The Fire Still Burns

First BBQ of the year yesterday at the suggestion of our Dear Leader, and an excellent suggestion it was too.

The leg of lamb I was to roast was instead butterflied and cooked over the charcoal, having spent a couple of hours in a garlic and garlic marinade. Not a complex recipe, you crush six cloves of garlic and rub them over the non-fatty bits then leave for as long as is prudent. With the meat varying in thickness between say three inches and half that there was something for everyone in there. Everyone who doesn't like lamb horribly overdone.

The meal fitted the health kick we're on at present. I didn't use any oil in cooking the lamb, nor a parcel of prawns steamed in their own juices and given an edge with lemon-grass, chilli and cumin. Patatas Bravas (nothing if not eclectic this) or Braves if you are Catalan had a few drops of the chilli-infused stuff that packs a massive punch, and the skewers of mushrooms and peppers needed none either.

In fact cooking over charcoal is a good way to remove fat from meat, so is healthy. Yet you'll see a regular summer story run in the papers that eating BBQ food is akin to signing your own death warrant. Only if you burn stuff badly, or underdo pork or chicken. But why spoil a good scare with conditions?

A barbie in March. Salad from the garden in there too, or the green house to be accurate. March.

Small son and I have lost half a stone and more each with what we have now officially dubbed the alternative eating programme. It basically has involved avoidance of frying, keeping oil and butter to a sensible minimum, no sweet stuff except at the weekend, and going for good carbs, lean meats, and loads of raw or steamed veg.

I can see my feet again when standing upright. We feel better generally, and felt wonderful in the sunshine of semi-tropical Fulwood yesterday, glass of Rioja in hand, the scent of meat (and, well, garlic) wafting across from the BBQ, and the knowledge that our Dear Leader had made another brilliant call.

The Taste-Calorie Equation

There is no equation.

What I mean is if you are being a bit more careful with the calories, what you do eat needs to be good and extra tasty. The lamb chops - one apiece whereas previously I'd probably have done two - last night were a case in point. Henry Rowntree's meat tastes so much better than even the generally good stuff from Booth's, and certainly better than what JS have to offer. Bone-suckingly excellent.

More tasty means more satisfying. Less temptation to eat crisps and chocolate to fill a sensation gap.

There are substitutions involved here too - but still not a formal equation. Instead of the butter that would normally have moistened the flageolet beans accompanying the lamb I used a small amount of cheaty stock, and two cloves of garlic crushed to max their flavour.

And a subtraction - the meat griddled on a ridged pan allowed some of the fat to run off, whereas my normal method with this would have been to fry the chops and use the fat to give some flavour to the beans in the same pan, a dollop of butter to finish and give a nice gloss.

Somewhere in 'An American University' (the source quoted for most stupid survey results) a dweeb in a lab-coat is even now trying to work out the formula. While eating a massive sandwich filled with reformed ham and turkey and drinking gallons of the appalling dishwater that passes for coffee in that otherwise generally blessed country. Forget the figures, find the flavour.

Colour Counts

Having written about how we are taking the health - and calorie - side of our eating more into account currently, a bit of balance. Away with the brown rice (not that I have any in the house) and the wholemeal bread (actually we had that toasted at breakfast), in with the bright celebratory colours to mark the most glorious day of the year so far, more like late May than late March here in semi-tropical Preston.


Not that colour is to be ignored as regards the healthy side of eating - the more colours, or so I reason, the broader the range of nutrients we're likely to get. It's the impact on the mood that colour brings that's more important at present though. Judge for yourselves if the main dish was colourful enough - for once I remembered to take some pictures.

I've posted before about paella as a Sunday special. We had a good friend coming round to eat with us, so an additional cause to do something a bit different.

And with the oil reduced to a minimum, none of the big cubes of bacon I generally like in my paellas, and seafood rather than chicken (it's the skin that gets you) as the protein elements, it was pretty healthy.

But it was the colour that probably did us most good. The tomatoes cooked into the rice helped, so too the sofrito that had yellow and red pepper. The saffron-infused stock added a touch of sun on what was a superbly sunny day. Even frozen peas did their bit. It was a thing of beauty to which my photography skills don't do justice.

