The best food advice is simple – make it yourself

Authentic carbonara. Honest

In a surprise move today, Mars Food announced that it was going to add new labels to its foods to indicate what should only be eaten once a week and what could be eaten on a daily basis.

This is largely a response to the government’s recently-unveiled sugar tax, and products would be in the once-a-week category because they contained high levels of sugar salt or fat.

So it’s probably fairly safe to assume that “a Mars a day” will no longer be recommended as the ideal way to “help you work, rest and play”.

Setting aside for the sake of this post the fact that increasing evidence is helping to topple the myth that fat, per se, is bad for you, one is left wondering just how much sugar and salt is in some of the Mars products.

The two brands mentioned are Uncle Ben’s and Dolmio, and Mars Foods claims that “some foods were higher in salt, sugar or fat to maintain the “authentic” taste of products”. So let’s take a little look.

A 500g jar of Dolmio bolognese original pasta sauce apparently serves four people and provides one portion of your fruit and veg for the day. The usual price at Ocado is £1.79.

It contains: “Tomatoes (76%), Tomato Paste (11%), Onions, Sugar, Cornflour, Lemon Juice, Salt, Sunflower Oil, Basil (0.3%), Garlic, Parsley, Herbs, Spices”.

A jar of Dolmio’s bolognese low fat sauce (same weight and price) contains exactly the same ingredients. Presumably, since no percentages are given below 11%, the percentages on oil and sugar change a little as it claims to be a low fat version.

The same company’s lasagna “creamy pasta sauce” (470g jar for £1.80) has a rather more complex ingredient list: “Water, Sunflower Oil, Modified Maize Starch, Butter Fat (from Milk), Sugar, Fat Powder (Palm Fat, Lactose, Milk Protein), Natural Flavouring (contains Celery), Lactose, Broth Powder (Sugar, Flavourings, Yeast Extract, Dried Glucose Syrup, Salt, Coconut Fat, Sunflower Oil, Smoke Flavouring, Milk Protein), Salt, Acid (Lactic Acid), Stabiliser (Xanthan Gum), Milk Proteins, Antioxidant (Rosemary Extract)”.

Dolmio’s “lasagne meal kit original” (807g for £3.99) contains: “Tomato Sauce for Lasagne: Tomatoes (67%), Tomato Paste (19%), Lemon Juice, Onions, Cornflour, Sugar, Salt, Basil, Garlic, Herbs, Spices, Creamy Sauce for Lasagne: Water, Cream (20%) (from Milk), Modified Maize Starch, Fat Powder (Palm Fat, Lactose, Milk Protein), Salt, Garlic, Milk Proteins, Sugar, Onion Powder, Spices, 9 Lasagne Sheets: Durum Wheat Semolina”.

The company’s carbonara microwave sauce (150g for £1.40) “serves one”) contains: “Water, Cream (from Milk) (14%), Ham (5.9%) (Pork, Water, Brine Mix (Dextrose, Stabiliser: Triphosphate, Flavouring, Antioxidant: Sodium Ascorbate), Salt, Preservative: Sodium Nitrite), Modified Maize Starch, Cheddar Cheese (from Milk) (2.0%), Broth Powder (Sugar, Flavourings, Yeast Extract, Dried Glucose Syrup, Salt, Coconut Fat, Sunflower Oil, Smoke Flavouring, Milk Protein), Milk Proteins, Salt, Garlic (0.2%), Yeast Extract (contains Barley), Spices, Sugar”.

Uncle Ben’s chilli con carne medium sauce (450g for £1.79) contains: “Tomatoes (51%), Lemon Juice, Red Peppers (7%), Red Kidney Beans (7%), Onions, Tomato Paste (6%), Pinto Beans (5%), Sugar, Cornflour, Spices (of which Cumin, Jalapeño Powder), Salt, Parsley, Coriander, Onion Powder, Cocoa Powder, Herbs, Colour (Paprika Extract)”.

