a2z Challenge 2022 - How would you know...

Rhubarb and the Return of Mercantilism…

April 21, 2022April 22, 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…

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…

Persimmons, Pulses and Pressure Cookers…

April 19, 2022April 19, 2022humanist55

Persimmons, also known as Sharon Fruit, are certainly edible in their own right so they meet the criteria for my theme, but to be honest, by the time they are ripe enough to eat (very ripe!) they are rather bland, up to that point, they are rather astringent and not very nice to eat. You could add them to a fruit salad where they can be balanced by other fruit at either the astringent or ripe stage, but they really come into their own as an ingredient in Persimmon Cake – here’s how I learned about it…

My partner’s brother during a phase of being single, went on a cruise and met and dated a lovely American woman and for a time, they conducted a long-distance relationship with visits. She came to England and took to sending his and my partner’s parents a Persimmon Cake each year. It was a dark, rich, densely fruited cake made to a secret family recipe (Persimmons grow extensively in the southern states) and as guarded as the recipe was, so was the cake she sent and we were lucky to get given a small slice! So I had no option but to try and find a recipe on the internet and try to recreate the secret recipe – I am still searching…

I will not give you a recipe as such, because I still try a different recipe each time in my long search, but I will tell you what I have come to understand about this cake, which has an almost unique method. A Persimmon cake is made with a fruity batter where the acidity of the fruit, even when ripe and past the astringent stage, is what activates baking soda to make the cake rise. To disambiguate baking soda and baking powder, baking powder contains baking soda (bicarbonate of soda) together with an acid such that when mixed into a moist cake, they react and produce carbon dioxide bubbles. In Persimmon cake, you use more baking soda and a little baking powder as the fruit does the activating. Some recipes suggest adding the baking soda to the blender with the persimmons but I recommend mixing it with the flour and other dry ingredients – otherwise, the fruit froths up in the blender and I find it harder to mix with the dry ingredients.

Beyond that, Persimmon Cake has a lot of cake spices, which obviously, you can adjust to your own taste, pecan nuts (or walnuts if you can’t get them) and dried fruit appear in some recipes. The first time I made it, I chopped the persimmons into tiny pieces rather than blending them, which made the cake mix very orange and yet as it bakes, the fruit, even when pureed, turns to a dark brown and I wonder if that might be a feature of the secret family recipe – puree and thinly sliced persimmon. I include a link to a good post on PersimmonsP and Persimmon cake here
but try different ones out and see what you think…

https://www.thelittleepicurean.com/2011/11/persimmon-walnut-cake.html

Pulses

I have spoken about beans and using small amounts of chorizo or prawns as a way to reduce your meat intake but pulses also covers a multitude of types which you might not think of in the same way as beans but pulses, or legumes, are anything that grows in a pod, – like peas, or peanuts (which grow in underground pods) but also lentils as well as the rest of the beans – butter, soya, broad, etc. Here is a good article that sets out a few of the well-known beans My favourite way of eating beans is in Cassoulet, originally a way of using leftover meats from a banquet by extending them with dried sausage (garlic, chorizo etc.) and beans. To this day most French butchers or delis offer cassoulet. It is similar to the great American staple Pork and Beans but given our current times and the increasing cost of meat (monetarily and environmentally), I recommend using strong flavoured sausage like chorizo and reducing the meat proportion altogether.

Cassoulet
1. Cook onions till transparent see M for using the microwave to speed this up. Leeks are good too. Garlic too, to your taste.
2. fry mushrooms and add carrots and other root vegetables.
3. Add dried beans that have soaked overnight and then been rinsed or if you have fresh beans then do the next stage first.
4. Add stock of any kind – enough to cover the beans and tinned tomatoes.
5. Add the chopped leftover meats and dried/cured sausages
6. place in a casserole dish and cover, bake in the oven – slow to medium until the beans are cooked – enjoy!

Pressure Cookers

I grew up with pressure cooking, mostly my mother used a pressure cooker to speed up cooking potatoes, but the microwave has come to supplant the pressure cooker even though it does not do exactly the same thing. She also cooked Christmas puddings in the pressure cooker and had a specially tall one for bottling fruit in tall Kilner jars. Pressure cookers cook more quickly because of the raised pressure so they are still more energy-efficient than cooking in a saucepan on the stovetop. You really need a gas hob to get the temperature just right once the correct pressure is reached. I probably wouldn’t use a pressure cooker to cook potatoes now, but they are ideal for cooking pulses – the bigger the bean, the better! And today, there is a new generation of pressure cookers that are self-heating rather than cooker top. They are energy-efficient and programmable and here is my latest addition to my kitchen…

So far so good – I have yet to try cooking pulses and as there is only one setting for beans, I anticipate using the +/- buttons to find the right cooking time for different beans… If you want save energy, keep in flavour , I urge you to give pressure cookers a try.

