“There’s always a van following close behind for when the going gets tough,” she says. “But the tours can be customised and are intended for all ages and abilities; people like me, who love to hike, cook, eat and drink red wine.”But how will all those rich dinners affect your performance? Jeff Archer, director of The Tonic, a fitness and lifestyle consultancy, explains: “The body’s energy system works most effectively with simple, fairly plain food, primarily carbohydrates. For instance, Active Gourmet markets supported bike tours along ancient Tuscan pathways, with clients rewarded at the end of a hard day’s cycling – along, say, the wine roads of Vernaccia – with dinner at decent local restaurants. Dehydrated pedallers can also visit the Badia a Coltibuono, an 11th-century former abbey where the monks produced some of Chianti’s earliest wines, and where Lorenza di Medici’s famous cooking school is located.It’s a canny piece of marketing. It was started in 2002 by a Kentucky-based American, Jo-Ann Gaidosz, and employs local agents in Europe to offer esoteric combination holidays tailored to clients’ specifications.
Far from it; think of it as a pragmatic way to work up an appetite. Being in the Liguria region of Italy or in California’s Napa Valley and not being hungry or thirsty doesn’t bear thinking about.There are at least two ways to take this type of holiday. The more expensive is to book with one of a growing number of companies at the top end of the market offering tailored breaks for active foodies. The alter-native is to travel to a specific region known for its food, its sport or both, and book your own supplementary activities.Active Gourmet Holidays is an example of the former. The only sensible approach for those who like to give their appetite free reign is to take a holiday that combines both a significant quantity (and quality) of calories with some perspicacious physical endeavour.
Not that your correspondent is recommending an earnest, health-conscious approach.
The soup section in Wild Flavours (Cassell Illustrated £20) suggests the following for your vacuum flask: “Pigeon shooting in a bitterly cold wood in February is always Pea and Ham, whereas rough shooting among the brambles in December is by necessity French Onion.” To be fair, there’s more to the book than game.. but you get the idea. Meat fans
Chef Mike Robinson, like Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, likes to catch his own ingredients. At least this means that there are plenty to choose from when it comes to buying presents, so here are some of the best recent examples, divided into some popular types of recipient as a small service to make your Christmas shopping easier. One thing’s for sure, there’s no shortage of cookbooks this season Amazon.co uk shows 30 to 40 new titles for October alone.
A word of warning, though: don’t sneak this out of your loved one’s stocking on Christmas Eve while you contemplate the gory and hollow interior of your turkey It’s not that kind of stuffing. To buy any of the books featured with free p&p, call Independent Books Direct on 08700 798 897 and quote IBD12/05 10% discount on all orders over £20. And that leads us effortlessly onto my top recommendation, which is Sam Leith’s Dead Pets (Canongate £9.99) which, apart from being very funny, is also terribly moving in its exploration of our relationships with companion animals and how we cope when our dumb chums move onto the Happier Hunting Ground. It’s also (as a nice change) very well written – see if you notice the repeated allusions to Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 – and, particularly useful at this time of year, has a lengthy section on stuffing. By the same token, normally I’d abjure Why Did Ars? Wenger Cross the Road? (Bantam £9.99), as it’s a football joke book, and if we’re going to ban golf, then why not football? However, the jokes are so good that even if you hate football (like me) you should be able to adapt something like the following to suit any circumstance: Why does it take two Everton fans to eat a hedgehog? One to do the eating, the other to watch out for traffic. Chris Riddell’s The Da Vinci Cod (Walker Books £5.99) is a delightful little book of excruciatingly bad literary puns, drawn with Riddell’s familiar flair for beautifully wrought detail, and no home should really be without the great Ronald Searle’s Searle’s Cats in a new and revised edition (Souvenir Press £9.99).
A Shit History of Nearly Everything by A Parody (ho ho) (Michael O’Mara £9.99) sounds like it should be equally cloacally empowering, but isn’t. It’s not even a parody, but just another sub-Schott bit of band-wagon jumping. Which isn’t to say that the ubiquitous Schott hasn’t led by example up some rewarding byways. Adam Jacot de Boinod’s The Meaning of Tingo (Penguin £10) is a collection/dictionary/glossary (that it’s indefinable is one of its many strengths) of words from around the world which have bizarrely exact meanings.
