Think about the next meal as soon as you finish one. You’ll have time to come up with good food choices rather than leaving it to chance at the last minute when your stomach is screaming ‘feed me now!’
Men think that every woman’s dream is to find a perfect man. I would argue that actually every woman’s dream is to live in a world where she can eat as many chocolates and cream cakes as she wants without getting fat. It wouldn’t be a disaster if she got accidentally locked up in Marks & Spencers’ bakery section over a Bank Holiday weekend and she had to eat those cream cakes to survive.
Mashed avocado makes everything taste nicer. Just add a scoop of mashed avocado to plain boiled eggs, omelette, smoked fish, tomatoes, cheese, banana, yogurt and even rice, and things instantly taste a lot better. Avocado has allowed me to be lazy with preparing my food yet still manage to eat healthily.
The quickest way to dispel the self-delusion when you start to get smug about your cooking as your god-given talent is to ask yourself if you would still cook if there was a willing person to do it for you all the time. I was starting get too proud of my skills and started thinking about taking cooking lessons when I asked myself this. I quickly realized that actually it wasn’t my life purpose to be a chef. I just love eating.
Try not to slice boiled eggs with a knife and fork. They will almost always fly off the plate and find the dustiest corner in the kitchen.
Unless you’re trying to mimic bovine beauty, close your mouth while chewing your food.
Cutting and chopping vegetables is less boring if you listen to some music or some audio books about human evolution or some strange man rabbiting on about philosophy.
You don’t need to consume a lot of alcohol and get drunk to be trendy.
Don’t daydream when you’re cooking. Your smoke alarm will surely shake you up with its piercing siren.
If you love stir-fry dishes, invest in a good wok and care for it like it’s your baby. Season it well and you can cook without things sticking to it and your stir-fry will taste so much better than cooking it in a non-stick pan.
Butter is the main reason I eat bread.
Don’t eat food in bed. I always manage to spill it. I rarely spill food when I eat at the table.
Don’t prepare food while wearing anything white, even though chefs do. Just the act of stirring food will cause a small morsel of tomato sauce to gleefully jump off and bind itself onto the white fabric. You’ll then spend the next hour trying to get rid of this stubborn red stain which will annoyingly transform itself into a bigger and paler red smudge instead of disappearing. All you’ll end up with is one hour lost and a white top with a pink smear across the front.
When eating with people around the age of 70 or over, you’ll almost always find them dribbling the food down their chin. Be sure to point it out to them so that they won’t walk around all day with baked beans stuck on their grey beard.
If you’re a health fanatic, but hate to cut vegetables, just pay a bit extra and buy ready chopped vegetables. They’re not as fresh as whole vegetables, but at least they’re better than carb-heavy ready meals which you’re going to get when confronted with a head of broccoli that demands to be unpacked and chopped before you can cook it. Since I have started to buy ready chopped vegetables I have managed to reduce my spinach consumption. As spinach is the most common leafy greens that doesn’t insist on being chopped and prepared, I was suffering from iron overdose.
Frozen green beans taste like rubber.
When someone offers to buy you a meal, always say ‘yes’ even if you are not hungry. They may not offer again in the future if you say ‘no.’
Don’t look at your tummy in the mirror straight after eating a big meal. You’ll panic and mistake the bulge as gaining fat. It’s just the extra food that you’ve just swallowed. It’ll ease off in a few hours.
If you feel sad, eat really spicy food. It’ll make you feel better instantly.
Thai food is spicier than Burmese food. They put raw birdeye chilli in the dishes! I found that out when I bit into a generous lump of green which I thought was a piece of spring onion. Once I’d sent the fire brigade home, I discovered that the curries were delicious though.
Cooking with a recipe book is not fun. I almost always end up with a headache from referring back and forth while trying to keep the book open at the correct page at every step. Plus the food gets burnt while I’m reading and re-reading a set of instructions. In the end recipe books are there on the shelves to inspire ideas and for guests to flick through and make notes of the dishes they’ll never make.
I haven’t learnt the art of eating a big sandwich without getting the mayonnaise or mustard all over my cheeks. Will keep trying.