Deborama's Kitchen

Mmm! Stinky tofu!

2011-11-25T14:07:00.002Z

Some times I think my knowledge of food is so vast, there is nothing new I can learn. But then that is just hubris, and something will come along to prick my balloon and bring me crashing back to earth, but with new foody knowledge. Here is something I just stumbled upon - Taiwanese Stinky Tofu, and a California restaurant that specializes in it.

Qype review - The French Meadow in Minneapolis

2011-11-24T18:51:00.001Z

Review of The French Meadow from 24 November 2011

The French Meadow is one of the best places in Minneapolis for delicious French-style artisanal breads, coffee, breakfast, salads and French-fusion bistro style cookery for lunch or dinner. It has a casual atmosphere, lots of vegetarian choices, and a sidewalk cafe that is especially popular for breakfast in the summer. Not cheap, but reasonable prices, especially considering the quality. Parking can be a problem. I don’t think they take reservations. They do takeaway. Family-friendly, licensed for wine and beer.

The Great British Bake-off : Recipes

2011-09-16T14:58:00.003Z

We have been watching series two of the Great British Bake-off on BBC2. As usual, lovely recipes, for the most part. Here is a link with "all" of them (only 34 out of over 100. This will be because they are flogging a "companion cookbook", of course.)

Food in The Nation

2011-09-15T23:05:00.001Z

The Nation has a major food focus group of articles this week, with contributors such as Frances Moore Lappe, Vandana Shiva and Michael Pollan.

Salad leaves, from my former supplier

2011-08-01T13:34:00.003Z

We used to get a monthly organic box until DH decreed that we could not afford it. I now have raised beds in the back garden, thanks to the aforementioned DH's intensive labour, and this year we once again have home-grown produce. (Last year we had one raised bed, and I was quite tardy getting anything in, but we still had some stuff. But also a couple of spectacular failures, including three brassicas which produced one tiny head and attracted a swarm of cabbage moths that ate everything.) Having been made redundant two months ago, I have a little more time (but not much, I still have to find my next job!) to devote to the garden. I know from past experience what produces the most for the least effort - rocket, salad leaves, chard, courgettes, radishes, not necessarily in that order. This year's new experiments, only marginally more successful than the previous ones, include sunflowers (mainly as a companion plant, and a gift to the birds), comfrey (maybe more on that later), chamomile (again to attract bees and repel pests as well as getting a couple cups of tea out of the bargain) and tomatoes and peppers (no fruit yet, but then they haven't died either.) Anyway, the link above is very informative on salad leaves.

Review: Cilantro

2011-06-14T14:27:00.002Z

I am visiting Paignton and after getting lost on the north end of town, I just had to stop at a nice place for lunch and a little pampering. I chose an Indian place called Cilantro, and it turned out to be a good choice. First decent food I have had since I left home. See my review on Qype.

So very very wrong

2011-03-17T20:28:00.002Z

In general, I love epicurious.com. I am a long-time, loyal user and it led me in turn to the wonderful product Tastebook. And in general, I think Americans are smarter about other cultures' food than Brits are (with a few exceptions.) I have had a few rants about the inedible piles of crisp cookies and unmacerated strawberries that are passed off as "strawberry shortcake" and the weird misconception Brits have about tuna and sweetcorn being quintessentially American, when I have never seen it in the States anywhere. British Italian food is less authentic even than American Mexican food. Britain is awash with Thai food, some of it pretty bad, but Vietnamese is almost impossible to find. And so on.
Thus, when I saw in my email feed from epicurious.com that they had a Bakewell tart recipe, I had high hopes. Which were crushed, not once but twice. First big fail - this recipe was presented as the dessert for a St. Patrick Day Irish-themed dinner. Bakewell Tart is not Irish, not even close! The village of Bakewell, where the tart supposedly hails from, is in the Peak District in Derbyshire (pronunciation guide for Americans: "darby-shur") and a more English village you could not hope to find. But most disappointing of all, when I looked at the recipe, it wasn't Bakewell Tart, again not even close. Here is a proper recipe for Bakewell Tart, and you will notice that the pastry is shortcrust, not puff (and by the way, how did they get it to look like a pie with puff pastry? Something is really wrong here.) And the filling. What is this - it's like a custard with no vanilla or other flavour and flour added. It sounds really vile.
Please, whether you are Irish or American, or a little bit of both, DO NOT follow epicurious.com's recipe for Bakewell Tart. The real thing is too nice.

Ayurvedic medicine's few simple rules

2010-12-04T09:30:00.002Z

Although I think this blog is by a Western woman, it does honour the Ayurvedic system, which I believe has a lot to teach Western medicine. I am going to try some of these, the Nyasa oil in the nose, the bedtime and getting up time, the CCF tea, etc.

Qype: Keflavík International Airport in Reykjavík

2010-06-05T19:14:00.001Z

Reykjavik - Transportation - Public Transport - Airports

I spent some hours in this airport two or three times on trips from the UK to Minneapolis, a popular destination for IcelandAir. This is quite a nice airport to have to hang out in. It has free wifi thoughout (I posted my first away-from-home blog there), it has several nice food stops and it has fairly comfortable surroundings. It seems to sit out in the middle of an icebound prairie (I was there in spring and in autumn, not the dead of winter or high summer) and is built all of polished but unpainted wood, with large windows but maybe not quite as much glass as a lot of airports (presumably to cut down on the heating). All of which gives it a slightly sci-fi, out of the world quality.

Check out my review of Keflavík International Airport - I am deborama - on Qype

Qype: Philadelphia International Airport in Philadelphia

2010-06-05T19:06:00.001Z

Philadelphia - Transportation - Public Transport - Airports

I had the bad luck /bad planning to spend 8 hours on a layover in Philadelphia airport. I have to say, although it wasn't pleasant, Phila is probably one of the best airports in the world to have to hang out in. It has two or three XpresSpas where you can get anything from a manicure to a full-body massage. It has old-fashioned white painted wooden rocking chairs dotted throughout the terminal where you can just sit and rest (if you can find one free - they're very popular) and it has a very good selection of fast food, restaurants and bars. So all in all, not bad.

Check out my review of Philadelphia International Airport - I am deborama - on Qype

Qype: Gaulart Maliclet Fast and French in Charleston

2010-06-05T18:51:00.001Z

Charleston - Eating & Drinking - Restaurants - Bistros

Fast and French, predictably, is mockingly called Slow and French by some of the jaded locals, but they keep going there, so it must be pretty good. I liked it, and I am very picky about food, especially if it deigns to call itself French and isn't actually cooked and served in France. We had salads (one of our party had a curried chick pea soup) and we shared two appetizer plates, "goat toast" (baguette slices with both garlic butter and goat cheese) and a Cheese and Pate plate du jour which included salami, a rich brown country-style pate and light, creamy chicken liver pate, brie and two other white cheeses and Roquefort cheese, a melon slice and some tiny whole dill pickles (cornichons?). I thought the pate and cheese plate was the most authentic item and the highlight of the meal.
Two of our party of four had the bouilliabaise, which was good but perhaps modernised and lighter than the traditional rich stew. Also instead of the rouille, it had a creme fraiche based sauce and big chunks of vegetable. Two of our party are allergic to shrimp and prawns (myself and my son's fiancee) so we had something else. She had a Seafood Normandy, made without the shrimp, and I had the grilled scallops, which were queen scallops, nicely cooked, served with lemon butter, couscous and steamed veg. We all had wine; the other three had merlot and I had a rose, which at first sip I thought was too thin, but then I picked up on its biscuit-y crispness and decided I quite liked it.
We shared a fabulously rich chocolate mousse cake for afters. I sampled the decaff coffee, which claims to be the best in the city; it was pretty good.
The unique feature of Fast and French is the communal seating at high stone-surfaced tables. The atmosphere is very down-to-earth, like a bistro. They serve breakfast and lunch as well as dinner.

Check out my review of Gaulart Maliclet Fast and French - I am deborama - on Qype

Qype: Waffle House in Atlanta

2009-12-27T13:51:00.001Z

Atlanta

Waffle House is a chain fast food restaurant found throughout the south. They are all open 24 hours, 7 days a week and specialise in breakfast, although they also have grilled cheese and other sandwiches and hamburgers. Surprisingly, their coffee is not that bad. Classic waffle house breakfasts include the old standard eggs as you like them, with grits, bacon and biscuits, or steak and eggs, with either grits or hashbrowns and of course, waffles, plain or pecan or strawberry.

Check out my review of Waffle House - I am deborama - on Qype

Good food blog

2009-12-10T20:48:00.003Z

I found Gluten Free Goddess when I was looking for ways to use Quinoa Flakes, which turned out to be a totally different product than what I was expecting. Normally I am not impressed by attempts to combine special health considerations (or downright food fetishism, in some cases) with gastronomy but in this case I think it succeeds. So why didn't I put it on my blogroll (see to the right.) Because I haven't accessed it in so long I have forgot everything, not just the password but even the email account it's linked to. Link rot happens, even to oneself.
Oh and by the way, most of the blogs in my blogroll are linkrot, they have passed on, ceased to exist, they are ex-blogs. A few have been thoughtfully archived, some just go into spamworld.
Oh, and by the way, here's another good food blog What I'm Eating Now.

Midlands gourmets

2009-11-10T22:03:00.003Z

No longer an oxymoron. There is even a website Eat the Midlands and a fan site on facebook.

Coming soon - a restaurant review. I went to Ashfield's in Earl Shilton for my birthday.

Qype: Kennedy School in Portland

2009-09-26T12:13:00.001Z

Portland

The big star of this place is the location. An old school building has been converted into a pub / cinema / event venue / tiny hotel, in a popular residential Portland neighourhood. There is a sunny courtyard dining and drinking area where the old playground was, and the school pool has been converted into a soaking pool for guests. The old assemby hall is the mini-cinema, screening classic films. The various pub/bars dotted around the building are the Detention Room, the Honors Bar, etc. This is part of a microbrewery empire, McMenamin's, so the beers, ales and ciders are tasty and diverse. There are also West Coast wines and cocktails, and what we would call in the UK "pub-grub" of a high standard, sometimes bordering on gastropub grub. It's child-friendly yet mellow, and has an amazing happy-hour menu. Live music is also said to be of a high quality.

