Cooking Real Food

Yesterday I posted regarding the meat content, or should that be lack of it, in hot dogs. This is illustrative of reason why I started writing here about cooking, food and farming issues. While these issues were always important to me, and I would hope to others too, there were situations and activities that were occurring just beyond my perception.

For me the real revelation came when I spotted a “Convenience” Pancake mix in the village shop. As pancakes are so easy to make I was really confused as to how any company could even dream of selling a product like this. Even if it was made for catering market, making a pancake batter is really simple.

At the time I was willing to lay the blame upon the education system, as all young people should be taught basic cooking skills. While I personally think this should start in the home, and with most families it does, schools also have a role to play as well. As no matter what else we may think that education is for, it is used to develop workers and economic skills. Thus allowing all young people learn some basic cooking skills will help them become independent latter when the leave school and leave home, but it may even inspire some to go further and have a career in the catering industry.

Equally, when the banking system collapsed and people needed to save money, one of the easiest ways I thought I could help was by showing how folks could cook and eat well via some videos and by writing. Again it seemed that lack of knowledge and skills were at the heart of the matter. The more people I talked to about food and cooking the more this seemed to be confirmed.

I had always known that there are a significant part of the population that will stick to the same foods and meals all the time, but was it that some folks were just to lazy to cook as others and stereotyping would have us believe or was it that people were just clueless. As I wanted to watch a TV programme on what manufacturers put in children's food, I watched that yesterday. And in that programme there was a dietitian working out of a hospital with young mothers who related a incident where she gave a woman a potato and a peeler and the woman asked what she did next?

Now I was aware of the joke that some people do not even know how to boil an egg. I had always assumed that was a myth as I learnt that as a child by osmosis rather than ever really being taught it. Latter I learnt tricks to do it better, but I genuinely am shocked that some people can not deal with the basics of cooking and food preparation.

I even started looking at what people were buying in the supermarket. I even tried to talk to people that I knew about this and offered suggestions of cheaper and better alternatives that they could cook from scratch. But this did not always go down well. While I know that people do live busy lives, and time can be at a premium sometimes, often with a bit of planning though it is possible to have pasta sauce for example ready in the fridge or freezer ready.

Yet the part that I least understand about peoples attitude towards food, is that often it is the unemployed and those not working that cook the least. When I have been unemployed it was only by cooking from scratch that I was I able to make ends meet.

Therefore near the start of the credit crunch I started filming some of the things I was cooking with the aim of helping people to learn some simple ways of cooking great meals. I also sought out some advice so that I could make them as best I could and provide some good quality information. However, each organisation that I spoke to had there own agenda and it made me very confused and the information that each body wanted included would have made the videos boring.

While I posted the original preview a while ago, and I tried to make the video entertaining, I realised that I needed to do more work before I was ready to post these films. So I continued to film so that when I was ready and had the time, I could try and help the folks that want the help.

This delay helped me realise that there are some people out there who just don't want help, no matter that they need it. Therefore I will offer help and advice to those who want it. I genuinely hope that the videos will entertain as well as inform.

The reasons why I became a vegetarian and why I stopped have already been related here, but this happened when it was near impossible to find vegetarian recipes so I had to learn to adapt recipes to be vegetarian. Thus I learnt more about cooking and what worked and what did not than most people ever do. Therefore this skill has given me the skills to cook and cook well, that I want to pass on in these videos.

While I was a vegetarian for more than twenty years, there was a real cultural change to food in Britain. Even when I was a child, even the poor demanded good food, and food was far more than just fuel. As even the poor took pride in producing good meals especially on a limited budget. So while I was expanding my diet via discovering new ingredients and flavours, other people were limiting their diets. Equally at the same time there was a cultural adjustment where instead of sitting down to meals together, people started eating alone. Families would have several sittings, one for each member of the family. This actually makes cooking more difficult for the cook in the family, as she, and unfortunately it will normally be a woman, then has far more work to do. It is this aspect of the cultural change that has enabled the food industry to sell more of the expensive processed food to people.

But this is the aspect that really surprises me, particularly when children are involved. Even as a vegetarian I noticed this as there appeared many vegetarian forms of processed food too. While I looked at and tried some of these, reading the chemical list, sorry ingredients list told me that I really did not want to eat them. While convenience foods do have a place in the kitchen and the diet occasionally, to have the whole of my diet based upon this would make me very depressed.

