Three snacks and out

I found myself, in a procrastinating moment, leafing through a leaflet from the Co-op, a Christmas leaflet promising all manner of festive treats that could readily be bought or whipped up using a range of Co-op products. I was lured to check out the helpful little labels at the foot of each recipe - you know, the ones with the 'traffic-light' system of grading content of fat, salt, sugar etc.

I suppose I was thinking of the disturbing news the other day that doctors no longer know what the average healthy weight of an 8-year old is because almost all children in Scotland are overweight or obese. It seems that the adult population is also heading for the buffers fully laden, as it were, and the NHS is doomed as a result. (Ok - I was sweeping a floor at the time and may have condensed this slightly, but you get my drift.)

One caller on the dreaded Call Kaye programme suggested labelling every instant meal with an example of the kind of exercise that would burn off the calories contained therein. I thought this a marvellous idea - it was the realisation that to rid myself of the calories of an average pizza I would have to climb a Munroe carrying a pack that had me decide that life was too short to eat pizza and would probably be shorter if I did.

Back to the leaflet. On average, the calories contained in the average helping of the snacks whose recipes looked so tempting - and these are one- or two-bite nibbles we're talking here - the average content was between 400 and 500 calories. Thats's appalling. The main culprits seemed to lie in the use of cream and butter, even on apparently healthful things like sprouts. Three of these snacks would constitute the recommended calorific average for someone of my age, build and height for a whole day unless I took some exercise. 

That's it, really. I'll probably eat a few such items over the gluttony season, leave my body to complain afterwards of the abuse, but not without thinking about it. I'm not miserable about that at all - any more than I am about cutting out, say, oysters from my diet (they have dire consequences for me). And I am reminded of something my father said when I was a skinny teen going to the cinema regularly and eating a bag of peanuts in the darkness. "That's enough to feed a starving family for a day."

He was ahead of his time, I think.

On cooking, baking - and custard creams

I've been thinking about food. Or, to be more accurate, I've been thinking about cooking and baking and how I feel about these activities - and about the fact that this morning I spent about an hour reading a recipe book. (I was given a pile of wonderful Ottolenghi books for Christmas; they're already full of paper markers and a list to tell me where exciting-looking things are.) It is perhaps a clue to my attitude that I then felt compelled to clean the bath - for a small inner voice told me that I'd been wasting time, sitting in my cosy living-room looking at the birds on the snowy feeder and reading about food. And cooking.

I love food. I'm what you would well call fussy, in that I like interesting and well-cooked food, and that there are things I body-swerve with increasing dedication: cream, fatty foods, shellfish, anything that will lie weightily in my digestive system long after I'd prefer to have forgotten about it. My mother, and now my sister, have long mocked my preference for green tea. But because I love good food, I try to produce same - and on the whole I would say I succeed. The creation on the right is one I recently enjoyed - venison fillet accompanied by freekeh pilaff and garlic yogurt - and I usually say that no-one who likes eating should be incapable of producing a decent meal.

But even after almost 44 years of being responsible for making the meals in my own home, I still feel it's not really me. I have the sense that I'm a sort of dilettante cook, playing at it without having acquired the basic skills or even the right equipment. Baking is even worse. My closest pal throws pastry together without a thought and uses it to entertain my grandchildren; she may never know (unless she reads this) how much awe I hold her in for this simple act. My Christmas cake is the best I've ever eaten, but since I stopped making children's birthday cakes it's the only cake I ever make - and more or less the only cake I eat, come to that.

So when I refer to myself as a Domestic Goddess, you should know that I do so in the spirit of deepest irony. Cooking - and the odd bit of baking - gets fitted in round the rest of my life even if the results are totally toothsome, and there's always this feeling that I'm in the same boat as the monkeys writing a Shakespeare play. Or something. My attitude to eating, I've decided, has hardened over the years. I shall never again, for example, eat a pizza - because you have to climb a Munro to use up the resulting calories. And I shall leave you with one final, devastating truth:

Life is too short to eat a custard cream.