Let me know if you have any secret family recipes for Persimmon Cake (or anything else) or if you use a pressure cooker
– please share your story in the comments if not your secret recipes…

Olives, and Overeating…

April 18, 2022April 18, 2022humanist55

Olive flowers and fruit, Crete, by the author.

With so many foods in our globalised world, we may never see them growing in their native habitat, but back in the winter of 2020, when my partner and I were lucky enough to lockdown in Crete for six months, I was able to take these pictures, firstly of the olives in fruit and then, following the harvest, the next year’s flowers – beautiful, tiny flowers. Cretan olives are small and although they can be eaten, they are mostly used for olive oil production and little factories all over the island grind into life for their short but frantic season of activity. Following the harvest, growers must prune their trees to keep them at a manageable height and shape for harvesting which is done by placing nets all over the ground below the trees and then using a sort of mechanical beater at the end of a large pole to knock the olives to the ground. So first the island sounds like it is being attacked by giant bees and then later it is shrouded in smoke from the many bonfires disposing of the prunings (see below). There is lot of waste heat generated here but the pits from the pressed olives are dried and do become fuel – the boiler of a laundry serving all the hotels in Elounda, where we were staying, was powered by olive pits!

Bonfires of olive prunings in an olive grove, Crete 2021

I realised that year, that what I had always heard, that olives have to be brined in order to remove the bitterness from them and make them palatable, is not the whole story. If you read my entry for K, where I discuss lactic acid pickling, you can see that the olives must be considered as being pickled and that the flavour changes are more complex than simply soaking the bitterness away. There is a variety and style of green olive that I used to get from a Cypriot shop in Brixton, London, where the brining is very light and the olives have been cracked to allow the brine to penetrate better – they then have some olive oil, lemon slices and coriander seeds added – they are definitely more bitter than most olives but they grew on me…

Olive Oil is credited with increasing the longevity of Mediterranean peoples, they use it instead of butter so for example, you sit down at a restaurant and you are immediately brought a small dish of olive oil and some bread to dip into the oil and eat. This will be extra virgin (first pressing) olive oil which has the greatest benefits as well as the best taste. Industry has been quick to jump on the benefit and produce margarine type spreads made from olive oil, but in the same way that the benefits of olive oil are destroyed by heat (so it is no good frying with it if you want it’s health benefits), I very much doubt that the many processes necessary to create spread, preserve the benefits either – take the wholefood (minimal processing) approach and stick to dipping your bread or pouring neat over a salad.

Olives can obviously be eaten on their own but are added to salads and stews but as an ingredient, a classic dish is Tapenade, and once more, Elizabeth David is the person responsible for introducing this to the British in 1950, and once they were able to get the ingredients, following the end of rationing, it provided an easy to achieve but sophisticated dish. The name comes from tapeno, the Provencal word for Capers and although it features olives as an ingredient, this is principally a caper dish. This recipe was adapted from “Mediterranean Cooking,” by Paula Wolfert (HarperPerennial, 1994) and appears here, and Wolfert in turn, based it on Elizabeth David’s recipe…

TAPENADE
– Pit a cup of wrinkled black olives (ready pitted olives do not have the same amount of taste and it’s easy enough to be worth doing yourself)
– 4 tablespoons capers
– 2 tablespoons lemon juice
– 1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
– Freshly ground black pepper
– tablespoons cognac or dark rum
– 1 cup olive oil
1. Soak the olives, anchovies and capers to remove excess salt. Rinse and pat dry.
2. Chop as finely as you can (do not be tempted to use a blender) olives, anchovies, capers. Place in a mixer and add the lemon juice, mustard, pepper to taste and cognac. Mix until pasty.
3. With the motor running, drizzle in the olive oil in a steady stream to obtain a smooth, thick sauce. Transfer to a bowl; let stand for at least an hour before serving to allow flavours to mingle.

Variations: To mellow the bold, salty flavor of this tapenade, mix in about a tablespoon of tomato paste and a pinch of sugar, or a tablespoon or two of crumbled canned tuna. Or bake a whole eggplant at 350 degrees for about 30 minutes, until it is black, blistery and collapsing. Peel under running water, and squeeze out any bitter juices. Place in a bowl, preferably wooden, and pound until well-mashed. Then gradually whisk in the entire cup of tapenade.

Per (1-tablespoon) serving: 53 calories; 5g fat (85 percent calories from fat); 0.5g saturated fat; 3mg cholesterol; 1g protein; 1g carbohydrate; no sugar; no fiber; 245mg sodium; 9mg calcium; 23mg potassium.

