Would you change your eating habits?

How far would you go to change your eating habits for health reasons?

Okinawa diet pyramid

I was reading about a man recently who became a fruitarian. He was already following the Okinawa diet which is high in anti-oxidants, low in fat and sugar, no meat, eggs, or dairy but high in vegetables with some soya and fish but decided to follow the advice of Douglas Graham, long time food guru, athlete and creator of the 80/10/10 diet. This involves eating 80% of calories from ripe fruit (carbohydrates), 10% from fat and 10% from protein.

Fruitarian diet pyramid

Once on the diet, the writer found himself enjoying incredible energy and superior physical performance in sport. He felt fantastic. As time went on, however, he discovered some down sides including moments of inexplicable anxiety, emotional fragility and jitters. There was another problem too, which his wife didn't appreciate...

I remember seeing an episode of Castle (starring Nathan Fillion as Richard Castle) where his daughter Alexis gets herself a fruitarian boyfriend - Pi. Richard, being a protective father, was not keen on Pi, and kept up a low level of hostility towards him until Alexis felt forced to move out and set up home in a grotty flat with him. However, Richard need not have worried about Pi's physical attentions towards his daughter as, from what I read about being a fruitarian, Pi would have had the libido of a tomato!

Changing to fruitarianism and become a social pariah? Not for me thanks.

On the other hand, I'm interested in anything that will keep osteoarthritis at bay, and it seems that the Chinese, with their 3000 years of medical expertise, have some advice worth reading.

Foods to ban from your diet if you suffer from joint pain

You'll see from the above that all wheat and wheat derivatives are banned, as are dairy products, alcohol, sugar and tobacco. Also on the list are oats, beetroot, corn, buckwheat, rye, split peas and salt. The problem with all these foods is that they promote inflammation which leads to joint pain.

But diet is only one part of the problem. To be free of joint pain you also need to draw on the right herbal medicine, acupuncture, Qigong, massages, and ventouses (suckers). According to Chinese medicine, whatever the type of joint pain (arthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, micro-crystalline arthritis), whether it's in your knees, wrists, elbows, hips, back or neck, it's the result of painful obstructions due to cold, wind and humidity. This means your Qi (inner energy) and Yin-Yang balance are unbalanced in favour of the cold, wind and humidity due to certain accidents, your emotions, food and bad posture.

The Qigong exercises recommended are called Lian Gong Shi Ba Fa - 18 movements to be done in the morning after a cup of tea but before breakfast:

I haven't managed to work them into my morning regime yet, mainly because I'm too lazy to get up that early, but also because I don't have room in my bedroom, although you're supposed to do them outside...! It's getting a bit chilly for that too.

However, I am taking some notice of the diet demands. Banning all twelve foodstuffs from my life is a bit excessive so I've decided to take the Option for Wimps: no alcohol during the week, no wheat unless I'm out (it's tough to avoid bread when eating out - no sarnies, no tarts, etc.), no dairy most of the time, no sugar (I suppose this doesn't include fruit) and no buckwheat as soon as I've finished the packet of flour I use for my gluten-free bread. I'll use fonio after that. I don't smoke, so that's no problem, and I can cut the other things out without too much trouble, except salt. I can't cook without salt even if I don't use much.

I'm sure there's an opportunity somewhere for someone to develop the Chinese Medicine Anti Joint Pain diet and gather recipes into one place instead of us trawling the Internet searching for ones which fit.

Do you eat with your health in mind too?

Warding off Alzheimer's with B Vitamins & Omega 3

September is World Alzheimer's Month. My dad had Alzheimer's so it's a disease which I particularly loathe as it ravaged his brain and rendered him unrecognisable. It also nearly killed my mother looking after him. Eventually he was found a place in a care home and died of a heart attack - a welcome relief.

It seems that Alzheimer's is not hereditary, but I don't intend to take any chances.

I subscribe to an e-newsletter called Food for the Brain which aims to help people ward off the disease and increase their awareness of it in others. This month it talks about steps you can take to ward off the onset of Alzheimer's. They can be summarized very simply as: lead as healthy a life as possible.

Diet is the front line in the anti-Alzheimer's campaign. Eat more essential fatty acids to increase the levels of omega 3 and decrease levels of omega 6 (found in high levels in AD patients). This means eating more oily fish, nuts and seeds and raw dark green leafy vegetables. I've stopped eating salmon however because it's contaminated with toxic chemicals so I stick to sardines, mackerel, and smoked herring instead.

On the flanks are sufficient levels of the antioxidants vitamins C and E to combat oxidative stress in our bodies. Eat lots of fruit and vegetables, nuts and seeds. Sunflower, chia and hemp seeds sprinkled on salad gives a nice crunch, for example.

Early subversive attacks by Alzheimer's can be analysed by checking your homo-cysteine levels. If too high (above 10µmol/l), this amino-acid will cause toxicity in the body, in which case combat it with supplements of B6, B12 and folic acid.

Lifestyle is central to the anti-Alzheimer's campaign in that it influences risk factors, so the best way to avoid it is to lead a healthy life - do exercise to stay physically and mentally fit, keep socially active, keep learning to stimulate your brain, and stop smoking. Still smoking? Do 50 press-ups!

If the worst happens, damage control can be administered through drugs and medication which can minimally affect the Clinical Dementia Rating. Solanezumab, for example, has been shown to reduce brain shrinkage over eighteen months by... 2%! I wouldn't call that much of a result for a massive blast of chemicals, and who knows what the side-effects are!

A much better result has been found from giving patients B vitamins with high levels of omega 3 reducing shrinkage by up to 73%!

So patients with high homo-cysteine levels should take B vitamins and omega 3 for a treatment that is thirty times more effective than the current most hopeful drug treatment, with no side-effects and at a fraction of the cost.

For a super anti-Alzheimer's recipe, try the fishcakes on the Food for the Brain website.

Ingredients (serves 2):

• 250g of roasted vegetables (eg. potatoes, carrots, parsnip, onions)
• 150g of mackerel (tinned or fresh) – other fish works too
• 4 tbsp of ground flaxseeds
• 2 tbsp of ground chia seeds (chia and flaxseeds can be ground together)
• 1 medium sized egg
• 1 tsp of Dijon mustard (English mustard works fine too, but use slightly less as it is hotter)
• 2 shallots (finely chopped - only add if there are no onions in your roast vegetables)
• Himalayan salt and pepper to taste
• Honey & mustard sauce (just mix one tbsp of mustard, 1 tsp of honey)
• Capers to garnish (you can add a table spoon to the fish mix if you like, it is quite delicious)

Directions:
Mash roast vegetables, add shallots, salt, pepper, beaten egg and mix well. Then add the fish, this is best done in flaking it on top of the mashed ingredients and then carefully folding the fish into the mix (at this point fold in the capers if you are adding them)

Pre-heat the oven at 160c and lay out parchment paper on a roasting tray. Place the ground chia and linseed on a plate - season with salt and pepper. 

Use a large spoon to divide the mix and make equally sized balls, then one by one flatten with the palm of your hand and coat with the chia and flaxseed mix before placing them on the baking tray. Do this very carefully as the fishcakes are quite fragile at this point. 

Bake for 30-45 minutes.Garnish the fishcakes with honey & mustard sauce and capers - Add minted mushy peas and/or a kale and lemon salad for an extra boost of nutrients!

