, it was back to River Café and a recipe I'd tried before.

Take your squid, clean it and thinly slice.

Then take a courgette and cut it into matchsticks.

Octopus in Venice.

Previously, I'd made the mistake of grating the squash far too finely and it all but disappeared. This time, I just used a razor-sharp paring knife and cut it up that way. Salt these for about 15 minutes, then rinse and dry.

This is a very, very quick cook, so it's best to be a bit cheffy and prep all the ingredients first.

Thinly slice as much chili as takes your fancy. Thinly slice a clove of garlic. Juice and zest some lemon.

Get a pan good and hot, add a generous splash of olive oil and, when it's really hot, pop in the squid.

Stir briefly and then add the chili and a grind or two of black pepper.

Stir again, give it all a couple of minutes, then add the courgette and the garlic. Let it cook through – it doesn't take long – and add the lemon. Stir once, twice – and it's ready to serve.

The original recipe serves this with spaghetti, but I opted instead for some good, fresh baguette. It needs little or no added salt.

And it is a feast.

Sunday went a bit off piste in terms of plans, so I saved the sole for Monday and managed, incredibly, to do the best filleting job I've ever managed (it was quite large) and then grill the fillets and serve them with Jerseys and asparagus and fine beans to welcome home The Other Half.

Good food should be a birthright for all of us. And good markets, where you can get good, seasonal produce, should be available for everyone.

Fortunately, many places do still have them – and they're not the rather 'posh' ones like Borough or even Broadway.

Tomatoes in Collioure – I dream of them.

So make sure you love your own local market – you know it's worth it.

And now a tiny 'fession.

Earlier in this piece, I mentioned tourists at Borough. Well, I like to photograph markets too – both at home and abroad.

Markets are wonderful places. So instead of a couple of shots of liver or scallops on a plate, I decided to illustrate this piece with a very few, varied shots.

I hope you enjoy.

And perhaps more to the point – enjoy your own local markets.

Rugby League changed my life

I like Rugby League. No, it isn't my favourite sport, but it's one I enjoy – and I've certainly got a lot to be grateful to it for.

It was three years ago Easter just gone that St Helens and Castleford Tigers played their first Super League matches against the then newcomers to the competition, the Catalans Dragons. And since there was barely more than a week between those two visits to the south of France, The Other Half and I decided to arrange our main holiday of the year around the games.

Travel on the Friday, watch the Dragons v Cas in Carcassonne on the Saturday, then travel to Barcelona for a week on the Sunday and back to Perpignan on the Easter Sunday for Saints' visit on the Monday, followed by a TGV journey to Paris and then home 36 hours later via the Eurostar.

It was to be a revelation of a trip – possibly even a trip that was life-changing.

Rugby League is, in essence, a working class sport. It split from 'rugby' in 1895, after the powers that be, based in the south of England, created a by-law to stop northern clubs in working-class districts paying their players 'broken-time' money, to compensate them for the wages that they lost when they took breaks from their jobs in the mills and mines to play.

Outside the north, players came from a different background and didn't suffer financially through playing. Thus was born Rugby League – the other code is Rugby Union, which only became openly professional around 15 years ago. They found plenty of ways to pay players via the back door over the years – thus it was known as 'shamateurism'.

But it's also an illustration, generally, of why amateurism in sport is elistist.

In France, the sport suffered miserably at the hands of the ruling elite – not least during the war years, when the Vichy government actually banned it and stripped clubs of all their assets. The French RL is still campaigning for official recognition of the wrongs done to the sport – and for some sort of compensation.

The introduction of the Dragons into Super League was not without controversy – plenty of fans in England didn't want them. But it was a major chance to help build RL in the part of France that had once been the heartland of the country's game.

And so we made our first trip to southern Europe.

Downside? Having to fly out by Ryan Air. Which I hate. But Perpignan airport is a small one and you have that wonderful experience of walking across the tarmac to the airport buildings themselves. Heat welcomed us, together with the sight of the Pyrenees, rearing up on the horizon.

That night, we joined other fans in a short bus trip to nearby St Esteve. A small town, we'd been invited to visit the Rugby League clubhouse, where a barbeque had been arranged. It was a most convivial evening.

Saturday's match was an evening one, to which we would travel by coach. In the morning, therefore, we joined a minibus to take a tour of the coast. As we headed down the motorway, toward the mountains, the conversation from our fellow explorers was most illuminating.

"We got to the hotel yesterday," said a male Yorkshire voice. "And the receptionist said: 'Bonjour'. And I said: 'Hello'. And she said: 'Bonjour'. And I said: 'Hello'. And eventually she got the idea and said: 'Hello'."

Oh, what a victory for perfidious Albion.

Then one of the women traveling in their little group: "I mean, it's very nice, but it's not a real Rugby League town."

No – it's not in the bleak industrial north of England, where manufacturing is all but dead and the towns are dying dumps.

Our first stop, winding down a hairpin road, was Collioure. We had an hour – and in that time, we were well on the way to falling in love, wandering along the seafront, gaping at the menus of all the restaurants and at the view in general.

