April, 2022 - How would you know...

Zucchini, Spiralising, and Eating Flowers…

April 30, 2022April 30, 2022humanist55

f you have seen my Theme Reveal for the A2Z Challenge 2022, then you will know that I am writing about becoming Vegetarian gradually as a response to the crisis in food supply chains sparked by the pandemic and made worse by the WAR in Ukraine. As well, I am keeping to the theme I originally planned of food which can be eaten in its own right as well as becoming an ingredient in other dishes…

Although Ratatouille was in my beloved copy of Elizabeth David’s “Mediterranean Food“, I really learned to make this dish in my first restaurant job. I blagged my way into working at “The Good Food Shop” in London to assist the chef by cooking at weekends and taking some of the load off her, and ratatouille was one of the dishes I had to prepare in commercial size saucepans… Elizabeth David stresses that this Provençale ragout of onions, aubergine (eggplant), Zucchini, peppers (pimento) and tomatoes, should be stewed very slowly in oil. She doesn’t say how much oil (much like some of my own recipes here, I think you have to figure out quantities by experience) but the author of the recipe pictured above is more explicit and uses a total of six tablespoons of olive oil. If you want stage by stage with pictures check his out. Elizabeth Davids recipe does not include Zucchini, but she says of her list of ingredients “usually” and most recipes seem to include them routinely, however, it shows that cooking is never set in stone and once you have a principal under your belt, then adapt, make a fusion with your own favourite ingredients – go forth boldly! Here though is Elizabeth David’s recipe with the addition of Zucchini, garlic, and herbs – my additions [like so]..

Ratatouille

2 large onions, 2 aubergines, 3 zucchini, 3 or 4 tomatoes, 2 red or green pimentos, garlic, fresh basil and thyme, oil, salt and pepper.
Peeel the tomatoes and cut the unpeeled aubergines [and Zucchini) into squares
Slice the onions and pimentos
Put the onions [and sliced garlic] garlic into a frying pan with plenty of oil, not too hot.
When they are getting soft, add first the pimentos, aubergines and lastly zucchini, and ten minutes later, the tomatoes.The vegetables should not be fried, but stewed in the oil, so simmer in a closed pan for the first 30 minutes, uncovered for the last 10. By this time they should have absorbed most of the oil.
[Sprinkle with fresh herbs to serve.]

The flowers of Zucchini can be stuffed with a mixture of Ricotta Cheese and Parmigiano Regianno and deep fried see here – an Italian recipe. You can also make a stuffing out of Zucchini which I remember from a 1970’s magasine article where it was put under the skin of a chicken to roast. You grate the Zucchini and sprinkle with plenty of salt and leave till the water is drawn out, squeeze them dry, mix with ricotta cheese, an egg, and herbs and seasoning – you could just bake this in ramekins as a vegetarian dish…

Lastly, you can use a spiraliser or such like, to make zucchini sphagetti for a gluten-free, carb-free alternative to normal sphagetti.

With Z, we have come to the last of this year’s A2Z Challenge – whther a reader or another participant, I hope you have enjoyed the ride or maybe it should be – the feast. As well as the food, I hope I have helped along the road to eating less less meat – a choice we may all be faced with in the coming year. I will be doing a Reflections post and participating in the Roadtrip in which I will visit and review some of the sites I haven’t had time to this month – hope to see you then…

Yoghurt and Self-Preservation…

April 29, 2022April 29, 2022humanist55

If you have seen my Theme Reveal for the A2Z Challenge 2022, then you will know that I am writing about becoming Vegetarian gradually as a response to the crisis in food supply chains sparked by the pandemic and made worse by the WAR in Ukraine. As well, I am keeping to the theme I originally planned of food which can be eaten in its own right as well as becoming an ingredient in other dishes…

I think we forget, in our world of refrigerators (if you live in the “First” World), that yoghurt, along with cheese, was originally a way of preserving milk – milk does not last long if not refrigerated, so once you have allowed “good” bacteria to work their magic, then the resultant yoghurt can’t be attacked by “bad” bacteria and even moulds will take a lot longer to attack. I covered Kefir in Kimchi, Kefir, Kombucha and Killing it in the Kitchen… and that is a form of drinkable yoghurt which is much easier to make than regular yoghurt. For other forms of yoghurt, you must

1. Bring milk almost to the boil and then cool it to around blood temperature – you will know what this is by dipping a very clean finger in…
2. Mix some live yoghurt which you have bought or saved from a previous batch (or dried yoghurt culture) – how much depends on how much milk you are using – too much is less of a problem than too little.
3. Keep at blood temperature 24 hours, in a cloth-covered bowl – a warm airing cupboard will do, but if you don’t have that luxury, then you can buy yoghurt makers with little pots sitting in a gently heated base. My new pressure cooker has a setting for making yoghurt but I haven’t tried it yet…

Yoghurt completely fits my A2Z criteria of food you can eat in it’s own right, plain or flavoured, but it also has a multitude of uses as an ingredient in other dishes. Dahi Curry or Dahi Khadi is an Indian dish where yoghurt is the main ingredient but you can also oven cook other items like Pakoras in a yoghurt curry sauce. As I have had a lot of visitors from India, this year, perhaps they might comment…

Another favourite is Overnight Oats which some people make with say, Almond Milk, Rolled Oats and fresh fruit such as Banana and Raspberry, mixed together and left to soak overnight – I like to use a runny yoghurt. It comes out rather like a porridge which has been cooked, and in a sense, it is – it has benefits over and above porridge though, including being better for avoiding diabetic peaks that you can get after porridge. This article explains in-depth and their recipe is here.

