Those brownies in full

So Becky B finally coughed up her recipe for her wheat-free brownies. And I only had to let down her tyres three or four times and beam a couple of incriminating snapshots through her living room window from my portable slide projector.

These brownies really are absolutely amazing - much better than my easy brownies I posted a while ago. They hit you right between the eyes, half-cake, half-fudge... but not half-fat unfortunately. EIGHT eggs! You might want to call an ambulance before you tuck in.

Anyway here we go - this is just copied and pasted from Becky B's email, (you can tell because there's no swearing), so none of the mistakes are mine THANK GOD, for fucking once.

Wheat Free Chocolate Brownies (makes 16)

295g luxury belgian plain chocolate
200g ground almonds
200g unsalted butter (diced)
350g caster sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
8 large eggs

100g walnut pieces (optional)

1 Preheat oven to 180 C
2 Break choc into chunks into large heatproof bowl & add butter
3 Melt choc mixture over pan of water
4 Remove from heat and add sugar, almonds, walnuts & vanilla
5 Separate eggs & beat yolks before adding them to choc mixture
6 Beat egg whites until they form soft peaks
7 Gradually fold egg whites into choc mixture
8 Pour mixture into a lined 20cm x 30cm swiss roll tin (depth of 5cm)
9 Bake for about 1 hour on middle shelf until cake is reasonably firm, risen & cracked on top
10 Cool in tin
11 Turn out of tin, trim off all edges (as no-one likes them!) and cut into 16
 
 
 
Coming soon: the lemon cupcakes. I've turned off the water supply to her house and ordered 18 pizzas in her name from Dominos, so she should cave in any minute now.

Baked Chicken Cordon Bleu

Chicken Cordon Bleu is a French-inspired poultry dish, although evidence suggests that Chicken Cordon Bleu was actually developed in the United States by chefs imitating other stuffed meat dishes from Europe. The name of the dish is clearly of French origin – Cordon Bleu means “blue ribbon” in French, and in French culinary tradition, the Cordon Bleu is awarded to food or chefs of particularly high quality. More information please check Wisegeek out.

50 ml Chicken broth 1 tbsp Butter, melted 1 clove Garlic, minced 1/2 cup Breadcrumbs 1 tbsp Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, grated 1 tsp Paprika

2 Boneless chicken breasts halves, skin removed 1/4 tsp Salt 1/4 tsp Freshly ground black pepper 1/4 tsp Dried oregano 2 slice Ham 2 slice Gruyères 1-2 tbsp Butter

1. Preheat the oven to 180C/350F. Combine the chicken broth, melted butter and minced garlic in a bowl. Set aside. In another bowl, mix together the breadcrumbs, Parmigiano-Reggiano, and paprika.
   
   
2. Place each chicken breast between 2 sheets of heavy-duty plastic wrap, and pound each to 1/4-inch thickness using a meat mallet or rolling pin. Sprinkle both sides of chicken with salt, pepper and oregano. Place a cheese and ham slice on each breast within 1/2 inch of the edges. Tuck in the sides of the breast and roll up tight like a jellyroll and secure with toothpicks.
   
   
3. Dip each roll in chicken broth mixture and dredge in breadcrumb mixture. Place rolls, seam side down, in a baking dish coated with butter. Pour the remaining broth mixture over chicken. Bake in the preheated oven for 28 minutes or until golden crisp.

Baked Chicken Cordon Bleu

World cup party

Every so often my husband and I will have a competition to see who was the more friendless and freakish teenager, who had the least loyal friends and the worst summers, who felt loneliest and most outsiderish and who is subsequently the more damaged and weird as an adult.

I always win. My husband might have been brooding and shy and crazy about comics, living in Cricklewood - but at least he was sporty. "You were on the cricket team!" I counter. "And weren't you on the football team as well? Give me a freaking break. Your parents had a house in the South of France! They bought you a car! Try being a ginger protestant called Esther living in the middle of Hampstead Garden Suburb with no car and no sporting prowess whatsoever."

