When you don't know what you want to eat

One of the things that seems to happen at this time of year is that I get bored with food.

No, actually, that's not quite right. I just find it difficult to know what I want to eat. And my appetite seems to go belly up, if you will, so that eating becomes an effort on many occasions – particularly when we hit August and it can traditionally get quite humid in the UK.

Fortunately, a few years ago, a friend and fellow gourmet gave some good pointers and now, even when I feel least like eating, they guide my thoughts back to some good stuff.

George has given me loads of recipes over the years – and taught me things like how to tell if a melon or a Camembert is ripe – but a few years ago, when I was suffering one of those periods of no appetite and little motivation, he introduced me to gazpacho.

This Spanish tomato-based soup, which is served very chilled and needs to be made from the very freshest ingredients, is incredibly refreshing and tasty – and healthy too. Which can’t be a bad combination. He was prepared to share his mother-in-law’s recipe – and it’s easy and very, very good.

And then there is a gem of a herring salad too, using matjes or sweet herring fillets, mixed with some sour cream or crème fraîche, and some thinly sliced apples and/or some diced beetroot. Again, really, really fresh and refreshing.

But I do occasionally find some little gems from elsewhere – and last week was one such occasion.

Some people don’t like Tamasin Day-Lewis, but she was already in my good books for her formula for cooking steak, which makes it a doddle:

if you want it done rare, cook for a minute, turn over and cook for another minute, then rest in a warm place for eight minutes.

If you want it medium rare, cook for two minutes, turn and cook for a further two minutes and then rest in a warm place for six minutes.

If you want it medium, cook for three minutes each side and rest for four.

If you want it well done, cook for four minutes a side and rest for just two.

And if you want it cremated, cook for five minutes a side and serve.

Brilliant – this makes it easy to do several steaks at once to different states.

However, browsing the other week on uktv.co.uk/food, I came across a stunning simple summer dish from the lady.

Heat some olive oil in a frying pan until it’s good and hot. Thinly slice some courgettes. Pop them in the pan and cook briefly. You want them to caramelise a bit at least.

Turn them over. Add some slivers of garlic, plus some lemon juice and some pine nuts. Cook for another few minutes. Season with good salt and pepper and serve.

Lovely tastes – the lemon juice just keeps it really fresh.

Because I wanted a bigger lunch (and two portions of my fruit and veg for the day), I added a couple of halved artichoke hearts. And the next time I did it, I toasted the pine nuts and garnished the dish with them at the very end. But it’s a corking idea.

So thanks for that idea, Tamasin. And thanks, as always, to George too.

Spilt beans leave a slightly sour aftertaste

Spilling the Beans by Clarissa Dickson Wright

Partly because of my love of food, partly because of my love of English eccentricity, this was a Christmas present from my mother.

Clarissa Dickson Wright is best known as one of TV’s Two Fat Ladies, the culinary duo that travelled the UK on motorbike and sidecar in the 1990s, but she has plenty of other claims to fame.

The youngest female lawyer to be called to the bar, Dickson Wright’s childhood was blighted by her father – a brilliant surgeon, but an alcoholic, brutally violent parent and husband.

But when her beloved mother died, Dickson Wright sank into an alcoholic spiral. She was debarred and ended up broke (having frittered away a lot of money) and homeless.

Getting sober, she helped to build up the London bookshop, Cooks for Books to its present fame, before going on to find TV fame and then becoming an ardent campaigner for the countryside (ie pro-hunting etc).

It’s an interesting book – deceptively light to read given some of the subject matter. But there is a feeling that Dickson Wright rather overdoes it on occasion. There’s no doubting her father’s brutality, but were she and her mother really nursing broken or bruised ribs on the sort of regular basis that she suggests? They’d scarcely have been out of hospital, yet medical treatment is never mentioned.

