The Guardian recently ran a feature where they asked chefs in the public eye what their guilty food pleasures were. It makes for interesting reading. Who would have thought that Gordon Ramsay protege Angela Hartnett had a thing for Babybel cheese or that Jason Atherton of London’s Maze liked nothing better than a Nando’s cheese wrap?

That chefs, even those with Michelin stars, want to eat the same food as everyone else shouldn’t really be a surprise. Years back, when Martin Wishart was still at Hadrian’s brasserie in The Balmoral, he did an interview with a group of journalists. We all looked at his menu of locally sourced ingredients that were prepped in a variety of painstaking ways and asked what he liked to eat when he was at home.

‘Normal food,’ he explained with a look that made it clear he thought that we were all barking. ‘I spend all day working with food, making complex dishes and tasting them. When I get home, if I’m hungry, I just want to eat something simple.’

He was right. It was a daft question. I’m not sure what we were thinking: that he would do a fourteen hour stint in the kitchens and then come home to whip up lamb four ways?

The idea of any food being a guilty pleasure seems wrong to me. There are some foods that I know I shouldn’t eat too often or I’ll end up looking like John Prescott. Eating them doesn’t make me feel guilty. It just makes me think that I’m going to have to spend another fifteen minutes on the cross-trainer.

Top of my list would be: chips, having a cheese course and a dessert, fry-ups and an annual kebab when drunk. The one thing thing that I enjoy most but is likely to knock a couple of years off my life expectancy is the crisp, salty skin from a roast chicken.