I have a real love of good food, and I love sharing food too. My better half has become my number one taste tester. It is this love of food that I want to share, here is the original video

Sweet Potato & Butternut Squash Soup

Half a Butternut Squash
Two small or one Large Sweet Potato
One Vegetable Stock Cube
Water
Two Bay Leaves
Salt And Pepper to taste

The Squash and the sweet potato can be roasted first. This can be done the day before while cooking another dish. However if this has not been possible then just follow the same method as this can be made with roasted or un-roasted veg.

Method

Peel and chop the vegetables into even sized chunks.
Place in a pan and pour on 2 pints or 1.25 litres of water.
Add a vegetable stock cube and two bay leaves.
Bring to the boil and turn the heat down and let the vegetables simmer for half an hour.
There is no need to add salt during cooking as stock cubes have a lot of salt in them already.
When the vegetables are cooked drain the vegetables reserving the cooking stock.
Remove the bay leaves and put the vegetables into a blender. If you don't have a blender you can use a potato masher (ricer) or a stick blender, but it will not make the soup as smooth.
Use some of the cooking stock to blend the soup.
Pour the blended mixture back into the remaining stock, reheat, check the seasoning and add a little salt if needed and pepper to taste and serve hot.

What are you really Eating?

One of the exciting aspects of the Internet and with interacting with people from other parts of the world, is that it can enable me to learn via the investigation of tangents prompted by a comment. Personally I can not even remember when I last had a hot dog. To the best of my recollection it was when I was a child. Therefore, I had no idea what was in one.

I have to emphasise that this applies to Britain and Europe, and while via systems like the GATT agreement (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), the rules are very similar across the globe, specifically I can only talk about European regulations here. I place this note here as while I am sure of the information regarding Europe, different rules and regulations apply in other parts of the world.

Anyway a question was raised about what is in a hot dog? In Britain they come under the rules that govern sausages and a sausage has to contain a minimum of 46% forty six percent of meat to be legally called a sausage. As items like hot dogs contain less than this, Hot Dog sausage manufacturers stay within the law by calling the things like Hot dogs or Frankfurters.

I did some digging to try and discover what was permitted and it was not easy. As it seems that manufacturers don't like to admit what garbage they are really feeding us. But looking at the labels and knowing that meat can be twenty five percent connective tissue and twenty five percent fat, fifty percent of the stated meat content may not even be meat then I found two brands that had less than nine percent meat in them.

Well, the question has to be asked what are you really eating?

What's Awful about Offal?

A comment made on the previous posting actually raises an interesting point. As an awful lot of offal does go into processed meat products. As my American friend points out, most Americans would baulk at the idea of eating the edible offal. It is not really that different here in Britain, as some people will and do turn up their noses at Liver, Kidneys, Heart et al. Yet all are incredibly good food and good value too.

Here in Britain, people of my generation, were put off eating Liver at school. As simply the liver we were served in “liver and onions” we did not know if we were meant to eat it or repair our shoes with it. Yet even at a relatively young age, I also knew that liver when turned into a pate was very good. Equally I knew from an early age that other offal went into other meals, the classic that springs to my mind was a Stake and Kidney pudding.

When I was a child, and I almost hate myself for saying this but it was true, you either ate what you were given or you went hungry. This prevented us becoming fussy eaters and it meant that we did eat our greens and a whole range of foods that some folks now struggle with. To be quite honest I don't think I could cope with a child that refused to eat vegetables. But as I know how to hide vegetables in a dish, I would hope that I would never have that problem.

Its the same trick though that the food industry uses to hide the poor quality cuts in meat products. In Britain (and Europe) you can include twenty five percent fat and twenty five percent connective tissue, tendons, skin etc. and still call it meat. So that 100% burger or hot dog could only have half the meat you think. Even reading the label will not enlighten you. Further that meat may contain offal too. While the percentages differ a little across the pond, the situation is similar in the US as it is in Europe.

However, here I will stick to what is allowed in Europe and specifically Britain. And here items like Heart meat has to be listed separately on the labels of processed foods. Now heart is a very flavourful meat, but as it is a heard working mussel it requires longer cooking times to make it tender. Thus in a pie from a food manufacture, its inclusion can normally be detected when the pie is chewy and tough.

Its rather funny, funny peculiar that is, as just last week the Food Standards agency here in Britain started a campaign to get people to use low fat milk. This will help fight obesity. Well as I have now got off the floor and stopped rolling around laughing, and changed my wet underwear, I thought what a waste of time and money. As the difference between full fat milk and skimmed milk is just one percent of the fat in milk. Had they tackled the amount of hidden fat in processed meats, well that would really help. But that actually requires doing something and not just making it look as though you are doing something.

