I’ve added some links to my blogroll, so I thought I’d take the time to write a little bit about each of them.

Jamie Oliver and Delia Online are pretty self-explanatory. I use recipes by plenty of other people, but if I’m looking for a basic recipe I’ll go to Delia for the reliable version and Jamie for a twist on the original. If I’m doing something that is likely to require precision, like baking a pudding or a cake, I know I’ll get a tried-and-tested and uncomplicated solution from Delia. Jamie’s recipes are a bit more haphazard (a slosh of this, a handful of that), but since that’s how I cook anyway, I don’t mind it.

Eat like a girl is the lovely Niamh, with whom I used to work in a non-food-related setting. I only found her blog by accident after I friended her on Facebook, but it turned out she was one of the UK’s best and best-known food bloggers, and she’s recently been rightly rewarded with a book deal. Comfort and Spice comes out later this year, and I’m really looking forward to it. She writes about recipes, restaurants and food-related events in a straightforward and engaging way.

The London Feminist Discussion Group is the online presence for a women’s reading group which I belong to. The blog discusses all kinds of issues relating to feminism, while the group meets up irregularly for book discussions and clothes swaps. They have some really interesting things to say on a lot of subjects, and I hope to lure one of two of them over here at some point for some guest posts.

Really Hungry is recipes and foodie tales from Jane, who is living the dream by ditching her highly-paid sales job and going back to college to become a chef. Like Niamh’s, her recipes are interesting without being too difficult to attempt. She also looks very cute in her chef’s whites.

Shapely Prose is no longer updated, but the archive is worth reading. It was where Kate Harding and a series of other bloggers wrote about feminism and fat acceptance. It’s also the home of the BMI project, which explained more articulately than words ever could why the concept of BMI as a useful indicator of health, size or anything else was a nonsense.

The Rotund is Marianne Kirby, who along with Kate Harding wrote Lessons From The Fat-O-Sphere, the book which we read in the women’s group which started off the thought process which has led to All Stewed Up. Marianne writes wittily and tirelessly about the politics of being fat, and anything else that takes her fancy.

I’ll add more links as I come across them.

This is a blog about food, but it’s not a food blog. There are enough of those already, and I’m not a chef – although I will post recipes, because I like to cook and I like to share the results. It’s not a blog about health and nutrition, because I’m not qualified to talk about those things with any authority. And it’s definitely not a diet blog. In fact it’s the opposite of a diet blog: it’s about enjoying eating without feeling guilty about it. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? We’ll see.

A week from now I’ll post a food diary listing everything I have eaten this week. I think food diaries are mostly stupid, but I won’t be using it to learn about my “bad” habits or shock myself into eating less or differently: I’ll just be using it as a kicking-off point for a conversation about my own eating choices and what prompted me to start writing about food, in between writing about plays and writing my never-to-be-published novel and writing about my noisy neighbour and writing about furniture and going to the recordings of my never-to-be-broadcast radio play – and, sometimes, doing my actual job. And wedding planning. In between all of those things.

A few days after I got back from Cyprus, an acquaintance of mine – who was, to be fair, quite drunk at the time – commented on my tan and then said “You look completely different. Usually you look – and I mean this in a good way – like a pasty Jew.”

It’s taken me a while to process this and reach the conclusion that there is no “good way” to look like a pasty Jew. It simply isn’t, whichever way you parse it, a compliment.

It’s also factually incorrect: I may be Jewish (well, sort of, and only partly) but I am not and have never been “pasty”. Pasty means pale, and I am not pale. I know this because I have spent my life being asked “Where are you from? No, but where are you really from? No, but where are your parents from?”. Aged about eighteen I got bored with trying to convince people of the actual answers to those questions (London, London and London) and started making up alternatives. “Iran”, I used to say, or “New Zealand”. People seemed happier to accept that.

You can get stuck in a way of thinking, though. University was the first place I went which was full of people who looked like me, because at Essex the student population in the mid-mineties was about 10% Greek. Having never looked like I belonged even to my own (green-eyed, freckled) family, I suddenly looked like everybody else. It was great, and for the first time I felt pleased to look the way I did. Do.

At around that time I briefly went out with a man who was newly separated from his South American wife. Before he introduced me to his mother, who had Alzheimers, he warned me: “If she says anything strange, don’t worry about it; she doesn’t always know what she’s saying.”

“Strange how?”, I asked him.

“Well”, he said, “she might say something like you’re not as exotic-looking as Paola“.

Not as exotic-looking? Exotic-looking was all I had. It was my USP. If I couldn’t compete on that level, I had nothing left.

Of course, the mother was perfectly charming and I gradually came to realise that the problem in that relationship lay with the boyfriend and not his dementing parent. But it left its mark, because I’d just started to come to terms with the fact that I would never be a blonde-haired, blue-eyed princess, and suddenly I wasn’t  foreign-looking enough either. It took a while to get over that one.

These days, I avoid answering at all. “I’m just dark”, I say. “Just dark. Nothing else.”

Because the troubling aspect of this question, and the regularity with which it is asked, is that I don’t understand why it matters. What is it about me, about you, about my relationship with you, that means you need that particular piece of information? What difference does the answer make? It wouldn’t be so surprising if I lived in a country with a less diverse population, but in Britain, and especially in London, everybody is from everywhere. So since I am obviously English, what is it, really, that you want to know when you ask me that?

But part of the reason I think I like visiting Cyprus and Spain and Italy so much is that I look more like a local than I do at home – sunburn, poor command of the language and enormous straw hat aside.

I saw this woman from the top of the 68 bus in Camberwell yesterday evening, and snuck a photo:

I really love the way she’s dressed, and I envy her her eye for an elegant combination: I probably wouldn’t have seen the potential of any of those items of clothing individually, and I certainly wouldn’t have thought of throwing them all together to create a look of casual insouciance that is only augmented by the two giant bags of Monster Munch.

You can’t tell in this shot, but the jacket is actually a tailored blazer with buttons. I have never known what to wear on cold summer’s days. She makes it look effortless.