Reading (and Viewing) and Cooking, and My Bread Recipe

Reading and cooking are two of my favourite things, so an informative and literate cookbook is always a joy. Like the wonderful Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe I can read such works as if they are thrillers. This Christmas The Dear Leader (lingering agony to her enemies) bought me Anna del Conte's tome on the cooking of Northern Italy, and it has duly been read cover to cover.


With that AdC book it has been the baking that has grabbed my attention the most. I've pretty much given up buying bread from the supermarket: sourdough that uses vinegar; leathery, pappy French sticks whose production should be punishable by death; Sainsbury's 101 ways to present tasteless white rubbish. Instead I bake batches two or three times a week, freezing the spare stuff for later. That fascination has now extended to other baked goods: yesterday I made some onion 'biscuits' from one of her recipes, and very good they were too. Biscuits, however, is a misnomer, as they are more like tiny scones, and only baked once to boot.


For many people these days I imagine TV is more likely to be the spark to ignite their culinary creativity. I've never watched GBBO, and probably never will, but I'm glad that for a very small percentage of its fans the programme has led to actual cooking at home. The shops have far more bakery equipment of a practical nature on sale; supermarkets are stocking a huge range of ingredients for fancy cake making etc. A quick scan of the shelves at one supermarket today suggests that the look of the thing, and sweet items, are what has grabbed the attention most - far more variety in cake decoration than in bread flour as a yardstick. But I really hope that, the bug having bitten, people who have not done so already will move on to making their own bread, pizzas, rolls... Sadly, however, it is probably not yet the moment to sell off your shares in Deliveroo.


For what it's worth, here's my infallible recipe for making two large loaves, or one large loaf and about 10 small rolls. It uses a lot of yeast, but as I buy mine from Aldi for 59p for 8 sachets, and it has yet to fail me, no matter.


Just in case this is needed: hot ovens can burn you; so can heated baking sheets. Use oven gloves (and common sense) to protect your hands from such hot surfaces.


1: In a large mixing bowl make a 'sponge' with 125g strong white flour (though plain would be ok), 150ml hand-hot water, and two sachets of dried yeast. Stir them together and leave for one to two hours, covered with a tea-towel, in the airing cupboard or another warm spot. The messy putty-looking mix you put in comes out more or less flat, pocked with bubble holes.


2: To that sponge add 300g of strong white flour, 300g of wholemeal or seeded granary or similar flavoursome flour, two more sachets of dried yeast, 2.5tbsp of olive oil, 2 tsp of fine salt, and 425ml of hand-hot water. Mix it, then plop it out on a floured work surface, flour your hands, and knead for about five minutes. If you knead too much the flavour suffers; too little and the texture is wrong. I go by the dough feeling 'silky' and stretching nicely to the hand - sorry there is no more scientific way of putting it.


3: When the dough is right, put it back in the mixing bowl, pour a tbsp of olive oil over it and turn so the surface gets a sheen, though there's no need to be too fussy, and then cover with the tea towel again and put it in the warm spot to rise for another hour to two hours. It has to double in size, more or less.


4: Dig your fingers into the risen dough to knock it back (get the air out of it), form into whatever loaf shape you want and put these on a floured baking sheet, or put some half way up a greased loaf tin, and again give it two hours to rise. Again the loaves or rolls should double in size.


5: Pre-heat the oven (here's where it gets difficult - everybody's oven is different, conditions and ingredients likewise), I bake at 210C, in a fan oven, it works for me. When I've gone hotter the bread's surface has been tougher but not crusty; cooler and the texture is denser. Slide the baking sheet with the loaves on onto another that has heated up in the oven (so you have one baking sheet on top of the other), and leave for 15 minutes for rolls, 25 to 40 minutes for loaves, depending on their size.


6: When they are done (looks, smell, their bottoms giving a nice hollow sound when tapped) put the bread/rolls on a wire rack to cool for at least 10 minutes (it helps the finished texture) before succumbing to temptation.


There are few culinary pleasures to match eating fresh, hot-to-warm bread spread with butter that melts into the crumb as you watch. I tend to use organic flour, no additives, so while the bread is good for a day or two, it doesn't keep like commercial stuff. But then it generally doesn't get the chance.

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.

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.

