Archive for the ‘Food’ Category

I’ve done all the recipes I want to do from Hugh’s Veg Every Day book, so I’ve started going back over them while combing in extra ingredients that I have found lying around during the Saturday inventory.

This one was the new potato, tomato and boiled egg salad. I swapped out the mustard in the vignette for honey and mild chilli powder. Then I (and by “I” I mean my sous chef Elina) fried up some turkey that we had marinated in some kind of substance. I think I put sunflower oil, freshly-ground black pepper, Jamaican jerk, lemon pepper, cayenne pepper and smoked paprika.

Massive success.

Thanks to the hearty contributions of savoury from Anna and sweet from Elina and GabrielÄ—, we were treated to a rich variety of treats from across Europe. I would have taken some pictures but thanks to the Instragram-generation, you’re now a complete dick if you take a photo of your food.

Instead, here is a picture of a hamster:

I have been thinking about whether we’re using the right online supermarket. That in itself is a pretty depressing action. However, I’m doing it having spent last week in London and Birmingham, and tonight in Sheffield, so it’s not like I just sit at home thinking about these things.

I am using Sainsbury’s at the moment. I tried Morrisons last month, and it was very good, but I much prefer the ordering processing with Sainsbury’s and I can amend by orders until 11pm. This is key, because I usually do, whereas Morrisons cut off is 5pm.

I also thought about switching to Waitrose because they have such a good reputation for customer service. However, it is significantly more expensive and their minimum order is like £60-65. Plus their website keeps crashing my computer. They do sell Swiss chard though.

Today I’ve been looking at Ocado. They have won loads of awards of their experience, and do sell chard. However, they are super expensive. They consistently come in the top two most expensive in Which?’s rankings, alongside Waitrose.

I also took a look at mySupermarket which is a really cool service. You add everything you want to your basket and it tells you how much it would cost at each supermarket. Here is the example basket I made for myself:

I started with the Sainsbury’s product set, so I don’t know if this biased it in any way. However, Sainsbury’s does come out really well for price, and with the good service I have always enjoyed, it does not seem to make it worth switching.

I recently bought myself a copy of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage Vegetable Cookbook and I have been using the downtime over Christmas to working through some of the recipes. I’ve had mixed results.

Disastrously Sainsbury’s online do not sell Swiss chard – this is figuratively a middle class nightmare. It is also difficult because every single recipe seems to start with “chop and then fry a large onion”…

Chakchouka

Mostly made of peppers and tomatoes, then you bake a couple of eggs in it. The egg was good. It also smells increasingly nice as you cook it.

Pinto Bean Chilli

A bit of a hassle to make because you have to soak the pinto beans overnight. You also need to add plenty of chilli. The first one I did I had deseeded the chilli and it was a bit bland, whereas the second one that included the seeds was much better.

North African squash and chickpea soup

Barely looks anything like the picture.

Pearl barley broth

To really get the croutons right you need to let the bread go stale.

Beetroot soup

Nicer than it sounds. But that is a fairly low bar to beat.

Squash and fennel lasagne

This is also a pain to make. You have to bake the squash while sautéing the fennel and boiling the sauce before combing it all together and baking some more. Very nice though, probably due to the quantity of cheese in it. I think I actually prefer fennel cold.

Last month Michael Mosley made a Horizon documentary on “should I eat meat?”.

The documentary started with a discussion similar to the one we recently held at Leeds Skeptics. The spoiler answer is yes. Meat is incredibly nutritious and often a centrepiece of family life. A non-meat diet can be very healthy (after all life-long vegetarian Lizzie Armitstead won an Olympic gold medal), but you do need to think a bit more about your nutrition. Meat makes it easy to get it.

The program dismissed white meat (chicken, poultry, fish) as not showing any signs of negative health effects, and so concentrated on red meat (beef, pork, lamb) and processed meat (bacon, sausage, ham).

Red meat comes out somewhat negative. It could have some positive health effects, but overall it is a negative. We’re just not sure why. Originally it was thought to be saturated fats, but this does not seem to be the case.

Processed meats come out hugely negative. 35 grams per day could increase your risk of premature death by as much as 30%. While the Harvard study and European EPIC study disagree on red meat, they come together on the danger of processed meat.

So what should we conclude?

Cutting down on your meat is probably helpful. Processed meat should be cut out entirely; red meat should be eaten 1-2 times per week at most. Such a diet will not only extend lives by as much as five years on average but will increase the quality of life of those years as well.

What do you do when you slow-cooked a pig’s tongue, have some left over sausages and half a jar of Thai cooking sauce left? You make a Thai gumbo…

For those that are interested, here is what I did. To be honest, it’s a lot less clever than it sounds, and it doesn’t sound that clever. But anyway…

I boiled a pig’s tongue the day before to make it really tender. I also pre-cooked two sausages. I then chopped the sausages thinly, cut slash ripped the tongue into pieces and chopped up a shallot and a red pepper too.

Heat some oil in a wok, then throw in the shallots for a minute or two until they cooked. Then put in 3-4 tea spoons of thai cooking sauce and stir it all together for another minute or two.

Finally throw in the meat and the red pepper along with 400ml of coconut milk, bring it to boil and then let it simmer for a few minutes, just until it gets up to temperature basically.

Turns out that herring roe is delicious. You probably don’t want to know what it is though…

A few weeks ago we had a dinner party that was similar to the previous one, except with slightly fewer people and a little bit more food. Or so I thought. Turns out, I did a lot more food.

Thus leaving rather a lot of food left over.

Worked out quite well as I didn’t have to buy sandwiches for a week.

We’ve gradually been working our way round the seafood we haven’t tried in the market.

Winkles are delicious. They’re also very small however, so you don’t get much meat. You also have to extract them with something – we used Elina’s crocheting hooks, size 1 or 1.5 does the job.

Scallops I was a little disappointed with, although maybe I just didn’t cook them right. I fried them in butter, but the pan might not have been hot enough. They’re a cross between prawn and chicken really.

Whelks provide quite a lot of meat for such a small shell, and are big enough to get out with your fork. Not as tasty as winkles though.

Cuttlefish is quite nice, though again you have to get the cooking right. It’s very similar to octopus and squid, given they’re almost the same thing. Apparently you’re supposed to find the ink pouch and carefully remove it, but I just dived in.

Today, I’m proud to announce the launch of the Leeds Restaurant Guide. It is, in our opinion, the finest guide to restaurants in Leeds city centre that has ever been created. Years of relentless eating, reviewing and indexing have come together to provide a complete guide to where to eat in Leeds.

• 188 restaurants and food pubs reviewed
• Covers every restaurant we could find in Leeds city centre
• Five star rating system
• Unbiased, independent, consistent

The book will be made available in e-book format through all major retailers – Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Ingram, Kobo, Google Play, OverDrive (Waterstones), Sony, WH Smith and Gardner’s (Tesco). It is also available online at LeedsRestaurantGuide.com. At a later date, it will be made available in print also.

It will be priced at a very reasonable £3.99. The exact time listings will appear on each retailer can’t be determined, so follow me on Twitter for updates.

I would like to say a big thank you to everyone who helped with the book, especially Elina for her eating and proof reading, Gijsbert for his feedback and advice, and James, Norm and Michelle for their proof reading.