It doesn't have to be unhealthy

I appalled my friend AP last weekend with the revelation that I had used an entire, although small, bottle of olive oil in a week's cooking. This revelation followed a protracted whinge about how all this cooking has taken a toll on my waistline -- there's no escaping it, I'm fatter than I was in January. AP then astutely pointed out that the food for this project does not have to be elaborate and rich, just new.

Sam and I were away last week, and came home laden with Italian nibbles and keen to catch up with friends A, H and M. So as part of my new not-eating-myself-to-death regime I decided to do a meal that started with salad, continued with a main, and had no dessert (the last part of that decision hurt me). For the main I dipped into Happy Days with the Naked Chef and made chicken in salt with fennel, thyme and lemon. At this point I should tell you that you don't eat the salt -- it's discarded after cooking -- so I haven't fallen at the first hurdle of eating better!

Now, burying a bird in salt takes slightly longer than you'd think. Allow half an hour to make your salt coating and stuff and bury the bird. Also, the measurements in the recipe seem to be incorrect. Firstly, you do not need three kg of salt. In fact, you can tell from the pictures in the book that nothing like that much is used. I used one and a quarter kg to create a crust that looked identical to the pictures, and was as thick as they requested. Also, you do not need eight heaped tablespoons of fennel seeds. You just don't: eight tablespoons is more than a tub! I used six heaped teaspoons and we still tasted it in the meat. Anyway, having painted the chicken in a (thin) layer of olive oil, stuffed it with herbs, and buried it in salt, it looked like this.

This is a fabulous dish to bring to the table when you have people over. The eggs used in mixing the salt coating cause it to harden and form a crystal-like crust -- it peels away in huge sheets. The chicken itself was delicious. The herbs, lemon and fennel all permeated the meat (actually, so did the salt underneath the chicken, but it wasn't unpleasant). The meat was incredibly tender, with not a hint of the dryness that a roast chicken sometimes has. I have a fan oven and cooked it for an hour and 45 minutes on 180 degrees C. Here are pictures of my beautiful bird. Common sense shows the way with the recipe mistakes, and I'm still counting this one a winner. Thanks Jamie!

Getting healthier still, on Tuesday this week I grilled fresh mackerel. Fish hasn't yet appeared here: Sam and I tend to avoid it, as ethically caught fish is hard to come by. Although mackerel are fine to eat in terms of fish stock levels, the ones I bought disappointed me, as they were caught by pelagic, mid-water trawling -- while this doesn't damage the sea bed, it is still liable to catch other creatures, like dolphins. For more information on fishing techniques, Greenpeace have a good site on it. (I'll climb off my soapbox, now, it's giving me vertigo.)

Anyway, the fish was bought, so it had to be cooked. I didn't bother with a recipe for this, although I took a hint from a James Martin recipe and spread my fillets with wholegrain mustard before I shoved them under a hot grill for between five and ten minutes (sorry, I forgot to time it). AP told me that a healthy plate of food should be 50 per cent vegetables, 25 per cent protein and 25 per cent carbohydrates (I should mention, here, that she is qualified to give advice on the topic). I served the fish with some boiled new potatoes: putting them into a bowl after cooking, I stirred them roughly with a fork and added a squeeze of lemon juice, a drop of olive oil, and some ground pepper and a tiny bit of salt. The combination of potato starch and lemon and olive oil made a creamy coating on the potatoes, and I recommend this to you. I also served with tomatoes (nice for cutting through the oil in the fish) and asparagus. It was a lovely meal, which we felt very smug eating in front of the telly watching Supersize vs Superskinny.

Butter will definitely be taking a back seat in my kitchen for a while: despite the fact that it makes everything taste so nice, I really don't want to end up the size of a baby hippo. Forty-two down.