The Elegant Sufficiency

More Than One New Me

I’ve been fashioning a sleeker new me. More than one sleeker new me in fact.
Sleek New Me Number 1 (above right) is an hour-glass-waisted brunette with impeccable, if conservative, taste. The decision to give myself an oblong face and full lips was simple, but it was a tougher call to decide between Mistress Juliya hair or the Layered look (the Layered look won out.)
Sleek New Me Number 2 (above left) is an altogether saucier thing, with Microbraids, pierced belly and Samba Dress. Oh yes, when it came to the creation of New Me Number 2, I went to town.
I’ve been wasting time at Meez.com, where you can “create unique 3D avatars that animate in minutes”. (Thanks to Meez.com, I’ve discovered you use avatars as “your personal ID on instant messaging, blogs, MySpace and other sites” – the Me Generation mentioned in the New York magazine article of my last post would roll their eyes at my Gen-X ignorance.) On Meez.com, you (and that includes you, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John…) choose whether you want an oblong or round face, your skin tone, hair style and dress sense; choose a theme – Brazil couture, Heiress, Sexy or Preppy; choose a background – Spiritual, Urban, Parties.
And I’ve been wasting more time at Style.com, picking up a head full of avaricious steam and a new wardrobe full of marvellous frocks and coats and shifts and pants – by designers such as Dries Van Noten (below left), Chloe, Marni, Donna Karan, Jil Sander, Bottega Veneta (below right).

Style.com, very courteously, allows you to create Lookbooks of the fashion items you covet – couture and ready-to-wear, shoes and bags and accessories. I’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in my Lookbook by now I’d say (my codename there is "Annie99" if you're remotely interested.)
But if you must know, it’s Galliano's Spring 2007, Japanese-inspired collection for Dior (below) that has me really hot under my sad, non-couture collar. You wouldn’t wear the creations of course, but I could feast my eyes on them all day – it’s art, I say.

My mucking around online has been a bunch of fun, but it hasn’t helped me feel anymore content with the shape of my body nor the contents of my wardrobe.
Spain can send skinny shop-store mannequins packing; actor Kate Winslet can defend her curves as “natural, womanly and real” and pick up an apology and damages from Grazia magazine for claiming she visited a diet doctor to slim down; Dove can wage its Campaign for Real Beauty for a century; and "new research" can reveal that models are lonely, unhappy and have lower life satisfaction than people in other careers. But none of it is going to change the fact that most women and, I’d hazard a guess, more than a few men, want to look more like someone else. (OK, maybe not more like their Meez.com avatars.)
Where, I wonder, does this all lead? To a society ever more afflicted by eating disorders, spending ever more on cosmetic surgery, and ever more materialistic. Or is there a tipping point somewhere along the line soon, when we’ll all throw our hands in the air and say enough is enough, no more, I am what I am. Perhaps that’s just called growing old.
And today’s recipe? It’s a little something that might, marginally, be considered Elegant Light (if you pull back on the olive oil, discard the chicken skin and turn your back on a carb companion); something that might please my trainer; something with such brilliant flavours that they might keep my mind off the fact that I’m determined not to eat bread this week – and determined to see a different, lower number on the scales in a week’s time. Guess I’m not old just yet.

Karen Martini's Syrian Chicken

2tsp sea salt
2tsp ground cumin
2 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp freshly cracked black pepper
1 tsp ground turmeric
size 14-16 free-range chicken, cut into eight pieces
100ml olive oil
2 brown onions, thickly sliced
100g fresh ginger, peeled and cut into matchsticks
5 cloves garlic, bruised with the back of a knife
2 small red chillies, split
1 750ml bottle of tomato sugo
2 pinches of saffron threads
½ tsp cumin seeds
5 sprigs thyme
1 lemon, juiced and zest finely grated
2 tbsp honey
100g currants
½ bunch coriander leaves
couscous or rice to serve

Combine salt, cumin, cinnamon, pepper and turmeric in a large bowl. Add chicken pieces and cover them with the spice mix.
Heat olive oil in a large, heavy-based pan and brown chicken on each side. Remove from pan and fry onions, ginger, garlic and chillies in the oily-spicy residue for a few minutes. You may need to add a little more oil. Add sugo, saffron, cumin seeds and thyme and cook for a little longer.
Return chicken to pan and add lemon juice and zest, honey and currants. If necessary, cover with a little water so chicken is just covered with liquid.
Simmer, covered, for 10 minutes, then remove lid and simmer for another 20 minutes until chicken is cooked and sauce has thickened just a little.
Stir in coriander and serve with a starch, if you must.

