Dice, chop, steam, bake and drool!

IT could very well be that I’ve missed my forte in life and, instead of writing about the telly, I should be a food critic.

It’s a tough job, I know, eating out in top restaurants, but, hey, someone’s got to do it.

Him Indoors and I went fine dining t’other day. It was his first time, bless — a virgin when it comes to more than one knife and fork on the table.

But he sailed through the whole experience as though he ate miniscule amounts of lobster and tiny baked baby fennel every day. Well, apart from wondering (out loud) when ‘us chips’ were coming . . .

Now, the basic difference between our good selves is that I live to eat whereas my best beloved eats only to live. Dish him up a slice of wet cardboard, drench it in curry sauce and voila — dinner.

If he could get by on a pill and a choccy biscuit he would.

Which is a shame, as my main hobby before meeting him was eating. Out, preferably, but in would do as long as it was tasty enough.

Now we eat frozen pizzas off our laps (well, cooked ones off a plate on our laps, obviously) and watch gourmet food programmes on the telly.

It hasn’t made me any thinner, but I am a tad more knowledgeable about what goes in to the foods I really like to eat.

Our favourite at the moment is the “Great British Menu” (6.30pm BBC2 Monday to Friday). We watch enthralled as top chefs dice and chop, steam and bake — then drool (or at least I do, Him Indoors just tends to be critical about the presentation of the meal, viewing it with an artist’s eye) when they dish up delicacies such as poached quails eggs with asparagus, deep fried crab salad, 26 different cuts of lamb and summer puddings by the score.

They’re competing this year to cook dinner for the troops coming home from Afghanistan. Not the rank and file, I suspect, more the jolly officers who do not, I am sure, live off ration packs like these poor chefs believe.

Listen, I ate the best fillet steak of my life off a paper plate, with a plastic knife and fork, cooked in an Army field kitchen at -29C in Bosnia — there’d be mutiny in the ranks if all they got for six months was dried sausage and beans.

We also watch “Saturday Kitchen” — while munching peanut-butter and banana toasted sandwiches in bed — and Jean-Christophe Novelli trying to beat the takeaways. Yum yum.

It’s just occurred to me . . . do you think it’s possible to put weight on just thinking about food?