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Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1 food unplugged
Back Again
It was ever thus
Everyday Vegetables
Illustrated Tomato Soup
If it isn't food, don't eat it
Bread in Urban Upper Nile
Stock Shock!
Offal & Cabbage... no, really
Bread In Real Life 2: Quicker
Houmous and Salad
Beef Pasta and Salad
Sunday Lunch
Everyday Breakfast
Courgette Curry
Making bread in real life
Fish, Chips and Cricket
An Omelette and a Glass of Wine
Errands and a Courgette
Bread in Kabul
Food in my house this morning
Soup and Bread
Stew and Asparagus
Convenient food
The staff of life
How to make chutney
A food manifesto
We're making jam
  




Back Again

17 Sep 2005

It's been a long time. A good deal has changed. I got married in February. And now I have a job. Soon, God willing, we'll have a baby and a mortgage. The big four of Normal Life. And jolly pleasant it is too. All the ancient wisdoms were young once. I was taken out to lunch (in Romford, but that's another story) as part of my induction into the wonderful world of work and, showing what I hope you will agree was a fine sense of idiom, I ordered a prawn cocktail, a steak, and a piece of chocolate cake. It was great! The thing of it is, a cliché only becomes a cliché by ... [read whole article]

It was ever thus

18 Aug 2004

One of the many good things about Dorothy L Sayers is that she is very circumstantial. Just as we might read Jane Austen to find out the detail of how the gentry lived in 1810, a Lord Peter Wimsey mystery gives you a potted social history of the year it was written.So we find that food companies messing with the heads and guts of the heedless is nothing new.

This is from Murder Must Advertise (1933). Lord Peter, working undercover in an ad agency is discussing the trade with his colleague Mr ... [read whole article]

Everyday Vegetables

11 Aug 2004

It's in the oven now but I'm not sure what to call it. Casserole is a bit like serviette and lounge. But the honest anglo-saxon word, my usual choice, in this case sounds unappealing - as in "in a stew" or "stewed". Hot pot is too seventies darling.

What the hey. It is what it is.

Yesterday 12.52 (I looked at the clock so I could tell you) it occurred to me I had nothing for lunch. And I have a cold - I wanted something warming and comforting. So I got up from my desk and cut up ... [read whole article]

Illustrated Tomato Soup

3 Aug 2004

A pal coming for lunch seems like the stimulus I need to make a week's worth of tomato soup. As ever it starts with garlic.

It all goes in the pan with tomato paste, as Peter Clemenza will tell you, where I stirred it a lot to stop it sticking (or you could splash in lots of olive oil but I'm trying to stop being a fat knacker at the moment) .

[read whole article]

If it isn't food, don't eat it

7 May 2004

It's déjà vu all over again in the fraught world of food labelling. Last week a health minister tongue-lashed food companies for smuggling salt and fat past our defences. In April the European Parliament came up with the proverbial "tough new rules" to make sure Low Fat Food is low in fat.

In February the implausibly named Geoffrey Podger, of the European Food Standards Agency, fulminated against food products that boast spurious health-giving properties. On the same day Which? came down ... [read whole article]

Bread in Urban Upper Nile

6 Feb 2004

I was in Sudan during November of last year and spent some time in Renk, the capital of the locality of the same name in the northern part of Upper Nile State. I may get around to transcribing some of my diary from this interesting trip. But on my last morning in Renk I had a quick scoot round the bazaar and with the help of a Sudanese colleague got the lowdown from a baker on how they do it there.

The bakery was a dark shopfront in a rundown brick and stucco arcade with a balcony above (it put me in mind of the kind of town Clint Eastwood rides into on a donkey a lot in his early ... [read whole article]

Stock Shock!

3 Feb 2004

For a few years now I've been going to Beaumonts, the butcher in Fulbourn, and after I've made my purchases sometimes I'll say "can you spare me some bones?" and they look in the big white plastic bucket next the chopping block and like as not pull out two or three halved femurs of a sheep or cow. I take these home and make stock. I'll tell you about that in a minute. But that shock I mentioned.

Well for a while I've wondered whether they mind me asking this. They're ever so nice, but maybe being polite. Sometimes I've heard a person mentioned, the "Bone Man" - evidently ... [read whole article]

Offal & Cabbage... no, really

28 Jan 2004

There are so many things I don't understand - ordinary everyday things, let alone quantum electrodynamics. Maybe I need a television. If I got a television, would there be programmes that would explain why kidneys and liver are thought disgusting?

Maybe it's because they're high in cholesterol. But anyone who went to the trouble of finding that out would find out also that cholesterol you eat doesn't translate one for one into cholesterol that kills you and that offal is surprisingly low in fat in general and saturated fat in particular (3-4% and 1%). By the way, these links ... [read whole article]
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