River Cottage:Veg

You know there had to be a book

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's latest foray into food crusading was launched this week amid much advertising and apparent high expectation. Sadly the promised veg recipes and the idea of vegetarian food in this first programme, are a bland  all or nothing affair. 


Ah but to begin at the beginning. Hugh has decided to become a vegetarian for a few months, ostensibly to save the environment and perhaps to shut up his ultra vegan mates. He has however missed a brilliant opportunity to take up the call of those who reasonably ask us to eat vegetarian once a week at least. The scientists and activist are not demanding we stop eating meat, just that we cut down the amount we eat.  Ironically, he and me and we, those of us who don't order out every night or seem to be at Macdonald's every other day, are not the people these environmentalist are asking to curtail their meat intake. We as a rule eat smaller amounts of better quality meat that is where possible and usually is, .locally raised and fed and not factory meat. One might make an exception perhaps for the Brazilians who revel in all meat orgies that would kill an elephant, but I doubt this programme will run in Brazil.  For the most part, we , reasonable people who eat our fruit and veg, partake of fish and poultry without deep frying it and serving it with chips, are not the problem. 

Assuming Hugh is in fact targeting the processed meat deep fried hamburger KFC brigade, he's fighting a loosing battle with his adopted strategy. The best way to show this lot that veg is not vile, tasteless and bland, is to NOT prepare vile, tasteless, and bland food.  His first recipe is a so called, veg soup, consisting of a few things he's pulled out the garden and boiled to death. There is no seasoning as such, no onion, no parsley, no garlic, no nothing... In the bad old days when we mostly lived on the farm, but we couldn't afford to eat too many of our own eggs and had to sell off our best meat to live, this meal was called a Green man  soup and would have been in point of fact ,  a lot more filling  than the miserly unpleasant gruel that Hugh  produced and moaned over  like it was the greatest thing ever.  A recipe that originally included ginger, some kind of rice or noodle or pulse, if it was about, was turned into something my father would would have turned his nose up at when he was a guest of Comerade Stalin in Siberia. 

The next recipe he trotted out to satisfy the savage hunger was something his go to vegan mate in London claimed he personally invented, called Stuffed lettuce. Having been married to a Chinese woman for over 15 years, I can tell you it's nothing new and if you'd have served that to a Chinese family, they would tell you to start again. Not only was it a nearly invisible ( forget pale) imitation of a  brilliant Chinese delicacy served during feasts, it is part of a full meal that includes, fish, seafood, beef, pork and poultry in small bite size pieces, all mixed a huge amount of a variety of well seasoned veg. And just when I thought I'd seen the last of the red menace that is the pomegranate seed, there they were being sprinkled in to the so called stuffed lettuce. In Israel pomegranate is cheap as chips, and yet not a seed in sight, what they do do , is press the stuff into a lovely tasty juice. This bland parody that was pretending to be wholly original could hardly be the super weapon that will prove to veg shy people they should maybe forget their mam's boiled everything with no flavour.

River Cottage Veg is nothing but a rehash of all the old pretentious hippy types who discovered organic food but never did come around to actual flavour and viewed food from other places as something one did as a dare. And by the way, if you're going to give up meat to save the planet, why bother racking up the carbon footprint by flyng in pomegranates from far flung shores???? Better off eating some lovely local pork or beef or poultry which grew up within a 100 miles of you and had a happy healthy life. Honestly, the premise of  this series is so flawed as to be insulting and condescending.  The people we see on screen, are clearly over privileged suburban tree huggers who haven't known hunger since they ate pot noodle that one time they stopped over at a mates at uni. Real poor people are not clamouring to eat 1960's hippie food, they want nutritions meals that taste good and would in fact love to afford a nice piece of meat every couple of days. As it is, there are entire sections of our society that don't see meat for weeks on end.  Even from my own middle class Polish up bringing, we used meat as an accent on our plate and in our soups, maybe once a week it would be the star of the show. From starter to pudding to the tea to wash it all down at the end ,our meals were ( and still are) sufficiently interesting day in day out that we didn't need take away every other day to satisfy both taste buds and body. I suspect if you ask the child of any immigrant, you'll find the same is true. Traditional British cookery is equally varied and interesting but seems to have fallen victim to fast food and flash freezing.

If this show means to teach us about the full variety of fresh delicious veg we can add to our meals and sometimes even eat exclusively in one meal, it is an epic fail. Only Rabid vegans will feel pleased and even then, if any of them are like some of my veggie mates, they will be bored by the uninspired, bland food on offer. The rest will recognize the less than subtle, evangelical, we are right and you are a murderer tone that runs through the entire narrative  and most definitively is the main supporting plank in the experiment  Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is running. If he is in fact taking the piss, it's hard to tell,.but if he is, that's too bad. Veg needs to be better explained and served to an entire generation that only know the stuff from a  tin or a frozen bag. At the very time that family produce patches are becoming common and many are now keeping chickens, pigs and other eating animals in the urban and suburban world, this series turns the clock back 20 or 30 years when the only people eating veg were environmentalists  and recently arrived immigrants. 


