Regrouping with 40 cloves of garlic

Your garlic breath will be totally worth it

Being unemployed again has made me focus on exactly what I want. I went back to my resolutions and realised (if I hadn't realised before) that my job at the School of the Environment and Something-or-other was hampering my pursuit of most of them. It really was the epitome of sad, middle-class mediocrity. The only things I will miss are morning teas with Petronella and driving to and from work with Mum.

My mother, who reads this blog, doesn't believe there was any malice or jealousy involved in Benji's decision to sack me. She says that Benji created a job for me where there really wasn't one, and I should be grateful for the experience I got there. With the greatest of respect, Shaz, I think you're wrong, but I won't go into it now. I think the chronology of events speaks for itself.

So I'm back in the cottage, cooking, eating too much, enjoying the onset of spring and planning my next move. As my book isn't going to be released until November, I do need to get another job, but this time it won't be in an office. My friend Sophie, who's a researcher at the BBC, has spoken to someone in the TV commissioning department. The outlook for the Piggy Show isn't completely bleak, though the chances of me appearing on TV without a having first produced a highly successful restaurant, book or blog are slim. Sophie's going to go back to her friend in commissioning and ask them to define 'successful blog'. Because I think I've got one, baby (approaching 500,000 hits).

In the meantime, I'm going to focus my job hunting efforts on the food industry - perhaps a restaurant manager or something like that. I'm reluctant to wait tables, but I'd do it at a pinch somewhere very upmarket. In spite of the general employment landscape in the UK, Bath is still a busy, wealthy place. Coming into summer, I don't think I'll have too much trouble finding a job. Can you believe how optimistic I am just a few days after losing my job? Ha! Boo sucks to you, Benji! You've done me a huge favour.

Now, to an area of life that's going extraordinarily well - Andy. He's definitely the most wonderfully behaved boyfriend I've ever had, though the bar isn't very high. The little darling calls me every day. We don't have a huge amount to say to each other, but that's not the point, is it? It's nice to be asked how one's day was, even when one is unemployed. It's a shame he has to be in London most of the time for calls, auditions and shoots. So assured am I of his commitment that I don't even care that he has ample sexual opportunities with freakishly beautiful women. In fact, I rarely turn my mind to the issue.

By contrast I can recall the anguish I suffered when I thought Martin was cheating on me. All signs pointed to infidelity - copious expensive gifts, mysterious overseas trips, distractedness - so you can imagine my relief when he called me from Kerobakan to tell me he'd been charged with drug trafficking. Honestly, Martin's crime was easier on my self-esteem than finding out that Hugh (whom I never suspected) had been shagging Poloma before he dumped me and while he was still pretending to participate in relationship counseling. With Andy, I feel completely secure. He's such a perfect gentleman and I can't wait to see him tomorrow.

Tonight I'm going up to the manor house for dinner. I've just made a wonderful Piggy-style 'chicken with 40 cloves of garlic' dish, which I'll the recycle for Andy tomorrow night. Lucky readers, I shall now share the recipe with you:

You will need:

• 12 fat chicken drumsticks
• 40 cloves of garlic, duh
• 1 bunch of spring onions, finely sliced
• 50g of unsalted butter
• 1 handful of fresh thyme
• Salt and pepper
• 3 cups of chicken stock
• 1 cup of reasonable quality dry white wine

And this is what you have to do:

1.  Preheat oven to 180C/360F.
2. Peel the garlic. This is the hardest part.
3. Heat a heavy duty casserole dish over a high heat, melt the butter and brown the chicken. Then put the drumsticks aside in a bowl
4. Add the stock to the casserole dish and half the garlic. Take the time to scrape all the brown bits off the bottom of the dish into the stock. It's worth the effort.
5. Place the chicken into the dish, trying as much as possible to have just one layer.
6. Add the white wine and then throw in the remaining garlic cloves and the spring onions. 
7. Season heavily with salt and pepper, place the thyme on top and then place the dish in the oven for two hours (with a lid on).

You can eat this beauty with potatoes if you like, but I prefer rice. It goes well for some reason.
I know the men in my life are going to love it! (Don't worry, Shaz. You can have some too!)

Piggy xx

PS Thank you to all my readers who have e-mailed me job offers and suggestions. I'm only interested in the food industry, thank you.

