1 Recipe completed: Roast Partridge with braised lettuce, peas and bacon

Page 155, adapted from the Roast Pigeon with Braised Lettuce, Peas and Bacon recipe.


Oh, the shopping! I had a partridge; I needed streaky smoked bacon, wine, butter, button onions, little gem lettuce, peas, thyme and watercress. First I tried the local garage shop (it's local; I'm trying to do my bit on the small-shopkeeper/ travelling miles front); wine, butter, big lettuce but no peas at all. So I had to go to the supermarket. Which is huge. And I decided to buy the ingredients for the Braised Endives whilst I was there. I thought I knew the place, but what I really knew was all the places to find the food that I usually eat, plus the interesting exotic shelves that come with living near a major airport. So, after an hour, I have the ingredients; okay, the onions are technically (actually) shallots but I'm not going to tell them this, and I've accidentally bought two different types of thyme, but it's there. The hard part, as always now, was choosing a wine; hwsgo knows more than anyone else I know about this and I can't ever justify just picking up cheap plonk anymore. But in the end, it was La Foret Hilaire, a cheap semillon sauvigon that won. It appears to be drinkable...

Blood pouring from a bird's cavities is one of the truly deeply yuck things of the food world. I'm not sure if I can get used to it, but it does take remarkably little time to go from yuck to 'I could eat that' in the bird-roasting world.

I'm reducing the stock, using a pan instead of the cooking dish because I have nothing small enough that can go from oven to hob (one more for the shopping list). Trouble is, the wine kept evaporating from the '1 glass of' whilst the birds were cooking, I missed the pan and poured half of it over the cooker and now I'm a little wobblier than usual. I could blame the exercise class and lack of food. It's a good thing that I'd done all the chopping as soon as the birds went into the oven.

So now the veg is in the oven and I can relax for 20 minutes. I can't find hwsgo anywhere (he's probably asleep; he had a long night), so I'll let my fingers run away with me here. If I'm to survive this challenge, I need to be very very careful about my diet and exercise or I fear I'll balloon. I'm currently 1 stone overweight (something of a small victory, having started out at 3) at 172lbs aka 12st 4lb (in case you think I'm overoptimistic, I'm a british size 10 - american size 8 - at 162lbs aka 11st 4lb) and I really don't want to get heavy again. Hence the gym. And keeping a food diary. Put your fingers in your ears if you don't want to read this bit. Today, I ingested: 2 pints water, 1 machine hot chocolate, 2 machine coffees, apparently half a bottle of wine, 40g of special k cereal with semiskimmed milk, 2 special k snack bars, 2 bread rolls (no butter), 1 fennel bulb with parmesan and milk and 2 rashers of bacon. And I should soon eat one of the partridges and veg, with some watercress. This is far too much for one person to eat in a day, even if there is no chocolate involved. But if I record what I eat every day, then eventually I should, possibly out of shame, eat less, in the same way that recording what I spent made me spend less. So here it is: full disclosure. And you can take your fingers out of your ears now, I'm back on the cooking.

It's all out of the oven, it smells delicious, I've photographed the food, sat down to eat and -botheration- the birds aren't cooked. They should be; they've had 20 minutes in the oven, but a quick stab and there's blood coming out of the breast. They're back in the oven now, I have no idea how long for, but they're getting another 20 minutes at least, just to be sure. In the meantime, I'm hungry now and the vegetables are utterly delicious.

20 minutes later, and the partridge is unbloodied, and, well, a bit like chicken. Which is not a slur on all partridges; we have had excellent gamey pheasants from a local butcher, but this supermarket version is - well- a bit bland. I want it to be strong, gamey, balanced against the peas and lettuce, but it's just a little way past insipid. I hope it wasn't farmed; I used to work next to a pheasant farm and although the cages were sufficiently large, the birds didn't have space to fly, to exercise, and spent most of their time wandering around the ground looking fat and dejected. But I suspect it is; we brits have lost so much of our ability to judge food for ourselves, have abdicated our responsibility for our own tastebuds to the mass marketeers and large chains, that a truly gamey bird would do nothing more than shock its consumers and unleash a plague of complaints onto a supermarket. Thank goodness for small game dealers. Which is a topic in its own right.