And so to overeating…
The “miracle” of first world agri-industry, with it’s chemicals to fertilise, protect from pests and disease, and even genetic engineering, implemented on an industrial scale by machines so large, that many small farmers no longer do the work, but bring in contractors to plough, spray and harvest crops, has made food production more productive and so more profitable – but at what cost? The food may be cheaper, but damage to the environment and bio-diversity and to the quality of the food, raises questions of whether it was worth it – and that’s just the crops. I have already described the cost in terms of land use, of raising meat and to that you can add issues of quality, in the light of the use of anti-biotics and growth hormones being passed up the food chain – to us! But it’s the cheapness that leads to the problem of overeating. In America, where agri-business reigns supreme, visitors to that country are staggered – literally – at the portion sizes in restaurants and equally, by the number of obese people – most Americans are not the svelte people we see in Hollywood offerings…. And the rest of us first worlders are not far behind. The combination of fat and sugar is particularly bad for people on low incomes. Take this trick of the food industry, sugar, salt and acidity, are all flavour enhancers which means that if you are making a tin of baked beans say, you can get away with a tiny amount of tomato in the sauce (saving money), as long as you use a well balanced mix of the flavour enhancers mentioned above. Too much salt is bad for your blood pressure but sugar is the killer, too often hidden in products such as baked beans and in staggering amounts in fizzy drinks, unless they are sugar free – in which case they are replaced, often, with addictive, probably harmful in the long run – Aspatrtame. For years, the sugar industry put the blame for obesity on fat, but we need “good” fats and we certainly don’t need lots of sugar.

Of course, exercise is good in combination with reducing your portion sizes just as much as fat and sugar combined are the very devil! At the end of the day though, reducing portion size and watching the calories (especially from sugar), are the most important steps, the more the weight comes off, the easier it becomes to exercise and then you have a positive feedback loop…

Nuts and “Nature” Naming…

April 16, 2022April 16, 2022humanist55

If you eschew meat, that is, give up chewing meat (sorry – couldn’t resist that) – then you need to replace that source of protein with as wide a variety of other proteins as possible, beans are an obvious one, but nuts are a very important source too. You can certainly snack ’em on their own and there is nothing more addictive than shelling your way through a pile of pistachios. Walnuts are more trouble to deshell but fortunately, you can readily buy them in their brain resembling nakedness and be saved the trouble. Once you start to use nuts as an ingredient, there are so many possibilities, both savoury and in desserts – my own favourite way of using walnuts is nestled down into a crumble topping so they are half-buried and then they toast to perfection… In fact, toasting is often required to bring out the full flavour of nuts – especially if you do buy them already shelled – this is especially true of ground Almonds which feature in the following recipe from Elizabeth David’s “A Book of Mediterranean Food” which as I mentioned before, was one of my first cooking inspirations:-

Skordalia
Ingredients – 2 egg yolks
2 oz ground almonds
2 oz fresh white breadcrumbs
6 cloves of new garlic
1/4 pint olive oil
juice of 1/2 lemon
parsley
1. Blitz the garlic and egg yolks together and then drip the olive oil in to form a garlic mayonnaise known in Greece as Aioli
2. Add the breadcrumbs and ground almonds (after warming the almonds for a minute or two in a medium oven – they shouldn’t be browned at all)
3. Stir in the lemon juice and parsley and you have Skordalia which you can use as a condiment to accompany other dishes or…
4. I like to prepare a load of vegetables and chickpeas and bring them all together, hot, and mix the Skordalia into it so that it melts into sauce binding them together. So Chickpeas boiled, onions and mushrooms fried, green beans, peppers, boiled – choose your own mix…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_David

One of my other foundational cookbook reads on Chinese Cooking, would have described this as an “assembled dish” and if you use that other great tool South-East Asian cooking, the Wok, then you can add nuts to your stir-fries – cashews, walnuts, peanuts – whatever you have to hand. Peanuts, incidentally are not so much a nut as a bean that grows underground – peanut butter (and other nut butters) are also a great ingredient in savoury dishes. In the days when I allowed myself to eat such things, this was my

Ultimate Comfort Food
1. Toast two slices of granary bread
2. Butter the toast and spread Ginger Marmalade on one and Peanut Butter on the other
3. Cut a thin slice of very hard Ice Cream and sandwich between the two slices of toast – eat whilst the toast is hot and the ice cream cold…

And so to “Nature” Naming…
We all want to eat healthy and wholesome food, but when food is produced industrially, then, by it’s very nature, it needs to be sold to us as such and so marketing is employed to convince us that these offerings are as healthy and wholesome as food we might concoct ourselves rather than what it is – highly processed with all the concomitant issues – preservatives, flavour-stretching, bulking out. Marketing makes use of all sorts of buzzwords to achieve its ends so let us examine some of the words used to sell us food and see which are meaningful and which are not – in no particular order:-

Organic – means produced on an organic farm where only certain substances are allowed to be employed in growing the food – if true then this is a good and meaningful label, but Organic carries a high premium price so it can be open to food fraud…

100% Wholemeal – I discussed this in H – it sounds great but really means deconstructed grain reassembled – so white flour with bran and toasted wheatgerm – better than white flour but not as good as it sounds. Stoneground will give you a slow release of energy.