Market Forces

A timely reminder yesterday that supermarkets are not the only, or the best, places to food shop. The Dear Leader took me to Preston Indoor Market while we were in town, and it was worth the detour. Two best buys were duck-egg-sized cream aubergines from the Asian veg stall, and un-vinegared whelks from one of the fish stalls (it also yielded some fine naturally smoked haddock enjoyed for breakfast this dreary Bank Holiday Sunday). Not only was the fish stall offering a wider range than Sainsbury's or Booth's, but it appeared better kept/more freshly sourced. And the prices on both were competitive - a huge bunch of coriander for 70p for example, easily four times what you'd get for the money at JS.

We'd invited some friends for a pretty impromptu Chinese-y meal, so most of the market finds were included in that, the little aubergines (the Americanism egg-plant in their case would have been perfectly valid) in a Thai green curry with other veg, the whelks as one of the starter dishes.

In my old life I travelled frequently in Taiwan, several times taken to one of those fish restaurants with stalls outside displaying the available ingredients. Asked what I fancied one time I opted for the whelks, partly because I love seafood, partly to see what Chinese cookery would do with them - this proved to be a simple dish of just the whelks barbecued with chili aplenty, and it proved a revelation.

I rinsed our £2.50 worth, then marinated them for three or four hours in a paste made with red and green chilis and coriander, a little soy sauce and sesame oil. Stir fried with some more green chili, soy, and sping onion they were lovely rather than rubbery as it were.

Whelks are, if not a superfood, a terrific one. Stuffed full of protein, minerals, vitamins and a little carbohydrate they're little packets of goodness. But equally importantly, they bring a taste of the sea in the way the more revered oyster does - and at a fraction of the price.

The Taste-Calorie Equation

There is no equation.

What I mean is if you are being a bit more careful with the calories, what you do eat needs to be good and extra tasty. The lamb chops - one apiece whereas previously I'd probably have done two - last night were a case in point. Henry Rowntree's meat tastes so much better than even the generally good stuff from Booth's, and certainly better than what JS have to offer. Bone-suckingly excellent.

More tasty means more satisfying. Less temptation to eat crisps and chocolate to fill a sensation gap.

There are substitutions involved here too - but still not a formal equation. Instead of the butter that would normally have moistened the flageolet beans accompanying the lamb I used a small amount of cheaty stock, and two cloves of garlic crushed to max their flavour.

And a subtraction - the meat griddled on a ridged pan allowed some of the fat to run off, whereas my normal method with this would have been to fry the chops and use the fat to give some flavour to the beans in the same pan, a dollop of butter to finish and give a nice gloss.

Somewhere in 'An American University' (the source quoted for most stupid survey results) a dweeb in a lab-coat is even now trying to work out the formula. While eating a massive sandwich filled with reformed ham and turkey and drinking gallons of the appalling dishwater that passes for coffee in that otherwise generally blessed country. Forget the figures, find the flavour.

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.

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).

Autumn Plenty

Keeping my journal of costs of growing stuff against value of what is grown has opened my eyes a little to the plenty we enjoy at this time of year - early October that is. On Sunday we had a harvesting session at the allotment that yielded a load of cooking apples picked with our stick of ultimate power (a telescopic thing with grabby fingers and a bag beneath them for picking fruit from tall trees), beet, kohl rabi, parsley, beans various including a second flush of broad beans, destined for pretend hummus; loads of courgettes, two massive and as it turned out sweet parsnips (typically we are not sure which of the three types planted they are), Swiss chard and a real bonus, a small punnet of very ripe raspberries.

Those berries joined some apples in a pie that was a real treat. The beans and parsnips went with roast chicken, and the courgettes filled a quiche rich with cheese that we'll eat tonight with a sharp salad made from some of the other produce. Veg soup beckons too when the chicken carcase becomes stock.

For the value I tentatively put down £10 the lot, a bit on the conservative side. And I left out of my calculations a massive pumpkin (about 30lb I'd guess) that is now drying in the garden greenhouse, safe from - we hope - robbers and vagabonds. The latter had visited our allotment shed, and those of many neighbours, but only a hunting-style knife had gone from one of them as far as we know. Per the police they are looking for petrol driven tools and booze. Happily we had decided against keeping our fine wines in the allotment shed this year.

As similar gits nicked a friend's prize pumpkin a few years back we picked ours for safety. It will have a fitting end too, both decorative and culinary for our Halloween/Bonfire Night party. How many pumpkins here are just for show? A sad waste as the flesh bulks out stews sweetly, and makes a particularly thick custardy filling for pies. The little ones are best for cooking, but we'll do justice to the giant one when we feed friends at the firework gathering. Having seen Sainsbury's selling pumpkins a tenth the size for £3 I don't think £10 would be far off, though feeding friends is pretty much priceless.

