Not Vegetarian Exactly

Since The Dear Leader (may those who oppose her crumble into dust) became 98.75% vegetarian I have thoroughly enjoyed the challenge of cooking what I hope is interesting food that fits the bill. Given the alternative was banishment to the ice planet Hoth, that's good.


Our regular 600 kcals Monday is a reminder of the bang you get for your vegetable (and fruit) buck. One dish in the evening was a real winner, roast butternut squash with orange segments and thinly sliced onions, served as a warm salad with the orange juice and two teaspoons of olive oil as a dressing. It will appear again on a non-fast day.


I often now envy what TDL gets served as a vegetarian when we are out and about: last weekend at Higham Hall the food I had was well cooked but frankly rather dull - basically meat and gravy, two veg, spuds; on the Saturday she had a nut roast that smelled wonderful, receiving the thumbs up from the supreme ruler. This evening she is at an event in Manchester complete with full fig dinner, and I'm fascinated to find out what they will give her, partly because it's often so much more imaginative than the corporate rubber chicken or overdone beef; partly because I am happy to nick good ideas for the future.


That said, Sternest Critic and I will be having a very blokey blowout tonight - well-matured Aberdeen Angus ribeye; mushrooms; corn on the cob; peas; tomatoes; and an avocado as a starter. I don't want to give up the pleasure, and the health benefits (B12 fix, zinc, etc), of occasional carnivorous indulgence. But it will be noted that where once we'd also have been enjoying sausage, kidneys and a chop with our steak as a mixed grill male meal the bulk of what we're getting outside tonight is vegetable - and if you're picky about toms and avos, fruit. And grain for the corn. And fungi for the 'shrooms. It isn't meat anyway.

Wild, Go Wild, Go Wild Mushrooming in the Country - and at Higham Hall

The Dear Leader (may her enemies dissolve into the earth) and I just spent a very pleasant weekend at (and around) Higham Hall in the Lakes. For years we've been saying we'd like to know more about the fungi we see on our walks, and finally got around to doing something about it with an introductory course on the topic.


Knowledge of both what and where is clearly vital with this, and course leader Paul had both. He took us to three sites in all, where - with care being taken to be environmentally friendly about the gathering - we picked a surprisingly wide range of fungi, edible and otherwise (though I do like the proverb that all mushrooms are edible, but some only once...). We learned how to identify the genus, and from that to refer to textbooks and identify precisely which fungi we'd found. It was a treasure hunt and a field trip. Given we picked and later identified examples of several fungi that could potentially kill anyone eating them, it was a stark reminder of how dangerous a field (and forest!) this can be.


On the Saturday evening we tasted four of the best edible fungi found that day, suitably prepared by the Hall's cook, and very enjoyable they were too: best for me the chanterelles; then the shaggy inkcap (before it had chance to turn unpleasant), the hedgehog fungus, and a poor last some chunks of puffball.


In future I'll be confident of identifying the chanterelle in particular, if we come across them (and we will be looking), having had the chance to compare it with the species with which it could most easily be confused (the false chanterelle - and that at worst would cause a bit of tummy upset, and learning what nasty others could be taken for it), and to cook and eat them. Probably the hedgehog and the shaggy inkcap too - I wouldn't bother with the puffball again on culinary grounds. If you have not both been on such a course and got the right books to hand, you should not even think of trying to do the same. THIS IS ABSOLUTELY NOT SOMETHING TO JUST 'GIVE A GO'!!!

Real Fast Food - Without Drama

Last night, because we're having some work done in the kitchen, and The Dear Leader (all hail The Dear Leader) got back from a work trip late on, I decided to make a rare foray to the local Indian (actually Bangladeshi) takeaway. The curries are good, you can watch them being cooked, but given the walk there and back (I refuse to have anything to do with Just Eat etc) and their cooking time, it was not fast food. Enjoyable, but not quick - from decision to eating a good 30 minutes. And two curries, one rice, one naan cost £16.