My partner is not good at eating fruit and I finally found this recipe which uses yoghurt as the base for the dressing –

Frewin’s Morrocan Waldorf Salad
1. Chop up Celery, Apple, Grapes, black or green, and add Walnuts. I add chopped Dates and or dried Apricots- hence the Morrocan soubriquet
2. The dressing is ideally made with Greek Yoghurt – this is thicker because it has been strained. Mix in well, some mayonnaise in the rough proportion 6:1 Yoghurt to Mayonnaise. This stops the yoghurt from absorbing water from the salad and breaking down.
3. Mix the dressing in well, it is a good keeper if kept covered in the fridge.

Self-Preservation

This is a bit of a pun on the fact that as well as the pleasure of eating food, you must, as you get older, consider your food in relation to your health – eating healthy… But self-preservation also means preserving food yourself and since as we have seen, Yoghurt is a form of preserved milk, it is a good thing to add to the range of preserves you can make yourself. I have covered Jam, Dehydrators, touched on Freezing and Bottling, and if you combine this with Growing your Own, you can have more control over your food, reduced sugar jam, for example, organic produce and save money by cashing in on the seasonal gluts from shops or your allotment…

Do you have an allotment, do you preserve your food yourself and what is your favourite way of eating yoghurt?

Xigua and Xouba…

April 28, 2022April 28, 2022humanist55

https://thekitchencommunity.org/26-foods-that-start-with-x/

Well I bet there has been a lot of head-scratching all over the A”Z Challenge as to what words to come up with for the last three days, and for X in particular – fortunately, there are always foreign names for familiar things even if I did have to resort once again to “foods beginning with X” to find them!

Xouba

Xouba, or Sardines, are eaten in many countries and are delicious eaten simply grilled or pan-fried so they meet my criteria of foods that can be eaten on their own, but although I have never made it, I will one day try the magically named, Stargazey Pie. Since I haven’t made it, I am going to direct you to this BBC Food recipe by Tristan Welch for a version of this famous Cornish recipe. Stargazey pie is famous because it is made with the fish heads poking through the pastry topping as if gazing up at the starry sky… A romantic notion and although many might find the fish heads disturbing, but I think that we are so often divorced from the reality of the animals we eat, by dint of pre-packaged, filleted pieces from the supermarket, that there is an honesty about Stargazey Pie.

https://matadornetwork.com/read/christmas-mousehole-fish-head-pie/

Xigua

After ruling out Watermelon in yesterday’s post in favour of Water as an ingredient, it pops up again as the Chinese name for it, the name translates as “Western Fruit” meaning it is not native to China but like so many foods, has been spread around by globalisation. Watermelon, especially chilled is a most refreshing fruit in Summer and can be eaten on its own or served in salads or as an accompaniment to savoury dishes since it is not so sweet as other melons like Cantaloupe or Honeydew. Not that sweetness is a barrier to mixing foods which are sweet and savoury – far from it! However the recipe I am going to link to (since again, it is not one I have made), is for Xi Gua Lao and although it is mentioned on several sites and the yummy looking photo also appears in several places on the www, the same rather thin description appears, suggesting that everyone is referencing the same source. At least this site gives some quantities and basic directions. The idea is to extract the juice of the watermelon, and thicken it with agar (A vegan substitute for gelatine made from seaweed) and sugar to form a jelly in which cherries suggest the watermelon pips (that have been removed) and the jelly is set to resemble slices of watermelon. The result is shown in this much-travelled image below and very pretty it is!

And here is the real thing…

And that’s X done – phew!

Water – the Vital Ingredient…

April 27, 2022April 27, 2022humanist55

https://thewaternetwork.com/article-FfV/food-security-impossible-without-water-security-aiWmpPPiaCeDNrFfv1bhlA

When I made my first tentative list of posts for this year’s A2Z, I put down watermelon, wine and watercress and whilst I could have covered watercress (so-called because it is grown in gin-clear streams of water) since it makes an excellent soup, I wasn’t really inspired- something niggled at my brain – and then it came to me – Water – how could we cook without it? Aside from the fact that it is a constituent of many foods and of course drinks, it is also used as a solvent to dissolve other ingredients, to extract flavours, and it’s physical properties are vital to the cooking process. Water has three states – solid, liquid and gas, and all of these can be used in cooking, after slowly raising the temperature of greens in water to near boiling, the sudden cooling with ice cubes (blanching), preserves and enhances the greenness (and nutritional qualities) of the vegetables. Boiling foods in water is one of the commonest forms of cooking and, given that ability to dissolve and extract taste, steaming vegetables is even better if you want them really tasty. Water, or rather it’s removal, is involved in preserving many foods, from pulses to the powdered, dehydrated ingredients of packet soups – and to reconstitute? Just add back the water!

The name of Whisky is derived from the Celtic word isca, meaning “water” and some people call it “the water of life” and to make Scottish whisky, you must have a source of richly stained peaty water which contributes both to the taste and colour of the whisky. In fact, most liquids we know in the kitchen will have some water in them – even whisky, since we don’t drink 100% proof, nor is vinegar 100% acetic acid. One of the common instructions in recipes is to reduce a stock (made from simmering meat or vegetables in water) in order to lose some of the water and concentrate the flavour.

Water is vital to growing food, meat or vegetable, and with climate change producing either too much or too little water, flood or drought, often, but not exclusively, in the poorer parts of the world, then water is a major geopolitical issue. The photograph at the top is from a site which can keep you informed about such issues…

The water we drink and use to cook with, varies in taste and purity, depending on it’s source and in simple terms, this is likely to be tap water (with various additives to keep it clean), and bottled water – still or sparkling – also with a variety of different minerals, depending on it’s source. This is particularly the case with sparkling water where the dissolved carbon dioxide that makes it bubbly, may come from a naturally carbonated source or may have been added at the bottling plant. Vichy and San Pellegrino are well-known examples and as well as the bubbles, they have distinct flavours due to their mineral ingredients.

