Food Bank Bankers

Every month I do a shopping run for our local food bank, two in December, August and July when the need is apparently at its greatest. I feel more involved actually buying three or four bags of shopping (at Aldi - not mean, I do half of our own shopping there, the core bits) and taking them in, rather than just giving a few quid. A load of thoughts pass through my tiny mind as I'm doing this - why in a world of billionaires such things need to exist; how it must feel to be a parent forced to resort to such support; what people would like to see, or need, in their lifeline bag of groceries.

As someone obsessed by food I reflect on the culinary aspects of this too, and what will stretch through the week. Thus I always buy some 500g bags of rice, and of penne, along with tinned toms or sauces that will help form the basis of several meals. I hope it's not too condescending that I worry some people needing these goods may prefer the canned stuff I include, as it can be cooked in seconds - just warmed through - or even eaten as it comes if they've been cut off, or have no working cooking facilities; and that some may not have the culinary knowledge to cook pasta so it's palatable, as successive governments have reduced cookery teaching to next to nothing in our schools, and fast food culture has done its worst too.

Monday's run included some pudding stuff - rice pudding, custard, tins of fruit - as food should be about lifting the spirits too, and a sweet treat is great at that. In case anyone is thinking ill of me, I don't do this for any feelings of innate superiority, or that it makes me feel good. It actually doesn't. Softie that I am, after every run I feel down that such places and services are necessary. But that's no reason to stop trying to help, even if it's only a tiny bit. Atheist that I am, I commend the Salvation Army to anyone reading this, and hope if you have the means you will make the occasional food bank donation to them, or their equivalents.

Super Stock

I love making stock so much that it's probably the most enjoyable part of cooking a chicken. It's cheap, delicious, can be altered in a thousand ways so it's never dull, and is the basis of innumerable great dishes.


With the carcass of a roast chicken to use up last week it actually fell to the Dear Leader (may her detractors shrivel like salted slugs) to start the stock off, a rare foray into the kitchen other than in an advisory capacity. To the carrots, onions, ginger and bay leaves she had incorporated I added a few rather tired but usable sticks of celery, a head of our own garlic, one of the few left from a disappointing season, and a load of spices - black cardamom pods, red and black peppercorns, some coriander seed, a star anise, some allspice berries... The more flavour you put in, the more you get out.


Once the initial albumen scum has been cleared from the surface, watching it give occasional little blips is a therapeutic exercise, repeated over a good two and a half hours as the liquid simmers ever so gently to maximise the flavour without clouding up. The aroma wafting up through the house is another mood lifter. And of course the end product is life-enhancing - tasty, complex, savoury, like a good wine but without the after-effects. As soon as the cooking is over I like to strain the liquid off the veg and bones, as left to cool on them it can develop some stale undertones.


As you'd expect with an ingredients list like that, the first use I made of the finished article was in a Chinese dish, a mushroom and vegetable-rich noodle soup-cum-stew into which, inauthentically, we stirred spoonfuls of the Mexican-inspired chili sauce made by Sternest Critic to preserve our bumper chili crop remains. A good soup needs a very good stock - I recall (probably not for the first time, my apologies) Chris Johnson, then owner of The Village Restaurant in Ramsbottom, being very upset that having paid £20  (and this in the early Nineties) for a bowl of soup in an extremely famous French restaurant owned by an extremely famous French chef, the stock was watery and boring. It spoiled what should have been - if critics were to be believed - the meal of a lifetime.


No such problem with our bowl of Chinese-y goodness. It was warmly spicy, onion sweet, and deep in colour and flavour. Satisfying to the palate, soothing on the stomach, and warming for the soul - and for pennies.

The Fixings

Strange, or maybe not, how 'the fixings' are so often the elements of a special meal that stand out. It's a cliche, but people at Christmas are wont to say if asked to choose between the meats and the accompaniments it's the gravy, bread sauce and stuffing that they'd prefer. Maybe that's because we're too lazy or busy to do them as frequently as we'd like. I swear blind every December 25th that I will make bread sauce more often, and here we are in mid-November and I haven't made any since that date. With The Dear Leader (tremble before her power) now 98.75% vegetarian I must make some veggie-friendly stuffing with bread sauce as a Sunday special, maybe with onion gravy, something we enjoyed last night and that I do cook several times a year. The urban peasant side of me relishes the thought that such a spread is very cheap, too.


