Snapshot: Alternative use for chopsticks #1

Thanks to the selection of oriental eateries near HQ, our office is peppered with single use wooden chop sticks. You'll find them sticking proudly out of pen pots, squirrelled absent mindedly in the back of stationary drawers, lying forgotten under keyboards and scattered, sheathed in their tin paper coats, on desks. They've generally been discarded in favour of more immediate methods of delivery (fork, spoon or simply slurped straight from the takeaway tub) while slaving over the keyboard - either working through lunch or in the midst of a midday youtube marathon.

But these unloved implements can have another life if used well. A chosen few meet after hours for our monthly instalment of Craft Club where my colleagues and I knit, stitch and gossip. I was in the middle of a skill swap - the trade of my colleagues insight into the art of crochet with my (somewhat mediocre) knitting skills - when I realise that, though we had a crochet hook between us, neither of us had knitting needles. I went off in search of a stand-in and happened across these humble chopsticks.

I must admit that they were pretty good (splinters aside!)...

The Chocolate Festival, London

You may already be aware of my love affair with chocolate but if you’re not, needless to say that I am a big fan. I won’t go into detail (it’s best not to get me started) but there was a time when I couldn’t go a day without some form of the good stuff. I’m reformed now but it’s still my weak spot. I’m heartened that I’m not as bad as The Boy who can’t sit still if there’s an open box of chocolate on display.

With this in mind, you can imagine my frustration about the fact that on a weekend when I’m schlepping oop North (to visit a friend who lives on an organic farm – post to follow) the capital will be hosting a festival devoted to my vice. The Chocolate Festival runs from today until Sunday and will be a melting pot for over 40 mouth-watering exhibitors. There will be demonstrations from some of the world’s best chocolatiers will be taking place throughout the weekend so I’m truly missing out. 

If you’re unlucky enough to already have plans, do not despair. They have already confirmed dates in March next year in Brighton and London to spread the chocolatey goodness.  

The Chocolate Festival runs from Friday 9th until Sunday 11th December 2011 from 11am - 8pm Daily (6pm on Sunday) at Southbank Centre Square, Belvedere Road, London SE1 8XX.

Make your own Christmas cake "kit"?

On my adventures in supermarket-land, I’ve noticed that many of them are selling kits for making the traditional Christmas cake. Now, on the one hand, I’m happy that they might encourage festive cake virgins to give the stodgy fruit slabs a try, which has got to be a good thing. One the other hand, the pointless packaging (individual sachets of spices? Really?) immediately gets my back up and leaves me wondering: is it really that hard to weigh out a few ingredients? It seems like commercialised “convenience” to me. It's been quite the cookery conundrum for me.

The kits themselves aren’t cheap – convenience, after all, costs – and aren’t a complete cake package. Each “kit” contains pre-weighed flour, sugar, almonds and spices as well as ready-soaked dried fruit .You’ll need to add butter and eggs which come at an additional cost. The kit itself will set you back anywhere between £7.50 - £15 depending on if you get one when its reduced. Now that the furious run-up to the big day has begun in earnest, they are discounting them left, right and centre. Assuming that you use free range eggs, you’ll need to fork out at least an additional £3. With your average home baked cake coming in around the £7.50 mark, you’d do better to make your own from scratch if you’re watching the pre-Christmas pennies.

The only thing that these kits seem to offer is convenience in the form is pre-weighed and pre-soaked ingredients as well as a tried-and-tested recipe. I suppose it could be helpful if you really don’t know where to start and probably scores highly in the supermarket impulse buy league tables. For a few of my friends, 2011 has been the year of the first Christmas cake. Instead of turning to the supermarkets for assistance, they got together and made a night of it. All newbies together; no pressure to impress, just cake baking at its best.

Let’s face it; we all know how to weigh out ingredients and there’s nothing out of the ordinary in a Christmas cake. The most difficult part is remembering to soak the fruit before you make the cake but this could be done overnight if you’re really running short of time. As far as tried-and-tested recipes, you have the internet at your fingertips! The world is your cakey (Noro-free) oyster. Plus, I’m sure there’s someone – whether it’s a parent, grandparent, friend or kindly colleague – who would lend you their trusty recipe.

So please don’t be fooled into getting one of these kits. Sure it’s probably better than buying one readymade but making one from scratch – which, in this case, basically involved getting the scales out – isn’t much harder.