One Flame Student Survival - Curry for Pennies

The one flame idea partly comes out of my experience living in France for a year as an assistant, when I had a single Calor Gas burner on which to cook, and partly from the fact that the less washing up there is the more likely people are to make their own food, which means eating better than you would from the chippie, and brings a social aspect with it. So how about this for a student meal for three, a common number in shared houses?

Fish curry in 30 minutes, with the cost well below £1.50 each again. This hits the protein spot too, not easy for budget meals. It's not authentic, but it is tasty.

Use a large and deep frying pan, heated quite high. In a couple of spoonfuls of vegetable oil fry three sliced onions until they start to brown a little - don't turn your back - then add a red chilli cut fine (stand clear, it's pepper spray time), and an inch or so of root ginger cut into teenie strips, and turn the heat down to medium. After a minute for these to cook through add two cloves of garlic chopped fine, then pour in a tin of chopped tomatoes and a tsp of sugar, plus a tin of coconut milk. When this is bubbling gently add a pack of frozen whitefish fillets (cheapo and they're good, it's pollock - no honestly). Cook till they are beyond defrosted and into cooked, and gently break them up. At the end season with salt, pepper, and spices - buy a plastic packet of garam masala - nicer than 'curry powder' and it costs less - from the ethnic shelves for about 60p and it will last all year, this only needs a tsp. When it is all cooked through serve with basics pitta bread in place of far more expensive naan.

The economics: (all Sainsbury's unless stated, so Morrison's would generally be cheaper still) 520g frozen whitefish fillets £1.75; tinned toms (Lidl) 31p; coconut milk on offer now 50p; 3 onions 15p; garlic 8p; chilli 15p; ginger about 10p; 6-pack of Basics pittas 22p. Spices 3p. The lot for £3.29 give or take a few pence. And the fish alone gives you about three quarters of your protein GDA. A veggie version of this can be made easily and more cheaply still, substituting two 69p tins of chick peas for the fish (so for three that's less than £1 each).

Mean beast that I am I buy Lidl chopped toms in bulk - they won an Observer taste test a while back (or one of the other Sundays) and at 31p each are maybe 40 per cent cheaper than own brand elsewhere, and 1/3 the price of advertised stuff - and I dare you to find a difference in quality.

One Flame and Three Courses for under £1.50

Doing the university visit round with SC made me feel firstly terribly sad - it is only about three weeks since my first day at uni in 1977 - and secondly inspired to share a few things about student food survival learned - annoyingly - after my student days.

Student finances are tight. But however fun the cheapo fried chicken thing briefly is, most students not in fully catered accommodation want a proper meal now and again. There is something civilised and satisfying about sitting down at a table with cutlery and plates, the mealtime spreading before you. This got me thinking of how to do a de Pomiane (several courses very rapidly prepared) for not very much money, and with the one flame proviso. The first result is as follows, a three course meal for under £1.50, ready in about 10 minutes.

First step is get a big pan of hot water boiling - pasta for the main. Little pans don't do it. You want a big volume of water so when the pasta goes in the water is only below boiling-point briefly. Pasta done in water not yet boiling, or in too little, goes gluey.

Put spag for (hungry) one in the water, then prep your first course, tomato salad. One large tomato or two medium ones should be sliced quite thinly (easy with a serrated blade), the slices laid in one layer on a plate big enough for them all. Dress with just a couple of drops of oil per slice and a tiny bit of salt, plus pepper if you fancy. Add wafer-thin slices of raw onion, or garlic, to pep it up if you want, and to increase the vitamin C content. First course is done, but as the toms have probably been in the fridge, let them warm for a minute or two before eating, and this allows the salt to work too.

Grate a small amount of Parmesan - a little goes a long way. My tip is buy Lidl's for price and quality. This with a thin slice of butter and a crushed clove of garlic is your pasta sauce.

Eat the tomato salad, then when the spag is ready (don't buy quick cook, it's pointless and not as nice), about eight minutes, drain the water off (but leave it moist), and in the hot pan mix with your cheese, butter, and crushed clove of garlic (peel the clove, put it under a broad-bladed knife turned sideways, and thump it hard).

Pudding is an apple. Granny Smiths are tasty, crunchy, and you can get seven or eight for £1.50 if you look in the right place.