Walnuts are the New London Buses

A skim through my calorie counter book yielded a few surprises. Take for example walnuts, at 50 kcals for one large nut. Which means that a smallish grilled rump steak is just about equivalent to four of them. My wife is now cursing me, as walnuts have been a regular feature in her packed-lunch salads for years.

Four teaspoons of oil have the same calorific value as that steak/those nuts too. Weird.

The nice surprises (and the steak thing counts as one of those, let's look at and possibly through half full glasses) include water chestnuts and bamboo shoots, where a small can of each runs to a total of roughly 50 kcals (one walnut - now to calories what the London bus is to height, or the area of Wales to disappearing rainforests). And a generous portion of coleslaw made with light mayo is round about - yes, you guessed, a walnut of calories. I love coleslaw.

Mushrooms, another favourite, are deceptive. Just 13 kcals for 100g raw or boiled (I guess I've done that in stews, but never on their own), they shoot up to 157 when fried in oil.

Happily eggs are pretty austere on the calorie front, at about 80 when poached or boiled. Happily, as our four hens produce enough for cooking and for our breakfast every other day.

We refuse to use the dreaded D word and to go on one, so tonight's meal will be our usual Friday fare of steak for males and fish for the supreme leader. They will, however, be carefully cooked and served with super healthy stuff again: steamed French beans and mushrooms (done in a way yet to be decided, but microwave-steamed may work), steamed new spuds. With a salad to start our virtue will be assured. Then sod it, and glory be, a Magnum - it's the weekend, and the dear leader in particular deserves a treat - Magnum Classic being five walnuts of calories.

Not That I'm Obsessive

Our decision to trim a kilo or two before jetting off to the sun had me reaching for the calorie counter - bought when wife and heir abandoned me to go diving in Egypt with their club and I tried the 5/2 diet for its anti poorly badness benefits rather than for weight loss. I used that to sort out what I could have for 600 kcals: answer 4/5ths of bugger all. Looking at packet info too - hastily put Doritos back when I saw what that said, and more surprisingly Special K with red berries.

Unsurprising but comforting is the fact that fresh vegetables, with a few exceptions (avocados stick in the mind) are very low calorie, especially if steamed. Egg noodles far fewer cals than rice, even boiled rice, so our Chinese tonight will have them for bulk (with prawns, another surprisingly low calorie ingredient), turkey with mange tout (for some reason super cheap yesterday at the supermarket), steamed pak choi, and a mushroom, water chestnut and bamboo shoot (both delicious and negligible kcals) and bean sprout stir fry in a tsp of sesame oil. Soy sauce is another winner.

What I found from that brief flirtation with the 5/2 diet (I learned afterwards that you don't need to do the two days at 600 kcals together) was that raw veg and fruit fill you up, I normally go way over the top with dressing, it's flavour as much as volume that I missed, and with a target like 600 kcals I became even more obsessive about food than normal. Food is one of life's great pleasures and a boiled egg (about 75 kcals) shouldn't be the culinary highlight of the day.

Austerity Light

I often wish I had not used the title The Austerity Cook for this blog, as in truth we have never had to face real austerity in this household. Never mind. Would Frugal of Fulwood have been better?

Currently a distant relative of austerity, the controlled regime (I refuse to use the D word) is in my culinary brain. We are looking forward to a summer holiday in the sun, the Indian Ocean sun in fact, and such thoughts have concentrated the mind on us toning up a bit before donning the beach gear.

One ruse to fool the body into feeling full without all those wonderful fats and starches is to eat raw food, so last night we started with a huge salad, to be followed by far smaller portions than normal of risotto. It was mushroom risotto made with my own herby vegetable stock, about five per cent of the usual butter used to give it a gloss at the end, and minimal olive oil to saute the chopped onion and celery. Just using the word saute surely must mean fewer calories are involved than if I called it frying?

The mushrooms that I would normally fry in oil or butter were merely cooked in with the rice and stock, and didn't suffer from that at all, in fact they were possibly moister than would have been the case cooked separately. Small things, and they will not be every day either, but if we all lose a kilo or two before flying off it will be worthwhile.

