Clam Chowder - Level 2 NVQ Diploma in Hospitality

Week one of my cooking apprenticeship certainly had a ‘surf and turf’ flavour to it. On the morning we made beef olives, we also knocked up another classic from the attic – clam chowder. Well, the chowder base anyway. We needed gallons of the stuff for a seafood festival that weekend. The soup would be finished off on the day and served in hollowed-out crusty rolls for £4 a pop.

Because we were making the base a few days in advance, our tutor told us not to add the bacon and to use powdered fish stock rather than fresh, to help it keep longer. The bacon, clams and cream would be added on the day.

I’ve always been a big fan of chowder and have wanted to travel to America’s blustery Atlantic coast ever since I read Moby Dick, when Ishmael and Queequeg feast at the Try Pots, a rough inn famed for its chowder “plentifully seasoned with pepper and salt”.

As always, I can’t find much agreement about clam chowder’s history among the many food boffins. Some posit it may derive from ‘chaudrée’ – a thick fish soup from France’s Charente-Maritime region. The variant, chowda, is believed to have originated in Newfoundland when fishermen would throw part of the day’s catch into a large pot for supper.

Not that it really matters, of course, because there is even less agreement about how to cook the dish. Indeed in 1939, as war was breaking out in Europe, politicians in Maine were fussing over the far more pressing issue of drafting legislation to make it illegal to add tomatoes to their traditional, cream-thickened chowder.

The type we made on our snappily-titled Level 2 NVQ Diploma in Hospitality (7132) course was definitely of the New England camp – a tasty base of potatoes, onions, peppers, carrots and bacon. Although I’m sure many purists would turn their noses up at carrots and peppers, and insist the only break from the calico broth should be pink cubes of bacon.

Flour added to the sweated vegetables

Again, some people use biscuits as a thickening rather than flour. But we used the latter. The lesson came with a short aside about using roux (equal amounts of flour and fat) to thicken sauces. For a ‘white roux’ - for use in white sauces - you fry the flour and fat over a low heat for five minutes, for a ‘blonde roux’ – the base for veloute (velvety) sauces – you cook the flour out for 10 minutes, and for a ‘brown roux’ – for gravies etc. – you could it for 20 minutes.

125ml vegetable oil

125g plain flour

125g diced smoked bacon

2 large onions, cut into brunoise

2 large carrots, cut into brunoise

2 large sticks celery, cut into 1cm dice

2 large yellow peppers, cut into 1cm dice

5 garlic cloves, finely chopped

2 large potatoes, cut into 1cm dice

2.5 litres fish stock

200ml double cream

2kg carpet clams

In a large saucepan, heat the oil and sweat the onions, potatoes, celery, carrots, bacon, garlic and peppers over a low heat for 10 minutes, stirring regularly. Once soft, but not coloured, add the flour and cook out for five minutes, stirring all the time.

Heat the stock and add a ladleful at a time to the roux, making sure the liquid is fully dissolved until adding the next batch. Simmer for 10 minutes. Season to taste. This can then be cooled and left covered in the fridge for a couple of days until you are ready to use it.

The finished chowder base

Wash the clams well and discard any that are open or broken. For my money, the best in the UK are the small carpet clams you get in Portland, Dorset – called palourde in France and almeja in Spain. Put them in a covered pan over a medium heat and cook until they are open – this should take only a minute or two.

Add the cream to the chowder base and the poached clams and serve with plenty of crusty bread. Garnish with finely chopped chives and black pepper. Some people also whisk in 125g of butter to give a good glaze to the bowl, but then some people eat butter the thickness of bread.

Pork Belly Parcel With Sage

This really is one of the simplest recipes, and it’s a belter - particularly if you want to sup wine with any guests you might have hanging around, rather than slave in the kitchen missing all the banter. 

It’s also an excellent choice if you fancy just bunging it in the oven, while you nip off to the gym or something, without worrying about the house burning down in your absence.

It uses three of the things that go best with pork - sage, onion and cider. Indeed, while we’re on the subject of sage, it’s also probably quite a restorative dish if the Romans and others were right. According to an old English custom, eating sage every day in May will grant long life, immortality even (but who wants that), hence the proverb: “Why should a man die who has sage in his garden?”

The sweetness of the onions is cut by the cider, which you add towards the end, to make an amber liquor smacking of sage and black pepper. When I made it last night, I bunged a couple of potatoes in the oven to bake while the pork was slowly cooking. Then I served it with finely sliced carrots, broad beans and peas.