Complete first-timer? Not sure where to start? The first thing you need to do is soak your fruit!

Food on the Brain

An amusing article in the Metro made me snort into my morning cup of tea. Apparently a study in the US has been evaluating the male mind. (Sometimes I toy with chucking in my job and becoming one of these mysterious “researchers” – how do you become one? It sounds like great fun!) I’ll side-step the predictable sexist remarks about there not being much to study, etc  and skip straight to the punch line. According to this study, men think about sex 19 times a day on average. That’s good and all but the interesting bit for me was that this only just trumped food (at 18 times a day) in their thought league table.

Now, you may have noticed that I’m not a boy (really really – verified by medical professionals and everything) which made me wonder a) how often to girls think about food in a day and b) how often to I think about food in a day? I’m tempted to keep a running tally on my hand though I think I’d probably skew the statistics as I tend to think about food rather a lot…

The question that dwarfs all others though, is what do men think about the rest of the time? My suggestions are detailed above!

Stall let down

Everywhere I look, I read the unhappy tales of our home grown producers and suppliers here in the UK. The price wars of the major out-of-town supermarkets have milked footfall from our town centres and this, combined with consumers looking for perfect produce available at all times of the day and night, has threatened many small businesses.

Normally, I’m a vocal advocate of small local businesses. As a consumer, I would rather put my money into a small business that will appreciate the income and will be more likely to feed this back into the surrounding community than a huge faceless corporation. Plus, the produce tends to top-notch because the owners take pride in providing great food and the whole buying process is more personal and friendly. I love becoming a “regular”; you get lots of insider information, tailored recommendations (much better than Amazon!) and a big smile to boot.

I’ve recently started a new job in London and, naturally, I set out during my first week to explore the foodie haunts local to my base in Westminster. I was overjoyed to discover the hustle and bustle of Strutton Ground, just minutes from my office, where the maze of Eat and Pret outlets morph into one-off bakeries and stalls groaning with clothes, hot meals and coffee. I was in my element!

I was especially pleased to find a small grocers stall with lots of fresh fruit and vegetables. I couldn’t resist buying a bag of figs and some late raspberries to go with my post-cycle breakfasts during the rest of the week. Happily rustling my paper bag of treats, I returned to the office with a smile on my face. Unfortunately, my smile quickly faded the next day when I discovered that my beautifully ripe figs had gone bad in less than 24 hours. I opened them up to find that they were rotten from the core – what a waste! The raspberries were better but were right on the cusp of being over-ripe and some were specked with mould. What a waste!

And herein lies the problem. This might have been bad luck. The stall may be a pillar of quality most of time and may have lots of regular custom. However in my mind, in these hard times every company needs to up their game. I know many consumers who, after my experiences, wouldn’t return. They wouldn’t bother to go back and let the seller know (which I will be – feedback is important) as they’re busy people. They’ll use it as another reason to by-pass their local suppliers in favour of schlepping to the nearest Tesco because you know where you are with the big four. It frustrates me that companies are wasting such a prime opportunity to make a great first impression.

You may say that this is simply natural selection in the business world. If a company doesn’t do what they do well, they won’t survive. And I would agree with you but I would appeal to the small business owners out there – please take note. It genuinely amazes me how many shops - both big and small - seem to get the simple things wrong. If you want to survive in these hard times, you need to up your game! Take pride in your produce, be friendly and offer useful advice – these are simple things that will keep people coming back.

Do you prefer swinging your basket around your local market or filling your trolley at your local supermarket? Do you have any thoughts on your local shops to share?

No such thing as a free lunch?

Volunteers in the Feeding 5k kitchen working hard to feed the hungry lunchtime masses

Or so they say. Who are 'they' anyway? Because they are wrong.

Friday saw queues that stretched around Trafalgar Square as many hurried to be one of the lucky 5,000 to be fed with surplus food that would have otherwise been thrown away. The sun shone as speakers instilled the captive audience with the virtues of creating less food waste. I stood in raptures as we were told stories of sorry cauliflowers that grew ‘too big’ for the supermarkets standards (!) and delicious but ‘misshapen’ fruit and vegetables that are turned away by the Big Four.

Beautiful curly carrots!

Producers and chefs alike had turned out to meet and share with their knowledge with the public and it was great to see the number of people that had been drawn to the event. I got my (geeky) thrills by spotting Valentine Warner casually mingling with the crowds before his turn on stage to cook in front of the masses.

