Breakfast: French Toast

As the weekend approaches and I inevitably spend Sunday morning in bed while my boyfriend lovingly prepares me breakfast. For the past three weeks I have asked for French toast and he has given me fried bread, with a circle cut of the middle where in its place lies a soft fried egg. It's nice, but it's not French toast.

Here are my two favourite French toast recipes:

The basics:

1 egg, beaten
Milk
Two slices of white bread, halved, with the crust cut off

1. Mix the milk and beaten egg together and dip the bread in it. Leave to soak for a minute.
2. Heat some oil in a frying pan and fry the egg-soaked bread, turning once.
3. For a sweet version coat it with sugar - it'll make it taste like doughnuts.
4. For a savoury version, add some cheese and ham when you're frying the second side, so the cheese melts and the ham warms.

Cook time: 10 mins

More comfort food: Mira's sweet soup

I wanted to create a recipe for my friend Mira, who can't chew after suffering after an operation on her jaw. It has to be delicious and easy to make, because her cooking rarely extends beyond "pierce film lid and heat on full for 4 mins." Here goes…

This recipe has lots of sustenance and carbs, because Mira can't eat solids and she's skinny anyway, but it also features lots of goodness. Mira hates greens, but the spinach (a good source of iron) should reduce down enough to fall under the radar.

Sweet potato
Butternut squash
Garlic
Leek
Spinach
Ghee (Mira's mum is of Asian heritage, so she should have some of this, but I guess butter would also do)
Crème fraiche
Vegetable stock

1. Peel and chop the sweet potato and butternut squash (these can bought pre-cubed, if you're feeling lazy)
2. Boil these in the stock and leave to simmer for 10 mins, until they are soft.
3. Chop the garlic and leek and fry them in the ghee until they are soft and then add them to the stock.
4. Take the stock off the heat and add the spinach.
5. Leave to cool for a while before blending it all together in a food processor or blender.
6. Re-heat and stir in the crème fraiche to thicken up.
7. Season with whatever it needs - salt, pepper, paprika is a good one, so is mustard and tarragon.

Cook time: 30 mins

More comfort food: Potato and mushroom gratin

I do have other ingredients in my cupboard, than cream and mushrooms, I promise.

Finely sliced Potato
Sliced Mushrooms
Double cream
Milk
Chopped garlic

1. Fry the garlic in a pan and add the sliced mushrooms. Fry until just soft.
2. Arrange a layer of slice potatoes in an oven dish. The slices don't have to be super-thin, 1cm should do it. You don't have to peel them either, but when you're arranging them, it's best if they don't overlap too much
3. Add some of the fried mushrooms on top of the 1st layer of potatoes, then add another layer of potatoes, and so on until there are none left.
4. Mix the double cream and milk half and half with some more garlic and pour over the potatoes and mushrooms, so that it's just covered.
5. Move the oven dish around a bit so the cream penetrates each layer, rather than just sitting on top.
6. Bake in the oven at Gas Mark 7 for 45 mins. Try to avoid the temptation to keep opening the oven and peer in.

If you've got some cream and milk left over, then you can make a creamy sauce by heating it in the same pan you used for the mushrooms, then add some tarragon and whole grain mustard. Thin it down a little with milk, or white whine, or some three-day opened Veuve Clicquot which is what I found lurking in my fridge. It goes very well with chicken and fish.

Hmm, maybe this is actually why you'll never see me on a diet.

Cook time: 1 hour

Why you’ll never see me on a diet, by Ms F

I’m the fattest I’ve ever been, I’m also the happiest I’ve ever been, but I don’t think that’s related.

I never quite got why women wanted to be skinny and I certainly will never understand how it’s turned into a multi-billion pound global business.

Health reasons aside – I’m not advocating obesity here – a few extra pounds here and there never really hurt anyone (unless they were being sat on at the time, but more about my sexual exploits later). But skinniness seems to have found itself wrapped up as a measure of success.

Lily Allen (left) was just a rich kid who made it cos of her dad and an annoying song until she went from a “curvy size 12” (my current dress size) to a “svelt size 8” – now she’s a front-row fashionista, an authority on all things coture, beautiful and witty instead of fat and brash. But here’s some news, she’s doesn’t look better because she’s lost two stone, she looks better because she’s ditched the awful trainer and prom-dress combo and now wears heels by Christian Louboutin and dresses by Chanel – who wouldn’t look better if they swapped New Look for Largerfeld?


And there’s Natalie Cassidy (right) who after going from her before (and my current) weight has transformed into a proper celebrity – one that gets papped at award shows and magazine deals to talk about her “amazing new figure.” Has the weight loss made her more interesting? Well, yes if you count her now-prominent and ridiculous boob job as a talking point.

Occasionally I find myself being sucked in by the promise of being able to lose a stone I a week, but then I look closer and realise it involves drinking lemon juice and cayenne pepper and I’m not so convinced.

Why is everyone so obsessed with being skinny anyway? Starving yourself won’t make you feel better. I’ll challenge any woman to find a size-4 dress that will make her feel better than my favourite comfort food.

Sara Cox, of all people, once said something very wise: “Girls, if you starve yourself your bones will snap, your ovaries will shrivel and die and boys like tits.”