Having known Tony Blair as a law student, she gets tedious in the extreme over his record as Prime Minister. Castigating Labour voters in general, she claims not to have found anyone who voted “for Tony Blair”, even in Sedgefield. Well no dear, you wouldn’t. Because Westminster politics isn’t like that. Nobody outside of Blair’s constituency could vote for him – they could only vote for candidates in their constituency. And frankly, whether someone is a good constituency MP, representing them in the way that they want to be represented, is higher on many voters' list of priorities than a silly argument about their vote actually being for the party leader.

It’s the sort of disingenuous approach that one finds in rags like the Daily Wail. And from someone who supposedly understands the law, it's crass in the extreme.

And there are other irritants: quite frankly, if any working-class individual described the equivalent of the ‘jolly japes’ that she unapologetically recalls getting up to (or her own friends getting up to), then they’d be regarded as rude and inconsiderate.

Dickson Wright is to be applauded for overcoming many of her demons, and her descriptions of alcoholism and dealing with it, together with her descriptions of fellow alcoholics and their struggles, are informative and, in places, moving. They form the strongest part of this book.

But she’s remarkably quick to dismiss some things in general, such as emotional abuse and bullying. And she seems over keen to blow her own trumpet – yes, of course this is a memoir, but there does seem to be a lot of: ‘I was the first to do this’, ‘I take credit for that’, ‘it’s because of me that’ etc. Perhaps all the demons have not been exorcised – perhaps nobody ever manages that completely.

Dickson Wright has plenty of valid points to make about food, and has embraced the countryside campaigning with the fervour of a true convert.

All in all, interesting. But it doesn’t leave one with a sense of particularly loving the subject of the book.

Sources of inspiration for inspirational sauces

A couple of years ago, in an article in the one of the more serious newspapers by someone suggesting that cookery books by TV chefs were all a load of rubbish, and what we all needed to do was bin our tomes of recipes and go and spend a year in France learning to cook properly.

Which is a lovely idea – well, the bit about spending a year in France learning to cook is a lovely idea. Trashing my kitchen library is not.

The central tenet of the writer's case was that we lack proper skills in the kitchen, and celebrity chefs and their books don't actually teach us anything, but end up collecting dust, never to be actually used.

Now of course I'm not cynical enough to suggest that the scribe in question – his name fails me and Google has failed me too on this score – was only trying to sell copies of the book he'd written about his year in France learning to cook, but that entire proposal is codswallop.

My own cookery journey started nine years ago, when I stopped dieting and started to eat without worrying about calorie counts. Over the course of about a year, I started to actually enjoy food. The natural progression saw me starting to take over the kitchen from The Other Half. And the crucial moment came when I went to Spitalfields Market one Sunday morning to return with a very nice piece of organic beef – only to realise that I hadn't a clue what to do with it.

Obviously I knew to put it in the oven and roast it, but at what temperature and for how long per however many grammes?

One course of action was open: I phoned my mother, who went and found a book from her own collection and read me the formula.

That week, I went and bought Delia's Complete Cookery Course. It remains on my shelf, a veritable Bible for exactly that sort of information. And she's got a good method for doing jacket potatoes too – much slower cooking time, and brush them with olive oil and then sea salt before popping them in the oven. I also employ her instructions for potatoes dauphinoise. And jolly good it is too.

There are people who consider Delia Smith to be boring – she inflamed some when publishing her three-part cookery course by including a section on boiling an egg – but Delia is trustworthy.

My next purchase was Jamie Oliver's Return of the Naked Chef. It's rather popular in the UK at present to lambast Oliver, not least for his faux cheeky Cockney persona. But he's made a wonderful contribution by making cooking seem fun. And indeed, I couldn't believe that I could make dishes that were modern, easy – and tasted good!

There are a few dishes I still do from Oliver's books (I added another three over the years): one involves marinading pork chops in olive oil, lemon juice, garlic and rosemary. The instructions tell you to use your hands and massage the marinade into the meat. The first time I made it, I stood there, hands covering in oil and juice and garlic and herbs, grinning like a loon. I was finally the little girl who was allowed to get her hands messy. And there was something so earthy and sensual about it.

