Posts Tagged ‘food’

Wild Food is a book by Roger Phillips and is on Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s recommended reading list from his Rover Cottage Q&A.

The sub-heading on the cover is:

A complete guide for foragers

However, it isn’t. In the introduction it talks about how it is not a field guide to identification, and really doesn’t help you actually forage any food. It does however give you a great range of recipes and cooking options once you have gathered the ingredients.

It splits the contents into mushrooms, flowers, seaweed, vegetables and herbs, fruits and berries, and finally teas, beers and wines. It then goes through each of the ingredients and tells you what to do with them.

The book itself is really nice: a matt hardback cover with plenty of colour photos inside. I haven’t really used it though because every time I buy such a book, it seems to insist it is not a field guide, and you need to get another book for that.

It does pick up massive points though, because in my review of The New Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency I said I was always going to be disappointed in the future whenever a book did not have a section on brewing and wine making – this one did not disappoint!

My gran’s side is quite a large family and we used to get together on a regular basis. Unfortunately, as people have got older, it is become a little too much to organise a large party, so they have gradually faded away.

That is until my parents stepped up and said they would organise a summer BBQ.

We ended up taking ten dishes – four breads (bloomer, stout, focaccia, stilton and bacon rolls), two sides (coleslaw, noodle salad), two starters (tomato and goat’s cheese tart, smoked trout pâté) and two dessert (devil’s food cake and eclairs). Most of it got eaten though due to the volume of food other people also brought we ended up coming home with boxes of new things as well!

We were reasonably lucky with the weather. There was a tiny bit of rain, but not enough to drive us inside, and the night was chilly but not survivable once we had the fire put going.

This is my speech for project 4 of the Toastmasters Storytelling manual.

Five years on from starting River Cottage, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall up-scales, buying himself a much larger farm and a second one that he converts into the River Cottage HQ – a field kitchen, cookery school and vegetable garden all rolled into one.

It’s an irritatingly cool thing to do. Starting up a business or project is always an exciting thing to do, let alone the opportunity to be unjustifiably pretentious about food.

It’s also nice to see a human side to Hugh. In the first set of River Cottage series, he tends to succeed at everything. Turning up to livestock and vegetable shows and winning prizes with no experience. There is still plenty of that, but he also struggles from time to time. He burns his toffee and gets caught out in the judging. He runs out of oven space to cook all his chickens, and Gill has to save the day.

His ten bird roast was also very impressive. Goose, farm duck, mallard, chicken, pheasant, guinea fowl, partridge, pigeon and woodcock, all stuffed inside a turkey.

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s first TV show was called Cook on the Wild Side. In his first series he converted a truck into a “gastro van”, which the back folded out into a complete kitchen for him to cook from anywhere. He then drove round the country foraging for food and cooking it up.

There was a surprisingly amount of illegal activity in it, which was amusing. He tried poaching, trespassing and raiding supermarket bins. He went everywhere from inner city London to the highlands of Scotland. In seemed quite realistic in that a lot of his attempts, especially fishing, just did not work.

In the second series he used a boat that he sailed up the canals and even included a bike with a pedal-powered stove so that he could leave the water whenever he needed.

While the series was highly entertaining, I also took away two practical tips. The first is that you can eat common garden snails. Literally you can just pick them up and fry them. Though you may also want to cleanse them for a few days before doing this. Gorden Ramsey has a great video on this as well:

Secondly Hugh recommends a book called “why not eat insects?” and then goes on to gather up woodlice from a wood and then fry them too. Apparently they taste like shrimp. I like shrimp…

According to the cover, Linda McCartney provides meals that are both “simple and inspiring”. My friend Alan lent me a number of cookbooks and this was my favourite one (which he then very kindly gifted to me!).

It should be noted that Linda does not seem to have been a fan of spicy food. I’m not either, I usually get my Nando’s medium, but I’m developing a taste for a little bit of kick. Even at that level, I found myself regularly scribbling “leave the chilli seeds in” or “use two chillies, not one” next to recipes.

Good points

It does keep things simple. Most do not take too long to make or involve complicated steps. So far, they have all been tasty.

The photos that there are are very large.

There is also an excellent section at the back breaking down how to make a selection of sauces and dressings.

Bad points

It feels a bit dated. Most of the recipes call for chilli powder or dried chillis. I could be entirely wrong about this, but my guess is that these days that would all call for fresh chillies (Hugh certainly would).

Just less than half the dishes have photos.

Finally a lot of the recipes rely on a meat substitute. Many of the recipes are existing meat dishes with vegetarian mince instead. This is unfortunate because vegetarian meat usually tastes terrible.

I wanted a good book on cooking with vegetables over Christmas and I eventually settled on Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s “Veg Every Day!” book. It has quickly become my favourite cookbook.

Good points

I got it in hardback format which helps keeps the book open and protects it. There is a photo of pretty much every single recipe – a recipe on one page and a full almost-A4 size colour photo on the other. That is probably the best feature of the book.

It is also really good food. All of the dishes are interesting and tasty. None of if uses meat substitutes; there is a real focus on cooking with interesting vegetables rather than making dishes with meat alternatives.

It was only £12 for the hardback.

Bad points

Just one really, though it is a big one. Everything takes ages to make. Ages! If you are a vaguely competent chef, you can probably work a lot quicker than me, and might be able to do most of the recipes within an hour. Me, not so much. I normally budget an hour and a half, maybe even longer, to make each one.

Just your average dinner of roast pork, Yorkshires, ratatouille, refried beans, new potatoes, mashed potatoes, three types of vegetables, Asian inspired coleslaw, seafood platter, cheese and tomato tart, salad and five different types of bread.

The real achievement was that we managed to eat almost all of it. Or at least will have by the time this is published…

You’re never too old to run out of bread.

Tuesday was not a good day. For a start, I have a mouth ulcer at the moment which means eating anything is painful.

Then, when I got home from work, I found that something had tripped all the electric plugs in my flat. Because of the way that the flat is wired up, this meant I lost my fridge and freezer too. As a result they had both risen in temperature and the food inside was ruined. It all had to be thrown away; cost of replacement, just over £100.

Worse, I then had to make a manic attempt to eat all the Ben & Jerry’s. This was both unsuccessful due to the quantity of Ben & Jerry’s that had been in my freezer and painful due to a combination of my ulcer and stomach pains, probably from eating too much Ben & Jerry’s.