Rise in UK's unemployment rate

As if I wasn't feeling awful enough after the murder of that poor young man in Woolwich, this morning Benji sacked me. Yes, he sacked me. He did it by letter left on the edge of my desk while I was in the ladies'. My probationary period ends in early June, and according to the letter, my employment will not extend beyond that date. As soon as I read it, I packed up my things and left.

To all those readers who made critical comments about my treatment of Benji, do you now see what kind of man he is? He thoroughly deserved everything I gave him. Bastard. I could have him for sexual harassment. Sleazy Patrick too. Even Petronella - she sent me plenty of photos of Gonzalo's penis. I could bring down the whole School of the Environment and Something-or-other.

Thank God Andy's coming out on the weekend to cheer me up. Bloody hell.

Piggy pens a porno...and a great recipe for madeleines

Crunchy, buttery madeleines

I'm almost afraid to say it, but my life is wonderful! My boyfriend Andy and my baby brother Ant are on their way from London to Nun Far as I type. What's more, yesterday I signed a contract with one of the world's biggest publishers of romantic fiction! I only sent the manuscript last week, so I certainly wasn't expecting to hear from the acquisitions editor this week.

Finishing my romance novella was one of the goals I set at the Tony Robbins seminar I attended last month. I was so afraid of being rejected that I almost didn't submit it at all, but with my day job sucking so badly and the whole celebrity chefdom caper taking longer than anticipated, I thought it was time to get some alternative income streams flowing. Incredibly, my plan worked! So if I was ever in any doubt about the value of attending the seminar in Sydney, I'm not anymore. Yes, the advance on royalties was paltry to say the least, but at least I have my foot in the door of the publishing world. And who knows, my next great work to be published could be a cookbook, or indeed this very blog. Imagine that! Er...sorry for all the exclamation marks. I suppose I'm just excited.

I don't want to give away too much before the editing process begins, but I can tell you this much: it's an historical porno, set in the days of the Roman empire, involving a great deal of gratuitous sex between the prefect of the Praetorian Guard and the illegitimate daughter of the Emperor. Oh, and it's coming out in November 2013. You heard about it here, readers.

Now, back to the humdrum reality of my working life at the School for the Environment and Something-Or-Other. Yesterday (before the receipt of aforementioned publishing contract) something pretty weird happened. Benji called me into his office to tell me why he'd been ignoring me this week. Of course, I'd been doing such a good job of ignoring him that I hadn't noticed I was being ignored.

'I was jogging past your house on Wednesday morning,' he revealed, 'and I saw you standing in front of your house with a guy.'

'Andy?'

'Well, how would I know his name?'

'Was he six-foot-four and extremely good looking?'

Benji scowled. 'He was tall. Had curly red hair like Ronald McDonald.'

'Hmm. Sounds like Andy. He's an underwear model. A friend of my brother's. You do remember my brother Antony, don't you?'

'Are you seeing this guy, Piggy? I mean, it looked like the end of a sleepover.'

I was thoroughly enjoying his unease, which was bordering on agitation. 'May I ask why you were jogging past my house?'

'I've been jogging around Monk Far for months. I'm in training, as you know.'

'It's private property, Benji.'

'But the owner - '

'He minds, okay? Stop stalking me.'

'Piggy! How could you? Oh, get out.'

'Do you want me to print out your e-mails?'

'No,' he said coldly.

'Pencils need sharpening?'

'No,' he snapped, reaching past me to open the door. 'Thank you.'

In the second it took to step past him, inhale his cologne and brush against his jacket, I sensed I was making a mistake, but Petronella's words echoed in my mind: Keep your nerve, Piggy.

Then I went back to my desk, opened my inbox, and there was the contract. Since then I've been in a fabulous mood.

Now I'm just hanging around the cottage with Mum, waiting for the boys to arrive. I made some great madeleines earlier. Mum and I just put away a few with a pot of tea. This is the best recipe for these lovely little shell-shaped sponges I know:

You will need:

• 3/4 cup of unsalted butter, metled, 1/2 for the mixture, 1/4 to grease the tray
• 1/2 cup of caster sugar
• 1 cup of self-raising flour
• 3 eggs
• 1 vanilla pod, seeds scraped
• Icing sugar to dust

And this is what you need to do:

1. Preheat the oven to 200C/400F. Grease madeleine tin with the 1/4 cup of melted butter. I half fill each mold so that the sponges fry in butter. Decadent, but wonderful.
2. Beat the 1/2 cup of butter, sugar and eggs. Scrape in the vanilla seeds and then mix in the flour. Give it all a really good beating.
3. You must leave the mixture in the fridge for at least an hour before spooning it into the tin. You can even leave it for a few days. You won't get that beautiful, humped shape with room-temperature mixture.
4. Bake for 10 minutes or until golden brown. Turn out onto a cooling tray and dust with icing sugar.

