So I have been determined to cook from scratch this week, and cook from scratch I have. Apart from on Friday, when my beautiful friends cooked from scratch. Burgers, homemade, with sweet potato crisps. Banging.
Cooking from scratch has led me down many wonderful and sometimes terrifying roads, my many recipe books have been pored over and the internet thoroughly scoured for the best way to cook from zero to hero. Things I have made in the last week: pesto, dough, fish fingers, smoothies, cock-a-leekie soup. Next on my list: pasta, humous, if you have any suggestions or want me to try out something then give me a shout.
One woman who had a recipe for chicken soup from a raw carcass (I’ll explain later) is also the author of the thoroughly intriguing and also utterly bemusing 105 Ways to Celebrate Menstruation. Seriously, it’s on Amazon and everything ‘the perfect book for any woman wishing to feel more empowered and creative during her monthly cycle.’ Ok then. Call a me a cynic or maybe just plain old fashioned, but I’ll stick to Anadin and a hot water bottle, thanks.
Another website gave me this as a recipe:
Chicken soup – dry fry some onion in a pan, add a can of Campbell’s cream of chicken soup, heat through. Eat.
WTF?
So why am I so desperate to find a killer chicken soup recipe? Well I’m making lavender and lemon chicken for this evening ( a Rachel Khoo idea); in case you’d forgotten (and I won’t mind if you have) there will be six of us eating this evening in my little home to watch the Euro 1012 Cup final. Italy V Spain and we’re all on the side of Italy. Apart from me who will secretly be cheering for the Spaniards as a) I can’t bear the idea of someone being ‘uncheered’ for and b) my aunt lives in Mallorca so I’m going to claim it as a family thing. She was actually born in Wiltshire and is about as Spanish as The Tower of London or Queues, however she’s been there long enough, I think we can call this one.
So I went to my butcher and asked for enough chicken to feed six hungry people, he showed me what at one time must have been a rather splendid cockerel and very kindly jointed it all up for me – my knife skills being somewhat lacking – and gave me a separate bag for all the bones. Now this particular beast cost me 22 quid. It was an expensive piece of meat and I am damned if half of it is going to waste because it’s not immediately edible.
This is a massive bugbear of mine. We have become SO lazy. SO complacent. SO frightened. SO, yes I’m going to say it, PATHETIC when it comes to food and cooking. We rely so heavily on everything being easy, or it looking nice, or being something recognisable before we think to eat it. Everything is regulation size in supermarkets, if the food doesn’t meet the standards it’s thrown away. The waste is disgusting. Baby boy calves killed at birth as they’re too expensive to raise for meat on dairy farms and obviously don’t produce milk so they’re shot, thousands of tons of lettuce ploughed back into the ground because they’re not the ‘right’ size. Food being so heavily processed that we can keep it for YEARS before it goes off, and food given flavourings because it’s treated with so many chemicals it loses any taste it’s supposed to have. People eat ready meals more than cooking at home, it’s quick it’s easy and they haven’t had to think about it. It’s depressing. I’m always amazed when I go to markets how big some of their veggies are, and I will happily confess to saying that if it’s a weird shape i will choose a more regular looking one instead. I always go for the ones that are closest to the supermarket version as I trust these will taste better. It’s sad.
Maybe it’s because I find cooking such a joy, or maybe it’s because I love my food, or maybe I’m simply lucky enough to earn enough that I’m able to make these choices; buying ethical produce is expensive and lower income families are unable to make the choice, so buy food that was badly treated when alive and so tastes of very little when dead. Cooking is time consuming and people are all so busy so why not shove a plate of oven chips on a plate with something pretending to be a sausage? (Meat content on some of the cheaper brands can be as little as 14 % (I don’t even want to imagine what makes up the other 86…salt, water and toenails I imagine.)
One awful fact I found out on my tour of the internet about badly treated meat is this: When an animal is frightened, it releases a hormone and obviously bucket loads of adrenalin, all of which floods its veins and this for want of a better word ‘solidifies’ when the animal is killed. Just as blood stops flowing when you die, and it congeals, so anything that is being carried along with it does too. You then eat this. You can see it too in the meat, you’re quite literally eating the fear of the animal. Now that can’t taste good. So the next time you tuck into KFC or Chicken Palace or whatever noble chicken shop graces your street be thankful for the crispy coating, it’s so you can’t see what’s really underneath. I’m starting to sound massively sanctimonious, I’ll stop.
So I have decided to wage a personal war on this. I am determined to try making things myself so that I lose the ‘fear of food’, so I don’t buy things in jars so much or plastic tubs, or worse, plastic tubs with a plastic seal with a cardboard wrap around and then a sticker on the top of that. It’s not just about reducing food waste, but the packaging it comes in too. Acres of plastic and cellophane and sticky labels and security plastic and cardboard, all thrown away.
Sell by dates are now not sell by dates, but death by dates. No one seems to trust food that is even one day over, it all gets thrown away because if you eat it, you might get sick, or even DIE.
Yesterday I made my own fishfingers (Thank you Nigel Slater for showing me how), and today cock-a-leekie soup from leftover bones. Both were delicious.
Maybe I’m preaching to the converted. Maybe you, my lovely readers, shun ready meals and can name 6 vegetables beginning with P off the top of your head (literally don’t know if I can, hang on… yup I can.) Maybe you’re not scared of trying new things, and you’re already interested in what makes up the stuff you eat. But if you’re not – and that is fine, it’s really hard to be when everything is already there, then give something a shot. Try something small first, like reading the ingredients on an innocent smoothie and then seeing if you make it does it taste the same? If so then it will cost you far less than their bottle, you’ll make twice as much and it won’t mean another plastic bottle in the bin. Start small, be adventurous, try something new and have faith, if somewhere out there a machine is programmed to make these things, then you can too.
I’ll leave you with this, a joke one of my kids at school told me when I said I had made dough:
Why did the baker have brown hands?
He kneaded a poo
xxx
hungrygillies 