Money for Nothing and Your Chick Peas for Free

Except we don't grow chick peas. No reason to spoil a good title for that though (it's a Dire Straits line).

This morning I started a project that will last a year, recording expenditure on growing food and the value of food grown. It seemed logical to start when I put in our annual seed order via our allotment association. We get 50 per cent discount from King's Seeds, but the food ones still cost just over £25.

Any editors out there wanting an article based on this, please get in touch!

That was done on Friday. On Sunday we spent two hours tidying up the plot, weeding and removing plants that are past it. But we still harvested a huge amount: 2 x giant parsnips; 2 turnips; 3 beetroot; a sugar-loaf chicory; about a dozen courgettes and patty pans; loads of runner and French beans; some apples; parsley; kale; a large kohl rabi. Enough for the veg for at least three days, though they'll be topped up with odd things from the garden - a few ripe tomatoes suddenly appeared this morning, and we have lots of small peppers left on one plant.

Also on Friday I did my regular run to the chicken man for a sack of layers' pellets and another of mixed seed to keep our two birds happy for five or six months, an outlay of £16.50. They provide on average 1.33 eggs per day through the year, which in Sainsbury's (medium sized organic eggs) are £1.90 for 6. So we get £150+ of eggs for £40 of feed and maybe £15 of bedding etc. A profit margin that I would have killed for in my industrial marketing days.

I was reminded of how good our eggs were when I bought a tray of 36 small ones for £1.50 from the chicken man (I wanted to do some baking and to go large on scrambled eggs at the weekend). His birds are kept in big sheds, free to run about but not as far as I can see to get out. The yolks are an insipid beigey-yellow. Our pair, frequently let out to eat grass, insect eggs, worms, dandelions, wood-lice, the occasional frog if we are not quick to intervene, and even once the decapitated body of a mouse left by the cat, give eggs with bright yellow to orange yolks. Even when we can't supervise them outside (we have foxes over the stream from us) they eat our leftover starches, veg peelings, and any fruit that has gone over. The chicken version of the good life/Good Life, as we on a small and partial scale enjoy the human equivalent.

Health Food

I find health food shops depressing, their gaunt and dull-eyed staff often an anti-advertisement for what they are selling. Mood and mindset are so important in health, and a diet of grey lentils, brown rice and beige beans is not going to lift the spirits. But I was reminded this morning as I scraped the honey jar to make a dressing for Ruth's lunch how often I use food to try to combat illness.

That honey jar was depleted because one of my cold-cures - the whisky-all-in - has been used several times of late. SC who hates the taste of alcohol had such a dose of his cold that he consented to try one (it's a small measure of whisky, a big tsp of honey, the juice of a whole lemon, and boiling water to fill a cup). Generously he passed his germs to Ruth, who in keeping with her trouser-wearing status in this house acts like a man when she has a cold - a near death experience for her and anyone crossing her while she ails - so she had several of these bedtime panaceas. 

The same epidemic (bit strong for the two of them I know) needed my other cure-all, hot soup. This is preferably chicken, but as I had a load of ham stock to use we had three soups based on that as well as a couple made from fresh chicken stock. Or to be more accurate as regards the ham versions we enjoyed one potage (veg cooked in the stock zapped to a gloopy thickness, then chunks of ham added), one simple soup, and one of the spicy Chinese noodle things that could be a soup or a stew.

It is probably the heat that makes you perk up with both of these, though the vitamin boost can't hurt and with the drink the sugar rush is another factor. But the sentimentalist in me likes to think that a demonstration of love, which is what taking the trouble to make these things surely is, doesn't hurt either. Say ahh, but not I hope to the doctor.

Say Cheese

September means it is time for some serious preserve making. A variety of reasons prompt this urge: economy - six jars of jam for the price of a 1kg bag of sugar; quality - no artificial rubbish included in the recipes and the flavour of fruit rushes through; maybe a deep desire to protect and provide for one's family for the coming winter; and curiosity - there are things I can make that are hard or impossible to buy.

It was curiosity that pushed me to make cheese. Not milk cheese, but fruit cheese. I occasionally buy membrillo, the Spanish quince preserve that is served with cold meats or 'proper' cheese. It costs a fortune. So with a magnificent crop of quinces to use up I decided to make my own. Both of the quinces (magnificent is overstating things, but the tree is young so maybe next year...) were chopped small and simmered with about a kg of apples until really soft, then put through a jelly bag for several hours. The resulting liquid was just over half a pint, so a 1/2 lb of sugar was added to the reheated juice and stirred and stirred, spluttering gobbets of red-hot jam, until it was the consistency of hot tar.

I ended up with two ramekins of apple and quince cheese. The smell is great. One ramekin for eating now, one in the freezer to be used later as a treat.

