I'm coming to the end of my week as duty cook. Generally the Systems Administrator does the cooking. This is partly an expression of a generous and nurturing character, and partly because whoever does the cooking gets to choose what we eat, and the SA likes to eat cooked meals involving meat, and does not trust me to provide them at regular intervals. It is true that I do believe that toast (with honey) or cheese with olives and oatcakes constitute perfectly adequate meals, especially on nice days when it seems a pity to waste good gardening weather doing stuff in the house, like cooking, but I am happy to be fed and nurtured, so generally the system works pretty well. However, last weekend the SA did ask if I felt like cooking at all, and on Sunday evening used the phrase 'just summon the energy to go and cook', so I said I'd cook this week. That wasn't as noble as it sounds, given that the SA was out all day on Tuesday and out again for lunch on Thursday, but I felt quite inspired, once I'd looked through some books, and it's easier to shop for ingredients across a run of meals than a single one, as you can use things up across a couple of meals, instead of being left with bits of this and that.
Unfortunately even when I cook I don't get to choose everything I would like to eat. Compromise of course runs both ways, and I daresay that some of the SA's curries would be hotter, and Pukka Pies might feature more often on the menu, if I weren't involved. However, there are foods I'm partial to that the SA can't eat, or really doesn't like, including fish, spinach, game, offal and capers. The first two produce bona fide allergic reactions, the others the SA simply finds too rich, or hates the taste.
I've read the newspaper articles saying that many people clinically tested for what they belive to be food allergies and intolerances turn out to have no such thing. My guess is that some of these alleged allergy sufferers are attributing a general malaise to a cause such as wheat intolerance, because it is human nature to want an explanation plus something to blame, and a few who say they have food intolerances simply enjoy making a nuisance of themselves. The SA is unambiguously allergic to shellfish. Eat shellfish, feel very ill, throw up, get the trots. It's pretty clear cut. Freshwater fish and mackerel have a similar effect on a smaller scale, and white fish and salmon disagree about one time in four. This is a pity, as the SA genuinely likes fish and chips and smoked salmon, but there's always the chance that indulgence will be followed by an evening in the bathroom. As a result of never cooking fish at home, I don't know how to cook fish, so I don't miss that, but I would really like to not have to skip over all those recipes involving anchovies. Spinach has the same effect as fish, which is a shame from my point of view, as I like spinach, and a surprising number of recipes include it.
My solution is to choose the forbidden foods when we eat out, and broach the occasional tin of anchovies when the SA is away. If you are wise, you will accept that there are some foodstuffs that you yourself like, but that some other people really can't eat without unpleasant after-effects. Unfortunately, attitudes to food allergies can be very odd, and there are a few unwise people who take a refusal to eat fish, or spinach, as a slur on their cooking, or their region's culinary traditions, or irrational prejudice to be combated and overcome, rather than entirely rational aversion based on painful past experience. When I was thirteen I went on a school exchange visit to Brittany, which being coastal had plentiful seafood. One of the French families took their English charge to a smart seafood restaurant as a treat. She said that she could not eat prawns, because she was allergic to them. They persuaded or bullied her into eating them anyway, presumably believing that she was just being silly, had never tried them, would love them once she did, etc etc. She came out in enormous red spots. Like she said, she was allergic to prawns. I've found the SA's fish allergy queried often enough over the years. What, not even a nice bit of salmon? Not even sole? Not even when I cook it really beautifully? I haven't yet worked out how to tell people politely that their lovingly prepared fish and the SA have sometimes parted company the moment we got home.
When I cook I can still indulge myself among all the things that the SA does eat. Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian comes out, as during the week the SA will be in for a bean stew or a vegetable bake. I like vegetarian food. I usually choose a vegetarian option in ethnic restaurants for ethical and gastronomic reasons, as I don't suppose the chicken in the chicken tikka massala was free range, and Asian cuisines tend to do vegetarian food well. When I'm cooking there will be more root vegetables on the menu, and more of them will be mashed instead of roasted. There might be squash or pumpkin, though there wasn't this week. There will be a lot less red meat, but it is not all lentils and healthy eating, as there will be more full fat dairy products.