You could thicken the sauce by making a roux with butter and flour and then stirring the pork liquor in, but sometimes life’s too short for that sort of thing, and besides the spuds are good for soaking up the juice.

PORK BELLY PARCEL WITH SAGE

(Serves 2-3)

1 small rolled pork belly joint, about 750g

2 small onions, sliced

20 sage leaves

Salt and pepper

200ml dry cider

Take a large piece of foil - about enough to cover two chopping boards. Lay the sliced onions in the centre, to form a bed big enough to rest the pork on. Tear up the sage leaves and scatter over the onions.

Sprinkle the pork joint liberally with salt and then nestle on top of the onions and sage. Season with black pepper - a good few grinds of the pepper mill. Then tuck the foil sides inwards and fold up into a parcel. Put in an oven tray, and into a pre-heated, low oven - about gas mark 4 or 160C.

After an hour and a half, take the pork out and crank up the oven to maximum heat. Open the foil, to form a bowl shape that will keep the juices in, and pour the cider over the pork. Season with more salt and pepper, and put back in the oven for another 20 to 30 minutes until the crackling is golden.

Take out of the oven and rest for 20 minutes before cutting into thick slices and devouring.

Parsley Soup: An Indubitable Hangover Cure

Don’t ask me why, but I find this soup makes a great hangover cure. Perhaps it’s because I associate it with the time I lived in London and would restore my flagging spirits and woollen head when I eventually rose on a Sunday afternoon, all a quiver with shakes and punched kidneys, and a liver a French farmer would be proud of, a dreadful thirst for milk, and vague recollections of the night before and the night before that, and disturbingly-vivid dreams of being captured by cannibals, and shrunken heads, and then I would wander out, and as the pub singer goes have a beer for breakfast and one more for dessert, and then head down to a pie and mash shop in Peckham, and fill myself with mashed potato.

Not the hideously-rich, sauce-like pomme puree stuff Marco Pierre White and a young, podgy Gordon Ramsay would knock out in those Harveys days, with the steaming potatoes straight into the Robot with a hod’s worth of butter and hot milk, and whizzed and topped up with more milk until it came out like pale custard.

But simple mashed spuds with just a suggestion of margarine and a cup of the river water they were cooked in. And soon, but never quite soon enough, everything would be alright with the world, and then I’d have that awful, kick-in-the-stomach start that tomorrow was Monday and I’d have to be somewhere dreadful like Hastings, with a notebook in my hand, braving the sneers and gob from the fag chuffers outside the magistrates’ court.

But it wasn’t the mashed potatoes and the dreadfully cheap and mean, but strangely acceptable Sweeney Todd pies, but the sauce, or liquor, that accompanied them. Made from, or at least claimed to have been made from, the Thames water that the eels were boiled in, with onions and pepper and bay leaves, and a garden of parsley so that there were more green specks than grey. I used to love mixing that parsley liquor with the mash and then covering the whole lot with a clattering of white pepper.

Anyway, they say food reminds you of hangovers, or vice versa. And I can positively posit that this very simple soup really does the job when it comes to banishing the evil-spirits aftermath of the morning after, when you wake feverishly with the taste of rum and lime juice in your throat, and a mint you know didn’t come from toothpaste, as you wake crumpled on the floor, the wood burner long gone out, and your face as ashen as the mound that remains of last night’s logs, and a Robben Island cold in your bones, your head rattling as though filled with dried acorns, and knowing you forgot to eat again.

And despite the hunger, there is very little you can face but parsley and potatoes, and certainly not last night’s hardly-touched kebab sealed with lamb-fat candle wax as it surely will be if the trails down your jacket are anything to go by, and then realising the pie and mash shop closed long ago, and besides you live in the country now and the nearest is a 39-mile drive.

And as you brave opening your eyes once again, and mentally scan the churlishly-empty pantry, and a dim hope ascends with bitter juice humming of rum, as you realise you’ve just about got enough ingredients to make a steaming pot of parsley soup. And an hour or so later, you’re very glad you did as you metal-scrape the last with bread, your spirits restored and last night’s bottles cleared, and a smugness that you remembered to put the bin out for once after tripping over next door’s cat, the apple missing like an England seamer, and then remember that the next day you won’t have to be in Hastings, but somewhere far, far worse.