This lovely tea cake is spongey, buttery and crisp. If you have the mixture ready, they take no time at all.

Piggy xx

PS Due to the antics of a few persistent weirdos, I am no longer posting readers' comments. However, I will still answer nice e-mails.

Baked chicken with thyme and a time-ravaged old hen

A delightful (polygamous) marriage of chicken, thyme and potatoes

Andy worked last weekend and couldn't come down to Bath, which was jolly disappointing. I felt pretty blue, actually. This, I realise, is the flip side of being totally into someone - you miss them frightfully when you're not with them. Maybe I'm becoming codependent.

On Sunday morning when I got up, I felt I needed to get my teeth into something (other than Andy's delicious white bottom) straight away. So I loaded the car with some of Dad's herb pots and hydroponics and took them up to the manor house. He's been asking me to bring them up for a while, but I've been avoiding it, still not quite able to believe that my parents have separate households.

There was no one around when I got there. I knocked on the door to the servants' quarters, but there was no answer. Dad's car was parked by one of the stone outbuildings, so I knew he was somewhere in the vicinity. I resorted to wailing 'Dad!' and 'Barry!' alternately, like a crazy woman. I knew I'd gone too far when the face of a real crazy woman appeared at a window on the second storey - this is part of the main manor house, not the servants' quarters, which only take up part of the ground floor at the back. Oh dear.

'Sorry!' I shouted and waved. 'I didn't mean to disturb you!'

The window opened outward and a wrinkled face popped out of it. I knew it must have been Sir Charles's mother, Lady Adeline, or at least one of her bingo chums. As I've never met an aristocrat before, I wasn't quite sure what to do or say.

'What the Devil are you doing?' she shouted down.

'Er...sorry. Just looking for my fahter.'

The old lady picked up a pair of glasses that were hanging around her neck and put them on. She squinted. 'Olivia?'

'No, I'm - '

'Olivia, what are you doing here?' She sounded agitated. 'I thought you were dead!'

'No, I'm Piggy. Just looking for my father.'

'Now Olivia,' she said sternly. 'In spite of  what others tell me about my sanity, I am certain that you drowned in the lake when you were two.'

What do you say to someone who tells you you're dead? I stood there like Lot's wife.

'Come inside at once,' she snapped. 'Your father will be glad to see you. He didn't get out of bed for six months after your funeral.'

Then the head disappeared and the window shut and I felt quite discombobulated. I ran like a terrified child into the walled kitchen garden and saw Dad working right down the back.

'Dad!' I shouted, waving like a signalman. He came up to meet me.

'I thought I heard voices. He was flushed and sweating in spite of the chill. He looked rather like a little boy himself in his overalls and gum boots.

'I think I just met Lady Adeline,' I said. 'She yelled at me in a very posh voice.'

Dad immediately seemed to know who I was talking about. 'Oh, she's bonkers. Best to just ignore her.'

As we were unloading his gardening paraphernalia from my car, Dad asked how Mum was.

'Mum? She's well. She's been promoted, you know.'

'So Ant told me.'

Then I came over all emotional. 'When are you coming back, Dad?' My voice quavered mid-sentence and my eyes filled with tears. It was a pathetic sight.

'Does she m-miss me?' stammered Dad.

'Of course.' And deep down, I thought she probably did miss him. I didn't think it was a good time to mention all her recent dining out and parties.

'I don't know, Piggy. At the moment I just feel like I need to find out who Barry is.'

Hearing my father speak about himself in the third person like that made me shudder. I left not long after, promising to bring up some chicken with thyme later on. I was planning a spectacularly delicious chicken dish, you see (but more on that later).

On a more serious note, I'm feeling very anxious about the state of my parents' marriage. It makes me sound immature, I know, but why can't they just sit down and sort their problems out? Honestly, I feel like Hayley Mills's characters in Parent Trap. If only I could dream up a scheme to throw them back into each other's arms...

