Bad Cook - Esther Walker

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sea. I couldn’t believe it. Otherwise handsome and winning, this man couldn’t dive! In order to get into the water off the boat, he would vault over the side railings and splatter into the sea, feet first. As my husband did a backwards dive off the edge of the boat, knifing into the water like an otter I thought: I could not marry a man who couldn’t do that. I also couldn’t marry a man who can’t whistle for a cab, carry me out of a burning building in his arms, haggle, parallel park on a busy street or do one-arm press-ups.

      I know it’s childish. Hot guns, a nice tan and ‘cool hair’ are the things I wanted in a boy when I was 14 and yet they’re still important now. I don’t think that says good things about me. But at least I know what I want.

      Anyway, that’s how Giles and I met. Now when we meet at a party, you won’t have to ask.

      The mystery of mutual attraction often occurs to me when I am picking a recipe. I quite often find myself flicking through an entire recipe book or colour supplement shrieking ‘there is NOTHING in here!’ So what makes me stop, what makes me pick something out of the crowd? What gives a recipe the X Factor?

      Recipes that are not too heavily reliant on carbohydrate will always catch my eye. Things without too many steps, without ingredients that I must hunt down in Thai supermarkets, which can be cooked without creating a vast mountain of washing up, will always make it off the page and into my pots and pans.

      So this pan-fried quail and barley stew I picked up on my travels was always going to get made, at some point. It is really good, this. I had been curious for a long time about what cooked lettuce would be like and, it turns out, it is nice.

      Quail and Barley Stew

      For two

       100g pearl barley

       olive oil

       1 onion, chopped

       salt and pepper

       200g frozen peas

       500ml chicken stock (one of those tubs from Waitrose will do)

       25g butter

       1 tbsp flour

       2 jointed quail – okay this is a bit of a faff to do yourself and you’re left with very sad little quail carcasses, so you can enquire at your local Waitrose if they will do this for you at the butcher’s counter or simply go without the quail; the lardons (below) make this a perfectly edible light stew without the addition of the bird.

       some sprigs of fresh thyme

       100g lardons

       a handful of Little Gem leaves

      1 Cook the pearl barley in salted water for 50 minutes, then drain and leave to steam dry.

      2 Heat some oil in a pan and add the onion and a big pinch of salt. Cook slowly on a low heat for 15 minutes, without letting them get much colour. Add the barley and the peas.

      3 Cover with stock and bring to the boil then simmer for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.

      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:

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