Austerity and the Soup Kitchen

Austerity for us means taking a bit more care over shopping, avoiding waste, making the best of our allotment and the beds we've made in the garden, and cheap protein from our own eggs. A friend who works for a soup kitchen offers another perspective on what austerity means for some less fortunate.

She volunteers as a cook and server. The people who now come to the centre for a good meal have changed of late, the numbers increased. The dyed-in-the-wool street-livers are still there, and the homeless who are getting by on friends' sofas. But they have been joined by people who are simply struggling to find the money to feed themselves and more poignantly their children. We picked the last of our potatoes yesterday, they won't store so we will send a small sack to help the kitchen out. And when I look at our cupboards, there's plenty more that we can add to that.

Such a situation makes you think. The other day passing through London the contrast of the Hilton near Euston being across the street from a church porch where people were sleeping rough was a snapshot of Britain in 2012.

And Yet More Courgettes

Well into September and the courgettes keep coming, and I have to find different ways to serve them.

Our favourite way of using them is as what is impolitely termed by my wife and son 'courgette muck'. This simply involves slowly cooking sliced or chunked courgettes in plenty of olive oil, then when they are soft enough bashing them with a wooden spoon or potato masher, depending on what texture you're after, and adding salt and crushed garlic (lots of crushed garlic) to boost the flavour.

It is something that can be used in a variety of ways (btw HF-W does something very similar), including last night's effort of a pasta course (little tubes) with nine skinned tomatoes (Spanish, from Lidl) and a dollop of Heinz tom sauce to sweeten it a bit, plus a half teaspoon of cayenne to give it some zing. Moist, loads of flavour, and a teeny bit virtuous into the bargain.

Having an allotment (and maybe nine courgette plants) means we can afford to pick baby courgettes: they are good just cleaned and thinly sliced in salads or dressed as a salad in their own right; or boiled whole for three minutes then served as a vegetable accompaniment or sliced warm and dressed with olive oil, salt and garlic. Raw or boiled these little ones are also nice grated and enlivened with oil and lemon.

The ones we miss and then discover as proto-marrows tend to go into soups to bulk them out, or if they are too huge onto the compost pile, the rule being that the bigger the courgette the poorer it tastes.

Large ones in need of something to sharpen them up are good sweet and sour (Italian cookbooks and various Middle Eastern ones have something along these lines). Thick slices of courgette are cooked slowly in olive oil for a couple of minutes, then sweet and sour elements added to cook for a few minutes longer. Wine vinegar works better than lemon juice for the sour, and just a couple of teaspoons of sugar (the books always say Demerara but white granulated works better for me), plus some spices and herbs according to your palate and needs round it off. A few chopped anchovies changes it again, garlic is always a good partner, and additions like sultanas, finely chopped red chilli peppers, and pine kernels make the dish prettier and more substantial.

To peel or not to peel? Given much of the goodness is in the peel or near to it, if they scrub up nicely then intact is best. But if they have become too muddy to wipe clean then I peel them as thinly as possible and use the peelings cut up with scissors for a nutritious treat for the chickens.

The plan this year is to transfer one courgette plant deliberately started late into a big pot and as the weather cools transfer it to the greenhouse. Potting it on is this afternoon's task: though the days currently are warmer than most of the summer, the chilly early mornings herald the first frosts soon.

Cheap and Exotic - Spicy Meatballs

Cheap and Exotic

A recent fascination with food from the Middle East has led to some spicy little efforts in the kitchen, one of the most successful last night's lamb and rice meatballs. I had some leftover rice to use up, and was making a meze for our evening meal, so gave it a go via the general principles route rather than following a set recipe.

Starting with a spice mix I ground cumin, pepper, rock salt, and fennel, added some ground chilli pepper and sumac, and when all that was mixed zapped it again with some onion tops. For 500g of minced lamb about 250g of boiled white rice was incorporated, plus the spices and two eggs to bind the lot together.

Formed with wet hands into 12 substantial meatballs, with the oven preheated to 175 Celsius, they needed 35 minutes of cooking. During that time a lot of the lamb fat melted out, and was easily poured off to make us feel virtuous.

The results were nicely spicy without any real heat, and provided us with a protein basis for the meal at £3 for the mince and pennies for the rest (eggs from our own hens).

These meatballs went well with a Greek-style dish of green beans: beans (from the garden) boiled for six minutes then added to a pan where a chopped onion had been sweated before a 37p tin of chopped tomatoes was added, with more sumac and loads of pepper. The pan of beans and toms was left to simmer while the meatballs baked.

The vegetable side of things was finished off with a big pan of chopped courgettes (zucchini) slowly fried in olive oil for ages, stirred regularly to keep from catching, the courgettes bashed with a wooden spoon and salted near the end of cooking, when four cloves of crushed garlic were added and given a minute or two to cook. It looks messy, but tastes great - good on bread too.