And in the meantime, I can't get Lady Adeline out of my mind. Who was Olivia? Her daughter/granddaughter? Or just a figment of her imagination? I'm beginning to see why all of Nunton Farleigh is obsessed with Clutterbuck family gossip. It's most intriguing.

Still, nothing intrigues this little Piggy quite so much as food and my baked chicken thighs with thyme and potatoes is a dish that keeps on giving. It's easy, and like me, it gets better with age.

You will need (for 4-6 people):

• 12 boned chicken thighs, skin on or off
• 700g of white potatoes, peeled
• 700g of cherry tomatoes
• Bunch of thyme, fresh is better but dried is okay too
• Salt and black pepper
• Olive oil, about 5 tbsp
• White wine vinegar, a decent splash

And here's what you have to do:

1.  Preheat oven to 180C/360F. Chop potatoes in half and boil them until soft.
2. While potatoes are boiling, cut each chicken thigh into 3 or 4 strips. Rub each strip all over with oil, salt and pepper.
3. Heat a large frying pan and fry all the chicken thighs in one layer for about 10 minutes or until almost cooked. Do in several batches if necessary. Place chicken in a large baking dish.
4. Add softened potatoes and tomatoes, and lay thyme over the top. Then drizzle olive, splash white wine vinegar over the top, and toss everything together. Be careful not to smash up the potatoes too much.
5. Cook in a single layer in the baking dish for an hour.

This dish needs nothing further but it does go nicely with a simple green salad. Dad and Bear LOVED it. And so did I.

Piggy xx

Benji cracks, Andy visits and Piggy cooks Gok

Cooking Chinese is not as hard as it looks

Ha! Benji cracked yesterday. You heard it here, dear readers.

He called me into his office, ostensibly to top up his printer paper, and then he baled me up.

'What's going on?' he demanded. He was smiling, but I could tell he was cross.

I put the paper on his desk and shrugged.

'And don't give me some deliberately obtuse answer,' he added.

'I'm sorry,' I said (obtusely!), 'but I don't know what you mean. Have you ever considered that my obtuseness might come naturally?'

'Save the jokes for some other time.' Now the smile was gone and he was really angry. He strode past me and shut the door. 'Some things should be taken seriously.'

We stood in silence for a few very awkward seconds.

'You're running hot and cold, Piggy. It's doing my head in. One minute you're dragging me into your bed and the next you won't even look me in the eye. You're so moody. I don't know where I stand.'

I pounced on his hypocrisy like a cat on a tit. 'Really? You don't know where you stand? That must be very irritating.' Needless to say, these words were delivered with a dash of sarcasm.

'Well, where do I stand, Piggy? Tell me. Am I your boyfriend?'

'I honestly don't know.' I paused to look him in the eye. I realised he was right. The last time I really looked at him was when I was dying a little in his arms. 'I think you're too handsome and intelligent to be my boyfriend.'

'Oh, Piggy!' He hugged me, but I didn't hug him back.

'You've never explained why you didn't take me to Munich,' I said into his shoulder.

'Is that what this is about?'

'Partly. And you don't call me after sex.'

He sighed. 'I didn't take you to Munich because I left it too late to make the arrangements. You wouldn't have liked it anyway. You're a climate change skeptic, for God's sake. As for not calling you...well, I do sometimes, and I'll do it more often in the future, okay?'

'That's assuming there's sex in our future, Benji, and at the moment that's a big leap of faith.'

And at that, I turned on my heel and left. Yup, left him swinging in the wind. He almost had me too - almost. There was something slightly implausible about the whole confrontation. I can't quite put my finger on what it was, but I just didn't believe him. Anyway, I went straight to Petronella's office and told her all about it, as well as the latest juicy details of my encounters with my beloved (i.e. not Benji.)

Yes, it has been going jolly well with Andrew, though the sex part has only been made possible by the augmentation of my dear mother's social life. Andy visits me weekly, but Mum has laid down a rule that he's not allowed to sleep in my room. This means that we have to wait until Mum goes out or falls asleep to get saucy.

This week Andy came out from London mid-week, arriving while Mum was out at dinner with a group that included a VIP - the Dean of the School of Something-or-other at Bath Uni. She spent a jolly long time looking at herself giddily in the bathroom mirror before she left, false eyelashes attached, hair sculpted into a perfect motorcycle helmet. If I didn't know better, I'd say she was off on a date. Any excitement she was experiencing didn't stop her from trying to ruin my fun, though.