Scary Things

From an article in the Beauty (?) section of The Times Online:

• According to designer Michael Kors, "in Hollywood, nobody breathes what size they are unless it's a 2 (Australian 8)".
• An increasing number of American women are working towards achieving a size zero, which really doesn't translate into Australian adult women's sizing. Some Hollywood women are even achieving "double zero", "negative zero" and "XXS".
• "Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder medication such as Adderall can cause weight loss. The telephone numbers of shonky doctors prepared to prescribe strange cocktails of drugs get passed around among friends."
• "Italian food" now means steamed fish, lemon and salads.
• Hollywood "healthy chef" Jason Harley has redefined sushi: "Our sushi comes three ways: normal; low-carb, with a paper-thin layer of skinny rice; and no carb, wrapped in lettuce."
• One woman who lost 9.5kg in three months "had to get a boob job" because she had nothing left to put in even the smallest bra size. She was, however, left with no periods, a thyroid problem and irritable bowel syndrome. "My daily diet was, breakfast: egg whites and rocket; lunch: chicken breast and vegetables; dinner: egg white and rocket."

Bitching

I can't get that book title, Skinny Bitch (a No-Nonsense, Tough-Love Guide for Savvy Girls Who Want to Stop Eating Crap and Start Looking Fabulous!), out of my head. Behind the glib, marketing-friendly title are some unpleasant, not-so subliminal messages: Women who are slim, either through nature or nurture, are malignant forces but still, we should aspire to be like them. You will only ever look fabulous if you are skinny. You are stupid if you can't stop eating crap (junk food) or, indeed, any other calorie-laden food. You are stupid if you aren't skinny. And will we have to wear corsets again to achieve a waist like that in the book's cover illustration? I wonder what my opinionated friend John Newton, a terrific Sydney-based food writer and author, might have to say about the title. My guess is that any thoughts John might offer would draw on those contained in an article he wrote for Australia's Divine magazine, which he has kindly allow me to reprint here and in which he outlines Newton's Lifetime 'Diet'.

10 Ways to Turn Meal Times Back into Good Times

by John Newton

Why are we so confused about food? Why is food becoming a problem to be solved, and not a pleasure to be enjoyed? I blame those pesky nutritionists. Since nutrition became a science just over a hundred years ago, its practitioners, nutritionists, have been making us frightened to put things in our mouths.

Food historian Harvey Levenstein, author of Paradox of Plenty, A Social History of Eating in Modern America, tells us that one of the first edicts from the gloomy prophets of this new pseudo-science was to advise the poor to stop wasting their money on expensive fruit and vegetables. That was just before the discovery of the importance of vitamins, after which vitamins became the miracle ingredients, and were added to everything, particularly breakfast cereals: the manufacturing process strips them from the grain, so they get sprayed on again along the production line.

Shelter Dogs and Skinny Bitches

Bored of CSIRO? Does Atkins give you bad breath? Weak with hunger from WeightWatchers? Bookshop shelves everywhere are straining under the weight of a new crop of diet books.

• The Dog Diet: What My Dog Taught Me About Shedding Pounds, Licking Stress and Getting a New Leash on Life, by Patti Lawson (HCI, 2006): "A shelter dog changed my life," says the woman who now drives a Mercedes E320 convertible with 'Dog Diet' on her licence plates.

• Our Lady of Weight Loss: Miraculous and Motivational Musings from the Patron Saint of Permanent Fat Removal, by Janice Taylor (Studio, August 2006): In which the artist author exchanges fat for art.

• Fat Girl, by Judith Moore (Profile Books, 2005): "You're too fat to fuck," she was told by a boy she fancied as they ate cheeseburgers together at a diner.

• How the Rich Get Thin: Park Avenue’s Top Diet Doctor Reveals the Secrets to Losing Weight and Feeling Great, by Jana Klauer  (St Martin's Press, 2005): In which I discover I have an endomorph body type, a characteristic I share with Danny DeVito and Queen Latifah.

• Skinny Bitch, by Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin (Running Press Book Publishers, 2005): From skinny Californian natives Rory and Kim whose all-teeth publicity photograph sets my teeth on edge.

• The New Orleans Program: Eat, Exercise and Enjoy Life, by David A. Newsome and Chef John Besh (Pelican Publishing Program, 2006): Is that the program where you hole up in the Superdome with thousands of others for a week?