Our fellow travelers, it should be noted, didn't bother looking around, but simply headed to the first bar that was open.

Then on to Argelès sur Mer, slightly further back up the coast. We had a little longer and, while the others headed straight for another bar, we ambled to the seafront, dipped our feet in the Mediterranean for the first time and basked in the spring sunshine. A couple of the seafront restaurants were already open for business and, while looking at the menu of one, the waiter drew us in. Not that there was much "in". The tables were set out on a deck, but the canopy overhead had been drawn back and we sat with the sun burnishing our skin and penetrating to cold, northern bones, drinking sangrias that came compliments of the restaurant for being two of the very first customers of the new season.

The Other Half had a spaghetti carbonara. I had huge gambas, shells blackened on the fire and served in warmed olive oil, infused with garlic. Within seconds, I'd given up any remote efforts to be 'ladylike', getting my fingers as greasy as possible as I tore off the shells and relished the firm, tasty meat of the vast prawns, and the flavour of the oil. TV chef Rick Stein, on a culinary trip through France, once commented that, in England, he'd seen people try to eat such food with a knife and fork. You can't. It demands to be handled – and such an earthy approach is wonderfully sensual.

The third and final stop on our little tour was Canet. It took us only a very few moments to decide that we won't bother going back there: an artificial creation of high-rise, concrete hotels and 'trendy' bars, it was far from the sort of place that we like. The others thought it brilliant – and found a bar straight away.

The next day, after a match that had seen Cas lose, we caught a train south. It was a long, slow journey in a very basic train, and by the time we reached Barcelona, it was evening and we didn't feel like venturing far from the hotel.

The next day, however, was a peach, with visits to Sagrada Família and then on to Las Ramblas, where we peeked just inside La Boqueria, one of the most famous markets in the world, and then relished a sumptuous lunch in a restaurant right next to the market. I had deep fried squid to start, followed by bacalao, cooked in a an unbelievable amount of olive oil, with peppers and garlic by the ton, and all served in the pan. Wonderful. And accompanied by a gutsy Tempranillo – The Other Half asked for the house red and the waiter brought a bottle and poured us each a little, with his towel obscuring the label.

"Tempranillo, si?" I managed. He was impressed. The Other Half was even more impressed. It's possibly the only wine in the world that I can recognise. I felt chuffed.

But that gives you an idea of what was to become one of the dominant features of that week – the food. A wonderful restaurant down the road from our hotel, Els Barrils, specialised in Galacian-style fish. I had padron peppers as a starter – lovely little jewels of green peppers, around 4.5cm long; they're fried very quickly and then served with a garnish of course sea salt. You pick them up by the stem to eat, and about one in 10 packs a serious pepper punch. They're delicious. I followed that with my very first lobster, and then a lovely chocolate and orange icecream for dessert.

Moon became a regular late-evening venue after walking off dinner, with good beers and tapas for the really hungry.

There was another restaurant where the young waiter was trying to open our bottle of wine and the cork broke inside the bottle. The maître d came over, and in a dumb show of pure comic genius, rolled his eyes, gave us complimentary tapas as a starter (little black puddings) and then, when he'd produced a new bottle of wine, rolled it slowly and with great drama on our table to help him ease the cork out. Later, he insisted on my having a complimentary dessert too – as though they had anything to apologise for. And the food itself ...

I had bacalao again, but this time in a sauce of honey and pine nuts. Fabulous.

At yet another restaurant – a very smart and modern one – I had the mesclun salad, with strawberries and nuts, followed by caramcitas – baby squid, perfectly cooked, the ivory pockets arranged like a star on my plate, and dressed with warmed olive oil, infused with garlic.

A few days later, in Paris for the first time, I had a wonderful pave of salmon, served with a small ratatouille and new potatoes, and followed by a dreamy crème brûlée that had me oozing 'tres bons' to the waiter.

Just over three years have since that expedition, but I remember those meals as though it were yesterday. I don't have to think hard to recall them or even refer to the diary in which I noted them in detail at the time. In Barcelona in particular, I found the most wonderful food that I had ever eaten.

Food that was full of colour, bursting with freshness and flavour. Perfect ingredients, wonderful simplicity. Meals that were so balanced and perfectly proportioned that even I – who normally can hardly manage two courses in the UK – could eat a full three. Eating had drama about it, and pleasure and pride for those who cooked and served it as well as the pleasure of those who ate.

We've spent a further week in Barcelona since, and visited at least three of those eateries again (Els Barrils twice more, while I ate exactly the same salad and squid at that restaurant as 18 months earlier). And then last year, in desperate need of a total break, we spent 10 days in Collioure. The food, again, was bliss.

We will return this September for a fortnight, staying not in a hotel this time, but in a cottage. I have always derided self-catering – my mother could turn it into a nightmare. But now – now, I am going to be able to shop and to cook in France. I'm already excited.

So no, given my tastes and how they've developed even since then, I don't think it's too much to say that that trip was a life changer.

So thank you Rugby League.