We arrived early, just before midday, as we were keen to taste what discarded dishes the huge industrial kitchens had put together. I was slightly staggered by the queue – there must have been about two hundred hungry folks ready and waiting – but this moved extremely quickly when food starting being served. There were plenty of friendly volunteers around to direct us to our free portion of vegan veggie curry and rice, which was flavourful but not at all spicy so it seemed to please everyone from us young professionals in office wear to the under-fives in buggies.

Grabbie, grabbie. Visitors go mad for discarded produce.

Once we’d filled our faces, we explored a little more of what the event had to offer. There was an air of premature January-sale-hysteria as volunteers from the wonderful Fareshare and local school children handed out bags of fruit and vegetables, which would have otherwise gone to waste. Although the odd slightly squishy grape was obviously sub-par (though still perfectly edible), the vast majority was virtually perfect. Between us, my group were given half a dozen bananas, a large bunch of grapes, a teensy pumpkin and four or five pears which were all delicious and apparently unblemished. We also saw curly carrots and small pineapples in the arms of fellow revellers. This prompted a lot of healthy debate about the peculiar standards the supermarkets have developed in response to our demands. Why on earth are the supermarkets throwing perfectly good food like this away?

A mere hour inspired a lot of conversations among my peers, which has got to be a good thing. The most common comment that I overheard was the realisation that we’re so lucky to have food at all and disbelief that, while some are starving, we are turning edible food away because it doesn’t conform to our aesthetic expectations. And all of this is before the food even hits our shelves! We throw away about 4.4 million tonnes of food that could have been eaten. If we stop this blatant waste of resources, our family finances will see the benefits as well as the environment that we live in.

If you’re looking for more information on how to reduce your food wastage, have a look on Love Food Hate Waste. If you’d like to help the amazing efforts of Fareshare in redistributing unwanted food to some of the most needy in our nation, have a look at their website. To find out more about the fantastic Feeding 5k day, have a peek at this year's event website.

Falling food waste and a free lunch

Food prices are rising while salaries are staying stubbornly still and that’s if you’re lucky enough to have successfully found and kept hold of a job in the last year or so. Many households are struggling with rising bills and a new study from the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) has found that the current economic situation has encouraged everyone to reduce the amount of food that we throw away.

Despite a 13 per cent drop in usable food waste, as a nation we still generate 7.2 million tonnes of household food waste every year of which around 60% could have been eaten. This is crazy – when money is tight, we should be watching the (compost) bin as well as our wallets. I don’t think that the confusion over sell by dates helps though hopefully the recent shake-up of regulations will make things clearer for everyone. However, I think many people (and many of my twenty-something-old peers are particularly guilty of this one) need good ways to use-up leftovers.

If you’re London-based and interested in reducing your food waste, you might want to check out Feeding 5k in Trafalgar Square tomorrow. With plenty of inspiration by way of living cooking demos from the likes of Valentine Warner and Thomasina Miers, you can find out great ways to cut the amount of edible stuff that you might otherwise throw away. If you're not London-based, fear not as I'll be schlepping over to capture the best bits (and bites) so that you're not left out.

As well as highlighting clever cooking, the event is championing the work of fantastic charities like Fare Share, a national charity who redistribute surplus food, that would otherwise be discarded, to the most needy. They also provide training on nutrition and safe food preparation. What lovely people!

So head on over to see the waste-eating pigs and flex your muscles while having a go at surplus apple pressing. Oh and you get a free lunch to boot! What more could you want?

Feeding 5k will be taking place on Friday 18th November in Trafalgar Square, London between 12 and 2pm. First come first served!

Journal Lust

“Let me pencil that into my diary” isn’t a statement that rings true anymore as most people I know don’t keep a paper diary anymore. Generally, the dates in question will be tapped into a mobile phone, i-pad or computer rather than whipping out a pencil and jotting down the information. I’m old fashioned and keep a hard copy that goes everywhere with me – it’s a big factor in organising my increasingly hectic life. The end of the year isn’t all that far away and I’ve already started making plans for 2012 (scary stuff!) so I’m in dire need of another diary.