PARSLEY SOUP

(Serves 2 with seconds)

2 medium onions

3 medium potatoes

Knob of butter

3 garlic cloves

One massive bunch of parsley

One litre of boiling water

Salt, pepper

Natural yoghurt

Cayenne pepper

Chop the onions  and add to a saucepan with the butter, and fry over a medium flame, stirring from time to time. Peel and dice the potatoes and add to the pan. Chop the garlic and add to the pan. Fry for a few minutes until the onions have softened.

Wash the parsley well in a tub of water to ensure any grit sinks to the bottom, then slice off the stalks and chop them finely. Add to the pan and fry for another minute or so. Boil a kettle and add about one litre of water to the pan.

Simmer until the potatoes can be pierced easily with a knife - about 15 minutes, depending on the flame and type of potatoes and what altitude you’re cooking at, and other immeasurables.

Chop the rest of the parsley and put in the pot and simmer for a minute, then blitz in a liquidiser or use one of those blender sticks, or just attack the soup with a potato masher. Season to taste with salt and pepper. It goes very well with a dollop of yoghurt and a generous dusting of cayenne pepper, if your stomach can handle it.

Chicken And Black Bean Stew

I’ve been getting into South American and Mexican food lately after re-reading the beautifully-photographed World Food Cafe recipe book and authors Chris and Carolyn Caldicott’s travels through the orange-sunset Americas.

As I sit here, barely able to type with frozen hands, and the woodburning stove behind me spluttering the last log, filling me with Withnail-ian thoughts of burning the furniture, despite what little there is in my ramshackle cottage, I can’t think of a place I’d rather be than Brazil.

This recipe is a take on the South American country’s traditional black bean stew. Normally, you’d add a few vegetables like cubes of carrots, sweet potatoes and turnips or something, and in the Caldicotts’ book, no meat. But this is all I had in the cupboard, and as it turned out pretty well and kept the cold at bay for an hour or two, especially with the high chilli content, I thought I’d share it with you...  

CHICKEN AND BLACK BEAN STEW

(serves 2)

6 chicken drumsticks

2 small onions

4 fat cloves of garlic

1 tbsp beef dripping

2 teaspoons cumin seeds

2 teaspoons extra hot chilli powder

2 handfuls of fresh coriander

Salt

400g tin of black turtle beans

Melt the dripping in a pot and fry the drumsticks on all sides until lightly browned. Roughly chop the onions and garlic cloves and add them to the pot, stirring away over a medium flame for a couple of minutes. Add the cumin seeds and continue to fry for another minute or so.

Add half a cup of water and cook away, turning the chicken from time to time, until the water has evaporated into a thick syrup, then add another half cup of water and the chilli powder.

Put the coriander in a tub of water and wash well, then leave in the water so any mud sinks to the bottom of the tub (there is nothing worse than grit in a stew). Cut or twist off the roots and leave the leaves in the water. Roughly chop the roots and add them to the pot and cook for another ten minutes, adding a little more water if necessary.

Add the turtle beans (including the purple liquid the beans come with) and stir for a minute until thoroughly coated. Cook over a low heat for another five minutes, stirring from time to time, and at the end add salt to taste and stir in the chopped coriander leaves.

Serve with warm tortillas (which you can heat either by putting them on top of the woodburning stove, or by turning them a couple of times in a dry frying pan, or pinging them for 30 seconds in a microwave if you’ve got one).

The Perfect Dirty Kebab: A Recipe Created On Twitter

This is a dish I came up with over the summer in the UK, before I flew back to Cambodia. Well to be fair, Twitter created it. You see I’d got bored of cookbooks, even the ones all boxed up in the attic and lovingly revisited one afternoon before I had to say goodbye to the house again.

And I was pretty flat out of ideas, what with the culture shock of being back in Blighty and all. It had become much more fun looking in the fridge to see what needed using up, and then asking people on Twitter for recipe ideas. That night, it was the mince that was going green at the back of the fridge.

“I have a pound in both weight and price of lamb mince, and zero inspiration. Any recommendations of what to do with it gratefully received,” I wrote.

Unless you’re Egg Wallace with his big, brass bed, throwing requests into the Twitter pond is a bit like fishing, in my experience - mostly you hardly get anything. But I had a good response that night.

