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!

Junk culture

Fine in a fritter, but not in the inbox

One of the greatest delights – I use the word loosely – on returning home after any sort of trip away, is the Everest of mail that has accumulated.

Wading through, it’s quickly clear that the overwhelming majority of the pile is utter and complete junk.

When I’m ‘in residence’, the chances are that I’ll unlock the door every evening to find that, if there is anything on the mat, it’ll be yet more junk.

Now I know that the flats stand on the site of a scrap yard, but the amount of crap that lands through the door is just taking the piss.

Given the number of trees that have been sacrificed to tell me that there are special offers at pizza and kebab and fried ‘chicken’ outlets, plus the menus from Indian and Chinese home-delivery takeaways, you could be forgiven for thinking we must be surrounded by them, which is not quite the case.

Is there some sort of equation that balances the number of ‘jobs’ created for people to shove such junk through doors with the impact on the environment of all this printed dross?

Would the economy actually suffer if all this rubbish simply wasn't even printed any more?

Not that it’s just junk food that’s advertised on the junk mail.

We get assorted other offers and opportunities, including quite a few from varied flavours of the God Squad. There may be few old-fashioned churches in the area, but those rather more modern evangelical, all-singing, all-dancing congregations are on the rise, meeting in everything from community centres to former industrial units.

Still, at least if they’re shoving stuff through the door, they’re not actually knocking on it. Although they do that too on occasion.

There are few political callers, even at election time: perhaps they're all too embarrassed.

But junk mail is hardly limited to what comes through the letter box.

I doubt that I’m alone in getting irritated by online junk mail – or spam, as it’s often known. And it’s not limited to stuff appearing in my inbox.

Facebook has become particularly bad, with ‘suggested posts’ cluttering up timelines.

These seem to largely consist in advertising absolute tosh. The ones I get are particularly of the get-very-slim-very-quickly variety.

And I get more, presumably because a bit of software somewhere has noted that I comment on them – which is sort of amusing, because what it appears not to spot is that my approach is of commenting that they’re exploitative, snake oil bullshit.

It frankly astonishes me that these con merchants are even allowed to advertise. I suspect, though, that they’re mostly not based in the UK and are not, therefore, liable to UK laws on protection of consumers.

Still, as long as Facebook is making money out of ‘companies’ exploiting vulnerable people …

And let’s be completely clear about this: the people who will respond are vulnerable. You have to have reached a point of desperation where you’ll try anything to conform to societal expectations that are frequently completely unrealistic and even downright unhealthy to respond to such ads.

You can not, as one advert suggests, lose 30kg of “belly fat” in just a few weeks. That’s something like three of the biggest bags of cat litter I can get – and there are not many people who will be carry that as “belly fat”.

And if they were, no doctor on planet Earth would recommend trying to shed it all in something like three months by taking some crackpot supplement that’s probably about as efficacious as if they were made of the same sawdust that finds its ways into the counterfeit fags that are made in China.

Then there is all the spam for ghastly-looking leggings that apparently “burn calories”. No. No they don’t. That’s as impossible as muscle turning into fat.

How do people get to make such patently false claims – openly and in public, and then charge the vulnerable/gullible? Oh, and it’s fine to say people should exercise personal responsibility, but why not some business responsibility too?

Some businesses that make false claims get dealt with – they get dragged into court and are penalized when trading standards can get hold of them.

Yet patently false, exploitative spam is not merely allowed in social media, it’s foisted onto your personal timeline.

Now I appreciate that Facebook needs to make money – it’s not a charity. And I have no issue with that. But as far as I was aware, it was making money – and plenty of it – before it decided to foist spam on people in this way.

This isn’t about freedom of speech – it’s about patently false advertising claims.

So, what to do about this deluge of crap.

I am wondering whether to put one of those labels on the letterbox at home: the one that says: ‘no unsolicited mail’.

And if I then continue to get flyers from estate agents who desperately want me to let them sell my home, I’ll pop them back in a postbox with a fucking brick attached and the postage unpaid.

But since I use Facebook, in part at least, for work-related matters, it’s not simply a case of stopping using it.

Perhaps Facebook would like to operate a little bit of corporate responsibility, for a change? It’s a nice thought.

And while we’re at it, what about all the free bloody magazines and newspapers?

I actually got on a bus one night in London a few years ago (on the way home from a Divine Comedy gig in Camden, as it happens, with the excellent Duke Special as support) to find that the bus was almost knee deep in discarded such freebies.