Compare that with a recent meal praised by The Dear Leader (may her enemies shrivel in shame) when again she returned late-ish, and I made a rapid (and filling) noodle dish. It took perhaps 15 minutes, the various veg prepped while the noodles were simmered prior to joining the stir fry. Using a load of the fresh ginger we both love, lots of different fresh vegetables (and one tinned), and some mushrooms, two platefuls cost at most £3 (the tinned bamboo shoots accounting for £1 of that).


I worry that with the inexorable rise of Just Eat and its rivals even something as basic as a stir fry will seem onerous to some families. Add to that the trend for cooking to be seen as drama, or even a spectator sport (the rise of the celebrity chef, Masterchef, GBBO and so on) rather than a basic life skill, and the concern deepens. I'm delighted that Sternest Critic has developed (inherited?) a love of cooking, and curiosity about new ingredients and dishes. It will serve him well, and save him a fortune.

Seasonality for the Common or Garden Cook

A major benefit of growing your own food is that it brings you closer to natural seasonality - for me that being the sort defined by things appearing ready to eat in the kitchen garden, rather than the new series of some reality TV programme starring the tattooed brain dead, or the first fixture of a sporting calendar. It is a more nuanced seasonality than Winter, Spring, Summer and Autumn (I actually prefer the more descriptive word Fall, once general in Britain).


Among the more notable dates of the produce seasons is New Potato Day, when the very first tiny new spuds are rushed from soil to pot with the minimum delay between. I've noted elsewhere here, I'm certain, that there is no comparison between such sprint-to-table potatoes and even the very best the shops or market can provide. It is - for me at least - interesting that the gardener can influence seasonality in this regard: we grew two huge black plastic potfuls (filled with our home-made compost) of spuds in a greenhouse, so that New Spud Day was at the very end of May, while the ones grown in the kitchen garden proper were only ready in the second half of June. An admission: the flavour of the ones grown in the kitchen garden was notably superior.


Other such events are First Strawberry Day, and First Courgette Day - that latter a week ago, though it was first two courgettes day, as two were ready together (used in a veggie sauce for pasta). There are less joyous seasonal dividers too, such as when we say goodbye to the last of many crops, but there again we can influence things a bit in our favour: by protecting some courgette plants we managed to have the last of them in early November one mild year, and not under glass either.


Hard though we try, however, there is much beyond our control, and that makes it all the more engrossing (again, for me). Two months ago I prepared a 1m x 1m patch to grow, fingers crossed without much hope of success, morels. A blend of sand, home-made compost, bonfire ash courtesy of a kind neighbour, decayed and decaying fragments of wood, chips of charcoal, rotting leaves, and some morel stuff bought from a reputable supplier, was mixed together and used on a square of ground beneath our oldest apple tree (morels are said to grow best in apple orchards, on ground where there has been a recent bonfire). I have kept the patch weeded if not overly so, moist to ensure the spores or seeds or whatever they be are not dessicated, and put the odd fallen young apple on there too. In May, we can but hope, we could just have our First Morel Day.

Gray (or Grey) is not the New Red

I've written here before about the positive aspects of colour, but yesterday I produced something that, while delicious (even if I say so etc) was not a delight, as it was gray. The gray of John Major's skin in Spitting Image. The gray of a naval vessel too long without a re-coat.

Doubtless whole bookshelves of scholarly stuff must exist on why we react as we do to colour (I wonder if it is the same, as regards food anyway, across cultures?). Gray is so unappetising.

The colour came about as I used the insides of a previously roasted aubergine (now there is a beautiful colour) along with a tin of anchovies, plus garlic and red chilli, zapped in our smoothie maker with stock as the basis of a fish soup. Basa fillets poached in it remained pleasingly white. Large prawns added some vivid coral. More chilli cut into rings flecked it with bright red. But the whole was inescapably gray.

That said, the flavour was deep, and the aubergine did the job I wanted of thickening the soup without the need for cream or carbs. It was moreish enough for two bowls apiece to disappear before it had cooled beyond the tongue-burny. But our conversation, just like this piece, was littered with the word 'gray'.

I tried to think of other gray foods, and only really came up with coley, not the most enticing of fish, and mushroom soup (not mushrooms raw or cooked, just the result of mixing the dark fungi with white cream), though acceptable enough not the favourite of many I'd hazard.