Check out my review of Kennedy School - I am deborama - on Qype

2009-05-09T20:43:00.001Z

Market Harborough - Eating & Drinking - Cafes & Coffee Shops - Coffee Shops

I had a lovely lunch here in Market Harborough. The cafe is on two levels and also has outdoor seating. They serve sandwiches, salads, coffee, tea and cold drinks, but are mainly known for excellent puddings and cakes. I can attest that their feta and roast vegetable wrap with mixed salad leaves and tortilla chips on the side is first rate, that the service is prompt and friendly and that their prices are very reasonable. I had a great time there, and I am very hard to please.
Check out my review of Aldwinkles - I am deborama - on Qype

Riverford to DH - Hello!

2009-05-05T16:51:00.002Z

I ordered an organic box this week from Riverford Sacrewell, and the newsletter that came with it was addressed directly to my DH! They only didn't mention his name for fear of embarrassing him in front of his friends. (I could have told them, though, that he doesn't "do friends", so it wouldn't have mattered.)
In the newsletter, founder Guy Watson addressed the issue of "the filthy lucre" and mentioned that compared to the three supermarkets who offer an organic box, theirs is cheaper for all: 15% (Tesco), 30% (Sainsburys) and 35% (Waitrose). My independent research confirms this.
The box contents this week were lovely. (To be fair and balanced, they aren't always. We have had issues, but they always respond to them in a good way, often with free food next time.) This week I got cherry tomatoes, spring onions, pointy cabbage, rhubarb, courgettes, long beans and mixed peppers. And they threw in a free head of curly lettuce, just because they had a lot. All that for under £12; it's got to be a good deal. I ordered extras - dry garlic, pea soup and winter salad mix with loads of good, bitter, mustardy things.

Serendipity - the chicken roundabout

2009-05-03T09:45:00.003Z

I have just become and "insider" on Qype, having earned 250 points from participation, mainly writing reviews. I was about to do a review of a restaurant I went to in London called Frontline, and happened upon the Frontline Club's blog, where in the restaurant section, I found this marvelous post about a "chicken roundabout" near London.

Qype: Lotus ayurvedic spa in Wetherby

2009-04-10T23:19:00.002Z

Wetherby

This place is not your usual spa; it's like a little pocket of India on a trading estate in Yorkshire. There is one Ayurvedic physician and a small team of therapists, but they offer a very comprehensive menu of avurvedic treatments at reasonable cost. There are also yoga and meditation classes, taught by the doctor. If you go for a day spa, you get a delicious vegetarian lunch thrown in. The ayurvedic massage is unlike any other massage you will have had, and involves a lot of warm scented oil being poured on to you (you can shower afterwards.) It's a good way to try out ayurvedic treatment without having to fly to India or spend a fortune. And they are very good people.
Check out my review of Lotus ayurvedic spa - I am deborama - on Qype

Qype: Sandinista in Leeds

2009-04-10T13:38:00.005Z

Leeds - Eating & Drinking - Restaurants - Tapas - Eating & Drinking - Restaurants - Latin American - Eating & Drinking - Pubs & Bars - Bars - Cocktail Bars

I only visited briefly and had one cocktail. I had heard about this place and wanted to see it. I wasn't going to stay but a man, presumably the owner, practically dragged me to the bar, so I said what they hey. I described the cocktail I wanted, a sort of Blue Martini, and they made me something that was very tasty but not as alcoholic as I was hoping (yeah, I'm a cheap drunk, it's true.) The atmosphere is about the friendliest and most welcoming of any watering hole in the UK. I will be back for sure my next visit to Leeds.
Check out my review of Sandinista - I am deborama - on Qype

Qype: Roots & Fruits in Leeds

2009-04-10T13:38:00.004Z

Leeds - Eating & Drinking - Restaurants - Vegetarian

I disagree about the price; for the UK, and for the quality of the food, I thought the prices reasonable. That said, it's tiny, chic-shabby and located inside a shopping arcade, so maybe you could expect cheaper prices. But the flavour and freshness and choice are excellent. I had a simple dinner of bean burrito type things and a fruity, Caribbean style smoothie. No dessert, although I would have liked to. Also very friendly, good service.
Check out my review of Roots & Fruits - I am deborama - on Qype

Qype: Sous Le Nez En Ville in Leeds

2009-04-10T13:37:00.001Z

Leeds - Eating & Drinking - Restaurants - French

I had the prix fixe meal for about £23 which was three courses and a half of the house wine. I had fish cakes for starter - nothing to rave about but competent. Belly pork with a cassoulet and veg - the pork was luscious, the cassoulet was fine but not real cassoulet and a tiny portion, the veg was fresh but unremarkable. The wine was, uh, well, I drank it all so it couldn't have been too bad. The dessert was a chocolate mousse tart with coffee ice cream - very scrumptious. The service - I was, as I often am, an older lady dining alone. If I get good service, it's unusual. I thought all the wait staff and maitre d' were snooty, up themselves and a bit rushy. So not that impressed. It's OK, and fairly good value for money. But not the best.
Check out my review of Sous Le Nez En Ville - I am deborama - on Qype

Qype review: Wood Hall Hotel in Wetherby

2009-03-31T12:12:00.002Z

Wetherby - Hotels & Holidays - Hotels

Wood Hall is a typical country manor house, extended to add more rooms and a spa. It has stunning views over the Yorkshire countryside. The rooms are grand and faultlessly decorated. The bathrooms, always the touchstone of quality in a hotel, are perfect. The food has some ideas above its station, just a bit. That being said, I can rave about the roast beef sandwich with celeriac remoulade! The staff are very professional but warm and friendly, a rare combination and very welcome. The spa is clean and well-appointed, with surprisingly reasonable prices for the health and beauty treatments. If you are planning to spend in the mid-100 of £s per night and want to get your money's worth, this hotel/spa is a good choice.
Check out my review of Wood Hall Hotel - I am deborama - on Qype

Qype: Praha Bar & Restaurant in Hinckley

2009-03-31T12:05:00.003Z

Hinckley - Eating & Drinking - Restaurants - European

Before I found "this cafe", Praha was my favourite place for coffee in Hinckley. (They serve Illi, which is the best if you're purely going by taste.) Their food is also of a very high standard for a cafe. With an upstairs annexe and a patio in back for fine weather, it has a good capacity. The ambience is young and hip, and they also serve beer, wine and cocktails and have live music of an evening. And yet, it is very family-friendly, without any of that condescending twee-ness of "family restaurants". For almost any event, it's the best all-round cafe/restaurant/bar in the area.
Check out my review of Praha Bar & Restaurant - I am deborama - on Qype

Qype: Bangla Lounge in Hinckley

2009-03-31T12:05:00.001Z

Hinckley - Eating & Drinking - Fastfood & Takeaway - Indian

My hubby and I went here to celebrate 10 years together. I liked it and he didn't. The service is very attentive. There is parking. One of the nice touches (I thought) was the large TV screen showing a loop of Bollywood music videos. The decor is bright, clean and modern. The food is top-end but basic Indian, not Michelin starred or anything, but a bit more fresh and elegantly presented than your corner curry shop. I think it would mainly appeal to the sophisticated 30-something who wants an elegant night out and doesn't mind if the price is a little high.
Check out my review of Bangla Lounge - I am deborama - on Qype

Qype review: this cafe in Hinckley

2009-03-31T11:41:00.003Z

Hinckley - Shopping - Food & Drink - Coffee & Tea Shops

I can hardly say enough good about this place; it has transformed Hinckley in my opinion. Their ingredient choices are exactly like mine. Their tea selection is awesome, but then their coffee is great too. It is small yet feels comfy and intimate, and the bright clean decor is very relaxing. It's just wonderful.
Check out my review of this cafe - I am deborama - on Qype

My trip - Kayal restaurant in Nottingham

2009-03-23T22:42:00.002Z

For lunch on the first full day of my trip I selected Kayal, an award-winning small restaurant in the Nottingham Lace Market area, which specialises in Kerala-style food. It is part of a small restaurant group which includes two Leicester restaurants, and a previous restaurant called Halli in Leicester where I had eaten once, so I sort of knew what to expect. Halli is the vegetarian version of the restaurant, but I ordered a vegetarian thali at Kayal. I had not had a thali before, as it is not a common offering in western curry houses, which is what makes Halli / Kayal so special. I still have no idea what I ate in the six little metal bowls around the plate, but they were all delish and seemingly very healthy. The thing that ties the whole dish together is a monstrous but very thin flatbread called a dosa. This place is great if you appreciate really fresh, wholesome food and you like curry but want to try something a little different. Also, did I mention that the prices are really reasonable?

My trip - the Quebec's Hotel in Leeds

2009-03-23T18:35:00.005Z

I went on a little UK-short-break holiday of my own devising last week. I stayed two days in Nottingham, two days in Leeds and one day in Wetherby. I am going to review all the hotels, restaurants and spas that I visited (not that many) starting with the best. Overall the best experience was Quebec's Hotel in Leeds. This is part of a small boutique hotel group called The Eton Collection, and they operate two hotels in Leeds, the other one being The Calls. Quebec's is on Quebec Street, within view of the train station. The building dates from 1906 when it was built to house the Leeds and County Liberal Club. There is no restaurant, but there is a conservatory where breakfast is served, and there is 24-hour room service food available (not cheap, and I didn't try it.) The one slight disappointment was the breakfast - nothing to write home about, but then I didn't go for the posh one. Maybe it's better. Some nice free touches are a large glass bottle of local mineral water at turn-down time and a free Independent newspaper. The beds are very cushy, the rooms are utterly elegant, the bathrooms are topnotch. (I don't know about you, but I mainly judge hotels by the bathrooms.)

The small farmer's burden

2009-03-12T21:28:00.003Z

Here's yet another situation where a well-meaning agricultural initiative (this one in the US, but it happens in the UK and EU as well) is 1) made necessary by the status quo of huge agribusiness, 2) designed with huge agribusiness in mind, since it is the status quo and 3) ruinously expensive and difficult for small farmers. Tragic.

Duelling restaurant reviews - and an anniversary

2008-09-17T19:28:00.003Z

This past Monday marked exactly ten years since I left my home in Minneapolis and tried out life as a half of a couple, an experiment that led to a simple civil wedding ceremony five months later and to my (more or less) permanent residence in the UK. DH and I celebrated the occasion with a rare night out. We had a dilemma in that we wanted a nice meal, didn't want to pay too much (credit crunch, you know) and it had to be in Hinckley due to other commitments. So we settled on a place opened within the past year or so called Bangla Lounge.
A few weeks ago, I had joined a business and entertainment networking site called TouchLocal, and I decided to review the restaurant. I sent the link to DH and he so disagreed with my charitable (Minnesota Nice) review that he joined the site too and did his own review and fired it back to me. We do love each other, honest. (Both reviews and the full marital spat can be read at the link above.)