Adding sparkling water to batters such as Tempura batter produces a lighter, fluffier batter…

Tempura Batter
85g of plain flour
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp sugar
200ml of sparkling water, chilled
1. Add the dry ingredients to a mixing bowl
2. Gently whisk/fold in the sparkling water – over whisking will cause gluten to form and the bubbles to be lost making the batter heavy
3. don’t leave the batter standing. Coat the things you are going to fry with flour before dipping them.
4. Quickly fry in hot oil till golden brown!

Water is the thing that makes our planet so unique and hospitable to life, it makes up a large proportion of our bodies and the more we investigate it, the stranger it becomes -as always, the Wikipedia elves have lots of info…

Vegetarians to Carnivores – the whole spectrum…

April 26, 2022April 26, 2022humanist55

https://www.glasbergen.com/diet-health-fitness-medical/vegetarian-cartoons/

Today, as we are willingly, or unwillingly, being led down the path from meat and two veg, to Vegetarian or even beyond, to Veganism, I thought I would try and outline the whole spectrum along with the pros and cons – starting at meat and ending with veg. These are not comprehensive essays but merely a few thoughts…

The Atkins and the Keto Diets

I remember watching a documentary about how scientists were trying to work out why people on the Atkins diet worked to cause weight loss when – by their calculations, it shouldn’t. People on the diet enthused as to how they could eat as much meat as they liked and even lashings of cream because they were allowed on the diet, but at the end of the film, the scientists looked d at how much the people were actually eating and found that it was not as much as they made it sound – eating proteins satisfy your hunger much quicker than eating carbs. and that is what the Atkins Diet and the Keto Diet have in common – they are low-carb diets, but they also have significant differences, with the Keto diet aiming to keep you in a state of Ketosis (where the body is forced to consume it’s own fat in the absence of carbohydrate). Atkins gradually returns your carbohydrate consumption to nearer to normal levels – although at a final 100gms it is still well below the 250gms of carbohydrate most Americans consume daily.
Both these diets can help to lose weight, and for Type 2 or even Type 1 Diabetes sufferers, they can both reduce the need for medication, but they are both difficult to stick to and generally involve a lot of meat-eating. You can find more about them here.

The Omnivore and Flexitarian Diets

The Omnivore (eats anything) is what many people regard as the norm, but in the world we are entering – climate change (contributed to by deforestation to raise methane-producing animals), threats to the global supply chain, cost of meat, health issues, ethical concerns for animal welfare, global food (and water) inequality, mean that the move to, at the very least, a reduction in the meat element of the diet, is desirable, and this approach is called Flexitarian and is what I have been nudging towards in this year’s A2Z Challenge. The Flexitarian diet is less about restrictions and more about adding plant-based diversity to the diet with its concomitant health benefits. More plant-based elements in your cuisine will improve your take up of micronutrients, vitamins, minerals, and phytochemicals and reduce the risk from animal additives like antibiotics and growth hormones. You can still indulge in a dirty burger at a barbeque – occasionally – but as you explore the flavours and diversity of plant-based eating, you may find that the craving for meat reduces naturally. This approach will have health benefits all around without great pain…

Pescatarian Diet

One compromise in order to retain some intensive animal protein and to avoid the lack of B12 and Omega 3 fatty acids, is to eat vegetarian but with the addition of seafood as a protein source. Some pescatarians will also eat dairy and eggs. As with all aspects of food choice, there are some difficult aspects – for example, huge factory ships hoovering up the fish stocks of poorer nations due to corrupt rulers selling off the rights to the fishing, overfishing generally, and bycatch, where unwanted species or too small fish are thrown back (dead) or large fish such as dolphins or sharks die in nets. So there is a need to choose sustainable fish if you go down this route…

Vegetarian Diet

I think by now, that I have covered the many benefits of choosing a Vegetarian lifestyle, better in many ways for you the individual, but also much better for the environment, not to mention animals. If all animals were raised in good conditions, it would still be an ethical issue as to whether it is right to kill and eat them, but in order to keep meat cheap, animals are frequently raised in sub-optimal conditions, are given antibiotics routinely to mitigate against their poor conditions, suffer stress and are consequently not even the best that meat can be. Becoming vegetarian can improve health provided some precautions are observed with respect to Vitamin B12 and Omega Fatty Acids, typically heart and diabetic issues, but I think it is prudent to discuss any drastic change in diet with your doctor.

Vegan Diet

Going fully Vegan is quite a big step, even from being Vegetarian. Once you drop all animal products such as eggs, honey and dairy, then you have to work harder to include sufficient protein. The reason milk is off-limits is that cows must give birth in order to produce milk and so for the males it’s curtains pretty much straight away and so you are part of the meat industry. Some people do not realise this because we are all so divorced from the source of our food. Personally, I am not bothered by collecting honey since the management of the beehives allows for this without damaging the bees and since the commercial use of bees to pollinate crops such as Almond trees, generates so much honey, it’s hard to imagine what you would do with this sweet byproduct. So both diets such as the Atkins or Keto, at one end of the spectrum, and Vegan at the other, require big shifts in relationship to food and eating and probably need monitoring loosely, by a health professional.

Joy!