So negative was the reaction to the aubergine-enriched potage that next time I do something along those lines I'll have to add to the stuff to be blended tomato, or more chillis, or maybe some orange or red peppers. Contrary to Spike's assertion in Notting Hill, chicks don't like gray, and nor do chaps.

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.

Right and Wrong

One of my favourite food writers was, is, Elizabeth David. This in spite of her undoubted snobbishness, and her highly prescriptive thoughts on certain foods. She, though not with 100 per cent consistency, believed in authenticity. Pizza was one such food she tended to see as to be done in a particular way or not at all. It was right (her way) or wrong (any other way).

I can agree that the dumping ground pizza - anything and everything added to one - is horrible. Again my kindergarten kids mixing paint analogy, you add too many colours and you just get muddy brown. But as the pizza base is such a great carrier of toppings I don't see it should be limited to tomato, mozarella and maybe an olive or three.

The smell of pizza dough is drifting through the study door even now, ready to form four bases. Just 500g of flour, 325ml of water, a sachet of dried yeast, 13g of salt and two tbsps of olive oil so the cost is well under 50p. A Sainsbury's basic mozarella (I've tried others, and only the pizza mozarella from Waitrose makes any real difference, and that's a trek across town) is I think 45p, to be used on two of the four, along with to be spread as taste fits: five or six cloves of garlic, a small red chilli, an onion, and a basic red pepper, another 45p the lot, and a tin of chopped toms 32p.

We have a small amount of turkey-breast leftover from Sunday's crown, that with some defrosted sweetcorn will add a few more pennies. A £1 taster-pack of peperone will make the basis of another topping, with three or four mushrooms, and an 80p tin of anchovies plus a few leftover olives a third. A few leaves from a £1 bag of baby spinach leaves will find a home on one of them, probably the turkey jobbie, the balance to make a small salad to assuage the guilt. So three pizzas, a garlic bread, and a small salad will set us back under £5.

None of those is going to be authentic, in Elizabeth David's terms, except maybe the garlic bread. But my son when we go out for pizza often goes for chicken and sweetcorn; and spinach with cheese of any sort is great. Plus an Italian peasant of yore would have done the same thing - it is pan y companatico, bread and something that goes with bread - when we had the whole Serrano ham slivers of that went perfectly.

Authenticity be buggered, this is just the best thing to eat on our one night where we slob out and dine in front of the TV.

What's in a Name?

In a previous post I wrote about how cheese and onions, a favourite of my parents (when money was tight I now guess), would have been more popular with foodies if it went by a fancier name. The same thing occurred to me last night when we had a variation on steak and onions.

Good braising steak (from the excellent Stuart and Caroline Lawson of Cockerham) was simmered in a low oven for three hours, the accompanying onions cooking down to a caramelly jam. The whole mushrooms (stalks removed) on top added to the ham stock juices to make, when thickened with cornflour an hour before the finish, something that deserved to be mopped up with bread and was. The stovies served with it added another savoury layer. 

It was delicious, the flavour deep and brown and sweet. But how many foodies would seek out or cook something so simple, just three principal ingredients? In France, where their peasant cooking is still the basis for many meals, the majority would. Here, not many, though if it had been called Boeuf Lyonnaise (the inhabitants of that fine city love their onions) maybe a few more. 

We have happily gone beyond our monomania about French cuisine, and now depending on the way the wind blows tend to bow before Spanish, Mexican, Morrocan, Egyptian, Japanese...  It's great to bring in new dishes and ingredients, but sad if yet again we denigrate British classics. Which do not, however, include Brown Windsor Soup or Coronation Chicken. 

Creative Austerity

Is it possible to be both creative and economical? Stupid bloody question really, as some of the world's great dishes are peasant in their roots, and thus made using the simplest ingredients. The mushroom lasagna I cooked the other night was not exactly simple, but it was economical, and it was the tastiest thing I have put on the table in months.

Mushrooms in place of a meaty ragu was an idea I'd been mulling over for a while, partly because I've committed to doing more vegetarian dishes. An interview with a vegetarian chef (she was making Christmas dinner lasagna) was another spur. Even plain button mushrooms are moist enough to help with cooking the pasta, a nice protein boost, and both cheaper and healthier than using beef. 