Food politics on Deborama

2008-08-11T07:54:00.002Z

I have posted a multi-faceted story about Whole Foods over on the main blog.

My life - walking around the world

2008-07-30T22:35:00.002Z

Wow, I have been pretty crap at keeping a diet/weight loss blog. I haven't been all that good at dieting and losing weight either. I have lost weight. I am going to disclose (look away now if you can't bear to see high weights.) At my biggest I weighed 16 stones and 9 pounds which in US terms is 233 pounds. I now weigh about 14 stones and 2 pounds which is 198 pounds. I was wearing size 24 jeans (British, even bigger than that size in US). I am now size 18 UK, or 16 US. And my underwear is even a 14 UK. I reckon I am about halfway to goal. I weighed 16 stones when I officially started in mid-January so I lost nearly 2 stones, about 26 pounds, in a little over six months, so if I can keep that up for a whole year I will be nearly "normal" weight. I have another even more shocking disclosure: I have a very big, shall we say, chest. I still wear a size 24 top or blouse, but now it hangs fetchingly off of my indiscrete cleavage and the flesh above the neckline is not fat, but actually shows a pair of well muscled shoulders (for a 55 year old, anyway) and a distinctly prominent collarbone.
But hardly any of this is down to dieting. I am ashamed to say how many little sweet treats I had today, and that is true most weekdays. Weekends are better. Exercise is my saviour. Thank you to the following (not a complete list):
Rachel my current Personal Trainer
Empire Fitness my gym in Hinckley
Slimming World
Weight Loss Resources
Global Corporate Challenge
It was this last one that had me out walking around between 8:15 and 9 pm this evening, listening to my Sony Walkman MP3 player and watching a glorious sunset worthy of Magritte. My "team" on GCC just passed 5 million steps. We have virtually "walked" from Peru to Russia.

My life- health news

2008-05-23T21:26:00.005Z

Chris Horridge, the chef in GBM who didn't end up winning anything, though he came close on two, kept banging on about xylitol, amongst other things. I tried xylitol, and I guess it's OK. Not that exciting really.
I am still losing weight, or occasionally just maintaining for a week or so. DH is losing more rapidly.
We have started with our personal trainer, R. She has got me running an agility course in the back garden. What fun.
And yesterday I started a thing called the Global Corporate Challenge. The first day I logged 6700+ steps and today 8200+ steps, but I think I actually did a lot more steps yesterday than today, so I think there was something making the pedometer malfunction.

Great British Menu results

2008-05-23T21:09:00.003Z

The results are in, and as happened last year, one chef won two out of four of the courses. This year the super-successful chef was Jason Atherton of Gordon Ramsey's Maze restaurant in London. He will be cooking the starter and the main dish; Stephen Terry from Wales will cook the fish course and Glynn Purnell of Birmingham will provide the pudding. The winning menu is:

Starter: Jason Atherton's Bacon, lettuce and tomato "in a glass" with Croque Monsieur
Fish course: Stephen Terry's Organic salmon and smoked salmon with crab fritters and cockle 'popcorn'
Main course: Jason Atherton's Dexter beef fillet, ox cheek, smoked potato purée and marrow bone
Dessert: Glynn Purnell's Marinated strawberries with tarragon and black pepper honeycomb with burnt English cream surprise

Here is a link to the dessert recipe, the only one you might conceivably want to try at home.

Great British Menu finals week coming up

2008-05-17T13:31:00.003Z

2008 Finalists

Central: Glynn Purnell
Wales: Stephen Terry
North: Nigel Haworth
Scotland: Tom Kitchin
Northern Ireland: Danny Millar
South-west: Chris Horridge
London and the South-east: Jason Atherton

The restaurants of the above chefs are given below, with the owner if different from the chef in brackets.
Glynn Purnell - Purnell's, Birmingham
Stephen Terry - The Hardwick, Abergevenny
Nigel Haworth - Northcote Manor Country House Hotel
Tom Kitchin - The Kitchin, Leith
Danny Millar - Balloo House,
Chris Horridge - The Bath Priory, Bath
Jason Atherton - Maze, London (Gordon Ramsey)

I have been trying out xylitol, which recently became available at Holland & Barrett. I mention this because Chris Horridge, who irritated us immensely with his palaver about nutrition, is a big fan of it and used it in his pudding.

Nutritionism

2008-05-12T21:35:00.006Z

I have mentioned Michael Pollan's In Defence of Food in a previous post. I think I first heard about it in this blog post (Eat Food, Not Too Much, Mostly Plants.) (Love the title!) This is another post from one of the best "diet blogs" out there, ploughing roughly the same furrow, but coming at it from another angle. By the way, here is a slightly edited, representative quote from Pollan's original article in The New York Times:

It was in the 1980s that food began disappearing from the ...supermarket, gradually to be replaced by “nutrients,”... Where once the familiar names of recognizable comestibles — things like eggs or breakfast cereal or cookies — claimed pride of place on the brightly colored packages crowding the aisles, now new terms like “fiber” and “cholesterol” and “saturated fat” rose to large-type prominence. More important than mere foods, the presence or absence of these invisible substances was now generally believed to confer health benefits on their eaters. Foods by comparison were coarse, old-fashioned and decidedly unscientific things — who could say what was in them, really?

Workouts, work, play and music

2008-05-09T16:37:00.003Z

Well, it’s music for money, but I’d do it for fun.
Oh, I know how to do it, it’s easily done.
To stand on a stage doesn’t make afraid -
I’m comfortable up here; it’s gotten me laid
And it always amazes me when I get paid.
--Loudon Wainwright III, “Career Moves”

I’ve got my (non-IPod) MP3 player on shuffle, and there are only 50 songs, though it could hold 1000, so I usually hear this at least some time during my workout at Empire Fitness. It makes me think about careers, about the difference between work and play, and about how our work and play choices come to define us. I could say the same thing LW III says about music about my creative career, loosely described as IT. Except the “gotten me laid” part, but considering the creatures such a career could get one laid by, I guess that’s a positive thing. Workouts themselves are something you can look at as either work or play, and also as either pleasure or pain. At first glance you may think I am just re-stating the same thing twice, but no, it’s far more complex than that. Some people see it as pain-play and some see it as pleasure-work. I know there are a lot of the former at my gym, and I guess if I were asked, I would say that I am in the latter category. Although the amount of pleasure involved is increased (and the amount of work lessened) if I have good music to listen to.

Here (if you’re interested) is what my workout now consists of. Some of this I made up myself, and some was drawn up by E, one of the fitness experts at the gym. I have two segments, cardio and resistance, and then I do some stretches as and when I feel I need them. I usually either do a half-length cardio first, then a full session of resistance, or conversely I do a full-length cardio followed by a pared-down session of resistance and stretches. On weekends, the workout may be either preceded or followed by a long-ish walk and some shopping. For cardio, I have only used the Cross-trainer for the last eight months. I started at 5 minutes and added a minute or two a week until I got up to 23 minutes, then I had to have a minor gynecological procedure that involved being checked into hospital as a day case and general anaesthesia, after which I had to drop back to 10 minutes. I continued working up and I am now at 30 minutes, where I will stop for a while and then when I get bored, I will start doing some jogging, doing walk/jog intervals on the treadmill. I may post some more details about my cardio training, which is (painfully slowly) producing some improvements in my condition. My resistance session includes the following exercises assigned by E:

Leg raises on the mat
Lateral leg raises on the fitball (2 sets, second one with 3-second hold)
Lunges (with or without weights) (I am really rubbish at these, so lately I have been doing them with fixed leg position and no weight, just trying to get some kind of acceptable form)
Squats (with or without weights; E told me without, but sometimes I add a 1 kg or 2kg weight in each hand, just for extra oomph)
Ab crunches on the fitball
Ab crunches with legs on the bench
Oblique crunches with legs on the bench
Bent-over Row
Triceps Kickback
Chest Press
Flies

In addition to these, I usually do weight-offset chin-ups and triceps dips, and occasionally I do some stuff on the other Nautilus machines in the women-only resistance studio. Like most people, I have my favourites, both in machines and in body-weight resistance. Strangely, my very favourite exercises are those that work the abs and obliques. Or maybe it’s not so strange; these are my most neglected body parts, and it feels good to be concentrating positively on that area, and to feel strength gradually appearing where there has been none for almost three decades.

A journey that began a few steps earlier

2008-04-23T22:01:00.005Z

Yes, it's been nearly a year since I have posted here. In fact, I see it was the GBM results, and the 2008 GBM is on now, and we are watching it, still cursing at Jenny Bond's inane witterings.
Deborama's Kitchen is being reborn as a diet blog. More than just dieting, I hope, I plan to cover:

my own journey, even now underway, to better health, including a healthier weight
DH's journey, also well underway, to a similar goal, but using some different tools and approaches
our shared endeavour, working with a personal trainer I will call R, which will start in about two weeks time
recipes as ever, both my own that I make up and those that I glean from elsewhere
a little bit of the gardening, nutrition theories and food politics stuff, although the mainly political will now be emanating from Deborama, possibly with a cross-post here.

Here are some of the tools DH and I are using:

My food optimising programme
My gym
DH's healthier weight programme
A "challenge" at work involving pedometers (more on that later)
A valuable website
Another valuable website
Our organic box scheme

Great British Menu results

2007-05-25T23:09:00.001Z

It seems about 90% of my readership in the past few hours has been people searching for Great British Menu results, which were just broadcast tonight. (DH look away if you haven't watched it yet.) Folks were getting a hit on my blog as number 3 (of many) even though the post was for last year. So I thought I would be kind and post this year's results, which are not available yet on the BBC Food website (although they may be by morning.)

The starter : Sat Bains' Slow-cooked Egg, Air-dried Ham and Pea Puree
The fish : Richard Corrigan's Poached Salmon and Wheaten Bread
The main : Mark Hix's Rabbit and Crayfish Stargazy Pie
The dessert : Mark Hix's Perry Jelly with Summer Fruits, Ice Cream and Elderflower Fritter

Recipes available.