Summer food

How do you like your ratatouille? The question arises because it's ratatouille-making season. The end of summer heralds a glut of summer vegetables which means, here in Montpellier, aubergine, courgettes and tomatoes. Plus green peppers.

I do not have a garden that produces anything more than sage, laurel and the odd chive so I have to buy all my veggies, unfortunately. Organic veg is never a huge bargain, but it tastes good, so now I have some time, I've been cranking up the ratatouille machine a.k.a the slow cooker.

I like ratatouille with still-crunchy veg plus soft well-cooked aubergine. It retains more of the vitamins this way and tastes lovely and fresh. My DB, on the other hand, likes it cooked for hours and hours so it becomes a rich-tasting mush. The slow cooker is ideal for this.

I fry the aubergine first to get them lovely and oily and brown, and add them to the slow cooker along with everything else (green and red peppers, onions, courgette, tomatoes, garlic, herbes de Provence). The oil from the aubergine is enough to flavour the whole pot once the whole thing is boiling happily.

The hardest part is resisting eating it straight away, because the idea is to freeze it to enjoy over winter.

I've also made some tomato sauce with some left-over sun-dried tomatoes added to the fresh. The flavour when finished was incredibly intense. Should be lovely over pasta and is great when you are in a rush and have nothing easy to cook quickly without resorting to an industrial ready meal. This Sunday is the Tomato Festival in Clapiers where I bought all my dried tomatoes last year. I've now finished them so I hope the same stand will be there this year too so I can stock up.

There is more to come as I ordered lots of aubergines from the Ruche Qui Dit Oui this week. I'm going to try caviar d'aubergine and make some baba ganoush which I learned how to cook from a Palestinian boyfriend back in my university days. It's absolutely delicious - so creamy, with a lovely smoky taste.

I only wish I had a larger freezer so I could fill it up more!

This summer I've been eating a lot of salad. It's been extremely hot, and I've developed a vinaigrette that I can't get enough of, and neither can my DB. I make it with whole almond purée which has a lovely rich roasted flavour, and add olive oil, balsamic vinegar, turmeric, dried nettles, herbes de Provence, garlic, S&P.

To this, which is made in the bowl, I add chopped mushrooms, cucumber, onion, raw beetroot, tomatoes, courgette, green pepper and of course, lots of lettuce. Then I add chia seeds, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds and hemp seeds, plus some chopped fermented tofu with olives and some avocado if I have any that hasn't gone off... (we've had lots of rotten avocados this year).

It makes a lovely, hearty, tasty salad that's healthy and a pleasure to eat.

What have you been eating this summer?

Horror House of Gluten

If you want to really give yourself the willies, read up on the horror that is modern wheat.

To start with, its development reads like a hammer house of horror. Modern wheat is a mutant of 42 chromosomes to the 14 of old varieties, developed over years of genetic modification. It makes me think of those old paintings of rectangular cows, or Frankenstein. You can't see it, but you're eating Frankenwheat.

This Frankenwheat contains a whole load of new proteins that our bodies can't assimilate. If they can't be assimilated through our digestive process, they pass directly into the intestine where they are free to wreak havoc.

If you're one of the 1% suffering from Coeliac disease, it's like having Frankenstein on crack rampaging around your belly wielding a flail and inflaming your insides. Not nice. Torture, actually.

You might think that if you're not totally intolerant, you're okay. Unfortunately, a new study from the US shows that modern wheat is toxic for all of us. Even if you're in tip top good health, eating wheat products merely increases the permeability of your intestine by perturbing the intestinal hormone zonuline, with dire results.

Not only does your intestine struggle to assimilate the nutrients you're so keenly consuming (rather than stuffing your face with crisps, hotdogs and doughnuts), but it can't stop certain proteins getting into the blood stream to act as front-line terrorists triggering auto-immune diseases and upping the risk of cancer.

Two of these malevolent buggers are prolamines and glutenines which together form the infamous protein gluten. Don't be duped. Modern gluten is bad Bad BAD. More and more people are suffering from its effects, including diarrhea, bloating, depression, joint pain, etc.

So cutting out gluten could happily cure your digestive problems, make you feel happier, less open to infections and give you more energy.

Does that croissant/slice of toast/baguette sarnie/pizza/spag bol/cake look quite as appetising now?

Even if you're in glowing health, eating a gluten-free diet reduces the production of proinflammatory cytokines, and by consequence, makes you less at risk from the effects of inflammation (heart disease, cancer, depression, etc.).

Having given myself the willies, and tried to frighten the boys, with a marked lack of success, I decided to try eating as little gluten as possible. I'm not a gluten-free nazi, but when I'm in my own home, I'm just not eating normal bread, pizza, cake or wheat pasta. Funnily enough, my boys are bored with my bread machine bread (although not the pizza dough it makes...) and are thus eating less bread because they want me to buy baguettes, and I'll buy no more than one of those a day, if that.

Instead, I eat Pain des Fleurs buckwheat crackers, lentil pasta, and I've started making my own bread. It doesn't look anything like the dry yellow stuff you see under plastic in the gluten-free aisles in supermarkets, and tastes surprisingly good.

Stylish inside and out

In France, there's a stylish seasonal magazine on gluten-free cooking and 'art de vivre' called Niépi that my yoga teacher told me about. She lent me the latest copy where I discovered the recipe for egg-free, gluten-free bread. I have nothing against eggs, but thought I'd give it a go for the hell of it.

The recipe called for 40 minutes in the oven. If a skewer came out clean, it was cooked. My skewer did not come out clean after 40 minutes, or 50 minutes. I got cross at 55 minutes and shook it out of its silicone mould and stuffed it back in the oven, heat turned off.

It never actually finished cooking, but was sufficiently cooked to eat. When I tried it again a few days later in a metal Teflon mould, the result was even less cooked at 50 minutes. Does anyone have a suggestion about how long it actually takes?

Here is attempt one, looking pretty normal:

Gluten-free, egg-free bread (a bit undercooked)

It's made with rice flour, tapioca starch, buckwheat flour, flaxseeds, chia seeds, psyllium etc. My DB enjoyed too and took the recipe to see if he could make it in his bread machine as he has no oven.

Attempt two came out with an over-inflated top - I think I kneaded it too much, and I forgot the apple cider vinegar. And it was really undercooked. A mystery!

I found and tried a couple of other recipes in the mag, liked one of them so much I decided to splash out 20 Euro and buy all the electronic back copies.

All I need now is a Kindle Fire to read them on...

UPDATE 15/6/15
I emailed the Niépi people and they told me that gluten-free flour is not calibrated in the same way as wheat flour (Types 55,65,110 etc.) and so they absorb moisture to different degrees. It was suggested I reduce the amount of water, and leave the loaf in the oven on the rack once it had finished cooking. I tried this, and the third loaf came out perfectly. It rose properly and cooked properly, and tastes very good. Result!

Veggie Wars

Gone are the days when I went to Carrouf, ploughing through the aisles to do my weekly shop. I still buy essentials like loo rolls there, but I go elsewhere for food. One of my suppliers is called La Ruche Qui Dit Oui (The hive which says yes), or RQDO. It's a funny name but the idea is good.

A reine, or queen bee decides to set up a ruche. RQDO is a national organisation bringing together a commercial website and local suppliers. It was set up by a couple of whizzo start-up entrepreneurs and is proving to be extremely successful.

