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.

Good Filla for Good Fellas

We are in culinary winter mode, the threat of a chance that there may possibly be the potential for snow ("Britain Doomed to Snowy Hell" - The Daily Wail) meaning we stoked up the multi-fuel stove, lit a rare fire in the living room (in the fireplace rather than just generally somewhere in the room) and have been upping the solidity of our evening meal. Tonight's was particularly robust, a simplified version of pasticcio.

The simplification only came in the layering - instead of the cookbook version that cut through resembles a sedimentary cliff face this was just penne and cheesy bechamel, tomato sauce and meatballs, penne and bechamel and a good layer of cheese on top.

This was another Monday night supper inspired by Sunday's roast, a way of using some of the remaining beef rib in the meatballs, and doing a bit more fridge clearance with three uncooked pork sausages that were disdained on Sunday morning, and about a third of a pack of 'recipe' bacon (another third became the stuffing served at the same Sunday afternoon meal). Hugh F-W was the source of the idea. In matters of meat I tend to refer to his books, which mix sound sense, culinary knowledge, and environmental awareness. It was he too who called pasticcio Mafia food.

How many Monday meals are dictated by the weekend's feasts? The rib of beef was not as extravagant as it sounds, reduced at Waitrose, and I have a feeling the girl behind the butcher's counter made an error, as a hefty 1.7kg two-rib joint only (only) cost £13. Given it did the Sunday roast, today's meatballs, and the rest will make a salad (with the bones destined to become the heart of a stock) or maybe a spicy Chinese soup tomorrow, that is not bad value.

Another spur to making the pasticcio was our new food processor. Toys need playing with. I'm still in mourning for the old one, about to be tipped. It was a present on our engagement, so not far off 30 years old. Fittingly, rather poignantly, it merely seemed to die of old age: no bangs or rattles, no distasteful smell of burning, one minute it was working, the next gone. It would have wanted to go that way. The new one has variable speeds and more attachments than James Bond's cigarette lighter, but I am willing to bet it won't last five years, let alone 30.

Cheap Cuts - The Cheek of It

One truism of economical shopping is that meat needing longer cooking will generally be cheaper than something you can flash fry. The savings on the meat have to be balanced with the fuel used over two hours and more in the oven, but with a little planning several dishes can be done at once.

Two days ago I cooked a stew of ox-cheek, meat purchased at Waitrose (not famed for cheapness, but this was a fairly thrifty £6.50/kg). With carrots, onions, and a leek there was the basis of something nutritious, and I added a bowl of mango chutney to the liquid (leftover from a party) plus some of our own dried sage and a tea-spoon of Bovril, a magical meaty ingredient in beef stews and gravies. Cooked very slowly in the morning and into the afternoon (for four hours at 120C actually, while I was out interviewing someone for an article) and then cooled it was kept to mature in the fridge overnight - stews pretty much always benefit from this, the flavours developing and melding.

The result when reheated next day was very tasty: the meat could be cut with a spoon, the juices were sweet and unctuous, and there was next to nothing left. I added a tin of Heinz beans when reheating it, as the meat needed some bulk other than carrots to balance it.

My planning was a bit off, the only thing I 'cooked' with it some lemon and lime skins. After they are juiced don't throw them away, believe it or not once dried out they make very effective firelighters.

One Flame Cooking

A recent comment about having to cook on one burner while kitchenless made me think about my year living in France during my degree course - living in a disused school accommodation block at the Lycee next to the one where I worked, and cooking on a single calor-gas burner (with a kettle too). Youth of course made it easier to accept a restricted diet - often wine, cheese,  and fabulous French bread from a bakery 200m distant - but I learned a huge amount about food and cooking in that year. Austerity, restrictions, can teach us coping strategies and the value of what we have. Variations on beans with big thick smoked pork sausages when it was cold were great, the sausages already cooked, but benefiting from the heat, their flavour enhancing the beans (not at that time Heinz in France, but some sort of cassoulet flavoured versions, often with chunks of petit-sale in them.

The big thing that I learned there was the value of great bread. Sadly it is still, 30 years later, almost impossible to find really good bread in this country. Waitrose makes an effort, Booth's sadly has very expensive stuff without a hint of crispy crust, and Sainsbury's is a disaster zone. So I make my own when moved to do so, which at least is free of additives, and for a brief moment has a crust worthy of the name.

It is totally impossible to find good French sticks here. They need a Vienna oven, and should have both crispy crust and a very holey interior. Not one that supermarkets go for as they are stale within three hours at most, but when fresh there is IMHO no better bread anywhere. The stuff I bought when living in France was inevitably nibbled on the short walk home, nobody could resist that aroma surely?

A Good Butcher is a Pearl Beyond Price

We just got back from visiting my father in rural Norfolk. His village is a sizable one, with two very small supermarkets and a variety of other shops. Happily for him and the rest of the village (or the carnivores at least) that includes two good butchers. A good butcher in my book can be judged on his (or her) sausages and minced beef (ground beef for our American friends). Simple things maybe, but they reflect the care and attitude of a skilled tradesman.

I live in a city, but the only butcher's shop nearby was not very good - mince gristly, sausages when I tried them tasteless - and unsurprisingly it closed some time ago. Strange how in this aspect of retail supply a city should be poorer than a village - maybe the supermarkets here the reason. One strand of my freelance writing work, however, takes me to towns and villages where there are still good craft butchers, a definite perk. A couple of years ago Roy Porter (picture) who has a shop near Clitheroe was very impressive, and recently Riley's in Crawshawbooth was equally good.

The difference between a butcher and the butchery at a supermarket seems to be mainly to do with the cheaper cuts - try to find them in your supermarket, where it appears animals no longer come with innards - rather than at the top end. Doubtless margins are lower on the cheaper bits than the expensive ones. At one butcher in the village I bought some excellent beef shin to make a simple stew for the four of us yesterday. Browned and then stewed for two-and-a-half hours with root veg and onions the meat made its own sauce, and even after seconds there was enough for my father to use as the basis of a meal today after we had gone. It cost about £2 each. There are exceptions to the supermarket butcher rule - Morrison's is good on offal and the tough bits that need slow cooking, and so (at the other end of the social scale perhaps) is Waitrose, where I bought ox cheek on Saturday.

The stew made with shin beef was another dish demonstrated to my son in preparation for his eventual escape into the big wide world as a student. He is learning the easy core skills of the home cook, in that case: brown the meat in small batches so it fries not steams; fry the onions before putting them in the stewpot (nobody likes boiled onions do they?); use some suitable liquid to deglaze the pan in which the meat browned (Adnams Broadside that time); cut the carrots and other root veg in good chunks so they retain their shape rather than disappear into the sauce; stew in a low oven for two hours or more. We sprinkled a bit of flour on the meat and veg before adding the beer from the frying pan and some boiling water. No stock cube, no stupid packets of casserole sauce mix. And it tasted great, because the meat was top notch.