Whole Foods - supermarkets, but not as we know them

2007-03-27T15:29:00.002Z

I used to hate Whole Foods, but eventually even I succumbed. You see, I am almost exactly the same age as John Mackey, the founder, and like him I have a history of being "in but not of" the hippie, green, healthy-foods movement. Unlike him, I see no similarity between labour unions and "having herpes".

Organic standards consultation on air freight

2007-02-27T10:28:00.000Z

It's no great surprise to learn that there are moves afoot to deny organic classification to food imported by air. The Soil Association has started a year-long consultation on the matter.

The economics of fine dining in a small city

2007-02-02T21:24:00.000Z

The best restaurant critic in the world is someone you have probably never heard of : Dara Moskowitz who writes for City Pages, a great weekly paper in the Twin Cities. Here she is writing, in place of her usual restaurant review, a think piece on the closing of three restaurants in Minneapolis. It probably sounds so boring you are not going to bother with the link, but please do. You have to think about this stuff, because restaurants in Minneapolis are just the tip of the iceberg in my opinion, although they are the part of the iceberg that Dara really cares about.

When did Bisquick become Betty Crocker Bisquick?

2007-01-27T13:26:00.000Z

I got some Bisquick from Asda (WALMART! Boo, hiss!) so I can make Sauerkraut, Kielbasa and Dumplings as per my very early childhood memories. And it's got the Betty Crocker brand above the "Bisquick". And this is obviously "British" Bisquick, because it has no recipe for biscuits on it. Brits simply cannot get their heads around the fact that "biscuits" in America are not their biscuits, not cookies in any sense of the word, but a bread product similar to scones (but never sweet). So the Bisquick box here has a recipe for scones, which is the same as the American recipe for biscuits but with sugar added and in grams.
Of course, on the other hand, a lot of Americans cannot grasp the idea that Yorkshire pudding is not their "pudding" (e.g. to custard to a Brit) and so they have this strange idea in the back of their heads that British roast beef dinners have a blob of sweet milk pudding next to the meat.
And while I am ranting about Americans and Brits refusing to understand each other's food habits (I can adapt totally, so why can't everyone?) the one that makes me utterly furious is strawberry shortcake. With supreme self-contented arrogance, British TV chefs of the highest order are constantly swanning in front of the camera to make "American-style strawberry shortcake", at which point they construct some impossible to eat or even understand tower of whole, unmacerated strawberries, whipped cream and shortbread. Please! Where do they get these bizarre ideas? Who puts strawberries on cookies? Can they not distinguish the fact that there is an entity of which they know (obviously) nothing called shortcake which is a cake like sponge or Madeira cake? And then, if they ever actually ate strawberry shortcake in America (a basic pre-requisite I would have thought) they could not help but notice that the strawberries are cut up small and macerated in sugar to create a lovely sweet soupy juice that soaks into the cake and is the main attraction of strawberry shortcake and the reason for its popularity. What strawberry shortcake is really like, if a British cook could drop the idea that he already knows everything and learn, is a strawberry trifle, sans the booze and sans the custard.

Organic boxes

2006-10-25T11:39:00.000Z

We have joined an organic box scheme, the closest thing this area has to CSA (at least to my knowledge - if anyone knows differently, get in touch). We just got our second box yesterday. We got a bag of juicing carrots and had big glasses of fresh carrot-apple juice using apples from our back garden. We also have on hand half the huge bag of purple sprouting broccoli from last week, and from this week : more carrots, more potatoes, hipsi cabbage, romanesco, Swiss chard, a big winter squash, a big tub of fat-free yoghurt, lemons and avocados. All organic. We had a couple of great meals with our stuff last week - a lovely cauliflower-cheese bake, some roasted veg that included the huge red bell peppers from the box, and purple sprouting broccoli with the pan-fried brill we got from our weekly fishmonger-truck-guy.

City Pages - the restaurant scene in the Twin Cities

2005-12-29T09:42:00.000Z

This is something I keep up with, in a lax and desultory fashion. I don't know why. I no longer live in Minneapolis and I probably never will again, but in some part of my heart, I can never leave. And then they don't really have a restaurant "scene" around these parts, do they? They just barely have restaurants at all, what I would call restaurants, anyway. So Minneapolis now has two kosher restaurants, even though only an estimated 2% of the Jewish population there keep kosher. (And the Jewish population isn't that large, either. NYC it ain't for all its aspirations.) But of course, in the Twin Cities, only a small minority of their clientele are even going to be Jewish.
I miss eating out.
(Cross-posted from Deborama.)

More than 300 years of the Raj . . .

2005-11-02T13:39:00.000Z

. . . and the British have no idea about curry! There is a joke about a British lad (of, say, 50) who has had a curry late at night, after a marathon drinking session in one or more pubs, nearly every Friday night of his adult life. Then one day he has one for lunch. And is appalled at how unpleasantly hot and pungent it is! And British men, in particular, do not know how to make curry. They are always very proud of their fiery creations, with loads of half-cooked onion, tinned tomatoes, extra chili, and a huge wad of raw madras curry paste dumped in at the last minute. It's more of a trial by ordeal than a meal deal, let me tell you. (See the excellent cookbook Cooking Like Mummiji, touted on these pages, for lessons in a better way.)
The catering service at my place of employment is officially "celebrating Diwali". Far be it from me to criticise their attempts at cultural sensitivity, but today they featured a Beef Madras. Besides being Diwali (or near to it, anyway) it is also into the last few days of Ramadan. So who exactly is going to eat this Beef Madras, amongst the Indian and Pakistani members of our workforce? Hindus (hello!) don't eat beef (if they are devout) and Muslims don't eat lunch during Ramadan (if they're observant.) So there you go. All the British lads can "celebrate Diwali" by devouring sacred cow cooked in a manner that would make Mummiji blanch. I saw one of our Asian or British Asian employees or contractors special-ordering a Vegetarian Madras, so I popped into the queue behind him and said "I'll have what he's having." But our "chef" is a British lad and it was - well, pretty bad. All hot and sour where it should have been pungent and alluring, no subtlety, loads of onions. Nice try, but no banana.

Waffle House turns 50

2005-09-06T08:12:00.000Z

The Waffle House restaurant chain is cheap and unassuming; some may even find its 50s-style decor a little tacky. But the Waffle House diners, ubiquitous throughout the American south, are synonymous with southern hospitality. Famous not only for waffles (and such waffles!) but also for their hash-browns, their coffee (nothing fancy, but strong and real, with unlimited free refills) and of course, that pinnacle of the American breakfast, steak and eggs. The first Waffle House was opened in 1955, in Avondale Estates, near Atlanta, Georgia. If Avondale Estates sounds vaguely familiar, you may be a Trekkie: it is also the hometown of DeForrest Kelly, who played Dr. "Bones" McCoy.

Real Simple's Guide to Expiration Dates

2005-06-22T21:48:00.000Z

Here's a handy-dandy thing. This is a guide to actual safe use-by dates, for cleaning products and toiletries, as well as common foodstuffs, from the excellent American magazine Real Simple.

A fun food site

2005-06-03T21:50:00.000Z

Eggbaconchipsandbeans is a website that reviews "greasy spoon" cafes across Britain and rates their full English Breakfasts, using the well-favoured quartet of the website title as the standard for comparison. It's wonderfully illustrated with photographs, not only of the food, but also of the condiments, signs on the wall, storefronts, etc.

U.S. covering up mad cow cases, scientist says

2005-05-28T11:49:00.000Z

Here's what I think. I think that as long as there has been mad cow disease, America has had it. Sometimes you don't have to go that far to be in conspiracy territory. Americans are used to kowtowing to business interests and the beef and dairy industries are as big as they come. So you have "downer cows" every day: they are not inspected. You have people dying of "Alzheimer's", sometimes "extremely premature Alzheimer's": it is neither cost-effective nor "dignified" to autopsy their brains. And anyway, no one wants to know. We have been living with, dying from and ignoring this disease for decades. Every now and then a little bit of the story leaks out. Usually in Canada.

Mercado Central in South Minneapolis

2005-05-28T11:15:00.000Z

Homesick for Minneapolis, as most always, I could not resist posting about one of my favourite places there. Just two blocks from Walker Church, the beating heart of the Powderhorn neighbourhood, is a wonderful Latin American market, Mercado Central.

Over Here

2005-03-28T16:46:00.001Z

You'll never guess what just appeared in Asda today. Well, you won't have to, because I put a great big picture of it on the post. Yes, I have been without Bisquick for nearly seven years. I shall make Blueberry Muffins, reducing the sugar to three tablespoons, adding 3 tablespoons of bran, and substituting clarified butter for the vegetable oil. With fresh blueberries, of course. The American muffins they make in this country are all just like cake. Nobody believes me when I say a proper muffin can be a healthy breakfast. They say, "Yeah, if you want cake for breakfast."

New EU legislation coming soon

2005-03-24T00:20:00.000Z

Here is a brief article by a nutritionist of Q&As about the new EU legislation on food supplements, which comes into effect in August 2005. Needless to say, this law is very controversial; there is an organisation cited in the article which has been working for the past few years to oppose it altogether.

Banana wars

2005-03-13T18:56:00.000Z

The banana farmers facing economic ruin are highlighted in this month's Observer Food Magazine. The recent changes in trade regulations threaten the fair trade bloc of banana producers by regulation against the preferential policies of European markets for smaller, more environmentally friendly growers. Boycott Dole, Del Monte and Chiquita! Support fair trade for third world producers.
And now for something completely different (and yet not) . . .
Here is the second great food-related passage from Gravity's Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon: Pirate Prentice's famous Banana Breakfast.

With a clattering of chairs, upended shell cases, benches, and ottomans, Pirate's mob gather at the shores of the great refectory table, a southern island well across a tropic or two from chill Corydon Throsp's mediaeval fantasies, crowded now over the swirling dark grain of its walnut uplands with banana omelets, banana sandwiches, banana casseroles, mashed bananas molded in the shape of a British lion rampant, blended with eggs into batter for French toast, squeezed out a pastry nozzle across the quivering creamy reaches of a banana blancmange to spell out the words C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre (attributed to a French observer during the Charge of the Light Brigade) which Pirate has appropriated as his motto ... tall cruets of pale banana syrup to pour oozing over banana waffles, a giant glazed crock where diced bananas have been fermenting since the summer with wild honey and muscat raisins, up out of which, this winter morning, one now dips foam mugsfull of banana mead ... banana croissants and banana kreplach, and banana oatmeal and banana jam and banana bread, and bananas flamed in ancient brandy Pirate brought back last year from a cellar in the Pyrenees also containing a clandestine radio transmitter ...
The phone call, when it comes, rips easily across the room, the hangovers, the grabassing, the clatter of dishes, the shoptalk, the bitter chuckles, like a rude metal double-fart, and Pirate knows it's got to be for him. Bloat, who's nearest, takes it, forkful of bananes glacées poised fashionably in the air. Pirate takes up a last dipper of mead, feels it go valving down his throat as if it's time, time in its summer tranquility, he swallows.

