What a funny old year. I know, I know, it’s been forever since I posted, but there’s a reason. Well, there are many – being inundated with work, having all sorts of things to keep up with on behalf of clients, etc, etc. So much, so no excuse really. But I do have a better excuse: this is a food blog, and last year I developed something that stopped me eating what I wanted. LPR: laryngeal pharyngeal reflux*. Lovely.

It started, I think, with a bug. That was not helped by a dodgy hog roast and/or a half of dirty beer. I know, I know again: at a festival or whatever, drink beer in bottles or cans. Yeah, right.

I was not well.

To avoid increasing my problems I had to trim my diet right down. Plain rice was fine, mashed potato was just about OK as long as there was no milk (I’m lactose intolerant anyway) or excessive fat. The same applied to cold meat, and I generally ate cold chicken; I knew beef would be too fatty and ham, good ham, just needed too much delicious fat trimming off. All fried food was out, and boy did I get fed up with scrambled egg. In fact, if I never scramble another egg I’ll be happy.

I drank loads: water. Coffee was out. Alcohol was unthinkable. Some herb teas were OK though – camomile, fennel. Pepperminty things were out.

Anything acidic was out. Anything with oomph – lots of onion, garlic, chilli – was out. Fruit? Even my beloved apples were out. I’d got lots of purée in the freezer, the result of the usual glut,

but no. Bananas? One a day. Maybe. Depending. What kept me semi-sane, hilariously, were chewy sweets – wine gums, pastilles, that sort of thing – and chewing gum, but not mint varieties. This does not an exciting food blog make. Oh, and eating out was a no-no. Or a complete nightmare.

Come October and I was down in London, still being very careful (such a waste). We strolled round the warehouses at Spa Terminus (nobody goes to Borough Market these days, ho ho); I tested nothing. We went out for dinner. I had the plainest dishes on the menu, and water. I wanted to buy something to eat on the journey back to Wales, and in the whole of Euston could not find anything my stomach could tolerate other than a tube of Rowntree’s Pastilles. Boring, boring, boring.

LPR does, however, eventually go (I’m having a mini flare up at the moment, again prompted by a bug that’s been doing the rounds, but very mini and I’m damned if I’m taking the tablets again). In the meanwhile a few things did save my sanity, and one was a miso sauce from a fabulous reader’s recipe I found in the Guardian. I’ve still got the cutting, so I can credit it correctly to Anna Thompson who ran a guest house in Kyoto with her husband. I adapted it for my needs and quantities, and this is my version. You need a small jar with a lid you can seal (don’t ask me why I’m putting so much stress on the seal; let me just say that cleaning ceilings is awkward at the best of times).

3 tsp miso paste
4 tsp olive oil
3 tsp rice wine
2 tsp clear honey
1 tsp shoyu
grated fresh ginger to taste

Put all the ingredients in a small jar with a decent lid (see above). Shake violently to combine; if it’s a bit thick, let it down with a very little water. Then use it as a dressing – for a salad, for crunchy oriental greens or, as frequently in my case, for plain rice.

The original also includes crushed garlic, but I couldn’t handle that raw. I can now. Yippee!

*LPR is a variety of acid reflux, sometimes called ‘silent reflux’, marked by constant coughing and throat clearing and hoarseness from damaged vocal chords, as well as the lovely feeling that you’ve got something stuck in your throat. It’s often the result of some infection, as with me. Happily it usually clears up with treatment, and usually doesn’t result in complications; unhappily, the treatment ‘requires larger doses of medication for weeks to months’ than normal acid reflux. And I didn’t get on with the drugs.