Romance Reviewed: Whighams Wine Cellar

I'd put eating at Whighams down as one of the biggest nights of gluttony I've ever enjoyed.

This Wine Cellar in Edinburgh is a dream of understated decadence. One half is decked out in fairly standard restaurant faire - all Beachwood tables and spot lighting - the other is like a collection of caves, dimly lit with candles and tea lights, like some French Resistance HQ from the 1940s.

The food itself was gout-inducingly rich. We started with Oysters, which tasted as if they were caught about 15 minutes before they were served. The menu was full of seafood staples - dressed crab, a platter that looked so full it could have been responsible for the North Sea over fishing crisis, we settled on fish cakes and a cut of fish I can't remember, because I was enjoying the white rioja a little too much…

But don't let my shortcomings detract from the splendour of Whighams. The service was attentive and knowledgeable, it a little on the slow side. It being a Sunday night and we being one of three tables occupied makes this a little difficult to forgive.

So an aperitif, starter, main, half a pudding and a bottle of wine came to about £80, the price my waistline paid, I shan't tell you.

Food: 9/10
Service: 7/10
Cost: £80, excluding tip

Whighams
Hope Street Lane
Edinburgh EH2 4EL

Ms F enters a hot dog eating competition…And loses

Why did I think I should enter a hot dog eating competition? In fact, why did I think I would WIN a hot dog eating competition?

You know, I don't even like them, I wasn't even hungry. My competitive nature must have got the better of me.

Romance reviewed: Arbutus

What is it with puree? Puree is what you feed toddlers, no puree is what you try and feed toddlers, but they spit it out in disgust. So why am I sitting at an award-winning restaurant with it glaring up at me from the menu.

Pretentiousness in food is something I despise, and it’s pretentiousness (or perhaps alliteration) that could only explain why anyone would want to serve (or eat) potato puree. At least the stuff babies get is sweet.

Arbutus won the Time Out accolade for Best Restaurant in 2004. Last year the proprietors’ second venture, Wild Honey, took the title, so I gathered I was in for a treat.

Puree aside (I couldn’t bring myself to order it) perhaps my culinary apprehension may have left me with a boring option – meat and potatoes, or steak and potato dauphinoise. I quite like the fact the waitress didn’t bother to ask me how I wanted my £20 steak cooked – there was no option for me (or anyone else) to whimp out and go for medium, or well done, or sin-of-sins or medium rare (medium rare is how heathens and idiots have their steak, it doesn’t exist, there’s no in between).

The steak was rare, whether I liked it or not. Well, I say rare, what I mean is a bit grey and brown, the kind of colour beef goes when you leave it out too long. Still, the potaties were nice.

My vegetarian companion faired much better with the one meat-free option, gnocchi. It’s easy to forget how nice gnocchi can be when it’s not bland or swimming in cheese like a bad fondue, and Abutus ticked both of those boxes.

Still, some vegetables would have been nice.

Dessert was an apple tarte tartin. If you couldn’t tell it was apple because it was so sickeningly sweet that parts of your brain become overloaded with the sugar rush, then perhaps the leftover bits of core and seeds would give it away.

Disappointing.

Food: 4/10
Service: 4/10
Cost: £80, excluding tip

Arbutus
63-64 Frith Street,
London, W1D 3JW

My favourite comfort food: Tagliatelle with bacon and mushroom carbonara

Smokes streaky bacon
Mushrooms
Tagliatelle
Single cream
One egg, beaten
Black pepper

1. Boil water in a pan and cook the pasta
2. Meanwhile heat a large frying pan and cut the bacon into small bits
3. Fry the bacon on a lowish heat and slice the mushrooms
4. When the mushrooms are browning add the cream and stir
5. Add the beaten egg and continue to stir until the sauce thickens. Add the black pepper and keep stirring over a low heat or the egg will scramble and you’ll be forced to eat scrambled eggs and bacon for tea
6. Drain the pasta and add it to the sauce. Dish it up or eat it straight from the pan to reduce washing up (I’m only partially kidding)

Cook time: 30 mins

Romance reviewed: Andrew Edmunds

‘Don’t fuck him, don’t fuck him, don’t fuck him.’ It is with this thought that I find myself sitting across the table from my date inside London’s Most Romantic Restaurant.

Andrew Edmunds is the establishment which has won this acclaim. It’s smaller, darker and cheaper than the Ivy, but still serves its food ‘on a bed of’ rather than merely next to its vegetables.

This is our Third Date - The Sex Date, which is probably why I feel the need to keep my knickers clamped on, and maybe why he thought he should bring out the big guns.

Every diner in this tiny French restaurant is a couple – they coo, oooh and ahhh over the food, feeding each other forkfuls of creamy goodness. You’ll either find it sickening, or, well, no it is sickening, but the food does make up for it.

The menu changes daily, which makes me talking about my duck breast feel a little redundant. Generally speaking it’s that old addage, 'good food done well.' There’s chicken and mushrooms if you don’t like you’re food too out there and snails and offal if you do.

The wine list is comprehensive and the service friendly, although they tend to leave you to it, lest they interrupt a moment of rampant footsie.

Food: 9/10
Service: 8/10
Cost: (He paid, I didn't put out)

Andrew Edmunds
Lexington Street
London, W1F 0LW