Here, he almost always admits defeat. And, as an adult, he shows again and again what a sociable fellow he clearly really is, making new friends and hosting parties at the drop of a hat, whereas I am sometimes nervous of calling my own mother because I reckon she's probably got stuff on and doesn't really have time to talk to me. My husband's phone bill is regularly £200. Mine is £37.50, almost on the nose, pretty much every month.

Anyway, so my husband thought it would be jolly to host a World Cup party this weekend and rounded up about15 people at short notice to celebrate England being beaten 4-1 by Germany - although he obviously didn't know this defeat in advance, or he'd have put a bigger bet on.

He was mostly excited about barbequing the shit out of everything and I directed him towards "jamie at home" (sic), which is concerned mostly with cooking stuff over coals.

He did a fantastic butterflied leg of lamb, in the most astonishingly marvellous barbeque sauce ever, which goes like this:

1 heaped tsp cumin seeds
2 tablespoons fennel seeds
5 cloves
salt and pepper
1 bunch fresh thyme
1 bunch fresh rosemary
zest and juice of one orange
1 bulb garlic, broken into cloves and peeled
4 heaped tsps paprika
150ml ketchup
8tbsp olive oil
10 bay leaves
6 tablespoons balsamic vinegar

This looks like a lot of ingredients but most of them are pretty commonplace. I think he missed out the fennel seeds, but it was great anyway. He shoved it in the oven at 180C for 1 hour and then finished it off on the barbeque (but I think if he was going to do it again he'd do it in the oven for slightly less long).

He also did some chicken, which I brined for him. Brining chicken for a barbeque is a great way to get a lot of flavour into the chicken and also keep it from turning into a gritty husk on the grill. For a brine you need:

1 large pot of water
5 bay leaves
1 bulb of garlic, cut acrosss the equator
1 small bunch thyme
1 small bunch parsley
8 tbsp salt
10 or so black peppercorns
4 lemons, halved

Put all this together in the pot and heat until the salt has dissolved. Leave to cool completely and then drop in your chicken for 12 hours. After that time, rinse and pat dry if using immediately. I recommend using a tea towel if you're drying them off and then whack the towel in the washing machine, because kitchen paper just sticks and turns into spitballs.

Giles cooked all this on the barbeque for about 25 minutes.

The "ironic" Union Jack singlet did not win us the match - and it DOESN'T make him an NF loony, ok?

As well as all that, we had a potato salad, made with a half-mayo, half-yoghurt dressing - he added some torn up bits of sorrel, which worked really well but you could also use mint, or nothing at all - and some chopped shallot. Although on reflection, he thinks he ought to have used chopped spring onions. There was also a tomato salad, made in the usual way.

On top of this magnificent feast, Becky B - she of the gift of the Global knives, brought these round:

Which were absolutely out of this world. I haven't emailed her for the recipe yet because I've been too busy sinking the leftovers with a nice cold glass of milk. Nnnnhhh.

Then I had to run off because I had a date with a young man:

Also known as Edward, nephew #3. I've got high hopes for training him up to make me gin and tonics when his motor skills improve so I've got to start grooming him now. Nephews #1 and #2 and nieces #1 and #2 just don't seem interested.

Spaghetti with Cape Hake Sauce

Nothing fancy. Just an ordinary but very delectable white fish and tomato sauce for pasta that works perfectly as a one-course meal.

250 g Cape hake fillet©angiesrecipes 250 g Spaghetti©angiesrecipes 45 ml Olive oil 1 clove Garlic, sliced 1 Anchovy, chopped 50 g Onion, chopped

1 tbsp Capers 8 Olives, cut into rings 1/3 tsp Dried chilli flakes 1 tbsp Fresh parsley, chopped 60 ml White wine 400 ml / 1 can Diced tomatoes with juice 1/3 tsp Dried basil

1. Rinse and dry the fish fillet. Sprinkle both sides lightly with salt and pepper. Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Add the spaghetti to the boiling water and cook until tender, yet al dente, about 8 minutes.
   