'Now this friend of Ant's will obviously not be spending the night in your room,' she said. 'I won't have that kind of thing happening under my roof. If he wants to sleep with you, Piggy, let him pay for you.'

 Of course, I resented that comment on a number of levels, but I didn't argue. I just muttered assurances, grateful for some time in the bathroom before Andy arrived.

I find Andy to be a very tender and attentive boyfriend. He rocked up for dinner bearing flowers, a tray of chocolates, a copy of Gok Cooks Chinese and two blouses from an up-and-coming designer whose clothes he's been modeling. I went straight to my room to put on one of the blouses, but I didn't actualy get into it until 15 minutes later, after Andy seized the opportunity of my semi-nakedness to make passionate love to me.

'So what's for dinner?' were his first post-coital words. I reached for Gok Wan's cookbook and Andy flipped through it and chose spicy stir-friend prawns with cashew nuts.

After a quick trip into town for ingredients - I don't ordinarily use Shaoxing rice wine - I whipped up the prawns. Kudos to Gok, the dish was fantastic - so fresh, tasty and aromatic. It was sexy too, causing me and Andy to return to the scene of the crime for another round.

'Ooh, Piggy,' he panted, rolling off me for a second time. 'I neve thught I'd goo oot with an older wooman, but you are the best girlfriend I've ever had. I'll never goo oot with a model again.'

'Not me,' I said, 'I'm only going out with models from now on.'

'Aye, you're so foony,' said Andy, scooping me into his long, lean arms, 'and you really know how to make a man feel good.

To hear that I was:

1. His girlfriend;
2. Superior to all the models he's ever dated; and
3. An expert in the art of making men feel good

Was rather gratifying. I can only put it down to the stir fry.

So this is more or less the recipe for Gok's spicy stir-fried prawns with cashew nuts, but bastardised by Piggy a little. I had a hungry Scot to feed and I didn't have time to boil up prawn heads for stock.

You will need (for two people):

• 1 tbsp of groundnut oil
• Thumb-sized piece of ginger, thinly sliced
• 2 cloves of garlic peeled and roughly chopped
• 4 spring onions, chopped
• 20 raw king prawns, peeled and take out the poo, for God's sake
• 3 sticks of celery, sliced
• 1 long red chilli, sliced
• Salt and white pepper (I used Chinese 5-spice)
• Tiny splash of Shaoxing rice wine
• Tiny splash of soy sauce
• Handful of cashew nits
• 1 tsp of cornflour mixed with a splash of cold water
• 1 tsp of sesame oil

And here's what you have to do:

1. Heat the oil in a large saucepan (or a wok if you have one, but who does?). Add the ginger, garlic and spring onion and cook for a few minutes. Add the prawns, celery and chilli and cook for another few minutes.
2. When the prawns begin to turn pink, add the rice wine and soy sauce. (The recipe calls for fish sauce but I left it out. I hate it.) Add the cashews and the cornflour water and stir to thicken the sauce.
3. Serve straight away with long-grain rice and drizzle the sesame oil over the prawns at the moment before eating.

Yummo! And thank you Andy for introducing me to Gok.

Piggy xx

Hot beef vindaloo hits the spot

Looks dicey, but it's heaven to eat

Due to shifting workplace politics, work has become slightly enjoyable. Petronella and I are like a pair of naughty sisters, giggling at private jokes and setting out for the cafe whenever the whim takes us.

'Tell me this,' said sleazy Patrick on Friday monring when I brought a latte to his office, 'are you and Petronella involved in a lesbian relationship?'

'It's none of your business, Pat,' I said, 'but just so you know, if you were the last man on earth, I'd masturbate.'

Patrick took a lascivious sip of his latte, totally unperturbed. 'I take it from your response that I still have a chance with Petronella.'

'This is sexual harassment,' I pointed out.

'Well, you'd know about that, Piggy. He he!'

There was a time when Sleazy Patrick's creepy sleaze made the bile rise in my throat. I can't say that I like it now, but I do expect it. And I'm always at the ready with a sordid riposte.

