Friends in blogland,

You will probably have twigged that I am not very professional at writing food reviews. It just occured to me a few weeks ago that since I travel a fair bit on business I ought to report on my dining experiences. I have - after all - picked up ideas when travelling that have provided - unfaithfully reproduced - results at home. OK, so I need to sort out the ratings to be more systematic but I will not get to it today.

I manage a pan-European team so travel frequently; usually by air. Not surprisingly my company needs to manage its expenses so always tries to find the cheapest way to transport Oregano to his appointments. Before the telecom bubble burst, I was booked on flights that gave me Gold cards with both BA & Lufthansa. In recent years I am flying many miles/kilometres but hardly scoring any points with the frequent flyer programmes (don't bother shedding crocodile tears for me, this is business!) because I am usually booked on the lowest price tier.

Tonight I was amazed that (contrary to company policy) I was booked on business class with BA to Munich; the cheaper seats were obviously sold out. After a few years of grotty economy class sandwiches (from different airlines) I was actually looking forward to the flight. Well, we were warned that we would be about 30 min late; I have a friend at church who is a BA pilot and understand that this can happen for good reasons so do not want to criticise. Well we boarded 30 min late and took off 60 min late.

So what about the grub? Better than the random sandwich in economy? I'm not so sure. I got a salad with sort of OK fricasée, 3 dubious tomato slices, even more dubious mushroom slices and 3 prawns. OK, this is intended to be almost like a starter, if you arrive at a decent time at a European destination you will want to go out to eat rather than rely on BA as your main meal of the day! However the dressing, real or imagined, was interesting. The last time I flew BA business class - 18 months ago - I got nice tiny corked bottles with dressing - but nothing like that today.

For the last two or more decades friends from our European neighbours or the USA have often said that they cannot understand why in they UK they get salads with good leaf quality but with no dressing. While that was the norm in my family too decades ago, as soon as I had tried I few dressings abroad I understood why they were saying that.

OK, so 3 prawns is not a real meal but a snack...but why did our salad have no dressing? A fellow British passenger complained and told the stewardess that there was no dressing. She (loyally - maybe she gets a Christmas bonus for this) said that there was no separate bottle because the salad was 'already dressed'. If it was dressed it was a mere vapour! After that and supercooled red wine I could not be bothered trying the chocolate cake desert.

I do not know if this was a forgiveable, silly screwup. But the extra Business Class fare was certainly not value for money. What is a little bit of olive oil with say a little less basalmic vinegar? It would hardly bust the airline's budget and would improve a very unambitious meal!