Pictured above is the woman who taught me to share, give and have a social conscience. Yet she supports a party which does not have the same values. I can only blame it on misinformation, since my Mum and Dad are far more responsible citizens than most lefties I know. Fact. Apart from with those huge naughty burners in the backyard.
To be honest, the dude (Jamie, not Cameron) annoys the hell out of me. Yet the man's recipes do work, which cannot be said for every cook writing books, and he does good things, which cannot be said of many people at all.
Actually I didn't like him at all until all the Fifteen, school meals and Ministry of Food stuff. All that Naked Chef "Wurrrgghhhhhh, throw a wodge of that stripper hot chilli on yer bangers luv" bullshit was almost impossible to bear.
Yet I was proved wrong. (Yes - you have that in print). People can knock him for not managing to turn the entire country from turkey twizzlers to quinoa salad overnight, but he showed what could be done and taught a lot of folk a lot of stuff about cooking and health, which it's now their choice to ignore.
Better get on with it. Once he agrees to cook some la-di-dah banquet for the Cam-Vampires I'll have to strike him from my favourites.
So: the admirable Cook with Jamie (Michael Joseph, £26) is his comprehensive attempt at teaching anyone already interested in food what's what and how to cook it. A contemporary Delia's Complete Cookery Course (BBC Books, £12.99) if you will.
It is like an encyclopedia of food, but only the food you really want to eat. It covers all the basics for anyone who wants to take their cooking up a notch - what equipment to buy, how to understand flavours and textures and how to shop, which is particularly handy where fish and meat come in.
It includes salads, pasta, gnocchi and risotto, meat, fish, vegetables, desserts and some bits and bobs. He also gives some good chat on knowing where your flesh hailed from, which apparently cannot be said enough times. Even my flatmate, who doesn't eat red meat on account of it being made from animal, buys the cheapest misery chicken she can find. I think I'm close to giving up chicken and tuna entirely, then I could just announce this when people are cooking for me instead of feeling sick while eating the misery chicken dinner at the thought of all those poor, tortured battery chicks and wise old Mr Turtle who lost his life over a can of skipjack tuna.
I digress. But believe me, I am close to tears looking at his Black Angel Tagliarini with Scallops and Clam Chowder, Essex Girl-Style (Ah, the twattery knows not its own bounds. Give it up Jamie), knowing there is but smoked mackerel and eggs in the fridge.
I had to give up the cooking btw, as I was spending all my days cooking instead of earning money, and it turned out this wasn't a sustainable way of life.
Both the above recipes sound a bit posh, and indeed they are, but overall the recipes in here aren't. They just come out a bit special because Jamie bothers to up the ante on flavours. If you can bothered to put in a tiny bit of effort, you will be rewarded. Take this Asparagus, Mint & Lemon Risotto for example. It's the perfect spring dish. I make Nigella's Lemon Risotto often but it is much heavier and greedier and doesn't cash in on the yummy spring greens we have right now.
Ah, news just in that Theresa May is to be home secretary in this ludicrous coalition government. I am actually pleased with this. As pleased, at least, as one can be by a token woman in an otherwise shady set-up. And she is the home secretary for fuck's sake, a big job, so I will not resort to mentioning her name and her shoes in the same breath, like everybody else out there.
Jamie makes it clear that it only takes a little leap to swap your failsafe pasta sauce recipe for something more inspiring, such as Summertime tagliarini, with pine nuts, lemon and parsley. He makes salads exciting and desirable, demystifies cooking fish and the veg section will deter you from ever relying on plain boiled again.
There's advice on freezing and guides to herbs and spices.
I'm not sure Thatcher, were she still in her right mind, would know what to make of Jamie. On the one hand she would surely celebrate a society where flush youngsters can spunk cash on prime cuts of meat and four different herbs for a midweek meal. On the other hand, it might well all seem a bit, well, foreign.
Jamie is capitalising on the hard work of older chefs who began introducing the diverse flavours he uses to the UK years ago. If Delia encouraged us to consider pasta and Tiramisu staple dishes, largely thanks to Elizabeth David and Anna del Conte, then Jamie owes much to them and to Claudia Roden and Madhur Jaffrey too, for providing an education on Middle Eastern and Asian flavours. In Jamie's hands they are normalised and feel at home on anyone's kitchen table.
These inspirations are as evident in the meat and fish dishes as they are in the salads, pastas and risottos (there is instruction on making your own pasta; given the easy availability of quality pasta, dry and fresh, if you're considering this I'd advise you forget about it and read this instead). Look for the Roast leg of lamb with aubergines and onions and the Pot-roasted Poussins Agro Dolce.
Time for a few pics. I pitched up at my mum's a few weeks ago dried out like salty olive left in a jar all on its own from a hen weekend in the nearby peaks, and sat and watched her prepare Slow-roasted pork belly with the sweetest braised fennel without lifting a finger to help. She said she didn't want me to and I think she was probably telling the truth.
Here's dad, ready to carve. Yes, he does indeed resemble both Danny Alexander, our new Scotland minister, and Charles Kennedy, the boozy former Lib Dem leader, but I'm not sure he likes either man.
And here's mum's brand new nine trillion pound seventeen oven Aga wot cooked the meat so slowly and meltingly
And here's some on my plate, lit up by the March sun
I was about to commend Jamie's website for its archives of every single one of his recipes, but we appear to have come a cropper with Pot-roasted Poussins Agro Dolce. Which is sort of good, because you'll have to go and buy the book, and all profits go to Fifteen. If you were stuck with just this book, and lacked any sort of imagination to think up dishes yourself, you wouldn't get bored for a long time.
He has too many other books to go through on this post, but don't get the US one. Even if you enjoyed the series, the book is not good.
I'm enjoying Jamie's romp through Europe on Channel 4 at the moment. Tonight he hit the French Pyrenees, uncovering the contented rural communities we might still have here had Thatcher not broken all our grรจves with her iron fist.
