Feeds two

• 350g braising steak
• Around 20 pickling onions or small shallots
• A small pack of button mushrooms, sliced or left whole according to size
• Two sticks of celery, finely chopped
• Oil – whatever you prefer, groundnut, vegetable or olive
• Flour
• Salt & Pepper
• 500ml of dark ale – my wife bought Wychwood Hobgoblin, but anything with a bit of body will do just fine
• 3 bay leaves
• A handful of rosemary leaves, stripped from their stalks

Heat the oven to 140C/Gas 2.

Cut up the beef into cubes – be guided by the thickness of the steaks. Don’t be too obsessive about this, as long as the chunks aren’t too small. The long cook will treat big cubes and smaller ones around the same.

Heat a non-stick frying pan and add the oil. Meanwhile, season the flour and coat the beef. Fry in a couple of batches until nicely browned on all sides – don’t be timid with your browning!

Remove the meat, add a little more oil if necessary, and gently fry the onions or shallots, mushrooms and celery for 10 minutes or more, until everything is getting nice and soft.

Put everything into a heavy casserole – I’ve had a Le Creuset one for 20 or more years that always gets pressed into service – and pour on the beer.

Bring to the boil, put the lid on and put in the oven for 2.5 hours, or more.

About half-way through, spoon off any fat that has found its way to the top and add the bay leaves and rosemary. Stir in the herbs and heat the casserole to boiling before replacing in the oven.

Serve with a steamed green vegetable and mash. We like mustard mash with this.

Mustard mash

Peel and boil potatoes – you know how many you’ll eat – for about 20 minutes, until soft.

Drain the potatoes and mash over a low heat until fluffy. Take off the heat and add butter (or low-fat Flora if you’re watching your fat intake). Stir in a dessert-spoonful or more of grain mustard. Stir it in gently, but thoroughly, with a wooden spoon and taste. Not mustardy enough? Then add some more. Mustard was made for beef.

You might like dumplings

This would be great with herb dumplings, but waistlines preclude beef suet, while suspicions of the health implications of vegetable suet kill off that option in my kitchen.

I bought some low-fat pork sausages and dry-cure smoked back bacon from Waitrose for brunch on Sunday; I used up the remaining sausages and bacon last night in what Sam said was an excellent sausage casserole. I agree, so I thought I’d share the recipe with you.

For two

• 4 low-fat sausages
• 2 rashers of back bacon, most of their fat removed and cut into strips (not too small, or the bacon will get lost in the gravy)
• 3 or 4 leeks (I used organic ones from our weekly veg box)
• 2/3 of a can of flageolet beans (use whatever you have to hand)
• Olive oil
• A glass of supermarket ruby port
• Beef stock from a Knorr cube (use the real stuff, if you have it)
• A good few sprigs of thyme, tied together like a bouquet garni
• Salt and pepper to taste

Cook the sausages gently under the grill to eliminate as much fat as possible. Fry the bacon until golden in a little olive oil in the pan you’re using for the casserole (I used my trusty Le Creuset pot). I want as much flavour as possible from the bacon, so I’ll put up with the extra fat.

Remove the bacon and drain on kitchen paper with the cooked sausages.

Slice the leeks into 1cm rings, and fry gently until soft and starting to turn golden. Separate the leeks as you cook.

Add the port and stock. Tip in the washed and drained flageolet beans. Add the thyme and seasoning – not too heavy on the seasoning; you can check it and adjust just before serving.

Bring gently to a simmer. Pop on the lid and forget it while you cook the mash.

Sweet potato mash

• Equal quantities of sweet potato and potato (you know how much you like to eat, so I’ll leave the amounts to you), peeled and cut into cubes for boiling
• Salt and pepper
• A little freshly grated nutmeg
• 1 or 2 tablespoons low-fat creme fraiche

Boil the potatoes in salted water until tender. Drain, then mash over a low heat. Add salt, pepper and nutmeg to taste. Beat the creme fraiche in with a wooden spoon.

Serve with a green vegetable – our veg box, rather bizarrely, came up with some spring greens!

Saturated animal fat is a complete killer for most diets, of course.

But I’ve found a great alternative. Get down to Marks & Spencer and buy a pack of their Oisin Venison Grill Steaks – just 2.5 Weight Watchers points for a 140g burger, not at all gamey-tasting, and juicy.

What a find!

As my friend Loli once remarked, my consumption of diet cola is so out of kilter with my advocacy of things Organic, and active avoidance of too many processed things in my diet (‘too many’ – what a wonderful fudge!). I have no real excuse. I’ll have to accept the brickbats.

But what brought on this post on? Well, on Friday night, after some noodles from the local take-away my wife suffered severe abdominal pains. We immediately blamed it on some dodgy seafood, and as the pain got worse, we went off to the A&E Department at the local hospital.

To cut a long story short, as several hours’ wait elapsed, Sam got better. But, even at the end of Monday, she still felt a little queasy – no pain, just unsettled, verging on the nauseous.

Then, after a glass of diet cola, the pain returned. Thankfully, not so badly this time. The truth suddenly hit us – it wasn’t the takeaway, it was the glass of diet fizzy stuff afterwards that had caused the pain.

Now, I’m owning up to mild indigestion feelings and the odd passing feeling of sickness sometimes following imbibing the fizzy brown beverage. Not scientific, I know, but reacquainting myself with the joys of Aspartame on Wikipedia is causing some real reassessment, not only of diet colas, but fruit squashes and desserts.

FACTS

1. Japanese eat very little fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than theAussies, British or Americans.

2. Mexicans eat a lot of fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than the Aussies, British or Americans.

3. Africans drink very little red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than the Aussies, British or Americans.

4. Italians drink large amounts of red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than the Aussies, British or Americans.

5. Germans drink a lot of beer and eat lots of sausages and fats and suffer fewer heart attacks than the Aussies, British or Americans.

CONCLUSION

Eat and drink what you like. Speaking English is apparently what kills you.

Squeezing the lemon and rubbing in into the skin before seasoning and drizzling with olive oil is a good answer to the flavour problem, but these days, in the cause to losing weight, I don’t eat the skin!

The answer came partially from a recipe in Jamie Oliver’s book Jamie’s Dinners, where he drops the lemon into the water he’s parboiling his roast potatoes in. He then punctures the fruit and pops it into the fowl.

It’s great. Lots of lemon flavour permeates the flesh. Problem solved.

My twist on this is to pierce a lemon plenty of times with the point of a paring knife, then put it in the microwave for about a minute at full power – just long enough to get the lemon and its juices nice and hot, without boiling the juices off.

That way, you can have a nice lemony chicken when you’re not serving roast potatoes.

As far as I’m concerned, the secret is to find ingredients and recipes that don’t compromise on quality and enjoyment, but still don’t swallow your daily points ration wholesale.

One of my favourite dodges is to use celeriac or swede instead of potato when I want some mashed vegetables – you can also use 50% celeriac or swede and 50% potato, if you prefer or have the points.

What’s more, choosing celeriac actually makes me feel as if I’m eating better on the diet than I’d be doing off it.

Give it a go!

I find Weight Watchers diets not too onerous, and recently have found some ways to eat well and still stay on the diet.

The Losing weight category will contain some of my best tips.