Just that yearly reminder to you all to rush out and spend a fortune on completely useless Detox Products! Yes, you too can find yourself ripped off by unscrupulous manufacturers who are relying on the fact that most people are not scientists!

Bathe in the glorious detoxifying marketing tripe, as it fills your body with the warm glow of complete gibberish. Use a neat convenient patch to remind yourself that the most stupid thing you did this Christmas was pay for such rubbish. Drink down gallons of wildly expensive detox potions to rid yourself of poisonous marketing.

Okay, enough of the sarcasm. Just eat properly and drink lots of NON alcoholic things like, umm, tap water! Manufacturers are cheating you. They are selling you products which are scams and rubbish. The way they get away with it is by reclassifying what the word Detox means. To you and me it means getting rid of toxins - poisonous chemicals. Trouble is the body does that anyway, and far more efficiently than any product can.

The manufacturers are actually talking about things like normal day to day dirt. Garnier's skin detox product does just that - gets rid of all the stuff that can only otherwise be got rid of that incredibly complicated thing called soap!

Even Boots the Chemist is in on the act. They sell a Detox supliment with an accompanying diet. The Diet is very sensible. Good thing too since the product is pointless. Just use the diet and save yourself the money.

This multi million pound annual rip off is being wonderfully exposed by our Friends at Sense About Science as they desperately try and get you and me to start listening to scientists talk about science and not marketing people, who quite frankly are just making it up to con you.

Read All About It - HERE. And happy new year.

Oh, and look out for a leaflet called Debunking Detox being given out to the public outside dodgy retailers like Debenhams in Central London. Don't live in London? Well, you can grab it here. How kind of me!

Okay, this is not a scientific study and to be honest I love both Grana Padano and it's friend Parmigiano-Reggiano, Parmesan to his English friends.

But I think many people sitting looking at their supermarket shelves at two seemingly similar cheeses, next to each other with different prices, often wonder what on earth they should be bunging on their pasta - the answer is BOTH! And actually all three if I chuck in Pecorino as well (sheep based cheese, er, on sheep's milk that is).

Quite often I must admit I decide on price and availability. Grana Padano tends to be the cheapest and Pecorino I rarely see in your average supermarket - a pity, I am rather fond of it. Parmesan is the posh one out of the three, and with some of the frighteningly priced vintage versions kicking around, can constitute a small investment. At home I most often use Grana Padano, freshly grated just as I am serving. Though if I am serving carpaccio, I love the best Parmesan I can get my paws on and the best olive oil to boot!

So there you go, dont be confused, dig in and try them all, but a warning: DO NOT buy pregrated, dried, or anything else than a good lump, preferably from the deli counter. You will find you get a lot of variety from a big lump. When you first grate it, it will be soft. But as the days go on it will get harder and harder giving a finer grating experience! So much from one cheese? The genius of the Italians!

I am all for freedom of speech, but the www is a perfect example of what freedom of speech is NOT meant to be.

Recently in the Daily Telegraph Andy Burnham, the culture secretary, gave an interview where he said that the Internet needed some levels of decency placed upon it, and he suggested a rating system as a starting point. The bloggers quickly laid into him; the nice ones laughing at his ignorance about technical possibilities, the nastier ones basically telling him to get lost and leave their precious little World Wide Web alone.

The problem is, Andy Burnham has made a good point based on a very straightforward day-to-day ideology that vast numbers of people can relate to.

There are various things that I class as comfort food. Soup is an obvious one, a fondue is another. But one dish that always got my attention as a child was Veal Milanese from our local Italian trattoria. Not a complicated dish this, just veal in breadcrumbs and pasta with tomato sauce, essentially. 

These days getting good veal is difficult and expensive, and many people are less than happy with the idea of it in the first place. (I will leave the arguments about dairy herds and the culling of male calves for another day.) But to be honest, if you like pork, and many of us do, it makes a wonderful substitute. To be honest, it can be a bit hard to tell the difference. So, here is what I am serving up tonight.