Her accuracy rate is 95%. Most trend forecasters aren’t in business long enough to even have an accuracy rate. That’s why IBM, American Express and McDonalds fall over themselves to employ her. In America, Popcorn is chat-show famous. Even Oprah wanted to meet the 60-year-old woman who predicted the success of four-wheel drive vehicles and the failure of New Coke. Popcorn was the first to identify the stay-at-home syndrome (which she called ‘cocooning’) and the growth in home delivery, home business and home shopping. Back in 1981 she told companies that, because we were ‘cocooning’, we would buy more Haagen-Dazs and babygros. She was right.

Popcorn’s methods are suitably futuristic. To research ideas she conducts ‘Hypnotrend Probes’, which regress volunteers under hypnosis. After they have signed a release form, of course. She has even employed psychics. “I’m not like Nancy Reagan. I don’t interview psychics, and then predict what’s going to happen. I’m more interested in how people in general feel about psychics”. So it’s no surprise to discover she has a Third Eye – although you wouldn’t know it to look at her. It exists in only a ‘spiritual’ way. “Every culture talks about an extra sense. Having a Third Eye is like being in the present, but seeing from the future”. Let’s just say that Popcorn is open to whatever is out there.

When I predict rends, it’s hardly “buckle up – we’re on our way to tomorrowland.” I mean, I’ve got a reasonable success rate. I can show you the press cuttings. But I can’t get too excited about this new branch of what’s now being called social anthropology. I need a mission statement that will appeal to the American self-improvement tradition. The same tradition that underpinned Chicken Soup For The Soul, and Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. And a new name. Richard Johnson is just too dull. “We sell okay in Britain” says Popcorn. “But in Britain you don’t think you need to look forward. Even to tomorrow.”

Popcorn has become a multimillionaire by painstakingly identifying the societal trends of the future, and then giving them cutesy little names. There’s ‘99 Lives’ (we’ll all be busy), ‘Egonomics’ (we’ll all be selfish) and ‘Fantasy Adventure’ (we’ll all be wearing hiking boots). “The 17 trends we have right now seem to be pretty stable” says Popcorn. “If I see something that I cannot fit into the 17 trends, I hang on to it. That will kick me into another trend.” Critics say she is merely selling the blindingly obvious. “Well” she says, “Fortune 500 Chairmen don’t think it’s so obvious” says Popcorn. “Otherwise why would they pay me so much money?”

Here are some of my best guesses for next year. Olive Magazine’s 2012 Food Predictions. If they’re correct, I’ll remind you about them in 12 months time……

We can see it in her television series. At the close of a show, after the credits have rolled, we see Nigella sneaking down to the fridge to wolf down the leftovers. It’s not just put on for the cameras. “To tell the truth,” she says, “I’m happy to eat them standing, leaning on the still-open refrigerator door, for my finger-picked breakfast. But I also love the culinary fiddling to which they can lend themselves with great satisfaction.”

If there aren’t any leftovers after dinner, Lawson actually gets a bit miffed. “From my point of view” she says “it wouldn’t mean that lunch had been so delicious that not a morsel remained but, rather, that you hadn’t provided enough to start with. Plenty is the very minimum you can think of producing, I think, though, this is a tempremental thing: some people fear extravagance, others meanness; in my own case, I just have a neurotic need for too much, too much everything.”

Bowls of leftover creamy mashed potatoes? Tomorrow’s fishcakes. Or a pan of bubble and squeak. “This dish” she says, “which consists of fried mashed potatoes and cabbage, has an unexpected buttery and nutty resonance when made with Brussels sprouts.” And to add a touch of elegance to it, if “elegance” is the right word for bubble and squeak, try topping it with a fried or poached egg. “And maybe some crumbled crispy bacon.”

Nigella is a big fan of the nursery food canon – toad-in-the-hole, for instance. “Toad-in-the-hole started off life, as many of these sorts of dishes do, as a kind of British version of cucina povera,” she says. “A way of making meat go farther. Scrapings of meat, the odd scrawny cutlet or anything left over from the Sunday roast would be tossed in batter to provide sustenance and energy.” For a woman of money, Lawson is very firmly grounded.

But then Nigella used leftover trampoline parts for her greenhouse – make-do and mend is clearly in her genetic make-up. She knows how to get the most out of every ingredient; coming up with ingenious ways to serve leftovers, and finding new recipes to use up a glut of fruit or veg. Could those carrots be pureed with almonds to make soup? Or could that loaf be turned into crutons? ‘Waste not, want not’ isn’t some dreary, outdated mantra. It’s a principle that can help all of us eat wisely and well.

And it’s very timely. The fact is that one third of the food we buy in this country ends up in the bin. That includes old tea bags and dirty vegetable peelings – but 15% of it includes perfectly edible food. Work out the sums. It’s quite possible we throw away £30 every time we do a supermarket shop. That’s £120 a month, or £1,440 a year – a lot of money. It’s also a lot of food: as a nation, we throw away 6.7m tons per year. Talk about a throwaway society. And, right now, we just can’t afford it.

