Battered but Unbeatable

On Monday we had a Man vs Food meal - I had a lot of leftover roast beef from the weekend, and a hot beef sandwich with the trimmings seemed like a good idea - it meant we got to use up the gravy too, and was something done quickly when time was not on my side.

A good pig-out is fun on occasion. I had bought some oven chips (sinful) that had been in the freezer for a while and needed using, so they went on the menu. A few batons of carrot and cucumber and some spring onions were a tiny gesture to health, the BBQ beans probably less so. The meal needed another element to fill it out, so I decided to make onion rings from scratch.

A few weeks back I did a cookery school piece for Lancashire Life, Norman Musa at Ning in Manchester showing a bunch of us how to make Malaysian street food. One of the dishes was a fritter made with beansprouts, prawn and Chinese chives. Norman's batter mix was incredibly simple (and for the austerity cook nice and cheap): five tbsps of plain flour, one of self-raising, a tsp of salt and another of turmeric, beaten with water to a thick cream consistency. It worked then, and a variation on it (less turmeric, some of the salt replaced with celery salt) made excellent onion rings, fried in about 1cm of oil in a small frying pan.

Frying stuff is not of course terribly healthy, but it got another vegetable into us, and just as importantly it made the meal fun - crunchy is good.

Talking about Man vs Food, SC posed a very interesting question the other day. Why do we in Britain have loads of fast food chains, but none of the mom-and-pop joints you see on Adam Richman's programme? Places where you can get a great burger without the plastic palace experience of MacDonalds? Where they do filler-upper cooking that pleases. When I travelled on business in the USA in the 90s those were the places that were great, restaurants owned by and run for families. Cheap-end chains were awful, high-end restaurants worse - why do the Americans love that whole 'The Maitre d' will insult you now' thing? But little burger and rib diners where you could eat well for not very much, and in a good friendly atmosphere too, were priceless.