For years and years, women were bombarded with various diets that promised to slim hips, lift breasts, tighten buttocks, flatten tummies, improve skin, lift your mood and make you’re husband see you in a new light. Low fat and high fat diets, low carbs, low GI, the murderous Dr Atkins, and the vegan way, although with the current concern about the amount of methane produced by man and animals, this must surely soon be discounted.
For years these dietary fads were the domain of the Females of the house. The Males nutritionally unaware, blind to the rigors of calorie counting. Men and boys ate what they wanted when they wanted while we quietly sucked on a Ryveta, insisting that it really was lovely and no they didn’t want any of their chips.
Over the past two decades, professional football teams have started to take their nutrition seriously. This first came to my husband’s attention on FA Cup final day. On this terribly tedious annual event, the build up to the game would begin at ten o’clock in the morning; two camera crews were detailed to follow each team throughout their preparations for the big match. On this occasion, Love idols Liverpool were in the final, my suitably nervous and twitchy husband leaping from his chair, at the sight of the Liverpool team sitting down to lunch, to berate the TV,
“Graeme Souness, eating poncy pasta? …….You need meat man, meat!, we’ve had it, what chance have we got, somebody get him a bloody steak and chips!”
His team went on to win, my husband at first attributing the victory to a fan slipping Souness a cheeky burger, but slowly accepting that there may be something in this nutrition lark. A moment of awakening for my particular hunter gatherer, but
over time more and more men have migrated towards the stove, and I can only attribute this to the increasing number of foreign footballers in the English leagues, particularly French, Italian and Spanish.
Now if some young French thruster took over my kitchen I would listen intently at what he had to say about cooking. If the kitchen interloper were Italian I would also be suitably agog although I would keep half an eye on what he was doing with his hands. If the new chef were Spanish, oil would be drizzled and garlic crushed passionately in the heady ambience that would prevail.
Unfortunately my kitchen intruders are my husband and son. Five minutes of Jamie Oliver and a print off of one of Rafa Benitez’s dietary sheets and they are culinary kings. Any food I prepare is now open to analysis and criticism, with comment on carbohydrate, sugars, fats and the type of protein they have been given, all of which are completely wrong! Just over a year ago, my husband’s newfound interest in nutrition peaked with a week of culinary experimentation. Looking on a web site that showed the nutritional analysis of various types of fish food -yes fish food! He took over the kitchen with a proclamation that we would now be getting our protein from sustainable sources. Sand eels were not a sustainable source of protein and as a result we would now be extracting our protein from feathers, as many fish feed producers were now attempting to do. This involved emptying the contents of a pillow into several saucepans boiling them up for several hours, before using the residue as a base for the most disgusting broth I have ever tasted. I stuck it for two days before reaching breaking point, informing him that I had never cooked him sand eels in all our married life, and coupled with his high-fibre bran and cardboard breakfast regime, the children were beginning to look increasingly egg bound; food should be enjoyed not endured!
Undeterred he continued with his governance of the kitchen zone, dictating the menu for the following few days; Gordon Ramsay had played football and crossed over into the kitchen, so it was definitely going to be an option for him.
The range of food became ever more bizarre, Pre match day, we were treated to what he proclaimed as his “signature dish” –Lasagne. On first inspection it looked reasonably edible, but on tasting proved to have been made with the mincemeat more suited to mince pies than the minced meat used in the classic Italian dish. Unable to find truffle oil in Thorntons or Hotel Chocolate, he instead used melted champagne truffles in at least two pasta dishes, one of which had daffodil bulbs on as substitute for onions. We had an exotic duck dish, where the bird was slowly braised for a day in orange squash, followed by a ten minute discourse on the secrets of making the perfect Apple crumble, the dish itself, a triumph, if the mixed spice or cinnamon stated in the recipe, had not been substituted for Garam Masala. We ate the pudding, my husband insisting, “a spice is a spice, is a spice”, while my daughter and I muttered quietly about fruit fools and counted our blessing that he had not used his “Old Spice aftershave”
Since that week, the process of feeding the family has generally fallen back within my remit. Of course there is much comment about what is served up, it is never completely right, something will be out of balance, or I could have cooked something differently. However, the plates do come back empty, and we are all still alive, something that I would consider a major achievement if my husband were ever to take over in the kitchen again.
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