A Rainbow on Your Breakfast Plate - and in Your Gut

We - the Dear Leader, the temporarily-home-before going-off to-Gozo Sternest Critic, and your humble servant - are on a weight loss quest for a time. Well, weight loss and health drive. That means the occasional 800 calorie day, and generally eating somewhere between 1000 and 1500 calories, with a day off every now and then. That may sound restricting, and in the mathematical sense it is of course, but to be doable without becoming boring it does mean getting creative.


Our breakfasts, except when staying in hotels or at Christmas when bacon and sausages rule, are usually pretty healthy. Currently they are - thanks Donald - bigly so. And not in a bad way - no kale smoothies, in fact given we learn from Michael Moseley that smoothies go straight through the gut and mean a sugar rush, no smoothies at all. But every morning for the past fortnight we have enjoyed a bowl of fruit (along with e.g. poached egg on wholegrain toast of some sort). Again I've tried hard  to avoid that being dull, leading to me hitting the local Asian supermarket, and looking out for what's good in Morrison's, Waitrose and Sainsbury's.


Today, for example, we had cherries, kiwi, blueberries, and golden plums (£1 for a punnet of eight or ten), with a squeeze of perfumed Egyptian lime, tiny little fruits that lift flavours even more than ordinary lemons do. Tuesday we had dragon fruit and guava with some more workaday stuff. I love guava, in spite of ripe ones smelling like men's locker room sweat. The local Chinese shop had durian in, but you have to draw the line somewhere, and fruit that smells like poo is one good place.


What is austerity in this? Eating fruit is not expensive. It takes a bit of effort to seek things out, but Morrison's wonky blueberries that contributed to two for the three of our breakfasts cost 84p. I defy anybody to explain how they were wonky too. Wonky kiwis (maybe 1.358mm shorter than non-wonky?) I think were 70p for a pack of eight. I use one sliced into six to add luminous green to the plate. Little oranges another bargain; likewise grapefruit reaching its sell-by-date and no different to full price ones in feel or as it turned out flavour for 25p. I buy full price stuff too, and dragon fruit are not cheap, but overall breakfasts for the week don't break the bank.


It's cheering to see something so lovely on the morning platter. Great for the body too, with loads of fibre (kiwis for me qualify as superfoods, though shops aren't allowed to use that word now) and vitamin C, and stuff that is good for the eyes but I can't spell. Blueberries are supposed to help the memory, per clinical tests, but they taste fab with lemon or lime on them. Cherries have some special phytonutrients that you don't find in many other foods. It won't harm your - what a very British word - regularity either.


Reading Michael Moseley's Clever Gut Diet book - he is to diet and health what HFW is to ethical food - as part of the current drive to lose a bit of weight one tip was to help your biome's diversity by eating 30 different fruits and vegetables in a week. We did that in two days, and after three are on 42 and heading ever onward. Tinned stuff in there for pennies; our own veg still (PSB, swiss chard, sprouting seeds, kale and leaks at present, we had too the last of our stored squash on Monday and some of our own stored garlic, along with loads of herbs that I haven't counted in the total); wonky or (per Sainsbury's) greengrocers' F&V are super cheap. And some fruits are reduced in price (like cheese) when they are approaching ripeness.


[Standing up] I am not Spartacus. Nor am I vegetarian. Friday's evening meal will be steak for SC and me, fish for the DL. But for our own good, and with more than a nod at helping the only planet we have to live on, and because they are so tasty, F&V make up the bulk of our nutrition. If that sounds poncey, my apologies. Lunch today will be baked beans on toast. Demotic and delicious.

The Chosen Ones

Looking at the post I wrote yesterday focussed on the threatened fiasco of Brexit, what it may mean to our food supplies, and similar woes, all the good stuff I feel about matters culinary was squeezed out. That's sad. As I hope is evident, food, cookery and all related matters actually bring me enormous pleasure. The resilience of providing some of our own food and the economy of using what we have intelligently, and what can be the joy of food, can be closely linked.

One of my food habits illustrates that. When we are at home I try every day, year round, to pick something from the garden, the (soon to be vacated) allotment, greenhouse or conservatory that we will eat that day. There is a comforting, or perhaps complacent, pleasure in choosing what to gather in. In the autumn it's very easy: fruit from our growing collection of trees; the remaining salads; crops various, and so on all need picking and using. In the winter it gets tougher, and often I'm limited to picking a herb or two - bay, sage, rosemary... But they're still fresh additions that perk up innumerable dishes. They are in their own tiny way life enhancing, and certainly flavour enhancing - sage picked seconds before going in the pot is vastly superior to the musty leaves sold in supermarkets, and I resent being asked to pay £0.75 for the privilege of using them.