The reine signs up on the website to create a ruche. She waits for people to join, which they do by hearing about RQDO and going onto the website to find their nearest ruche. While she's waiting, she searches for suppliers so that when she has enough members, she can go live.

The idea is that suppliers fix a minimum amount of produce that they want to sell before they will 'say yes' to the overall order. There's not much point using petrol to deliver five hundred grams of carrots. If their minimum order is reached, the sale goes ahead; if it doesn't the supplier cancels the orders.

For the consumer, you can choose exactly what you want from the list of produce. If you don't want anything, you don't have to order. At the ruche I go to, you can choose from organic veg, fish, meat, artisan soap, artisan biscuits, and jars of things like caviar d'aubergine and soup, and so on. You can also buy a box of veg according to season from time to time.

There's been a bit of a hoohar recently between the RQDO and AMAP organisations. AMAPs are a similar concept, but you sign up to buy a box of produce every single week, and pay up front or by trimester. It's brilliant for producers because they know they have a fixed consumer list, and can plan ahead for the year's cultivations. For the consumer, they can be reduced to a diet of turnips and cabbage during winter months.

I don't have an AMAP near me, so the decision about which to go for was taken out of my hands, but I'm pretty happy with the RQDO, and like the fact that I can talk to the producers when I go to the ruche on a Thursday evening, and have a bit of a chat.

Hardcore AMAPs fans have been accusing RQDO of being a dirty capitalist organisation consisting of hard-working reines who earn a pittance and evil entrepreneurs who are raking in the profits from their labours. The RQDO takes 16.7% of total sales, gives 8.35% to the reine and uses the rest to pay for salaries of tekkies and admin staff. The average amount earned by a reine per month is €400 apparently although I'm sure my local lady earns a lot less.

The internet was steaming with accusations flying left right and centre (here, here, here) from AMAPers while RQDO reines wrote in to defend their position, and one of the entrepreneurs replied on the RQDO blog.

"La Ruche qui dit Oui ! est un réseau qui réunit des dizaines de milliers de personnes et de multiples organisations. On y trouve des entreprises, des associations, des bénévoles, des clients. Le service qui permet à tous ces gens de se rencontrer, de travailler, de commercer est développé par une entreprise : La Ruche qui dit Oui – Equanum SAS, 50 salariés, une échelle de salaire de 1 à 3, un agrément d’Entreprise Solidaire d’Utilité Sociale.

It's basically a network that brings together thousands of people and multiple organisations, like associations, volunteers, and clients. These people can meet, work and do business via the RQDO which has 50 employees on an earning scale of 1:3. The company has an official status as a socially responsible business.

No system is perfect, but it suits me. This weekend I decided to try the kilo of fish to make into fish soup. The fisherman gave me a polystyrene box of mostly tiny fish, and the recipe, and I made a start. He told me I had to cook the fish and then remove the flesh from the fish. I don't know if this is actually what you should do, but imagine me standing over a hot pot fishing around for very small bits of body and head, getting spiked by vicious bits of bone, and burnt fingers. It took me over half an hour and I was vowing never again would I make a sodding fish soup.

It tasted delicious though, especially with the rouille that I made to go with it which is a fiery mayonnaise. My DB, who moans when I cook fish, was in heaven.

Having looked it up (belatedly), it seems that I just had to put the whole lot through the blender and then sieve it. Have you ever tried to make your own fish soup?

More Odds and Sods, but mostly food...

What's been going on recently in your life?

Sandwich jambon-beurre

I might not be in Britain, but I can answer the Daily Mail's cri de coeur: "Is there no one left in the UK who can make a sandwich ? Or rather my youngest can. He went off on a school visit to Lac de Salagou with a Festive baguette-jambon-beurre, as requested. No tomato, no lettuce, no pickle. Just ham and tasty raw organic butter. The ham came from Hyper U. No one's perfect... The Festive baguette sarnie is one of the simple pleasures of living in France, and certainly better than an industrial triangle in a plastic box full of salt and fat that those poor Hungarians were being brought in to make.

Still on the subject of food, I actually bought a couple of paper recipe books recently rather than print off the net. One is the Oh She Glows Cookbook by Angela Liddon and the other is YumUniverse: Infinite Possibilities for a Gluten-free, Plant-Powerful, Whole-Food Lifestyle by Heather Crosby. Not that I'm either gluten-intolerant or a vegetarian, but I like variety, and my DB would prefer to eat as little meat as possible. Both books are written by successful food bloggers whose recipes I've tried and enjoyed, with lovely appealing photos. Funnily enough, both women came to veganism after years of eating extremely badly resulting in increasingly poor health that popping pills did nothing to cure.

The YU book is a guide really on how to incorporate more plant-based food into the average diet. It has sections on the importance of soaking beans, grains and nuts to remove anti-nutrients, how to sprout, how to cook with new ingredients, how to make it all happen. It's quite a challenge to change habits and it's only by taking it in small steps that you avoid reverting to the old ways after a few months.

She gives recipes for homemade spice mixes (Ethiopian, Chinese, Taco, Chai etc.), different sauces and vinaigrettes (Kale and Walnut Pesto, Cashew Sauce, Sweet Potato Sauce, etc), sandwich ideas (Smoky Lentil and Dill, Crispy Eggplant, Sprouts & Tomato, etc.), snacks, and so on. This weekend I soaked some mung beans and amaranth to start sprouting them, and I've just put some pumpkin seeds in a jar of water as I add them to salads almost every day and didn't realise they should be soaked.

I also made a soup from Angela's OSG book: 'on the mend spiced red lentil-kale soup' which was surprisingly tasty. You can find the recipe here. It looks really simple, but the flavours blend together beautifully. I also made her black bean burgers which I forgot about in the oven so they came out rather well cooked, but crumbled perfectly over a kale salad that my DB was delighted to eat after driving back from his Zen retreat in Toulouse.

Talking of Zen, my yoga classes are going well, but I don't think I'm ready for one of the full-on weekends they organise. My DB is taking a couple of Zen courses in town and has been on two Zen weekends. One was too religious-based for his liking while the other concentrated more on meditation. I enjoy yoga for the physical element and the peace, but the group yogi is president of the southern France yoga association and she gave me a magazine to read to encourage me to join and go further into yoginess. It was a bit too much for my superficial taste...!

To help us in our pursuit of regular walks, I bought a couple of blue 1/100,000 IGN maps of the region - the ones that show GR routes and other paths. I love maps and spent some of the weekend poring over them. In searching for the link, I came across a site called VisoRando where you can create an itinerary based on these maps! Just what we need!

At the other end of the health spectrum, we spent part of the weekend the other week at Domaine Puech at the Weekend Cave en Fête where we ate charcuterie, cheese, and oysters, drank the Noémie red wine and were très merry. The producers of the cheese, charcuterie, oysters, champagne, and Alsatian wine were there all weekend and available for tastings. We ended up buying... cheese, charcuterie, wine and oysters. The oysters were 7€ the dozen, so I bought two (dozen). We had a feast on Sunday night!

On a sadder note, last week I had to take my cat to the vet after he developed an abscess in his mouth. He was kept in overnight to have it drained, and came home wearing a plastic Elizabethan-style collar to stop him scratching. He's not pleased at all. It comes off on Thursday, and not a day too soon as far as we're all concerned.