The milk for the bechamel was flavoured as ever with onion, carrot, pepper and herbs - bay, thyme and sage - so was packed with flavour already. I made the sauce, though, with about 50g of Stilton. Blue cheese goes well with mushrooms, and this made the sauce - stiff as behoves bechamel for lasagna - really special. 

The market-bought 'shrooms were just sliced and sweated in vegetable oil (plus a teeny bit of truffle oil from a bottle someone kindly bought for us last Christmas), then the lasagna was layered sauce, pasta, sauce, fungi, grated cheddar, pasta, sauce, fungi, cheddar, pasta, sauce, grated Parmesan. 

It cooked to cheesy brownness in 40 minutes at 180 Celsius, filling the bottom two floors of the house with appetite-inducing aromas, within which the few drops of truffle-oil played a surprisingly big role. Ruth was out at a leaving do (plenty of those at the university currently), but SC and I, having already prepared a plea in mitigation with a tomato and cucumber salad, finished all bar a mouthful, both of us tempted to seconds and thirds.  

Back-of-the-envelope calculations make the cost well under £3, and it was good enough and solid enough (unlike my ragu version) to have graced at least a gastro-pub table, if not somewhere more upmarket. It would have fed four with ease too. 

So yes, sometimes you can be creative and economical. Long-winded answer really. 

Something More on Toast - Student Survival (Again)

I'm a great believer in simplicity in the kitchen, or the home kitchen at any rate. For a domestic cook it's clearly easier to get something quite basic right than to master some 13 stage three days of preparation grind your own hand-picked spices splendour. Though I love cooking I don't necessarily want to spend my whole day in the kitchen. I also think that in cookery as with children mixing paint and anyone unskilled mixing cocktails if you have too many ingredients you end up with brown.

The colour of my breakfast this morning was indeed brown, or at least grey-brown, but the flavour was wonderful. Four quite large mushrooms sliced, fried gently in a little butter till the juices ran, a tsp of plain flour stirred into the juices and cooked for a minute or two, then a bare sherry glass of milk stirred in and cooked until there was a shiny sauce that spooned onto toast was thick enough not to soak into it. Salt, pepper, eat. As with a previous post about a boiled egg I took huge pleasure in getting something as good as it can be, a very rare moment.

An aside: why does that sauce, made with flour, need only a brief simmer to lose the floury flavour?

As my son gets nearer to university age I'm thinking more and more about the sort of economic and simple dishes students should be able to cook. I think he will be able. Those creamed mushrooms, with more toast to fill the bottomless stomach of youth, would suffice for the day's lighter meal. And it would cost well under £1. Substitute two baked potatoes (one of the few things I cook in the microwave - quicker, cheaper, and no loss of flavour) for the toast and it's a substantial main course, still with intelligent shopping less than £1. How many students have the resources to do that, though, compared to the number living off supermarket pizza?

Austerity Tart and Student Survival

The title refers to a dish rather than me. Not that I am a dish, clearly.

Circumstances dictated lunch was today's family gathering, the boss off to Ireland later. Travel for her and stuff to do for the rest of us meant something fairly light, so I made a cheaty tart with a pack of mushrooms, three onions, some not great cheddar and a block of Sainsbury's ready-made puff pastry.

It looked great (I must remember to take some food images again), with the cheese browning and the edges, the surface just cut through to make a border, rising to hold in the ample filling. It could have fed six, but didn't. The meal was made for its taste not price, but afterwards I worked the cost out at around £2.75.

I told SC that it's a dish worth remembering for when he's a student - it would make the main for four yoots, and bulked out with chips in the same oven (we virtuously had salad), or boiled spuds, would still come in under the £1/head mark. Especially useful if feeding vegetarians.

Back in my own student days vegetarians were rarer animals, not perhaps the most appropriate description. A couple I knew lived (very badly) on baked potatoes, and were unhealthy because of it. And not even baked potatoes with. Just BP. Basically they'd removed the meat from the already unhealthy meat and potatoes regime. Even at that time people thought they were daft, lazy and unimaginative.