I personally do not have any problems with eating offal. I am a great fan of nose to tail eating. Not only does this reduce waste, but it also means that farmers actually get a reasonable return on the whole of an animal. If you only use the prime cuts, the farmer has to send more animals to slaughter just to meet the demands for the prime cuts. While the rest of a beast does go to the processed food industry, the reluctance to eat the cheaper cuts and the offal perpetuates the problems of food and farming.

While I know that the readers of my other Blog will have already heard this and will be bored by this, but I stopped eating meat and became a vegetarian when I discovered what cattle were fed and the writers of this book were predicting BSE long before it (BSE) had even been discovered. The difficulty for me was that I did not know what I was eating. As people became more demanding regard quality and provenance, I felt that it was only right to support the farmers that were now doing what I wanted. Yet many of the people who would extract the urine from me for being a vegetarian, will happily eat all the processed meat that the food industry can offload on them, while I can know where the meat or offal I eat comes from. Often right down to the breed.

Most people are already eating offal hidden in processed foods. This is something that amuses me when folks say that they would never eat this or that! This is why I think that cooking is such a fundamental skill, as only if you can cook from scratch can you truly know what is in your food.

Eating offal has a long and honourable tradition in Britain and Europe. When folks have tried a food and genuinely do not like it, then I respect that. What I can never understand is people that will not even try. Especially as these people will readily eat foods manufactured for them without any knowledge of what really goes into it. Further, I respect that there are cultural differences between the foods that different nations will eat. I don't think I could ever eat insects, yet in some cultures they are delicacies. The difference here, is most of the foods that people say they would never eat, they already are consuming.

There is just one last detail that I would like to mention for my American reader, that haggis are coming. Last week I read that America is changing its import regulations so that the traditional Scottish Haggis can be imported into the US. I have eaten this myself, and who knows, the Scottish could convert Americans to eating offal on a regular basis.

British Food Culture

I know that to some people the term British Food Culture is an oxymoron, but that's a stereotype that is just as unfair as all stereotyping is. If you read sections of the media, Britain is full of overweight people who never cook and rely upon take out food to eat. While there is a growing number of people who have problems with their weight, often it is the hidden calories in processed food that causes the problem. At a latter date I will be posting on that issue. But no matter how good anyone is as a cook at home, we all enjoy take out food. It may be that its an occasional treat
or something that time constraints mean folks have to do to ensure that there is a hot meal on the table. As with all foods it is a matter of balance.


One of the wonderful aspects of modern Britain is the range of different foods and cuisines that are now available. However in Britain we have always borrowed cuisines from other parts of the world, you only have to think of the spice trade of the 15th and 16th Centuries. Further it was the access to the spices from the east that drove the creation of the British Empire. Yet as logic dictates these exotic foods were the preserve of the rich.


Thus the majority of the British people did not have access to these spices. Further, the foods that the lower classes ate were considered poor quality. This created the illusion that British food and cooking was low quality and bland. When we move towards the 17th and 18th Centuries, with the nobility doing their grand tours of Europe, continental cuisine became seen by the upper classes as being the hight of taste. This excluded and denigrated British foods even more. This cultural attitude also had the effect of stopping the Scots from harvesting the Herrings from the Scottish coast, yet the fishermen from Norway, Holland and Denmark seeing that we did not want our own fish, established their own fleets to harvest the Herrings.


As when Britain became the first industrial nation and people started to move from the land to the city the link to the land, the farmer and producer was lost for some, it was never lost entirely. While the attitudes towards the foods that the lower classes ate was even further disregarded, among the people who lived in the towns and the industrial areas, this “Peasant cuisine” developed.


This dismissive attitude of British food as tasteless and bland was reinforced in print in Mrs Beeton's book of Household management. Where, for example, was the instruction to boil cabbage for thirty minutes. This reflected the upper class attitude that vegetables were bad for you. Mrs Beeton and her husband (who was the driving force behind the publications) were writing for a market. And a major part of this attitude towards the British cuisine was simply that the upper classes indulged in the continental foods and food styles from Europe and ignored the indigenous ones.


This continued until the first world war, when the appalling waste of human life, lost Britain many of the people who knew how to cook and grow good food. This loss of skills reinforced the myth that British cooking was poor. As simply people turned to books like Mrs Beeton's and cooked to death vegetables and undercooked the wrong cuts of meat.