Free From – this covers a lot of things such as Gluten Free and I am sure some people think that “Ooh – gluten free – that must be better, right?” Wrong, unless you are allergic to gluten.
Sugar Free and No added Sugar are two more confusingly similar terms – sugar free usually means that something has artificial sweeteners some of which are addictive, or cause diarrhoea when eaten in excess and who knows what effect all these chemicals will have in the long run. No added Sugar means what it says, but many foods are high in sugar so you still need to check the nutrition guide where it says Carbohydrate […] Of which Sugars […].

Halal and Kosher – these are religious food terms and generally relate to avoiding prohibited foods such as pork but they also mean that meat has been slaughtered in a particular way. An example is gelatine – it is not prohibited in Islamic eating , but it must have been made from animals slaughtered in a Halal manner… Interestingly Christianity which grew out of Judaism and was followed by Islam – all worshipping the same god, Christianity has no food prohibitions as the other two do.

I mentioned bulking out – food production has byproducts – you make cheese, you get left with Whey – what to do with it, because throwing stuff away has a cost. So whey, which is protein, is used to bulk out any suitable foods, goes into animal feeds and of course, is sold at a high price to body-builders – like I said – bulking out!

Mangos, Miso and Mirowaves…

April 15, 2022April 15, 2022humanist55

Mangos are a delicious fruit with many varieties from many parts of the tropical world – and being from the tropics, they are always available, but they do have some seasonality and nothing creates greater excitement in the shops in Bradford, UK, where I work – than the advent of the Pakistan Mango season… They arrive in the boxes pictured above, and are taken home to be distributed to eager families. Here’s how to eat them. Roll the small, yellow, ripe mangos between your hands until you have squidged all the flesh inside (they are a very soft variety). Bite on end off the mango and then suck out the delicious flesh! Messy but worth it!

Mangos as an ingredient range from Mango Chutney, sweet though to especially sour mangos), Ice cream, Gelato and Kulfi, I put them in crumble, fruit salad and a favourite – Mango Lassi. Simply peel and de-stone mangos – puree them and blend with plain yoghurt or you can use tinned mango puree… In a future post I will deal with Persimmon cake which is made from a fruit puree batter and can also be done using mangos.

I know I promised to get all the weird stuff out of the way under K, but Miso didn’t fit in so hard cheese! Actually, it’s not so weird when you consider how ubiquitous Soy sauce is, and miso can e thought of as a kind of solid paste version of soy sauce. Both are made from soybeans and fermented (see the K post) and come in a variety of flavours – more so in the case of Miso which ranges from so-called White Miso (light brown and almost sweet) to a dark miso which has been aged longer to develop the flavours. Miso is salty but rich in flavour, about the strength of Marmite (yeast extract) and if you are vegetarian, I strongly recommend keeping some in your fridge as a stock source. Vegetarian stock cubes, are for some reason, often more expensive than meat ones?? here is a very simple recipe using Miso:-

Miso Soup
1. Chop an Onion into small pieces and do the same with a carrot.
2. Cover with water and boil/simmer till tender.
3. Pour a little boiling water from the pan into a bowl and mash a spoonful of miso into it.
4. Allow the soup to come off the boil before adding the miso since it is a “live” product
The natural sweetness of the carrots and onions are balanced by the saltiness of the Miso.

Another thing which Miso is handy for, is to bring flavour to Tofu, which is also made from soya beans in the form of soya milk – Tofu is effectively a soya cheese but it doesn’t have a lot of flavour. (We are talking “hard” Tofu rather than soft or Silken). Carefully peel back the container lid to reveal the tofu floating in its own whey. Spread a thin layer of miso on the top surface of the Tofu and cover and replace it in the fridge for a few days. You will find that the miso flavour has permeated down into the Tofu because the Miso is a live product and so interacts with the Tofu in a unique way. Afterwards, you can use the tofu as you would normally.

Microwaves! Spreading radiation in the form of invisible rays! Shock! Horror! Poppycock! Open a conventional oven and you will get a blast of infra-red radiation! Microwaves heat things up in the same way as any other oven except that they work at higher frequency energy waves that penetrate right through the food, cooking the inside and outside simultaneously which makes it much more energy-efficient and faster too. Infra-red ovens can burn the outside whilst leaving the inside cold as anyone who has misjudged cooking a large turkey will know! But with a microwave, because of the laws of physics, this does lead to one problem – the hotter something is, the easier it is to heat it, so if one part of the food starts to heat up ahead of the rest, it might get hotter and hotter and also burn. This is why the food is rotated in a microwave to make sure that there are no extra-hot-spots and why some instructions tell you to pause and stir the food. However, if you are reheating lasagne, say, and this is a very typical use of a microwave, you can’t stir it and hence you may very well get the odd burnt corner.
Although I do use the microwave to reheat food, I like to use it to do real cooking too, for though you will never see one in the Master Chef kitchen, it is an excellent tool for real cooking. Read any recipe that begins with the instruction to “Gently sautee Onions until transparent”. What it won’t tell you is that you will need to stand over the onions for a good fifteen minutes, regularly stirring them else they too will crisp and burn and go bitter. If recipes said this, would you think”Nahhh – too much faff!” Instead, put your copped or sliced onions into a microwaveable container (I use old take-away containers), add a dessert spoon of oil and a couple of tablespoons of water. cook with the lid on until the onions are indeed translucent and then put them in the pan to continue with the recipe. This might take 5 minutes depending on your microwave and it might work better slightly longer at below the maximum setting – try it out with your machine. At least you don’t have to stand there stirring for fifteen minutes and you can get on with other preparations… Furthermore – cooking vegetables like frozen peas, they will be far fresher coming out of the microwave having been steamed with just a drop of water than boiled in a saucepan. And its better for the environment… Lastly, microwaves were made for cooking steamed puddings – supremely – Christmas puddings. My mother made Christmas puddings in the Autumn and after their initial cooking some hours of steaming, she put them in the Pressure Cooker to re-cook on Christmas Day – another 45 minutes at least. With a microwave, you can reheat even a large Christmas Pudding in about 5 minutes. Anything with water in cooks well in a microwave but something rich in fat like Christmas Pudding – the microwave excels! The recipe below could have come under L for Lemons but I saved it for here.