When I bought my sofa a few years ago, I didn't expect it to be so badly made that the back would be falling apart after a bit of rough treatment from the boys... I paid about fifteen hundred euro for it so it wasn't exactly cheapo crap. This weekend my youngest and I turned it on its front (where you put your legs) and I cut the material underneath to reveal... bad quality wood held together with STAPLES! Honestly, it looked like an amateur had thrown it together on his first day at a furniture-making class. My son got out the No-Nails glue and, while I held the sofa up, he gunned the glue into place. While he was working away, we had this conversation:
Me: "Oh it's so nice to be doing this with you. It's really cool that you volunteered to help and didn't have to be press-ganged."
Him: "It's only because I didn't have anything better to do..."
Me: "Hey, don't spoil it...!"
That put me in my place! We left the sofa upright with the packet of cat litter, a dictionary and four books weighing it down over twenty-four hours. Today, we put it back in place, and lo, the sofa-back is no longer wobbly! Result!

So that's what's been going on in my life. Living on the edge as ever...

A Kitchen-Sink Post

Here's a round-up of odds and sods.

Family
It was my eldest's 18th birthday last Sunday (28th). He went out the night before, blew most of his birthday money and as a result had a quiet day on Sunday which included a mega treat of a KFC take-away lunch... He decided on a birthday dinner of roast chicken at 4pm despite me asking him regularly since the previous day (Me: "Do you want a birthday roast chicken dinner?" Him: "Dunno, I may eat out."). Naturally, not having already obtained a response, the organic chicken was still in the freezer. I got it out, chucked it in the oven on 'defrost' mode, then prised it apart to cut into pieces, chucked them in the microwave to defrost faster, and actually managed to dish up a fully cooked roast chicken (pieces) by 8pm. I was sorry to treat it in such a cavalier way, but 18th birthdays don't happen every day...

Montpellier under water. Photo Midi Libre

Weather
You may have seen on the tele the torrential rain and flooding in Montpellier at the beginning of the week. We got five months of rain in three hours. On Monday lunch time, I took my son to the tram station to go to lectures. Mistake. It was already pissing down and the roads were awash. I had very little petrol (35km worth) and had to get to work so really didn't want to be travelling much. I got to work after a very scary drive only to hear not long after that all lectures were cancelled and he was stranded in town because the buses and trams were no longer running.

Luckily it was the end of our fiscal year at work and manic, so I couldn't go to his rescue even if I'd wanted to, and a good thing too, because the roads became rivers and people were having to leave their cars stranded where they broke down. I would have been caught up in all that, and been stranded too.

In the end, he walked with a friend to the tram station where I'd left him, in the pouring rain, and got a lift back. His new computer was fighting for its life overnight drying out... It hiccuped to life the next day, thank goodness.

Vitamin D
The world wide recommended dose for vitamin D3 is 1400 to 2000 UI per day, with a maximum of 10,000. In France, it's 200 UI. Why the difference? Because of a calculation error by the Conseil (not so-)supérieur d'hygiene publique de France (CSHPF), the people tasked with deciding on the dose. Instead of fixing 10,000 as a maximum dose (like in the rest of the world), they calculated it as 1,000. D'oh. The result is that vitamin D3 is only sold in capsules of 200 UI which means you have to take at least five to get the right dose.

It's important, because three out of four people are deficient in vitamin D, and this is a shame because vitamin D helps prevent and treat some cancers, auto-immune diseases (multiple scleroses, diabetes I), depression, fractures, and infections like the flu.

I've just ordered some vitamin D3 for us all in the form of drops because it's easier to take five drops rather than five capsules.

Food supplements
I'm very excited because they have all been ordered and are due to be delivered from tomorrow. I had to wait until this month to order them due to the financial strain of September. The ones I already had have been excellent in improving the quality of my sleep (rhadiola and magnesium). I've been eating a quarter of pomegranate every day for my breakfast too as their juice is very good for balancing women's hormones. I'd eat more, but they cost a fortune each!

Cooking
My naturopathic doctor gave me a recipe for rice flour bread which I decided to try the other day. It contained rice flour, buckwheat flour, some oat flour, olive oil, an egg, bicarb, and water. She said to put it in the oven at 130°C for half an hour. I was dubious but followed her instructions. Well, of course it wasn't cooked and it tasted quite disgusting. I'm sure there's an error in there somewhere... must email and ask!

Enemies of the Body State

Healthy eating comes in many guises. You can go from eating lots of standard fruit and veg plus meat (if you're not a veggie) from the supermarket to eating more and more organic produce and better quality meat, to eating totally organic. For some people, a vegetarian or vegan diet is the healthiest; for others, including meat is essential. Some even decide to adopt a totally raw food diet.

Never one for extremes, I like to pick and mix, but I'm becoming more and more aware that eating gluten and dairy produce is not good for you. This morning, I got an email from a newsletter I subscribe to (SanteNatureInnovation) which convinced me even more.

According to Dr Jean Seignalet, a dairy-free and gluten-free diet can relieve ninety-one major illnesses: auto-immune (psoriasis, multiple sclerosis, poly-arthritis, etc.), allergies, asthma, headaches, depression, insomnia and gastric/intestinal problems.

Apparently, giving up dairy and gluten for three months can be a life-changing experience for those who don't know they are intolerant. They regain their energy and morale; sleep well, feel good, and lose weight. Their hair looks better, and their pains and fatigue disappear.

Historically, people turned to wheat and dairy because they were not expensive, so they incorporated them into as many recipes as possible. Unfortunately, humans can't digest lactose in milk very well, and the protein casein provokes intolerance and allergies. As for calcium, only 30% is absorbed, so it's not such a brilliant body-builder after all! Wheat is poor in nutrients, containing starch (sugar), and some protein of which mainly gluten which 15% of the population is intolerant to, and a bit of fat in the germ.

Those who are intolerant to either or both know just how bad it can get (like this professional ballerina). The intestines get inflamed, become porous, and let proteins pass into the blood which set off inflammatory and auto-immune reactions throughout the body.

I'm not particularly intolerant to either, although I do burp after I eat bread (and it's probably getting worse), but I'm interested in what I can replace them with. I've started using different flours (buckwheat, chickpea, rye), in muffins, tarts and cookies, but I want to know more, and I don't want to spend (even more) hours finding out.

The newsletter invites us to register for a cookery course called Naturacook given (in French) by Benjamin Dariouch, founder of Naturacoach. It teaches the secrets of tasty eating gluten- and dairy-free, and how to use properly the different flours that are available. It's on for four months and is delivered through videos which can be watched and re-watched, plus pdf versions of the 120 basic recipes, the possibility to ask Ben questions, and how to transform normal recipes to gluten-/dairy-free.

I was asked recently to find out about cookery courses for an American couple who wanted to come to Montpellier for a couple of weeks. I was quite surprised at how much they cost. This course is €37/month for four months which I reckon is a good buy. I'll let you know how it goes.

NutriNet-Santé Study - Sign up Sign up

You know how I've been banging on recently about my interest in eating organic? Well, to my joy, there's a massive study that's just been set up to compare the effects of nutrition and various other factors such as genetics, environment, biology and family upon health.

I've signed up to be accepted. Anyone in France can sign up. You don't have to be an organic nazi (as my DB calls me... jokingly). They want half a million people to take part over five years so it will be an important study that hopes to identify the risk factors linked to nutrition of many of today's major health problems such as cancer, cardiovascular illnesses, obesity, diabetes 2, high blood pressure, etc.

