Posts by Tom Johnston

After a couple of weeks of depressing you with lots of foodstuffs best avoided, there’s some more positive news this week. A lot of people say they give up on diets because the food is boring. You just have to look at your fridge or store cupboard from a slightly different angle to realise that…

Now please don’t write in to complain about the selection for today’s combo. Yes, I know that everyone can make a stir fry.  But what I’m looking to illustrate is a way you can take a dish you have made many times, and reduce its calorie count by upping the ratio of veg to protein.…

After Part 1 was published, one of my daughters took me to task that it was terribly negative, containing things you really shouldn’t touch. While I’m not sure that was entirely fair – I did after all extol the virtues of bread – it certainly can be applied to today’s warnings. Never mind, there’s some…

Should The Wee Fat Lawyer’s Diet Book ever see the light of day as a complete volume, it will contain this A – Z, a random compendium of some foods and thoughts on where, if at all, they can fit into your dieting programme. Recipe names in Italics will feature in Tom Cooks! Once the…

As I mention in the book, for all calorie counting I refer to the My Fitness Pal app. If I am cooking something substantial, such as a piece of meat or fish, or using an ingredient with a very high calorie count such as butter, then I will weigh it. Otherwise it’s an approximation; however,…

Avgolemono For today’s recipes, my thanks are due to two remarkable ladies. The first comes from from Sarah Wyndham Lewis, who featured in this Wednesday’s Food Producers feature in On The Side. Sarah Wyndham Lewis’s Avgolemono Sarah’s Introduction Avgolemono is the ultimate in simple, nourishing comfort food, quickly made and very sustaining. (The g is pronounced…

Certainties in life? There are many. In central Prague, for example, they come in the form of young men dressed as Mozart selling tickets to Vivaldi concerts. (No, I don’t understand that either. Though come to think of it, maybe the ones flogging tickets for the Mozart gigs are in fact dressed as Vivaldi.) Anyway,…

From this… This is such a simple recipe that I thought hard about including it at all. But when you have a meat dish which can feed up to six people with the main ingredient costing less than a pound a head, it is irresistible. Equally so is the transformation from something so tough that…

Many will have heard of Omelette Arnold Bennett; fewer, I suspect, will have eaten it; and fewer still will have made it. Invented at The Savoy Hotel in London for author Arnold Bennett, who resided there for a number of years, it features on the menu of The Savoy Grill to this day. Provided you…

I didn’t follow a recipe for this anniversary routine masterpiece, but it worked quite well. You  make it slightly backside foremost, as you have to cook the mussels first. The sauce for the fish is wine based (or in this case vermouth). Traditionally you would thicken this with a splash of cream, which I don’t…