Deborah Ross

Food

If I could just settle for who I am rather than the person I hope to be one day, I could save a lot of money

One evening I saw Gordon Ramsay on Friday Night With Jonathan Ross plugging his latest cookery book, Gordon Ramsay Makes It Easy, which is readily available from most bookshops, unlike Ramsay Makes It Hard which, I’m guessing, is available only from those adult shops with beaded curtains. Anyway, every time Mr Ross mentioned the book Mr Ramsay added: ‘And it comes with a free DVD!’ which totally got my juices going. What an inspired idea, I thought. A recipe book with Free DVD! so that you could play it on your laptop while you cook. It’ll be like having Gordon — a brilliant chef, whatever else you may think of him — in the kitchen with you. Why hasn’t anyone thought of this before? And if he turns nasty and swears, you can always freeze the frame and give him a good slap round the face with a fish slice. True, there goes your state-of-the-art laptop, but I can’t help thinking it would be immensely satisfying just the same.

So, first thing on the Saturday morning, at around noon, I go down our local bookshop, where I find Gordon Ramsay Makes It Easy readily available, unlike Gordon Ramsay Makes It Hard, which is more difficult to acquire and not necessarily worth the effort, by all accounts. I then take it over the road to Starbucks, so that I can study it properly. Our Starbucks, by the way, is one door down from Costa Coffee and just two up from Mr Espresso, just in case you ever find yourself in Crouch End gasping for a cappuccino and can’t find a place to go. I study the book with glee. I love cookbooks. I can read them from cover to cover as if they were novels. I rarely cook from any of them, but that’s hardly the point.

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