While perusing new notebooks, I came across this elegant recipe journal made by Moleskine which looks an absolute delight for those who love design and food. It’s designed to be a vessel for your culinary thoughts and has sections waiting to be filled with recipes and ideas. I love the little icons on the pages and the way the blank pages sing with potential. I have a recipe folder where I keep snippets from magazines and where I write down my tried-and-tested recipes for another day but I don’t tend to sketch or jot down ideas. The Moleskine journal makes my recipe folder look really rather sterile in comparison!

I’ve made my own sketchbooks and journals in the past and I wonder if I could better this. I do find the paper that Moleskine favour for their bog-standard notebooks tends to be a little thin for my liking. The format and page size (21cm by 13cm) is slightly narrower than A5 (21cm by 14.8cm) but it’s a nice compromise as its large enough to get a recipe (unless it’s really complicated) on to one page without being too big to prop up in the kitchen.

To buy or not to buy, that is the question! Maybe I should add it to my wish list in the hope that someone will be inspired to pop it in my stocking just before 2012 rolls around!

Fat-Free Gloop

Fat free yogurt. When will I ever learn? One word. Bleugh! Okay, so maybe it’s an onomatopoeia. Either way, it was grim and I couldn’t bring myself to finish. This was mainly down to the strangely chalky and bitter aftertaste which crept in after the (equally bitter) disappointment at the lack of any kind of flavour had subsided. I double-checked the packaging and confirmed to myself that, logically, there should be at least three flavours present – yogurt, vanilla and chocolate. Alas, all that my taste buds found was an assault of sickly sweetness as the gloop covered my tongue. I’ve said it once but I’ll say it again: bleugh.

My bad experience drew me to consider the ingredients listed on the side of the offending tub. I’m assuming that vanilla comes under the blanket term “flavourings” but I was pretty bewildered by some of the other (alien) components catalogued in micro-lettering.

Acesulfame K and Aspartame are both artificial calorie-free sweeteners which is 180-200 times sweeter than table sugar which, individually, can have a bitter aftertaste. In combination with the other sweetener listed, Aspartame, it takes on a more sugar-like taste where each one masks the others aftertaste and tastes sweeter than the sum of its component sweeteners. Clever but a little Franken-food to me! Especially as it obviously hasn't worked in this case. Both sweeteners have obviously been approved for general used by the powers that be but some critics claim that they haven’t been tested adequately enough. Some suggest that artificial sweeteners of this ilk may be carcinogenic but this has been dismissed by the governing bodies.

You may recognise pectin on the list which will, I think, have been used as a thickening agent. Pectin is the lovely stuff that makes your jam set and occurs naturally in varying amounts in fruits like apples and oranges. In Europe, you'll sometimes see pectin on ingredients lists as E440 (or E440(i) or E440(ii). Strangely, the yogurt also contains gelatin, which would also act as a thickener. Animal skin and bone with your yogurt? Mm-mm! Tastes like mammal! Needless to say, this "delicious dessert" isn't vegetarian.

There's a little note saying “A source of phenylalanine” too which after some quick research tells me that the yogurt is fortified with an essential amino acid which acts as a building block for proteins in the body. Our bodies break aspartame down into its components including phenylalanine. This is good for the majority (as it is an essential amino acid which our bodies can’t make and we have to find through our food) but bad news for people with phenylketonuria, a rare genetic disorder which means that the body can’t metabolise phenylalanine.

I don’t like my food to be fooled around with though I'm aware that the only reason many of us are here today is simply the fact that we can process and keep food for distribution around the country or even world. I like to limit my processed food intake and generally make most things from scratch (as you can probably tell!). I haven't taken this to the level of my parents - my Dad makes his own yogurt! Maybe this is the kick start that I need to try it! Next time, I'll definitely be going for full fat yogurt and adding my own chocolate sprinkles (more than 0.5% too!). No matter what you eat, take the time to become familiar with what's actually in it.

'Sell By' Dates set to expire?

There's a lot of hoo-ha going around the newspapers today regarding the dates that appear on the packaging of boxes, cartons and wrappers that go in our baskets and trolleys. You know how those reporters like to make mountains out of molehills! Some of the headlines make my blood boil - "Sell-by dates to be scrapped to cut food waste" is a prime example from the BBC News website today - as they don't make it clear enough that, although some of the advisory dates are changing, there will still be dates on food wrappings.

