New culinary experience

By Romilla Arber, 8th of April 2010 | id: 87 | 0 comments

This month for the first time I arranged for fruit and vegetable box deliveries from Abel and Cole. One fruit box and one vegetable box arrives every Wednesday and I do what I can with the raw materials. Come the summer I will be using my own vegetables but until then it is fun opening the boxes to see what I have to use for that week. I was an ardent Waitrose shopper but since they have introduced their essentials range they have stopped stocking a lot of the items that made them different from the other supermarkets. In my local branch the shelves are half empty on a Monday morning which is when I go shopping. More often than not there are no eggs at all. So anyway I have voted with my pocket which is what we can all do to tell big business that it's bottom line is not the only thing that matters. I feel it is important that as much of my food budget goes to small and local producers. The only down side with the fruit box is that I have too many kiwi fruit. I tried making a kiwi fruit loaf last week but to be honest it wasn't very nice. The best thing is just to eat them as they are. They are packed with vitamin C and potassium.

My other new culinary experience this month was to get my hands on some wild boar cross. I had a rolled shoulder from Laverstoke Farm for Easter Sunday, and in a world of too many over used superlatives, it truly was a taste sensation. Seasoned with salt and pepper and then slowly cooked in a low oven it made a memorable meal. There was too much meat for one meal but I used the leftovers a couple of days later in a Thai noodle dish. Apparently Raymond Blanc's last supper, according to the Observer newspaper, would be a 'slow roasted' shoulder of wild boar, with a red wine jus. If he was cooking it would probably be my ideal last supper as well.

Spring seems to have very definitely got it's feet under the table, at long last. I will know for definite that it is here when I see the first spikes of asparagus poking through the earth. My body is ready for some different food as I am now tired of root vegetables, which are great friends to the cook during those long winter months but have now overstayed their welcome.

I have been enjoying Raymond Blanc's Kitchen Secrets on television. You can really learn from someone like him, who has cooked professionally all his life but is able to pass on invaluable tips without changing too much the essence of his style. He has not tried to get involved in the

What did the generals have for dinner the night before the charge of the light brigade?

By Romilla Arber, 9th of February 2010 | id: 85 | 2 comments

I have often thought that an interesting cookbook to write would be one which recreated recipes from great meals in literature or history. I wonder what the generals had for dinner the night before the charge of the light brigade, or what French delicacy Napoleon ordered before Waterloo. From The Last Supper by Leonardo de Vinci it is hard to see what Jesus and the disciples are eating for their supper but the fact that they get together to eat and drink before Jesus tells them that one in their number will betray them is hugely significant. Eating and drinking in a social setting is an intimate and significant occasion however well you know the people with whom you are breaking bread.

I have always found the description of meals and food in literature very interesting. They are age old literary devices that help to pull us in and engage us in the book and the characters. A common setting in children's literature is mealtime. I remember reading Arthur Ransome books when I was young and particularly enjoying the accounts of the eggs and bacon sizzling in the frying pan at the end of particular adventures. Remember how wonderful it felt in The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe when the children meet the beavers for the first time and settle down to a lunch of fresh river fish followed by steaming, hot, sticky marmalade roll. Once again you imagine the frying pan

Little Things Matter

By Romilla Arber, 7th of January 2010 | id: 84 | 0 comments

The country is covered in snow. I am staying at home today with the children as the last few days of the holiday unwind. Piles of wet clothes get deposited by the back door as they come in from the garden when another half hour of cold snow play comes to an end.
Days like this make you realise that little things do matter, so much in fact that they can't be little things. During the day our thoughts stray to what might be on the table for the evening meal. We can luxuriate in good English comfort food at this time of year. Banish worries about weight gain and be confident in the fact that if you are reasonably active and that you eat what the season provides and what your body craves, and that you don't over indulge then your diet is pretty much spot on. Our cold English soil still offers us leeks, parsnips, swedes, carrots, kale, turnips and cabbages. Marry these vegetables with rich stews, pies, roasts or make thick winter soups and you will find January much more enjoyable than you ever thought it could be.

The government launched it's 20 year food programme yesterday and warned of the dangers of continuing as we are with our food production, with the heavy dependency that a western diet places on meat and the fact that there will be less water around as the decade progresses. We can make a difference and these aren't difficult choices or actions that we need to take. All the choices we can make that will make a difference will also make our lives better and more enjoyable. We can all grow more food from home, which is better for our purses, our bodies and our general well-being. We can all choose to stop buying processed food and adopt a rule that we only put real food into our bodies. This will in turn make us more healthy, in the long term reduce the amount of money the government spends on health care needed as a result of poor diet and of course it will save us money in the supermarket. We can all also start to rely much more on what our countryside and shores provide us with. Eat more rabbit, pheasant and venison. Eat gurnard, pollack and mussels, as our shores provide these items in plentiful amounts. These are not difficult actions, but they are life changing actions that will have far reaching consequences.