Uncle Ben’s sweet and sour original sauce (450g for £1.79) contains: “Water, Tomatoes (17%), Sugar, Onions, Pineapple (6%), Vinegar, Carrots (5%), Cornflour, Red Peppers (3%), Celery, Green Peppers (3%), Bamboo Shoots (2%), Tamarind Juice, Salt, Colour (Paprika Extract), Spices”.

In some cases there’s no much obviously wrong with the ingredient lists. Although who puts cornflower in a basic tomato sauce?

A basic tomato sauce requires finely-chopped onion, softened in some olive oil, with either skinned, fresh tomatoes or a tin of good-quality ones added, a squeeze of purée, then a pinch of salt and maybe a tablespoon of milk to cut the acidity, a little time and a few gentle stirs. Rocket science is is not.

Cornflower doesn’t come into it. Nor does sugar. And it’s a fair bet “sunflower oil” isn’t an “authentic” ingredient in Italy.

And once you get to the lasagna or carbonara – go on: hands up who looks at those ingredient lists and actually wants to eat that?

There’s one very simple way to avoid the crap and the inauthentic ingredients in these products – eat fresh food rather than processed.

The prices can make it appear that this is the affordable way to eat: that £1.79 for a jar of sauce might look very cheap, but as illustrated above, you don’t need much to make a decent tomato sauce. Oil, purée, seasoning and milk are store cupboard ingredients. Tomatoes and onions – well, you’ll be able to make more than £250g per person for your money and, by doing it that way, you’ll get two portions of veg.

To clarify further: you can get a 400g tin of high-quality, organic tomatoes from Ocado for 89p. A portion of veg is classed as 80g (or a handful), so that’s a portion per person for four. A couple of onions gives you a second portion – large brown onions at Ocado are 24p each. So that’s £1.37 for tomatoes and two onions. The other 42p will probably cover your store cupboard ingredients. And, as with the jar of sauce, you still need to add meat and pasta to make your Bolognese.

Of course, if you were really trying to be “authentic”, you’d need some celery and carrot too, plus red wine, garlic and bay leaves – and that’s before you get to the meats (pancetta and minced beef), the pasta – tagliatelle, NOT spaghetti – and Parmesan cheese to serve.

I shiver at the thought of that carbonara being “authentic”. But then again, part of the trick of Big Food is to work on the basis that most people won’t know that’s it’s wrong and won’t question such a statement, so they’ll get away with it.

By the way, carbonara is simple.

Dice some good pancetta (or top-quality, unsmoked streaky bacon) and cook gently in a little olive oil.

Cook your spaghetti. When it’s done, drain and mix in the bacon.

Stir grated Parmesan into a bowl with a beaten egg or two and then, with the pasta off the heat, gently fold the eggy mix over to coat the pasta – and serve.

Or if you want to be a little different, try the Perpignan way – the best I’ve ever had and which I replicated here.

Whatever you do, you do not want it scrambled – just a silky egg coating on the pasta.

So … no water, no cream, no modified maize starch, no cheddar cheese (what planet are these people on?), no “broth powder”, no sugar, no yeast extract, no glucose syrup, no coconut fat (WTF?), no sunflower oil, no smoke flavouring, no garlic …

And I would confidently assert that my version is a damned sight more “authentic” than anything that has a Dolmio label on it.

* All ingredients lists reproduced as they appear online.

New season, new kitchen

Counts as 'cooker porn'?

If there was one thing – apart from seeing our cats again – that made the return from holiday worth while, it was coming back to a new kitchen, just in time for a new season.

In the last week, a number of people have commented, of our having been away while the work was done in our home, that we were very ‘trusting’.

The implication being that they would be reluctant to leave their own homes in the hands of “contractors”.

It’s difficult, though, to know how they’d continue to live in a home while a room such as a bathroom or kitchen is being gutted and completely re-fitted.

That Tardis carousel

Three weeks using a bucket instead of a loo – unless they get workmen to spend time refitting one every day at the end of the work? Take-away meals for the duration? Yuk!

We’re incredibly fortunate to have Ian, a local, old-fashioned tradesman, has done a wonderful job yet again. And it not only all looks great, but works so much better too.