Headlines aside, there seems to be a tug of war going on between the government who wants to cut the amount of edible food that we throw away and the food companies and supermarkets who are petrified of getting sued after consumers eating gone off produce. I can see where both are coming from - as a nation, we throw away the equivalent of £12 million a year in food which we've bought but don't eat and during 2010, there were over 84,500 cases of food poisoning in England and Wales. We need to find a happy medium that, at the end of the day, benefits us 'normal folk' as consumers.

Dates on food packaging can be useful; they're used by the supermarkets for stock rotation (whereby the seller takes measures to ensure that the oldest stock is sold first which in itself reduces waste) and many consumers use them as a guide when planning how to use the contents of their fridge or larder. Having a 'Used by' date on packaging for food which is deemed perishable (foods which need to be kept refrigerated) is actually a legal requirement in the UK in order to ensure that the food that we buy is 'safe' to eat.

The change in guidelines which are being publicised will banish 'Expiry' dates on items which won't actually become hazardous to health after a certain date and replace it with a 'Best Before' date. This would apply to things like vegetables, dried pasta or jam and it's like saying "you'd like to enjoy this item to the max, you're better off eating it before Tuesday when it won't make you ill but might not taste quite as good".

Any changes to the way we perceive food is a positive in my book but, to me, this doesn't go quite far enough. Although some bacteria that is present in food that has 'gone off' doesn't change the smell or appearance of the food, I do think that a little common sense and knowledge does go a long way. I feel like this needs to be taught, along with nutrition and cost effective cooking measures, in schools while children are still developing their relationship with food and their ideas about meals. There are a few ways that I would test an apple, onion or cucumber, for example, to see if they were past their best.

Craving more information about cutting down your food waste? Check out Love Food Hate Waste for hints and tips on everything from cutting down the amount that you buy to canny uses of those pesky leftovers.

The Sweetest of Potatoes

Fancy a slice of the action?

I love sweet potato. It may not be the prettiest of vegetables but its orange flesh pleasantly treads the line between savory and sweet. They're versatile and good for you as they're high in a range of vitamins, complex carbohydrates (which keep you fuller for longer and burn slowly in your belly) and fibre. They have also been rated the highest for nutritional value in a study that surveyed common vegetables. They're delicious whether they're roasted, boiled or mashed but be sure to have a little fat (such as a dressing of olive oil) with your potato to encourage your update of the precious beta-carotene that its naturally bursting with.

So, the sweet potato. An all round winner? Hrm, maybe not. If you head to your local supermarket or grocer, you'll be faced with roots that have winged their way to the shelf from America. The US of A. That means that if your potatoes came from North Carolina (the leading sweet potato growing state), they will have travelled over 3,700 miles to get to your dinner plate. My research shows that sweet potato season runs from September to March so maybe the suppliers see the US as the answer to summer shortages but it still seems crazy to me to be shipping them all that way. I'm no expert but I wonder how much of the nutrients are lost during transportation.

Anyway, The Boy and I got talking about this subject and he (being particularly passionate about these orange beauties) challenged me to grow my own. Baring in mind that we don't have a garden, this is likely to be difficult. I doubt that we have the space to grow potatoes on our window sills and the distict lack of soil makes growing them on our driveway sound a bit far fetched too. Having done some reading, it seems that I'm a bit late of the starting blocks too as tubars need to be started in February to be ready for September. Ho hum!

Still, the dates have been put in my diary and that gives me plenty of time to work out how (and where!) I'm going to grow them. I do love a challenge, don't you?

How to make your own delicious hedgerow brew

Our ‘drinks cabinet’ (the top section of our free-cycled side board) holds everything from beers (pre-fridge storage) to a lovely bottle of red wine given to me by my Dad which we haven’t yet had an occasion to drink yet. My most prized bottles, however, are mismatched reused wine and spirit bottles which are filled with a glorious burgundy liquid and dark berries – sloe gin.

My parents made sloe gin and elderberry wine when I was very small and I was reintroduced to the warming wonder of this berry-infused spirit while spending the festive period with The Boy’s family. They drink it straight (in small measures) but it’s lovely with lemonade too. The beauty of it is that it is wonderfully simple to make and the key ingredient – the sloe berries – are free! I see it as my first foray into the world of home brewing though I suppose it’s technically infusing. The kit is cheap (or free too) as I picked up a funnel for a few pence from the supermarket and saved an old spirit bottle.