Sussex Pond Pudding
1. Make a suet pastry with self-raising flour and either real or vegetarian suet – more here.
2. Roughly p+roll out the pastry and line a plastic microwave bowl with the- one saved from a bought Christmas Pudding is ideal.
3. Chop a whole lemon into centimetre cubes and add to the lined bowl.
4. Chop a block of butter equal in weight to the lemon into pieces and put on top of the lemon pieces
5. Add an equal weight of dark Muscovado sugar and put on top of the butter – your pastry lining should now be full.
Add a circle of pastry to seal the top of the pudding and cover with microwaveable cling film (unless your Christmas pudding bowl came with a lid)
6. Cook at full power in the microwave for 4 minutes
7. After a minute or two, turn the pudding out upside down onto a deep plate, because when you cut into the pudding, the “pondwater” of melted butter, brown sugar and lemon juice will flood out. Serve with custard or ice cream or just cream. In Victorian times, they left the lemon whole, merely piercing it to let out the juice and discarding it after cooking, but I like to eat the zesty pieces which cuts the sweetness and the unctuous suet pastry…
Enjoy!

Lemons and Land Use…

April 13, 2022April 13, 2022humanist55

In case you are thinking that nobody eats Lemons in their own right, I have a guilty pleasure to confess – when nobody around me is looking I eat the slice of lemon from my, say – Gin and Tonic – and maybe even my partners. Zest, which is the name for the outer layer of citrus fruit and contains the oils, also means enthusiasm for and so, when I owned a Frozen Yoghurt shop – I called it Zest!

To be fair, Lemons are mostly used as an ingredient for other dishes and rather than following the trite maxim “If Life Gives You Lemons – Make Lemonade!” here is a list of the many wonderful things you can make with Lemons. For example, the giant lemon pictured above next to a normal lemon, is cooked by the Greeks, in syrup and served on yoghurt or ice cream. We hid in Crete for six months whilst the pandemic was at its worst and from our apartment balcony, you could reach over the rail and pick lemons from a tree which reminded me of Andrew Marvell’s – The Garden in which he describes the bounty of cultivation thus:-

What wond’rous life in this I lead!
Ripe apples drop about my head;
The luscious clusters of the vine
Upon my mouth do crush their wine;
The nectarine and curious peach
Into my hands themselves do reach;
Stumbling on melons as I pass,
Ensnar’d with flow’rs, I fall on grass.

Lemon Curd
Lemon Meringue Pie
Lemon Marmalade
Lemony Greek Roast Potatoes
Limoncello
Preserved Lemon Mayonnaise
Lemon Drizzle Cake
Lemon Sorbet
Lemon Posset

I invite you to contribute your own favourites using this yellow skinned, zesty miracle…

Lastly, I want to share some more about the issue of the land it takes to raise meat compared to a vegetarian diet. I take this quote from here.
“A Bangladeshi family living off rice, beans, vegetables and fruit may live on an acre of land or less, while the average American, who consumes around 270 pounds of meat a year, needs 20 times that.

Nearly 30% of the available ice-free surface area of the planet is now used by livestock, or for growing food for those animals. One billion people go hungry every day, but livestock now consumes the majority of the world’s crops. A Cornell University study in 1997 found that around 13m hectares of land in the US were used to grow vegetables, rice, fruit, potatoes and beans, but 302m were used for livestock. The problem is that farm animals are inefficient converters of food to flesh. Broiler chickens are the best, needing around 3.4kg to produce 1kg of flesh, but pigs need 8.4kg for that kilo.

Other academics have calculated that if the grain fed to animals in western countries were consumed directly by people instead of animals, we could feed at least twice as many people – and possibly far more – as we do now.”

