Fat dogs and Englishmen go out for a take-out

One fat dog with human traits and trends

Last night we had fish and chips. It's a great meal, quite nutritional if cooked well. However, we only have it about once a month. We cook our own pizzas, and make our own chicken nuggets for the children. I've got a slow cooker, and we have cooked vegetables and we have salads (not just lettuce leaves!). I go regularly and suffer not from constipation or diarrhea. I'm not paragon of vitamin virtue but neither am I a glutton for culinary punishment. So I can't understand gartantuans and their problems.

Jamie Oliver is quite right to berate Michael Gove over food in schools. Because successive ministers have skirted round this. We have crap food in British institutions! Even in my uncle's London club the food was worse than school. If anyone complained the answer was "they like it like they remembered at school!".

My stay in hospitals, infrequent as they are, have been marred by the frightful food and the nonchalent attitude of the staff. The medical procedures I can't fault, but knives and stitches don't provide sustinence. FOOD DOES!

We are only fools to ourselves. Fools for letting government ministers feed us crap, both political and physical. What is wrong with cooking good, decent healthy food? Is in beyond the ken of these hospital administrators?

Unhealthy food is creeping back into schools. Doesn't surprise me. If people are weaned onto the wrong food, then given the wrong ideas about food generally, then we have an ignorant mass of people. Do they want to be so dim? I like confectionary, crisps, chips, etc. It's all tempting stuff. But I don't eat the stuff three or four times a day. Variety is the spice of life and is certainly the spice of food. All the programmes I've seen on fat people being given tasty food that doesn't blow them up further shows that they never ever thought of eating such stuff. Education is the way. If people don't know, let those who do show the way.

Nearly one quarter of British women are fat. Or obese, in the clinically correct jargon. The UK has more obese women than any other country in Europe, according to data agency Eurostat. It looked at 19 countries, found 23.9% of British women were recorded as being obese in the year 2008 to 2009. And no doubt many of those are smoking too!

Jamie Oliver may feel he's whistling in the wind sometimes, but I think his motives are right. Good healthy food never killed anyone. It's the over indulgence that is the killer.

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Cheesed off with the brown sauce!

It seems every trade and profession these days has its own business-speak. The catering industry is no exception. I'm a great fan of cookery programmes on TV. Ina Garten, the Barefoot Contessa, is my latest interest! It's made by the same company that does Nigela Lawson's shows. Thankfully, St. Vitas doesn't operate the cameras!

A lot of these cooks and chefs have developed the habit of saying that everything is "off" this and "off" that. Nothing is ever cooked properly in a word sense. It is baked off, boiled off, or sweated off. Sounds ghastly. Fanny Cradock only ever managed to sweat off Johnny. The one that really gets me is "pan-fried". Nothing is just fried these days. It is PAN FRIED!

One menu item is pan-fried sea bass. This popped up in the early 80's. I remember a time when it was just called bass. "I've got a nice piece of bass, madam!" as my mother looked over the Macfisheries slab. She never thought of pan frying it.

Do we ever ask for our eggs done this way? Americans are great at asking how we like our eggs at breakfast. They'd think I was some kind of plonker if I said "I'll have mine pan-fried!"

It is a kind of distancing. By using words to imply some form of complicated process, those not necessarily in the know think it is more important or possesses deeper meaning than it does. I have to say though that Pan-fried Sea Bass sounds far more exotic and appetising than just Fried Bass.

I'll be thinking today when in the kitchen what I want "fried off". Sausages might be an idea.

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