Bad Cook

4 In an egg cup or small bowl mash together the butter and flour to make a paste. Plop about half of this into the barley mix and poke it about until it melts about. The idea is that it will turn your stew into a sort of thick broth.

5 In another frying pan, heat more oil and season your quail bits with salt, pepper and thyme. Put the legs in first and when they are browning, add the lardons. When the legs and the lardons look brown, add the breasts and cook for 4 minutes on one side and a minute on the other side.

6 Stir the lettuce into the barley broth and leave to steam cook for a minute. Serve with the barley as a base and the quail over the top.

Are You an Alcoholic?

I’m always a bit freaked out by those ‘Are you an alcoholic?’ surveys, because whenever I do them, and answer them honestly, it always turns out that I ought to get myself to the Priory immediately. Do I drink by myself? Yes. Do I drink to forget my problems? Of course. Do I find it difficult to stop after one drink? Who doesn’t? Do you scour the house in a rage for alcohol after a particularly trying day? (Ok I made that one up. But the answer is yes.)

There have been two times in my life when I’ve realized that I am actually going to end up an alcoholic if I don’t stop drinking immediately. There are alcoholics on both sides of my family, so I’m as ‘at risk’ as a Ming vase on the M4.

The first one was when I was about 23 and working in a seriously lowly job and then my boyfriend ran off with another girl. Which I was doubly pissed off about because before he went out with me he was gay, like actually gay gay – running off with a boy I could take but a girl was just beyond the pale. I would come home to my parents’ house from work and sit at our kitchen table while my father would pour red wine down my throat until I passed out. I must say, it worked, because I didn't feel nearly so much like killing myself when I was drunk.

In fact, I wrote 40,000 words of a really excellent comic novel, mostly in those evenings when I was drunk. Well, I say it’s excellent but the first agent I showed it to hated it and the second didn’t even write back. Bastard. And the restraining order means I can’t EVEN push a Molotov cocktail through his damn letter box.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, then one day my parents went on holiday and I was left in the house by myself. I wasn’t so crazy about cooking and shopping back then so after three days there was no more alcohol left in the house and I RAGED around it trying to find something to drink. As I stood in the laundry, contemplating a bottle of cherry brandy, I realized I needed to stop immediately.

The second time was when I was working as a reporter for the Standard. I was, for weeks at a time, either drunk or hungover. When I found myself slipping out for a Bloody Mary the second the afternoon edition had been sent (back in the days when the Standard had different editions) I thought I should stop.

I mean, I was hardly Anne Robinson, or George Best, but you don’t need to hit rock bottom to be drinking too much, or too regularly. Anyway, my point is that stopping drinking is really boring, but I learnt that it’s basically all about replacing the FIRST drink of the evening. (Not a new concept, but I’m pleased with how well it works.)

If you want to have an alcohol-free evening, all you need to do is replace the first drink you would normally have of the evening with something else. The plain fact is I’m normally just thirsty. I’m not one of those people who drinks 18 pints of water a day. I would, but I’m too busy drinking 18 cups of tea. So, my dummy evening drink is usually a Virgin Mary or a tonic water with ice and lemon.

My brain is so incredibly stupid that it totally thinks it has been given a little drinky and Giles’ stash of Chardonnay is left untroubled. All I need to do is stop Giles from pounding down the stairs at 7pm, rubbing his hands together, doing a little dance and shouting ‘Let’s have a BEER!!!’

The Shitty Food Diet

I occasionally go on what is known in our house as ‘The Shitty Food Diet’.

The Shitty Food Diet is very simple and very effective – if what you want to do is lose a lot of weight very fast and don’t really care about the impact on your health.

What you do is eat INCREDIBLY shitty food – but hardly any of it. So on the downside you get quite hungry, but on the upside, you’ve got some sort of disgusting, shaming treat waiting for you and the thing about diets is that they’re all about morale.

So a typical day’s menu might go like this:

Breakfast: 1 latte with chocolate croissant.

Lunch: nothing.

About 2pm: McDonald’s double cheeseburger and small Coke.

6.30pm: 1 packet peanut M&Ms® OR 1 Krispy Kreme OR 2 Jacob’s Cream Crackers.

Dinner: 3 small glasses of oaky Chardonnay and 2 handfuls of crisps.

This is the kind of menu I find myself eating quite often and I am thin as a rake. People say to me ‘You are so thin, what diet are you on?’ and I say ‘The Shitty Food Diet’ and they go ‘Ha ha ha, no really’.