Then a slender volume that had been gathering dust for some years came into its own. Gordon Ramsay Pasta Sauces is a 32-page booklet that had come with two pasta bowls and some small bags of dried herbs in a Christmas gift set. It had been a present from The Other Half, frustrated doubtless by my former addiction to boiling a bowl of dried pasta and a bit of frozen veg to buggery as a post-pub repast.

It came at a time when I didn't even know – or care – who Gordon Ramsay was. And besides, the recipes were scarily complicated and looked far too posh for my taste (or lack thereof). The box was emptied, the contents stashed and it was all forgotten.

I did have a couple of cookery books in my pre-cooking days – three Good Housekeeping volumes that my mother didn't want, a Marks and Spencer book of salads, a vegetarian Mexican collection, a Schwartz Spices booklet (free with however many jars of spices) and a notebook in which to note down recipes. Over almost 20 years, it had had around five entries. Which might tell you something.

Then, one day, I decided to try one of Ramsay's pasta dishes. A velouté sauce for scallops (or salmon – the suggested alternative being what I served it with). So began an understanding of sauces – more to the point, of reductions. And the dishes in that little book are delightful: a sauce of very lightly curried shallots and carrot batons, with wilted spinach; mushrooms in a velouté – incredibly intense; another cream-finished sauce with lardons, rosemary, cannellini beans and asparagus (which also taught me that two minutes is sufficient time to cook those wonderful spears of flavour).

Also in my possession from around the same time is Rick Stein's Seafood Odyssey. And although there are not a great many recipes I've done from that book or continue to use, one of the dishes taught me to make and use a beurre manié, a mix of flour and butter that is added at the end of a reduction to thicken a sauce.

The dish in question I do quite often – seared tuna steak (substituted for swordfish), served with a mushroom gravy. It might sound odd, but it works very well.

So between Ramsay and Stein, I've picked up some real basics of sauce making – and not just the mechanics, but some comprehension of why you do certain things and what they achieve. That is the sort of thing that inevitably leads to understanding why stocks are so important and why it's worth making your own. And thence to creating your own sauces.

I find myself using River Café Easy Two frequently, even if just to take inspiration and then adapt things to my own specific needs. The food is easy and light, with some great salads, soups and pasta dishes.

And it also has the best recipe for roast chicken that I've used, stuffing the bird with rosemary and thyme and garlic, cooking it very slowly at a low heat, and then finishing it by adding Vermouth to the dish for a final half hour at a higher temperature, while rubbing butter all over the skin. It's divine – and the carcass makes a fabulous stock.

It should be said that my favourite recipe book remains a tome of French cookery, authored by a team who only got their names mentioned on the inside back cover. And a little book of pasta dishes that I picked up for next to nowt in low-cost supermarket Lidl, which also has no author listed. But I've learnt so many actual skills from books by celebrity chefs – it's errant nonsense to suggest that they have nothing to teach us.

All of those have helped educate and draw me to a point where I can now appreciate the work of the UK's cookery goddess, Elizabeth David.

I have enough reference points and understanding to skills to be able to relish reading her books. And indeed, to be inspired by her work. If those muslin cloths arrive through the post by Saturday morning, I'll be trying out potted fish this weekend – the result of reading, with mouth watering, the section on potted meats and fish pastes in An Omelette and a Glass of Wine.

Whoever that writer was who suggested throwing away books by celebrity chefs because they have no real value – they teach you nothing – he was a fool. And he'd do well to actually try reading a book properly next time before claiming that the recipes in such tomes never work properly.

And I rather hope his own literary effort is languishing on the shelves of those remaindered bookshops. It'll save people having to take his own advice and trash the thing after wasting their money on it.

Of spring days and mayonnaise

I'm glad I used to do a fair bit of bodybuilding in my twenties. You need a strong arms for making mayonnaise.

Early last year, I made my first allioli – the wonderful garlic mayo that heralds from Catalonia. The instructions came courtesy of Rick Stein's Mediterranean cookbook, and it was initially only intended as an experiment.