Suffice to say that if you are a vegetarian, you will not learn anything new, if you are looking for great new or old recipes to add to your table and get your children eating veg, don't bother. The old stand bys like Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsay will be a better place to look. Both the BBC and C4 have extensive and varied recipe sections that will guide you through a world of food. If you really want to try proper vegetarian food and you like a curry, try southern Indian food, if you like to see what a plate looks like without a steak or a burger taking up a quarter of your plate, try Chinese or or Indonesian food. Veg need not be a punishment, so do yourself a favour, pass on this year's River Cottage.

Honey cake and the Well Good Show

 And so it's here, my first proper mostly food oriented post. Was a while in coming as frankly it's been a busy couple of weeks and the closest to cooking I have come was the massive 6 litre pot of spaghetti sauce. I think however before I get on with it and give you some of the things taken for granted at ours, I want like to take you on a personal voyage of culinary discovery that now has me making, dishes I used to only order in restaurants or waited for an Aunt, Babcia or family friend to make. such as a of cabbage rolls or a honey cake. Barring these lovely ladies, we needed to shlep all the way to a Polish bakery or Jewish quarter to get a fix of our favourite food. During my first marriage, my wife did the bulk of the cooking, not because I wasn't any good, I had a few recipes and hadn't poisoned anybody, no she just thought she was the only person who knew how to do anything just so, perfect. You know the type, I preferred to just step back and let her have at it. Nothing  was I was going to do was ever going to be as good as hers. And to be fair,, she was a dab hand at cooking,  even picked up other cultures cookery well and quickly. The problem arose when I wanted to try something different or I wanted to keep the spices I used more often up front. It was symptomatic of the relationship that even our spices didn't get along. 

It was about this time that Jamie Oliver came into the picture and revolutionized my cooking. Notwithstanding what certain people may think of Jamie, he did something for men that hadn't been done before, he simplified the cooking process and explained it in such a way any man would get it the first time. He also espoused fresh herbs, veg meat and poultry, all things that had till then been the secret purview of only the select few. Suddenly, markets were carrying the ingredient of the week, countries that had not known what crème fresh was, had to have it and hitherto taboo puddings were a dawdle. In the beginning ... God made the mountains and the seas,  no seriously, in the beginning Jamie Oliver was the can opener on the lid of cookery secrets, we learned techniques ranging from whisking to a simple fish in a pan . Over time, much that was needed to be known was shown one tip at a time, the mortar and pestle became a common tool and no longer a  decoration, the revolution was on. To his credit, he soon dropped the Naked Chef tag and just became Jamie, a wise decision as I'm not sure he could have continued the cooler than cool trendy chef routine. Spurred on by personal cooking success, I sought to rediscover my own cookery culture and found that while it may not have been apparent at first, I had in fact picked up lorry loads of information from my Babcia as a boy. It first manifested itself in sense memory. Taste, smell, texture, that let me know something was just so. like my grandmothers and Aunts had made it. With experimentation, I even began to rediscover precisely how to get those flavours myself.  Now the problem with perception  is that skill often is achieved faster than it is recognized by others, so I had to wait till I was on my own again to get  the recognition I deserved, which of course only made me try harder. Today I have only a few Everests left to climb. What is an Everest you ask? It's a recipe you so fear , that so intimidates you, you are afraid to try it.  I'm doing my own sauces, puddings roasts, pies ( sweet and savoury), curies , I can even do a New York Deli Cheesecake so good , some people thought we stopped by some place to buy it and kept saying it must have cost a fortune....well no it didn't , except for the £7 of shmeer that went into it. That's a lot of cheese mate,  but so much fun to make, this was one of my Everests by the way. My wife is the baker in the family and usually handles cakes, but she was flat on her back and dying of whatever. We ( yes me) had promised a cheesecake, and I was not going to disappoint. Ended up with a deli sized mountain of cheese cake that was reduced to a single slice in the space of an hour. Not bad for a pudding with the atomic weight of  a black hole. I think the list of what I'm afraid to try is reduced to sushi, smoking my own beef and wine making. We have become those people. But it's ok, most people before the advent of the pre-packaged, easy to heat up  microwaved meal were those people.We had to know how to cook or we were stuck eating expensive food or inexpensive rubbish like turkey twizlers. I'd like to take a minute here to say, health secretary, Andrew Lansley can go back under the rock from whence he came. Healthy meals are saving lives and the budget of the NHS, Tories will not get a majority next time on the junk food vote, they'll be to busy burning Cameron in effigy for cutting the budget with a machete.  .