Not too much protein in this, though the cheese has about 7g, and the spag 11g, so roughly a third of our daily need, but I'll post another three-course cheapo menu later in the week to address that.

The economics: Two medium toms from Sainsbury's £1 pack with seven in cost 29p. 500g of own-brand spag £1, they suggest 100g for a main course, to fill up I'd say 150g at least so 30p. 10p for butter, and about 40p for Parmesan (200g for £3.75, so 21g for 40p - you need the flavour and the calcium). An apple for 22p. Garlic two cloves 4p. Half a medium onion 5p. Total £1.40.

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.

Missing, Presumed Dead Good

I could recite a litany of tasty and tasteful products that I or my whole family have come to love, but that have been removed from the shelves in one way or another. Yet vile perversions like cheese with candied mango remain. When I see shoppers buying such things I give them a cold stare that would have made Paddington Bear envious.

Take for example Mrs Kirkham's Lancashire Cheese in my local Booth's supermarket. It is one of this country's finest cheeses, and beyond sensible argument its best Lancashire. Yet the shop, perhaps eight miles from the farm where it is made, has dropped it, presumably because of poor demand.

Or the giant Greek beans in sauce that were sold by Sainsbury's, expensive but delicious they were a perfect part of a mezze.

It is tempting to resort to thinking along the lines of the mother at the passing out parade: 'Look at all those soldiers out of step with my son.'

There are ways round the problem. For Mrs Kirkham's I will try the local Waitrose, or call on the farm myself - Graham Kirkham is a top bloke, great storyteller, and cheese genius, I'd hope he'd sell direct if asked.

For the beans I have just made my own, taste-memory harnessed to try to mimic the ingredients of their sauce, and butter beans the nearest equivalent of the gigantes ones in the long lost jars. SC tried some, and thought them good, but the bean texture wrong. So the next step is grow our own. Maybe.

Update: the gigantes bean jars are back in Sainsbury's, not on the fancy gourmet shelves but with various preserves. Excellent.

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.

The Pie

Last night I cooked the pie. Not a pie, the pie. It was one of those sadly all too rare occasions when something sublime results from ordinary labours in the kitchen.

Some twenty years or more ago I made the soup, a fish soup whose stock enriched with anchovies was deep and rich and seasoned to perfection, whose fish-flesh was done to creamy rightness and no more, whose vegetables retained toothsome crispness without any hint of the raw.

Neither of those dishes was innovative, or had fancy flourishes. But they were utterly delicious. In fact, they were probably my ideals because they were ordinary things done exactly right. That is perhaps why I am so often disappointed by restaurants it being cheffy to tamper, add the unique, the unusual, the previously unthought of touch. Unthought of because so often they don't go. Last year in and around Parma was happily different, the food in three separate places proud to be based on hundreds of years of tradition, skill, and judgement, the ingredients used wisely. So for example I ate cappelini in brodo that will forevermore be the version of that simple delight for me.

The pie by the way was made with steak bought from Robinson's butcher's shop in Chipping, the cubed meat browned before joining onion, carrot and turnip already fried until beginning to colour, then lots of whole medium-sized mushroom added. I am increasingly convinced that where possible mushrooms should be kept whole, they keep their flavour better that way. The cooking liquor was just water to which I added a tsp of Bovril and a glug of rum, then thickened with cornflour ("How horribly unfashionable darling, nobody uses flour let alone cornflour these days", to which my response, as a master of repartee, is "Naff off, it works.").

This filling was stewed in the morning at 150 centigrade for two and a half hours, then when cool put in the fridge until used at night, heated until warm and covered with a cheaty Sainsbury's puff pastry lid. The pie, in its Le Creuset metal dish, was cooked at 220 centigrade for 20 minutes (not the 190 for 10 minutes suggested on the pack) and emerged with top crisp and interior hot. Hot and delicious. It was the pie.

Years ago I saw a French film where a man who had trained and practiced for years to do the perfect Japanese tea ceremony achieved his goal, and immediately died, his life complete. Silly sod. I prefer to think of how sometime in the future I can repeat the experience.

Like 1973 All Over Again

We just got back from a weekend in Scotland - not all of it at once of course, merely a little bit of Dumfries and Galloway. As the cottage we had booked was not near even a pub we took our food for the duration. With a three hour car journey this meant most of it was tins. And nothing wrong with that, if you go for the right stuff. On no account buy tinned carrots, ever - unless they are for someone you despise.

