Outdoor eating (part one)

I have to admit, I love a barbie. I'm a real sucker for eating outdoors (and so's Mark), so the minute the sun comes out, so does the Weber.

I often think dieting is easier when the weather's hot, too. For starters, I find I don't get terribly hungry once the thermometer hits the mid-20s C, but even when I am feeling peckish, simply cooked meat or fish and loads of veg and fruit tends to be the order of the day. All very healthy.

One of the first barbecues we had this year involved marinating some chicken in a spicy semi-liquid rub, then serving it up with some roast veg and a bean and tomato salad. Recipes below.

Marinade for spicy chicken:

20ml olive oil
1 tbsp chipotle in adobo (from www.coolchile.co.uk)
1 tsp ground cumin
juice from 1/2 lime
1 clove garlic, mashed
salt

Mix all the marinade ingredients together.

Skin two portions of chicken (I think a small leg and thigh is the best option rather than breast), then score the flesh almost through to the bone.

Rub the marinade into the chicken and leave for at least a couple of hours (and up to a whole day).

You can barbecue or grill the chicken. I served ours with a roast tomato, garlic and green bean salad; roast butternut squash and barbecued sweetcorn (the last is an indulgence, I admit).


Roast tomato, garlic and green bean salad:

250g cherry tomatoes
2 cloves of garlic, skins left on
1 tbsp olive oil
150-200g green beans, topped and tailed
50g pine nuts
a small amount of dressing made from extra virgin olive oil, sherry vinegar and a dollop of Dijon mustard, plus salt and freshly ground black pepper

Heat the oven to 100C, then place the tomatoes and garlic in a roasting dish and sprinkle with olive oil.

Roast gently for up to four hours, by which time the tomatoes should have shrivelled and blackened a bit, and their taste will have intensified. The garlic should be soft and creamy. Allow to cool.

In the interim, blanch the beans and refresh them under cold water. Leave to one side until cooled.

Toast the pine nuts in a frying pan. Watch them carefully as they go from raw to burned very quickly.

Place the tomatoes, pine nuts and beans in a salad bowl. Squeeze the garlic cloves out of their skins and toss them into the veg. Dress with a small amount of dressing.

The damage

As predicted, Mark came home last night, took one look at my knee and put the kibosh on the idea of going out for dinner.

As a result, I spent just over two hours in my local A&E department waiting to be dealt with. The triage nurse, who I saw after about half an hour's wait confirmed that I'd need stitches, so I sat in the busy, noisy waiting room and, well, I waited. I'd sent Mark home, because there was no point in both of us sitting there doing nothing – I thought he'd be best of getting some dinner – but then he came back with a book for me to read, but instead we sat there and cuddled. I was feeling rather weepy, which is fairly unlike me – I suppose it must have been delayed shock – and my knee was starting to stiffen up and become sore.

Eventually I was shown in to a cubicle, where I climbed up onto a leatherette bed and a nurse practitioner peeled back the bloody bandage wrapped round my leg. Apparently I was lucky to have missed severing the tendon by a matter of millimetres, but as it was I needed five stitches, three to the large gash at the top and another two below. My leg is now swathed in stitches, steristrips and a big gauze plaster.

I'm under strict instructions not to do any exercise for the next 10 days or so. On the principle that you miss most that which you cannot have, I find myself craving an early morning jog.

The first rule of jogging

Today I learned something new. What I learned was that the first rule of jogging is that you must always, always look where you're going. As you can see from the picture above, I didn't.

I was out in the park with Laszlo, trying to loosen up my muscles after my last session with James had left me feeling a bit stiff (serves me right for not stretching right afterwards). James and I were due to go out on Clapham Common tomorrow morning to see just how far I could jog when I put my mind to it – the goal was half an hour.

So, there I was, being a good girl, pootling round the park, not really looking where I was going – in fact, actively looking over my shoulder because Lasz had stopped to play with a Jack Russell – when I tripped over a shallow hole in the path and went sprawling.

I've badly skinned the palm of my left hand, but that's nothing compared to my left knee – I've got a deep, deep gash just below my knee cap. It's really quite gory-looking in real life. I was meant to go out for a review dinner tonight, to Lindsay House. I was really looking forward to it, but I've got a sneaking suspicion Mark may come home in half an hour and insist I go to hospital and get my leg stitched up.

I'm also not convinced that I'm going to make the half-hour run tomorrow.

Drat, drat and double drat.

Still, if I ever wanted proof that journalism was the right career move for me, the fact that my first thought on getting home was that I'd better get a picture of the injury to post on the blog seems to provide ample confirmation.

Sweet and savoury

One of the things I found myself yearning for during my week in Georgia (isn't it funny how some weeks seem to last a very long time?) was fish, so I went out and bought a couple of tuna steaks for dinner the other night. I marinated them for a few hours in some lime zest (if you use lime juice, it 'cooks' the fish), minced ginger and chilli, soy sauce and a dash of sesame oil.

Alongside, I served wilted pak choy with strips of stir-fried ginger and, a new discovery, Asian butternut squash mash.

Asian butternut squash mash for two

1 medium butternut squash
2 star anise
1/2 stick cinammon
1 tbsp mirin
1 tbsp maple syrup
1 tbsp light soy sauce
a splash of sesame oil
salt and freshly ground pepper

Peel the squash and cut it into cubes (the smaller the cubes, the quicker they'll boil). Place in a saucepan of cold water with the star anise and cinammon and bring to the boil. Simmer until the squash is tender (depending on the size of the cubes this could be anywhere between 10 minutes and half an hour).