We have, in the last week, been able to get pretty much everything sorted out and into its new place.

As explained previously, it was an excellent opportunity to cull and clear. Now, though, I have one cupboard that must be the Tardis in disguise – it’s so big, with a carousel inside, that it stores every single pan, casserole, oven dish, earthenware pot, tagine, jug and large serving bowl that I have!

One very deep drawer now takes all my bakeware – which used to take a whole cupboard and a drawer – while another substantial drawer takes ladles, serving spoons, most of which had been hung on the wall, and another cupboard easily hosts all the slightly less-used gadgets, such as the mandolin and the potato ricer.

Neat and tidy – and so much more work space!

Pull-out sections bookending the cooker hold all the tea and coffee-making kit on one side, and all my herbs, spices, salts, vinegars and oils on the other.

The crockery is now displayed in the shelf unit/dresser, while all the cups, mugs and glassware are in further cupboards.

The entire effect is one of far less clutter, while it’s all so much lighter, too.

The butler sink came into its own on the first day back, as it allowed us to soak and wash out the big, retro, enamel bread bin, that previously would not go in a sink.

And of course, although I’m still getting used to the cooker – it has had me purring since day one – while the splashback that we made of features tiles from Casa Latina in Collioure, and the drawer and cupboard handles from the same source, looks lovely.

After just a brace of hobs on this trip to France, the Rangemaster is a big step up!

I should add that the new fridge – the old one was dying on us and would have needed replacing anyway – is a piece of magnificent Bosch. We took account of width and nothing else when planning, but this is another massive step up.

And it provides far more fridge magnet space too – I had a joyous task at the weekend ‘curating’ our personal art gallery!

I had been told, in conversation with a friend, that when buying white goods, the best – and most simple – advice is: “Go to John Lewis and buy as much Bosch as you can afford!”

Our washing machine for the past two years has been Bosch and I can easily see the wisdom in that advice. The fridge-freezer merely confirms it.

But all of this has had me thinking about how our cooking areas and facilities have been reduced in the last three decades.

Not a posh cooker – just an old one

Back in the 1970s, it would hardly have been a luxury to have a cooker that had both an oven and a separate grill.

However, the years since, and the advent of built-in cookers, have seen this end as the norm.

More recently, we’ve moved to new homes being built with, in some cases, only enough room for a microwave.

As food journalist Joanna Blythman relates in one of her books, a developer who planned holiday homes with just a microwave found themselves having to re-do kitchens when Continental visitors complained at the lack of proper cooking equipment.

And as Blythman also uncovered, the UK accounts for more than half the European ready-meals market, while the figure for snack products is similar.

There’s an interweaving of things here, but as I’ve also said many times, there is also a poor culture when it comes to how we see food in the UK.

A few weeks ago, I happened to overhear a ‘conversation’ between a mother and child, the latter having only recently turned three.

“What do you want for your dinner?”

“Dippy chips.”

“You can’t have dippy chips every night!”

The conversation did not, you probably won’t be surprised to know, take place in France.

When and how did it become considered sensible or appropriate to ask a small child what they want to eat? When did it somehow become bad parenting to deploy the old ‘you eat what’s in front of you’ routine?

The glories of a Bosch fridge

For the record, the mother in question is not particularly young and is a working professional.

Having said that, on the subject of school meals, I’ve heard otherwise apparently intelligent adults arguing that choice is good for young children – precisely because it teaches them to choose.

Which is idiotic reasoning. You teach them about proper food – and then, when they’re a lot more grown up and they have some of the food skills required to make choices, they can start choosing.

Why would making choices – without experience and knowledge – be a positive thing? And especially when they are, in effect, up against companies, including big corporates, that are out to make a profit that may be increased by providing less-than-healthy options?

It’s like David v Goliath where people are suddenly rooting for the giant.

‘Choice’ can mean a salad over there and the lasagna and chips over here. How many six or seven-year olds do you know who won’t choose the latter, with all the sugars and salts and fats made to make it attractive?