The NutriNet-Santé study is not some flippant webside story, but is being coordinated by a nutritional epidemiology team from University Paris 13 at the Centre de Recherche en Epidémiologies et Biostatistiques Sorbonne Paris Cité.

You can sign up on the website here, to receive a login and temporary password. Then you log in, and go through a series of 3 questionnaires about your personal circumstances and health. You also get a random set of three days over a couple of weeks assigned to you. On these days you have to note what you eat and enter it into the website within a few days. It doesn't seem to be too onerous!

I really hope that the study will show that nutrition has an effect upon health. It must do really mustn't it? My eldest has just spent the week buying rubbish food with his pocket money instead of eating at home, and last night puked it all up as a result of eating something dodgy. As he said, it hurts most to think that his precious pocket money ended up down the loo.

Me? I laughed.

Nutritional Lies Busted

Any rational person would find it a risky business to base public nutrition advice according to lobby. But if you think about it, that is what happened, especially in the US.

Remember this food pyramid that got thrust at us for years?

Classic food pyramid

I suppose it was the wheat lobby that pushed it initially. Lots of lovely bread and pasta to give us energy to last until the next meal (or snack). Preferably wholemeal but whoever took much notice of that? Kids don't often like wholemeal bread, and wholemeal pasta tastes like cardboard, so people packed in the highly processed white flour products and the wheat producers were happy.

Then came the corn lobby which pressed to put GMO corn syrup in everything but the kitchen sink, and the soya lobby which told the government that its products were really healthy and look at the vast populations of Asia to see how right they were. So soy (GMO) products were pushed and it was put in everything but the plug in the kitchen sink. Convenience food was advertised as labour-saving so we could get on with more important things (cue images of smiling mother playing with her rosy offspring, or rugged man striding off doing something sporty), and the microwave revolutionised producing food for those with no time.

Strangely, obesity rose to reach epic proportions, heart disease increased, and people had never been so unhealthy. Yet they were all following health advice given to them by government agencies and their doctors.

It was only fairly recently, in March 2012, that one man, a heart surgeon spoke out. Dr Dwight Lundell, a heart surgeon with over 5000 heart surgeries under his belt, revealed that heart disease is not caused by cholesterol but by inflammation in the artery wall. This is caused by following a recommended diet which is low in fat and high in polyunsaturated fats and carbohydrates. Remember those (rich) lobbies? Thanks guys!

Inflammation is caused by eating highly processed carbohydrates like sugar, flour and everything made from them, and excessive consumption of high omega-6 vegetable oils like soybean, corn and sunflower which are found in many processed foods. For a graphic description of what happens to your arteries when you consume these products, and why, do read his article here. It's not pretty.

To combat inflammation, we should be following a food pyramid that looks more like this:

Chronic-disease prevention pyramid

It's another reason to go back to basics. I really want to avoid chronic disease, and reading that article opened my eyes to the vital importance of eating properly.

This includes avoiding all non-fermented soya products. How did soya become the number one low fat milk substitute? Back in 2002 the soy industry lobbied to promote calcium-fortified soy milk as a healthy alternative to milk. For vegetarians they advised soy as a meat protein substitute. It was all down to the soy industry lobbyists who decided that they should modify nutritional advice for the masses.

There are numerous problems with unfermented soy. It is high in allergens so the more you eat the more likely you are to develop allergies, while the phytates obstruct absorption of protein and minerals such as magnesium, iron, zinc and calcium. Most soy products found in soy milk and processed foods are unfermented. Unfermented soy is linked to a number of illnesses you don't want to have such as digestive distress, immune system breakdown and reproductive problems to name but three. It's particularly bad for men.

We were told that Asians have been eating soy since time began, but what we weren't told is that they only eat fermented soy products (miso, tempah, tofu, etc) and only a small quantity per day (about 25g).

No wonder public health in the US and elsewhere has declined dramatically. People are slowly poisoning themselves, take medication to deal with the symptoms, but do not deal with the underlying source of the problem which is poor nutrition. And they have poor nutrition because they follow advice given to them by those in charge of protecting public health. Except they don't, do they? They protect industry. Follow the money and you'll find a circle of death - poor nutrition, heart disease, toxic medication, early demise.

Take your life in your hands in the kitchen!

Mastering the Art of French Eating by Ann Mah

I don't get sent many books to review, but this is not a problem as I'm quite fussy and would not like to have to interrupt my bloodthirsty or psychological criminal thrillers too often with romantic slush or other fluffy literature. However, I'm a keen foodie so a book on food and eating in France will immediately gain my attention. This one seemed to combine both, so when the publishers asked me to read and review it, I said yes, but did warn them that my readership is fairly limited (and I don't have an Oprah effect of immediate sales the moment I say I like something, more's the pity...).

Ann Mah is an American of Chinese origin, and I really enjoyed her writing. I particularly admired the way she links from stories about her life to her exploration of French food because how she could make the transition was not immediately obvious but she managed to carry it off extremely well - very smooth and delightful to read.

I do not share her passion for Paris though, so all the lyrical descriptions which illustrate her deep-seated love of the city passed somewhat over my head. Paris, for me, is a pretty place but lacks dynamism. It's nice for a visit, but I would hate to live there and suffer the metro, RER, pollution, noise, traffic, high prices and time-wasting. My main contact with the place in recent times has been the RER from Gare de Lyon to Gare du Nord where you might think you were in downtown Douala rather than gay Paris.

What I did like about the book was the way Ann Mah threw herself into investigating her food choices thoroughly. She went all over France and met all sorts of interesting people, and official groups dedicated to maintaining the heritage and standards of certain dishes (and wine). She's a professional so you would expect a certain level of contact, but she went far beyond what I would have expected. I learned lots of things about the iconic dishes of France, which is always a pleasure when you've been in the country for a long time. It's easy to get blasé about fondue, aligot, bœuf bougignon, cassoulet and choucroute so some history about each dish and her pursuit of the real thing appealed to me a lot. I loved the way she enjoyed her food. I'm sure she's a joy to feed. One obvious omission was foie gras though. I wonder why she left out this most controversial French speciality. Or perhaps that's why...

The book is not just about Paris and food though. Ann Mah tells us a bit about her childhood and how she fell in love with Calvin, a diplomat, which meant she had to put her own successful publishing career to one side as they travelled about the world. I liked reading about how she dealt with that and how she found the means to overcome some of the issues of being an accompanying spouse. 

The poor woman had just settled into the city of her dreams with her husband when he was called away to Iraq for a year, so she had to stay in the "city of romance" without her partner-in-love. How's that for pas de chance? It could have been worse though, she could have been in Slough! And at least she could develop a project based on food and eating (and drinking), and had the means to indulge her foodie passion. 

This is an enjoyable book if you like Paris, France and food, and appreciate an honest approach to love and life. All is not rosy in Ann Mah's life, as you may have gathered, but she deals with her loneliness and isolation, even though she moans a lot about missing her husband. Actually she comes across as a someone it would be fun to have lunch with.

This book would make an excellent present for a Francophile foodie. Other chapters are devoted (and I use that word wisely) to crepes, steak frites, andouillette, salade lyonnaise, and soupe au pistou. My favourite moment in the book is when she recounts eating cheese fondue in the middle of summer. I had a good laugh at that, plus when she observed that the French do not like cinnamon which she realised after she'd made a pumpkin pie for a foodie family at Thanksgiving. I could just imagine them taking a small bite, making a mou and politely pushing it away. 