English candy drill

2005-02-19T08:54:00.000Z

For nostalgia (if you're British) see this company selling a staggering range of traditional British sweets. To get deeper in the dark and mysterious heart of British sweets, however, you must read this famous excerpt from Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, the "disgusting English candy drill".

A very posh tuna-noodle

2005-02-09T20:35:00.000Z

This is not my own story; I found it on one of the threads on Tribe.net from a tribe called Recipe Exchange:

I used to work at the Daytime Women's Drop-in Center in Berkeley, a place for homeless women and children to go during the daytime, when the shelters were closed. The Center receives boxes of leftovers from Chez Panisse, which is a very fancy place to eat. One time they sent us a box that included slightly poached tuna steaks. The women did not know what to do with these and would not eat them. We had also received two big bags of very fancy ravioli from the Pasta Shop which the women also would not eat because they were weird.
So what I did? Made tuna casserole with the poached tuna and the fancy-pants ravioli. It hid these strange foodstuffs in a recognizable dish. It was the best tuna casserole I ever had - and will probably ever have.

Holy chocolate

2005-02-04T20:48:00.000Z

Can chocolate save the world? Well, that depends. Micheal Roberts, founder of Legacy Chocolates, thinks it can, along with "perennial agriculture", shade-grown coffee and grass-fed beef. Although I am personally not so sure about the beef, I like where he is going with this, and apart from a few quibbles, suspect that he may be a kindred spirit. Roberts has over 30 years invested in organic agriculture. He has turned to the art of the chocolatier partly because he is convinced that organic agriculture is being co-opted by agribusiness. (Indeed, preach it brother!) His latest project is perennial agriculture, encouraging the cultivation of perennials as opposed to annuals, because they are kinder to the planet, and output more better food while taking up less resource.
Also, I learned something new from this story. I really like it when I learn something totally new about food. Like coffee, with its robustica and arabica dichotomy, chocolate also comes in two distinct varieties. (No, not milk and dark, or black and white.) The two are even more distinct than the coffee varieties, because one is a perennial and must grow in the shade, while the other, the cheaper, less healthy, altogether less desirable kind, is an annual that must grow in full sun. The good stuff, the original Mayan "food of the gods" is Criollo, while the inferior kind, cash cow to fortunes from Hershey PA to Bourneville, England is Forastero.

Cake for Christmas

2005-01-04T11:47:00.000Z

I made this scrumptious cake for Christmas. I followed the recipe almost exactly, which is rare for me, so I'll just link to it. It's from Deliaonline. (Americans may not know who Delia is; she is Delia Smith, sort of the British equivalent of Martha Stewart, but different.) This is more of a souffle than a cake. It is two layers of flourless, eggy cake made with cocoa powder, sugar and eggs, and the filling between the layers is a prune-armagnac mousse. The topping is just melted dark chocolate with a few prunes for decoration. It is really good, and not all that difficult to make.

Blogkeeping and my life

2004-11-27T10:33:00.000Z

(A little late with the cross-post; I've been sick.)
As badly as I have been neglecting this blog, I have been even worse at my book review and bookstore blog and at Deborama's Kitchen, my food and food politics blog. So I am cross-posting this at both, because I have been a) actively reading and planning, bursting even, to review a couple of books, and b) I have some cookie recipes to post and some simmering thoughts about all this diet and nutrition stuff. First the cookies. As those of you in Britain will know, last week was the big Children In Need charity fund drive. My employer (a mega multi-national) is a big participant and this year I sold cookies. Real American cookies baked by a real American grannie, is how I advertised them. They even (ugh!) put my picture on the intranet, posing with my cookies held out in front, a fake smile on my face, not a hint of (detectable) irony (I hope.) As for food politics, it has been brought to the fore, for me, by the recent hunting-with-dogs ban. I used to be a vegetarian. I am still selective about what animal products I will eat, and I try to influence DH who is pretty much not. I saw a Countryfile show on Sunday where a gamekeeper and a leader of a shooting ("wild" birds) group debated two anti-hunting activists. My thoughts, about which I will probably not get more specific, were about the comparative ethics (from an anti-animal-cruelty viewpoint) of eating game vs. farm animals. I do believe that the world is evolving towards total veganism, which I think is a good thing. But I tried and failed at that for myself, in the here and now. So this is a pragmatic argument for me. Maybe I will get more specific, later. I have to think about it.

Now, as to the books. While the siege of Fallujah was going on, I was reading Absolute Friends, by John le Carre. This book echoed against some very dark and despairing sentiments I was already experiencing due to watching "The Power of Nightmares" on the BBC, and due to the same nightmare scenario being acted out in Fallujah and elsewhere. I need , desparately, to review this book. I want to talk about it to someone. But my energy continues to wane and every little task I accomplish after work or on the weekend is a major triumph. So in the meantime, life must go on, and long train journeys must be endured, so I started on some other books. Right now I am about halfway through Cryptonomicon (Neal Stephenson) and it is so very very excellent. I am enjoying it immensely.

Red objectives with the pears

2004-08-25T20:08:00.000Z

Rühren Sie sich gut, dann dienen Sie from Horst's excellent blog, The Aardvark Speaks has this to say:

Red objectives with the pears
A very fast, simple objective plate. It is spicy, but the sugar and the complete Schalotten give it a singular sweetishgeschmack.
red objectives 250g (masoordal); vegetable oil with 4 essloeffel; the seeds with 1 Senfen the teeloeffels burnish; 1 large Klemmasafoetida; 10, the Curry; 2 gartennelken; 4, leave dried red paprika, deseeded and crushed; the Schalotten 500g, far away, but lead to the left through; the brown sugar with 2 essloeffel; the 1 Teeloeffeltamarindepaste; 1 Teeloeffelgelbwurz; you completely salt and examine rinses the objectives you for stones. Insert it then into a pot with twice the quantity of the water and arrive you you at the blood ulcer. Remove for forms each possible of this foam rubber with for notch a spoon. Blood ulcer, until the objectives are very soft, but not dissolved (approx. 10 minutes). Unload surplus water, if any is left.
In a second pot you heat the oil. Add the mustard seeds. If they begin to slam shut, add you you the Asafoetida -, Curryurlaub, gartennelken and red paprika. If you roast briefly for approximately one minute, then you add the complete Schalotten. Roast it for certain minutes and constantly excite you.
Add the sugar, Tamarinde, Gelbwurz, salt and 1 dish water. Leave more more simmer, until the Schalotten became transparency and excites occasionally. Most of the water should evaporate during the process (it to add more waters if necessarily).
Add the cooked objectives. With you you move well, adjust you if necessarily pepper up, then you serve Chapati or rice immediately.
In connection confessed by protection to the vegetarian.

There's actually a great recipe in this post, but you will have to read the whole linked post to get it. Do not try this one whatever you do.

Summertime

2004-08-15T08:15:00.000Z

I am remembering one of the highlights of summer when I was a girl in East Point, Georgia. I generally didn't like summer; it was hot and sticky and I had to watch my five younger siblings all day. From the age of 12 I did a lot of the cooking, and cooking was something I enjoyed a lot more when the weather was cool. But two things I remember about summers at home that were OK were the constant day-long sipping of iced tea (being Yankees we made ours a lot less sweet than our southern-bred neighbours) and the almost weekly "Southern vegetable dinner". Here is the menu, in 2 versions:

Yellow crookneck squash
Okra fried in cornmeal
Sliced ripe tomatoes with mayonnaise
Collard greens with side meat
Corn sticks with butter
Iced tea

Fried green tomatoes
Stuffed zucchini boats
Corn on the cob
Turnip greens with ham hock and pot liquor
Cracklin bread
Iced home-made lemonade with one orange

Cooking methods:
Okra and green tomatoes are fried in the same manner. Slice and then dredge in a mixture of plain flour and corn meal (maize meal or polenta not cornflour, which is corn starch in America) seasoned with salt and pepper. Fry in single layer batches, in either corn oil or vegetable oil or bacon dripping.

Turnip greens and collard greens are made the same way, too. Wash them well, cut them into eatable size pieces and put them in a heavy stew pot with an inch of so of water and a piece of meat or bone for flavouring. Ham hock is the bony end of a ham, smoked and salty, and side meat is a thick slice of salt pork, which is mostly fat. If this is too rustic for you you can use any flavourful small piece of meat, or for vegetarians, leave it out and just season with something you like. (I like Spike, but I have to buy it in the US.) The greens used in the South will be very tough and are cooked for a long time, ending up with a brownish green colour and an intense, slightly bitter flavour, and a brown puddle of "pot liquor" which is soaked up with bread or corn bread.

Yellow crookneck squash is ubiquitous in the American South but not available in the UK as far as I know. Yellow courgettes or pattypan squash can be substituted. This is cooked very simply by stewing with onions and a little water (about 2 parts squash to 1 part onion), then seasoned with salt and pepper and enriched with a knob of butter. Zucchini boats are courgettes sliced lenghtwise and a trench scooped out of the seedy part. You fill them by mounding up a mixture of bread crumbs, garlic, onions and olive oil, top with a little Parmesan, and bake in the oven until the courgette/zucchini flesh is soft and the filling is gratineed.

Corn on the cob needs no explanation, nor does tomatoes with mayonnaise. You could be fancy and make your own mayonnaise. I suggest not putting either salt or (shudder) sugar on the tomatoes, but just a small grinding of black pepper.