• The Vice Busting Diet: A 12-Week Plan to Break your Worst Food Habits and Change your Life Forever, by Julia Griggs Havey, with J. Patrick Havey (St Martin's Press, 2006): From a self-described former "290-pound single mother".

• Japanese Women Don't Get Old or Fat: Secrets of My Mother’s Tokyo Kitchen, by Naomi Moriyama and William Doyle (Delacorte Press, 2005).

• Mediterranean Women Stay Slim, Too: Eating to Be Sexy, Fit and Fabulous!, by Melissa Kelly, Eve Adamson (Collins, 2006): What's next? "Sudanese Women Stay Slim As Well: 101 Ways with Millet"?

• The Sonoma Diet: Trimmer Waist, Better Health in Just 10 Days, by Connie Gutterson (Meredith Books, 2005).

• The Diet Code: Revolutionary Weight Loss Secrets from Da Vinci and the Golden Ratio (Warner Wellness, 2006), by Stephen Lanzalotta: In which you run like a crazy thing through the streets of Paris with Audrey Tautou?

A savvy publisher would follow the lead of romance novel factories such as Harlequin, which issue guidelines for would-be romance writers looking for love and a publisher. A savvy publisher would, on request, email out its diet-book formulas. Number 1 on the list would have to be the Tea and Sympathy Style Memoir, in which the once-immense author takes his/her readers on a  journey through devastating playground jibes, teenage taunts, XXXXXL sizes, late-night binge-eating, serial relationship failures and then, the shining, life-altering epiphany that puts them on the speakers' circuit and into the Petite Sizes section of their local boutique and a convertible.
Then there'd be variations on The Wise Doctor/New Research Diet; The What My Mum From Cambodia/Albania/Mexico/Iceland Taught Me About Staying Thin and Sexy Diet; and the aspirational You Can Be as Rich and Thin as I Am Diet. And the genre I'd like to write? The How I Lost Kilograms/Pounds without Denying Myself a Thing Diet.
Until that becomes possible, I'll be cooking things like this dish from The New York Times writer Mark Bittman. (If you're smart, you'll notice that the fish in my photograph is not salmon. I tried Mr Bittman's spicy soy oil with a fillet of rockling baked in a hot oven for about 10 minutes. I don't think the fishmonger was good to me on the day but the soy oil certainly was. And, if you use salmon, please eat the skin ... it's the best bit.)

Roast Salmon with Spicy Soy Oil
Serves 4

2tbsp peanut oil
4 fillets of salmon, cut from the thick part of the fillet, rather than the tail
salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 tbsp sesame oil
1 tbsp slivered garlic
2 dried red chillies
1 tbsp soy sauce
1/2 cup chopped green onions (scallions) or coriander (cilantro) for optional garnish

Preheat oven to 500 degrees. Place a nonstick, ovenproof frying pan over medium-high heat. When hot, add one tablespoon peanut oil; swirl it around. Season salmon with salt and pepper and place skin side up in pan. When salmon has browned (about a minute), flip over and transfer to oven.
Combine remaining peanut oil in a small saucepan with sesame oil, garlic and chillies, and turn heat to medium. Cook, gently shaking pan, until garlic colours lightly, about five minutes. Turn off heat and remove chillies. When sauce cools a bit, add soy.
Salmon will be medium rare after about six minutes in the oven. Cook for a shorter or longer period depending on your preference. Remove to a plate. Drizzle with oil, garnish, and serve.

Coming to Heel

A recent edition of Publishers Weekly (June 26) reviews Beauty Junkies: Inside Our $15 Billion Obsession with Cosmetic Surgery (by Alex Kuczynski, Doubleday, US release October ‘06).
The reviewer tantalisingly writes:
“A podiatrist shortens toes so her clients can fit into Jimmy Choos, and a lawyer who’s argued before the Supreme Court routinely lies to a succession of doctors to feed his Botox habit. … New York Times reporter Kuczynski has attitude to spare as she outs Sarah Jessica Parker and Nicole Kidman as probable Botox users. … A canny and witty guide to the excesses of a conformist society with more money than sense, Kuczynski discloses her own beauty addiction in the form of Botox, collagen derived from cadavers and fetal foreskin cells, liposuction, eyelid lifts …”