It is the 'with' bit that makes the difference. Reading about Tuscan peasant cookery of a couple of generations back brought up the description of most evening meals as pan e companatico, bread and something that goes with bread. Filler and variation. Starch and vegetable matter, or on good days protein. Things would have to be really extreme in our times for the companatico to be absent. The only excuse today for a carbohydrate-only diet would be the direst poverty, though variation would be possible even on a really tight budget: lentils, onions, garlic, beans, chilli peppers, all cheap and if not cheerful then certainly not cheerless.

Fresh is Best But...

We eat lots of fresh veg - types and in terms of weight. Our allotment and several beds in what could laughingly be called our kitchen garden provide us with fresh stuff in season, and I buy much more from shops and markets. But it is convenient to have frozen too. I have been surprised how good frozen broccoli is, if treated well. And pleased by how cheap it is - Sainsbury's always seem to have an offer of buy two bags of Birdseye Frozen veg for a knockdown price.

Last night doing a celebratory Chinese feast I made a pretty and very tasty dish, idea courtesy of an old M&S cookbook: broccoli stir-fried with a chopped red chili, spread in a ring on a heated plate around mushrooms and prawns with soy sauce which were done in the wok after the florets had vacated it. The look of the thing was great, it was a bit fiery and very satisfying, and it accounted for two of our seven or more a day. And it was another one flame dish, though as we had another four to accompany it the meal was not in the same category.

Had the meal not been a celebration I'd have omitted the prawns, and the look of the thing may have been even better - minimalist with green and browny-grey. The Chinese don't eat with their eyes as much as the Japanese do (some of their food definitely better to look at than eat), but the feel of a meal is not hurt by a splash of colour and a dash of contrast.

Flan in the Pan

The idea mentioned the other day as so successful - pizza dough with edges rolled over to form a lip, part cooked before being filled and finished - worked beautifully again today, this time with onion, mushroom and cheese as the filling. More tart than pizza. Or perhaps it's flan in the pan.

Again with the Richard Bacon thing. This was done to provide us with an interesting way of adding to the veg this evening, so more than a little healthy. And it cost by my estimate under £1. What would we have got for £1 at MacDonald's Richard (apart from spotty skin and a desperate feeling that all our clothes needed washing at once)?

Demitarian - Honestly?

I love meat, but understand that it is hard to square eating it several times a day with our knowledge of the world and the way it is heading. Not on moral grounds about our rights to eat animals, though anyone with a mind at least considers that aspect of the thing; but for environmental reasons. Producing meat takes up a lot more of the earth's resources than its benefits justify.

But as with every moral dilemma there is complexity here. Meat raised on grain is frankly daft, we use about 4kg of food that humans could eat to make 1kg of meat. But there are many marginal places - hill farms, sparse grasslands - where not much else can be farmed. Then again, it is such a good source of the protein we need to thrive that meat makes life easy for the nutritionally aware cook (vile phrase but useful). Add to that the damage cow farts etc do to the atmosphere and stir. But don't forget to include the sensual side of the argument - for the carnivore there is nothing more toothsome than a well-hung piece of sirloin griddled rare.

A half-way point between vegetarianism and its opposite is now being touted and it seems made trendy (though philosophically eating a bit of meat makes you a carnivore still), the idea of demitarianism - eating meat occasionally, and not in massive lumps if that's not putting it too technically. I just wonder about such a position: practical yes, but honest? Nevertheless it is, though I loathe the ugliness of the word, kind of where I intend heading in dietary terms. More fish (sustainably sourced etc etc), more vegetables (with our own to the fore), more mushrooms and other fungi, more tofu if I can find the good stuff locally (the honeycomb variety not the nasty soggy slabs). And, though they may be a concern for the cholesterol in them, more eggs given we have our own hens.

The practical worry I have about this is that as many have lost the ability to cook for themselves in any meaningful way (i.e. they may feed themselves, but it is by reheating what another has cooked) and a slab of protein is so simple to serve, a lot of people will be considering themselves demitarians, but like a few vegetarians I've known who have the occasional burger, they really won't be. Which leaves the environment just as knackered as it was before the idea started to trend - moreso as we will surely soon see a flood of celebrity demitarian tomes ("Film actress Lula Schachter-Bonk tells us she has always been a demitarian, and her new book [by Lula and someone who can write and cook] gives her favourite recipes."

