I'm just an occasional user

My name is Tony and I am an addict - there, it is out!

According to the AA (and I don't mean the Automobile Association) website the first step to recovery from addiction is:

"We admitted we were powerless over alcohol (for me read all things foody) - that our lives had become unmanageable".

I am struggling a little with the "unmanageable" bit, but if I could substitute bloody expensive I pretty much fit the bill for Step 1.

This realisation dawned upon me after my recent visit to Leiths School of Food and Wine. I have to confess that this was not the first time I had visited such an establishment, but up until now I was very happy to characterise myself as an occasional user. OK, I did go overboard a bit when I did the week long course in Tuscany (get over it - it was a holiday!) but, apart from the odd occasional lapse since then, such as a Borough Market Saturday cooking course at the Enrica Rocca school , I have left the Class A stuff pedalled by the cookery schools to those that were powerless to resist them and kept myself happy with the more socially acceptable addiction to cookery books and cooking implements. You know the kind of thing - innocuous looking brown parcels from Amazon.com delivered to the office and the occasional furtive visit to the kind of places that social users like me call into for a fix when they have told everybody they are off to town to get their hair cut. I am not proud to admit that my kitchen is littered with the paraphernalia of this clandestine world.

However, after the knife skills lesson, I have found myself unable to stop thinking about the sordid delights that these pushers of cooking skills offer those people not strong enough to resist them. The pull of these dealers in culinary knowledge is almost overwhelming. Indeed, I am not sure that Leiths alone will now be able to satisfy the cravings that have surfaced. I am ashamed to admit that I found myself looking at really hardcore stuff on the website of Le Manoir Aux Quat' Saisons cookery school when nobody was around at work recently. So far I have succeeded in remaining just a voyeur of these top end dealers' seductive blandishments (I hope the Government moves swiftly to nip them in the bud before we end up with the Pru Leith World Darts Tournament or Cordon Bleu McClaren F1 teams) but am not sure that I will be able to resist for much longer. The re-runs of Masterchef are just not hitting the spot any longer.

There is a day long course on sauces coming up at Leiths soon - I might just go to that one and then stop - what harm can that do?

It really is freezing in London

Well, for once the weathermen got it right! No trains, no buses - no work!! Weather like this calls for some comfort food methinks!

And still the snow comes down! The back garden is a complete no go area for the cats save in extremis.

 

I have perused the contents of the fridge and freezer and have found the following ingredients:

- two onions

- 6 Cumberland sausages (again courtesy of Moens Clapham)

- A Swede

- Some Maris Piper potatoes

- Savoy cabbage

I also have some eggs and was contemplating making a toad in the hole with onion gravy but have decided instead to roast the sausages with some onions and thyme and then make the onion gravy in the roasting pan (tricky if you are doing toad in the hole unless you want to wash up another roasting pan - which I do not). I will have the sausages with some buttered savoy cabbage and a mix of mashed potato and mashed swede or, as my mother used to call it, "potch".

I read somewhere recently that eating even one sausage can increase your risk of cancer by X%. When sausages are as good as these bad boys I will take that risk! Happiness is clearly the key to a long life and these are little packets of happiness on a day like today!