IT'S a funny business, writing about food. You spend quite a lot of your time eating in restaurants, which is always a slightly surreal, although highly enjoyable, experience. Mind you, you need the restaurants, for if you are a food writer, people never invite you to dinner.
If you aren't to be found in restaurants, the curious belief about food writers is that not only do you eat little other than ortolans and truffles at home, but you always cook superb food. No beans on toast here, my man, for in the five minutes before the X-Files begin, you will probably rustle up some scrambled eggs with caviar, open a bottle of Gevrey-Chambertin and cut a slice of the foie gras you prepared two days ago.
Phooey. The life of the food writer is actually littered with disasters - the "recipes that don't work, trying to figure out what to do with 18 egg whites (and failing), getting some things not quite right, which means getting them quite wrong, disregarding your own advice all of the time.
But of all the disasters which lie in wait in the kitchen, the pitfalls can rarely have been assembled with such expertise as we managed one night when a friend came to dinner.
It began well. Let's do something foolproof, we decided. Soup. Then steak and potato gratin. Then salad. Then some chocolate pots. A relaxed evening. So we began by cooking the chocolate pots.
It's a simple recipe, from the newest edition of Jane Grigson's English Food It doesn't even use eggs, so how could it so wrong? You mix sugar, wine and lemon juice until dissolved, stir in cream and cook, then add a stem of rosemary and the grated chocolate. Bring to the boil, lower heat and simmer for 20 minutes until it is dark and thick.
Dark and thick was what it certainly was. But not, sadly, in an attractive, delicious way. This was dark and thick in the way motor oil is when it is drained from the sump of your car after you have driven 50,000 miles.
Mrs Grigson's faulty recipe? Not a bit of it. The baby had begun to cry, my wife adjourned for feeding, and the promising dessert got left for 40 minutes. The fat had completely separated from the chocolate. and was swimming ominously around the surface. It emitted an aroma of burning tyres.
I responded in typically roisterous. and ridiculous, style, attacking the desultory mess with a balloon whisk. You can't reconstitute chocolate once it has separated. believe me, and no amount of enthusiasm or idiotic force will manage it for you.
Hell, who needs dessert? We'll finish with cheese. Let's make the soup.
Let me. at this point. give you a piece of advice which you should never disregard. Let us say you buy a packet of dried habanero chillies. and alongside all of the promising things written on the label (Tropical fruit flavours... used in salsas, condiments, fish stews and jerk dishes") it says: "Heat Scale: 10/10".
Trust these people. They know what 10/10 means. And I now know what 10/10 means.
It means the heat of the fires of hell. It means the heat of the centre of the sun. It means flamethrowers, blowtorches, it means Death Valley on a hot day. It means disaster.
And I only used a little bit. But, having made that smashing chocolate and chilli soup with a conventionally mild chilli, we decided to experiment.
Never experiment with chillies. Not when you have a friend coming to dinner. Not when you are getting the babies, to bed. And always bear in mind this truth about the chilli: you taste the chocolate and chilli soup, and it is hot, very hot.
Okay, but it will mellow, surely? It will not mellow. It will intensify.
STEAK and potato gratin and salad and cheese. There is a meal for a king, eh? And here, at last, at long last, is our friend, so crack open the white wine and let's get going. Heat the grill pan.
Grill pans are great yokes altogether. They create the most attractive dark ridges on food, and are completely invaluable. There is one rule with grill pans, however. You can't get them to cook properly if the piece of meat you are going to grill is too big for the pan. Then, they don't really work. And this piece of meat - the width of the whole sirloin - was too big for the grill pan. And if you are darting in and out of the kitchen to chat and drink some wined and check the babies, it won't - sadly - achieve perfection without you.
There will not be attractive darkened ridges criss-crossing the sirloin. There will be black bits, and red bits. And that's all.
Our friend arrived about 40 minutes late. As a result, the gratin got overcooked, and was chalky dry.
We did try a bowl of soup, but gave up after a few mouthfuls. Once we had put our clothing back on and closed all the windows, we felt better. We did nibble a bit of steak, and there is something undeniably interesting about a piece of meat which can be simultaneously raw and blackened at the same time. But it's not the sort of undeniable interest which makes you want to have another bite. The potato gratin looked as sad as we felt. With all this hoo-haa going on. the salad never got made.
They say that cheese and wine can make a meal. They are right. Cheese and wine can certainly make a meal, when everything else you have cooked is a fiasco. So we had a perfect, mature Durrus, and drank the fabulous Domaine Tempier La Migoua and a fine bottle of Chateau Clarke. Blessed are the cheesemakers and the wine makers, for they can salvage your evening.
If you are reading this. Bernadette, we're sorry.