Any excuse for onion gravy. Having come across two recipes for celeriac 'steaks' in the past week I decided to give the idea a go myself, but with the twist of aiming for (pretend) steak and (real) onions, a childhood favourite.


One of said recipes boiled thick slices of celeriac for 20 minutes before frying them in butter to finish, the other roasted them, so as I had the oven on to bake bread (I'll make someone a lovely wife) I opted for the latter route, coating the 10mm-thick slices in olive oil and a dusting of smoked paprika before sliding them in with the bread. They cooked at 190C, turned once, for about 30 minutes, till starting to show charring at the edges.


The celeriac was pleasant, strangely enough still tasting of celeriac rather than braising steak, though the texture was not far off, but the onion gravy with which they were covered on the plate - a load of red onions sweated, reduced and slightly caramelised for 45 minutes - was the star of the show. Some tawny port added sweetness, plain flour thickened things, half a tsp of Marmite gave it umami depth (stop showing off, Kyle), and a knob of butter added gloss at the end.


Heston B would doubtless wish to add a vanilla pod, eyebrow trimmings and donkey cheese to give it a lift (and justify charging the price of a high-end bicycle for a jar). He'd be wrong. If it ain't broke, don't fix the fixing.

Gratifyingly Good Gratin

Nigel Slater is a cookery writer I find both helpful and annoying. His prissy style gets right up my nose, but he has some excellent ideas. Reading his recipe for baked onions with miso nudged me to make something with onions prepared in the same way - boiled for 40 minutes till soft (he said 25 - 30). My version then diverted from his entirely. Halved across the equator the onions were placed cut side up in a gratin dish, moistened with a dash or six of vermouth, then covered with a heavily peppered gruyere-and-brown-breadcrumb mix, dotted with butter, and baked in a 190C oven for 25 minutes or so (until the top crisped and browned). Does anything smell more appetising than cooking cheese and onions?


The Dear Leader (eternal damnation to those who oppose her) and Sternest Critic both approved, though both later blamed the need to extinguish naked flames in the house on the alliums.


The gratin is one of those culinary joys that seem to have been pushed aside as old fashioned - 'so eighties darling [bro?].' As someone who is a dedicated follower of anti-fashion I prefer, greedily, to keep it in my ever-expanding kitchen vocabulary. Perhaps restaurants avoid them as needing too much checking on, and for the time it takes, though as with the example above you can often pre-cook the vegetables and just need to slide the dish in a hot oven to finish.


It is also a great way of making something substantial that costs very little - especially economic if the oven is used for something else as the same time (the onion gratin was followed by a fish pie of modest size). Some years ago I wrote a paid piece for a culinary website where a cheesy potato gratin was one of (I think) four dishes to feed a family, each with ingredients costing under £2. No cream in that one then, but a stock cube, some dried herbs and a couple of cloves of garlic make a decent moistening, an alternative to milk, and supermarket cheddar browns as nicely as posher gruyere. You can save on pre-cooking too if, like in one cooked last week by Sternest Critic, you slice the spuds and onions to see-through thickness.


That use of vermouth, by the way, is something I'd recommend. I sometimes buy a cheapo bottle just for used in cooking - it gives a herby flavour, keeps better than wine, and makes you feel somehow more generous - as I only had some rather high end Dollin to hand, doubly so then. And its pairing with gin is as sublime as cheese with onions.

Simplicity Itself

A year or so back The Dear Leader (cursed be her detractors) bought me a vegan cookbook. It was written by the chef who catered for a week-long event she attended. Interested though I may be in the topic, I have not cooked a single thing from it, as just about every recipe requires 20+ ingredients, several of which I've never heard of. I prefer to keep things simple.


Take a dish we ate yesterday: pasta with unpasteurised butter and a load of grated Parmesan. Ready in about 10 minutes, and delicious. We love pasta putanesca too - crushed garlic and chopped chili warmed in oil, with plenty of salt. Another 10-minute wonder. Given we have a healthy crop of chilies this year, we'll be revisiting that plenty of times.


Simple does not have to be quick, of course. I am writing this while waiting for some bread dough to finish rising for the second time. That was made with flour, water, yeast and salt, basic ingredients, but it takes time and patience and a bit of experience to avoid disaster.


As I've written before, it's sad that a life-skill as important as cooking isn't included in the education of many (all) our kids in the UK. It would take just a few lessons a year to teach them some building-block recipes. How to make a soup from scratch; pancakes, great for a quick pud, but the basis of some fine savoury dishes too; a simple tomato sauce for pasta, and the proper way to cook the pasta itself; maybe how to cook (without buying the sauce) a potato and veg curry; how to make an ordinary vinaigrette dressing for salad...