Drain and remove the anise and cinammon. Return the squash to the saucepan and, over a medium heat, mash until smooth. The squash contains quite a lot of water, so keep stirring and mashing until the water has all boiled away, otherwise you'll end up with sloppy mash.

Once you're satisfied that the texture is right, add the mirin, maple syrup, soy and sesame. Don't add them all at once, but taste as you go instead as the amount you'll need depends on how much mash you've got in the pan. Season to taste and serve.

Something weird happened while I was away

I never thought I'd say this, but while I was away, I got kind of fidgety from lack of exercise. I found that I was actually looking forward to going for a run on my return. I even found myself, on the second morning in Tbilisi, down in the gym (inappropriately attired in linen trousers, a singlet and a pair of Converse trainers, but there you go...) jogging on the treadmill.

Maybe they're right when they say you can get addicted to exercise. What a horrible thought...

A double celebration

Much to my surprise, after my kachapuri and kebab fest, I've come back weighing somewhat less than I did when I went to Georgia. Maybe misery has a purpose after all...

85.4 kilos. Hurrah!

Plus I managed two laps of the park again yesterday morning. The fact that spring has sprung while I've been away, with a consequent rise in temperature, makes things a tad more difficult than they were when the weather is cool and overcast. It's not much fun jogging in the sunshine (I feel like someone whingeing about a half-full glass, but it's true). But if I can haul myself out of the house before about 10 in the morning, it's not too bad.

Kachapuri and kebabs

So, I'm back from my travels. For a while, at least. Georgia was, er, interesting. Sometimes genuinely interesting, sometimes more in the nature of Chinese curse interesting.

We landed at Tbilisi airport at one in the morning and were whisked straight to the hotel, so I couldn't tell very much about where we were apart from the fact that everyone seemed to drive on whichever side of the road they felt like at any one time. The trip between airport and hotel seemed like a game of four-wheeled chicken.

After a few gentle hours of sight-seeing the next day, we were taken out for dinner to one of Tbilisi's best restaurants by the organisers of the wine competition I was there to judge. Dinner was delicious: lots of good, fresh, herby salads; a couple of kinds of cheeses – one similar to a slightly tough mozzarella, the other somewhat like feta; a dish of lamb stewed with herbs and sour plums and a minced lamb kebab enlivened with barberries and pomegranate seeds. Our host for the evening, a genial politician whose smile didn't quite reach his eyes, appointed himself tamada, or toastmaster, for the evening and raised his glass every eight minutes on average, with a new theme. We drank to Georgia, to women, to absent partners, to international co-operation, to marriage, to the success of the next few days' judging... to so many things, in fact, that I lost track of what I was toasting, despite the fact that I was only taking very small sips of the wine in my glass. Apparently we got off lightly: the true Georgian tradition is that you drain your glass at each toast.

After a press conference the next day (it would seem that a wine competition is big news in Georgia, meriting exposure in the national newspaper and the evening news on TV), we set off for Sighnagi, the village where the competition would actually be held. Sighnagi, it turns out, is a bit of Potemkin village, designed to attract tourist dollars to help shore up Georgia's rather feeble economy. The trouble with Sighnagi as a tourist destination (apart from the glossy Disneyland-esque quality of the village, which stands in complete contrast to the poverty of all the other villages I passed through) is that it only has one hotel and two restaurants.

The hotel was truly abysmal. I picked five dead flies off the synthetic carpet in my room (the very same carpet that sent out sparks of static electricity with every footfall) and flushed them down the loo. What I couldn't get rid of was the mouldy smell in my room – it was like sleeping in a corked bedroom. It was so bad that the only way I could fall asleep at night was by dousing myself in perfume to over-ride the damp aromas.

As for the restaurants, on the first night we visited Sighnagi's 'French' restaurant, where we were served by the place's one waitress, a bored teenager who was obviously pissed off that we (the only table of diners) had prevented her from bunking off early to hook up with her boyfriend. Her boyfriend may well have been the chef, whose sole function was to open cans and tip the contents onto a plate. Actually, I lie. He was also responsible for my 'pork chops with spinach', which turned out to be two meatless spare ribs doused in vinegar and a salt pan's worth of salt, accompanied by four burned balls of spinach that had been cooked hours earlier and left to go cold.

I have to admit to having had a bloody good cry that night after I got off the phone to Mark. So much for the glamour of my life as a wine writer...

Things got mildly better the next day. The competition helped to take my mind off my surroundings (we tasted 180 or so wines and 12 chachas – local grape brandy) and we discovered the town's other restaurant, which served authentic Georgian dishes. In practice, this meant a plate of herbs, spring onions and radishes, more of the salty, feta-like cheese, more kebabs and kachapuri, a kind of Georgian cheese pizza. While it wasn't haute cuisine, it was better than what was on offer at the French restaurant, so that's what we ate for lunch and dinner for the next three days.

I've never yearned for home more than I did last week. Mark, bless him, came to pick me up from the airport and proudly announced that he was cooking me dinner to welcome me home. He'd planned on making lamb burgers and salad, but I just couldn't face more minced lamb and salad. We went out for a Chinese meal instead.