I like to try things once – so that I understand what the process is (before buying the ready-made version next time). I've tried houmous and taramasalata and tapenade for exactly that reason. Only tapenade has not been shop bought since.

Thus I tried my hand at allioli. But the thing was, it was so utterly gorgeous, that the experiment convinced me that I'd make it again. And again.

And now, this lunchtime, I've made my first mayonnaise proper. More instructions courtesy of Mr Stein. Two lovely egg yolks, with two teaspoons of white wine vinegar, half a teaspoon of salt and a teaspoon of dry mustard all plopped in a bowl with a damp cloth underneath to keep it from slipping. Take a whisk and gently break the yolks. Then start – extremely slowly – dripping in 300ml of oil (you can use sunflower oil, but I stick with virgin olive oil) and whisking it into the eggs, vinegar, salt and mustard.

The mixture doesn't get looser – it stiffens up: that's the hard bit and my bicep was groaning more than it has in years. But it's a glorious, smooth texture and a wonderful, bright yellow – reminiscent of the daffodils that are now in bloom. The taste ... well, the taste is like incredible.

It screams to me of sun, sea and squid on the Med – or chips in Amsterdam and Berlin. Nothing out of a jar, hauled down from a supermarket shelf, could ever taste of such things, of such memories.

So why do cooks and chefs claim so vociferously that mayonnaise is difficult to make? If you measure your ingredients carefully, take your time adding the oil and work those arm muscles, it's a doddle.

And such a process, when it produces something so special, can hardly be viewed as onerous.

Not, of course, that it should ever be pleasurable. At least that was my mother's view. I remember her intoning: "We eat to live – we don't live to eat". Technically correct, of course, but what she meant was to emphasise the role of food as fuel alone – don't be having any sensual pleasure from it.

Whether because of that attitude – or whether that attitude grew out of something else – my mother has never enjoyed cooking. She's worked hard at it – indeed, she's turned into an art form the ability to take two hours to prepare something that I could do in 30 minutes. She's always been dutiful in preparing food for her family – but then again, duty is A Good Thing. Pleasure is not.

And neither I nor my sister were ever taught to cook. We had to do chores in the kitchen – scraping new potatoes in the summer, prepping sprouts in the winter – and drying up. But we didn't get to actually try any cooking or baking. Mother also considered domestic science at school to be a complete waste of time and money, so I was hauled from those classes as quickly as possible.

It begs the question of where she imagined one learnt any basic culinary skills. By the time I left home, I had not a clue.

Perhaps it's the case throughout the UK?

Perhaps that's why celebrity chefs and cooks always make out that mayonnaise is so, so risky – so very difficult to get just right. Because such an awful lot of people in the UK can hardly do much more than pop a ready meal in the microwave?

I'm never sure whether I want to evangelise about food – or keep it as at least a partial secret. Perhaps that's what those chefs have decided – to retain for themselves a little secret about mayonnaise (and thus retain for themselves the kudos of being clever enough to make it)

But as of today, I'm in on their secret. I have a new skill: I can make mayonnaise. It's gorgeous – and it won't be the last time.

Terrific tuna

Here it is: today's tuna, with slivers of garlic and red jalapeno chilli inserted into carefully cut slits in the succulent flesh, and with rosemary added for even more flavour.

Then it was all ready to pop into a pot with loads of tinned tomatoes and juice, anchovies and capers. It was poached gently for about 30 minutes and then served with hanks of good bread.

Mmmmmm. That's why I like food.

And that's why I'm always bemused by the attitude in this country toward Jamie Oliver. This dish comes from Jamie's Italy. Now okay, the "pukka" stuff on TV might be a tad irritating, but his books make it easy to cook great food. Perhaps that's the problem? Maybe if he was 'selling out' like Gary Rhodes, who has taken to advertising spread that's had the fat stripped out of it, thus becoming gray and requiring colourings as well as flavour to be added to it – otherwise known as margarine – he'd be less of a target for so many people?

After all, the whinging about Oliver surely can't be jealousy at someone's success, can it?