There is something addictive about making preserves. It's easy to get carried away and make so much that you never use it. But tiny batches like that are a way to pass a dullish Sunday evening, and if they are something special all the better. And atheist that I am there is a certain appeal to the ancestral Puritan in me of making the best of what we are given. I have, however, decided against closing all the theatres in Britain, cancelling Christmas and banning Morris dancing, though I agonised over that last one.

The Kindest Cut

Preparing various dishes recently has brought home how the way vegetables are cut affects their taste.

That's something most cooks will be aware of as regards garlic - whole it gives a mild and deep flavour, sliced thinly it is somehow sharper, smashed beneath a blade it's pungent and fiery.

But it applies to certain other foodstuffs too, for example raw beetroot: grated it seems sweeter by far than when it is cut into the old pound-coin slices which emphasize its earthy side, and made into tiny matchsticks (I have a device like a peeler with teeth that is a faff, but safer than a mandoline) the flavour is halfway between those two.

I am not sure if this is some chemical effect, like what happens with the crushing of the garlic, or perception, or how surface area to weight influences what we taste (grated you maximize the surface area). Something to bear in mind when making up salads though. My wife this morning took to work something on the sweet side, grated beetroot and apple, a boiled egg cut up, and walnuts, dressed with Helmann's.

The apple beet and egg were all home grown, sadly not the walnuts, though one day... We planted a tree here when we arrived in 2000, and it is at the very start of giving nuts now. One last year (one) and two this, all nicked by squirrels, the bastards. They didn't get our cobnuts this year though, I tried one this morning - sweet as a etc. Some of them will be in another salad tomorrow, cut into small pieces and mixed with cheese, diced apple and the thinnest slices of raw courgette. Diced apple is apple-ier than the supersweet grated flesh, sliced courgette is nutty, to blend with the cobnuts.

I think about food too much.

Serendipitous Substitution - One Flame Fish Stew

Once a month or so in the  autumn and winter we have chowder as a weekday supper. Or dinner. Or tea, depending on class, pretension and region.

I am not a believer in strict recipes unless they are needed. Yesterday's chowder had kippers and basa as the majority of the protein, but lacking bacon (the shame) and with some chorizo to use up I added that, a happy circumstance as it gave a nice paprika spice to the dish. As ever it was bulked out with potatoes and sweetcorn, both of which like onions cook beautifully in the milk that forms a good half of the liquid.

We discussed as we always do if chowder is a soup or a stew - this one was definitely a stew - and if, with chorizo, it actually qualified as chowder at all. That takes me back to the point about strict adherence to recipes. Chowder is said to have originated as a one-pot dish cooked by fishermen (the word chowder derived from the French chaudiere, a big cooking pot or in modern French a boiler), with a bit of the catch, some spuds, bacon and onions cooked in water at sea. Some - me included - use milk plus stock now for the smoked fish version, not a luxury that those driftermen enjoyed, so it is already different from the pure original if indeed such a thing ever existed.

This is not to say that you can bung in whatever comes to hand, some discrimination is needed. My version includes garlic, red pepper and carrot, all chopped finely to cook quickly (the onions likewise, the spuds big dice), to add flavour, 'goodness' and a bit of colour. The chorizo helped with that too, the paprika sending the milk a rather fetching pink.

We All Become Our Parents - One-Flame Lamb Shanks

It is a sad fact of life that if we live to middle age we almost inevitably morph into models of our parents. Not completely, we are individuals, but in part. This for me is most noticeable in certain food habits, as the shared diet of my youthful years is the foundation of my culinary experience.

I felt suddenly like my father a few weeks ago when I found my self whingeing to the butcher at Booth's about the price of lamb shanks. They used  to be given away almost, but now cost between £3 and £4 each. Same with several other foodstuffs, like monkfish, crab, and sweetbreads (some butchers couldn't give them away, though that was ignorance on the part of customers). History is littered with such matters, with asparagus and oysters once the food of the poor, now very much the food of the comfortably off if not rich. My father constantly complains about the price of such items as lamb shanks, spare ribs, brisket and so on, as his mother did before him (she was eventually in her 70s banned from a local store for doing this once too often).

In spite of the price I did lamb shanks for us yesterday, braising them at 125 centigrade for five hours, the meat on a bed of our home-grown veg (turnips and kohl rabi for depth and bulk, carrots and onion for sweetness, herbs and garlic for interest). Doing my particular work (at home) I get the chance to try slow-cooking like that, able to keep an eye open in case things dry out. The results showed why lamb shanks are now expensive: meat falling off the bone, rich juices for dipping bread into, and slutchy heart-warming vegetables.

That was yet another one-flame (or pot at least, given the casserole was moved to the oven after meat and veg had browned) dish. I'm becoming increasingly tempted to miss out on cooked starch and rely on good bread (when I can find it), which makes life easy and with tasty loaves makes life more flavorsome.