Fighting with ham

Serrano ham is one of my favourite types of food. Whenever I've got a trip to Spain on the horizon I find myself becoming more excited about the good ham I'm going to get than I am about anything else!

There's one particular delicatessen in Tarifa, which is imaginatively called The Delicatessen. It serves and sells a fine selection of ham, including some of the best Pata Negra I've ever tasted.

It's harder to get good ham in England, I've discovered, but some delis and tapas bars have the proper stuff available. Tesco's finest Serrano ham is pretty good, too.

Earlier this week I made a tapas-style dinner with some ham, tortilla and patatas bravas. On the same evening we watched the film Jamon, Jamon - subtitled 'a tale of ham and passion'. It was, unsurprisingly, a ham-based film and added significantly to my enjoyment of dinner!

What does the baked potato say?

Apparently if you eat the skin of a jacket potato, worms will grow out of your face. Or so I'm told, anyway.

A slightly more plausible fable is that a jacket potato is the healthy or low-fat option, but it's a fable nonetheless. I guess this would be true if we all ate baked potatoes as they come out of the oven, but we don't. Hands up who adds butter, some kind of butter substitute, cheese, mayonnaise or something else? Hmm - forest of hands!

I'm not trying to suggest that jacket potatoes are bad - in fact they're delicious and I'd recommend a huge pile of grated cheese and some black pepper on top, personally! I'm just saying that a plate of oven chips or some homemade potato wedges (with the skin left on, baked in a little bit of olive oil) is probably lower fat in the long run.