Nigella will use leftover chicken in a pie – or goose in a cassoulet. As with bouillabaisse, there is no general rule as to exactly what goes into a cassoulet. It’s just a catch-all for anything edible that a chef decides to toss into a pan. In the olden days, when kitchen fire was kept constantly stoked, cassoulets would claim a twenty-year life span. Just don’t ask for the recipe. As any self-respecting chef will tell you, there IS no recipe. It just accumulates!”

It was Nigella that got us all saving carcasses. Every time you roast a chicken, simply pop the leftover carcass into a plastic bag and throw it into the freezer. When you’ve got three or four carcasses, put them into a stock pot with enough cold water to cover, and simmer for three hours. Maybe throw in some herbs, and a whole onion for the last hour. The broth – once it’s been skimmed and sieved – will be the backbone for many a dish.

Leftovers are obviously better put away in the freezer if the alternative destination is several days lingering in the fridge and then in the bin. “On the other hand,” says Nigella, “beware against using the freezer as a less guilt-inducing way of binning food you know you don’t want. If no one, including you, liked the soup the first time round (and that’s why you’ve got so much left over) there is no point in freezing it for some hopeful future date when, miraculously, it will taste delicious.”

But bagging leftovers – say stews – in single portions can be useful for those evenings when you’re eating alone. “Take the little packet out of the deep freeze before you go to work in the morning and heat it up for supper when you get back at night” says Nigella. “Immensely cheering.” Or knock up a really big batch and freeze the surplus for days when you can’t face cooking. Don’t be prissy about it. Pretty much anything can be used to make soup.

One of Lawson’s favourites is ochazuke – a simple rice soup. Put your leftover rice with a few flavour additions such as spinach, a bit of courgette, fish (tinned or otherwise), bean sprouts, tofu, broccoli, Japanese pickles, whatever’s around. Leftover stirfry would be nice. Make green tea or open an ochazuke sachet (which seems to contain seaweed, vegetable flakes and sesame seeds as well as the green tea), and pour it over the rice. Season, if you like, with soya sauce and sesame oil. Eat.

It’s all about understanding food, and the way it works. It’s about picking food up – and interacting with it. Licking it off the end of your finger while you look at camera two. Like all chefs, Lawson understands food. She won’t abuse a ‘use by’ date, but will treat a ‘best before’ and a ‘sell by’ date as little more than a guideline. The supermarkets only put them on packaging because they’re catering for a public that are very poorly educated about food – and prone to sue at the drop of a hat.

The message from the government is, when you get in the kitchen, exercise some basic portion control. According to WRAP, the government department behind the Love Food, Hate Waste campaign, getting the portions wrong is one of the main reasons we end up wasting food. So www.lovefoodhatewaste.com has a portion planner. But Nigella won’t be interested. Like she says, “I don’t feel a house is a home until there are leftovers in the fridge.”

White was in Manhattan promoting The Devil In The Kitchen – the American edition of his autobiography. His publicists at Bloomsbury were selling him as the original rock-star chef. The one who made Gordon Ramsay cry – who would string up his kitchen juniors by their aprons before dumping them in the dustbin. He was off to do a live cooking demo on The Martha Stewart Show. If he could keep his breakfast down long enough.

Last night it went wrong. It went wrong when White suggested ‘the house cocktail’. The heat of the shot glass threw one member of the drinking party into a blind panic, and she smashed her hand down onto the table. There was flaming sambuca everywhere. White got burnt, and had to ram his hand into a bucket of ice water, and bandage it up in a table napkin, before somebody – nobody quite remembers who – rolled him into a cab.

But somehow he still managed to look handsome – despite a grey demeanour and a tangle of greasy hair. He hadn’t spent any time at the mirror, but it wouldn’t have hurt – The Martha Stewart Show is, after all, the American standard for gracious domestic living. White’s turbot with citrus and cilantro was due to sit alongside a leaf-covered candleholder how-to, and a tip on using old navigational charts as gift wrap. It was the start of one hell of an adventure……

Marco (alongside the equally brilliant and magnificent Mark Hix, Antony Worrall Thompson and Thomasina Miers) will be judging the British Street Food Awards. And by the look of this Marco Pierre White LIDO feature in the Sunday Times magazine, he’s quite excited about it……

Because of the success of grazing foods like sushi, dim sum and tapas, we’ll see more and more chefs learning to be more flexible with their menus. I’ve always had my suspicions that the starter-main-course-dessert structure is actually as much of a bore for the chef as it is for the diner. The only problem with grazing menus that offer lots of small courses is that – whether you like it or not – you’ll be on first name terms with your waiter before you leave the restaurant.

Menus in 2010 will continue to tell us more about the origins of our food. ‘Transparency’ is the buzzword because, these days, we all want to know the farm where our food comes from. We even want to know the name of the farmer. I’m amazed by the number of waiters who have no idea. Admittedly, most of them don’t even know what the soup of the day is, but it seems ridiculous in this day and age that waiters – and even chefs – are working in ignorance.