“It is easy to lose sight of the fact – especially when the word diet appears frequently on a post, that eating is meant to be a joy and not just a maintenance task! I hope that I have brought some of my own joy in the recipes that I have brought to the table, and certainly your comments have told stories of your own experiences of food – up to and including joy. Here are some of my favourites…

“I’m a guinea pig and I eat only vegetables, and I eat them raw. But you probably want to know more about my Mummy. She’s been vegetarian since 1986, but she eats cheese. She doesn’t eat fish or meat and avoids eggs.
She’s been doing quite well on her eating programme to lose weight until Easter. I think she should go back to it, even if it does mean she spends longer in the kitchen every day.
She says the problem with most people going vegan these days is they don’t eat a balanced diet – beans and lentils are essential, not ‘meat-free’ products they substitute meat-looking dishes with.
I only wrote that because she told me to. 🙂
Ludo” – https://how-would-you-know.com/2022/04/urid-dal-umeboshi-and-you-pronounced-u.html#comment-562

“Ah I am from India and connect a lot with Urad dal. You can use it to make anything from dosa (crepes) batter to fritters. Just ping me if you need any recipe and I’ll share the easiest and perfect ones with you! You would generally need to soak urad dal for a couple of hours to make anything for better and quicker results. “ – https://how-would-you-know.com/2022/04/urid-dal-umeboshi-and-you-pronounced-u.html#comment-561

“Is it an indication of my proclivities that your Tofu image looks like Indian sweets to me? (And now I want some).
Thanks for the “fun” fact about diabetes. I’m on that road, and trying to reduce my sugar intake. Very difficult. Hoping dates will help.” – https://how-would-you-know.com/2022/04/tofu-tomatoes-and-type-2-diabetes.html#comment-559

“I’ve never eaten rhubarb… keep hoping someone will make me a pie with it someplace so I can try. I don’t like making foods I’ve never eaten. LOL” – https://how-would-you-know.com/2022/04/rhubarb-and-the-return-of-mrchantilism.html#comment-537

“Love this connection and all the research involved. I love rhubarb because my grandfather grew it in backyard of the house where I lived as a kid.” – https://how-would-you-know.com/2022/04/rhubarb-and-the-return-of-mrchantilism.html#comment-548

“I was never a huge fan of olives – black on a pizza or kalamata in a salad – until we visited Turkey and they served a plate of olives to nibble on while perusing the menu. My husband never cottoned on to olives, but I became a convert.

I’m fortunate to live in a part of the world where most foods are fresh, not prepackaged, preservative-laden, and prepped in bulk to be shipped to chain restaurants.

Visiting from A to Z
Doesn’t Speak Klingon“ – https://how-would-you-know.com/2022/04/olives-and-overeating.html#comment-503

“I would happily overeat on olives, I love them.” – https://how-would-you-know.com/2022/04/olives-and-overeating.html#comment-507

“I look forward to this blog and anticipate what I can learn and add to my diet.
10 years ago my (new) husband was diabetic and weighed over 300 pounds (not sure what that is in Kg). I challenged him to get rid of the diabetes by diet and exercise. 10 years later by introducing things slowly he is a few pounds about 200 and no longer a diabetic. It’s taken changes like a handful of nuts (no salt for us) instead of a bag of crisps. Meat is rarely on his plate.
Your great recipes are adding to my growing recipe book – thanks
What Next – https://how-would-you-know.com/2022/04/nuts-and-nature-naming.html#comment-486

“I belong to the Tamil speaking Brahmin community of South India… we are vegetarians and the orthodox followers refrain from eating even pungent items like garlic, onion and even cabbage. I often have people questioning the lack of proteins in a vegetarian diet but it did not seem so as we do include dairy , lentils and nuts… my grandmother lived upto 92 on an only veg no onion, no garlic diet … and had all her teeth intact ha ha … interesting notes there on the marketing tactics… I was not aware of the wholemeal part

Jayashree writes“ – https://how-would-you-know.com/2022/04/nuts-and-nature-naming.html#comment-489

“I did not used to be a mango fan, I’m still not a fan of the whole fruit (but that’s just me and most fruit), but I do love it pureed. Have a fab recipe somewhere for mango and coconut ice cream, which is mango and coconut milk blitzed and frozen – very easy.
My sister makes a fab steamed treacle sponge in the microwave and I wouldn’t use anything else for melting chocolate these days. I also start all of my jacket spuds in there before popping them in the oven, to reduce cooking time and give a fabulous texture.
Tasha
Tasha’s Thinkings: YouTube – What They Don’t Tell You (and free fiction)“ – https://how-would-you-know.com/2022/04/mangos-miso-and-mirowaves.html#comment-471

“the sussex pond pudding sounds utterly intriguing, both disgusting and delicious. I must try it.” – https://how-would-you-know.com/2022/04/mangos-miso-and-mirowaves.html#comment-472

“I am trying to up my water intake ( for so many reasons), especially during a wickedly humid summer. A squeeze of lemon juice makes it easy peasy, otherwise it’s like feeding brussel sprouts to a three year old.” – https://how-would-you-know.com/2022/04/lemons-and-land-use.html#comment-462

“I love lemons, and you can always count on me to volunteer to cut them, squeeze them, any thing in order to get a bit of the oil from the zest on my hands. I’m hopeless. How absolutely delightful you got to lemon pick from your patio in Crete. And a shop named Zest! How fun.

The land usage facts are pretty compelling aren’t they?” – https://how-would-you-know.com/2022/04/lemons-and-land-use.html#comment-464

“If one sees the love shown by a mother cow to the baby calf or even a mother pig to its piglets with some attention many of the worlds meat eaters would turn vegetarians I feel

Jayashree writes“ – https://how-would-you-know.com/2022/04/lemons-and-land-use.html#comment-492

“”I regularly have to hide veggies in the meals I prepare — I love them, but not everyone I cook for appreciate their deliciousness. LOL.