Chef Dave Ahern (@CorkGourmetGuy) - who I’d met the day before when he did a cooking demo at Maltby Street Market, near London Bridge, where I was flogging my book  - suggested lamb chilli. Dino J (@Gastro1) recommended keema mutter or lamb kofte. Mikey Davies (@tucksontour) went for koftes with pitta and tzatziki, or lamb burgers, as did Linda Galloway (@daffodilsoup). And Judy Olsen (@judycopywriter) recommended Greek meatballs with lemon sauce, which she remembered making in the 1980s.

There were more calls for kofte, and then pub landlord and kebab aficionado Oisin Rogers (@Mcmoop) suggested an adana kebab, and sent a link to a recipe from New York restaurant Turkuaz. Everything from the onion to the parsley to the red pepper to the garlic was ‘minced’, except the mince which was ‘ground’. Oh, how I love American English.

Mix, squeeze on to skewers, and hope it stays together. But I didn’t like the idea of a tablespoon of coriander seeds, whether lightly crushed or not - the nearest kebab van was miles away, and I was craving something truer to the simple lamb and onion notes of a true, dirty kebab. Oisin wrote back, saying: “I had one made by a mate in Antalya that ONLY used ground pepper and salt. Sumac on the salad, garlic yog and chilli sauce. A*”

I liked the sound of that. I put the pound of lamb mince in a bowl, and added one small grated onion, two finely chopped garlic cloves, salt, pepper, and then trudged out into the dark to pick a handful of fresh coriander, which I chopped up and threw in to disguise the colour of the mince.

I mixed the meaty dough with my hands until it was well blended and then rolled it on a board into a sausage shape. I know some chefs who scoff at the idea, but I’d always been told to roll minced kebabs in flour to help them stay together, so I threw some flour on the board and rolled them out until they looked like saucissons you see hanging from the ceiling of French delis.

I poured a glug of vegetable oil into a frying pan and fried the babs over a fairly gentle heat for 15 minutes or so, rolling them around to ensure they were evenly browned. They looked so good, I got a bit carried away at that point.

I pilfered half a bottle of blended Scotch, with ‘medicine’ written on the bottle, that was hidden at the back of the cupboard, threw some in and flamed it. I’m not quite sure why, it didn’t do anything for its Turkish authenticity. But if you’ve got a well-stocked booze cupboard, then you might flame a few glugs of raki or arak, or perhaps not bother at all.

While the kebabs were frying, I got on with the rest of the meal. I found an old pitta bread that was crumbling slightly in the freezer, and then headed back out into the dark, taking fright again at the will-o-wisp glint of the CDs hanging in the cherry trees to scare away pigeons, and snagged a cabbage from next door’s garden. They’d probably just think the rabbit had escaped again.

I soon had my sliced cabbage, onion, cucumber and tomato together. I had my bottle of delicious African Volcano peri peri sauce from Maltby Street Market at the ready, and then just as it was all going so well, I moved on to the garlic sauce and found the only yoghurt I had was fucking probiotic peach and mango flavour.

So I thought bollocks to the wellingtons, and just covered my kebab with the fiery sauce, just like they used to make them at the legendary Sphinx kebab shop in Brighton. It was a splendid late-night, home-made kebab, and didn’t cry out for the toasted cumin and coriander seeds that many of the tweeted recipes asked for. In fact, it was a lot better without them. But then, that’s the beauty of Twitter.

Killer Curry In Cambodia: In The Kitchen

Luckily there was a 2kg tin of tomatoes being used as a doorstop back at the restaurant. Dee, one of the Cambodian cooks, was serving a few customers. Josh told me to come back at 4pm when the broom cupboard kitchen would be quieter. I had between 4pm and 6.30pm to get a killer curry made before another two cooks turned up.

Dee was finishing her last order when I returned. Josh was fretting around behind me.

“So what do you need? What do you need?”

Thankfully, he soon left us to it and returned to his card game with a man on red wine. I borrowed a chopper, board, and a plastic bag for the off-cuts and got to work on the sack of onions.

Dee was standing around, watching me anxiously. She still had no idea what the strange long nose was doing in her kitchen. All Josh had said was “we make curry.” She obviously wanted to chop the onions, but I wasn’t taking any chances. The onions had to be right. I’d had enough set-backs already without ballsing up the onions.

