Off on my travels again

I might not be able to make any kind of posting for the next week or so because I'm about to fly out to Georgia (that's former Soviet Union Georgia rather than Georgia, USA) to help judge a wine competition. I'll be gone until next Saturday, and I'm not sure how easy it's going to be to get any kind of internet connection while I'm out there – or even if I'll be given any spare time to do so.

When I get back, I hope to be able to make an interesting posting about eating and drinking in the Wild East.

The joys of spring

What could be better on a sunny spring day than a light lunch of English asparagus, dipped into the runny yolk of an egg? The answer has to be dipping the asparagus into a lightly boiled duck egg, rather than the more usual hen's egg. The added richness – and the larger size of the eggs – makes this an extra-special treat.

And now for the bad news...

When I returned from Istanbul, my weight had dipped to 85.7 kilos, and I thought I was back on track. Now, 10 days later, I'm now back up to 86.3 kilos. I could kid myself that it's just a matter of water retention or something, but I have to acknowledge that I'm not being as rigorous with the diet as I was at the start of the year.

I've got plenty of excuses for relaxing my eating patterns: I've had a lot of work dinners, I've had friends round or been over to friends' places for dinner, and I've just started my annual restaurant reviewing rounds (I'm a section editor for one of the main restaurant guides). In other words, temptation's been placed in my path, and I've succumbed. Only slightly, but just enough to ensure that I'm not losing any weight. The time has come to reconsider my priorities, because I'm always going to have to face up to temptation. If I want to lose more weight, I'm going to have to stick a little closer to the rules. Darn.

Breaking news

After I managed to make it all the way round my local park (see above) at the start of this month, James and I set a new challenge: to make it twice round the park. According to James, who's googled the info, twice round the park is somewhere just over a mile – a distance that would have seemed impossible a couple of months ago, when twice round the tennis court brought me out in a fit of wobbles.

So, after the triumph of one lap of the park, the new target was set, and James' reckoning was that I should get there in about six weeks' time, which would have taken us to the middle of May.

Last night, however, I had dinner with Jon, one of my oldest friends, who was telling me that he went out running last weekend for the first time in living memory and managed to keep up with some country friends of his, regular runners, for an hour – although he did say they were very kind with their pace-setting. I still don't know how he managed it; by my reckoning an hour's running, even at its most gentle, must cover about five miles, a distance that would give me a heart attack or heat stroke, whichever came first.

But Jon's account of his weekend run did make me feel challenged, so I prised myself out of bed (a challenge in itself, for some reason my bed seemed ultra-comfortable this morning) and went out to the park, determined to make it round at least a lap and a half. I did better than that, though – I made it round twice. I feel knackered, but I also feel really pleased with myself, and that's a good feeling.

South American steak, with all the trimmings

I bought some lovely rump steak at Borough market the other week: it had been hung for 45 days, so it had loads of flavour and was really tender. I marinated it in some olive oil and crushed garlic for a few hours before slapping it onto the griddle.

I served it with some chimichurri sauce, an Argentine relish. I haven't given specific quantities, because it's the kind of thing that needs to be balanced according to your tastes, and it also depends on how many people you're feeding.

To make chimichurri sauce, mix together:

olive oil
lemon juice
fresh parsley, chopped
fresh coriander, chopped
hot red chillies, chopped
salt and freshly ground black pepper

I served the steak and chimichurri with some corn on the cob (Mark got some butter mashed up with lime zest to spread on his). I also dished up a salad based on quinoa, a kind of nutty-flavoured grain. In my own mind (but possibly nowhere else), this creates a kind of South American flavour to the meal because I based this salad on something I ate in a restaurant in Chile a few years ago. I've been making variations on the theme of nutty grains, herbs, tomatoes and chillies ever since.

Quinoa salad for 4:

a punnet of cherry tomatoes
olive oil
250g quinoa or pearl barley (I used quinoa this time round, but have used pearl barley with great success in the past)
1 chipotle chilli
1 red onion, halved and sliced finely
a big bunch of fresh coriander, chopped
1 ripe avocado, peeled and sliced
a couple of limes
salt and freshly ground black pepper

Preheat the oven to 100C. Tip the tomatoes into a roasting tray and sprinkle lightly with olive oil. Roast the tomatoes gently for at least a couple of hours, until they've completely softened and have started to caramelise. Remove from the oven and allow to cool.