The "Our" refers to an American audience, but I don't doubt that, while the dollar figure might be smaller in the UK, Australia, New Zealand or Scandinavian countries, the subject is just as applicable. Scoff, sneer, deride if you like, but I’ve stepped into the glossy, contemporary-art-filled waiting room of a haughty surgical dermatologist, and then into his treatment rooms, for an ‘inconsequential’ cosmetic procedure (those quote marks are mine … don't be too harsh in your judgment of me). I’ve also been shown his before-and-after books and listened, with more than a passing interest, to a dissertation on the benefits of a chemical peel.
Working in an office of stunning post-pubescents and twentysomethings is confronting for sure, but it would take more than toe-shortening to get my fat feet into a pair of Jimmy Choos. And, the fact is, I think I’d rather spend my $700 on a deposit for a piece of contemporary art.

All the Crazy Things

The crazy things we have done:

Figure 1: We were blinded by insubstantial science: From the late ‘50s, millions of women around the world turned to anorectics such as the amphetamine-related German drug Preludin. Preludin didn’t stop them eating Schwarzwalder Kirschtorte and feeling guilty about it, nor did it help them find a good hairdresser. It did however cause agitation, tremors, excessive activity and insomnia. (Press advertisement, circa 1967)
Figure 2: We took silly prescriptions like Doctor Mackenzie’s Menthoids and thought they’d make us look like Esther Williams in a leopard-skin bathing suit. The Menthoids claim? “In ridding the body of poisonous waste fluids that cause fatness, Menthoids bring new health. Pains disappear and youthful energy returns.” Writes Mrs G. of Bankstown: “I’ve just started my third bottle of Menthoids and already I have lost 24lbs.” And from Mrs F.M. of Manly: “I am no longer always tired, my aches and pains have gone … the reducing has been very even.” (Press advertisment from Australian Home Journal, 1st June, 1957.)
Figure 3:  We spent crazy amounts (£30, US$55, AUD$74, NZ$90, €43) on Palmer’s Slim Fit 20 Caffeine Tights. From the Tights Please website: “These Caffeine tights from Palmers have caused the biggest rush for products we have ever seen. Wearing these caffeine tights on a daily basis can reduce thighs by up to 2cm. Coffee tights do not work for everyone (see our reviews) but we think they are worth a try! They come in a 3 pair value pack. How do they work? Body heat releases caffeine microcapsules into the leg increasing its metabolism rate and the burning of fat. This can reduce the circumference of thighs and of the "orange peel" cellulite effect.” Oh for heaven’s sake. Give me another caffe crème.

As long as there are women who dislike what they see in the mirror each morning, there’ll be silly things for them to do.
In a recent article in the UK’s The Daily Telegraph, beauty editor Kate Shapland described some of the beauty treatments she had endured in the name of research:

“I have spent three days in the past month with a patch over one eye following an allergic reaction to an eye cream, and £185 consulting a dermatologist about the state of my eczema, which extends its nasty red self from my chest to my naval whenever I come into contact with an unidentified cosmetic ingredient.
The dermatologist’s fee did not include the prescription renewal for a heavy-duty ointment, which smells like WD40, that I regularly go to bed in. In my business, believe me, you really can have too much of a good thing.
… but the worst things I have ever done to [my legs] … is to have them ‘stapled’. Quite how I went through with this treatment after seeing the device – a metal sheet with a series of tiny holes in it and a trigger on one end which, when pushed, made tiny needles shoot out of each hole and into my thigh – I will never know.
The idea was that each injection sent a cocktail of active ingredients under the skin to melt the fat, which would then be miraculously metabolised. The reality was an hour of torturous stapling, a week of wondering why I had such low appreciation of myself that I felt it necessary to put my thighs through this torment (even for work) and hundreds of white pigmentation spots all over each thigh.
Needless to say, any change to their size was nonexistent.”

Back to the Beauty Myth

With this post in mind, I was flicking through that old classic, Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth (Chatto & Windus, 1990) and zoomed in on a couple of passages that seemed to say so much about all this craziness. Dieting and slimming “are trivialising words for what is in fact self-inflicted semi-starvation,” she wrote. “In India, one of the poorest countries in the world, the very poorest women eat 1,400 calories a day, or 600 more than a Western woman on the Hilton Head Diet.” The Hilton Head diet is a bit of a dinosaur in this world of Atkins and South Beach and CSIRO, but it wouldn’t be the first or last diet to restrict calories so severely.
And a neat wrap-up from Naomi: “My mother, a beautiful woman, got too little of the pleasures that I could understand. I saw that her beauty hurt her: teeth-gritting abstinence at celebration dinners, fury on the scale, angry rubdowns, self-accusing photographs posted over the refrigerator. She’d won – why wasn’t that enough? It would be nice to be  beautiful like her, I figured, sure; but nothing about it seemed nice enough to make up for that endless degradation.”