Nearly Vegetarian III

On Thursday I did another vegetarian meal. Nearly vegetarian. As the intention is to cut down on meat rather than cut it out, it passes my personal test.

This, a cheaty mushroom tart, was one of the best things I've done in a while. Even SC said it was not at all bad, a paean of praise from him. Some bought puff pastry rolled out to fit my flat griddle pan, which cooks pastry nicely, was covered with a grated mozzarella, a couple of slices of Parma ham in thin ribbons, about 75p of mushrooms (and given they were bought from Morrison's this meant a lot of mushrooms) previously cooked in a little butter and a lot of garlic, then drained to keep the sogginess to the minimum. The whole thing was covered in grated Parmesan, and cooked in a hot oven (220C) for about 15 minutes.

What made it look nice was having the filling inside a margin about 2cm from the edge, the surface of the puff pastry barely cut through with the tip of a sharp knife. This rises up to make a neat wall that keeps the filling from spilling out at all.

Served with a green-ish salad (strips of red pepper perked up the colour) it was at least three of our five a day. Five minutes of prep, five to cook the 'shrooms, 15 to cook the pastry itself. It would have taken that to do a packet pizza, which for anything half-way acceptable would have cost the £4 that I reckon that set us back. And packet pizza would not have tasted half as good.

Nearly Vegetarian II

As stated previously, we are not vegetarians, though meatless days are part of our flexible culinary schedule. But is it vegetarian if we substitute fish for the meat? I'm sure real veggies would say no.

Last night's effort then was meatless but not vegetarian, a fish pie made with pollock (doubtless soon to join the poor mackerel on the at-risk list as every chef seems to be lauding it now) and a mushroomy bechamel. The top was a mash made with spuds and parsnips about 67/33. Weirdly the bechamel smelled exactly like Heinz mushroom soup, which it wasn't, but that reminded me of the 1960s and 1970s thing of using tinned soups in dishes - Batchelors made a big thing of it. Nothing too wrong with that I suppose, but for the same price we got no additives and I am sure far more mushrooms.

When I make mash it tends to be with parsnips added, or a few cloves of garlic, to give the flavour a boost and add a different vegetable without using another pan. One of the few British veg currently in season parsnips are cheap at the moment, though had we ventured to the allotment through the mud and floods we could have had some for free. It feels like the rain hasn't ceased since about June.

And another tangent, prompted by that endless downpour. We are as a nation to spend £33 billion on quicker trains. We spent £13 billion on the big school sports olympics. At what point will some meaningful money be spent on our food security? We will not be able to rely on food from the countries now coming up on the rails economically; and one of them China is busy buying chunks of Africa for its own food safety. Orwell in the 1930s pointed out that we had been incapable of feeding ourselves in WWI when he and Cecil Beaton worked together on their school allotments in the drive to produce a bit more, and the situation has worsened since.

Nearly Vegetarian

As posted previously, I am trying to fit in one fish and two vegetarian main courses into our week's eating. Or nearly vegetarian. Like tonight's offering, which will be mushroom risotto, maybe with some peas to give a contrast of textures and some more vegetable matter (yes, I watch QI too, fungi are closer to animals than vegetables, but for culinary purposes let's forget the DNA analysis). Except I have some ham stock to use in making the dish, and am probably going to use up the last little bit of a packet of 'recipe' bacon too.

So the definition is broadening to mainly vegetarian. True moral veggies would be horrified by this. I am not a vegetarian at all, certainly not by belief. I just know that too much meat is not good for us. And is weight-for-weight far more expensive than mushrooms or vegetables other than those wastefully (and given their loss of freshness pointlessly) flown in from Peru, Egypt etc.

The inclusion of bacon as above reminds me of a couple of incidents long past. In my Sixties and Seventies childhood one of our neighbours was a vegetarian. When she came over for a party my parents gave my mother cooked her a vegetarian dish - a pie - specially. Except she later admitted to having included "A little bacon, for flavour." And holidaying in Brittany with another couple who were vegetarians I carefully explained to a waiter in a little restaurant that our friends didn't eat meat. He suggested a salad, which duly came with lardons. When challenged about this he said: "But it is only a small amount." 