   
2. In a large saucepan over low heat, gently sauté the garlic in olive oil until aromatic. Add in chopped anchovy, stirring briefly, then add in chopped onion and stir until softened. Stir in capers, olives, chilli flakes, and the parsley. Then pour in the white wine and cook until it reduces a bit. Now add in the tomatoes and bring the mixture to a boil.
   
   
3. Put the fish into the saucepan, covering with the sauce. Cook 15 minutes until it is cooked through. Flake the fish and continue to cook briefly. Drain the spaghetti and add to the sauce.

Spaghetti With Cape Hake Sauce

Lucian Freud ate my polo

This is a bit off-subject but it's my blog, yeah?

So, a few weeks ago my friend Ed, who does something in the army with horses, invited me to lunch. I met him at university, where he was the life and soul of the party. Often more than one party at a time. Then he baffled everyone by going into the army. Like John Cusack in Grosse Pointe Blank.

"There will be interesting people there," promised Ed.

"Great," I said. "Whatever. Did you say lunch?"

I love horses. And I really love a soldier - how can you not? All that subsidised health care... mm... great skills with an iron... irresistable. But most of all I love a lunch that I haven't had to cook myself.

Off I trotted on one of the hottest days of the year down to Knightsbridge, in my favourite new dress. A five year-old recently asked me if it was my "nightie". So that gives you a picture.

I arrived at Hyde Park Barracks and wasn't even frisked, damnit (I suppose it's not neccessary when you're wearing a nightie) but was led up some creaky stairs to where about 15 large men, including Ed, were standing around in thick uniforms, perspiring manfully and nursing pale fizzy drinks. And there, on the edges of the throng, was LUCIAN FUCKING FREUD (not in uniform). Well, I didn't really know what to say. Or do. So I just said "Hullo!" and shook his hand and started talking to not one but two people who had left or were about to leave the army to become barristers. It seems to be a trend.

A rumour flew round the room that Lucien Freud had exclaimed to a cavalryman called Peter: "I love your hips," and then put out his hands to describe the broadness of the beam. "Oh fucking hell," said someone. "Can you imagine a portrait of Peter in the nude?"

Here's why I worry about the troops in Afghanistan: as we were about to sit down to lunch, it turned out that only some of us had place cards. So finding out where we were supposed to sit was tricky. It was a bit like a round in a very, very posh Krypton Factor. We all scratched our heads and then some bright spark went out to track down the seating plan. Three Captains of the British Army, I think all of whom had seen active service really quite recently, bent over it, turning it this way and that, navigating by Lucian Freud, who had found his seat, and saying "So you must be there... or is that the other end? Oh no wait, it's upside down."

But we all sat in the right places in the end.

Lunch was an absolutely delicious bit of roast lamb with superb pomme mousselline and green beans. (Obviously I'm saying it was nice. I don't want a helicopter gunship to swoop into view and flatten my house).

Then we went to see the horses. Giant animals the size of elephants who all wanted to snog me because I had Polos. I told them I was married but they didn't care. I hid my terror by shrieking "It's going to EAT ME!"

A guy wearing shiny spurs and a pair of wicked trousers with a red stripe down the side said: "Those are crack for horses."

"Have one," I said to Lucian Freud, who was standing next to a mint-frenzied horse. I put a Polo in his steady palm, which had a small mark of white paint on one side, and he zonked it straight into his mouth. And then he laughed.

Punishment biscuits

Every morning for breakfast I have a bowl of what we call in our house "punishment museli". I'm assuming I don't have to explain what this is, but perhaps for my overseas readers, "punishment museli" is a collection of dusty rolled oats, nuts, seeds and clumps of raisins. No added sugar. Semi-skimmed milk. Washed down with tea - also no added sugar.

I used to eat Shreddies for breakfast, or toast with marmalade, or Crunchy Nut Cornflakes. I even at school once, when I was in too much of a serious hurry even for cereal, had an eclair. But then my dentist said: "Okay you're getting to the age when your teeth are going to start falling out. Stop eating so much sugar." And instead of ignoring him and going straight out to buy a Mars bar to eat on the way home, like a latter-day Adrian Mole, I took it all in.