Fresh sloe berries and my first bottle of sloe gin

The sloe, or blackthorn, bush can be found all over the place but usually in woodland or as hedgerows in the countryside where they are sometimes planted as shelter for game birds. That said, I found mine on the tow path of my local canal which runs through our town and I’ve heard of people finding berry-laden bushes in the middle of cities. Their dark blue-purple berries look a little like hard blueberries but they are actually a drupe, like peaches. Blackberries, their fellow hedgerow buddy of the same season, are the same but are aggregated drupes – lots of small fruits as part of the same berry.

Before you go rushing out with your buckets at the ready, I must interject now. Tradition says that sloe season starts after the first frost of Autumn which is usually around October. Some people hurry up the process by picking the berries when they are ripe and then freezing them at home. Sneaky! You'll start seeing young fruit on the bushes from around next month onwards. A walking stick or broom can be useful for pulling the higher branches down to picking level. I tried to improvise with a flattened out wire coat hanger which sort of did the trick until some nearby fishermen used their net poles to drag them down to my level. Such gentlemen!

Once bottled, the spirit needs to mature so I bottled mine over 6 months ago and it’s just starting to mellow now. It’s getting to the time when I should think about removing the berries and rebottling the gin to allow it to further mature. Apparently, you can then top up the bottles of old berries with cider to make slider!

My sloe gin after 1 hour then again after a day

Although it’s a while until the sloes will be out, Gordon’s do a sloe gin which can be bought from the supermarkets. Bramley & Gage do a delicious organic sloe gin too; I wouldn’t be able to resist getting a bottle of their elderflower liqueur as well if I was ordering from their online shop! I would recommend saving glass bottles as you get them too – I like clear glass bottles (so that you can see how the colour is developing in the bottle) with screw tops and have a stash of them in the back of the cupboard. Just be sure to keep a bottle that will be big enough.

Sloe Gin

450g sloe berries, approximately
750ml gin, or there abouts
350g granulated sugar
A bottling funnel
An empty sterilised glass bottle
- Rinse the berries well and leave to drain in a colander.
- Prick each berry with a sterilised needle or knife and place into the bottle.
- Pour the sugar into the bottle through the funnel.
- Top up the bottle with gin so that the berries are completely covered.
- Turn the bottle every so often. At least once a week but more often if you remember. The gin will gradually become infused with the colour and flavour of the berries.

Coming soon: Sloe Gin cocktails for those balmy summer nights!

Volcano Tea and Fire pit Sausages

What better to way to celebrate a birthday than to have a beach picnic? A bit of sand in your sandwiches never hurt anyone but the Birthday Boy had simpler ideas for his festive feast. So we packed up our bags with blankets, bikini’s (In April! Who were we kidding?) and bundles of fire wood and headed to Inch Strand beach.

We set up camp and built a fire pit with rocks and pebbles to fill with dried out seaweed, drift wood and logs from our own stash. With the sun shining, the Birthday Boy installed himself in front of the fire and grilled sausages while everyone else collected pointy sticks (for eating said sausages) and sipped homemade lemonade. When the sausages were declared to be suitably browned, they were spiked with driftwood sticks and dunked into Ballymaloe Country Relish. Delicious!

As more relatives and friends trooped across the sand, cheese on homemade soda bread topped with more Relish was handed out. Now all we needed was a good cup of tea and maybe a slice of cake to round things off.

“Where’s the volcano kettle?” Someone shouted. Volcano kettle!? Had I heard rightly? My hosts produced a stainless steel contraption and proceeded to explain how it worked. Despite its exotic name, the principle is quite simple.

Five Minute Scribble Volcano Kettle

Volcano kettles, sometimes known as Kelly or Storm Kettles, have a central chamber for wood which is lit to boil water in a surrounding chamber. They were first dreamt up by ghillies on the West Coast of Ireland and are ideal for brewing a cuppa on the go. Because the fire chamber is small, you can use twigs, sticks and leaves (or in our case, drift wood and dried out seaweed) to boil your water rather than having the hassle of building a proper fire. The built in spout and attached handles make it easy to pour too. How cool is that?

Teas all round!

Review: Omnivore’s Dilemma

My last trip to our local library took me past their cookery section. Amongst the various tempting recipe books, ‘The Omnivore’s Dilemma’ caught my eye. Having watched Food Inc, my interest in food production and processing is growing so I decided to give it a try. That’s the great thing about the library – if you see a book that you fancy, you can take it home for free with no obligation.