I got her to peel some garlic, and then I realised just how good a cook she was. She blitzed the garlic, then started on the meat. I showed her how I wanted the breast cut up, with six cubes out of each one, and two minutes later there was a mountain of glistening, perfect cubes. She told me she’d started in the kitchen as a pot wash at 14, and had worked for the past six years under a series of long nose chefs. It was in her blood.

I threw chopped onions, ginger, garlic, red chillies, and two scoops of sea salt into a huge pot with plenty of vegetable oil, and started cooking the curry base down. I didn’t want to rush the sauce, but the clock was ticking and another order had come in to mess things up. I let the onions simmer for 30 minutes until they had that sweet, melted confit texture you’d use for onion marmalade.

I started thinking about the customers again. They were no doubt already down the bar swigging ice cold Anchor and talking about their curry. They’d probably even written out score boards. I knew they were anxiously waiting for me to mess things up. One of them, a huge pit bull of a man, had already cracked jokes about if his curry wasn’t good enough, he wasn’t going to pay for it. But as he’d survived five years in a Thai jail I wasn’t going to argue with him.

Dee was fascinated by the curry, and I could tell she was taking it all in. I said Tom and Josh were lucky to have such a good chef, and told her to ask for a pay rise. I got her to sniff each of the spices as I threw them into the onions and explained how it was important to cook the sauce for a long time. I fried the spices for a few minutes and then added two fat cinnamon sticks and three bay leaves, and more water to stop the paste catching on the bottom.

Dee finished chopping the tomatoes, and added them to the pan with the juice from the tin. We’d let them cook down for another 45 minutes. It gave us about 30 minutes to finish the dish. Josh popped his head in, and showed me the blender he’d promised. It was about the size of a coke can.

I had about 10 litres of sauce to blitz. I didn’t have another big vessel to pour the pureed sauce into, and there wasn’t the time or the surface space to fill up a load of plastic containers.

I was just glad I’d finely diced the onions, and got Dee to do the same with the tomatoes. With plenty of oil and cooking it should almost go down to a smooth sauce, but again it wouldn’t be perfect. Then Josh came back and said he couldn’t find the grinder for the fenugreek. I thought about the boxer again and his freshly made curry pastes on the Curry Mile.

The onions had almost dissolved by the time I put the chicken in. I let the curry gently cook for another 30 minutes or so. I added more salt and some lemon juice, sugar, and tomato ketchup (the secret ingredient in Indian restaurants). It was as good as any I’d made at home, I was sure of it, but then it was hard to remember. I was in foreign climes, nursing myself with gin and tonics to quell the afternoon sun, my mouth salivating at the very thought of curry. I was in no position to judge.

But somehow there was still something missing. I tried more lemon juice and vinegar, but there was a sharpness missing. Then I reached for the bottle with the cobra curled up inside.

Killer Curry In Cambodia: Gone To Market

The alarm went off and I pressed snooze, then I pressed it again, and eventually woke up with a blinding headache at 12.30pm. I was four hours late for the market. I grabbed my lucky hat and headed over the road to the restaurant with my tail between my legs.

“How’s your head?” said Josh as I arrived.

Tom was in the background fiddling with his computer. Somehow he had managed to turn the screen upside down and had his neck tilted at a painful-looking angle, trying to read as he typed. He was in a wretched mood, and was already on the Pastis.

“Good morning,” he said, looking at his watch. “Well, I suppose it’s afternoon now...”

Josh began fretting about what ingredients we’d need for that night’s curry I’d promised to make. It was all in hand, I assured him. He grabbed a tuk tuk and we headed down to the covered central market in Sihanoukville. It was like a pizza oven. Luckily, Josh didn’t want to buy the chicken from there. But not for hygiene reasons, he just said they were too scrawny.

He said he always bought imported ones from the supermarket. They were much plumper, but the Cambodians wouldn’t eat them because they said the Thais fill them with chemicals to make them grow.

Josh’s order was already bagged up at the stall (above). I bought what I needed for the curry – a sack of onions, tomatoes, a huge lump of ginger, two heads of garlic, a handful of chilli peppers, but no coriander. I wandered round the stalls. None of them had coriander. They were selling celery leaves, but no coriander.

But far worse, there were no dried spices anywhere. It wasn’t a good start. We loaded up the tuk tuk with bags of rice, flour, and potatoes, and headed to the supermarket for spices.

The second one was worse than the first, so we went back to the first one. Josh showed me the enormous range of vodka bottles. There was a bottle of local spirit with a cobra curled up inside (top pic).

