Journals

I'm large; I'm greedy. So am I just one big character defect?

I love cooking for friends, but in order to keep it downsizing – and on the table before the next day's breakfast – I have a few guidelines.

Caramelised onions are vital to a happy life, but cooked in lashings of butter or olive oil they are not conducive to a thinner life. So finding a way of cooking them that made them taste amazing without using a bucketful of oil or a barrel of butter, was like discovering the secret of turning straw into gold.

How to make real mayonnaise in 20 seconds; why you should, and how it helps with downsizing. And why you should never, ever make it with virgin olive oil .

Mixing food for maximum flavour and making a small amount of oil go a lot further.

I’d like to talk about the other pandemic: the one caused by marauding chocolate bars rather than somebody sneezing. It’s been rather upstaged for obvious reasons, but it’s doing amazingly well. According to WHO, obesity affects well over 2 billion people and kills roughly 2.8 million a year. That’s enough to fill nearly 30 countries the size of Britain entirely with overweight and obese people, and wipe out the population of Wales every year.

The NHS is crippled by the costs of treating fat people. You might think they would be doing everything they can to help... This is what happened when I went to see my GP.

It is not a complete surprise that foods stuffed full of vitamins and minerals are good for your chances of surviving a deadly virus, but having such a large improvement confirmed by a study of over a million people’s diet and Covid health records does help a person reach for the broccoli and pomegranate seeds.

If your fridge is full of fruit and vegetables, you will eat lots of fruit and vegetables. If your fridge is full of chocolate, you will eat… you get the idea.

Radicchio Salad with Strawberries, Black Olives, and Ricotta; Marcella Hazan's Lemon-Roast Chicken; Roast Cauliflower with Beluga Lentils and Tahini Dressing; Roast Red Peppers

Roast pumpkin and apple soup with zhoug and yogurt; Baked salmon with ginger garlic and lime; Puree of roast beetroot, onion, and apple; Lentils alla Veneto; Steamed Broccoli with lemon zest and olive oil

Autumn in Tuscany. Chicken with courgettes, tomatoes and black olives, cooked on a wood-fired cooker

Roast aubergine with yogurt, lemon, thyme and pomegranate seeds Quail with romanesco, grapes, pine nuts, and saffron Fennel, escarole, and roast grape salad

I have been in love with Tarocco oranges since I lived in the Campo dei Fiori in Rome and bought them from a man who wanted to kill my landlord for running off with his wife. This supper menu is my ode to the orange, but there are no murderous Sicilians involved..

There is a place for formal courses – preferably somewhere with an enormous separate kitchen filled with skivvies, and a dining room with a footman behind every chair to keep things running smoothly – but I have an impressive talent for disorganisation and chaos and often prefer to put lots of lovely things on the table and let people eat them in whatever order they like. Especially on the footman’s day off.

Gyms have equipment to help you get fit and lose weight. So do kitchens. Having the right kit can make the difference between making a salad and diving headlong into the nearest bag of doughnuts. As a side effect, it also makes cooking a lot easier. You might want to put some of them on your Christmas list.

I first heard about the Iraqi-Israeli sabich when I was reading Kitty and Al Tait’s fabulous book, Breadsong. I was looking at her pitta bread recipe and my eye was captivated by her serving suggestion: fill it with hummus, soft-boiled eggs, fried aubergine, and pickles. It sounded absolutely delicious and I immediately set about creating a low-calorie-dense version.

How to keep your Christmas downsizing(ish) but so delicious that you wonder why you ever did it any other way.

I reach the end of my challenge. After 3 weeks of eating a great deal of fabulous food, the weight-loss was very pleasing. Even more pleasing was how fantastically well I felt.

Week 2 involved a lot of socialising, a mountain of delicious food, and a 2lb weight-loss

This is how the first week on my rabelaisian weight-loss challenge went – what I ate, and the recipes I used.

If you want to try the 21-day Downsizing Deliciously weight-loss challenge here are some top tips.

Here is how you go about flattening those fat-making, health-ruining sugar spikes and eat delicious salads while you are about it.

Having plenty of low-calorie-dense food to hand is absolutely crucial if you want to avoid an armed raid on the biscuit barrel. Low-calorie-dense means eating a lot of fruit, veg, and pulses. Imagine you have the contract to supply the Elephant House* at London Zoo and you’ll get the quantity about right.