You can make friends with salad

For the last six months I've been obsessed with a single dish from the same food outlet. I eat it for lunch at least once a week, sometimes twice… and once I'm pretty sure I had it three times within a seven-day period. Oops.

The outlet is a hole-in-the-wall Vietnamese place near my office. It's called Misschu and it's run by a lady who I call Miss Chu… but only in the privacy of my head because our 'relationship' is at a point where it would be insulting to now ask her first name, even though mine is seared into her brain thanks to the regularity of my visits.

The dish is lemongrass beef vermicelli salad. I've tried other dishes from the menu: I've cheated on lemongrass beef with satay chicken for example, and while it's good, to me it's not as good. (I also have a regular dalliance with the Asian vegetable dumplings on days when I need a snack and not a meal.)

Early on in my burgeoning relationship with the beef salad, a colleague who also fell under its spell ran into my office in a panic. "This salad is soooo good. I love it but is it healthy?

Given it was now a part of my staple diet, this was suddenly a pertinent question to ask. I'm smart enough to know that because something is a 'salad' doesn't mean it's healthy, low fat or low calorie. So I applied some Diet Another Day tests to gauge whether or not regular consumption was going to move me up a clothes size:

What are the ingredients? Beef (though it's also available with chilli prawns or chicken), a mix of herbs and mesclun, vermicelli noodles, shredded carrot and a dressing which at my guess had garlic, fish sauce, chilli, vinegar, sugar and possibly the tiniest bit of oil.

Are there any potentially 'dangerous' zones? Nope. The beef used is a lean fillet, there is no greasy film inside the bowl at the end and the beef-to-salad-to-noodle ratio was good. And though it's a hole-in-the-wall, it's not one where you fear a serve of food poisoning with your pho. I may be a sucker for the marketing, but Misschu is clean, fresh and healthy, something which sets her apart from other Asian takeaway.

Does it meet my criteria for a nutritional gold star? A serve of lean protein. Check. A decent serve of mixed vegies. Check. A reasonable serve of carbohydrates. Check. The portion size is generous without being supersized, and without fail keeps me full and satisfied until dinner.

Ding, ding, ding, we have a winner! This is all guess work of course. I'd never ask Miss Chu what was was actually in the salad (she's lovely but I dare not risk getting my fix by offending her) but my friend Google has been a help and she confirms that it looks OK.

The bad news is I have to break up with Miss Chu. In a couple of weeks I'll no longer be working round the corner from her Takeaway Window of Joy and my visits will cease to be as regular, like maybe only once a fortnight. In the meantime I've found this recipe so I can make it for myself and my MasterChef-like brother-in-law also does a mouthwatering rice paper roll with similar ingredients.

Turns out Lisa Simpson was right: you can make friends with salad.

Thy daily bread

I won't waste your time with lengthy explanations about why I haven't blogged since 1984. I'll simply say I've been researching new material and now I'm back.

Ahem, so in the name of research I got to eat at Jamie Oliver's London restaurant, Fifteen. We ate at the upstairs bit, which is evidently not as fancy-pants as the basement downstairs, but still a definite treat considering I'd been on a steady budget-induced diet of Pret A Manger sandwiches for the two weeks prior.

I love Jamie and I loved his restaurant. The vibe, the service and the food were all swell. I was lucky enough to dine with a friend who worked at Fifteen – and I struggled not to gush when she told us she and her colleagues spent that day in a field collecting wild mushrooms for the restaurant. (Then, when they'd finished foraging, Gennaro, Jamie's friend and mentor, whipped them up a mushroom risotto on a makeshift bush stove. Love.)

I ate lots of yummy things that night, everything yummy in fact, but the taste that stays with me to this day is… the bread. It was a rosemary and sea salt focaccia, and save for my sophisticated dining companions and the fact that I was 28 (and not eight), I may have forgone 'real' food in order to have a three-course meal of that bread.

As is well documented on this blog, I'm an unashamed carb lover – with bread chief among my passions. My new friend Jamie is a fan, too. "I'm still really mad about bread – I love it. It's so exciting. It's such a rewarding, therapeutic, tactile thing and you'll be so proud of yourself once you've cracked it," he explained to me… via our mutual friend the internet.

And the good news is bread isn't the diet devil it is made out to be. The better news is one of the yummiest breads (in my humble 'Bread Expert of the World' opinion) is the ideal choice if you're watching your waistline. A study in the (genuinely) prestigious British Journal of Nutrition found sourdough is the best bread to manage blood sugar. Yep, better than even wholemeal or wholegrain. To put it plainly – sourdough bread keeps us fuller for longer.

Lucky for me I have the World's Best Sourdough baked around the corner from me. I won't tell you where it is because the queues are already long enough on a Saturday, but the secret to its genius is the dough is developed for 30 hours – as an authentic sourdough should be (limiting the need for commercial yeast).

If you want to know if your favourite sourdough is the 'real' thing, then ask the baker. Get them to tell you how it's made. Sourdough should be properly 'aged', not tricked up with vinegar, improvers or emulsifiers. It's probably something you'll instinctively know anyway because real sourdough is AWESOME, and fake sourdough is just regular bread with a fancy fake name.

I've pretty much settled on World's Best Sourdough – with either Persian feta or Irish butter – as my death-row meal. I'm also determined to have a crack at making Jamie's rosemary and sea salt focaccia. I have the recipe and as Jamie says, making your own bread is a satisfying – and ultimately a very tasty – experience.