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What I ate last week.
Monday
Breakfast Egg on toast, wolfed down too fast for a picture, but this is the deal (and it's often repeated): wholegrain rye toast, with a soft boiled egg schmooshed on top, with lots of Maldon salt and coarsely ground white pepper. Straight after breakfast, made batch of coffee ice-cream and chocolate nougat cookies to take to curry favour with various radio and TV interviews that I have lined up for day.
Lunch I am not good when I miss meals; being hungry makes me both murderous and suicidal. So didn't feel good that I didn't manage to get back for lunch until about 4.30pm and had to leave house for the next thingy at 5pm, so all I had time for was some rye toast with hummus and coriander on top, and a far too small portion at that.
Supper Roast chicken – I have all the bits with cartilage and skin, by choice, while pretending to make great sacrifices so that the children can eat the white meat – on escarole (my favourite lettuce) dressed just with Maldon, Mellow Yellow cold-pressed rapeseed oil, lemon and lots of English mustard.
Tuesday
Breakfast Made an egg and bacon sandwich for one of the children, but then ran too late to have breakfast myself. Not a good start to the day, made worse by the fact that I was going to a photographic shoot, which always makes me nervy.
Lunch Made up for lack of breakfast by eating huge amounts of rotisserie chicken, char-grilled corn and crinkly chips from Chicken Shop in Kentish Town. Don't blame them for the poor display: I had a takeaway and didn't present the food (such was my quaking hunger) to its best advantage. From this point onwards, my life started looking up.
Supper By special request, made risi e bisi, a Venetian recipe (think a soupy pea risotto) that's a favourite in my home. I am always grateful when this is what I'm asked to cook, because it's quick and easy, and as comforting for the cook as the eater.
Wednesday
Breakfast Rye toast with Mellow Yellow cold-pressed rapeseed oil and Vegemite. I feel a real traitor to my country choosing Vegemite over Marmite, but there it is.
Lunch Since this is a day of interviews, and the meagre toast with Vegemite is wearing off to the point of panic, I order a steak and chips. True, there are only four chips on the plate (though I must tell you they were much bigger and hunkier than they look), but they've been generous with the béarnaise sauce, and I also have a tube of Colman's in my bag, so I manage to get through the afternoon.
Supper By request, again, I make another of my children's favourites – penne with ham, peas and cream.
Thursday
Breakfast The usual rye toast and egg – and an awful lot of tea. In fact, I can never actually eat breakfast before I've had my two mugs of tea.
Lunch Have a meeting at home over lunch, so roast a butterflied leg of lamb, along with a tin of sliced pink fir apple potatoes, yellow courgettes, cherry tomatoes, leeks and black olives. There is no particular design to this vegetable mixture: I was just giving my fridge a bit of a going through, and bunged everything that needed to be used up into a roasting tin.
Supper Although I complied with children's wishes, making them burgers (not homemade, I must own up, but Heston's from Waitrose) with plastic cheese, potatoes cut somewhere between wedges and chips, roasted with garlic cloves and pancetta cubes, and a rather 1970s-looking salad, I needed the simple salve of an avocado, eaten with nothing more than a spritz of lemon and a snowy throw of salt.
I did succumb to some Booja-Booja champagne truffles later, but I never feel bad about that.
Friday
Breakfast Smoked salmon, coarsely ground white pepper, lemon juice and lots of dill – for me, the best way to eat it. I am very fussy about the smoked salmon, though; it must be London-cure, which is so lusciously mild that it's more like eating wafer-thin sashimi than anything else. I get mine, as my grandmother did before me, from Panzer's in St John's Wood, despite the schlepp.
Lunch A frantic day, and much as I like having proper meals and not grabbed snacks, lunch today is a toasted sandwich. Still, it's a very good toastie, buttery-crisp on the outside, lined with ham as thin and tender and pink as a kitten's tongue, and gooey with jarlsberg.
Supper Going to see Michael McIntyre at the O2, so supper has to be a picnic on the way there. I have an old picnic box I bought on eBay, and make a few batches of rice noodle and prawn salad, with beansprouts, sugar snaps and a lot of ginger, chilli and soy to go inside it. Friends we're going with a supply of champagne and, given that I can get drunk on one glass, I am reeling by the time I get home. Fantastic night, though, topped off by a buttered, toasted bagel on my return, followed by crisps and chocolate.
Saturday
Breakfast Get up too late for breakfast, but manage a good lunch-after-the-night-before (and pre-opening snoop) at Colbert of fried eggs with black pudding and crêpes with lemon and sugar.
Supper I live very near the Chelsea Fishmonger and generally throw myself at Rex, the fishmonger, and get myself comfortingly overstocked for the weekend. Tonight's supper is part of this catch: halibut, juicily roasted and plonked on top of some treviso leaves, with broccoli cooked with garlic oil, anchovies, chilli and dry white vermouth. This is what I use whenever I want white wine taste, but without having to open a bottle. I know it sounds odd, but unless we're having friends over, it never occurs to me to open a bottle of wine.
Sunday
Breakfast Up too late for breakfast, but I do manage a supersized cappuccino in bed with the papers.
Lunch Tuna tartare with capers, lemon zest, spring onions and rocket: this takes about three minutes to make and is a virtuous reward for the lazy and greedy.
Supper Ever since the children have been teenagers, the ritual of Sunday lunch has been shunted on to Sunday supper. Tonight, we're having pork belly slices – think melting meat and triumphant, bronze crackling – with soy and cumin gravy, mashed potato and broccoli. I've been experimenting with some mini versions of my cappuccino pavlova and have some bases left, as well as some coffee ice-cream from Monday, so do a housekeeping job of getting rid of the two together (that's my excuse), anointed with a sticky, gleaming drizzle of Golden Syrup which, along with Maldon and Colman's, constitute the holy trinity of Great British Foodstuffs.