What Do You Cook?

At a social gathering some time back it came out that I am the family cook. Someone of the female persuassion very patronisingly thought that meant I'd mastered one or two dishes for when The Dear Leader was taken up with plans for world domination and didn't have time to fend for us. This person asked the stupid (in the circs) question: 'What do you cook?' Inevitably my reply was sarcastic, but a more considered one would have been that I cook from a repertoire learned over years, to which new things are occasionally added.

Yesterday's main meal was from the tried and tested list, stuffed cabbage Troo style (there should be a circumflex over the first 'o' btw, but I can't figure out how to do them on this). Slice a savoy or similar across as thinly as possible, plunge the greenery into boiling salted water for five minutes, drain, then layer cabbage, sausagemeat, cabbage, sausagemeat, cabbage in a buttered casserole with a good lid and cook at 140C - 150C for 120 - 150 minutes. Each layer of cabbage is seasoned; I add a clove or three of garlic; and the top is dotted with butter before cooking. But it is essentially simple (thank you the late great Jane Grigson).

Such dishes allow me, immodestly, to consider myself a cook (and specifically for that one, an austerity cook once again). In that case it is justified by the making of something really good (there are never any leftovers) for a small outlay (£2 for Sainsubury's Toulouse-style sausages, carefully skinned, 69p I think for the cabbage, pence for the butter and garlic. Cookerhooddomness is reniforced by the fact that I only make it once a year, or even every other year - contrary to that lady's thought, my repertoire consists of hundreds (thousands? I never counted) of dishes. It's something that satisfies in more ways that one - quite filling, but also (contrary to what might be expected of slow-cooked cabbage) enticing beforehand, the savoury sausagey smell filling the ground floor.

It's good, and healthy, to add new stuff to the list too. Midweek I made us something that definitely gets added to the roll of honour for repeating. It was essentially a salad, with rocket as the leaf, plus toms, spring onions, and yellow pepper to bulk it out. To make it more fillling and interesting I added little scallops fried in salty butter, and chunks cut from half a Galia melon. Dressed with lime juice and olive oil, and seasoned with the emphasis on pepper, it was delicious, the salty seafood and sweet melon a lovely match. Not exactly an austerity plateful, though the melon and rocket needed using up and the bag of frozen scallops set up back £4, cheaper than a burger meal for one. And, perhaps because it was so flavoursome, we needed nothing else afterwards.

More Autumnal Than Falling Leaves

Being able to cook truly seasonally is one of the big benefits of growing your own, though careful shopping can bring the same end - some things like decent culinary pumkins, Jerusalem artichokes and British apples are not always easy to find.

I just got back from spending a happy half hour of my lunchtime picking stuff from our allotment, the day job of writing magazine articles having taken up my morning. Conscience about getting back to it is nudging me gently in the ribs now. The three carrier bags of veg brought home hold turnips, beetroot, kale, apples, runner beans, parsnips, Jerusalem artichokes, leeks, the final pair of tiny pumpkins, and a load of courgettes and patty pan squash. The last two tell a tale perhaps about how our climate is changing: summer squash are now harvested through October and even into November if we're lucky.

Last night's main was venison sausages, potato-pumpkin-and-turnip-mash, roast onions and apple sauce. As autumnal as the brown and gold leaves carpeting sunny Fulwood. More so, as the leaves have been falling since late summer, possibly because it was unseasonably dry then. It may well be my imagination, but I feel more at one with the universe having indulged in something in keeping with our place and time than if I had eaten asparagus from Peru, for example. The Dear Leader lit candles in the dining room, we drew the curtains on the dark night, and the house had a sense and apple-rich scent of the season.

Tonight though the meal will be different the results will, I trust, be similar. Steamed kale with anchovies, garlic and pepper on toast as a starter, a thick vegetable soup with leeks at its heart as the main. To lower the tone somewhat (hugely), no Jerusalem artichokes till the weekend, as the DL is giving a workshop ("Death Rays and How Best to Develop Them," I think) tomorrow, and were she to fart loudly and repeatedly as she addressed her adoring audience of master criminals and dictators it would mean the gulag for me. Again.

Gravy - Artform and Austerity Weapon

At first blush there is nothing austere about a rolled rib of beef joint that cost £25. And very delicious it was too. But the gravy that accompanied it is another matter.

Our national inferiority complex about food has, happily, been weakened over the last two or three decades. We still tend to think though of e.g. French sauces as things of artistic beauty, and dismiss gravy as very basic and unworthy of consideration. Nonsense, a well made gravy is a joy. It lifts the potatoes that go with a roast, and moistens the meat if it needs that treatment. Given the basis is what you scrape off the roasting dish it gladdens the austerity heart too.