They do it to mince pies too...

Goujon Wraps and Samosas - lessons learned (possibly)

While some people are bemoaning the demise of the ready meal, forcing reluctant parents to consider the prospect of actually cooking real food for their kids, I have found myself spending even more time in the kitchen than usual. I do like to cook, I like to eat well, and I hate industrial food (except nems), so I have no problem at all putting on my pinny (metaphorically, who wears a pinny nowadays?) and getting stuck in, usually for around half an hour to an hour max on week days.

I would normally leave long-winded cooking to the weekend, but I have been known to get a mindless bee in my cook's bonnet and won't give up until stung.

So this week saw me coming home from work on Tuesday, for example at just gone 5pm, make the dough for flat-breads, slice up 4 turkey breasts for goujons, chuck them into a marinade, do a taxi run, roll out 16 flat breads thinly, start dry-frying them (a couple of minutes each), do another taxi run, finish cooking breads, take out marinated turkey, dip in egg and dukkah/breadcrumbs and start frying in small batches.

Mine did look something like this!

Talk about time-consuming. I totally miscalculated the time it would take. In the end, I got everyone involved from my youngest doing the washing up to my eldest cutting up salad stuff for the wraps so we could eat just after 8pm! Three sodding hours!! (Minus one hour or so taxiing) but the turkey goujon wraps were yummy, the dukkah giving the meat a delicious nutty, spicy crunch.

Not having learned my lesson, yesterday I had the brilliant idea of making samosas. It would have been fine, had my DB not wanted veggie ones rather than the pork ones I was making for the rest of us. It would also have been fine had not my mincer decided it was a piece of crap and mincing pork was above its price grade. This meant I had to scrape all the squishy bits out of the machine and throw them in the food processor instead. Time, it all takes time!

Mine looked a teeny bit like this, just add black bits and general untidiness

I am throwing out my measly mincer (bought from low-cost store Norma). My cleaner had first refusal, and refused, can't blame her... Enough is enough!

So then I made the pork filling (recipe) with potato, onion, carrots, frozen peas and mild curry paste (I wimped out of grinding and roasting my own spices), and turned my attention to the Hairy Bikers' veggie filling - onion, garlic, garam masala, mustard seeds, turmeric, potato, carrot, frozen peas, curry leaves, parsley (as the plastic bag of fresh coriander that had been lurking in the fridge, possibly for weeks, produced a selection of rotten black soggy stems and leaves... mmm tempting...).

Once done, the fillings had to be added to the samosa circles which I did NOT make, and the intelligence test of how to fold the little sods. I've never been terribly good at geometry so I ended up with a bit of a mess, but miraculously they all held together when they hit the hot oil, all 13 of them, in small batches. It's the cooking in small batches that takes up so much time, isn't it, but by then I'd run out of large frying pans and had to use the wok.

Everything tasted lovely, but it damn well should have done the effort and time it took to make. I won't be getting stung like that again for a while. I'll stick to my slow cooker and a roast chicken this weekend I think. Nice hands-off cooking!

Guess what we're eating tonight? LEFTOVERS! YAY!!

Do you do things à l'envers too? Like busy cooking on week days, cool cooking at weekends?

What an Effing Crappy Boxing Day

Yesterday was a write-off, a day I would mostly like to remove from my memory bank. Normally that shouldn't take long as I have a terrible memory, but I have a nasty feeling that this one will hang around for quite a while, like a lingering mauvais pong.

It began badly. I discovered that my kitchen sink was blocked when I tried to do the washing up. I chucked in some unblocking gel and left it to do its thing.

Then I had to go to work, on Boxing Day, but because France doesn't do Boxing Day, muggins here was up at the crack of dawn (it being around the shortest day) to haul her weary bones to earn a crust. I don't like working on Boxing Day. It feels wrong despite the fact that I've been in France for a really long time now (and at this time of year it feels way too long!). There were two of us at work: me and the guard.

Luckily on Wednesdays I finish at noon so I could escape to the joyous prospect of dealing with the sink, which I discovered was still blocked. The water hadn't moved a jot. It was all still there, stagnating. The gel had not worked, at all.

I poked my head under the sink and, because the plumbing in the house is so crappy, as I was taking out the bottles and boxes I keep there, I knocked a tube and a whole sink-worth of water cascaded out onto the floor. Some people are flooded from torrential rain and an over-flowing river outside; I just get flooded from the sodding sink inside.

It was not a happy moment. I believe I screamed and beat my head against the wall. Then I had to go and chuck all the books that were piled up on the floor over to the other side of the room so they didn't get soaked.

A frustrating hour later, I'd found the culprit, a blockage made up of a plug of fat. God knows how it got itself into a perfect plug shape and had the time to get attached to the U-bend. There's hot water flowing down the sink regularly. It was probably being away for 24hrs over Christmas that did it.

Then I discovered that my cleaner had poured a whole load of bleach down the sink and it had spattered all over my decent brown jeans. The bleach was manifesting itself through the appearance of red patches up and down my legs. EFFING RUINED!

To cheer myself up (much needed) I decided to go and use some of my Christmas gift coupons to buy a new pair of jeans. I could use the coupons I received in the Halle aux Vetements (not normally my first port of call...) so off I went. Ten pairs of jeans later, I had to leave the shop empty-handed. They were either too big or too small or too crappy. Actually they were all crappy, so I tried Kiabi next door. Same result. I could use the coupons in Pimkie or Etam but I'm not 12-20 so anything I bought would make me look like mutton dressed as lamb and a total twat.

By this time I was totally frustrated as well as furious. I stomped around Carrefour to buy wine, some food and brown dye then went home to glare at the sink and carry on mopping.

My DB came round so I could take out all my frustration on him (bless 'im). Then I had a nice cup of tea and a mince pie. Later I made a recipe from BBC Good Food - Garlicky potato and mushroom gratin to which I added some girolles (chanterelles) that I'd bought as a treat in Carrouf, and it was sooooo good and so wickedly creamy that I felt really much better.

So things did improve eventually, but my god, what a mostly effing awful sodding day!

Fancy an astronaut ice-cream cornet?

When I was about the age of my eldest, my mother bought me some astronaut ice-cream to put in my Christmas stocking. It came in a flattish plastic packet and made a peculiar scrunching noise when I prodded it.

It apparently did not need water to re-hydrate the freeze-dried slab inside, but, according to Wikipedia, was "brittle and rigid but still soft when bitten into". I put it away for a rainy day and forgot about it. When I did eventually dig it out, I was dismayed to see that it had long passed its use-by date, so it went into the bin unopened. I think I'd thought that as it was basically dry, it would be edible for years and years. In fact, disappointingly  it went off after two.

This was how most freeze-dried food was produced until demand increased for longer lasting packs. Freeze-dried food is used by the army, astronauts, sailors, adventurers, emergency teams, NGOs and so on. It is also being stocked by survivalists. Oh, just a few nut-jobs in the wilds of the US, then... Well, no, freeze-dried food is becoming big business, and not just in the US. There are keen survivalists in the UK and Germany too, and the phenomenon has spread to France. People are stocking up against economic, social or natural catastrophes where survival would be an issue because distribution routes could become paralysed.

Last year, the website lyophilise.fr sold 85,000 meals to individuals here anxious about the future. At between €4.50 and €6.50, that's a lot of money. One guy bought €30,000 worth of provisions. There is no typical customer - couples, families, singles are all at it, discreetly so as not to avert their neighbours.