“I bet that’s got a bit of bite,” I said.

“Jesus no, that’s for the Cambodians. Never touch the stuff. No way. Not in a million years. Forget it!” he replied.

It may have had every vodka brand under the sun, but there was a very poor spice selection, especially for a country historically influenced by India, and a town filled with expats. You can buy anything in Cambodia from a live Russell's viper to a hand grenade, but cumin seeds? Forget it. I could imagine what the boxer was going to say.

The only relatively cheap spice was ground coriander. You could get a bag of it for $1.50 (£1) - but everything else was expensive, especially by Cambodian standards. A small pot of cardamom would cost an average Cambodian more than a day’s pay. We were going to struggle to make a profit on this meal. But then it was only a trial, I suppose. They wanted to see whether I could cook.

I bought ground coriander, ground cumin, cayenne pepper, turmeric, cinnamon sticks, black onion seeds, fenugreek, and a bottle of the snake liquor. It was far from perfect, but it was enough to make a decent curry. I’d put in plenty of ginger and garlic and pep up the cayenne heat with some finely chopped red chillies.

I thought about what I’d said the night before, and how I’d boasted that I was going to make them “the best bloody curry they’d ever had”. I stood in the aisle flinching at the words. Then I consoled myself that a cook can only work with the ingredients and kitchen he’s got, and I’d just have to make do. It would add to the challenge.

But I knew they wouldn't take excuses. Then I thought about the boxer stuffing himself with his favourite curries on the Wilmslow Road, and tried to get the thought out of my mind. I knew there was nothing wrong with my recipe.

I’d made it as a staff meal for the chefs at the Fat Duck. As Masterchef’s narrator would say, it was the toughest cooking experience of my life. But they’d liked it, or at least said it was okay, which is a glowing accolade in cheffing terms, and they were three star Michelin chefs, not a tattooed bunch of renegade food experts who’d found themselves washed up on Sihanoukville beach.

Then we had a major problem.

“I hope you’re not looking for tinned tomatoes,” said a miserable, old Brit as we walked up the aisle.

He was enraged about not having any tomatoes to go with his bacon the following morning. I was worried about not having any for 20 customers that evening. You can say what you want about using fresh tomatoes, but good quality tinned tomatoes make a better curry, especially if you compare them to the bland, white-centred offerings you get in Cambodia.

“It’s okay, it’s okay, there’s a tin in the kitchen,” said Josh. “Yep, yep, I’m pretty sure there’s a big tin in the kitchen somewhere.”

Then there was more to come. The supermarket had almost sold out of chicken. I didn’t fancy a trip back to that hot, sweaty covered market. All they had were chicken wings and breast. I remembered the boxer harping on about how breast meat is “tasteless mush”, and the wings were no good, and then I thought about that stupid drunken boast again.

We bought four big bags of frozen breasts for $16 and loaded up the tuk tuk, and called into a computer repair shop to send someone round to fix Tom’s screen. He’d phoned up to say he was going for a massage because he’d got a crick in his neck.

Masterchef & The Call Of The Onions

I’ve been watching this year’s Masterchef final with a tad more enthusiasm than normal. Not so much googly-eyed Alex and his wonderful use of offal and, yawn, molecular gastronomy. He’s got his life in front of him. It’s the doctor and Dhruv, who are getting on a bit and have thrown in their jobs to pursue a life in food.

Whatever the outcome of tonight’s final (and don’t worry I won’t spoil it, but isn’t it pretty obvious who’s going to win?) Dhruv and his wife have vowed to open their own restaurant, but refreshingly after he’s learnt a bit more of the trade. And the gap-toothed doctor – who’s been put off by the long hours required in restaurant work – now wants to open a cake shop in Norfolk.

The cynics among you will no doubt say they can always go back to their old jobs. But throwing in a well-paid job during a recession is a pretty brave thing to do, and it makes me feel pretty miserable about my own sojourn into cooking, and why I chose to serve raw tuna of all things during my attempt to get through the regional heats on Masterchef.

It’s been something that’s been on my mind a lot lately. Not my dismal Masterchef application. The decision to hang up my apron and go back into journalism. Alright, I had eaten through my savings. And I had fallen in love with a woman, who was used to holidays in the Caribbean rather than Cornwall. But it was one of the hardest – and easiest – things I’ve ever done, going back.