I cheat a bit, using a tsp of Bovril to add extra meatiness. Yesterday's version had a cm of white wine left from the previous day to loosen the thickened juices and de-glaze the dish, then some vegetable water, and included a finely chopped shallot for some texture. For me, though the meat was very good (farm shop, a proper mature brown not pink), the gravy and mash were the best bit of the meal.

Later in the week I'm going to do bangers and mash. Again a gravy will make the thing moist and interesting, and as it will be onion gravy an extra vegetable will be smuggled in - my onion gravy involves very slow melting of four or five finely chopped onions until they start to caramelise. It takes a good 25 minutes or more, but it's worth the wait. Thickened thereafter with plain flour, then made into a luscious liquid with potato water and that magical tsp of Bovril added to give extra flavour, it's not far off very thick French onion soup by the end.

Six fat 'taste the difference' sausages from Sainsbury's cost £2 the other day; spuds for the mash maybe 50p; onions 25p; with in all likelihood peas and steamed carrots for more veg the lot will come to at most £3.25 for three of us. Which makes £25 for the beef joint a little less painful (though it must be said the leftover meat will make hot beef sandwiches tonight - my own bread, some lettuce and cucumber piled on top, thin raw onion rings, and a knife full of mustard). And just one slice saved for another day will make a starter of lentil and beef salad with gherkin and raw onion chopped in, so the £25 does stretch to three meals).

Processed Meat is Coming to Get You

The story about the dangers of processed meat is leading on the radio, TV and though I don't buy a daily paper so can't be sure, doubtless in the press too. Sadly from the interview with one of the researchers on whose report the story is based quality is not the issue, but the presence in all such meats of preservative chemicals.

Apparently the safe level of consumption is deemed to be one rasher of bacon, or one sausage, per day. That is each rather than for the entire country, but it is only a matter of time.

I don't doubt the science, and will take it into account in my cooking, but am saddened that yet another of life's pleasures now has a safe daily limit. We have limited our alcohol consumption to Fridays, Saturdays and some Sundays, though not without the occasional sip midweek when circumstances dictate. I now await with dread the announcement on Today that reading more than two pages of PG Wodehouse a day is thought to be carcinogenic.

On reflection, however, I am pretty sure that we don't exceed that limit of one rasher/link a day, even taking into account occasional enjoyment of Mortadella, Parma Ham, and salamis various. That researcher said it wasn't a matter of quality, but if we are to limit our consumption of such things, surely we (if we have the means) should seek out the very best, so that this now slightly guilty pleasure should maximize said pleasure? As ever a bad meal is a wasted opportunity, and within that meal wet and tasteless bacon, or foully bready sausages, wastes our ration of preserved pork.

Yet again, btw, nobody on Today mentioned enjoyment as part of our dietary benefits. I recall (as I may have done previously here, but never mind) the thriller writer whose name escapes me who retired to Jersey and every day there ate the same lunch at the same table in the same restaurant: eggs and bacon and champagne. Setting aside the monotony that doesn't appeal, the decision to enjoy to the utmost a glorious obsession is clear and for me laudable. That writer may have died of cancer eventually, (then again he may not) but for the years in which he tucked into his favourite meal he packed a vast amount of pleasure. Which would you judge preferable - his perhaps somewhat shortened but pleasing existence, or someone who lived five years more lunching on brown rice and cabbage water?

Christmas Future - Sanity and Austerity

This is not the refrain of the middle-aged grump that Christmas starts earlier every year. Though it appears to do so - Miracle on 34th Street (the original, not the inferior Richard Attenborough version) currently on Film 4 while November is far from over. But as we seem to clutch on to Christmas as some sort of lifestyle lifeboat I was wondering what is to this generation what the giant turkey was to my mother's.


In the Seventies there was a mania at Christmas for having the biggest turkey as some sort of status symbol. Mad. People regularly found their ovens too small to cook the damn things, and had to remove the legs for cooking separately, mothers forced to rise before dawn to start the cooking if it was to have any chance of being eaten before nightfall. Turkey risotto, sandwiches, broth, curry, rissoles and cold cuts followed the big day's feast seemingly endlessly. Ad nauseam for sure.