This took me back to our family holidays in the 1970s. It fits the austerity bill too, as my family was far from well off, my mother a teacher, my father a local government officer. The upside to those jobs, once my father had long tenure anyway, was that we had three week holidays generally spent abroad. In pre-credit card days, for them at least, that meant careful budgeting with the cash and travellers' cheques taken with us, and our caravan being packed with tins and dried foods that would last the trip.

For a couple of months before we left my mother would put away a few tins and packets every week. There were always a couple of tins of M&S chicken in white sauce; lots of pasta; the epitome of 70s supermarket cuisine Vesta curries and paella (curry good, paella awful); and tins of mince that would become a spag bol with a single onion and a tin of toms.

What was not spent out of the daily budget went into a fund for treats, which included the occasional meal out. We had great holidays.

I am not sure whether my choice of chicken in white sauce (from Sainsbury's this time) to take with us to the cottage was bought because of that heritage or not. But it worked as well as the stuff my mother used to make for us. Sunday's main meal was boil in the bag rice with a curry comprising that chicken, a tin of Bombay Potatoes, and another of vegetable curry, with a concession to fresh veg in the form of onion and lots of garlic fried before the rest was added and heated through. It was not at all hot spicy, and far from authentic, but like those meals in Interlaken and elsewhere in the dim and distant it was what we needed after a longer than expected walk (in the 70s that would have been a day on the lake in a blow-up boat, table tennis, and riding foldy-up bikes): it was moist, filling, tasty and nutritious. So you can more than get by on tins (and a bit of fresh veg).

Best not to do that every day, though I recall the story of an arctic adventurer who had to spend a winter in a hut somewhere in the frozen wastes. His food, other than what he could shoot or catch, was tinned. A flood of his store washed all the labels off these tins, and, no gourmet it seems, he then for simplicity and perhaps variety determined to simply take three tins at random and heat them in the same pan. Thus he enjoyed the likes of custard and mince and prunes on occasion. Which maybe puts my makeshift curry in a better light, if it needed to be. Which it didn't.

Ribs, Deliciousness and Dignity

If I had to name my favourite meat it would be pork ribs. They tick several of my personal boxes: quite cheap, require care in cooking, and are something for relaxed dining - you have to eat them with fingers not fighting irons.

A digression: we have a little family game, if it can be called that, of creating a menu for the overly dignified. Imagine your particular hate figure of the day, say a pompous politician: what do you serve them that will bring them down a peg or two? Not nasty foods, but messy. Watermelon slices without cutlery. Spaghetti with a liquid sauce is a good choice; I think a whole crab or lobster takes some beating, cracking claws and sucking meat out of them; a soup I was given (hmm, thinks...) on my first trip to Indonesia, whose main component was fish heads. Pig's trotters. You get the idea. BBQ spare ribs fits that scenario too.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if the Mansion House Speech gathering was given such a menu? Politicians, bankers, media tarts and dignitaries with faces dripping with crab juices, stained with BBQ sauce, their court dress jackets or formal gowns splashed with ragu. Not going to happen sadly. Can you imagine the devastation Nicholas Soames and Eric Pickles could cause during that meal? Eating people is of course wrong, but it's hard not to think of either or both eyeing neighbours covered in sauce and not for a second being a bit tempted.

Tonight we are eating two racks of pork ribs, a reward for Sternest Critic in midst of exams, and for us all as we have managed the two veggie nights and one fish this week. They went into the oven to steam gently at two thirty, the smell of the meat and the spicy dry-rub (cumin, celery salt, fennel seed, two dried chilies, salt, pepper, juniper berries, smoked paprika thanks for asking) now permeating the whole house, and will have in total three hours of such treatment before being finished with a coating of sauce in a hotter oven.

Another hurrah for Morrison's on this too, they always have ribs on their butchery shelves, with Booth's it is about 50/50, Sainsbury's one trip in four or five unless you want to buy ready-processed pre-sauced ones, which I don't. Two substantial racks cost well under £6, the price of one half-decent sirloin steak but they'll make a feast for three of us.

Dry January

As mentioned previously, we have decided albeit belatedly (started on the 5th) to do the dry January thing. For those who knew me in undergraduate times, I hope it helps both my livers (I still think one is a bad design fault). Happily no shakes, nightmare visions (beyond wife with foul coughing disease) or desire to sneak a quick one while nobody is looking.