Anyone with a garden should have at least one courgette plant: in the shops you pay maybe £2 for a sad pack of three picked days ago. We have I think eight plants on our allotment, at least four different varieties, and from July to (with luck) mid-October will have as many as we can cope with. The different shapes and colours - last night yellow, dark green and the almost grey-green Lebanese - make for bright dishes too.

Elegance for Pennies - Floaty Cheese Dumplings

This post harks back to the whole austerity cooking thing of buying the most bang for your buck, as yesterday I made some very pretty little cheese dumplings with Parmesan. Any well-flavoured hard cheese would do, but Parmesan was to hand so I used it. A cheese with little flavour would have been cheap compared to Parmesan, but more would have been needed which balances it all out. You gets what you pays for. And for the same flavour cheap cheese would have meant eating much more fat.

The cheese was in fact free to be honest, as I just returned from a press trip to Parma with a suitcase weighed down with some wonderful samples, gratefully received, though I had some in my fridge anyway and it is what I would have reached for.

In the morning I had made some chicken stock with the carcase of a bird roasted at the weekend and a few pot vegetables - turnips past the first flush of youth, a carrot, sage, onion, garlic, leeks, par-cel and bay all from the garden or allotment, and a half chilli looking sad and unwanted. To make it more substantial as a first course and to use up a dried-out bread roll I later made some dumplings to poach in the stock.

Bloke cooking means no precise measurements were made, but in rough terms I used about half the crumbs from the roll, added the yolks of two eggs, some seasoning, and maybe three or four tablespoons of finely grated Parmesan. The egg whites were beaten till stiff-ish, a little stirred into the crumb/cheese mix to loosen it, then the rest incorporated as lightly as possible. More crumbs were needed to make a consistency that would hold together. In wet hands I formed the resulting mix into big marble shaped and sized pieces, and dropped them into the simmering stock to poach for about five minutes.

The results looked and tasted so good - they were really light and soft, (very different from my usual efforts in meat stews) that they were served out of the stock with more cheese grated on them, the stock served as a consome after them.

Summer Bread and Butter Pudding

Best food idea of the summer so far, on about the only summer's day. Doubtless it has been done before, but I hadn't heard of it - and my wife was the one who suggested this way of using our limited crop of black- and redcurrants, about 250 grammes in total. Birds and bad weather did for the rest - last year we had perhaps five times as much.

I used some cheap and cheerful brioche rolls, but it could be made perfectly easily with sliced white bread, buttered well (both sides if you wish) layered bread-fruit-bread-fruit-bread, with a sprinkle of sugar on the fruit each time, and again on the top. A custard made with four of our eggs (small ones from the newer chickens), a pint of milk, and about eight teaspoons of sugar all whisked together was poured over the rest, then the pudding popped in an oven at 180 centigrade for 40 minutes.

The fruit burst, colouring some of the custard purple, and the top was glazed with sugar. Left until it was just warm it was delicious.

Best Coffee Ice Cream Ever

Last night we ate half the coffee ice cream I made on Sunday. Had a medium tub of double cream and some from another, used the yolks of four of our lovely fresh eggs and some sugar to make a nice thick custard, and flavoured it with some coffee flavoured tequila (left over from a review, very coffee, not much else). Our cheapo ice cream machine did the rest. The alcohol helps keep it soft, even after half a day in the freezer. It was wonderful, even if I say so myself. Which I do. But then home-made ices are generally so much better than the shop-bought stuff, no stinting on flavour or ingredients. Glut time for strawbs on the allotment, so some will soon be a sorbet (fruit, sugar, lemon juice, zapped and put in the machine).

Homemade ices are cheap too - strawberry sorbet for us just the cost of a few spoons of sugar and the electricity needed to run the machine for 10 - 15 minutes.

Ribs and More Ribs

Not sure if this really fits the austerity thing, but it is about a bargain - and a delicious one too.

Watching that compulsive-repulsive programme Man vs Food (I find it excellent, my wife takes a different viewpoint) I saw a way of cooking BBQ ribs that just had to be tried - steamed before baking. So I put a rack of ribs each in a roasting tray, rubbed them with a mix of ground spices - pepper, cumin, fennel and smoked paprika, plus some salt - added a glass of water, and put them in a low oven - 120C - for 2.5 hours. Then they were drained, had a tomato ketchup and spice sauce added, and baked at 200C for 25 minutes.

The flesh falls off the ribs, almost like jelly, with no loss of flavour. Best thing I've cooked, or eaten, in months. For three of us a pig-out ran to about £7, and with homemade coleslaw and a green salad we didn't feel too guilty. Indeed, I guess a lot of the fat comes out of the ribs in the steaming time. Will definitely try this with the finishing cooking done on the barbie when we get (if we get) some decent summer weather. Meanwhile, it is what I have planned for this Thursday's evening meal.

Now all I have to do is find out how the US BBQ joints do that brisket that falls apart.