Corn bread is another ever-present food in the old Confederacy. It is a soda bread made from corn meal and it can be baked in a cast iron skillet, a rectangular baking pan similar to a swiss roll tin, or as corn muffins or corn sticks. Corn muffins are baked in an ordinary American muffin tin, now widely available in the UK. For corn sticks you will have to send off to or go to America for a special pan. It only comes in cast iron, and the "sticks" are shaped like little corn-on-the-cobs. Baking in cast iron makes things have a lovely brown crust, so these are always brown and crusty and they have a lovely roasted corn flavour. Cracklin bread is corn bread with cracklins, e.g. bacon bits. Here is a recipe for cracklin bread which can be adapted by leaving out the bacon to make any form of corn bread. (Just remember - corn meal = maize meal and forget about the "white", yellow is fine.)

To make home-made lemonade, place 6 tablespoons of caster or superfine sugar in the bottom of a glass jug. Squeeze the juice of 5 lemons and one orange and remove any pips. Put the juice over the sugar and stir until mostly dissolved, then add four times the volume of fresh cool water and a few ice cubes.

To make iced tea, I would suggest sun tea. Put 6 tea bags into a litre of cold water in a glass jug (must be glass) and cover with clingfilm. Place the jug in the sun and let it sit for at least 6 hours. Remove the tea bags, sweeten to taste and serve over lots of ice. A tall sprig of mint adds a nice touch.

The economics of obesity

2004-07-22T17:40:00.000Z

Fact-filled article from a US publication called The Public Interest.
"The main message of contemporary research is that there is no free lunch, that with benefits come costs. Positive changes such as increases in technology, reduced smoking, and increased female participation in the labor force have also carried unforseen negative consequences. Was the anti-smoking campaign a mistake if it also encouraged obesity?"

The ultimate food politics book

2004-07-03T20:19:00.000Z

I am currently reading Not on the Label: What Really Goes into the Food On Your Plate, by Felicity Lawrence. It is really frightening. And I have been a savvy food-politics activist for about 35 years and still I didn't know about some of the appalling things covered in this book. It seems to affect everyone this way. Here are some excerpts from Amazon's reader reviews:
"I thought I had some idea about how supermarkets operate and how our food is produced, but I didn't know the half of it. Read this book (then lend it to everyone you know), ponder its contents for a while and I am sure you will change your shopping habits."
"All the chapters made a big impact but I was particularly moved by the descriptions of the migrant agricultural workers living on rubbish tips in Spain, of coffee farmers who were paid so little for their crop that they couldn't support their families and of the phenomenally destructive (and disgusting) practice of prawn farming in South-East Asia. . . Time and time again what came across is the enormous power of the supermarkets and how in competing with each other to be cheapest they create misery all the way down the food supply chain. Some of the supermarket practices described simply beggar belief."
"Yes it costs more but once you've read this book you won't have any alternative. I am encouraging my family to eat seasonally and to think about food air miles. And I'm making them read the book!"

Classic Peanut Butter Cookies

2004-06-27T13:03:00.000Z

I just made these for the cooking demo at a hostel for homeless youth that I am conducting (now on Sundays):
1 1/4 cups flour, sift or stir before measuring (Deborama: I used strong white flour)
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 cup shortening (Deborama: I used unsalted butter)
1/2 cup peanut butter
1/2 cup granulated (Deborama: or caster) sugar
1/2 cup light brown sugar, packed
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1 egg
Sift together flour, salt, and baking powder; set aside. Cream shortening, peanut butter, and sugars; beat in vanilla and egg. Stir in flour mixture, blending well. Shape mixture into 3/4-inch balls; place on greased baking sheets. Flatten each cookie with the tines of a fork (Deborama: in a cross-hatch pattern); dip fork in flour periodically to keep it from sticking to the peanut butter cookie dough (Deborama: or rinse it off leaving it wet, that works just as well).
Bake peanut butter cookies at 375° (Deborama: 175 C) for about 10 to 12 minutes.
NB: To do a volume measurement of butter or other fats: use a larger measuring jug than you need. To measure 1/2 cup, fill the jug to the 1/2 cup mark with very cold water. Drop spoonfuls of butter into the jug until it measures 1 cup. Then carefully pour off the water.

Omega-3 and "green food" for mental health

2004-06-27T13:00:00.000Z

A story in the Independent says: Changes in UK diets could trigger a mental health crisis. A study has shown that eating too much sugar, and not enough omega-3 fatty acids (of course, the two often go hand in hand) can lead to depression and even schizophrenia.

The Observer Food monthly - Veggie food ratings

2004-06-13T19:49:00.000Z

Pretty depressing, really. I guess this is why we cook for ourselves and don't buy much in the way of prepared foods, veggie or otherwise. And, who knew that the UK even had a "leading expert on vegetarian dishes"?

UK: Eating our way out of trouble

2004-05-31T07:47:00.000Z

For a more UK focus in a similar story to the one below, this recent article in the Independent, looking mainly at childhood obesity and also hyperactivity, concludes with some simple nutritional advice.

The Way We Eat Now

2004-05-31T07:44:00.000Z

From the Harvard magazine, a very in-depth article (although just from an American point of view) about evolution, human behaviour, western food practices and the "obesity epidemic." (Frankly, I have trouble writing about the "obesity epidemic" without the quotes since reading about Richard Campos's book The Obesity Myth.)

Oxfam hopes to stimulate taste for fair trade with espresso bars

2004-05-30T21:10:00.000Z

The Guardian had this report recently about Oxfam's debut in the coffee bar business. There are plans to start 20 espresso bars in a partnership with disadvantaged coffee growers under the brand Progreso. I wonder if they will just sell the coffee beans so we can make it at home? Because with only 20 of them, chances are not very good that there will be one around here.

Kitchen Gardeners Redux

2004-05-22T08:40:00.000Z

The May 2004 Kitchen Gardeners International newsletter. There was an April issue, too. Mostly about shrimp, which was not much use to me because I have developed an allergy to the stuff in later life. I do have fond memories of it, though - the shrimp boats arriving at the dock in Thunderbolt Georgia, a field trip taken in an oceanography class I took at University just for the fun of it, the one party I ever threw for work colleagues, subtitled Programmers' Paradise with Pool and Prawns in 1982. Ahem. I seem to have drifted from the topic of kitchen gardening. (But what does kitchen gardening have to do with shrimp in the first place, I ask myself.)

Hippie Student Food

2004-05-22T07:55:00.000Z

Today will be the third of a weekly series of "economical cooking" classes that I am teaching at a youth hostel here in Hinckley. I got their attention the first week with this simple little confection and they liked it so much they insisted on making it again. I thought it would be a hit - my son, now in his mid-twenties - likes it so much it was the only recipe from his childhood he asked me for when he was on his own as a college student. (I suspect he may even use it "to get chicks".) (I should say in his defence that I think when my son refers to the young women in his life as chicks, he is being deeply ironic. Or maybe that's just wishful mother thinking.)

Hippie Student Food
(no exact measurements)
Put a largish spoonful or two of butter or margarine in a heavy-bottomed saucepan and put this over a very low flame to start it melting (and keep an eye on it.) Break up a bar of dark chocolate. (In the US, you can use unsweetened cooking chocolate; in the UK I recommend Green & Black's organic plain 70%). Add the chocolate to the melting butter and stir it as it begins to melt into it. When it is nearly melted, add an equal amount of peanut butter (smooth or crunchy as you prefer) and continue melting it all on the low flame. Finally, add a sweetener of your choice. Liquids, such as golden syrup, cane syrup, corn syrup and/or honey work best, but you can also use caster sugar (in the UK) or superfine granulated (in the US) or fructose or brown sugar. But be aware that the choice of sweeteners makes a difference in both texture and taste. The moment your chocolate mixture looks smooth and creamy, take it off the heat and begin adding rolled oats. You will want to add slightly more rolled oats by volume than chocolate, so that you have a dry, stiff mixture with lots of flaky oat texture. (At this stage you can add other optional ingredients - such as nuts or dried fruit.) Butter a pan or low flat dish (anything large enough to hold it spread out to no more than 1/2 inch thickness). Spread the mixture in the pan and smoothe the top and put it in the refrigerator for about 30 minutes to an hour. Then cut it into squares.
The recipe is very flexible. You can, for instance, use unsweetened pure cocoa powder instead of a bar of chocolate, in which case you use a bit more butter and more sweetener. You can use chocolate chips (real ones, not chocolate "flavour"). You can use another nut or seed butter instead of peanut butter. And you can add any nut, seed or fruit that you like.

"I never had good sex with a vegetarian"

2004-05-16T18:38:00.000Z

Under this provocative title, Lisa Hilton, English woman married to a finnicky Italian, writes about her experiences cooking for the men in her life in The Observer Food monthly.

My Lovely Rhubarb

2004-05-05T23:05:00.000Z

I have become a huge fan of rhubarb. We have a few good productive crowns in the back garden and before the nettles overwhelm it, I do this two or three times:

Rhubarb Streusel
Wash and cut up about 10 stalks of rhubarb. Add a knob of fresh ginger, minced very fine. "Sweat" this in a saucepan with three heaped tablespoons of caster sugar or fructose. (No water or other ingredients. ) A lot of juice will come out; simmer the rhubarb in its own juice until tender. Butter a low, rectangular glass casserole dish. Make the streusel: cut with a knife and then rub between your fingers to make a fine crumb 50 grams brown sugar, 50 grams of soft butter, 1 tablespoon plain flour and 50 grams of ground almonds. Mix in with your hands 50-75 grams of rolled oats. Add a pinch of ground ginger. Strain the rhubarb-ginger mixture, preserving the juice. Spread it (the rhubarb, not the juice) over the bottom of the casserole dish and top it evenly with the streusel mixture. Bake the dish in a 175 degree (C) oven for about 20 minutes, or until the streusel is crispy but not too brown. Drink the syrup you drained off of the rhubarb quickly before anyone else can get to it. (It doesn't keep). (And I call it syrup but it is not very sweet - it should be so sour it makes you shiver. That is the shiver of health!)

Potassium Deficiency: Widespread and often Neglected

2004-05-05T22:54:00.000Z

I found this useful story at Health Supreme. I also take a potassium supplement (when I can get it.) And I try to avoid sodium, but it is hard if you use any prepared foods at all, incuding such innocuous seeming things as salad dressings and "natural" breakfast cereals. And those TV chefs - they drive me crazy. They can't make anything without dousing it with appalling amounts of salt and black pepper.