Ronel visiting for the A-Z Challenge My Languishing TBR: J” – https://how-would-you-know.com/2022/04/jerusalem-artichokes-juicing-and-hide-the-vegetables.html#comment-441

“Yes to frozen baby peas and butter beans (or lima beans)! I prefer frozen peas to fresh, I think they’re sweeter. Corn is one canned veg I prefer to frozen. I think it comes down to the sweetness factor.
I make a lot of freezer jam, which tastes fresher than cooked. I even store my marmalades in the freezer, to not bother with the boiling water bath to seal the jars.” – https://how-would-you-know.com/2022/04/fish-and-freezers-on-the-road-to-less-meat.html#comment-445

“I love the idea of a dehydrator, but are they expensive to run?
I call myself a ‘reducitarian’ (i think coined in the Guardian) and have stopped referring to dinners as ‘vegetarian’ because they have no meat in them, we just call them dinner.” – https://how-would-you-know.com/2022/04/dates-dehydrators-and-the-death-of-globalism.html#comment-407

“I am a carb-loader and absolutely love bread of all varieties! My mother made homemade bread when I was a kid and she still makes dinner rolls from scratch every holiday. She also makes amazing cinnamon rolls whenever I visit. 🙂” – https://how-would-you-know.com/2022/04/bread-in-geopolitics-in-vegetarianism-and-as-an-ingredient.html#comment-379

Of course – not everyone is heading in the same direction of V…

“I stopped eating meat (but not seafood) in high school, and I think it was primarily to irritate my parents. In addition, I was attending a girl’s boarding school, and the meat offerings were gross. Plus it was the ’70s.
This eating style, pescatarian, continued until I turned 40 and succumbed to Bacon. Well, yes, there WERE the occasional Chinese Green Beans with bits of pork prior to that, but I clearly remember standing in a kitchen in Indianapolis scarfing down a slice while frying some for my mid-life crisis boyfriend.
It took another 20+ years to confess to my mom that yes, I now ate (some) meat. I wanted her meatloaf recipe!
Anyhow, it was never anything moral, it was simply youthful diffidence and then flavor (and mouthfeel – still don’t like chewing slabs of meat).

ps: I hear you on the difficulties “pantsing” A-Z. This morning, not only did I have to write the post, I had to create the artwork! (And it took 3 images before I was satisfied). https://www.anne-m-bray.com/blog/177137/atozchallenge-2022-u-is-for-utah“ – https://how-would-you-know.com/2022/04/urid-dal-umeboshi-and-you-pronounced-u.html#comment-558

Well thank you all for your comments and especially Ane for that last brave confession! Only four more letters to go – phew!

Urid Dal, Umeboshi and You (pronounced U)…

April 25, 2022April 25, 2022humanist55

www.theedgyveg.com/2018/01/08/instant-pot-dal-indian-dal-recipe/

It turns out, that to meet my criteria of foods that can be eaten on their own or used as an ingredient, “U” is the most difficult yet! I had to resort to searches for food beginning with “U” and Urid Dal and Umeboshi were the only two. Now Umeboshi is a Japanese salty pickled plum which, though eaten on its own as well as a central ingredient in Japanese cuisine, and which I have tasted, I cannot claim any knowledge of recipes, so your google search is as good as mine! What I can say, is that of the five basic tastes, Sweet, Sour, Salty, Bitter, and Umami, it hits Sour and Salty spot on! Although Umeboshi is often described as a salted Plum, it is more nearly related to an Apricot. If you are a super-taster and enjoy new flavours, I urge you to try it – it grew on me and I really ought to try finding and trying some recipes.

Urid Dal is one of the many varieties of lentils so popular in Indian cooking, it is a white lentil and I decided to give it a try in my new pressure cooker. I found a recipe (pictured above) by the lovely Candice aka The Edgy Veg! It was an InstantPot recipe and since my Ambiano pressure cooker is not, and cannot achieve the same pressure, I had to adapt the recipe by adding 1/3 extra minutes according to instructions from this site – intriguingly called The Aisle of Shame – those of you who frequent Aldi or Lidl supermarkets will know what this alludes to…. It is in fact a site which promotes Aldi goods despite the name!

So using sixteen minutes and substituting a can of tomatoes for fresh, I can report that the lentils were absolutely, perfectly cooked! Not so my next attempt with the pressure cooker – to cook butter beans – always a good test because they are a large bean and prone to losing their skins aka turning to mush… There is a slow cooking setting on the Ambiano pressure cooker which runs for two hours, I soaked the beans first with a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda – it helps to soften pulses – and after rinsing them well, covered them liberally with water, chose the high pressure option and crossed my fingers. The Butter Beans were al dente and I foolishly decided to try another short period of cooking at full pressure – mushed! Ah well, a pressure cooker of any description has a bit of a learning curve…

You! Pronounced “U”

I know – it’s a stretch but, as Archy, the cockroach, reincarnated from a free-verse poet used to say “wot the hell – wot the hell” (Archy and Mehitabel by Don Marquis)

Tomorrow I am going to summarise all the diets from full-on Carnivore to payed-up Vegan and I would please like to know YOUR story and where you are both in reality and aspirational on the spectrum if you care to share in the comments and I will feature tomorrow… Why do you eat what you eat, are there health reasons or other necessitations or do you roam freely through foodstuffs purely on taste…

Tofu, Tomatoes and Type 2 Diabetes…

April 23, 2022April 23, 2022humanist55

https://www.wearesovegan.com/how-to-make-homemade-tofu/

I have touched on Tofu before in the M post Mangos, Miso and Mirowaves… where I described how to use Miso to add flavour to Tofu – because here’s the thing – many people consider Tofu to be a tasteless waste of time. Tofu is what we in Britain, call a Marmite substance – (Marmite or yeast extract is something that divides people completely – you either love or hate it – I am a Marmite lover…) but since Tofu is a source of protein and vegetarians and vegans need as many sources of protein as possible, then Tofu cannot be ignored. Both Tofu and Miso are Japanese inventions along with Tempeh, a block of the leftover pulp from making Soya Milk (the source of Tofu) which has been welded together by a cultured fungus and in case you think that sounds icky, it does have a slight resemblance to chicken, so another good vegetarian source of protein – and let’s not forget that mushrooms are fungi too!