The book distils America’s food chain down to its key components – corn, chicken, beef, lettuce – before giving you the warts and all truth behind the production and processing that gets food on to dinner plates all around the USA. It’s an intense read (though I’m mostly a fiction reader if I’m honest) as Michael Pollan goes into the chemical composition of common foods, the history of ‘organic’ and the in’s and out’s (s’cuse the pun) of a cows digestive system.

One of the things that struck a chord with me was how the loss of traditional farming techniques is affecting the immediate environment as well as people’s health. For years, the long-established farming practice involved rearing animals and growing crops. Naturally, this meant that the by-product of one stock was used to benefit another – chicken droppings being spread as fertiliser for your arable land, for example. Now, farmers in the US are encouraged to produce single commodities which means that the waste just piles up. Without natural fertilisers, farmers have to resort to increasing amounts of chemicals to encourage the plants to grow which is infecting the water table.

It's a genuinely fascinating book and I would highly recommend it though I did have to take certain parts of it with a pinch of salt. Otherwise, I could see myself turning into a food fundamentalist.

Michael Pollan's book, The Omnivores Dilemma, can be found on Amazon here. Or why not pop down to your local library to see if you can borrow it from them and save you a few pennies...

Herbacious Healing

Click the image for a full-size, readable-with-out-a-magnifying-glass version

Did you know that the lovely little jars of herbs and spices could do much more than just flavour and fragrance your meals? As a doctor's daughter, I'm naturally cynical of anything that claims a certain food or drink can work miracles or, equally, lead to a painful death. This is mainly because we get so much conflicting information on the subject of health and because our overly keen media likes to jump on any study that might scare people and drag it kicking and screaming into our consciousness.

Anyway, I found this article interesting (even if it is cods wallop*).

*Not that I'm saying that it definitely is, of course...

Fat Tuesday

Awesome pancake flipping robot

 It's Shrove Tuesday, also known as Pancake Day! Believe it or not, our friends across the Pond call it Fat Tuesday. Lovely! Traditionally, it was a way to use up perishables before Lent, the season of fasting. We seem to be pretty obsessed with the lovely 2D cakey-things (my facebook stream is currently 2:1 pancake-related statuses and photos!) so much so that we're teaching robots to make them (above - though the pancakes look a little rank)  and master that all important flip (have a look here - patience need required).

I like the 'traditional' thin-ish crêpe-style pancakes on Pancake Day though I tend to make thicker, doughier Scotch pancakes the rest of the time. So far, we've had two lots of pancakes in the last three days (awesome) and the unwritten rule is that I make the batter and The Boy does the forming/frying/flipping side of things.

My recipe is so simple that it barely counts as a 'recipe':

Mix together:
125g plain flour
1 egg
Half pint milk

We tend to eat them hot out of the pan with a running selection of jams, honey or lemon and sugar though Nutella (other chocolate spread brands available) is the bees knees - so much so that we don't tend to keep it in the house for our own health. Savory pancakes cakes can be fun too; I have memories of my parents feeding me pancakes stuffed with tuna and sweetcorn or cheese. I have a bit of a craving for stilton and caramalised onions which I think could be a bit of a winner. Adding the finely grated zest of half a lemon can add some zing to your cake whether it be sweet or savory and I'd recommend mixing up your batter in a jug rather than a bowl so that it's easy to get the batter to the pan. Beware though; make sure you rinse or wash up immediately after as pancake batter goes from liquid to irritating dried-on solid very quickly.

Point of Interest: What's in Worcestershire Sauce?

A friend of mine is a fellow designophile and subscribes to Wired magazine. He very kindly passed on his recent cast-off in the shape of the June addition. I've heard of Wired before but haven't had a chance to give it a proper read. It's certainly interesting stuff - a mix of a little bit of everything with a tilt towards the world of digital/science/design geekery. Needless to say, this floats my boat rather well.

I'm a publication behind the cool kids but I thought that this article about the ingredients of Worcestershire Sauce is interesting. Shamefully, somewhere down the line, I'd assumed that Lea & Perrins was an almost exclusively English affair but it turns out that they have it across the pond too. This article sites high-fructose corn syrup as a sweetening ingredient but, as this is from the US version, I doubt that this is found in the UK bottles. Still, a little food geekery for your Monday afternoon...