Food

Water – the Vital Ingredient…

humanist55

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://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…

Urid Dal, Umeboshi and You (pronounced U)…

humanist55

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…

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…

humanist55

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://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

Photo by Edgar Castrejon on Unsplash

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…

humanist55

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…

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…

humanist55

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 …

humanist55

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…

Photo by margot pandone on Unsplash

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…

humanist55

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…

Photo by Ladimir Ladroid on Unsplash

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…

My 21st century pressure cooker…

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…

humanist55

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…

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…

humanist55

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…

Photo by Maksim Shutov on Unsplash

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…

humanist55

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…

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!