"Shit," I thought. "I don't want my teeth to fall out." And so I stopped having sugar in my tea (worse than giving up smoking) and started on the punishment museli. Bastard dentist. This is not my current handsome bastard dentist, but a previous bastard dentist. Less handsome but still able to freak me right out, like a bastard.

But the punishment museli thing has kind of grown on me. And I've started noticing that if you are looking for something to snack on, it's almost impossible to buy anything that isn't rammed with sugar. I'm on the move quite a lot at the moment - not for any interesting reason - and often find myself adrift in London town and starving, but unable to locate anything to eat that isn't a packet of salt and vinegar crisps, a McDonald's cheeseburger or a Curly Whirly.

So I thought I'd give some oat bar snack things, that I saw in Nigella Express, a whirl. I'm in two minds about these things. Obviously, being a Nigella recipe, they don't really work, in that they're not that nice. But actually, they do do a pretty excellent job of providing a portable, minimum-sugar, punishment snack.

If you're not really into punishment foods, there is also a way of making these more edible and less like something you'd find in an emergency supply tin in a bothy half-way up Ben Nevis.

Punishment biscuits (called something like Rise-And-Shine Bars in Nigella Express)

250g rolled oats
75g dessicated coconut
8 dried apricots, chopped
1 large handful raisins
1 large handful hazelnuts, chopped
1 small tin condensed milk

1 Turn on the oven to 130C
2 Warm the can of condensed milk in a pan
3 Combine all the other ingedients in a bowl and then add to the milk and stir
4 Turn out into a greased, loose-bottomed square tin (or round, it's only aesthetics. For my US readers, this is a springform tin)
5 Bake for 1 hour
6 Eat, grimly.

If you want to change these from punishment to merely a light rap across the knuckles, add to the milk 2 tablespoons of golden syrup and a knob of butter and melt together before adding the oat mixture.

Zucchini Chicken Omelette

Look for a different omelette recipe for the breakfast? Zucchini Omelettes are healthy, delicious, and simple to make. Use smoked salmon, or cheese instead if you have no leftover Milanese chicken in the fridge that needs to be used up.

• 3 Eggs
  
  
• 1 tbsp Water
  
  
• 150 g Zucchini, grated
  
  
• Salt and pepper to taste
  
  
• 1 tbsp Oil
  
  
• 80 g Leftover Milanese chicken, diced

1. Beat eggs and water in a bowl. Mix in grated zucchini and season with salt and pepper. Heat the oil in a small, non-stick skillet. When hot, add half the egg mixture and cook for 1 minute until the egg begins to set. Scatter evenly with half diced chicken.
   
   
2. Cook for a further 1-2 minutes, until the egg is golden underneath, and just set on top. Slide out onto a serving plate, folding it over as you go. Repeat. Serve the omelette with your favourite salad.

Zucchini Chicken Omelette

Menu fail

The thing I enjoy most in restaurants is when they spell things wrong on the menu to hilarious effect (not depressing - eg "herbal tea's".)

This weekend I spotted "smocked salmon" and "asparagus mouse".

If you spot any such marvels, please send them to me, or post them below.

Henry's house

It's been one disaster after another in my kitchen over the last few days.

First of all, I tried to cook chips thinking, how hard can it possibly be?

My mother, who was brought up in a vacuum of electricity and the English language in a woodier bit of Wales, always talks, misty-eyed, about how her mother used to cook chips in freshly-rendered dripping in a black pot suspended over a fire in their earthen-floor kitchen. (Before casting some light spells over the nearby wildlife.) And the hostess of a great restaurant we found on Santorini, where they made the most fantastic chips (like the best fish n chip chips you've ever had), claimed that they were so easy peasy - you just chop up the potato and fry it: fool!

But they are both doing that thing where you tell everyone that you've done no work for the exam and then completely fucking ace it, leaving everyone else to spazz it up because they believed you when you said you'd just been sitting about picking your nose for 3 straight weeks. My grandmother, I can only assume, cooked these miraculous chips from frozen and the Santorinian hostess is a similar FRAUD.

