Food Bank Bankers

Every month I do a shopping run for our local food bank, two in December, August and July when the need is apparently at its greatest. I feel more involved actually buying three or four bags of shopping (at Aldi - not mean, I do half of our own shopping there, the core bits) and taking them in, rather than just giving a few quid. A load of thoughts pass through my tiny mind as I'm doing this - why in a world of billionaires such things need to exist; how it must feel to be a parent forced to resort to such support; what people would like to see, or need, in their lifeline bag of groceries.

As someone obsessed by food I reflect on the culinary aspects of this too, and what will stretch through the week. Thus I always buy some 500g bags of rice, and of penne, along with tinned toms or sauces that will help form the basis of several meals. I hope it's not too condescending that I worry some people needing these goods may prefer the canned stuff I include, as it can be cooked in seconds - just warmed through - or even eaten as it comes if they've been cut off, or have no working cooking facilities; and that some may not have the culinary knowledge to cook pasta so it's palatable, as successive governments have reduced cookery teaching to next to nothing in our schools, and fast food culture has done its worst too.

Monday's run included some pudding stuff - rice pudding, custard, tins of fruit - as food should be about lifting the spirits too, and a sweet treat is great at that. In case anyone is thinking ill of me, I don't do this for any feelings of innate superiority, or that it makes me feel good. It actually doesn't. Softie that I am, after every run I feel down that such places and services are necessary. But that's no reason to stop trying to help, even if it's only a tiny bit. Atheist that I am, I commend the Salvation Army to anyone reading this, and hope if you have the means you will make the occasional food bank donation to them, or their equivalents.

Super Stock

I love making stock so much that it's probably the most enjoyable part of cooking a chicken. It's cheap, delicious, can be altered in a thousand ways so it's never dull, and is the basis of innumerable great dishes.


With the carcass of a roast chicken to use up last week it actually fell to the Dear Leader (may her detractors shrivel like salted slugs) to start the stock off, a rare foray into the kitchen other than in an advisory capacity. To the carrots, onions, ginger and bay leaves she had incorporated I added a few rather tired but usable sticks of celery, a head of our own garlic, one of the few left from a disappointing season, and a load of spices - black cardamom pods, red and black peppercorns, some coriander seed, a star anise, some allspice berries... The more flavour you put in, the more you get out.


Once the initial albumen scum has been cleared from the surface, watching it give occasional little blips is a therapeutic exercise, repeated over a good two and a half hours as the liquid simmers ever so gently to maximise the flavour without clouding up. The aroma wafting up through the house is another mood lifter. And of course the end product is life-enhancing - tasty, complex, savoury, like a good wine but without the after-effects. As soon as the cooking is over I like to strain the liquid off the veg and bones, as left to cool on them it can develop some stale undertones.


As you'd expect with an ingredients list like that, the first use I made of the finished article was in a Chinese dish, a mushroom and vegetable-rich noodle soup-cum-stew into which, inauthentically, we stirred spoonfuls of the Mexican-inspired chili sauce made by Sternest Critic to preserve our bumper chili crop remains. A good soup needs a very good stock - I recall (probably not for the first time, my apologies) Chris Johnson, then owner of The Village Restaurant in Ramsbottom, being very upset that having paid £20  (and this in the early Nineties) for a bowl of soup in an extremely famous French restaurant owned by an extremely famous French chef, the stock was watery and boring. It spoiled what should have been - if critics were to be believed - the meal of a lifetime.


No such problem with our bowl of Chinese-y goodness. It was warmly spicy, onion sweet, and deep in colour and flavour. Satisfying to the palate, soothing on the stomach, and warming for the soul - and for pennies.

The Fixings

Strange, or maybe not, how 'the fixings' are so often the elements of a special meal that stand out. It's a cliche, but people at Christmas are wont to say if asked to choose between the meats and the accompaniments it's the gravy, bread sauce and stuffing that they'd prefer. Maybe that's because we're too lazy or busy to do them as frequently as we'd like. I swear blind every December 25th that I will make bread sauce more often, and here we are in mid-November and I haven't made any since that date. With The Dear Leader (tremble before her power) now 98.75% vegetarian I must make some veggie-friendly stuffing with bread sauce as a Sunday special, maybe with onion gravy, something we enjoyed last night and that I do cook several times a year. The urban peasant side of me relishes the thought that such a spread is very cheap, too.


Any excuse for onion gravy. Having come across two recipes for celeriac 'steaks' in the past week I decided to give the idea a go myself, but with the twist of aiming for (pretend) steak and (real) onions, a childhood favourite.


One of said recipes boiled thick slices of celeriac for 20 minutes before frying them in butter to finish, the other roasted them, so as I had the oven on to bake bread (I'll make someone a lovely wife) I opted for the latter route, coating the 10mm-thick slices in olive oil and a dusting of smoked paprika before sliding them in with the bread. They cooked at 190C, turned once, for about 30 minutes, till starting to show charring at the edges.


The celeriac was pleasant, strangely enough still tasting of celeriac rather than braising steak, though the texture was not far off, but the onion gravy with which they were covered on the plate - a load of red onions sweated, reduced and slightly caramelised for 45 minutes - was the star of the show. Some tawny port added sweetness, plain flour thickened things, half a tsp of Marmite gave it umami depth (stop showing off, Kyle), and a knob of butter added gloss at the end.


Heston B would doubtless wish to add a vanilla pod, eyebrow trimmings and donkey cheese to give it a lift (and justify charging the price of a high-end bicycle for a jar). He'd be wrong. If it ain't broke, don't fix the fixing.

Gratifyingly Good Gratin

Nigel Slater is a cookery writer I find both helpful and annoying. His prissy style gets right up my nose, but he has some excellent ideas. Reading his recipe for baked onions with miso nudged me to make something with onions prepared in the same way - boiled for 40 minutes till soft (he said 25 - 30). My version then diverted from his entirely. Halved across the equator the onions were placed cut side up in a gratin dish, moistened with a dash or six of vermouth, then covered with a heavily peppered gruyere-and-brown-breadcrumb mix, dotted with butter, and baked in a 190C oven for 25 minutes or so (until the top crisped and browned). Does anything smell more appetising than cooking cheese and onions?


The Dear Leader (eternal damnation to those who oppose her) and Sternest Critic both approved, though both later blamed the need to extinguish naked flames in the house on the alliums.


The gratin is one of those culinary joys that seem to have been pushed aside as old fashioned - 'so eighties darling [bro?].' As someone who is a dedicated follower of anti-fashion I prefer, greedily, to keep it in my ever-expanding kitchen vocabulary. Perhaps restaurants avoid them as needing too much checking on, and for the time it takes, though as with the example above you can often pre-cook the vegetables and just need to slide the dish in a hot oven to finish.


It is also a great way of making something substantial that costs very little - especially economic if the oven is used for something else as the same time (the onion gratin was followed by a fish pie of modest size). Some years ago I wrote a paid piece for a culinary website where a cheesy potato gratin was one of (I think) four dishes to feed a family, each with ingredients costing under £2. No cream in that one then, but a stock cube, some dried herbs and a couple of cloves of garlic make a decent moistening, an alternative to milk, and supermarket cheddar browns as nicely as posher gruyere. You can save on pre-cooking too if, like in one cooked last week by Sternest Critic, you slice the spuds and onions to see-through thickness.


That use of vermouth, by the way, is something I'd recommend. I sometimes buy a cheapo bottle just for used in cooking - it gives a herby flavour, keeps better than wine, and makes you feel somehow more generous - as I only had some rather high end Dollin to hand, doubly so then. And its pairing with gin is as sublime as cheese with onions.