Actually, this week's menu all got out of synch. I planned ahead, made a list and stuck to it, like you are supposed to. Then on Wednesday we didn't fancy the left over bolognese sauce with jacket potatoes that by mutual consent had been scheduled for lunch, so they became supper. This pushed Wednesday night's planned adjuki bean stew forward to Thursday, because by then I'd already bought the shitake mushrooms and soaked the beans. On Thursday night the SA was still full of lunchtime curry and wasn't really in the mood for bean stew. Thursday's planned tagliatelle has got bumped forward to tonight (already bought the fresh pasta and the cream), which leaves us long of a packet of ready made puff pastry as I hand the baton back to the SA. Luckily that keeps until December 3rd, so it can get worked in at some stage. I never believe the figures about the hundreds of pounds worth of food that the average family is said to throw away each year. Ours is a fraction of that, though when I was sorting out the kitchen store cupboard the other day I did chuck out some partly used packets of dried beans dating back to 2007-9. Once they get that old, they take forever to cook, if they ever do. It is a sign I should cook a little oftener, to use them up in time.
Showing posts with label cooking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cooking. Show all posts
Friday, 18 November 2011
Thursday, 3 November 2011
another fantasy art work
Apologies, last night's posting was put up without having time to proof-read it, as I heard the crunch of car wheels in the drive while I was still typing. Reading it just now I spotted two 'maybe' in the same paragraph, so I should have taken one of them out. The process whereby once you've used a word once you are more likely to use it again used to be called Lexical Facilitation when I was at university, though it may be called something else now, or have been disproved as a phenomenon. Proper journalists check their copy, pull out the Thesaurus and think of synonyms, hence the invention of the Popular Orange Vegetable, aka carrot.
It is difficult to make Birds custard while someone watches you. The thin yellow liquid seems to take forever to thicken, and there is a terrible temptation to add more custard powder, despite having measured the correct amount in the first place using a proper measuring spoon. If you succumb then by the time you get to the pudding course the custard has set to a thick gloop. Last night I resisted the urge to try and speed the process up, unlike the previous time that my parents arrived while I was still making custard. It turns out that my mother doesn't like custard anyway.
We had an idea for another fantasy art work, this time for the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. A while back I bought a couple of pouffes in a sale, nice squidgy round ones covered with knobbly fabric in a geometric tribal design, that is intended to look like recycled kilim rugs, but was probably made in a factory somewhere for the upholstery trade. I got them for overflow seating, for when we have more than a couple of people round, and the rest of the time they are tucked out of the way in the downstairs part of the sitting room. On Saturday we had friends to supper, so one pouffe was brought upstairs. After the guests had gone the cats reappeared, and one promptly claimed the top of the pouffe as his own and curled up there. They went on using it until we cleared it away before my parents could fall over it, and this morning the Systems Administrator put it back for them. I sometimes think our cats might be hopelessly over-indulged.
Anyway, we decided that the fourth plinth should have a gigantic cat curled up on it. The S.A. favoured ultra-realistic carving in white marble, but I thought that had already been done with Alison Lapper, pregnant. I want a kitsch cat made out of fake fur, like one of those imitation cats they sell in Nauticalia that are slightly too small, but this cat should be much, much too big. Really worryingly large. And I think it should purr at random intervals to disconcert passers by. The S.A. thinks that finding weather proof fake fur could be a problem, but I'm sure it could be done. We are the conceptual artists, we don't have to make the blessed thing ourselves. Like I said, Damian Hirst doesn't paint all his own dots.
It is difficult to make Birds custard while someone watches you. The thin yellow liquid seems to take forever to thicken, and there is a terrible temptation to add more custard powder, despite having measured the correct amount in the first place using a proper measuring spoon. If you succumb then by the time you get to the pudding course the custard has set to a thick gloop. Last night I resisted the urge to try and speed the process up, unlike the previous time that my parents arrived while I was still making custard. It turns out that my mother doesn't like custard anyway.
We had an idea for another fantasy art work, this time for the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. A while back I bought a couple of pouffes in a sale, nice squidgy round ones covered with knobbly fabric in a geometric tribal design, that is intended to look like recycled kilim rugs, but was probably made in a factory somewhere for the upholstery trade. I got them for overflow seating, for when we have more than a couple of people round, and the rest of the time they are tucked out of the way in the downstairs part of the sitting room. On Saturday we had friends to supper, so one pouffe was brought upstairs. After the guests had gone the cats reappeared, and one promptly claimed the top of the pouffe as his own and curled up there. They went on using it until we cleared it away before my parents could fall over it, and this morning the Systems Administrator put it back for them. I sometimes think our cats might be hopelessly over-indulged.
