Tom Cooks!

This is the penultimate in the A – Z series. Some of this may be no more than stating the obvious, but there may be a few surprises. Meat Lean meat is better for dieters, but if your meat has fat it on it, don’t remove it before cooking. Just don’t eat it. Beef is…

I used my May sabbatical to get a few articles in the can, as it were, to be able to roar back as fresh as, well… a very fresh thing. At the time of writing I was fairly unsure what the rules would be about entertaining, but it surely can’t be too long before we…

The thing, said Kenny, is that everyone who wants to lose weight will tell you that they hate salads. Until I started going to France regularly, I was probably among their number. Remember the Scottish attempt at a “salad”? A piece of cold meat, or worse. Possibly a birstled three day old Scotch egg whose…

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…

I hope you didn’t miss Wednesday’s On The Side column featuring Galton Blackiston. The daft customer experience involving the guest whose filo pastry in her en papillote dish was tough is a classic. Confused? Read on. En papillote simply means cooked in a paper bag. (Incidentally, that ridiculous little paper frill you used to see…

I share at least one thing with Nigel Slater. Not, sadly, his cooking ability – how many know that he trained as a chef at London’s Savoy Hotel? I refer to his love of seizing on an ingredient or two, then building it into a dish off the top of his head. This one came…

Ginger on Wednesday, Ginger on Friday No, not a couplet from a popular ditty. Just a mundane reminder that, as night follows day, so the Wednesday Alphabetical of Food in On The Side comes a couple of days before a couple of recipes featuring that month’s hero. There are so many choices. Ginger cheesecake and…

If you normally read both Tom Eats! and Tom Cooks! don’t read this column till you’ve digested the former. If you don’t read Eats!, I can tell you that these are recipes for a few dishes which featured there. Consommé Olga You may recall that Binkie’s steward, McTavish, attributed this dish to chef’s dalliance with…

I made up this dish and wrote down the recipe in the depths of January. As the weather improved, I thought it might have to go on the back burner till the end of the year; however, with the mercury hovering around 4˚C here, I decided it was too early to be abandoning hearty winter…

With this week’s Chef Watch focussing on Stuart Smith who majors in fish, it seemed appropriate to include a fish recipe. Last week’s guest recipe provider, Myint Su attracted a lot of interest, particularly the Burmese connection. Bang on cue, she has delivered another Myanmar dish, this time a fish curry. Many of you asked…

Foodie fashionistas in London are always on the lookout for The Next New Thing.  Quite a difficult thing to do these days, and therefore readily open to parody, not to say ridicule. One of the first ever On The Side columns looked at a ludicrous list which appeared on the Observer Food Monthly (editor Nigel…

This is the birthday week of Tom’s Food! Like any foundling, the exact date is uncertain. Never mind. To celebrate, Tom Cooks! has as promised brought you a celebrity packed issue. I asked some star names for recipes and we have not one but two today. While I usually do something around Shrove Tuesday (February…

Cat Thomson of The Scotsman is indeed a good friend to Tom’s Food! A few weeks ago she gave us a fascinating introduction into the work of Food Heritage Scotland. I had actually asked her for a recipe. In fact I got two articles in one. After her piece for On The Side, she followed…

The observant among you, or more accurately the few who give a damn about these things, will have noticed that there is one more Friday, and therefore one more Tom Cooks! column, before Valentine’s Day. Indeed. But Pancake Day is just 48 hours later this year, and I have a belter of a guest recipe…

We’ll come to the main event in a minute. If you read Wednesday’s Chef Watch column featuring Neil Forbes, you would have seen reference to various dishes. One of these was his dad’s cassoulet. I kid you not, I had been planning on featuring a version of the classic bean stew this very day. Being…