As long as I can remember I have been at least a little obsessed with food!

I do remember being hungry as a child and I was not deprived, just burning it off fast and hungry before each meal – how often are we really hungry before we eat? Not often, try it and see.

I had to go straight to dancing school after school. When I was younger I was delivered and I remember being given Rivetas that my mother was piling cream cheese and pineapple on, I think there could have been butter too – Riveta wasn’t really advertised as it is now as a be all to all people base for fine concoctions, way back then it was just about diets.

The topping sends a mixed message – but as the skinniest kid in class thank goodness for a Mother who was ‘on a diet but just couldn’t resist’. I still love the sucre/sale flavours!

As I grew older I had to get to dancing myself so the minute the bell rang I ran as fast as I could – a few miles across flat planes, across town, up hills, to get there in 15 minutes, about 3 or 4 miles I’d guess.

Usually I had taken nothing to eat. A couple of hours of dancing at least, then a trek back to town and the bus home, just waiting for fooooood!

Home was a funny place, not always happy, a lot of tension and conflict going on. I often spent sleepless nights working out how I could support my siblings and myself on the pocket money I saved every week (religiously I squirreled it away, just in case).

I always started with a base of a massive white sliced loaf because it was cheap and would fill our tummies; there were bags of apples and bananas too. ….

I still wake in the night and work out food for the next day, make up recipes, analyse the day before, NO sliced white loaf now but the bananas and apples figure, somewhere behind the green leaves and celery.

The other day Robin was watching me and asked what I was doing – “counting my portions”  (I was counting on my fingers) I do it every day, smug when I hit ten or over, less so when 7-10 and fed up with myself (I’m working on that flagellation thing) if I don’t make 5.

That is a rare occasion these days but when staying away or travelling it can be REALLY hard to get those portions in! In the UK it is not so bad with the brilliant motorway service stations where they have M&S and Waitrose salads, washed fruits and peeled, chopped fruits but when we are going through France it is really tough.

You have to go off road and find a market or super market then find somewhere to wash the stuff – or eat bananas which is fine for the first one or two.

OR be organised and take stuff with you – even after all these years and hardly ever managing to sort myself out to take something for between school and dancing I still rarely get it together.

So that is something I will be working on “being prepared” and delicious recipes to travel with – that means they last in a very warm car or on a very cold ferry, are delicious, nutritious and easy to eat without setting up a picnic table/ getting it all over you,  and without having a bag of slimy washing up to do in a hotel room – or worse, forgotten about and to be discovered weeks later, under the seat, when trying to find out “what that smell is”!