There is a lot more in that article… If you have been trying to cut down on the amount of meat you eat in order to save money, or the world, whether as a result of the ideas shared here or because you were already on this track, please share how it is going for you and what you would like to know more about or see discussed…

Kimchi, Kefir, Kombucha and Killing it in the Kitchen…

April 13, 2022April 13, 2022humanist55

If you’re new to vegetarian/vegan food, then you may think “Uh-oh – here comes the weird shit!” But hey! At least it’s all in one post…

Kimchi is nothing more than South-East Asian sauerkraut – still too weird? It’s just pickled cabbage, a bit on the spicy side. It is particularly Korean and is served as a side dish with almost every meal. By pure coincidence, Kefir and Kombucha share the fact that they ate all fermented items. Kimchi is a pickle, but not as we English know it, however, most of the rest of Europe have great traditions of fermented pickles. In England, we pickle onions, beetroot and eggs (as well as shellfish) by simply putting them in vinegar – in the case of pickled onions, we boil pickling spices in the vinegar first to jazz it up! If you think you have never tried fermented pickles, then think Gherkins and if you haven’t tried them then…?

Of the fermented pickles, sauerkraut is the easiest example, and is made by layering very thinly sliced white cabbage in a jar or bowl, with salt. The salt draws liquid out of the cabbage and after a few days, it naturally forms lactic acid and the cabbage softens and pickles – all you have to do is cover it with a cloth and occasionally stir and skim any froth off the top. When it is acid enough for your taste, decant it into smaller, sterilised jars and it will keep in the fridge for up to six months…

How do you use sauerkraut? It’s great with sausages and mustard and can be eaten cold or warmed up, but I like it in a vegetarian context too in place of chutney or added into soups and stews to bring some acidity to the dish. Why would you eat it? Well aside from the taste reasons I’ve just given, all fermented pickles are good for digestion, provide probiotics, vitamins and strengthen your immune system and even help you lose weight! Another health claim for all of today’s K products is that they contain “enzymes”. This is one of those “magic” words that abound in the world of Healthfoods and I am always a little sceptical because whilst it is a known fact that enzymes are important in digestion (they are catalysts that speed up reactions), drilling down to the details of enzymes and their presence and effects, you need a degree in some kind of science plus access to scientific research papers – yet healthfoods tend to make blanket claims for things like enzymes which then get repeated (as I am doing) with what may as well be an invocation of magic. Make up your own mind – certainly, fermented products are rich in enzymes – whatever they do!

Kimchi is just Sauerkraut on steroids, or to be more accurate – its spiced up with chilli and other oriental flavours. So for western tastes, the argument for using it more as an ingredient rather than eating it as a dish on it’s own is strong. You can buy a jar of starter flavourings in some supermarkets or you can look up recipes on the www! Like Patata Fagusta in the last post, kimchi is more of a principle with many variations and every family having it’s own special recipe.

Kefir grains, a symbiotic matrix of bacteria and yeasts

Kefir is a drinkable consistency yoghurt which is easy to make because it makes at room temperature – so no special Yoghurt maker with little heated pots which you use for a month after buying then relegate to a cupboard. Ideally, you acquire some of the Kefir grains shown above, and simply add them to a bowl of milk, cover for twenty-four hours and then strain the grains out to add to the next batch then neck the kefir! Popular throughout Eastern Europe, Kefir has broken through to a wider market in the last couple of years appearing in shops as both plain and flavoured drinks. If you can’t get Kefir grains, try buying kefir from a Polish shop – it will be unpasteurised and added to milk, will produce perfectly good kefir. You can use kefir as you would yoghurt, drink it, add it to salad dressings, curries, puddings…

Kombucha is a similar thing – if you can’t get the culture, then use a bottle of commercially made Kombucha to start you off. Much is made in Kombucha circles, of the layer that forms on the top of the brew such that Kombucha is sometimes referred to as “the Manchurian Mushroom” or as the “scoby”, but I can tell you that this substance is not necessary to making Kombucha. I won’t bore you with the scientific details of the layer (find them here) but the fact that you can start it off from a bottle of commercially made kombucha, and that it will take many batches before the layer starts coming, is proof that what really matters, is the yeasts and bacteria present in the drink. What that layer does, is make the kombucha more acid, and if you leave it longer than a week, then the drink will become too acid, so if you like it mild, you can throw the layer away each time. (Shock horror in the kombucha brewing camp!)

Here’s what happens – you make two and a half litres of black or green tea using eight tea bags and add eight ounces of white sugar and dissolve. When the brew has cooled to room temperature, you add half a litre of your last batch (or a bottle of the commercially made drink), a piece of the top layer, if you have it, cover for a week, pour off two and a half litres to drink, retain half a litre to start the next batch and discard most of the sediment at the bottom. There will be enough yeast and special bacteria floating into the retained starter to do their job, which is:- the yeast ferments the sugar into alcohol, but you never get any detectable alcohol because the bacteria turn it into lactic acid – so what starts off as a too-sweet tea, ends up as a delicious, fruity concoction.