Food today is delivered to shops from highly centralised centres of distribution. As strikes have shown, it doesn't take much to disrupt this system, and you get folk running around like headless chickens buying up trolleys full of pasta, flour and oil heedless of the needs of others. The concept of sharing goes out of the window the moment a whiff of emergency is felt. When the first Iraq war was declared, my French granny-in-law urged me to lay in stocks of vital foods, having lived, as she had, through the War. I went to the supermarket on my normal shopping day to find the shelves empty of basic foods. I wondered if the panic buyers would be able to use their stocks before they actually went off. Frankly, I hoped not.

People who are stocking freeze-dried food understand that they cannot necessarily count on the system when there is a serious problem. Tinned food has a short life span despite what many people think (how many old tins have you got lurking at the back of your kitchen cupboards, eh? I recently threw out a bag full...), but freeze-dried food is now being made that can last for ten to twenty-five years.

You can buy all sorts, from breakfast packs to full meals, desserts, snacks and even packs which self-heat. You're a vegetarian? No problem, there are meat-free meals too. A pack of month's worth of food for a family will cost about €1500, the only problem is they all seem to be halal. I haven't worked out why this might be. Are Muslims more likely to buy in packs of stocks, or is it because they have more disasters and so possibly consume more, or is it a marketing ploy to ensure a maximum number of potential sales (except Jews?)? I am very much against halal so if I were to invest (!), I'd have to become a vegetarian or buy individual meals.

My DB asked me if we should buy some to put away (er, where?). He already has a small stock of soap (no soap - no cleanliness - rapid death... with soap you are king) and other necessities just in case. I tried to get worked up about the idea... and failed. Sales figures might be doubling or more every year, but I have enough trouble keeping the present running smoothly let alone worrying about the future. We'll probably all be nuked by the Iranians anyway and it won't matter how much stuff we've got in the garage. Pouf! Gone.

Food and a Wild Goose Chase

Question: What can you do with some scabby old freezer burnt pork?
Answer: smother it in hoisin sauce, chuck it in the slow cooker or in the oven at 100°C for hours and hours (at least 5). Boil down the juice and Bob's yer uncle.

Tasty shredded in wraps, used in lasagne or simply with the sauce and some fried potatoes. Three French boys including two visitors have just declared it 'delicious' so it must be good!

Still on food, I've had to resort to making fresh fruit salad every day. My boys are too lazy to get up, take a kiwi, peel it or cut it in half and eat it. They are too lazy to take a nectarine, wash it and eat it. They are not too lazy to tuck into a bowl of prepared for them nectarine, apricot, melon and kiwi... with that essential squirty cream.

My youngest and his friends are also not too lazy to light a bonfire in the barbecue having hunted for sticks in the pinede opposite (I'm too lazy to buy charcoal), ask for sausages (having already eaten a hearty dinner) and cook them whilst they toast marshmallows. I'm not interfering except to give them fondue forks so I don't have to make a trip to the emergency department later because someone burnt his fingers, and forbid a towering inferno.

I've had a fascinating day going on a wild goose chase to Nimes in search of the skatepark. It did not auger well as there were two addresses given online, in two different places. They were quite near each other so I supposed one should be good. We stopped off first at TamTam, an all things skate/BMX/VTT/roller shop where my youngest got his scooter seen to by a lovely young man who was toasted by the sun to a gorgeous golden colour.

He gave us vague directions to the skatepark and off we set. We never found it and in the end, as we saw no pedestrians to ask, I said we'd give up and go home. For a large place I don't know where they hid it, but hide it they did, very successfully. There wasn't a single signpost to help out either.

On the up side, when we were on the motorway coming home, at the Montpellier péage we avoided all the queues by following the far right lane which took us to 4 extra booths, all empty. We sailed through in no time at all.

In other food news, Mondial Market, my nearest purveyor of foreign foods, has started stocking Aunt Bessie's Yorkshire Puddings (microwavable), frozen back bacon, sausages, vegetarian sausages and other delights. I bought a packet of the Yorkshires, not because I like them - I think they taste of cardboard - but my boys love them. My eldest was ecstatic when I got them home and showed him. I also bought a packet of back bacon as well as Yorkshire Tea.

And finally, I've noticed that Carrouf Discount does a milk chocolate fruit and nut. As the only other brand to make this here is Nestlé, and I don't buy Nestlé products (and it's rubbish anyway the time I succumbed to desperation and gave it a try), I was curious to know what it tasted like. Normally I wouldn't touch discount chocolate, but it's actually very nice, especially fresh from the fridge. It's not Cadbury's but it's pleasantly similar. Oh happy day!

L'Ail des Ours

L'ail des ours

Isn't that a cute name - Bears' garlic? Not to be confused with Lily of the Valley which is similar but toxic! I'd never heard of it until I came across a recipe for asparagus gratin. It grows in woods apparently but I would never dream of hunting for it in the wild. Not having being raised a child of nature, I prefer my food bought in a bag with a label ta. I don't go mushrooming either as I wouldn't trust myself not to pick the only toxic mush in the forest!

Anyway, I bought a bunch of purple (tinted) asparagus in the supermarket the other day, it being French and the thin green-stalked bunches next to it (at half the price) Spanish. I have nothing against the Spanish but I try and buy local and support the French suppliers whenever I can. They have a hard time competing with the cut price stuff that floods in across the border although in fact there's no competition when it comes to taste. Still, buying seasonal and local is sometimes a luxury!

The other reason for splashing out is that the boys are with their dad so what I didn't spend on chocolate, biscuits, Nutella, and kids' cereal (and the rest) I spent on expensive French asparagus and other tasty bits and bobs like superior lait cru camembert and a large pack of Heineken (on special offer...).

So, have asparagus, will cook, but how? I normally steam asparagus and eat it with a main dish, or do asparagus risotto, but as my bunch is mainly white I'm reluctant to create an anaemic-looking dish of cream-coloured bits. Plus, I felt the need to try something new, so turned to my favourite recipe site: BBC Good Food.

A disappointing 4 pages later of vegetarian asparagus dishes, my dearly beloved having annoyingly turned veggie last year, I thought I'd try the French sites. The BBC's recipes were all for green asparagus and seemed to be variations on risotto, tarts or salads. One exception was for Thai pancakes stuffed with (green) asparagus and egg which sounded yummy but I don't have any limes or spring onions and as I don't go shopping half way through the week, I have to make do. This keeps shopping time and costs down. It also involved quite a lot of work.

Back on Google, I found a list of white asparagus recipe sites and started working my way through them. The sites didn't offer a filter for vegetarian recipes as vegetarians are considered as an eccentric minority in France, so I just had to bite the bullet and read each one. There were recipes with delicate sauces you had to cook over a bain marie, one recipe that cooked asparagus in an almond and parmesan crust, a soufflé, a soup and an espuma. Doesn't that all sound like hard work to you?

Back to the drawing board, and eventually I found Gratin d'Asperges Blanches. Basically all you do is steam the asparagus until they are almost done, then whisk some cream and mix with a couple of eggs. Season this with cayenne pepper, lemon juice and the ail des ours and chuck it in the oven for 10 minutes or so. I have never seen ail des ours for sale but apparently it's a member of the chives family so as my chives are one of the few things left growing in my garden after the super hard Winter freeze killed everything else, I can use them. The recipe called for basil as an alternative but I don't have any of that fresh either. No, it'll have to be chives and parsley. Serve it with parma ham unless you are a veggie in which case don't.