A Quantity of Guilt

And as for me? There’s no sanctimony in what I write about snake-oil salesman-style stuff. I’m a victim in my own way. I’m above the body-mass-index level that science tells me I should be. I’m happiest in my pjamas when there’s no waistband cutting into the folds around my middle. I am just useless at sticking to any sort of exercise regime – my down-filled duvet is far more appealing in the morning and at the end of a work day there’s no momentum to do anything other than find the corkscrew. Most recently, I’ve tried the Cabbage Diet and Weight Watchers with no success. So, with every mouthful (and right now, that’s a mouthful of quince crumble with cream left over from yesterday’s long-table lunch), I take in another quantity of guilt.
But the bottom line is that I’m not prepared to sacrifice my love for food, eating, cooking, cookbooks, restaurants, eating with family and friends, good wine.
Instead, I’ve been putting a great deal of thought to the types of things that I can cook and eat simply without guilt but still with great pleasure. I’ve combed my cookbook library for dishes that won’t suffer if I pull back on the olive oil quantity, or which don’t really need a carbohydrate on the side. I’m finding the most joy comes from Asian flavours; beautiful fresh fish; things that have been marinated; roasted vegetables; meats that intensify in flavour during the cooking process; and dishes made from the most brilliant, fresh, in-season food. And slowly, I’m building up a catalogue of dishes that I love to eat. I won’t eat them every night; I’ll still find room for crumble, pannacotta, pasta, pork crackling, chocolate brownies, icecream. But I’m trying, a little more frequently, to eat dishes like this one, adapted from Patricia Wells At Home in Provence: Recipes Inspired by her Farmhouse in France (Fireside, 1996).

Salmon with Warm Lemon Vinaigrette

1 cup (125g) best-quality green olives
4 tablespoons capers (the salted variety, not those in brine)
4 salmon fillets (about 200g each)
sea salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
4tbsp extra virgin olive oil
4tbsp freshly squeezed lemon juice
fresh fennel fronds, or fresh dill for garnish

Bring a saucepan of water to the boil. Add the olives and blanch in the boiling water for 2 minutes to get rid of excess salt.
Drain well and set aside.
Rinse the capers well, and soak in cold water for 10 minutes to rid them of excess salt. Set aside.
Preheat oven to 150° C. Season salmon lightly with a little salt and pepper and brush on each side with a little olive oil. Brush a metal oven tray with a little oil, place salmon on tray skin-side up, and roast for 5-7 minutes. (This will give you very rare salmon.)
Meanwhile, drain the capers. In a small saucepan, combine the oil, lemon juice, capers, and blanched olives. Stir to blend and warm gently over a low heat.
To serve, transfer the salmon to four warmed individual plates and spoon the sauce on top and around the fish. Sprinkle with fennel fronds or dill.
Serve immediately with steamed potatoes in their jackets.

A Slim-Line Omelette

Have I found the finest Parisian solution to an adult life spent disconsolate about lavish belly, thighs and bottom? Hedi Slimane, a man who knows a French collar from an Italian cutaway, is a renaissance man, and not just because he has, in his role as head of the house of Dior, apparently, forever transformed the silhouette of man. He is a man whose insight is sweeping. He is a man who knows the importance of stovepipe trousers and narrow jackets. The importance of a slender outline that vanishes when one turns sideways. He is a man who clearly appreciates a social X-ray. (Nicole Kidman and Sarah Jessica Parker, both of whom know a thing or two about social X-Rays, are said to be salivating at the prospect of Hedi's impending women's line.) If only I had found Hedi earlier. If only I had known of his solution to weight gain.

Hedi is a man who eats baby food to stay slim.