I’m sorry if I have not made Tofu sound attractive so far so let’s start again, Tofu is cheese made from Soya Milk, it has a delicate taste but which can be enhanced in a number of ways, infusing with miso, serving in strongly flavoured dishes where it’s blandness is a nice contrast and the following freezing technique. Like dairy cheese when it is first turned into curd, tofu is full of whey to a greater or lesser extent depending on how much it has been pressed. If you freeze Tofu, the whey will turn into ice crystals that compress the curd surrounding them so that when you defrost the tofu, even more whey will drain out to it and the Tofu will be like a sponge and tougher – less prone to disintegrate when stirred into a sauce, plus the sponge soaks up the sauce so that each mouthful is tastier.

I have not made Tofu myself, though I once worked for a man who did make it commercially and who gave me that last tip – my job was to come up with dishes made from tofu since he was only making a burger and a peanut burger. I added custard tarts, quiches and pasties (all vegan) to his range – the pasties used the freezing technique. However, I wondered how easy it is to make Tofu at home and found this article which seems to be pretty simple to follow. Since Tempeh is a much more complicated thing to do – Roxy and Ben freeze their leftover soya pulp, which is known as Okara, and use it as a supplement to flour in baking. The photo at the top is from their site. They point out that you can press the Tofu to different degrees according to your taste or intended use and when you buy it from a shop, you can either buy Silken or soft Tofu in little cartons, or Hard Tofu – swimming in it’s own whey. Silken tofu is good for making say, a custard tart whilst hard tofu goes into stirfry and other savoury dishes. In Japan, there are several other types of Tofu – for example one that can be deep-fried and then slit open to form a pocket which can be stuffed with other things – pretty neat!

Tomatoes

Tomatoes, like potatoes, which are part of the same family of plants, were brought back to Europe by the Spanish where they had been refined from their wild cousins (and who doesn’t like a wild cousin) by the Aztecs. Both plants suffered some resistance towards eating, partly because they belong to a family of poisonous plants that include Deadly Nightshade and Mandrake, and certainly, in the case of the potato, they were regarded as the food of the conquered – the Spanish didn’t even bother to bring potaoes back for twenty years having failed to notice that the whole Aztec economy was based on controlling the staple crop of dried potato pucks. The people grated the potatoes, squeezed out as much juice as possible, placed them outside to freeze at night (they lived in the mountains so frost every night), squeezes out more liquid the next day and after repeating the process several times, they had freeze-dried potato!

As you can see above, there are many varieties of tomato (as with potatoes) and although they are in fact fruit (Love Apples is one popular name) they are regarded as vegetables because their sugar level is quite low and they have more umami than sweetness. The Wikpedia article on tomatoes is scathing about the way modern tomatoes have lost much of their sweetness by breeding for uniform ripening and longer shelflife – no surprises there then…

Where would we be without tomatoes in our culinary lives – they are the basis of so many sauces from classic Italian pasta dishes to Heinz baked beans – although the latter have only traces of tomatoes which are amplified with sugar, salt and acidity. There are so many that I will give you just two examples.

Oven-Dried Cherry Tomatoes
1. In a roasting tin, roll cherry tomatoes in a dessert spoon of olive oil and distribute them evenly. Sprinkle with slat and pepper
2. Bake in the bottom of a very low oven – less than 100°C for four or five hours or until shrunken and wrinkled
3. Eat hot or cold

Cauliflower Romagna
1. Break cauliflower florets into tiny pieces and fry in oil with as much garlic as you like until they are browning – don’t worry about burning – cauliflower is very strong and the taste benefits from caramelisation
2. Add tinned tomatoes and a little stock to cover the cauliflower, also herbs, fresh or dry, of your choice – thyme, basil, marjoram etc.
3. Cook until the cauliflower is soft, although a little al dente is good, and the sauce will have reduced somewhat – serve!
This is a dish which, if you are on a gradual journey towards more vegetarian eating, you can add small amounts of
chopped up chorizo or prawns to…

Type 2 Diabetes and Vegetarianism

Type 2 diabetes runs in families and if you have the genes for it, you have it all your life – even if it only manifests later in life, so don’t feel guilty as people used to be made to feel, because the onset, whilst caused by too much sugar in the diet, is inevitable if you have those genes even though those without won’t develop it from eating too much sugar – they may also get overweight but not get diabetes.

The good news is that Type 2 is reversible – eating a less sugary diet and eating foods that release their carbohydrates slowly, can prevent or even reverse the onset of Type 2 Diabetes. Eating a vegetarian diet of low-glycemic foods that keep blood sugar levels steady, such as whole grains, legumes, and nuts is the way to go. So, on top of ethical, environmental and financial reasons to eat a more vegetarian diet – you can add health grounds. If you go completely vegetarian, and even more so – vegan, then there is the risk of deficiency of vitamin B12 and Omega fatty acids but there are foods (such as Marmite) which can help as well as supplements but it is for this reason that some people prefer to be Flexitarian or Pescatarian rather than go the “whole hog” if you will pardon the expression…

Special Shout Out!

Yesterday was Earth Day, but because I am now pantsing my A2Z posts, I didn’t read until this morning, the S post from one of my favourite bloggers ever since I started with the Challenge in 2020. This year on Part-Time Working Hockey Mom Tara,who used to work for Starbucks, has been guiding us through the finer points of coffee in which Starbucks train all their management. Yesterday, for S, Tara told us about Sun V’s Shade Grown Coffee – something I and I think, most people, have no idea about. I will let you read Tara’s words to learn why this was an especially pertinent subject for Earth Day. Tara is a prolific blogger all year round, unlike me who grinds into gear for April and collapses in exhaustion in May – please check her blog out! Despite the title of her blog containing the word “Mom”, and her having worked for Starbucks, Tara is Swiss, though she is an Americanophile!