As for Benji, what can I say? I have honed my disinterestedness to perfection. I consider Petronella's hypothesis proven: it isn't beauty, charm or intelligence that causes a man to fall desperately in love with a woman, but her ability to ignore him. The power lies in not caring; that is how one gets a man to care.

Benji called me at home several times last week. Once he called the home phone while I had Andy on my mobile.

'Benji,' I said as he started rattling on about a running race he thought I should attend as a spectator, 'can't we discuss this tomorrow at work?'

But then at work I'm always sloping off with Petronella or joking with the girls at reception or pulling faces behind Sleazy Patrick's pimply back. Alas, no time for Benji. Disinterestedness is so easy to do well when it's supported by a solid foundation of genuine disinterest.

Anyhoo...I made a fabulous authentic beef vindaloo for lunch yesterday. Andy came over and requested something hot, so I gave him something hot. And I made a curry as well.

This is what you need:

• 1kg of beef steak, trimmed of fat, but into 1-inch cubes
• 2 tbsp of ground coriander
• 3 tbsp of ground cloves
• 1 tbsp of ground cumin
• 3 tsp of ground cinnamon
• 2 tsp of black peppercorns
• 3 tsp of mustard seeds
• 6 small red chillis
• 8 cloves of garlic
• 1/4 cup of white vineagar
• 2 tbsp of butter
• Few bay leaves
• 1 cup of beef stock
• 2 tbsp of fresh coriander, chopped

And this is what you have to do:

1.  Combine the ground coriander, cloves, cumin and cinnamon and then rub the mix into the meat. Then roughly grind the chillis, ginger, garlic, onion, peppercorns, mustard seeds, fennel seeds and vinegar and rub that mix into the meat as well.
2. Set aside the meat for at least an hour. When an hour has passed, melt the butter in a heavy pot and add the meat.
3. Once the meat in browned add the beef stock and the bay leaves. Bring to the boil and then simmer gently with the lid on for 3 hours, stirring occasionally. Serve with natural yoghurt, chopped fresh coriander and long grain rice.

It won't take your head off completely but it's hot enough. And let's face it, some of us like it hot!

Piggy xx

Greek shortbread biscuits for a Scottish hunk

Invented by the Greeks, but enjoyed by the Scottish

Och, I had a great weekend. Rewind, if you will, to Saturday morning. As you may recall, I had dinner up at the manor house with Dad and Bear the night before. It was a great night, but I drank rather too much white wine. Bear had to drive me back to the cottage.

Early Saturday morning (well, it was still dark) I was woken my my bleeping phone, which I promptly turned off before going back to sleep. A short time later I was woken again by Mum knocking at my bedroom door.

'Pig, it's Benji on the phone.' She sounded as bad as I felt. And not a little irritated.

'Wha? Oh. Okay. Well, I'll get up. No - actually, tell him I'll call him back on his mobile, okay?'

'Piggy, kindly tell that young man not to call so early on a Saturday morning. I have a life, you know.'

'Ugh. Okay, Mum.'

I went back to sleep for over an hour, woke up and wrote a post, and then finally rang Benji from my bed.

'Did I wake you?' was how he answered the phone.

'Yes, you did, actually.'

'You sound hungover, Piggy.'

'I had a few wines last night,' I admitted. I was actually enjoying myself. I had what you might call The Upper Hand.

'And where exactly did you consume these wines, may I ask?'

I decided to use some poetic licence. 'Up at Sir Geoffrey's manor house,' I said haughtily. 'Just a few of us at a dinner party.'

'I see. Well - what about having a few wines with me tonight?'

'Tonight?'

Then my mother had the nerve to join the conversation from her covert position just outside the door. 'Piggy, you can't go out tonight. Ant's visiting from London with a model friend and they're expecting you to cook dinner.'

'I can't do tonight,' I told Benji, getting out of bed and shutting the door. 'My brother's coming over.'

'Oh. Well - '

'Maybe another time, Benji. Byee!'

Then I stayed in bed for almost another hour, basking in the power I've had since I chucked Benji without telling him. I must admit it rather excites me. I'm rapidly gaining insight into Petronella's air of vampish confidence.

Oh, but it was nice to hear his voice...

I spent the rest of the day until Ant's arrival shopping and cooking. I bought two free-range chickens from the butcher at Nun Far and prepared them the Piggy way, with strips of butter pushed under the skin, dusted with flour and salt and sprinkled with oregano and thyme. A lemon up the jacksie of course, to keep the carcass moist. The secret with roast chicken is to cook it in a very hot oven for the first 20 minutes, so the skin gets crisp.