How wonderful. How ground-breaking. Thank heavens there is The New Yorker Magazine to share such critical information with us all:

"It matters what Slimane looks like, because he is, in a way, his own best model...Because he's so thin and others would like to be, his eating habits are a subject of curiosity. He says that he eats baby food, and some stories have suggested that he hardly eats at all. But the fashion designer who can do without food is a mythical beast, like the business executive who never sleeps. (Slimane's friend and mentor Karl Lagerfeld supposedly survives on Pepsi Max, and has said that the reason he lost eighty pounds, not long ago, was to fit into clothes designed by Slimane.)"
'Pretty Things', by Nick Paumgarten, The New Yorker, March 20, 2006, p. 126

No wonder Hedi is reputed to have melancholy eyes.

I wonder what his favourite flavour is: Perhaps Creamed Corn, or Applesauce and Bananas with Rice Cereal. I wonder if he snacks on rusks?

I feel like cooking him a good roast chicken, skin on, and distended with stuffing; potatoes, par-boiled, tossed around in the saucepan to rough them up, then dunked in a baking dish of stinking-hot oil (lard is even better) and cooked until crisp on the outside; followed by a crumble, maybe apple and raspberry (the more brown sugar and unsalted butter through it, the better), with clotted cream. Perhaps we'll take smaller steps though, so as not to frighten the poor man.

An omelette shouldn't upset a true Frenchman too much. Even if it does have some Asian flavours.

This recipe here is inspired by one dug out of John Torode’s book Mezzo (Conran Octopus, 1997), from his days at Sir Terence Conran’s Soho restaurant Mezzo (I had my 30th birthday there; Veuve Clicquot and, from memory, a  brilliant roasted red mullet with white beans and pesto). Torode now heads Smiths of Smithfield, near the wonderful old meat market in London’s east end.

So, to the recipe, it’s an Asian-ish omelette that Torode suggests rolling like a Swiss roll at the end. No need. Serve it simply, half-moon-style, as you would with a normal omelette. You'll still get a creamy luscious result thanks to the fact that you don’t flip the omelette during cooking: only one side feels the direct heat of the pan, the other stays a little gooey. The following cut-down and adapted version of Torode's recipe is a perfect, swift, healthy, green-filled, zero-carb meal for one.

Even for one Hedi Slimane.

Asian Omelette, Greens, Garlic, Ginger

Filling:

½ tablespoon vegetable oil

½ onion, sliced finely

2cm piece of ginger, peeled and grated

1 clove garlic, crushed

1 chilli (if you choose)

100g bok choy, stalks cut in 4cm chunks, the rest very roughly so the leaves remain large

2 stalks of broccolini, stalks cut in 4cm chunks, the rest roughly so the vegetable doesn’t turn to mush

1 teaspoon sesame oil

7cm section of cucumber, peeled, then thinly sliced lengthwise using a vegetable peeler/or zuchinni

1tbsp fish sauce

Omelette:

2 medium eggs (for a great result, it’s essential that you pull out all the stops here: really fresh, free-range organic eggs from much-loved chickens)

fish sauce to taste

white pepper

sea salt

fresh lime juice to taste (maybe a teaspoon)

½ tablespoon vegetable oil

Heat first half tablespoon of oil in a frying pan over high heat. Cook onion and ginger for a minute or so, but don’t allow them to burn. Add garlic and chilli, stir, then throw in the bok choy and broccolini. Toss for three to four minutes until the greens are wilted. Add the sesame oil and cucumber and stir well for a minute or so. Remove from the heat and add the fish sauce. Use a fork to lightly beat the eggs with a little fish sauce and a squeeze of fresh lime, plus salt and pepper to taste. Heat a small non-stick frying pan over medium heat and add the oil, tilting the pan so it’s evenly covered. Pour in the eggs and roll around the surface of the pan, tipping the pan so the runny bits run to the edge of the omelette. After a couple of minutes, the omelette should have firmed on the underside and the top will be soft and just a little runny still. Gently ease or slide the omelette onto a dinner plate. Lay the wilted green mixture across one half of the omelette and then flip one half of it over to cover the greens. Serve immediately with extra fish sauce to taste as seasoning.

In David Thompson's Thai Food (Penguin Viking, 2002), Thompson offers a recipe for kai jiaw, a simple omelette, and suggests it “can be embellished ­– with a few sliced red shallots, a little crabmeat or minced pork, some pickled mustard greens or dried prawns.” I love the sound of the crabmeat. If you wanted to try the Thompson idea, you could simply make the base omelette above and, instead of the green mixture, lay on the crabmeat. Meanwhile in Taiwan, and parts of China, an oyster omelette is a famous snack, usually served with a spicy tomato sauce.

Perhaps these ideas might bring a sparkle to Hedi's melancholy eyes.