Further, the lack of respect for food meant that between the first and second world wars there was a decline in Agriculture and Horticulture. The solutions to this from the British government was to import food and further undermine the production of good food in Britain.




The second world war helped highlight the danger of relying on importing our food rather than growing our own. While one of the effects of rationing ensured that the nation ate a balanced diet, it was far from exciting.


Therefore by the 1960s when rationing was over and trade was allowing food to be be imported again, the old standard model was back reinforcing the same stereotype that only French food was worth eating. By the 1960s and 1970s it was still presumed that French food was the hight of gastronomy, this was to ignore the great foods that were always here.


But even during the last few hundred years of this potted history, in local communities and across the regions that form the tapestry that is Britain good regional and local food thrived. Additionally because of the Empire, people were returning from far flung parts of the world bringing back dishes borrowed from many diverse nations. This was happening long before many people assume, and there have been curry houses in Britain for over one hundred years. While Chinese communities have been here for many centuries influencing our foods too.


Therefore Britain has always had a good food culture, it is just that it has been hidden and ignored. While I personally despair of the people that travel to Spain and insist that they will only eat British foods, half the fun of travelling is the discovery of great new foods, flavours and dishes, the increase in mass travel has enabled the growth of the world cuisine that is now available in Britain.


However, while this great food revolution has gone on in some sectors of the community, in other parts of the nation, peoples diets have become even more limited. Personally I am baffled by the attitude that views food purely as fuel. Food is and should be a pleasure and it is not that great flavours are only available to those with money, as good food can be cheap too. After all a good hearty vegetable soup is very easy and cheap to make. So it is not poverty that has created these culinary wastelands.


But if you just base the view of British food upon the “Cant Cook, Wont Cook” Brigade, then the view of our national cuisine will be distorted. However in this last decade there has been a growth of the “Gastro Pubs”, pubs that have developed food that goes beyond the Stake and chips or Fish and Chips menu. The growth of Farmers Markets, a wonderful import from the United States, and an explosion of ingredients from across the globe in our shops.


I do like using many of the wonderful ingredients available, most I had previously been sourcing from different stores. Indian spices from Indian stores, as often you can get great advice on using them too. Equally I love the farmers markets as there you can get good ingredients direct from the farmer and producer. While there are times when I do feel that some of the producers are expecting to much for their produce, most are reasonable. Now reasonable does not mean cheap, but good value. That said, I often find that good quality items like sausages will be cheaper than the premium ranges that are in the supermarkets and are better tasting too.


The last time I made a Lancashire Hot Pot, I bought the neck of lamb and the kidneys at a farmers market for less than I would have paid for the cheapest cuts in the supermarket or even my local butchers. And it was good meat too.


Using potatoes and a cheap cut of meat like neck of lamb, herbs and onions and you have a main meal that takes little time to prepare and is slowly cooked so that it does not prevent folks doing other tasks or jobs, and can feed a family. The irony is that if you visit one of the “Gastro Pubs” this is likely to be one of the dishes on the menu that will prove very popular, yet it is so easy to cook at home. As I personally maintain, good food is not about having lots of money.


However there is an irony here, as on television there is a plethora of cooking programmes that have developed over the last ten to fifteen years. In the same period there has been a growth in the sales of cookery books, yet also an apparent decline in the number of people cooking. Yet foods and dishes that were once disregarded as being “British Peasant Food” has become the mainstay of these programmes and books.


This is just one example of the food that forms part of the diversity of British food culture that is alive, well and creating great meals across the nation.

Lancashire Hot Pot

Ingredients


675g 1½lb Neck of Lamb cutlets
2 lambs Kidneys
675g 1½lb Waxy Potatoes
1 Large Onion
2tbsp chopped fresh thyme
150ml ¼pint Lamb Stock
25g 1oz butter, melted
Salt & Pepper


Method


Remove any excess fat from the lamb.
Skin and core the kidneys and cut into slices
Scrub and thinly slice the potatoes and slice the onion
Arrange a layer of potatoes in the base of an oven proof dish
The dish needs to be one of three pint capacity 1.8 litre
Arrange the cutlets on the potatoes to form a single layer.
Place the sliced kidneys on top.
Add a layer of onions and sprinkle this with the chopped Thyme
pour the stock over the layers and season with salt and pepper.
Layer the remaining potatoes on top so that the potatoes form a lid covering all the other ingredients.
Brush the potatoes with the melted butter and put the lid on the dish. If you don't have a lidded dish cover with foil.
Cook in a preheated oven at 180ºC/350ºF/Gas Mark 4 for 1½ hours
Remove the lid or foil and cook for a further 30 minutes until golden brown on top.


