Gourmand

Hold onto your seats, ladies and gentlemen, because I'm about to tell you what I had for dinner last night.

It's a variation on a favourite recipe of mine, called "Beef Misery", where you brown some mince and onions in a frying pan and cook it with tomatoes and beans for between six and eight hours. It's very English.

If it turns out that the kitchen for the flat college has given you doesn't have a frying pan, try "shallow boil". I'd like to imagine that I invented the shallow boil, but it probably has a technical name in French. So yes, boil your meat and onions in a half-inch of water. You should choose a white onion if you like the strong taste, but I prefer the more fragrant red onion. If your upbringing makes you incapable of throwing away food, you can replace the beef with pink-grey meat frozen by your one of your housemates at some point in the last fourteen months.

I served it with some bread, cutting the crusts off because as anyone who's lived alone knows, they succumb to mould first. I was already a little worried about the kidney beans- don't you have to be sure they cook well? Don't bad things happen? I'm not yet blasé enough to make a meal where two ingredients might cause me to convulse and see witches.

I have a friend with a pretty serious nut allergy. She once told me that when presented with Pesto or chocolate or whatever, her approach was to tentatively sniff a little and carefully watch for the first stages of horrible death. My attitude to this meal was a little reminiscent of that.

It was delicious.