Anyway, we decided that the fourth plinth should have a gigantic cat curled up on it. The S.A. favoured ultra-realistic carving in white marble, but I thought that had already been done with Alison Lapper, pregnant. I want a kitsch cat made out of fake fur, like one of those imitation cats they sell in Nauticalia that are slightly too small, but this cat should be much, much too big. Really worryingly large. And I think it should purr at random intervals to disconcert passers by. The S.A. thinks that finding weather proof fake fur could be a problem, but I'm sure it could be done. We are the conceptual artists, we don't have to make the blessed thing ourselves. Like I said, Damian Hirst doesn't paint all his own dots.
Tuesday, 14 June 2011
my name is cardunulus and I shop in supermarkets
Tesco's financial results (UK like-for-like sales excluding petrol down slightly for the second quarter in a row) have provoked the predicatable comments on the internet expressing satisfaction that the Great Satan is suffering, and vilifying Tesco and supermarkets in general for damaging Independent Shops and destroying the High Street. Professing to hate and distrust Tesco is a popular sport (funny how one in eight retail pounds is spent there). It isn't a line I go with myself. I'm middle-aged enought to remember what shopping was like in the late 60s and 70s, and it wasn't very good. Or at least, there may have been a golden age of grocery shopping then in Soho, but there wasn't in provincial east Devon.
Groceries came from Knotts. The Knott family had a handsome shop with a brown varnished counter and shelves rising up behind. Mr Knott stood behind the counter wearing a sort of brown labcoat. My mother told Mr Knott what she wanted, and he put items one by one into a cardboard box. Sometimes the box was even delivered in a maroon van with Knotts written on the side in gold curly lettering. I'm not sure if cash changed hands over the counter, or if there was an account and Mr Knott kept a record of all that we had and sent the bill later. Shopping took ages, and cost a far higher percentage of the family income than a pair of academics would expect to spend on their groceries nowadays. (I last visited the village about eleven years ago, and Knotts had turned into a reproduction furniture showroom).
I particularly remember the parmesan, which we bought to go on pasta and considered the height of sophistication. It came ready-grated, in a carton about the same size as a a baking powder tin or a jar of ready-made mint sauce. We sprinkled a tiny amount on our food, about as much as a dusting of dandruff on the shoulders, which contributed absolutely nothing to the taste. Whole blocks of parmesan that you can grate or flake yourself? Forget it. They sell those in Tesco, you know.
There was a bread shop, which did sell quite decent bread. A loaf cooked in a tin and cut down the middle before cooking was called a 'split riser', a term I have found used nowhere else in the country, and which does not appear in Elizabeth David's English Bread and Yeast Cookery, but which was certainly current in east Devon circa 1970. I will concede that the bread was good, though you had to queue for a while to get it, and if you got there too late they would have run out. Oh, and if you were thinking of ciabatta, or a French stick that tastes at least vaguely like the ones they sell in France, or sour dough bread, not a hope. They didn't do those in my young days. Tesco do, though.
There was definitely no golden age of locally sourced vegetables in 1970s east Devon. The main greengrocers was Purchells, who displayed the veg on green astroturf, very tasteful. I remember onions and potatoes and big round oranges and all the traditional fruit and veg that people must have been glad to see again after the war. I remember learning to cook from the Penguin Cordon Bleu Cookery Book, or possibly an early Elizabeth David, and wondering what exactly a shallot was, and where you got one from. A grocers in Soho, perhaps, but not Purchells. In Tesco you would be fine now. They have two different sorts of shallots, and red onions. I don't think most of Purchell's vegetables were especially local, I think they came from the local wholesaler. There were a couple of strange, faded shops further down the High Street, that did sell a few tired and wizened locally grown lettuces and tomatoes, but they looked pretty unappetising.