I need you to know that while you must never think that what I do doesn't require skill and care, you need to know it's not hard to do. None of it, just pay attention to what you're doing, and you too will be cooking like a chef. Now there is a small drawback, once you've learned to cook like this, your once a year romantic meal will now be taken for granted and to the next level, the grand gesture will need the rarest and most expensive ingredients. Which of course is ok if you don't mind cooking and being called a genius. The other drawback is that unless you can't cook it yourself, you'll never again be able to enjoy a meal , even a good one in a restaurant.You know how much it costs, how easy it is to make and the price tag will make you choke. This may be the reason I still haven't learned how to make sushi, it may destroy my last excuse to get out of the house and let somebody else cook for a change.  

 So maybe now a recipe or two, both are dead easy, both will make you a legend with you friends. First the Honey cake, a traditional Polish recipe served at Easter and Rosh hashana depending on what day you keep holy. This version is the best and most accurate english text I can give you, my wife adds extra raisins and  walnuts inside and sliced almonds on top it to make it perfect.



Piernik or Polish Honey Cake

Ingredients

• 1 cup sugar
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
• 1/2 teaspoon ground allspice
• 4 eggs
• 1/2 cup milk
• 1/2 cup vegetable oil
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 cup honey
• 4 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/2 cup raisins (optional)
• 1/2 cup chopped walnuts (optional)

Directions

1. In a large bowl, mix the sugar, cinnamon, cloves, allspice, and eggs. Stir in the milk and oil, and mix in the baking soda. Place honey in a small pot, and bring to a boil. Stir honey into the bowl. Mix flour into the bowl. Fold in the raisins and walnuts. Stir by hand with a sturdy spoon for 10 minutes. Allow the dough to sit 1 hour.
2. Preheat oven to 325 degrees F (165 degrees C). Lightly grease four 8x4 inch loaf pans.
3. Fill each loaf pan with about 2 inches of the batter. Bake 1 hour 15 minutes in the preheated oven, until a toothpick inserted in the centre of a loaf comes out clean. Bread will be brown in colour and will crack on top.

Another treat is the home made skor bar, or as it was before it was disguised as a candy bar,  the perfect way to make guests happy before or after a meal ..

Chocolate covered matza

Ingredients

• 4-6 unsalted matzohs
• 1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter or unsalted Passover margarine
• 1 cup firmly packed brown sugar
• 3/4 cup coarsely chopped chocolate 60% cocoa or higher

Preparation

-Preheat the oven to 375°F. 

-Line a large (or two smaller) cookie sheet completely with foil. Cover the bottom of the sheet with baking parchment — on top of the foil. This is very important since the mixture becomes sticky during baking.

-Line the bottom of the cookie sheet evenly with the matzohs, cutting extra pieces, as required, to fit any spaces.

-In a 3-quart, heavy-bottomed saucepan, combine the butter or margarine and the brown sugar. 

-Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, until the mixture comes to a boil (about 2 to 4 minutes). Boil for 3 minutes, stirring constantly. 

-Remove from the heat and pour over the matzoh, covering completely.

Place the baking sheet in the oven and immediately reduce the heat to 350°. 

-Bake for 15 minutes, checking every few minutes to make sure the mixture is not burning (if it seems to be browning too quickly, remove the pan from the oven, lower the heat to 325°, and replace the pan).

-Remove from the oven and sprinkle immediately with the chopped chocolate or chips. 

-Let stand for 5 minutes, then spread the melted chocolate over the matzoh. 

-While still warm, break into squares or odd shapes. 

-Chill, still in the pan, in the freezer until set.

This makes a good gift.

Variation:
You can also use coarsely chopped white chocolate (or a combination of white and dark), and chopped or slivered toasted almonds (sprinkled on top as the chocolate sets). You can also omit the chocolate for a caramel-alone buttercrunch.

I didn't forget your need to know if maybe you been missing something, so I decided to be brave, I was going to finally take a chance on the BBC's "Lee Nelson's Well good show". I resisted for 4 weeks you know, but curiosity got the better of me. I'm not sure what it's about, but I do know that it made James Corden look sincere. That said, I didn't last more than five minute. By the time Lee got to his sad opening monologue, I knew several things.He isn't a charv, just poser, he isn't funny, he's not well good. not even close and this turkey will fold after one series, or at least it should. My intestines haven't wanted to rear up and kill me if I didn't press mute right away since a certain pile of dreck about ad execs in London. It was Vogon poetry bad, we've got a  game, my wife and I, each of us gets a small bell, if we want to stop watching a new programme, we ring he bell. This shambolic lie of a show lasted less time than Big Top. I bemoan the fate of modern comedy at the BBC. I suspect even charvs can be funny, but this was just painful. Whoever green lit this needs a vacation to recharge the batteries while a competent person scours through the rejects to see if there is any gold in the pile of turds. I cannot believe the writers of fresh new comedy are as bereft of ideas as this appears to indicate.  Seems we'll have to depend as usual, on Parliament English football  for fresh comedy.

Time for some sleep, football today !!!!!