But the only trend that all critics seem to agree on is the importance of street food in 2010. I read about it first in the wonderful Olive magazine (where I used to be a restaurant reviewer). And now the Guardian are behind the Awards. According to http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/31/the-year-ahead-food, we are up there with the London opening of Heston Blumenthal’s new London restaurant. I fully intend to make the most of being a What’s Hot, before I’m a What’s Not. But, in the meantime, here are my thoughts on the foodie year ahead……

Last year
Salt

This year
Pepper. I kid you not. This trend is in response to the fact that many processed foods are high in sodium, and companies are trying to replace the savouriness of salt with pepper. Without salt life would be impossible. Without pepper, it would be impossibly dull.

Last year’s superfood
Pomegranate

This year’s superfood
Spelt – one of the most ancient cereals known to mankind. It fell from grace because the chaff was so difficult to remove, but now it’s back. It is wheat free and has a Glycaemix Index of just 30, making it a natural choice for those with a wheat allergy and on a low-GI diet. And, let’s be honest, isn’t that pretty much everyone these days?

Last year
Dessert to end a meal.

This year
Savouries to end a meal. The Ivy recommend their savouries to diners who are still lingering over a bottle of red which would be spoiled by a pudding. Just don’t show yourself up by ordering one (whether it’s the welsh rarebit or the herring roe) as a starter. So nouveau!

“You’re on holiday, you’re feeling peckish, what do you do? You don’t really want the expense of a full blown meal, so you think to yourself ‘Do I trust the street vendors?’  The answer in many cases must be no.

My general rule of thumb is, if you’re in a western country (USA, UK, Germany, Australia), don’t touch them with a bargepole — unless, of course, you are into greasy nondescript burgers with boiled onions or boiled frankfurters with tasteless cotton wool bread.   Let’s face it — we don’t do street food well. Except, of course, the great bacon buttie. As long as good quality bacon is used.

Take the sub-continent, the Far East or other Asian Countries and even North Africa and we’re talking a very different story, I love this sort of street food.   In the hawkers’ markets of Singapore I’ve experienced some of the most delicious stuffed flatbreads and piping hot bowls of steaming noodles with chicken and prawns, cooked to order in large woks.

Then in Indonesia you can’t afford to miss the different sate with a variety of sauces including the traditional peanut.   There are times when you yearn a steaming spicy vegetable stir-fry enriched with sambal oelek, soy sauce and honey or some fab seafood encased in a fritter with a spicy chilli sauce.

And in China you can’t go wrong with their vegetable or chicken spring rolls. So cheap to make, but so delicious to eat.  I’ve even eaten saffron ice cream from an Indian street vendor, how brave was that? But it was delicious, and I’m still here to tell the tale. Street food done well has to be one of the nicest forms of instant fodder, but be selective — go where the crowds go; it’s definitely the best endorsement.

I remember a time when it was different. When a ‘free refill’ was a threat rather than a promise. When coffee tasted like tea. I remember industry insiders talking about toasted bran and chicory as “the new coffee” because coffee was dead. But then came Frasier and Friends, and all of a sudden we were ordering double skinnies like we knew what it actually meant. Now coffee shops are everywhere. Baristas are busily swathing espressos in hot milk, whipped cream and flavoured syrup, and handing us back something that looks like an ice-cream sundae. Which isn’t always a good thing.

You see espresso isn’t a solution but a colloid—a mixture of liquids, gases and finely dispersed solids. It has more than 1,500 chemical components detectable by taste and smell—far more than wine. A good espresso will give you an aftertaste that can last for 20 minutes, making it a good match for a short cigar. Wine, which we get terribly uppity about, is judged to have ‘a long finish’ when its aftertaste lasts for over 60 seconds. So the bean and the roast are important. The double dash of raspberry syrup doesn’t really help.

My biggest gripe is with the big coffee chains who buy pre-ground coffee. Or grind enough to last them for two days. I’m here to tell you that oxidisation is public enemy number one. Which is why I liked the smaller places. All the mobilers I know use freshly ground beans. They don’t extract the espresso too quickly (anything under 20 seconds, and I recommend a simple grinder adjustment) and they don’t try to pull multiple shots from one load of coffee. They even put the right amount of steamed milk into my cup.

All I want is my uncommon grounds. Like the coffee I tasted this week from Lean Green Machine. They deserve their success. I know that it’s fashionable to knock Starbucks. And I would always prefer a good coffee cart, given the choice. But all Starbucks is actually doing is free-market capitalism. Better than anyone else. Go live in Cuba, I say. Which doesn’t sound much of a threat any more. And it’s not like we’ve got a British coffee culture to get sentimental about.

To judge by the applications I’ve had so far, Best Hot Drink is shaping up to be a busy old category. This piece in Caterer Search explains why……. 

Click here for coffee article.

Click here to see the Reader’s Digest article.

For journalists, who were (hopefully) going to write about it. So I didn’t invite along the market traders. Or my friend Alan. Or my Mum. That’s torn it. If my Mum finds out, I’m in trouble.

After the launch, Marco and I went to his new-ish place at Stamford Bridge to talk about the judging process. It wasn’t a posh lunch. All we ate was custard tart. He wasn’t sure about the nutmeg — or the egginess of his custard. Graciously, I gave him my opinion.