Alas these past few days I have been rather worse for wear. Alas for me because I have felt like complete crap and alas for you because you have been sadly lacking in Rhona-updates. Fear not, I am on the mend and so is my appetite….

But there have been a couple of blog-worthy days to tell of as I feel I have experienced, at least for a short while, what it feels like to have no joy for food. What a bleak, bleak life that would be. Even now when my taste buds are beginning to re-emerge, god damn it is a struggle to enjoy my food as I did all those many days ago (nearly five now). I tell you my friends I tried hard, oh so very hard to ignore my lack lustre approach to dinner time. But I persevered like a good woman can and forced some home made shepherds pie (thank you Zac) down me, scoffed (a meagre portion alas due to my pathetic state) Lydia’s Thai green chicken curry and battled on to eat a French lemon tart made by my good self on Saturday. But the days pre-ceding the last more care-free days of my illness, hereby referred to as ’the plague’, the very thought of eating repulsed me! These are the days I shall never forget. Black, black days.

I will tell you one thing, the only thing I need reveal to you to prove to you the darkness of those days: on Friday 3^rd October I ate instant mashed potato. It wasn’t even smash! I don’t even know what it was. I didn’t even care!!! I’m off now to wash myself in bleach after such filthy behaviour, but don’t stray too far as I have some good things to write about this week, including a really good meal in Wimbledon, a bit of a crap one in Old Street (bet you can’t wait for that one) and some general banter.

Oooh but I did get a lovely new cookbook that I highly recommend! It’s ‘The French Kitchen’ and it’s by Joanne Harris and Fran Warde. God bless Fran as I have no idea who she is (not that that means much) but Joanne Harris is the lady who brought us ‘Chocolat’ which I love. I am reading her sequel to Chocolat now called ‘The Lollipop Shoes’ and loving that too, but I am quite a whimsical fart and like all that sort of stuff. But she is a good woman regardless of your taste in fiction and if you love pretty cook books with loads of good pictures and tasty recipes then this is for you. I think the emphasis of the book is on simplicity and good produce, which does not sound all the original now that I type this damn you, but seriously it is still worth the ten English pounds I paid for it. So far I have only made the lemon tart, but that turned out to be pretty good. Next I shall be trying the cabbage galette recipe, once I have convinced Zac what he will be eating is not just a ‘cabbage pie’ as he has decided.

Till then my loves…………..