There was a butcher (more queueing) and a fishmonger (ditto). I don't remember the meat of my youth being unbelievably flavoursome compared to the controlled atmosphere packaged, tasteless offerings that are all you can get in a modern supermarket, if you believe half the comments on the net. The fishmonger was a good bloke who ran the local young ornithologist's group and was a pillar of the community and prototypical member of the Big Society. I remember walking a long way in uncomfortable wellington boots to look at a small black dot out on the river mud, and being told 'That is an Avocet' and thinking, is that it? The butcher was more problematic. I rather think he, or his successor in business, eventually set fire to the butcher's shop in an outbreak of Insureandburn, and practically killed the people in the upstairs flat.
A local financial advisor opened a wine shop, which sold refreshments on the premises. I remember being taken to drink grape juice and eat French cheese, which was cut from an enormous wheel of brie and always tasted strongly of ammonia, because the turnover wasn't high enough to get through all the cheese before it went past its best. The grownup drank Rombouts coffee made with an individual filter holding the coffee grounds over the cup, which was filled with boiling water and dripped through into the cup while you waited. I didn't like the cheese or the grape juice particularly, but felt mysteriously chic. We didn't want a latte, or a cappucino, or an espresso instead, because in the 1970s in east Devon these things hadn't been invented, not even in Exeter and that was a City and not just a village.
Lemon grass, okra, limes, organic natural yogurt, muesli without added sugar and whey powder, fresh basil, dried pasta in any shape other than spaghetti or macaroni, any kind of fresh pasta, any kind of fresh noodles, tahini paste, puy lentils as well as the orange ones that go to mush when you cook them, chapati flour, pitta bread, fresh coriander, chorizo, parma ham, black eyed beans, whole cinammon sticks. You could not buy these in my village growing up, but you can in Tesco (or Sainsbury, Waitrose etc. Other supermarkets are available).
And yes, I know that I could visit a town centre and go to a butcher and a baker and a deli and a greengrocer and queue in each of them, and carry it all back to the car, but it would take most of the morning and cost significantly more than going to the supermarket. Sorry, but it would. And I know that the foodies tell me that food from small, local producers sold in real, local little shops just tastes so much better, but I defy them to spot the difference between pulses bought in the supermarket and ones I made a twenty mile round trip to the nearest deli to buy. And I know that plastic wrapping destroys the flavour of cheese, and I should have been to a speciality cheese shop to get my parmesan, but now that we aren't big swinging dicks in the City we do like to get some change from twenty quid when we buy cheese. And supermarket opening hours are so jolly convenient. I'm sorry, but they are. We stayed in a cottage once outside Ludlow, a foodie hotspot, and still ended up buying the ingredients for most of our suppers in the local Tesco and not the lovely independent foodie shops, because we wanted to spend the days looking at gardens and houses and strange rural churches. Leaving the shopping sitting all day in the car seemed a fast track to rancid milk and food poisoning, even in September, and by the time we got back each evening after a hard day touristing all the foodie shops had shut.
I bet loads of the people who moan about supermarkets shop in them. If you aren't going to, you either have an awful lot of money or a lot of time on your hands.
Groceries came from Knotts. The Knott family had a handsome shop with a brown varnished counter and shelves rising up behind. Mr Knott stood behind the counter wearing a sort of brown labcoat. My mother told Mr Knott what she wanted, and he put items one by one into a cardboard box. Sometimes the box was even delivered in a maroon van with Knotts written on the side in gold curly lettering. I'm not sure if cash changed hands over the counter, or if there was an account and Mr Knott kept a record of all that we had and sent the bill later. Shopping took ages, and cost a far higher percentage of the family income than a pair of academics would expect to spend on their groceries nowadays. (I last visited the village about eleven years ago, and Knotts had turned into a reproduction furniture showroom).
I particularly remember the parmesan, which we bought to go on pasta and considered the height of sophistication. It came ready-grated, in a carton about the same size as a a baking powder tin or a jar of ready-made mint sauce. We sprinkled a tiny amount on our food, about as much as a dusting of dandruff on the shoulders, which contributed absolutely nothing to the taste. Whole blocks of parmesan that you can grate or flake yourself? Forget it. They sell those in Tesco, you know.