Such a programme if it can be dignified with that title is far easier and somehow more rewarding now we have started getting our own salad through. As last year (thanks to the idea stolen from neighbour Louise) we are buying 'living salad' from Sainsbury's and planting the lettuces out. A box that costs about £1.20 (I think) contains 30 or so plants, all of which have done well in the greenhouse in a big trough filled with compost. We went to a garden centre on Sunday (how grown up is that? - well, I had been allowed to watch all three rugby international the day before) and far fewer tiny and rather weedy looking seedlings - not at all tempting - cost £3.49. Definitely for ladies who garden in white gloves, so much better for indicating which bed the staff need to focus on.

Happily we all love green salad, whether it be as a starter, or to follow the main and mop up juices. Easy on the dressing. For the austerity cook (hmm) knowing that salad costs just a few pennies makes it more pleasurable.

Roast Beef Rides Again

One of the supermarkets has been running a campaign - actually a rather laudable one - showing people that a roast will do more than the Sunday lunch for which it was bought. Roast chicken is an austerity staple, as a decent bird will give you the roast, a curry/risotto/wrap/sandwiches, and broth or at least stock made with the carcase. Beef is no slouch on the second coming front either.

Tonight we will be having one of my takes on leftover topside, and almost as importantly on the gravy that graced it. We ate this a fortnight back and it was enough of a hit for there to be requests for it to be repeated with the excellent beef (Henry Rowntree's superb Aberdeen Angus, and no he doesn't sponsor me, it's just that even a teenager notices the difference) remaining after we feasted post the England - Wales match.

The gravy (ultra-garlicky as I roasted a whole head with the beef, and squidged the soft contents into the meat juices) will be flavoured with smoked paprika, a chilli chopped very finely, Worcestershire sauce, some ground cumin, cayenne, and plenty of pepper. The beef, chopped into 5mm dice, is mixed with its gravy and a tin of Heinz beans, and the resulting mass used to fill wraps that fill a 300mm x 200mm cast iron dish perfectly. Atop this goes a sauce made with tinned toms cooked with a chopped onion and flavoured like the filling, with loads of grated cheese - cheddar and Parmesan - on top.

Cooked in a 180C oven for 30 - 40 minutes (when the cheese is browning it's ready, though I tend to warm the Le Creuset cast-iron dish over a low flame first to speed things up and ensure it is piping hot inside as well as out-) it has the added benefit of looking rather lovely.

The result is filling, rich in vegetables, and tastes good. But then in our family lore most things taste good with Parmesan. And it doesn't need a £1 packet of ready-mix fajita magic dust to give it a Tex-Mex touch.

I'll try to remember to take a photo or two.

Bread, Toast and the Meaning of Life

Fed up with the poor quality of bread available here I've experimented with recipes of late to make my own, resulting in one that's tasty, has yet to fail, and looks rather lovely. The one thing lacking is a crispy crust.

Bread-making is an area where bucket-cookery won't work, so I have a precise recipe:



1.25 cups water
2 tbsps olive oil or walnut oil
a beaten egg added to the water
1.25 tsp salt
2.25 tbsps sugar
2.25 tbsps milk powder
4 cups strong white flour
7g sachet of fast acting yeast

I use a bread-maker on its dough setting to mix and rise the bread, then knock it back and kneed it briefly. That quantity makes two good-sized loaves, the top slashed in three or four places with a thin-bladed knife to make a pretty surface and a different texture when the cuts expand.

The loaves on a flat griddle are left to rise in a warm cupboard for at least two hours, then put in a cold oven and the oven turned on to 200C. They're cooked in about 25 - 30 minutes, then left on a cooling rack (fresh out of the oven, smelling wonderful, it's a tempter, but until the crumb has formed they are not right).

As far as austerity is concerned it's not a bad deal either, our eggs free, or sort of, from our chickens, and if I use Sainsbury's white bread flour at £1 for 1.5kg I reckon I get six of those loaves from one bag. Add 14p for a yeast sachet and pennies for the rest and a life-enhancing and delicious loaf costs, even with the energy needed, less than 50p. As regards those energy costs, I'm careful to make the bread before or with something else, so they're not extravagant.

But it's really not the cost that is paramount, but having bread that looks good, smells good, tastes good. Bread is such a fundamental thing to so much good eating. Soup with nice bread becomes a meal, for example. And toast at breakfast should be a basic human right.

The egg in this recipe gives the crumb a faint yellow tinge that becomes more obvious when the bread is toasted (and it toasts superbly). On Sunday morning drinking good coffee, eating toast and jam after bacon and egg, all was right with the world. Ours anyway.