I guess that the goose, rather a return to the 19th century perhaps, has become the contemporary equivalent - I must admit that I've never cooked a whole one, only a leg and a breast bought on different occasions (at Lidl btw). Two years ago I did a small sirloin, and have heard that it - or a rib of beef - is gaining in popularity. The pheasant has been mentioned in dispatches for the Christmas board, which seems more a nod to snobbery than enjoyment - I have never had one roasted in either domestic or commercial circumstances that was worth the effort of eating, however many slices of fatty bacon are wrapped over it. Dry and tough is invariably the rule that way; braised or stewed is another matter. The three/four/five bird roast is another option growing in favour. Never having tried this I can't comment on how they turn out.


Of course there are turkeys and turkeys - there's a world of  difference between a frozen battery-reared jobbie and a Kelly Bronze, for instance. The latter is expensive but worth it for a special occasion, which December 25th surely is.With austerity pushing cooks towards economy it's unlikely the behemoth bird will make a comeback.

My own prediction for Christmas future is the increasing importance of the stuffing, sausages, and other accompaniments meaty and vegetable. They show care and generosity (of time and effort). For us, though we remain in funds, I think the smallest turkey crown I can find and either a small beef joint or a goose breast again will feature. And possibly for variety, if I can get the timings right, a frozen pack of four quails that is already in the freezer (Lidl again), the antithesis of the titanic turkey of Christmas past.

Hot Under the Covers - Sandwiches as Art (And One Flame Opportunity)

San Francisco 1979

It wasn't as if I had never eaten a hot sandwich before going for the first time to the USA, but then again it was. Our sausage sandwich (Danny Baker's Saturday morning programme on Radio 5-Live reviving its fortunes), or bacon butty are all very good, but the Americans do the thing so much better. Which also means bigger.

The hot sandwich is of course a one flame cooking opportunity par excellence, and something that surely fits the austerity bill.

Travelling on Greyhound buses with an old school-friend, though by that time we were university students, covering vast distances with diners and bus-stations the only options at times to grab a quick bite, burgers quickly lost their attraction. An alternative on one menu was a chicken sandwich, duly ordered. I expected two slices of white bread with some dry chicken. I got a stack of moist chicken, salad, pickles, a serving of fries, some onion rings and some nicely toasted bread, if memory serves. A meal in itself, and it even had vitamins and fibre!

A Now Sad Reminder of a First Visit to New York

Further discoveries on that trip and others were the Philly cheese steak and the hot corned beef sandwich (is that the Reuben if it comes with sauerkraut?). Whether on a round roll, a sub roll, toast or bread the hot sandwich can be a wonder - and a rather blokey wonder too.

Last night with my wife returning late Sternest Critic and I had a simple steak sandwich, Topside from Waitrose a bit tough but very toothsome, with a couple of slices of bacon left in the pack from the weekend on top, mayo on mine, a thin onion slice or two, wholemeal bread, and a side salad (authentically with Iceburg lettuce, the least-worst looking in the supermarket) the meal was on the table in minutes, and very satisfying. The steaklets were I think £3.50 for 3, the third in the fridge to be part of a Chinese dish tonight), so it was not too expensive.

Ian and I up the empire State Building

 Man v Food has highlighted the joys of such simple feasts, though tending to gluttony too often. Some of the sandwiches Adam Richman gets to eat look magnificent, and the culinary tip (subject of a recent post) you pick up from the top places making such things is use the pan juices, don't waste that flavour. Some dip the entire sandwich in a pan of stock/cooking liquid.

I'll buy the steaks again, but next time slice them thinly post-cooking to build up some structure, make it easier to attack, and create some spaces for mayo to fill and to hold the pan-juices better.

Get Stuffing

Sunday's chicken was on the small side, so to bulk the protein out and complement it I made a quick stuffing.  This used half a pack of Sainsbury's Butcher's Choice Lincolnshire sausages, skins removed (they look a bit false but I prefer them for flavour to most of their Taste the Difference range), a big handful of white breadcrumbs, and a carrot and two small leeks zapped into tiny shreds in my 1980s food processor (it plays Duran Duran while chopping  stuff up and has massive shoulder pads). Moistened with a couple of teaspoons of olive oil and seasoned the mixture cooked in a separate dish alongside the chicken.

Even with the three of us having substantial helpings there was enough left to go in a chicken and stuffing sandwich for my wife's packed lunch, and the same for me. So you could say I gave my wife a good... sandwich today, if you were a comedian from when my processor was new.

The stuffing idea brings to mind a post I did on my Northern Eco blog a year or more ago, where something similar (then made with recipe bacon as the meat component if I recall correctly) was central to an austerity Christmas meal. If I remember I'll copy and paste that piece to this blog.