Great British Pie II - Mushrooms are the New Meat

I'm defrosting some stewing beef that will be the basis of a pie tonight - my prediction for the food trend of 2013 is indeed the return of the Great British Pie big time, though they will be largely homemade as chef-restaurateurs will not be keen to make something that involves substance more than style. And the effete and fashion conscious crowd that writes restaurant reviews for the Sundays would probably pan them if they did serve something filling and tasty instead of chi-chi platters acceptable to anorexics.

I had to dash to Sainsbury's for some emergency Olbas Oil for my wife, currently suffering with woman-flu, and they had no decent stewing beef in - quelle surprise - to bulk out what I had already, so I opted to buy some mushrooms which weight-for-weight are a fraction of the cost, and will provide a nice difference in textures.

A digression. As with men not being able to multi-task, man-flu is a myth - my last illness was in fact Spanish flu with a touch of Ebola, Malaria, and SARS [whatever happened to SARS btw?] that I was lucky to survive. I nearly had to go to the doctor, that's how serious it was.

The pie tonight may well be cooked in Adnams Tally Ho, though that will be a sacrifice. We decided rather belatedly to do the dry January thing (after a convivial evening on Friday 4th, and a slight rise in weight over Christmas), so that's the closest I'm going to get to a beer for three weeks.

Along with Olbas Oil I picked up some flowers btw, which are probably about as effective.

Cheapo Chinese

Saturday night as so often was Chinese feast night, but with a twist - it was the first of our campaign for two veggie evening meals (or nearly) a week. One of my favourite things from takeaway Chinese meals is stewed mushrooms which I reproduced as a dish last night, simplicity itself, also cheap thanks to a big buy of mega 'shroom box at Morrison's.

Quartered fungi lightly fried then finished in soy sauce and cheaty chicken cube stock, thickened with cornflour and pepped up with star anise, and stewed for ages on a very low heat to infuse the flavour. The lot cost maybe £1, which compares well with the £2.50 at least that it would cost if bought in.

I love mushrooms, and they are one of the few foods that don't seem to have shot up in price recently - homegrown, not very demanding, and doubtless hefty competition for the supermarket slot stopping producers from pushing prices upwards. Bought in big boxes they are a bargain too. Memo to self, eat more mushrooms on veggie nights, and not just risotto either.

One Flame Cooking Chapter 3 and a Bit

With Sternest Critic absent at a party I will be able to indulge a culinary passion that he frowns upon - kidneys. Sunday breakfast sorted.

Joyce's famous line: 'grilled mutton kidneys with a fine tang of faintly scented urine', is frequently quoted, but is no advert for what is one of the best things you can eat, and I'd always go for lamb's kidneys fried.

They fit the austerity bill - especially from a butcher's shop where they can often be had at bargain prices - and the health bill too, low fat and full of vitamins. If you go to some supermarkets you'd think that sheep had stopped growing kidneys.

Kidneys are ideal one flame cooking candidates too: sliced open and white gristle removed, fried gently in butter, the red juices mixing with the fat to make a simple sauce to which a good dab of mustard is added, with a spoon of stock and/or cream if available. Something more substantial evolves if quartered mushrooms are fried with them, their grey juices adding to the reddy-brown ones from the offal.

Served on toast (another of Alan Bennett's somethings on toast) or bread to soak up the gravy this is a dish for those who enjoy forthright tastes. Tunes can be played with paprika, Tabasco, or chili sauce providing extra layers of taste to the jus (I hate that word but it's useful), though plain and simple is good. One of my abiding childhood food memories is of eating kidneys on toast on my knees while watching the kids' cartoon Jonny Quest, the moment fixed by the flavour and scent.

And kidneys are very special too as regards texture, something we tend to ignore or relegate to an afterthought in British cooking. The Japanese and Indonesians cook with texture as much in mind as flavour. The feel of teeth penetrating a meaty kidney is about as good as culinary texture gets, for me at least.