Sesame, Steamers and Supply Chains…

April 22, 2022April 22, 2022humanist55

Photo by Slashio Photography on Unsplash

Okay, so eating sesame on its own is a bit of a stretch but I had to shoehorn it into this A2Z because I love sesame and keep it in my kitchen in several forms. I honestly can’t remember whether the first time I encountered sesame was in the form of Sesame Snaps (bought ones but a recipe here) or Gomasio which is a delicious condiment made simply of salt and toasted sesame – it is so long ago and these things seem always to have been in my life…

Gomasio
1. take 2 cups of raw sesame seeds and toast them in a wok or frying pan carefully stirring till just turning brown
2. Add the toasted seeds and one tablespoon of sea salt to either a mortar and pestle or a grinder/blender and grind until it forms a coarse meal
3. Store in an airtight container and use in place of ordinary salt – it adds a nutty savour to your food. Some people like to add seaweed to Gomasio, kelp, dillisk (dulse), nori – all these can also be lightly toasted before combining with the salt and sesame and grinding for extra taste and minerals such as iodine.

Sesame seeds have little taste when raw but blossom with flavour once toasted so they are ideal to sprinkle on top of bread or cakes (see above) where they automatically get the toasting treatment. The other way of adding the nutty taste of sesame is to use Sesame Oil – this is something I gleaned early on from Chinese cookery – I will use a mixture of sunflower and sesame oil when making an omelette quick style (mess the eggs up with a fork and chuck it into hot oil in a frying pan as opposed to the separating the egg whites and beating to a froth kind). When you have a Chinese dish such as egg fried rice, this how they make the egg part and add it to the fried rice at the end.

Steamers

Nothing to do with supply chains – ships are diesel-powered, not steam these days lol, but more of supply chains later. No this is about cooking vegetables and other things – they are not exclusively a vegetarian implement – in fact I always use them for that logistic nightmare which is Christmas Dinner – carrots in the water at the bottom, sprouts in the next layer and frozen peas at the top. Cooking all these things together uses only one ring on your hob and uses less fuel so good for the planet.
Vegetables are not the only things you can use a steamer for – you may have had a Chinese or Japanese meal including steamed or even steamed and fried dumplings, meat or vegetarian, and thought that they involved some arcane Asiatic magic cookery techniques, but they are really easy to make. The first ones I tried used sausage meat as the basis with various additions, but since the object of these posts is to move towards vegetarianism (with the cost of meat going up) here is a recipe for steamed dumplings filled with stir-fried vegetables which is first steamed and then fried to give them a crispy bottom – it even tells you how to freeze them…

Supply Chain Issues…

Supply Chains mean the linking of one or more sequential factors in the supply of food. Initially sparked by Covid19 but exacerbated by the war in Ukraine, these problems look to get worse as 2022 progresses. They might include the following, failure at the farm side, failure in the picking, failure to deliver, and failure at the food processors. At the farm or faraway plantation, covid reduced the workforce available and likewise to harvest produce. Of course, in Britain, we are especially cursed by our insane decision to leave the EU and close the door to migrant workers who used to plant and pick vegetables. Likewise, abattoirs are short of skilled butchers. Brexit also compounded the shipping of produce with lorryloads of strawberries and fish rotting as they failed to get through to the ports in time, mired in red tape which the Tory government promised would not be a problem… Supermarkets and food processors all have staff shortages and if you have problems at all these possible stages, you got you a Supply Chain Issue. Some of these issues are relatively local, but the increase in oil prices means the shipping of say, apples from New Zealand to the UK, might be prohibitively expensive – it is a challenge to globalization.
Is there a silver lining? Well everybody from nations to individuals, could grow their own. British apples, because of their seasonality, have decreased in popularity as they have been supplanted by apples from every part of the apple-growing world until it’s too much trouble for supermarkets to host UK produce during it’s season. Well not anymore! Learn to embrace your local seasonal produce, grow your own in your garden or allotment – if life hands you lemons…

Rhubarb and the Return of Mercantilism…

April 21, 2022April 22, 2022humanist55

https://gardenerspath.com/plants/vegetables/tips-growing-cooking-rhubarb/

There are two themes running through my A2Z challenge this year and whilst you may think that rhubarb and Mercantilism are pretty random blog-fellows, in fact, the one illustrates the historical application of the other nearly perfectly! Some years ago, I was reading the lengthy series of historical novels – Poor Man at the Gate, by Andrew Wareham when I came across a passage in which the protagonist, by this time a member of the government, was discussing the reasons for a chronic shortage of silver in circulation. The reason given was that the Chinese were insisting on being paid for goods, not in trade for other goods, but exclusively in silver. The goods we so wanted, were silk, tea and rhubarb! I did a double-take thinking “how would you even ship rhubarb halfway around the world?” I had to investigate… The Chinese were acting out Mercantilism, one of the tenets of which, was that you should try to accumulate silver and gold to make a country rich, and you did that by trade restrictions – restrictions on imports and pushing exports for hard currency. The opposite philosophy, which came in the mid-19th century, was liberalism which pushes entrepreneurship and free trade – Liberalism favours individuals getting wealthy whereas Mercantilism favours the State accumulating money. Mercantilism confuses monetary wealth with the wealth that a wide selection of goods offers. The state – which is big in mercantilism, may grow wealthy in money, but the population came off badly. The British tried to get around the import bans by trading with merchants upstream from the government and eventually resorted to selling opium and getting a nation hooked on it – not one of our finest hours… The Chinese government retaliated by completely withholding the rhubarb – of course, it was not the fruit, but the powdered root which had medicinal value – it was touted as a cure for digestive disorders, flatulence and constipation. So much of the medicine did we buy, that the Chinese reasoned that we Brits must be really bunged up and that withholding the vital rhubarb would soon bring us to our knees – perhaps literally! If you want to read more fulsome explanations of Mercantilism then you can find them here and here.

