My father loved to cook a little but gender roles made him the breadwinner and not the bread baker. My mother was a pre-feminist gal refusing to teach her son to cook unlike his sisters with someday husbands and families to feed I watched secretly – absorbed the gist anyway.
On going to university and facing the inevitability of student self-sufficiency they gave me a carbon steel Sabatier a knife that sharpens beautifully but must be cleaned immediately else it soon goes rusty I have worn it down every day of fifty-one years – two food businesses and cooking daily – now so thin it pares perfectly.
They also gave two books of recipes The Paupers Cookbook and Catherine Whitehorn’s classic Cooking in a Bedsit sectioned One Ring, Two Rings and slimly a Cooker for the very lucky… I read and dutifully cooked a few but though a lifelong love was born yet who with a world of food to explore would base their style on paucity
I added a book on Chinese cookery whole, diced, steamed and stir fried bought a wok and never looked back spiced it up with the Penguin Indian cookery And last but by no means least found Mediterranean Food by Elizabeth David
Seduced by the sensual celebratory rather than precisely noted quantities Elizabeth David liberated me as well as, I later learned the married man she ran off with travelling Europe and living on a boat My mother would not have approved
To these three parents chosen Chinese, Indian and Mediterranean I must mention the American professor of studies West African she taught my roomie and I Palaver Sauce and Jollof Rice suffered our inept experiments with nicety so when I moved near Brixton Market I fell into a world of ingredients from bitter, Cypriot, taste-acquired lemon and coriander brined olives. to stinky, dried, West African fish in baskets – I never came up for air
My culinary philosophy – read recipes with a pinch of salt absorb, ferment, reuse, infuse resist encouragement to cull your larder treat every meal as an adventure feed strangers, friends and family and you will never lose.
Over at dVerse Poets Pub, sanaarizvi in Poetics invites us to explore the senses in Food Poetry. I should add, to contextualise the above poem, that my Mother’s maiden name was Cook and my partner’s Mother’s maiden name was Larder – go figure…
For my third year of the A2Z Challenge, I am reverting to one of my passions in life – Food! Two years ago, I only discovered the challenge on April 1st, the day the challenge started, so I had no time to prepare and plunged into the effects of the burgeoning pandemic. Last year, I decided to try and finish a novel and write around its theme – I didn’t finish it within the month but it gave me enough impetus to have finished it since and if any of you readers from last year want to read it – please let me know and I will send you a pdf.
DISCOVERY APPLE
The aspect of food I was going to tackle is ‘Foods that can be used as an Ingredient’ – so for example, Apples can be eaten in their own right as well as being an ingredient in other dishes. Tumeric cannot really be eaten on its own so it doesn’t make the list… There will be recipes of mine, links to other peoples’ recipes and odd food facts.
However, the world finds itself in a crisis due to the war in Ukraine and so I am going to add substantially to this theme – shades of the 2020 challenge when Covid was on the rise… Here are two things to consider -Ukraine is seventh in the league of worldwide wheat producers (but not for the next year). 50% of the Wheat imported into Germany, is fed to Pigs – it takes 7kg of wheat to create 1kg of pork. Imagine the price hikes coming down the line, from the price of wheat ‘feeding’ through to the price of pork (and other meats). What better time to consider choosing to eat more vegetarian meals. Note that I didn’t suggest becoming vegetarian, but at least increasing the amount of meat-free meals. There are other reasons for considering this, principally the Environment – less land use to grow all that food for animal feeds, less farting animals contributing methane to greenhouse gasses (methane is worse than CO2), less expensive, refrigerated transport of meat around the world. More grain for everyone around the world – poor countries in Africa will be hard hit by Ukraine being unable to plant this year, and not just wheat…
I have had in mind, for a long time, writing a book to be called ‘The Gradual Vegetarian…” I imagined a family where the progressive (probably) females in the house desired to go vegetarian for all the good reasons – ethical, environmental, health – and the (probably) males are resistant to the change. So the book would be vegetarian by stealth – gradually introducing recipes that give the lie to the idea that vegetarian food is bland and boring. Also, you don’t want to rush out and buy lots of new equipment and ingredients before you’re sure the change will take, so the idea of a book that gradually introduces vegetarian recipes, equipment, and ingredients, always seemed a good one to me and I am going to inject it into this year’s challenge…
There will be some jam recipes and so as a ‘taster’, I give my generalised method below, little wrinkles may appear with further recipes…
Making jam is simple, you need fruit and sugar in equal parts plus jam jars…
Making jam is simple, you need fruit and sugar in equal parts plus jam jars. Almost all jam jars these days can be recycled because they have a silicone seal inside the lid edge so you don’t need to mess about with acetate covers, rubber bands and waxed disks – unless you want to!
Weigh the fruit so you know how much sugar to add.
Cook the fruit in a large saucepan – some fruit needs chopping into small bits.
When the fruit is mushed down, add the sugar and stir till dissolved and bring to a roiling boil.
Take a spoonful of jam out and put in the fridge till cold, if you can draw your finger through the cooled jam and it wrinkles, you have a set – if not repeat until you do.
Meanwhile boil a kettle, stand the jars and their lids on a newspaper and fill both to the brim with boiling water.
Once you have a set, carefully empty the jars and lids and use a heatproof jug to pour the jam into the jars. Immediately screw the lids on tight. It’s good to have a couple of smaller jars in case there is some left over.
As the jars cool down, you should hear a pop as the vacuum forms and sucks the lids in – then your jam is properly sealed and will keep forever! This whole process can take as little as half an hour…
I am trying to write as many as possible in advance so that I can spend more time reading other bloggers’ posts, connect with old friends and make new ones. I have had to come out of semi-retirement and go back to four days a week as the company I work for (Gelato and Puddings) – is moving to a larger factory so it is all hands on deck! But by April, I hope the worst will be over and I can put the effort in here…
There is a hard-working team behind the scenes of the A to Z Challenge and this year, Jeremy, the graphic designer responsible for all the badges and banners, sadly passed away, so the badge below is to honour him…