Simplicity itself, and satisfying to the soul and the stomach. Not to mention the benefit to the national purse of reducing what appears to be our growing reliance on unhealthy takeaways and ready meals, so saving the NHS billions from their long-term effects.

Not Vegetarian Exactly

Since The Dear Leader (may those who oppose her crumble into dust) became 98.75% vegetarian I have thoroughly enjoyed the challenge of cooking what I hope is interesting food that fits the bill. Given the alternative was banishment to the ice planet Hoth, that's good.


Our regular 600 kcals Monday is a reminder of the bang you get for your vegetable (and fruit) buck. One dish in the evening was a real winner, roast butternut squash with orange segments and thinly sliced onions, served as a warm salad with the orange juice and two teaspoons of olive oil as a dressing. It will appear again on a non-fast day.


I often now envy what TDL gets served as a vegetarian when we are out and about: last weekend at Higham Hall the food I had was well cooked but frankly rather dull - basically meat and gravy, two veg, spuds; on the Saturday she had a nut roast that smelled wonderful, receiving the thumbs up from the supreme ruler. This evening she is at an event in Manchester complete with full fig dinner, and I'm fascinated to find out what they will give her, partly because it's often so much more imaginative than the corporate rubber chicken or overdone beef; partly because I am happy to nick good ideas for the future.


That said, Sternest Critic and I will be having a very blokey blowout tonight - well-matured Aberdeen Angus ribeye; mushrooms; corn on the cob; peas; tomatoes; and an avocado as a starter. I don't want to give up the pleasure, and the health benefits (B12 fix, zinc, etc), of occasional carnivorous indulgence. But it will be noted that where once we'd also have been enjoying sausage, kidneys and a chop with our steak as a mixed grill male meal the bulk of what we're getting outside tonight is vegetable - and if you're picky about toms and avos, fruit. And grain for the corn. And fungi for the 'shrooms. It isn't meat anyway.

Exotic Preston

OK, so Preston is not exotic. But in our Preston garden (and greenhouses) we are growing things that some in the UK would consider exotic. We do this for the sheer fun of it, the challenge without danger, and the pleasure of eating, fresh, things that normally come from hundreds or thousands of miles away.


This morning we ate the first of our Physalis/Cape Gooseberry) 'crop.' We had one each in our morning bowl of fresh fruit. One. Like the dolts who win the lottery and change nothing, we are not going to let it affect our lifestyle. Doing this (not just the Physalis, but the other exotics we grow) clearly is not in any way economically viable (that plant cost quite a bit), though by (minutely) reducing our carbon footprint it may be environmentally so. But even with just one apiece it was worth it in taste terms - they were sharper, 'fruitier,' simply better than what we buy from the supermarket.


The same thing most definitely applies to the lemons we grow. Though this year it was lemon, singular. Used in G&Ts it was zingier, several steps up the citric ladder. A friend and neighbour has been doing this for longer, and her harvest is a good bagful of fruits every year, so we hope our tree will become more productive in the not too distant.


It has to be acknowledged that some of the fun of growing such things is the showing off. So I'm going to do a bit (more) of that now by listing a few: we will shortly be harvesting a few tomatillos; the next flush of Physalis will be ready in a week or thereabouts; though this year we have had no fruits, we have had limes and apricots in the past, and the trees are looking healthy; we had one delicious fig a month back. If chilies count as exotic (and they probably don't) then we can add them to the list - this year, starting from seed, we have grown a dozen plants or so and harvested scores already (some dried for later, some eaten fresh) with hundreds to come. They're the exception to the economic viability rule, a £1 pack of seeds yielding several pounds-worth of fruits. But they also demonstrate the culinary advantages of this activity - we have purple, red, yellow and green ones; some are fruity and mild; some hot as Hades; and some have rather thicker flesh than anything in the supermarket packets, tempting you to damn the burn and just eat them like fruits.


Ever the optimists we have other projects on the go: Morels and truffles (though they may never appear) in two spots of the garden; two Szechuan pepper plants looking very healthy indeed; and our Kiwis. Ah, our Kiwis. One vine is about 12 feet high, has been established for maybe eight or nine years, looks great, and has never yet produced a fruit. It was sold as self-fertile, but clearly isn't, so we've now bought two others (belt and braces) of different types in the hope that one day... Ever the optimists indeed.