The thing is, mercantilism has never really gone away, indeed the Chinese (and several other south-east Asian countries) have done very well for their economies by practising this economic philosophy whilst in the US and Europe, we have embraced the liberal and neo-liberal philosophies – there has been some meeting in the middle with globalism – China, South Korea and Taiwan exported lots of geegaws to the West which our consumers happily consumed, but with the fallout from the war in Ukraine threatening globalism, a resurgence of protectionist policies – apart of mercantilism is on the cards…

Enough with the economic philosophy stuff – now to the fun bit – Rhubarb as food! Rhubarb is properly speaking, a vegetable that we happen to regard as a fruit. It is the petiole, or leaf stem that we eat, never the leaves which are quite poisonous – containing a lot of oxalic acid – very bad for your kidneys. The fleshy stems can even be eaten raw – especially when young and tender – my partner used to eat it as a child, by dipping the end in sugar… Rhubarb stems contain vitamin K and also the antioxidants – anthocyanins (which give it its red color) and proanthocyanidins. Brought to Europe for its medicinal properties, the increasing cheapness of sugar, meant that by the 18th century, rhubarb was transitioning to culinary usage. It needs sugar because it is quite tart or acid so although it is a favourite in pies and crumbles, it is also (like gooseberries) a good sauce element to serve with oily fish like Mackerel. I have shot myself in the foot for a recipe by talking about Rhubarb and Ginger jam in my post about ginger, for this is a classic pairing. I also talked about how to concentrate young and tender rhubarb stems so they don’t cook to mush and that technique can be used for any soft fruit that has the same tendency – such as strawberries. Strawberries are also sometimes paired with rhubarb – to the disgust of rhubarb purists…

MONTY RAKUSEN/GETTY IMAGES from https://www.tasteofhome.com/article/forcing-rhubarb/

I will leave you with this magical image of the forcing sheds where early season rhubarb is picked by candlelight for early season, extra sweet shoots. We live near the Yorkshire Rhubarb Triangle where such sheds abound, if you live in the US, then half of all rhubarb comes from Pierce County, Washington. Here in Yorkshire, this is the time of year…

Quinces and Questioning …

April 20, 2022April 20, 2022humanist55

Quince is another fruit I tried for the first time in our lockdown sojourn in Crete in the winter of 2020. Although there were virtually no cases of covid whilst we were there, the lockdown, which began two weeks after we arrived, was very strict and food was one of the few things available for interest. We lived next door to my sister-in-law and her Greek chef partner, who could not stop the habit of producing food in quantity and variety, and quince was one of the things he made for us. Not just the fruit itself, but he carefully kept the skins in water with lemon juice as he peeled them (very tough to peel) since they discolour quickly. Then, whilst the fruit, sliced, was cooking in a syrup with cinnamon sticks and star anise until it magically transformed into a beautiful shade of pink, he chopped up the pieces of skin until they were about a centimetre square, and cooked them in an even more sugary syrup. I have mentioned this Greek tradition of preserving things in syrup before and so far, we had experienced grapes, the pith of the giant lemons and now Quince skin. He cooked it until it also turned pink and thickened just short of setting like a jam. Inspired, I plucked some lemons from over the balcony, bought my own quinces from the market (highlight of my lockdown week) and some Seville oranges which are grown about towns as ornamental trees. I then made marmalade from the three things which I felt to be the best marmalade I had ever made. I hail from Oxford, and along with the annual boat race, the Dark Blue/Light Blue thing, our disdain for Cambridge (the new place, upstart breakaways) is expressed in our choice of marmalade – thick-cut for Oxford, thin-cut for Cambridge – so my marmalade was naturally chunky. It must have achieved a set quite suddenly because despite frequent samples going into the fridge, and the moment I got a set, pouring the marmalade into jars, it came out very firm, not that that’s a problem – however, on returning to England, I found quinces in an Asian supermarket and repeated the recipe with the same thick, but delicious result. I say recipe, but it was the basic jam method, weigh your fruit, cook in the minimum of added water and once cooked, add sugar equal in weight to the fruit – fuller instructions here.

Reminded by one of the comments from Tasha – I had tasted Quince before Crete in the form of Membrillo in which the quince is cooked and pureed and set as a quite solid jelly, slices of which are served on your cheeseboard to enhance the eating of cheese. Delicious!

Short and sweet today… And so to Questioning.

What I have realised in the course of writing these posts for this year’s A2Z theme – especially the half relating to gradually becoming vegetarian, is that I am constantly asking questions, about the world, about current events and about food – well ok that’s not so much new self-knowledge, but realise I feel the need to proselytise about those issues. It makes me angry when I see cynical or misleading marketing by the food industry, or see around the news headlines about the war in Ukraine to the way in which the fallout from Putin’s hubris is falling on the whole world. But it also gives me joy to share the knowledge of food that I have enjoyed gathering over the years, or to try and instil a questioning attitude in others, because the world, it’s food, and our relationship to it is complex. Does that spoil my basic enjoyment of food, not at all, anymore, I imagine, than an obstetrician’s knowledge of childbirth spoils their wonder at the birth of their own children or maybe every baby they see come into the world… I hope my joy in sharing comes across and is not seen as man-splaining…

If you have a favourite, marmalade, or any other food story, or you want the answer to a food question, or feel the need to share food thoughts of your own – feel free to comment, please…

How would you know…

Month: April 2022