I spent a day in a school canteen a couple of years ago – and it was far from being a bad canteen, with all food made from scratch by a dedicated team – but because they have to offer ‘choice’, there are children who happily (and apparently regularly) just choose a plate of stodge. And I heard the dinner ladies trying to encourage them to try something different.

The artiest Bosch fridge in town?

There’s a substantial part of the issue with that overheard mother, though, of sheer laziness.

Of course it’s difficult when both parents are working, but is copping out on what you actually feed your child really the only option?

Why does the myth persist that it is ‘difficult’ or too time consuming to cook a meal properly, from scratch, in the evening?

What you eat is one of the most important factors in your life – and if you’re nurturing a child, it should be even more important.

And you don’t need a double oven and a butler sink. But what the gradual reduction of kitchen spaces in homes does do is to shore up the attitudes that then lead to this kind of behavior.

They lead to the decline in sales of dining tables – and the seven-year-old who cannot use a knife and fork properly.

That’s another example where the parents were white-collar, full-time workers who couldn’t be arsed to feed their child properly after a day at work, so relied on finger food, takeaways and frozen pizzas while they concentrated on the important things in life, such as what’s on the telly.

It does beg the question of how much this syndrome is a question of both partners having to work or the ‘conveniencing’ of our diet.

I’d suggest it’s primarily the latter, since women in working-class communities have had to work for centuries. The textile mills didn’t run on unmarried, childless female labour, for instance.

The difference now is the vast development, in the last 40 years, of ready-meals, microwaves and the takeaway culture.

It has denuded our collective culinary skill level and the result is a culture where increasing numbers of people feed themselves – and their children – badly.

And when you see food as fuel, and all fuel as having the same value, then you’re well on the way down this route.

The examples I’ve given are far from unique. This morning, the BBC online included a report that 12% of UK three-year-olds have tooth decay.

It came a day after I saw a mother on a bus with three small children, explaining to her partner that one of them had had chocolate, a sausage roll and crisps to eat that day – and was still hungry.

And it was only last Friday that I happened to see another small child in a pushchair complaining to his mother that he’d finished the large tube of Pringles and wanted something else.

Laziness, ignorance – and, of course, lack of money, all feed into this, along with the (partly mythical) cheapness of ultra-processed junk food.

A big tube of Pringles is well over £2. You can buy a 500g bag of pasta for comfortably under 50p, a 400g of tinned tomatoes for well under 40p, an onion and some garlic for next to nowt.

Even allowing for a little oil and seasonings that you’ll need from the cupboard, that will create a simple meal that’ll take 30 minutes at most, in one pan on one hob, and will be infinitely cheaper and better for up to four people eating it than that single tube of Pringles for one small child.

So, irrespective of the cooker – let’s take autumn as the opportunity to get cooking proper, real food for ourselves and our families!

My kingdom for a knife that cuts!

A knife – that cuts

A knife that cuts, a knife that cuts – my kingdom for a knife that cuts!

It is a mystery – albeit not, perhaps, one of Earth’s greatest – how some people view self catering.

We are, as we have been for the past six summers, in a self-catering cottage in Collioure.

On Saturday, after our overnight sleeper from Paris had pulled to a halt at the little station above the ville, we wandered down into the village, found our abode for the duration and dumped the cases, and headed out to Delice Catalans for breakfast.

A quick stock-up of basics in the little Carrefour followed – water, bog roll, kitchen paper, oil, vinegar, fromage frais and rhubarb compote (the last two combine for my breakfast) – and then it was off to the beach.

We ate out that evening: a pleasant – if not stunning – meal at Saffran Bleu, where we’d first tasted dorade some summers ago.

So why bother with self-catering? There are plenty of reasons: not least, that it is ultimately far more relaxing than having to abide by a hotel’s schedules and, of course, there is the food.

With a twice-weekly market as good as the one here, who wouldn’t want to cater for themselves – at least for part of the time?

Sunday marked this year’s first visit for produce.