So the chips didn't work. So I tried a burger. I've got a thing about home-made burgers, in that they're always too fussy and too thick. A burger is just a sandwich and the meat element of it doesn't need to be two inches thick. So I did a thing where I patted the burger meat out really really thin and then grilled it and stuck it in a floury white bun with nothing but finely chopped shallot, gherkin, mayo, mustard and ketchup. And it was a total fail. It just massively sucked.

Then, finally, I had success making some loaded potato skins. I cooked two baking potatos for 1 hour at 200C, then scooped out the insides and smeared the skins with a mixture of:

creme fraiche
chopped spring onions
cheese
salt & pepper

and shoved them back in the oven at 180C for 20 minutes, while I watched a leftover episode of The Mentalist on the V+.

But come ON! Loaded potato skins?!? What kind of cooking is that? Cooking for five year olds? I despaired.

The only thing for it was to invade Henry's house.  Henry is my friend who is a chef. The most successful things I've ever cooked have always been stolen off him. He is a friend of my husband's and of my brother-in-law's AND (this is so weird) is married to my first boss, Jemima.

So we invaded yesterday for a barbeque, where Henry did squid in this amazing sauce:

Here's why I was never much of a reporter: I was too shy to quiz Henry really hard about the sauce the squid was in. I only fathomed that it was made from:

grilled red peppers
grilled chillis
garlic
coriander seeds
coriander leaves

all pulverised in a food processor.

I've never successfully grilled and skinned a red pepper. Henry said something about grilling them until they're black and then leaving them in a plastic bag for a bit and then skinning them. This may very well make loads of sense to someone out there. The full recipe will be available in the new Leon Cookbook, which is out in September, which I am very excited about.

Then we had cakes from Violet Cakes because Claire, who runs Violet Cakes, lives near Henry and every weekend offloads all the stuff she hasn't sold on him, including this amazing rice flour banana bread, which we had with caramel sauce.

This picture is out of focus because my  husband doesn't understand my camera.

More cakes from Violet Cakes

Caramel sauce is really easy to make:

For 10

1 Put 250g sugar in a saucepan with 4tbsp water and put over a medium heat until dissolved
2 Turn up the heat and let the sugar bubble for 4-5 mins until it has turned thick and sticky
3 Remove from the heat and stir in 50g butter and about 140ml double cream

Anyway we ate all that and messed around in the garden for a bit:

My nephew and I discussing Chris Huhne's affair and organic shop-bought baby food vs homemade

My  husband's feet and my brother-in-law's feet. But which is which?

Henry and Jemima have a really nice garden

And then when the various children around started to go absolutely mental and screamy, we went home.

And for dinner I made fish fingers and peas.
Fuck's sake.

Buckwheat Almond Flakes

Buckwheat is loaded with nutrients and has an unique nutty earthy flavour. In addition, buckwheat flour is gluten free, leading people with gluten intolerance to seek it out as a flour alternative. Inclusion of buckwheat flour will also make a dish more nutritious, since buckwheat is high in fiber(which offers significant protection against breast cancer-according to WHFOODS), amino acids, protein, niacin, and vitamin B, among other things.


I am sending this to Carol's Gluten Free Photo Contest.

• 130 g Egg whites
  
  
• 90 g Sugar
  
  
• 50 g Butter, melted
  
  
• 80 g Buckwheat flour©angiesrecipes
  
  
• 120 g Almond slices
  
  

1. Preheat the oven to 160C/320F. Line 3 baking trays with paper. Beat the egg whites and sugar in a mixing bowl until well combined and the sugar are dissolved. Stir in melted butter until combined.
   
   
2. Sift in the buckwheat flour and then the almond slices. Fold to combine. Spoon the mixture on the prepared trays. Use the bottom of a tablespoon to spread the mixture until thin and even.
   
   Bake in the preheated oven for 15 minutes until golden crisp. Remove and cool completely.