There was a bread shop, which did sell quite decent bread. A loaf cooked in a tin and cut down the middle before cooking was called a 'split riser', a term I have found used nowhere else in the country, and which does not appear in Elizabeth David's English Bread and Yeast Cookery, but which was certainly current in east Devon circa 1970. I will concede that the bread was good, though you had to queue for a while to get it, and if you got there too late they would have run out. Oh, and if you were thinking of ciabatta, or a French stick that tastes at least vaguely like the ones they sell in France, or sour dough bread, not a hope. They didn't do those in my young days. Tesco do, though.
There was definitely no golden age of locally sourced vegetables in 1970s east Devon. The main greengrocers was Purchells, who displayed the veg on green astroturf, very tasteful. I remember onions and potatoes and big round oranges and all the traditional fruit and veg that people must have been glad to see again after the war. I remember learning to cook from the Penguin Cordon Bleu Cookery Book, or possibly an early Elizabeth David, and wondering what exactly a shallot was, and where you got one from. A grocers in Soho, perhaps, but not Purchells. In Tesco you would be fine now. They have two different sorts of shallots, and red onions. I don't think most of Purchell's vegetables were especially local, I think they came from the local wholesaler. There were a couple of strange, faded shops further down the High Street, that did sell a few tired and wizened locally grown lettuces and tomatoes, but they looked pretty unappetising.
There was a butcher (more queueing) and a fishmonger (ditto). I don't remember the meat of my youth being unbelievably flavoursome compared to the controlled atmosphere packaged, tasteless offerings that are all you can get in a modern supermarket, if you believe half the comments on the net. The fishmonger was a good bloke who ran the local young ornithologist's group and was a pillar of the community and prototypical member of the Big Society. I remember walking a long way in uncomfortable wellington boots to look at a small black dot out on the river mud, and being told 'That is an Avocet' and thinking, is that it? The butcher was more problematic. I rather think he, or his successor in business, eventually set fire to the butcher's shop in an outbreak of Insureandburn, and practically killed the people in the upstairs flat.
A local financial advisor opened a wine shop, which sold refreshments on the premises. I remember being taken to drink grape juice and eat French cheese, which was cut from an enormous wheel of brie and always tasted strongly of ammonia, because the turnover wasn't high enough to get through all the cheese before it went past its best. The grownup drank Rombouts coffee made with an individual filter holding the coffee grounds over the cup, which was filled with boiling water and dripped through into the cup while you waited. I didn't like the cheese or the grape juice particularly, but felt mysteriously chic. We didn't want a latte, or a cappucino, or an espresso instead, because in the 1970s in east Devon these things hadn't been invented, not even in Exeter and that was a City and not just a village.
Lemon grass, okra, limes, organic natural yogurt, muesli without added sugar and whey powder, fresh basil, dried pasta in any shape other than spaghetti or macaroni, any kind of fresh pasta, any kind of fresh noodles, tahini paste, puy lentils as well as the orange ones that go to mush when you cook them, chapati flour, pitta bread, fresh coriander, chorizo, parma ham, black eyed beans, whole cinammon sticks. You could not buy these in my village growing up, but you can in Tesco (or Sainsbury, Waitrose etc. Other supermarkets are available).
And yes, I know that I could visit a town centre and go to a butcher and a baker and a deli and a greengrocer and queue in each of them, and carry it all back to the car, but it would take most of the morning and cost significantly more than going to the supermarket. Sorry, but it would. And I know that the foodies tell me that food from small, local producers sold in real, local little shops just tastes so much better, but I defy them to spot the difference between pulses bought in the supermarket and ones I made a twenty mile round trip to the nearest deli to buy. And I know that plastic wrapping destroys the flavour of cheese, and I should have been to a speciality cheese shop to get my parmesan, but now that we aren't big swinging dicks in the City we do like to get some change from twenty quid when we buy cheese. And supermarket opening hours are so jolly convenient. I'm sorry, but they are. We stayed in a cottage once outside Ludlow, a foodie hotspot, and still ended up buying the ingredients for most of our suppers in the local Tesco and not the lovely independent foodie shops, because we wanted to spend the days looking at gardens and houses and strange rural churches. Leaving the shopping sitting all day in the car seemed a fast track to rancid milk and food poisoning, even in September, and by the time we got back each evening after a hard day touristing all the foodie shops had shut.
I bet loads of the people who moan about supermarkets shop in them. If you aren't going to, you either have an awful lot of money or a lot of time on your hands.
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