First up was the usually grumpy man at the organic tomato stall, who grinned broadly, reached over the orange, green, striped, yellow and red tomatoes to shake my hand and ask how I was.

A bag of these divine fruits in hand – I really do dream about them for 13 months of the year – I headed to find Caro, who sells lovely charcuterie and regional cheeses. Fruit was added, and a campagne gris from the nearest boulangerie.

That done, it was back to the house and, with everything neatly stashed in it’s proper place, off to the beach, where Cyril had transats waiting for us.

Lunch brought with it our second chance to eat out.

This was, as per annual ritual, at St Elme, which is right behind the beach. It’s rather touristy, and I get bored of it very quickly, but for the first few days, it hits the spot.

We had steak haché with a fried egg and chips.

But it was in the evening, after we’d returned from sunning ourselves, that the problem hit: where oh where was there a knife that would cut charcuterie and tomato and fruit?

Last year, we had the lunacy of an electric bin: this year, there is not a knife in the place that will cut anything other than hot butter.

There is lashings of cutlery, a plethora of glasses and plenty of plates – but just two paring knives that could be safely given to a toddler, a small serrated knife that is hardly razor sharp, and a bread knife for ... well, bread.

Fortunately, the oversight does not extend to a bottle opener.

What sort of self-catering does that represent?

That night, we muddled through. On Monday, however, with no obvious kitchenware shop in the village, I headed to a local shop that specialises in knives and the odd samurai sword jobby; so sharp it could split a hair. I even managed a conversation with the man in the shop after he asked if it was for a present, using my pigeon French to explain the situation.

He indicated that it was a similar issue in many of the houses that are let.

Later, The Other Half put it to me that, if I was letting for the summer months, I wouldn’t leave my knives out for just anyone.

“Well no,” I observed. “My Sabatiers and Zwilling-Henckels would be under lock and key. But I’d equally make damned sure that were still solid, sharp knives around, together with something with which to sharpen them, other than a steel or the doorstep”.

I’d also ensure, come to that, that chopping boards were labeled – there’s no way of knowing which one has been used for what in previous weeks and months.

Just two hobs (and a microwave)

However, the Opinel allowed us to continue with our simple evening repasts of charcuterie, tomato and bread (plus rosé, of course) with much increased ease.

For lunch on Monday, we returned to St Elme, where I joyfully wolfed a plate of gambas with persillade, aïoli and frites.

On Tuesday, doing so little that the nearest we got to the beach was lunching at the back of one, we hit my beloved Au Casot, where I wolfed baby squid, with persillade, aïoli, tiny tomatoes and wafer-thin slices of roasted potato.

I haven’t relished food so much for a long time – both meals were as perfect as they could be.

And so as it turned out, Wednesday was my first night of actual cooking.

There is no oven, but just two rings on a tiny hob.

I had bought boudin Catalan – the regional, lightly spiced  version of black pudding; always a treat – a tin of potatoes, a jar of haricots blanc and an onion.

The thinking was that I could cook the onion in the pan to which would, late on, be added the sliced boudin, while the beans and spuds could be cooked in another pan, in some olive oil.

That, however, had been based on an absurd assumption that a reasonably large saucepan and a frying pan would fit on the aforementioned dinky hob. Fat chance.

As I confided to The Other Half: thank goodness this hadn’t happened five years ago, because I’d have been flummoxed.

The onion thinly sliced – thanks to that rather fabulous Opinel – I let it soften gently in olive oil for some time, before adding some of the haricot blanc, drained and dried.

Heating a generous amount of olive oil in a saucepan, I drained and dried some of the potatoes and then added them to the hot oil.

After around 15 minutes, sliced boudin joined the onion and beans, and was warmed through gently for a further 10 minutes, turning the pudding slices once.

All was served with a generous dollop of sweet, grainy French mustard.

I must say, it was perfectly fine fodder – but bugger me sideways with last year’s Christmas tree, this was cooking as a challenge, in the face of ridiculous obstacles!

So I ask – what do some people imagine ‘self-catering’ means? And this in France, of all places – sacredieu!