Buckwheat Almond Flakes

There now follows a party political broadcast from the Monster Raving Loony Party

Apart from a guess-the-weight competition for a jar of jellybeans when I was 10 years old I have never won anything. Literally - nothing. Not one thing.

And I certainly have never even been considered for even, like, two seconds for any kind of industry award.

Here's where you come in. No, I'm not going to hit you up for cash: it's worse than that.

The Observer Food Monthly has a new Blogger section in their awards this year. I am never going to win it in a billion years, even if you all vote 18 times under different names from hacked IP addresses. But I badly, badly, BADLY want to be on some top 1000 longlist somewhere so that I can print it out and show it to my grandchildren so that I'm not just that funny cat lady who smells like soup.

I have already voted for myself. If you feel so inclined to waste your vote on me, (consider it a protest vote -I am the Monster Raving Loony Party of food bloggers), you can vote here. Apologies for the slightly torturous process.

Cream Cheese Cookies

If you are looking for some buttery, chewy, soft and mellow cookies, then this is the one for you. These cookies are plainly delicious, especially if you are a fan of cream cheese, which serves as a fanf^ckingtastic catalyst for the rich robust flavour in cookies.

• 20 g Raisins, finely chopped
  
  
• 60 g Cake flour
  
  
• 1/4 tsp Baking powder
  
  
• 50 g Butter, softened
  
  
• 50 g Cream cheese, regular
  
  
• 30 g Icing sugar
  
  
• 15 g Egg white
  
  
• Extra icing sugar for coating

1. Preheat the oven to 150C/300F. Line two baking trays with paper. Finely chop the raisins. Sift together the flour and baking powder.
   
   
2. Cream the butter, cream cheese and icing sugar until well blended. Add in egg white and beat until combined. Add in chopped raisins. Mix in the flour mixture.
   
   
3. Shape teaspoonfuls of the dough into balls and place them 2cm apart on the prepared trays. Bake for 30 minutes. Then turn the oven off and leave the cookies in for 20 minutes. Remove and cool on a wire rack. Coat the cookies with extra icing sugar.

Cream Cheese Cookies

Egg poaching in the past tense

Someone who is as ill as me as often as I am, should not write a blog about food. It means that every six weeks there is a dramatic hiatus in service, while I lie quietly in a dark room with a damp flannel across my forehead breathing deeply through my nostrils.

Which is a roundabout way of saying that I'm still ill and am not eating anything more complex than white and golden carbohydrates. For example, today I'm planning to eat some boiled eggs with white bread toast, then a fish finger sandwich and then later, maybe, one or two slices of a very plain pizza.

But if my desultory stint in newspapers, from 2004-2008, has taught me anything, it's that when it comes to writing, you can be there without actually being there.

You know around Christmas time, or around the August bank holidays, when you go out and spend £1 on your paper and it's filled with even more nonsensical shite than usual - a 6,000-word book extract about life in Soviet Russia/My Celibate Year/top ten tips for changing your career - ? It's because there's no-one at the paper. They've all gone home. The office is empty, except for the work experience girl whose name no-one can remember, who wasn't told that she didn't have to come in.

What they did in the week leading up to the holiday was to rummage around in the back of their computers and draw out, between thumb and forefinger, all the crap they commissioned on a whim during the year, which turned out to be too long, or boring, or too similar to something the Magazine ran the previous week, to use - and then they run it, switch off their computers and go badger-baiting, or whatever it is that commissioning editors do for fun when they're not telling me that my idea isn't "quite right". (Only kidding! Commissioning editors are the best!!!)

And this is relevant because this is exactly the stunt I am about to pull on you today and probably for a few more days, while my interest in most food remains a zero.

So here we go:

I discovered the other day the secret to poaching eggs. I am unable to poach eggs (see "Egg Poaching for Dummies" for more) and believed that the talent lay in some kind of chef-school magic. But it turns out, despite my protestations, that the eggs really do just have to be fresh - so fresh they're still almost warm.

My husband is filming a TV series at the moment about self-sufficiency and there are a lot of hens around the joint. And hens lay eggs. And they're put in a cardboard carton and brought back to my house, where I boil them and eat them with white bread toast.

