In the course of my work, I don’t travel to the other provinces much, but I do go to KwaZulu-Natal now and then, and of course, being as I live in Knysna, I eat out in the Cape quite often.

One thing I’ve noticed: you can get an interesting variety of vegetarian food in almost any restaurant in Durban. But in the Cape? Chefs think vegetarians live on pasta, feta cheese, and spinach.

So I’ll let you in on a secret: we don’t.

There are three reasons why you need to know this: firstly because I’m a veggie myself, and if – as happened on Monday – it’s cold and rainy and I walk into your cutesy Victorian-style farm stall and want something to eat, I don’t want to be offered a Greek salad, and nothing else. (True story: everything else on the menu – at a farm stall! Where they sell vegetables! – was made with meat or chicken.)

Secondly because it’s insensitive to other cultures: if you’re halal or kosher, or perhaps Buddhist, I expect you’ll also be likely to choose the vegetarian option. If there is one. And if you haven’t had it in a million other restaurants already.

Or maybe you’ll just stay away (and we all know how tourism thrives when visitors stay away).

And the third reason you need to know that there are more three things on the vegetarian diet is because the world is moving to a more considered, better researched way of eating which is high on protein and low on carbs (as opposed to the high carb, low fat option first espoused – for largely political reasons – by American nutritionists whose science was questionable but whose influence was immense. Read Gary Taubes ‘Good calories, Bad calories’).

And so it’s out of my good-hearted desire to educate you that I recommend Colette Heimowitz’s ‘The new Atkins new you cookbook.’

It’ll open your grill-burned, spinach-covered eyes to the fact that there is a wealth of interesting food to be had. Vegetarian and otherwise.

The book begins with a basic introduction to the now famous diet, and you can skip that if you’re a chef: what’s important here are the recipes – divided as usual into the different meals of the day, and with chapters on important specialties like deserts.

And a whole section on vegetarian cooking, too.

Tempeh-roasted cauliflower and peppers with curried cashew sauce anyone? Imagine seeing that on a restaurant menu. Yumgasm!

20 gm Net carbs; 24 gm total carbs; 4 gm fibre; 19 gm proteins; 31 gm fat; 430 calories.

And here, you see, this is what’s really interesting about this cookbook – all the recipes come with this kind of nutritional information.

Maybe you want to pay attention: with an increasing understanding that it’s carbs and sugars that are making us obese and diabetic, I predict that your guests are going to start demanding this kind of information on your menus in the future.

That and the fact that I would like some variety when I go out to eat.

Buy ‘The new Atkins new you cookbook’ here.