For dessert, I decided on Greek shortbread biscuits, which are easy to make and go so well with tea or coffee after dinner.

Though I was looking forward to seeing my brother and telling him all about the Tony Robbins seminar, I was dreading the prospect of accommodating yet another model 'friend'. I wondered what her excuse would be for not eating or just picking at dinner. Would she still be full from lunch? Would she be feeling ill from the drive from London? Would she devour every scrap on the plate and then disappear to the bathroom for twenty minutes, returning to the table with watery eyes and a pallid face?

Oh, how mean and unnecessary such ruminations proved to be. For on Sunday morning, I woke up naked with my head resting in Ant's model friend's nook. No, I haven't turned to women, okay? I can explain.

Ant's model friend turned out to be a bona fide friend and not a 'friend'. He's a six-foot-four, 23-year-old Scottish underwear model called Andy. You know the type. Abs you could wash your clothes on. Jaw like a set square. Erection that could bat a loaf of bread off the kitchen table.

My God, I wasn't expecting to go to bed with him when he walked through my mother's front door wearing a trilby and matching scarf. He was so bloody gorgeous that I assumed he was gay. It appears that I was wrong about that - so wonderfully wrong.

'This is the best food I have ever tasted,' Andy said during his third helping. I was thinking, yes, this is exactly what I need: a straightforward hunk who praises my cooking. However, it wasn't until I brought out the shortbread that the really meaningful looks started passing over the table.

'Oh, Piggy,' he said, icing sugar powdered all over his chin, 'what are you doing to me?'

The flirtation was all over Mum's head, but Ant kept looking at me like a constipated owl, as if to say, 'Don't you dare, you cradle snatcher!'

In spite of all the sexy vibes, I wasn't expecting Andy to sneak into bed with me after lights out, which is exactly what he did.

Look, I won't say he was as good as Benji, because he wasn't, but what he lacked in skill, he made up for with sheer enthusiasm. I had to keep a lid on the volume knowing that my mother's head was about a foot away. Believe me, it wasn't easy.

When I woke up, he was already awake, staring at me.

'You look really beautiful when you sleep,' he said kissing my forehead with his perfect lips.

I felt like an aged albino whale lying next to his flawless form, but that didn't stop me consenting to another round.

My brother knocked at the door at an inconvenient moment.

'Piggy,' he said formally, opening the door a crack, 'Andrew has disappeared. He didn't...er...come in here, did he?'

'Ant,' gasped Andy 'I'll be oot soon. I joost wanted to find oot what's for breakfast.'

'Don't come in, Ant,' I said with a giggle.

Ant tut-tutted like an old woman. 'Well, time is getting on and we can get some breakfast on the way back to London.' He sounded none too pleased.

Before Andy left, he put my number in his phone. 'I feel like the loockiest man in the world, Piggy. I'll call you tonight.'

And guess what? He bloody did call! We talked for ages and arranged a date for this weekend.

So boo sucks to you, Benji! Ha!

And I suppose my readers want to know the recipe for the Greek shortbread biscuits, which without a doubt induced Andy to slip between my sheets.

You will need:

• 250g of butter, softened
• 2 1/2 cups of icing sugar, sifted
• 2 tsp of vanilla extract
• 1 orange, rind finely grated
• 1 egg
• 2 1/2 cups of plain flour
• 1 tsp of baking powder
• 1/2 cup of ground almonds

And this is what you have to do:

1.  Preheat over to 160C/320F. Line 2 flat baking trays with baking paper
2. Beat butter, 1 cup of icing sugar, vanilla and orange rind. Then add the egg and beat until well-combined. Add flour, almond meal and baking powder and stir until the dough comes together.
3. Using a tbsp of dough per biscuit, roll out 3-inch long sausage shapes and then bend to form crescents. When putting them on the trays, allow room for spreading. Bake for 20 minutes and then stand on the trays for about 5 minutes, or until they're firm.
4. Put the remaining icing sugar in a bowl and then coat the warm biscuits in sugar.

They are a dry biscuit, but that's why they go so well with tea and coffee. They're lovely and sweet and you can fool yourself into believing that you're not eating something too calorific.

Piggy xx