But the other day, my husband decided to give egg-poaching a crack. Into gently boiling water, he carefully cracked an egg. And rather than just going "spoink" and gunging everywhere, it sort of folded in on itself and cooked in a neat little bundle for 4 minutes, at which point it was fished out and scoffed with brown bread toast and a lot of salt and pepper.

At least you didn't have to pay £1.

Chicken and rice

In July 1999 I was poisoned by a VSO. I think his name was Gary and he visited the campsite I was living on in Namibia, made banana fritters for us all and nearly killed everyone.

I was in Namibia with Raleigh International, trying to ignore the fact that it was my Gap year, but I didn't have anyone to travel round the world with. Nobody wanted to travel round the world with me because I don't smoke pot and need to go to bed at 11pm. So I went on Raleigh, with a whole lot of other people who also didn't smoke pot and needed to go to bed at 11pm.

It was pretty nice.

Here we all are:

I'm in the back row, blue sarong, second from the right. The guy on the far right in the white t-shirt was fresh out of a tour of duty in Bosnia. He had a huge scar on his leg and the rumour was that he'd been caught in a landmine blast and had to have a skin graft. He was the toughest bastard I've ever met and yet brought his own pillow to camp. "Any fool can be uncomfortable," he said, as we stared at this grotesque thing of personal luxury. Needless to say, we all thought he was pretty hot.

Washing your hands was a big deal on Raleigh. Almost the first thing we did wherever we set up camp was to fashion a hand-washing station out of a stick, some string, a bottle and some lightly bleached water. There was a lot of peer pressure around it; if you didn't have the industrial stench of bleach around you, you were a potential Patient Zero.

Gary had no such bourgeois ideas about cleanliness. We all noticed that he wasn't washing his hands as much as we were, but we were too excited about our banana fritters (having been living off porridge and sardines for the last 6 weeks) to care.

I'm not sure what it was exactly in the end that Gary rubbed all over our fritters - someone suggested the name of an illness but I couldn't quite hear it over the sound of retching and groaning. I didn't even have whatever it was that badly, just 48 hours of the most crippling stomach cramps and nausea known to man, which would make unanaesthatised dentistry seem like a trip to the movies. Paul Gibbon, back home a warehouse manager from Leeds (front from third from right), lost about a stone in four days. I don't think you need details, only know this: projectile vomiting is not a made-up thing.

Since then, my stomach has never been quite the same. After I came back I would have bizarre and humiliating intestinal reactions to:

Curry
Anything roasted
Anything fried
Anything rich
Wine

And so for what seemed like forever, but in reality was only about two years, I ate nothing but Special K for breakfast and chicken with rice at all other times. To this day I put my chronic heartburn down to that stinking Gary and his filthy hands - a curse on his eyes for all his days!!! - even though I know full well that I've inherited my chronic heartburn from my dad.

It's not so bad anymore, a mere 11 years later. But the last couple of days, out of the blue, I've been feeling sick as a dog. I've got the old "giardiasis list", which is when you walk slightly bent over at an angle, because if you straighten up you feel so much worse. It ought to feel all romantic, like I'm some a Victorian explorer returning from adventures in Africa with recurring malaria and a permanent tan-line, but in reality it's just a bit shit.

At lunchtime yesterday, because if you don't eat it's downhill all the way, I reached for my old bad-tummy staple, chicken and rice.

I was lucky enough to have some chicken stock hanging around in the freezer and a new kind of rice I happened upon in Waitrose - Thai sticky rice, by Thai taste, which I've been meaning to try out for ages. I simmered everything together for 12 minutes with half a stick of lemongrass, 1 thick slice of fresh ginger, 1 large whole clove of garlic and one whole small Thai chilli. When it's cooked you fish out the lumps of spice to leave just the rice in broth. The Thai rice transformed the stock into a silky, comforting soup and the spices fragranced the whole thing without actually being allowed to mess about with my guts.

Now if you'll excuse me, there's a voodoo doll I have to go and stick pins into. It's called Gary.