Food that tastes good is what should be in vogue

Trend terror. It's the usual January thing where food is concerned: What to Eat this Year; New Food Fashions; 2014 Food Trends; and so on.

B**gger what tastes good, is it in vogue? It always leaves me with a sensation slap-bang between nausea and rage.

Feeling childishly otherwise, I dug my head into one of the oldest (and least fashionable) cook books I have: a scrappy, stained thing full of recipes I'd hand-written over some years, starting in my teens, gleaned from people known and unknown, some brilliant, some hilariously bad. I settled on - hold your breath, and your sniggers - chicken with sun-dried tomatoes. I made it, and found it every bit as good now as it was then. Sun-dried tomatoes are so deeply unfashionable now, and so horribly murdered by mad, bad over-use in their heyday, but let's not throw the baby out with the bath water.

Try this delicious recipe which came to me circa 1992. Thank you, Mrs Phaditis.

Chicken with olives and sun-dried tomatoes

For 6 to 8 people: 10 chicken thighs / cup best quality sun-dried tomatoes / cup olive oil / cup good calamata olives / cup white wine; not bone dry / improbably, cup red wine, not too tannic / 2 big cloves garlic / cup soy sauce / cup honey / cup tomato puree (not paste).

How: marinade chicken in honey, white wine and soy for about 8 hours. Put sun-dried tomatoes, olives, garlic, oil and most of the marinade in a blender and make it fairly smooth. Pour all over the chicken in baking dish. Cook for one hour at 160C. Add tomato puree and red wine, mix about and cook for another hour. Strain off excess oil if it makes you nervous. Check saltiness (dependent on the type of soy and olives you used). Serve with the plainest long-grain rice, a not-too-buttery mash or good bread.

PERFECTION

It's quite some boast, calling virtually every one of your recipes perfect. But that's exactly what the wonderful, and not famous enough, Felicity Cloake of The Guardian newspaper does. Go to www.theguardian.com, Life and Style section and check her ''How to Cook the Perfect." columns. Or order her book, Perfect (Fig Tree, 2011).

When Cloake chooses a dish to get right, she meticulously cooks her way through versions from a proud handful of revered chefs and food writers, then gathers the best aspects of each recipe, to create her own - always superior - version. Perfect calamari fritte, perfect ginger-cake, perfect Southern fried chicken, perfect tabouleh. I've tried a lot of them. And I can never think of how to improve her version. Why the queen hasn't handed this woman a knighthood already, I just don't know.