Except next-eldest sister. She said ‘You are so thin, what diet are you on?’ And I said ‘It’s called The Shitty Food Diet.’ And she said ‘Ooh really – what does one do on that?’ But my sister lives in Notting Hill so nothing surprises her.

So this is what I do on my own time, but on my husband’s time, it’s a different story.

But as it happens, we are getting a bit slack about provenance in this house. My husband’s strict rules about what, exactly, one is allowed to buy and eat basically allow for us to eat almost nothing except kale and roast chickens. He doesn’t want to buy, from a supermarket, any fish that isn’t mackerel or any meat that isn’t produced by Duchy Originals. So if we haven’t been to the farmers market recently (where one can buy, guilt-free, anything one wants), the menu round here gets a bit samey.

I used to observe these rules faithfully but recently I’ve got a bit loose around the edges with it. The other day I just wanted some spare ribs, damn it. We’d just been to a restaurant called Sonny’s Kitchen in Barnes, which was AMAZING – just the best food I’ve had for a really, really long time and worth a trip if you’re anywhere near it.

You would think that being married to my husband I get to eat a lot of amazing food, but it isn’t so. A lot of new restaurants we go to aren’t very nice and if you order wrong, well: yuk. Sonny’s Kitchen genuinely stood out.

So anyway we had these spare ribs, which were like, out of this world and I wanted to re-create them, although nothing like as spectacularly. But I couldn't find any free-range organic spare ribs in Waitrose so I just thought – fuck it – and bought the essentials ones.

And they turned out gorgeous, drowning in a barbecue sauce, which contained the following:

5 tbsp tomato ketchup

3 heaped tsp English mustard

1 tbsp soy sauce

1 tsp Chinese five-spice

the zest of ½ an orange if you have it

2 garlic cloves, crushed

3 tbsp vegetable oil to loosen

1 tbsp vinegar, any sort

1 Mix together the sauce ingredients and leave the ribs to marinade for as long as you can – preferably all day but even 30 minutes will make a difference.

2 Put in the oven at 180°C for about 25 minutes.

Note: What You Need in Your Kitchen

The novice cook will often find herself held back from making certain things because she hasn’t got the right gear. But, on visiting a cookery department, it is easy to get totally overwhelmed by the sheer volume of pastel-coloured dishes and silicon utensils – it’s like Barbara Cartland has exploded – and come away empty-handed.

You can, of course, use whatever you like when you are cooking. If you want to cook in high heels, using only lilac-coloured implements while wearing a flowery apron that’s your business. But that’s not what most cooks do. Most cooks wear shitty old aprons and wipe-clean shoes and cook with a range of dented, industrial kitchenwear that looks like it started life in a prison.

Like me. Some people have gardening clothes, I have cooking clothes – ratty old T-shirts and ancient jeans. And I must, must have Capital FM on somewhere.

Here are some things that I couldn’t cook without, that I rely on and use every day and now have many multiples of, so that even if two or three are in the dishwasher I still have at least one to hand. They are all functional and ugly and that’s the way I like them.

1 A timer. Back in the days when I thought cooking was easy, I never timed anything. I had been encouraged to believe, through the casual watching of cookery shows, that timers were unnecessary – for wimps and cowards – and the thing to do was intuit using some innate power when things were ready. As a result, everything I cooked was underdone, or charred and alight. Now I time everything, even pasta, because you can just stick the flipping thing on and then wander off and really relax into another task rather than glancing at the clock every three minutes and then losing track and letting your pasta boil dry.

2 A plastic chopping board that will go in the dishwasher. I refused to use a plastic chopping board for ages because – and this is how shallow I am – I thought they didn’t look very nice. But then I came to a point when I thought that if I had to wash up one more wooden board and breathe in the old garlic-and-onion fumes coming off it I thought I might be sick. So now I have about eight plastic boards, which I boil the shit out of in the dishwasher and which are thus always fragrant.

3 Stainless steel mixing bowls. These are light and unbreakable and hygienic and easy to clean. I have three but would like more.

4 A Victorinox paring knife. Once you are doing a lot of cooking you can purchase for yourself at vast expense a cook’s knife from Global or Sabatier but in the meantime, a fantastic multipurpose knife is a little one with serrated edges from Victorinox – the same people who do Swiss Army Knives. They cost about £15 from John Lewis and I have four. The only knife with which to slice tomatoes, but it has many more uses than that. After buying one you will quickly find yourself roaring ‘Where’s my little knife?!’