Cooking or carving? No contest

Well, this is certainly a first. Nearly 1 year and 23 posts on and here I am recommending ready meals. The horror, the horror.

But before you all decide to never read this blog again, ever, at least consider my defence.

There are some occasions when food has to take a back seat and no where is this more true than the dads' surfing weekend.

After months of debate a date has been fixed - well in advance of having any idea of what the swell will be like. A lovely holiday cottage has been rented. Complicated pick up rotas have be
agreed.

Only two things are certain:

1. Leaving London on the Friday will be long and painful
2. If the waves are any good we will want to spend as much as possible on them (or in my case in them)

Which is when the ready meal as supplied by the Waitrose £10 dinner for two comes into it's own.

Rather have than 4 grown men stumble round a supermarket trying vainly to come up with some kind of coherent menu, in 20 minutes I have spent £41.95 (bizarrely not buying a 4th bottle of wine adds to the price!) and got starter, mains, puds and wine all sorted.

Simply bung it in a coolbox, sling in an ice block and load it alongside boards, wetsuits and the rest of the essentials. 

Then, when you finally arrive in Wales some hours later, you can turn the oven up high and be eating a pretty tasty pizza with salad in about 15 minutes. Which compares favorably with trying to find a restaurant where the kitchen will stay open after 9.45, which isn't a curry house).
So that's Friday sorted.

And Saturday is equally easy. No need to cut short your attempts to perfect our bottom turn (crouch, reach with the arm opposite to your front foot and lean into the rail since you ask). By the time you get back after you have finally struggled out of your wetsuit and had that post surf beer, it will be later than you think. But again the ready meal is your friend. Place in oven and heat through while you have a shower and try to get the last few grains of sand out of your ears.

Now I appreciate that to some eyes, this post could show me as a total impostor - all my talk of the importance of cooking fresh, real ingredients disappearing like oil into a frying aubergine  when things get tricky.

And those eyes may be right.

But in the final analysis, as a wannabee surfer based in the smoke, the point of these weekends is to be in the water. And anything, but anything, that will help maximise that, is worth it.

Including looking like something out of Woody Allen's "Everything you wanted to know about sex...." 

Fact.

Black is so flattering.