Make up the quinoa or pearl barley acccording to the instructions on the packet and set aside to cool.

Soak the chilli in boiling water for half an hour or so, then chop finely.

Mix the quinoa/barley with the tomatoes, chilli, red onion, coriander and avocado. Drizzle with olive oil and the lime juice (start with the juice of one lime and taste before adding more juice). Season and serve.

A big challenge

I've spent a couple of days over the last week or so helping to judge at the International Wine Challenge, one of the three big wine-tasting competitions to run each year here in the UK. The picture, left, gives you some idea of the vast number of wines entered in such competitions. They're big business: big business for the people who run them (who charge a fee for each entry) and big business for the lucky winners (who get to put a sticker on the neck of the winning bottles in the hope that this will help them sell more wine).

Each day for the past fortnight, 100 or so experienced tasters – journalists, wine makers, wine merchants and sommeliers for the most part – have rocked up at one of the Barbican's exhibition hall. We get split into groups of between four and six judges per table, under the guidance of a panel leader, and then the tasting begins. The first week's job was merely to sort wines into three categories: Out (you really don't want to put that in your mouth, do you?), Commended (it's drinkable, but far from exciting) and Medal-worthy. This is done by tasting your way through flight after flight of wine – a flight is made up of anywhere from a couple to a dozen bottles of wines of a similar style (for instance, German Riesling or Australian Shiraz) – and then deliberating over the various merits of the wines.

The second week, any potentially medal-winning wine is re-tasted in order to determine whether it's worthy of a Bronze (good, but not remarkable), Silver (batting well above average) or Gold (outstanding). Yesterday was a week two-day, and my judging colleagues and I tasted our way through 75 wines, awarding one Gold, about three or four Silvers, numerous Bronzes and kicking a number of wines back into Commended positions.

After a day spent tasting like this, my teeth were stained black with tannin (which makes you look like your dentist learned his skills back in the 17th century) and I have to remember not to smile politely at anyone on the bus on the way home.

Istanbul (not Constantinople)

Last weekend, Mark and I took my mum to Istanbul for her 70th birthday present (she's probably going to kill me for revealing her age – she discovered this blog because she was googling me. How embarrassing!).

Because it was a special occasion, we stayed in style at the Empress Zoe hotel, a lovely little boutique Byzantine job in the middle of old Istanbul, just round the corner form key tourist venues like the Topkapi Palace, the Ayia Sophia mosque and (inevitably) the Grand Bazaar.

Shopping played a relatively large part of the weekend (something Mark bore with remarkable fortitude, standing patiently by the door of shop after shop, with an ever-growing pile of bags clustered at his feet). I was relatively restrained, and returned home with an embroidered coat and a pair of shoes made from an old piece of hand-embroidered material (Laszlo has already had a good gnaw on one of them, but only managed to damage the sole, luckily).

We also spent a fair amount of time strolling through the Spice Bazaar. As a matter of fact, I think I preferred the Spice Bazaar to the Grand Bazaar: it smelled more interesting for starters, with its blend of sumac, cinnamon, thyme and rosewater. I almost bought a kilo's worth of mixed spice, and only managed to restrain myself in time (I've got all the spices I need at home in my kitchen), and mum couldn't resist buying bags and bags of almonds, dried fruit and loukoum – she said it was for presents, but I'm not convinced she wasn't intending to scoff half the goodies when she got home.

We ate well, too – although, as I discovered, a girl can have too many kebabs over the course of a long weekend. Our best meal, however, was the one we enjoyed at Körfez (left). Part of the treat was the drive through Istanbul's suburbs, from gritty inner-town concrete jungle to upmarket Hampstead-on-sea beachfront apartments, followed by the short boat ride across the Bosphorous to the restaurant. We sat down for dinner just before sunset, and as the starters arrived, the lights of the city started twinkling and soon all we could see of the opposite shore was a galaxy of lights and the vague outlines of the hills and buildings. The food was excellent, too, particularly the sea bass baked in a salt crust (although we suspect we were ripped off as they only served us half the fish but charged us for a whole one when the bill came).

Luckily, after an attempt to order a couple of glasses of wine on the first night, I wasn't too tempted afterwards. They were the worst wines I've tasted since I went to Cyprus on a work trip...