I fear I have done my chips in the quest for healthier food.
The closest I could get to a balanced diet was a glass of riesling in the left hand, and a shiraz in the right.
That may seem a poor approach, but we must remember there is wisdom in wine, and bacteria in water. And candidly, health food makes me sick. Why bother avoiding alcohol, fats, or starch when the voluptuous Sophia Loren has said: ''Everything you see I owe to spaghetti.''
I'd eat pasta for breakfast if there was space left after bacon and eggs. Eating is our top indoor sport, and I'm sure there's no better company for a test match than a pepperoni pizza delivered five minutes before kick-off.
But I must say the finest carbohydrate injection civilisation has discovered is potatoes mashed into joyful submission with a large lump of butter or, if that perturbs you, half a cup of cream.
Like pizzas, mashed potatoes can be enjoyed with a varied range of toppings. It escapes me why no entrepreneur has taken on Pizza Hut with a mashed potato chain serving delicacies like Onion Delight, Parsley Mash, or (and this is potato with a college education) Mash and Prosciutto.
Mashed potato is the soul of bubble and squeak and the best leftovers dishes.
I suspect we all have an aunt who cooked up leftovers so often we wondered if the original meal had ever existed. But the presence of mashed potatoes in her frying pan allowed much to be overlooked.
Ronald Reagan said there was lot you can tell about a man by the way he eats his jellybeans. Likewise, his mashed potatoes. I had a dodgy school mate up north in Dargaville, whose favourite dish was Fried Toheroa Mash. (I swear).
This was in the days when there was still an annual season for these large clam-like shellfish, which saner people turned into soup or fritters.
Both were delicacies that came in a quite alarming shade of green. Jonathan Swift would have rephrased ''He was a bold man who first ate an oyster,'' if he'd faced a bowl of toheroa soup.
Today the only shellfish eaters permitted to dig toheroas are Maori desiring them for traditional occasions. There are toheroa beds on several Southland beaches, of course, but the biggest were on the wild west coast beaches of Northland.
During the season, we were allowed to dig out 20 toheroas each, or hoard 50 per car. While in pioneer days people ripped them out with a horse and plough, the rule became dig with your bare hands, which was interesting.
The typical toheroa is about 10cm long, with a large tongue to suck tunnels through the sand. I can't believe shellfish have brains, but the fact is that when you get your fingers on the end of a toheroa, it pokes its tongue out and flees. You have to chase, and wrestle it out.
It may be a good thing toheroas were placed off limits, because they'd started a breakdown in public morality. Perfectly decent people who feared God and spanked naughty children, were crazed by the temptation of toheroas.
The rangers patrolling the beaches found honourable men driving home with extra toheroas in their hubcaps, their wives in very lumpy bathing suits.
I like toheroas, but prefer oysters, where we'd all agree the brownish Bluff is superior to the softer, somewhat slimy, grey Pacific. I'd never considered a mashed potato and oyster dish, so I checked the web for an edible recipe.
The first I found required a base of mashed potato in a tin mould, shovelling several oysters aboard, and covering this midden with a further layer of mash.
That seemed unpromising, until I read the recipe's next steps. We take this potato oyster sandwich from the mould, egg it, and sprinkle with breadcrumbs. It is then laid in a deep fryer basket, and plunged into boiling fat until ''nicely brown''.
This process would seem to validate my mad schoolmate's Fried Toheroa Mash, and perhaps even the fad for deep-fried Jimmy's pies Dave Cannan recently exposed in this newspaper. (The fried pie is a bridge too far, in my opinion).
Myself, I prefer my oysters natural, with a dozen being about right. This health food's efficacy may be further improved when balanced by a glass of dry white, although frankly, I'd rather take my oysters with a Steinlager. The original brew, thank you.
John Lapsley is an Arrowtown writer.