Verdict: I think would have preferred it simply steamed and served with melted butter and a squeeze of lemon juice. It was okay, the asparagus was okay, but it wasn't great. I won't be splashing out on the pinky white stuff again. As a gratin, the eggy mixture was reminiscent of a quiche filling so something of a failure in my book, but it tasted okay. Maybe it really did need the ail des ours...

Comfort Food Blog Hop

I'm incredibly distracted at the moment. My head is whirl of potential future projects if certain things come off, and I even find myself having snippy words with that slime ball Piers Morgan in an interview on my new situation. No, I have no idea why either, but it kept me busy during my 2.5km walk last Sunday morning on the parcours de santé which I've finally found at Grammont. Sometimes my head gets a will of its own and just goes off into realms of fantasy without permission and which totally bog down other functions.

It's not the first time my head has taken unilateral action, but I'm now older and wiser and can come down gently. On previous occasions it was almost painful focusing back on reality.

One reality that I can focus on happily, however is food, and in response to LittleMe's Blog Hop on my top five comfort food, here is my list:
1. Roast chicken with veg and roast spuds. Chicken is the ultimate comfort food as it's unchallenging in taste, but incredibly versatile. I love mine with crunchy skin which I eat, careless of the consequences. My mother makes a mean roast chicken and her roast spuds are to die for. I've been told mine are pretty yummy too - I like them cooked to the crunchy far end of the golden spectrum, going as far as some burnt bits here and there.

2. Pancakes. There's nothing like sinking your teeth into a soft warm pancake with lemon and sugar. I just adore the combination of flavours and textures - the crunchy sugar, the squidgy pancake and the liquid lemon. I don't reserve them for pancake day, but have them several times a year. My boys love them too and always cheer when they smell the delectable aroma of cooking pancake.

3. Sausage and mash. With British sausages, natch. French ones don't really do it for me, they don't have the cultural flavour clout that a good old Sainsbury's chipolata has. Fried, with fried onion, bright green peas and a creamy mash, and served with ketchup, there's nothing like it for warming the cockles.

4. Kedgeree. Kedgeree comes in all different recipes, but my favourite is the one my mother cooks. Smoked haddock boiled in milk, rice, boiled egg, tomato, lots of parsley. You have to fry the cooked rice in butter to get it a lovely pale yellow, which with the addition of egg yolk becomes a glorious golden colour setting off the red of the tomato and green of the parsley perfectly. Kedgeree has acquired cult status in our house. It is the lunch cooked before a wedding - light but sustaining, and my brothers and I all had it before getting married. My youngest son adores it, so it'll be in good hands.

5. Boiled ham and parsley sauce. Another dish from my childhood that I replicate with difficulty here due to the problems of sourcing the right cut of meat. All I can find is 'palette' which is a bit of the shoulder, and maybe a tiny end of the leg. My mother gets a superb hunk, with skin, boils it, then scores the skin, pricks it with cloves and rubs over brown sugar then pops it in the oven to crunch up. Served with mash and peas, it's utterly delectable in a creamy, savoury with sweet bite sort of way.

As you can see, my comfort food is heavily influenced by my childhood memories. There isn't one French dish in there. The only one that might get a look in is blanquette de veau which my mother also makes. All that talk of pancakes has given me cravings, but I only have one egg left so tonight it'll have to the poor relation of sausage and mash - Toulouse sausage and mash. Or maybe a sausage casserole...

Tasty Experiments

Nutty chicken curry

In an interesting coming together of circumstances, I find that I'm changing my eating habits. I'm not bad as a cook but there are times when life's pressures get to a point that I take refuge in 'old favourites', and variety goes right out of my repertoire. Old favourites such as spag bol, roast chicken, home-made burgers, chicken breasts in creamy sauce, kedgeree, sausage and mash, spaghetti carbonara, and so on make such a regular appearance that there's a danger of identifying the day of the week by the meal.

It never got that bad, but I was beginning to realise that, as the weeks went by, we were always eating the same things, and that is very boring. Then a number of things happened.

First, my dearly beloved announced that he was going to eat as little meat as possible as he is really vegetarian de coeur and, while difficult in a business context, at home he aimed to practically give it up totally. This meant at my home too.

Secondly, I discovered a really useful food website, BBC Good Food. I like it because it has lots of tasty recipes, including vegetarian ones; they are well explained, are mostly easy to do and don't take all day. They don't seem to have a huge list of bizarre ingredients either, although if you have a bizarre ingredient to hand, you can search for a recipe in which to use it. Another thing I like is the comments section where people leave comments on how they rate the dish, what changes they made because they didn't have all the ingredients, and other suggestions.

Thirdly, I found I wanted to diversify my tastes and explore different flavours, trying out chillies and other Asian and oriental dishes.

Fourthly, because I had a recent non-scare concerning my health and thought it was high time, anyway, that we ate a bit less meat and hopefully cut down on my food bill (some hope!).

I have taken to buying in packets of cereals - mixtures of quinoa, barley, rice, couscous, etc. - and pulses - red lentils, chickpeas, split green peas. I don't know if I'm also, subconsciously, laying in siege stores, stocking my pantry with dried goods as a buffer against rising prices.

I've had to buy in a few spices I didn't have previously, but no great investment, and it was great fun to wander round the shelves of Mondial Market in Le Cres once I'd stocked up on Yorkshire tea and baked beans.

One of the best dishes I've tried so far is the Coconut dhal recipe. Made with red lentils, coconut milk, and green chillies, it was quick, easy and very comforting after our bike ride in the wet and windy Aude. The fried onion added a lovely luxurious crunch.

My TWDB had his daughter over the other weekend and together we rustled up a Chickpea, aubergine and tamarind curry. The aubergines were roasted in the oven drizzled with oil and added to the other vegetables including green beans in a tasty stock perked up with garam marsala and mustard seeds. We served it with lemon rice and naans. It went down a bomb.

My boys are notoriously fussy about certain vegetables so I made a Spicy root and lentil casserole which had carrots and parsnips in it (on the black list) and it went down without a murmur. I like to use seasonal produce wherever possible so this one was perfect for a nasty winter's day. When I told them they had been eating carrots, which they had noticed anyway, natch, they said that the curry made them taste really good. I also excelled myself that day and made some naans. The bread machine did all the hard work and then I pored over a frying pan waiting for them to cook. It's a time-consuming process as each one takes about 5 minutes, so it's not something I'm going to do too often, but they did taste fabulous, much much better than the ones I buy in Carrouf.

Last night I made a Nutty chicken curry which had peanut butter, Greek yoghurt and chicken breast chunks in a sauce of coriander, ginger, and red chillies. I stirred into it some leftover mixed cereals and it was delicious. It wasn't too powerful, but had a good kick.

The boys are perfectly happy to have meat-free meals and seem to love the spices I've been using, so this has encouraged me to try many dishes I wouldn't have thought of cooking before. The good thing about Asian vegetarian recipes is that they don't base most dishes around cheese. As my two don't eat it, many British staples are out of the question.

Come the summer I'll be testing their resistance to peppers and aubergine which they currently detest, but may find edible if disguised in a tasty curry. Where there's a will there's a way... maybe.