Serves Four

Devils Food Cake Recipe

In my other blog, I made a posting regarding me baking my own birthday cake rather than having my better half use a packet mix. As I refuse to allow products into my kitchen that have emerged from a chemical plant and not a kitchen. Personally I do worry about what additives are put in our food. While they are all tested to see if they are safe, over the years a not insignificant number have been banned as they were latter discovered to cause health problems.

In the 1980s the book E for Additives became a surprising best seller. Surprising as it was just a list of the chemicals that were added to our foods in the form of colours, preservatives, flavourings etc. The industry reaction was to change the labels from the EU codes, the E numbers, to the chemical name. However some of these additives were removed from the approved list as a result of the book.

It is one of the bizarre aspects of some processed food that to produce them the nutritional bits are removed. Corn Flakes being the classic example. The kernel is removed first and and the corn is flattened and toasted. As the Kernel is where all the vitamins and minerals are naturally stored, these vitamins and minerals have to be artificially added. The manufacturers even boast of the added vitamin and mineral content of their product. Now while I personally like corn flakes and I do not think they are a bad food, it says something about the mindset of food manufacturers that they will mess about with our food only with the aim of making a normal food, maize (corn) in to a product.

While the rational projected by the manufacturers and processors is often about convenience, but the question needs to be asked, whose convenience? If it looks as though the convenience is just for the manufacturer then it probably is.

In Europe HVO, Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil the cheapest of the cheap oil or fat that can be used in foods, has long been associated with cardiac illness, while still legal is via publicity being removed from products. The EU even changed the regulations so that it could not be hidden in products as vegetable oil. In Denmark and New York it is now banned. However, reason why manufacturers love this oil is not its low cost, but it adds months to the shelf life of a product. If baked with butter, a pastry would last only four to six weeks. HVO can make that 12 months or more. That can save a food manufacturer millions.

So while no food processors and manufacturers are not deliberately trying to poison their customers, the corporate mentality of the food industry means that dubious items are used. Therefore, by staying with this rule of not using anything that contains items that you can not find in the kitchen is a good rule to follow.

The irony that I should be talking about what I would call Devils Food, the over processed rubbish that the food industry loves to sell us having just discovered this American classic that is called Devils Food. The difference is the cake is just straight forward fattening and indulgent. While many of the over processed foods are fattening just from extra sugar and fats that are added to make them cheap, or have longer life and profitable. However, this is one of those wonderful treats that can be part of a family celebration. I personally love dark chocolate but a good milk chocolate can be used, if that is your personal taste.

I love discovering new dishes from different nations, and if anyone has something interesting to share, lets share it here.

Devils Food Cake Recipe

Ingredients

100g 3½oz Dark Chocolate
250g 9oz Self-raising Flour
1tsp bicarbonate of soda (baking Soda)
225g 8oz Butter
400g 14oz Dark Muscovado Sugar
1tsp Vanilla Extract
3 eggs
125ml 4 floz Buttermilk
225ml 8oz Boiling water

Frosting
300g 10½oz Caster sugar
2 egg whites
1 tbsp lemon Juice
3 tbsp Orange Juice

Method

Set the Oven to 190°C/375°f/Gas mark 5
Lightly grease two 20cm/8 inch round cake tins and line with greaseproof paper.
Melt the chocolate in a bowl over a pan of water.
Sieve the flour and bicarbonate of soda into a bowl.
Separately beat the butter and sugar in a bowl until pale and fluffy.
Beat in the vanilla extract and one at a time the three eggs.
Fold the melted chocolate into the butter sugar mixture until well blended.
Gradually fold in the flour, a little at a time works best.
Then stir in the buttermilk and the boiling water.
Divide the mixture between the tins and cook in the preheated oven for thirty minutes
Leave to cool in the tins for five minutes as this helps the cake release from the tin, then cool on a wire rack until fully cool.

In a bowl set over gently simmering water, as you would melt chocolate, put all the frosting ingredients.
Whisk, this works best with an electric whisk, until thickened and forming soft peaks.
Remove from the heat and whisk until cool.
The heat will cook the egg whites while continuing to whisk will keep the frosting smooth.
Spread about a third on one of the cooled cakes and make a sandwich then coat them both with the remaining frosting.