Honey Ginger Lemonade

2004-05-05T22:49:00.000Z

4 large or 6 small lemons
1.5 pints (30 fl. oz.) filtered water (or spring water)
2 to 4 tablespoons local honey
2-inch knob of fresh ginger root
2 tablespoons caster sugar or fructose

Peel the ginger and slice it into 5 or 6 thick slices. Put 1/2 pint (10 oz.) of water in a small stainless steel saucepan and bring it to a boil, then add the honey and the ginger. Simmer this until the honey is absorbed, then turn off the heat and allow the ginger to steep as it cools to room temperature. When the honey water is cool, squeeze the lemons and pour the juice into a pitcher with the sugar or fructose in the bottom. Stir to dissolve the sugar into the lemon juice, then strain the honey water into the mixture. Top up with the rest of the water, stir and chill to serve.

The big fat con story

2004-04-24T20:55:00.000Z

I got a big charge out of this article in the Guardian: The big fat con story, an excerpt from Paul Campos's book, The Obesity Myth. Here's a good quote:
'The single most noxious line of argument in the literature about obesity is that black and Hispanic girls and women need to be "sensitised" to the "fact" that they have inappropriately positive feelings about their bodies. Readers may suspect this is a bad joke: I wish it were. One University of Arizona study found that, while only 10% of the white teenage girls surveyed were happy with their bodies, 70% of the black teenage girls were happy with theirs (the black girls weighed more, on average, than the white girls).'
And another:
'In 1853, an upper-class Englishman could be quite unselfconscious about the fact that the mere sight of the urban proletariat disgusted him. In 2003, any upper-class white American liberal would be horrified to imagine that the sight of, say, a lower-class Mexican-American woman going into a Wal-Mart might somehow elicit feelings of disgust in his otherwise properly sensitised soul. But the sight of a fat woman - make that an "obese" - better yet a "morbidly [sic] obese" woman going into Wal-Mart... ah, that is something else again.'

Caesar salad dressing

2004-04-24T20:36:00.000Z

I have had problems finding a bottled Caesar dressing that I like. The best is Cardini's which has little or no sugar, but it doesn't have enough garlic and is a little too thick. Another pretty good one is Brianna's, which has the added attraction of Asagio cheese, but it's a little too sweet and too thin. Gary Rhodes, on a randomly-viewed television show, had a quick and easy way to make a Caesar salad dressing, which I have just barely modified; tried it out and it's great. This amount will almost fill an empty Cardini's bottle:
4- 6 heaped tablespoons mayonnaise
1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
6 salted capers, salt rinsed off
4 anchovy fillets
2 dashes Worcestershire sauce
1 dash Tabasco sauce
juice of 1 lemon
4 large cloves of garlic
Just whizz it all up in a blender or food processor. Keep refrigerated, obviously.
For my vegan friends:
Substitute: 1/2 teaspoon of kelp and 1/2 teaspoon of Spike for the anchovies, vegetarian Worcestershire sauce for the obvious, tofu mayonnaise or other vegan substitute for the mayonnaise.

British? Sign the save-our-supplements petition

2004-04-09T22:13:00.000Z

Another important story from Josef at Health Supreme. This is a petition campaign against a proposed EU directive to effectively ban food supplements such as vitamins and most herbal preparations. The link to sign it (but only if you are British) is here.

Aspartame Neurotoxic: Coca Cola, Pepsi, Nutra Sweet Sued in California

2004-04-09T21:49:00.000Z

Supreme Health covers the story. I have tasted NutraSweet a few times, all but the first time being by accident. It makes me feel not only very ill but slightly insane and definitely poisoned. But everyone thinks I'm a crank for saying so. Or they think I'm a crank, and this just confirms it. So it is heartening to find that I'm not the only one.

The Kitchen Gardener

2004-03-18T23:08:00.000Z

Here is the March 2004 online issue of Kitchen Gardener Newsletter. You can also subscribe to this and receive it in your inbox. This month it features an article about gardening and cooking with your kids, and how effective that can be in positively influencing them to eat healthy food.

Washington Posts fat and calorie counter for fast foods

2004-03-13T12:10:00.000Z

Calories and fat in fast food menues (US menues). Thanks to loca lady of From the Inside Looking Out for this link.

Hash Browns - what they are and are not - and a story

2004-03-07T18:51:00.000Z

I told this story to Natalie and she said I should put it in my blog. I decided to put it here along with a recipe and recommendation.

What people in the UK think hash-browns are:

What I think hash-browns are (more or less) :

Recipe for Hash-browns
sufficient quantity of potatoes
about 1/3 as much onion by volume as potatoes
canola oil
butter
good quality salt
cayenne pepper

You need: a heavy frying pan with a lid. Best not to use non-stick. Definitely do not use stainless steel. I recommend (strongly) seasoned cast-iron. If you do use non-stick, use a wooden spatula and don't turn the fire up quite so high.

First chop the onions. Melt the butter in the pan to just cover the bottom and then add an equal amount of canola oil. Get the heat up to where it will sizzle when you put the onions in, but won't burn them. But before you even put the onions in (and I mean just before) . . .

Shred the potatoes. I am opposed to parboiling. Some people do, but I like the texture better if the potatoes are only fried. I recommend using a non-floury potato. Desiree would work in the UK, or Golden Wonder if you can get them. In North America, use either young-ish Russets or best of all Yukon Gold or Yellow Finn. Scrub the potatoes very well and dry them. Shred them with a food processor or large grater. Again, some people peel the potatoes, but I like the texture of the shredded peel. If you prefer you can peel them. (Wuss.) You don't want the potatoes to sit around much after they are grated, because they turn brown. Yuk.

So quickly saute those onions for about three minutes, and then add the potatoes. Stir-fry them around for about three minutes to mix the onions and potatoes together and to coat everything with oil. Then, walk away and let it cook for 3 to 5 minutes, come back, turn it over, and walk away again; repeat about four times. Then put the lid on the pan and let it cook about 5 more minutes in the steam. (You may want to turn the fire down at this point.) There should be a final heavy crust on the bottom. Stir that in, along with the salt and cayenne pepper to taste. Do not put ketchup on these hash-browns. Ketchup is for little kids who won't eat their healthy food. If you must adulterate them, try Crystal hot sauce. Or sour cream. Or both.

Minneapolis is a great place to get hash-browns. Try the Seward Cafe, and the Hard Times cafe in the West Bank, for hippie or anarcho-punk ambience combined with astonishingly good food. Another place I used to love, sadly out of business now, was Cathy's at 25th and Chicago. Their hash-browns violated all my rules above, and didn't even have onions in them, but they were awfully good in their own way. Beware the famous and popular Keys restaurants, though - I am pretty sure they use frozen potatoes, and their oil is very industrial tasting.

Now for a hash-brown story: about 10 years ago, when I was living on my own in Elliot Park, I had a very busy day and didn't have time to eat lunch or dinner. At about 11:30 at night, I decided to make myself some hash-browns. Now three things you must know about me to understand this story. One, I am the most accident-prone person on the planet. Two, I'm a big baby and a hypochondriac about some things. I am OK with pain, and with blood, but I always think I am going to die from some freak accident, so I panic and rush off to the ER for what most people would say are minor things. And I am afraid to drive, so I have to get someone to take me. Finally, I have this friend, with whom I had at the time a very close relationship, but he was not my boyfriend. But we sort of acted and appeared to be a couple at this time. So, long story not quite so long, I cut myself on the grater and bled a lot, I called my friend Chuck in a panic and begged him to take me to the ER, and he did. For some reason, possibly to do with Chuck's rather scary-macho appearance, or with our old-married-couple style banter, the staff there decided I was a domestic abuse case. In other words, that Chuck had cut me and I made up this ridiculous story of a kitchen accident at almost midnight to cover for him. The doctor was especially skeptical - "you were making hash-browns at 11:30 at night. Yeah, right." And he also didn't believe that a guy who was not my boyfriend would come out at midnight and drive me to the ER for a cut finger. All I can say is, I make really fantastic hash-browns, OK?

Creamy Spicy Cabbage

2004-02-22T20:27:00.000Z

1/2 head Savoy cabbage
1 small yellow onion
1 dried red chilli
1 tbsp. each olive oil, corn oil, spiced stir-fry oil
about 1/4 pint of water
1/2 tsp. cayenne
1 tsp sea salt
1 tbsp. French's brown mustard or Dijon mustard
1/2 container cream cheese
1/2 container creme fraiche

Dice the onion, mince the chilli and cut the cabbage into 3/4-inch slices and then into lengths of no more than 3 inches. Heat the oil in a wok over medium-high flame. Add the onions and chilli to the oil and stir-fry until soft but not browned. Add the cabbage; it may work better to add half and let if cook down a bit and then the other half. Stir fry it so that it cooks evenly. Keep adjusting the flame if needed so that it doesn't burn, but just softens and maybe has a few lightly browned edges. (This is very important to the taste of the final product, so be patient.) After about 10 minutes of cooking, add the seasonings and a little bit of water and put a lid on the wok and turn the flame down low. The water should mostly cook away in about 5 to 7 minutes and by then the cabbage will all be soft. With the flame still on very low, stir in the creme fraiche and cream cheese throroughly. Cook for five minutes more, stirring occasionally.

GM crops to be approved - quelle surprise

2004-02-19T13:01:00.000Z

The UK government is ignoring all the overwhelming negative reactions from the so-called great GM Debate and is set to approve the first commercial plantings next week. This is cross-posted from my main blog.

Recipes in the free paper

2004-02-13T22:26:00.000Z

I just discovered the online version of the free tabloid, Metro, has a recipe section. Here is a sample from the vegetarian list.

The Ultimate Cassoulet

2004-01-21T18:51:00.000Z

I found this at BBC (Food - Recipes). It's too meaty for me, but appears to be very authentic. Hubby would like it.

This year it will be different

2004-01-16T22:09:00.000Z

Unfortunately, these are mostly tongue-in-cheek, but a very funny list of ways to stick to your diet. (I am considering doing a sponsored slimming for charity, so I could use some real ideas.)

Gardening fantasy

2004-01-12T13:22:00.000Z

It's too early to be thinking of this, but I want to grow strawberries. If we plant in June we could have them for June 2005.

Enough already!

2004-01-12T13:11:00.000Z

The Guardian's Andrew Martin has just about had it with the UK's unhealthy food obsession.