You can ring the changes by using some herbal tea bags (I favour lemon and ginger) or adding a flower head of Elder when in season, but the great thing about kombucha, to return to the theme of ingredients, is that it is a perfectly balanced flavour amplifier. Add a splash of mango juice, say, to a glass of kombucha, and it will taste more like mango than you would have imagined – so a world of non-alcoholic cocktails beckons…

Finally – Killing it in the Kitchen! No! No killing is involved in vegetarian cooking – I am talking about the fact that cooking can be a competitive sport. There are so many cookery competitions on TV and so many chefs who tell you that recipes are easy as they turn out something immaculate in taste and presentation. Cooking is for pleasure – first and foremost and the process must be something you enjoy, love even, if the end result is to be good. You don’t have to kill it in the kitchen, impress your friends with “elevated” dishes – if homely, rustic, down-and-dirty cooking is what you like – go for it!

Jerusalem Artichokes, Juicing and Hide the Vegetables…

April 12, 2022April 12, 2022humanist55

Jerusalem Atrichokes, sunroot, sunchoke, wild sunflower, topinambur, earth apple.

Once again I was casting around for what to bring to you for the letter J – all I had was Jerusalem Artichoke – which is one of my favourite vegetables – especially for including in a brown vegetable soup in which, together with carrots and onions, it brings a sweetness but also a great rich, roundness of earthy flavour, add a drop of sherry and your soup will be positively ambrosial…

Once again also, I am indebted to Wikipedia for a plethora of facts which both surprised and edified me regarding the Jerusalem Artichoke, many of which relate to how it got it’s name since it has no relationship to Jerusalem and neither is it any form of Artichoke. The artichoke bit is easy, the French explorer, Samuel de Champlain, who first brought the tubers back to Europe from the New World, opined that they tasted somewhat like artichokes, though others thought the taste more like Chard. The plant does have a familial relationship to Sunflowers – the Italian word for which is Girasole – they are both members of the Helianthus family – and Girasole gradually corrupted to Jerusalem.

What was particularly interesting to learn was that not only can Jerusalem Artichokes be eaten raw (unlike potatoes) but they are particularly useful for diabetics since their starch is in the form of Inulin (not insulin) which is not absorbed by the human gut. On the downside, lower down in the colon, they can make you fart a lot… A small price to pay for this delish vegetable which seems to be having a bit of a moment. My wife loves to watch cookery competition shows and one chef recently prepared Jerusalem Artichokes Five Ways – he knew a good thing when he saw one!

Jerusalem Artichokes can be used to make Ethanol fuel as well as, in Germany, a spirit called Topinambur or Artichoke Brandy. The inulin is also extracted on a commercial scale as a form of dietary fibre in food manufacturing. So there you have it – a vegetable rich in flavour, fibre, vitamins and with a sweet taste that does you no harm – what’s not to like? You can find more recipes here.

Oh! And Jerusalem Artichokes are easy to grow and because they reach seven to nine feet tall, they can be used to create annual mazes…

Back on our quest to increase the intake of vegetarian dishes, or rather find alternatives to increasingly expensive meat dishes (all complaints to the Kremlin please), we come to juicing. Adults may quite enjoy juice and smoothies anyway, but when it comes to children (or adults) who have to be tricked into eating one or more vegetables, the juicing and smoothing are the way to hide the smoking gun. Oh sorry – you don’t need to shoot vegetables, although vegetable preparation is full of distressing terms, such as, “tear out the heart of a lettuce” or “macerate a clove of garlic” there you go – Vicious Vegetarianism….

Those of you with small children may have found the need for this strategy… Properly speaking – a Juicing Machine, finely grates vegetables or fruit and then spins the juice out of it leaving behind quite large quantities of, still nutritious pulp which, if you don’t want to have a guilty conscience, ruin your budget or fill up your bin, you need to find creative uses for – dips, soups and savoury sauce extenders. Blending a smoothie, on the other hand, avoids all these creative soul-searchings by giving you the whole fruit or vegetable blended to down in one! My advice – juicers are more trouble than their cleaning is worth – get a handheld stick-blender or a Nutri-Bullet.

Hominy and other processed grains habituating Healthfood Shops…

April 9, 2022April 9, 2022humanist55

Lew Robertson / Getty Images – https://www.thespruceeats.com/hominy-corn-995715

Every A2Z Challenge has it’s difficult letters and for me, H is one of those! After resorting to searching Google and combing through a list of 52 foods beginning with H, I decided to go with Hominy and some seemingly similar products like cornmeal and Semolina. To connect with the other theme of this blog, these are products you might find in a Healthfood Shop, depending on where you live in the world – so what’s all that about?