Of bulls, flamingoes and rice

A feature of our recent trip to France was the journeys we made around the area - we had a bus and driver at our command throughout (the driver looked to be about 12 years old). On the Sunday we went south, to Arles, arriving mid-morning. All we knew about the day was that we'd had to change our eating arrangements: a restaurant where we were booked for lunch had been obdurately and mysteriously closed after the booking had been made. When we  arrived, it looked as if Arles had also been closed, and the bus dropped us off at the end of a blocked-off street. The barriers were over head height, and wired together - you can make them out in the photo on the left. Apparently we had arrived on the Feria du Riz and had no idea of what might happen. We set off on our walking tour, accompanied by an excellent American guide. (Oh, the joy of a good guide, and oh, the tedium of a poor one). We were delighted by the garden of the hospital where Van Gogh was taken minus his ear, and by being able to snap the cafe he famously painted at night and see that it was much the same even if the street wasn't. And we loved the way the Roman remains were somehow mingled with buildings still in use, so that the whole effect was somehow casual and random.

We arrived at lunchtime. We'd already seen the huge vats of paella being cooked on ever corner, and the backstreet cafés were tempting, but we had a notion to be close to the action. Having heard the wild roars from the Roman Amphitheatre, we had a taste for the excitement of the promised bull run; we wanted to see what was happening. We sat at a table beside the barricaded road. Bands played, vying with one another. Lines of horsemen - and women - paraded up and down the road with what looked like spears (they weren't). They wore the kind of hats that made them look special, and sat with their legs straight in long stirrups. They were Camargue cowboys, and they looked invincible. We waited for paella and action. A gun went off. There was a distant roar, and then the clattering of hooves on tarmac. By this time I was peering through the barrier, just in time to see a swirl of horses, dust, and - fleetingly - the small, black bulls corralled in the centre of the horses. This was how it worked, then: they had to keep the bulls under control as they all pelted along. Just where I was standing, a bull escaped, turned round, started back the way it had come. Great horsemanship, more swirling, and it was back in the equine corral. Youths dashed after them, trying to catch the tail of a bull. Later - for they did it about 10 times - young boys joined in and with the reduction in speed were able to catch up, wrestle the bull's horns. One of our party, wine-glass in hand, chased after them too. She spilled not a drop. I thought fleetingly of health and safety. I also thought more about how exciting I'd found it - I'd thought I might be crippled by disapproval. I even wrote a poem about it, which you can see, along with a great photo by a friend, here.

The afternoon saw us wandering the paths of a bird sanctuary in the Camargue. It couldn't have been more of a contrast. There were flamingoes, egrets and mosquitoes - though we only became aware of these the next day, when we realised that we hadn't spread the repellent under sleeves. One even bit me through my t-shirt. It was hot, and the tall grasses rustled in a gentle breeze. I loved it. And I loved the restaurant in which we ate the meal we hadn't had in the Camargue. La Cuisine de Dimanche in Avignon has inspired me now I'm home and cooking again - you can read what I wrote about it on Trip Advisor.

And now I feel I've written enough for now. I may have to share what happened with a Carousel, and in a modern art gallery. But I have another trip to prepare for ...

Tempus fugit in corpore sano

I've been thinking about food today. Actually, I began by wondering where the morning had gone, and it was while I was making soup for lunch that the foodieness kicked in. T'other day I was checking out my messages (shopping, for the non-Glasgwegian) in the local Somerfield when it struck me forcibly how much I was spending. No booze, nothing fancy, one piece of pork fillet the only meat there - and it came to over £60. For two people. I stuck my credit card in the thingummy and commented that it hurt less than handing over cash.

'But you eat healthy food,' opined the youth who was serving me. I had taught him at some point in the past - a pleasant, polite sort of chap. 'It's expensive to be healthy.' I suppose he was looking at the veg and the "best ever" (or whatever) fruit, and the Tropicana juice and the soya milk - but he had a point. It's expensive not to buy the basic loss-leaders. It's expensive not to like the taste of Dutch hothouse tomatoes and to prefer Pink Lady apples. Expensive in money terms.

And in time terms - and this is where this all began - it's expensive to make your own soup (carrot & coriander, with onion, garlic and a wee bit of crushed chili and a sweet potato to improve the texture - about 20 minutes + cooking and blitzing time) and to prefer to make your own bread (I was making the starting 'sponge' which is now sitting in my pantry bubbling gently while it gathers flavour). Sometimes I use the machine and it takes only about 5 minutes to sling the stuff in, but sourdough takes longer, with the floury hands-on bit the time when someone is bound to phone you. Worth it, though - a great taste and texture.

But I digress. Where the time went this morning was partly on cooking, and partly on swimming. For the rest, I was seduced by a particularly enticing post on Kimberly's blog and spent an hour on the phone. But wanting to eat well and being a domestic goddess is clearly to blame for much of what I have left undone of what I ought to have done ... so is there indeed 'no health in me' after all?