Similarly one of today's culinary tasks, baking bread, fits both the careful husbandry (how apt) and the epicurean sides of my existence. It started yesterday with the preparation of a biga - the Italian version of a (very much sort of) sourdough starter, that isn't sour (unless forgetfully you leave it much more than 24 hours before using). This afternoon I'll be making dough - rather a sensual process in itself - to which a ladle of the biga will be added, and cooking it up for the evening meal, fresh, warm and scenting the whole house, with a loaf or two for the freezer as well. Sadly, as the currently absent Sternest Critic is wont to point out, I never manage a decent crusty crust, in spite of which only crumbs remain when I do have time to bake my own, which will cost a lot less than £2.50 for a Waitrose grand pain, excellent though they are (and with a good crust). And baking is far more fun than the work to which I'll now return.

Necessity, Simplicity and Invention

Returning from Anglesey yesterday to an under-stocked fridge I had to rely on the garden, what little we had left by way of supermarket veg, and the store cupboard. I enjoy such petty challenges, making something with not very much to hand. It also seems healthy, using what is in season, and enjoying (relative) simplicity.


What resulted was what we decided was a sort of Mexican bean soup. Onion, garlic and carrots as the major part, Swiss chard (I guess not very Mexican at all) stalks and leaves, and a big handful of herbs - basil, parsley, sage, tarragon and chives - plus what was the defining ingredient, a green chili picked fresh from the conservatory. It was surprisingly hot, maybe because unlike previous pickings from that plant the chili was used in seconds, rather than kept for later. Liquidised carefully to make a satisfyingly velvety bowlful, and eaten with that staple of serving suggestions, good bread, the meal only needed a bit of cheese to round things off.


Prompted by the Dear Leader, we again discussed cooking and education, this time musing that given our litigious culture it would be very difficult now to teach large groups of kids the basics of cookery, even were the schools to have the teachers required, and the facilities. Little Jimmy gets a minor burn from a hot pan and his parents see the prospect of a six figure payout. Sad. So school reports will feature media studies instead of meal-making skills.


I missed a trick with that soup, I decided today. The fridge did (and does) have a packet of cooking chorizo tucked away at the back, and still in date. Adding fried slices of that as croutons would have finished it nicely, added to the nutritional range, and been in keeping. As my own school reports so often said, must try harder.

An Omelette and a Glass of Wine

Real austerity of course would mean doing without the second part of that pairing (the book by Elizabeth David my introduction to her writing by the way, a step change in my culinary existence), but the simplicity of an omelette and its easy co-existence with a glass of wine mean they are cosmically made for one another. And the wine, unless an addition to the eggs clashes, can be either red or white, full bodied or thin. Just not sweet unless you are going pre-war with a jam omelette.

Last night's first course was an omelette, with a load of Parmesan grated in with the beaten eggs, a pinch of salt and a turn of pepper. Fried in olive oil and butter it was ready in five minutes from cracking the eggs to table, which doubtless some 'easy-cook' microwaved dish for twice the price or more would also take to prepare.

We have 'free' eggs from our own hens (and tasty too with all those worms and things they forage when let out), but even bought the four eggs and cheese, enough to feed the two of us (one absentee last night) would have cost around £1. I often include herbs from the garden as a clean-tasting way of changing the flavours, and they are essentially for nothing: parsley, par-cel (leaf-celery for those not in the know, easy to grow and prolific, no sticks to speak of but tons of taste in the leaves), tarragon...

Omelettes are not for every day, though nutritionists (as so often) cannot make their minds up about the 'dangers' of eggs. But they are for regular consumption.

The book An Omelette and a Glass of Wine, as mentioned above, was something of a game changer for me, but an omelette was the first thing I ever learned to cook, and very badly too, as a sixth former. Onion fried for 30 seconds if that, bacon cut into thin bits the same, sometimes tiny potato cubes too, before the eggs were added. But it was a start, and I learned from my crunchy under-cooked mistakes. Making omelettes was how I started my son cooking (rather earlier than the sixth form), and he has fared a lot better than I did.