To explain what hominy is – I quote from Wikipedia the fount of all knowledge (which I do contribute to each year) “Hominy is made in a process called nixtamalization. To make hominy, field corn (maize) grain is dried, and then treated by soaking and cooking the mature (hard) grain in a dilute solution of lye (potassium hydroxide) […] soaking the corn in lye^[4] kills the seed’s germ, which keeps it from sprouting while in storage. Finally, in addition to providing a source of dietary calcium, the lye or lime reacts with the corn so that the nutrient niacin can be assimilated by the digestive tract.” Plus this jewel of scientific jargon – “Some of the corn oil breaks down into emulsifying agents (monoglycerides and diglycerides), and facilitates bonding the corn proteins to each other. The divalent calcium in lime acts as a cross-linking agent for protein and polysaccharide acidic side chains. Cornmeal from untreated ground corn cannot form a dough with the addition of water, but the chemical changes in masa (aka masa nixtamalera) make dough formation possible, for tortillas and other food.”

So, this Mexican speciality is quite different from Cornmeal – a staple carbohydrate in many countries around the world because of the treatment with Lye that makes it both able to form a dough as well as being more nutritious with the ability to provide Niacin and some extra Calcium. Both products are ground to various sizes of particles, right down to flour, but it’s interesting that only one country has discovered the secret of nixtamalization (how much could you score in Scrabble for that?) and can make true dough-based dishes. This article gives some recipes since I confess to never having tried hominy and only having vaguely heard of Hominy Grits.

On the other hand, I am familiar with Cornmeal – or Polenta and sometimes use it to make a quick pseudo-pizza, because who has time to make a yeasted dough, prove it, spin it round in the air to spin a disk and then top and bake it!

Frewin’s Pseudo Pizza
1. Add cornmeal – anything from fine to coarse, to a saucepan of boiling salted water. I judge the amount by pouring it carefully into the centre to form a cone whose top reaches the surface of the water.
2. stir frequently until the mixture sets like a thick custard and then pour out onto a wooden cutting or breadboard.

If you have any leftovers, then the next day, cut into cubes and shallow fry till heated through and crisp on the bottom…

https://www.browneyedbaker.com/polenta-pizza/

I turn to Semolina because it is also a versatile grainy looking substance which I for one, often think of in the same usage category as cornmeal but which in fact, is made from our old friend wheat. Most semolina is made from hard Durum wheat – the same one that is used to make pasta but if made from softer wheat it is known as Farina and softer and stickier. When I was growing up, Semolina Pudding was a frequent dish but has been crowded out by the plethora of more elaborate confections on offer today. What is interesting to compare with hominy, is how a similar problem is solved by a more physical process. All grains have a husk or bran outer layer. Inside wheat are two halves of the part which is ground into flour, the endosperm or middings, and between these, nestles the wheatgerm, a tiny plant in the making, ready to be activated by moisture. If you stonegrind wheat, this little plant gets mashed up in the flour and will cause the flour to spoil fairly quickly (so don’t let stoneground flour linger in your cupboards) and the same is true of corn. Hominy solves this problem by chemically treating the kernels of corn which kills the little plant and softens the husk allowing it to be removed. With wheat, it is nowadays ground in roller mills – heavy metal rollers that are set apart so precisely, that they first crack the husk off, secondly break the two halves of the endosperm apart simultaneously allowing the wheatgerm to fall away, and thirdly, they can produce flour of different quality as they gradually and precisely grind the endosperm ever smaller. Semolina is produced by breaking the endosperm up into pieces rather than flour, once the bran and wheatgerm have been cracked off. Incidentally – they can toast the wheatgerm to kill it, then add it back into the ground bran and flour to produce 100% Wholewheat flour, but unlike stoneground flour, where the carbohydrate is released slowly into your body, such wholewheat flour is basically fast release white flour albeit with added fibre and some vitamins from the wheatgerm. Slow food is better – more of that later…

If you have to choose between Hominy and Cornmeal, then remember that Hominy has a little extra calcium and allows you to digest Niacin, a form of vitamin B – so especially beneficial to vegans, which segues nicely into Healthfood Stores.

Many are confused between Healthfood and Wholefood Stores – they are both about healthy food – right? Well, up to a point, because their philosophy is completely different. Healthfood shops are usually half devoted to supplements – pills in the main, which are to make up for deficiencies in the modern diet. The other half is usually dry goods which are regarded as healthy and perhaps some of the more difficult to source in the supermarkets. These dry goods are also usually available in Wholefood Stores, but often at a much better price and the philosophy is quite opposite – eat whole (unprocessed) foods and you won’t need all the supplements. Well that’s not altogether true – modern science has given us an understanding of conditions that require additional supplements to that found just in the diet – true this may be because food quality is not the best – and here the Wholefood Store tries to provide the best in Organic quality foods, but let’s face it, we cannot all afford the prices of such quality food and supplements may be a cheaper option. Its hard to find an affordable balance between the two philosophies, but understanding the difference between them is a good starting point…

What kind of food do you eat, healthfood, wholefood, convenience, ethnic, affordable? The choices are only going to become more difficult in the next while following the war in Ukraine – source of much wheat, but also other grains like millet and bulgar.