My fellow hacks, of course, were delighted and ribbed me about “how the dream was over”. They said it broke their hearts to see me eating canteen food every day. But one news shift gave me nearly the same amount of money as a week spent cooking. I carried on a few days here and there knocking out dinner party dishes for rich clients (they used to bring in their own dishes so it looked like they’d cooked it themselves) kidding myself that I’d soon be back, maybe with my own restaurant or pub, but in the end I gave up the cheffing and before I knew it was working in news full-time on a good pension and decent health care.

The cooking went and my girlfriend left too. But it wasn’t all about her. I think the moment I finally lost faith in cheffing for a living was when I put my back out lifting a stock pot and had to spend my whole day’s pay on a 30-minute physio session. The physio spent 10 minutes of it on the phone talking about an injured horse.

And so here I am now, three years later, with a house and a mortgage. Well, it’s more of a building site really but it’s getting there. I bought it for the kitchen mainly, and put in a stove so big it could hold its own in a 40-cover restaurant. But I miss the cooking.

Like I said, it’s been filling my thought s a lot recently – the call of the onions. I only have to watch a Floyd re-run and it all seems so possible again – making a living from the thing you love, being a bon viveur without a care in the world, unshackling yourself from the mortgage and opening a little bistro somewhere, banging out good old fashioned classics from the attic. Coq au vin, cassoulet, venison stew with dumplings and dauphinois, razor shells like they cook them at that fish market in Barcelona, pan-fried lemon sole with butter sauce, proper steak and kidney pudding, I could go on.

Falling into bed with shattered limbs, and sleeping the sleep of the just. A trade where talent is rewarded, and promotion comes with hard work rather than the ability to brown nose the boss. And it’s the creativity I miss as well. I got disillusioned at the time, realising that the higher you got in the restaurant industry, the more it was about consistency and the ability to knock out the same identical dishes, whatever Hell unleashes. Yet there was still an art to it. Far more than the new world of formulaic, Twitter-fed, desk-bound journalism anyway. Or what passes in its name these days.

When I returned to the newsroom a few of the hacks muttered, “well, at least you’ve been learning something useful for the past two years.” The others just thought I’d been to prison. And I had learnt something. I was never going to be Marco Pierre White, even the flabby, out-of-practice, stock cube-hawking, crisp-peddler you see on your screens now, but I could throw a decent dinner party and serve up a damned good steak. In fact, I’d learnt a huge amount in those two years, and I sorely regretted not trying harder.

And that’s what I’ve been thinking about. Ludicrous, I know. But maybe I should have one last go? Put a lodger in the spare room, and hope to pay off the rest of the mortgage with a cooking job? Or just rent out the whole house and get a live-in cooking job near the sea?

I never did find that fisherman’s shack I wanted to cook at. Shucking scallops on the quayside, and haggling over crabs. My knife skills are still passable – I’ve been keeping them up to scratch, chopping onions and prepping tomato concasse in the evenings. But would I be brave enough to throw it all in again? There are only so many times you can go back. This time it might be permanent, this time it might have to work or I might find myself in my 60s with no house and just the state to lean on.

I want success, not TV shows or books or recipe columns, just contentment. But however hard I try I just don’t seem to find the courage. I asked to go part-time, but they said no. I asked to do freelance shifts, but they said the new boss would see it as disloyal giving up a “good job” to become a shifter. The only way was to give it all up, finally, and throw myself into cooking.

Maybe move to Spain and learn Spanish and cook tapas and go out after work with the crew and be happy? Not bitch about the boss and being overlooked for promotion. This winter has taught me one thing – I hate the cold and repressive gloom. You forget when you find yourself in a job like mine with no windows, that there are a number of ways to live your life, even in cheffing. I’ve been thinking about that guy I worked with at the Fat Duck who worked on billionaires’ yachts in France. He had a happy life, even if he was woken up at 3am to make sandwiches for pissed Russians.

But then the fear and doubt set in and I see it painfully for what it is – a man, ahem, approaching middle-age giving up a well-paid job, with a good pension and decent health care, and a nine-day fortnight, for a badly-paid job, with long hours and no guarantee of happiness.

Ah, the call of the onions. If only I could find the courage to get back out there again, and do it properly this time. I’ve forgotten what it’s like to feel alive. Offices do that to you, especially ones without windows. So, what do you think? I'd like to know, really I would...