In austerity terms it is a positive, as expenditure on alcohol is not strictly necessary. OK, not at all necessary. Maybe we'll put some coins in the Sealed Pot (see my other blog for explanation) to acknowledge that. But as regards our eating it makes a difference to the pleasure of the evening meal gathering. Wines and beers bring something extra to the taste of food, if chosen correctly they bring out the best in a dish; and I can't say that really about what we have substituted for them: ginger beer (no alcohol type) was refreshing, but overpowered what was on the plate; last night's lime cordial (Rose's - I look forward to making a Gimlet in February) with soda again slaked the thirst, but would not be my first choice to go with a beef and mushroom pie. Sainsbury's bitter lemon on another occasion was unpleasant.

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.

Two Reasons for Shopping at Morrison's

My normal shopping run is done at Sainsbury's, merely because it's five minutes by car. I buy plenty of meat and good cheese at Booth's, paper-goods and Parmesan at Lidl, but don't often venture to Morrison's as it is  a 15-minute drive. As I was on another errand that took me near there today, however, I did my weekly shop in the store, and was again impressed.

It was not the fact that the end bill was definitely cheaper than I'd have paid at Sainsbury's, whatever their special offer guarantees say. It was the meat and veg that shone out as so much better.

As to the meat: their range of cuts is far wider, and the meat just looks better than JS's does. Lamb ribs, pork ribs in the piece, pork hock, ham hock, hearts, pig's trotters, crackling sheets, and plenty of other cheaper options that indicate they have confidence those shopping there know how to cook. 

I was sorely tempted by the trotters, one of my favourite things, but SC loathes them and Ruth doesn't care for them.  There is another cook book in that - in my business travel days I made a point of eating trotters whenever I saw them, which means I have fond culinary memories of a couple of Chinese versions (one of them another thing where star anise lifted a dish), one a stew thing, the other a dim sum platter; a Portuguese stew with chick peas; Ste Menehould breaded trotters in France (when I ordered these the French colleague dining with me accused me of not being English, which for the French is a compliment I think); and a spicy chorizo-enriched stew in Bilbao. 

The fruit and veg section has kept up the campaign started some time ago to expand the offer - lots of varieties of mushrooms, for example, along with a good selection of exotics. I didn't go mad, but along with the usual stuff bought frisee and plantain which would not normally feature on my list.  

I admire their courage, presenting the market with a chance to cook proper food, to try new things, and to enjoy cheap cuts along with the steaks and roasts. Two racks of pork ribs are now in our freezer for either a pig-out of BBQ ribs one night, or as starters for two different Chinese meals, and our Friday-night-is-steak-night for SC and self will be with two small but thick pieces of rump each (a bargain because of the size), bulked out with a lamb cutlet that the butcher cut from the carcase for me as they had none left when I asked. 

Parson Woodforde and the Great British Pie

Not that I am stuck in the past, but my new reading is Parson Woodforde's diary, or at least the Folio Society's selections from it. Somewhat less than brilliant observations: how did the middle classes and above actually manage to stand in the 18th century? The good parson drank vast quantities of wine, cider, beer, arack, punch, rum and brandy, yet it was his brother Jack who was the sot. And what did it do to their livers? One wonders if the frequent reports of deaths of apoplexy were the terminal points of organ damage caused by alcohol.

From the foodie point of view (or has foodie become as unacceptable and derogatory as luvvie now?) there is much to be gleaned from the pages of his journal. He lived well, and his guests could generally rely on a table laden with several major main-course components - a fowl, boiled pork, rost (his spelling) beef, perhaps a leg of mutton.

Somewhat inspired by this at the weekend I served visiting friends a roast chicken and a venison and beef pie, along with vegetables various. Not unsurprisingly the pie was the hit - everybody loves a pie. Please someone commission me for that TV series/book/world pie-tasting tour. Venison from Lidl, beef from Henry Rowntree, both meats cooked together in a low (125C) oven with bay, thyme, carrots and onions for two and a half hours, then freshly cooked onions, carrots and turnips added and the lot covered with cheaty Jus-Rol puff pastry. I am a fan of own brands, but for some reason the Jus-Rol stuff seemed better than the last lot of Sainsbury's I used - though they may be made together for all I know. The juice from the oven cooking was reduced and thickened with cornflour (how terribly unfashionable) then half of it spooned into the meat and veg before the pastry lid went on. About 30 minutes at 180C finished the thing off, the puff pastry lifting clear of the filling at the end. This was a pie, a Great British Pie.