Only a few mornings ago, coming down some steps near Euston station, I was faced with three people trying to shove three different publications into my hand from right, left and directly in front of me.

That was after someone standing outside WH Smith tried to hand a leaflet for weight loss.

Is all this throw-away matter indicative of a generalised junk culture? I leave the answer to you, but it does feel like it at times.

A week of supermarket food

Broadway Market is a remarkable place – even in the rain.

Last weekend was an unusual one. It started with work on Saturday covering the London leg of the TUC’s March for a Future that Works.

This was an opportunity for a new form of multitasking – emailing and walking at the same time.

I say “walking”, but given the speed of the march and its stop-start progress, it was more of an unnatural waddling gait. And I know from conversations since that it wasn’t just me.

By the end, my thighs were in a state of stiffened, screaming agony and my toes were hardly thanking me for being cramped into boots that were not designed for walking such distances.

The latter serves me right. I have a pair of Docs, but they need wearing in. And Saturday was not the occasion on which to start that process. I’ll need to spend some days with plasters strapped over my heels – or they’ll be shredded.

The day also offered a rare opportunity for trying some ‘street food’. Well, maybe not. In reality, it was a case of whatever fodder I could get for a late lunch in Hyde Park, because lugging something around all day would have been very inconvenient.

In essence, this means: ‘something in a bun’. Apart from chips, that is. Which, of course, go perfectly well between slabs of buttered bread. But such was the exception to the food-in-a-bun rule last Saturday.

I selected a van on the basis of it having the shortest queue, and selected a burger. If not on the rocks, I declined the cheese, which was a de rigueur square of plastic, and opted simply for the ketchup to add some moisture.

The bun was better than expected – it wasn’t one of those rather dismal cotton wool affairs – and the burger itself seemed as though it was proper meat, properly made.

So well done to which caterer it came from.

The Royals Parks staff deserve a mention too, for having done wonders to avoid the entire rally area being a complete quagmire after the combined rain and concert activity of the summer.

Later, back at home and slumped in a chair while The Other Half (who’d also been working, but on his backside and not his feet) cooked up a sausage dinner, it dawned that the chances of my feeling like getting up early the following morning to do a weekend food shop were remote.

The most obvious solution was to break my usual rules, and add groceries to an order from Ocado for Sunday.

With fresh food involved, I checked provenance and opted for organic as much as possible.

On Sunday itself, we had steaks from Daylesford – Ocado is now marketing their produce as a ‘farm shop’. I cooked them in the oven and they were pretty decent.

I did leeks and button mushrooms on the side: both organic; both English, but both lacking the level of flavour I’d get from my not-quite-organic greengrocer on Broadway Market.

This is interesting, as it supports my increasing belief that being organic does not, per se, produce great taste, but growing naturally and harvesting as late as possible is what does that.

Supermarkets have highly centralised systems that work against that rather than for it – which is alwo why much produce is harvested before it’s properly ready, thus cutting off the proper process of ripening.

On Tuesday, it was time for some Cornish monkfish fillet, wrapped in prosciutto and then baked for four to five minutes in an oven set at 170˚C (fan).

Summery versions of such a dish then add a delicate vine of cherry tomatoes: I doused it in a tin of organic chopped tomatoes in their own juice (and nothing else). And back into the oven it went for a further 10-15 minutes, with a check to see whether the fish was cooked through.

This worked well – tasty and moist.

On Wednesday, the remaining steak from the pack was diced and browned in lard before being removed to another plate.

Onions were chopped and then softened, together with some celery (Broadway Market celery, that is). A spoon of flour went in and was cooked through for a minute, before the contents of a bottle of ale was added, bit by bit, stirred in and, with the heat up, thickened.

Then the meat was returned to the pan, followed by some sliced carrots that had been par boiled for five minutes, and some halved potatoes that had had also been pre cooked for about the same time.

And that was fairly hearty and sustaining.

On Thursday, it was a matter of a jar of Bockwurst cooked in the usual way, with sliced onions, a few boiled spuds and some sliced cabbage on the side, plus proper German mustard.

It was, in general, a decent week from a food perspective. But the experience bolstered my understanding that it is clear that, even opting for the best possible quality that’s available, fresh fruit and vegetables from a supermarket are not as fresh as those I can get even from a once-weekly market or from any of the small local shops (mostly Turkish, in our area).

Although it’s worth noting that this past week’s leeks and mushrooms etc were considerably better than any of the veg I had in days of yore, when I actually shopped at Tesco.

I was incredibly glad to get back to Broadway Market this morning.