Nigella's Spiced Pink Soup

2004-01-02T19:27:00.000Z

This is a fabulous cold soup and it is really PINK. It contains oven-roasted beetroot and a curry-flavoured broth, and then is steeped in the refrigerator for several days with a sliced spring onion. Finally, the resulting very fragrant cold beetroot soup is blitzed with lots of creme fraiche. I can't recommed it highly enough.

Easy-peasy ways with vegetables

2004-01-02T19:04:00.000Z

We have been raising some of our vegetables in the garden for the last couple of years, with mixed results. The best results have been in plain old greens of various kinds - some for salad (rocket or arugula has done well) and some for cooking (Swiss chard was the star in this category.) Here are some of our favourite very easy recipes for vegetables.

Stir-fried courgette
3 or 4 courgettes (zucchini)
1 small onion
1 small red chili (optional)
olive oil
salt and pepper
Slice the courgette and dice the onion. Mince the chili, if using. Stir fry in olive oil until just limp and translucent; season to taste.

Melange of vegetables in a creamy sauce
1/3 head cauliflower, cut into florets
1/2 lb. brussels sprouts, trimmed and halved
2 parsnips, sliced
1 leek, sliced
3 cloves garlic
1 tbs. olive oil
1 tbs. butter
1/2 tub creme fraiche
Tabasco sauce (to taste)
mild curry powder (to taste)
salt (to taste)
Steam a choice of 2 or 3 different "firm" vegetables, cut into similar size pieces. Good choices might be cauliflower, brussels sprouts and parsnip.When they are on the verge of tender, remove them from the heat and melt the butter over them. Meanwhile, saute the leeks and garlic in a shallow pan in the olive oil. When soft, add the other vegetables, the creme fraiche, the Tabasco sauce, the salt and the curry powder. Keep the heat on until the cream sauce is hot and simmer it for a few minutes.

Stir-fried kale and sweetcorn
1 head kale
1 small red onion
1 can sweetcorn
oil
salt
cayenne
Wash the kale thoroughly and cut it into bite-sized shreds. Dice the onion. Stir-fry the onion and kale in a wok or very large skillet until the kale is wilted down by half and the onion soft. Add the sweetcorn and seasonings to taste and heat through.

What we had for Christmas

2003-12-25T11:56:00.000Z

We actually had our main meal yesterday. I wanted to take it easy today because tomorrow I go on the long grueling journey to a family celebration. This involves a few hours on the road to Gatwick, a few hours at Gatwick, about 9 hours flying, a few hours in Detroit and then flying to Memphis, a couple of hours in Memphis then a (hopefully) quick hop to Gulfport, where it will be at least 11 pm the same day but will feel like 5 am the next day to me. Ugh.
So, what we had (and still have). A very large, fat, free-range reared goose, simply roasted. Damson cheese, which I made back in early September. (I used Mrs. Beeton's recipe but this is pretty close.) Mashed cauliflower and celeriac with cream, and also, parboiled cauliflower and celeriac roasted in goose fat. Stir-fried thinly sliced brussels sprouts with shallots, chili and mushrooms. Wild rice with onion and celery. Chilled Cava Brut to drink.

An Indian Christmas menu

2003-12-25T11:55:00.000Z

A menu with recipes from Delicious India.

Christmas Salmon

2003-12-24T10:22:00.000Z

This is the first year in six years that my husband and I will not be having this for our main course for Christmas day.

1 salmon, gutted and de-scaled
1-3 cups wild rice (depending on size of party and size of salmon)
1 to 3 tbsp vegetable bouillon powder (recommend Marigold)
1 to 3 tbsp olive oil
1 to 3 tbsp butter
3-9 shallots
1 medium yellow onion
1 or 2 leafy stalks celery
1 lb. brown closed-cap (chestnut) mushrooms
1/2 - 1 cup pecan halves
salt and pepper to taste
1 lemon

Rinse the wild rice; place it in a large saucepan and cover it with three times the measure of cold water. Bring it to a hard boil, add the bouillon powder and turn it down to a simmer. Cook for about half an hour (it will not be quite cooked yet, but will have approximately doubled in size and be semi-soft.)
Pour the olive oil into a roasting tin large enough to hold the salmon. You may cut the head and/or tail off of the salmon if you choose (and use them to make stock). Slice and dice the shallots, onions and celery. Melt the butter in a skillet and fry the shallots, onions and celery until soft but not browned. Add the mushrooms, halved or sliced, and fry for 3 minutes. Add all the shallot mixture and all the pecans to the wild rice and blend thoroughly. Place about half the wild rice mixture in the bottom of the roasting tin. Wash the salmon thoroughly and rest it on the bed of wild rice. Stuff the rest of the wild rice into the cavity of the salmon and season the whole pan to taste. Slice the lemon and place some slices in the cavity and some around the side. Bake in a pre-heated oven at 190C / 400F or gas-mark equivalent until the salmon flesh is pink but not dry and the skin is crispy but not blackening. It is recommended that you test the salmon by making a deep cut near the centre and look at the inner flesh; if it appears quite dark and moist, it is not quite done. However, be aware that fish cooks much more quickly than other meats, so the total will be as little as 20 minutes for a smallish salmon and perhaps 45 minutes for a very large one. Finally, if you do have a very large salmon, you can cover the dish with foil for the first half hour of cooking so that the outer parts don't get too dry before the inner bits are cooked.

Serve this dish with roasted root vegetables, a fancy salad and home-made cranberry-orange relish.

Germany still divided - by food choices

2003-12-17T14:23:00.000Z

The culinary divide in Germany remains although the political unification is accomplished. Eating more pork and less fruit and veg, East Germans are 11% more likely to be overweight.

Not really a restaurant review - Jive Turkey in NYC

2003-12-17T13:46:00.000Z

I really like Guardian columnist Gary Younge, who offers the perspective of a black Briton based in New York. His ex-pat viewpoint is often a perfect counterpoint to my own. Today he offers something to post in the Kitchen: a discussion of highly specialist restaurants, including Jive Turkey which sells everything you can do to turkey legally. It's a great article about choice and diversity, and, like he says, Britain could learn something from Jive Turkey.

Raw Food

2003-12-17T10:16:00.000Z

This is something I have toyed with. It probably works. I know lots of fat vegetarians and even fat vegans but no fat raw-fooders. (Don't know about the cancer thing, though.) The Hippocrates Institute is the oldest and sanest.
Loca Lady and From the Inside Looking Out has a humorous song on the subject.

Kerala-style Fish Curry Soup

2003-12-16T20:05:00.000Z

This is by request:

1 lb. or more firm, de-boned white fish (I used queen fish)

Cut the fish into bite-sized pieces and set aside.

1 tbsp. mustard seed
1 tbsp. coriander seed
2 tbsp. stir-fry oil or ghee
1 onion, chopped finely
1 knob fresh ginger, grated
2 or 3 red chilis, fresh or dried, minced
1 red bell pepper, diced
1 tbsp. garam masala (or your own mixture)
1 tsp. turmeric
1 kaffir lime leaf
1/2 can pureed tomatoes or passata (about 3/4 cup)
1 can coconut milk (can be low-fat)
salt and white pepper to taste
1 cup chopped raw spinach or chopped coriander {cilantro} leaves (or both or neither)

Heat the mustard and coriander seeds in a wok or curry pan until they pop. Add the oil or ghee and then quickly add the onions, ginger and chilis. Stir-fry for about 5 minutes, then add the bell pepper, turmeric and garam masala and stir-fry another 5 minutes. Turn the heat to medium and add the tomatoes, lime leaf and coconut milk, taste and season as needed. Allow this to simmer for about 20 minutes to blend the tastes and mature the spices. Add the fish, spreading it out evenly in one layer and covering all the pieces in the liquid. Cook it for 6 to 10 minutes at a low bubble. Add the spinach if desired and cook 1 minute more; add the coriander/cilantro and turn off the heat and stir the soup. Allow to sit one minute before serving. It can be served with rice or just eaten as a soup.

My Chicken Salad

2003-12-16T17:39:00.000Z

1/2 pound of chicken, roasted, cooled and cut into very small chunks
2 tablespoons mayonnaise
3 tablespoons low-fat fromage frais (substitute yoghurt if desired)
1 tablespoon lime juice
1 tablespoon olive oil
12 dashes Tabasco sauce (or other hot chili sauce as preferred)
2 spring onions {green onions}, finely sliced
1 leafy celery stalk, finely sliced

Combine all ingredients. Serve chilled with green salad or on a slice of good bread, open-faced.

Too Posh to Pluck

2003-12-16T17:22:00.000Z

(Cross-posted from Deborama's Book Reviews and Store)

The Duchess of Devonshire's Chatsworth Cookery Book

I really shouldn't have this in my book reviews at all; for one thing, it's more of a tourist attraction than a book, and for another, I haven't read it. But I just read Lynn Barber's very amusing review of it, and interview with the Duchess, in the Observer Food Monthly, and it made me want to look into it. The first paragraph will give you a flavour:
"It is quite thrilling for me to meet someone who knows even less about cooking than I do - especially when she is publishing her very own cookery book. The Duchess of Devonshire - for it is she - actually begins her Chatsworth Cookery Book with the words 'I haven't cooked since the war'. She says she would have liked to make that the title, but the publishers wouldn't agree. Her friend, the hairdresser in Chesterfield, told her that her writing a cookery book was 'a bit rich!' but of course it will be - being by the Duchess, it will sell like hot cakes."
There is a recipe in the book for Oeufs Mollet which the Duchess, when pressed, chooses as her personal favourite. It is a dish she was "brought up on". (Her mother, Lady Readesdale, was an avid cook and an early health food advocate, and this was one of her mother's standards.) The dish is very simple, poached eggs with fried capers and parsley, basically, but here is what Her Grace has to say about it:
"Well it's soft, you know.' What? 'Like a hard-boiled egg only soft, and you take the shell off - quite tricky sometimes. I don't think you or I could do it! And then you put butter and fried capers." Ah, bless. Is it really possible that an 80-something year old woman, who raises prize chickens and has dined in all the best houses of the world, whose own house is one of the best in the world, and who went to the Cordon Bleu (admittedly sixty years ago) does not recognise and know the term for a poached egg?
By the way, I stole the above title from the Observer review.
But even though the Duchess got most of these recipes from her cook or in some cases, her friends' cooks or the cooks for her wildly successful farm shop at Chatsworth, I think this is a good cookbook for those who like really posh food (that would be me too, reverse snob though I am) or for those who just like reading about really posh food (also me.)