The aftermath

The sherry party is becoming increasingly popular, for it has a leisurely and gracious atmosphere which many people find attractive.

Oh, how times have changed. Something that was becoming increasingly popular has faded away almost completely, and I’ve never even been to one.

So, if we wanted to bring this great concept then what do we need to do?

I dug out my 1956 good housekeeping guide to find out:

Not everything changed ..

It is advisable to serve both a sweet and a dry sherry, and, if possible, a medium type also. True sherry is made from white grapes grown in the Jerez district of southern Spain; the best pale, dry sherries are usually sold under the names of Amontillado, Manzanilla and Vino de Paso, while the best of the rich, full, dark sherries are Amoroso and Oloroso. Also available are very good South African and Australian sherries, which are considerably cheaper.

Now here is something that hasn’t changed too much, Jerez still makes the best sherries in the world.

Dry sherries are at their best when served slightly chilled (stand them for a short time either on ice or in a refrigerator); the flavour of the sweet sherries, on the other hand, is best appreciated when they are served at room temperature.

This hasn’t changed either, except for the fact that nobody uses the word “refrigerator” anymore.

.. but enough has

Just in case you think that sherry is a bit of a girly drink, then don’t worry. In the fabulous 50′s they had an answer for that as well.

Some of your men guests may not particularly care for sherry, so if possible have a bottle of whisky available, also one or two refreshing “soft” drinks, especially in the summer.

They also apparently had a bit of a shortage of glassware.

If you have only just sufficient glasses, and do not wish to hire extra, it is a good idea to stick a small named label on each, so that your guests will keep the same glass the whole time.

The titbit was alive and well, and not only as a sexual diversion.

Serve titbits and savouries as for a cocktail party- have an abundant supply, and keep them small and dainty, so that they can be easily handled.

Oh, and another slight change, smoking was cool and fashionable.

Have supplies of cigarettes available at several points. in addition to well-known brands, you may like to offer the gay coloured cigarettes obtainable from the bigger tobacconists. It is a good idea to have several cigarette lighters in readiness, in preference to matches, which very quickly make the room look untidy. And finally, do have plenty of good-sized ashtrays, if you value your furniture.

My plan

There can only be one plan, I am going to revive the sherry party concept, starting right now. I’m going to plan a sherry party of my very own, and encourage others to do the same, it’s going to be huge!

So, anyone want to come?

If only they were ever this empty

Three minutes later I left the shop without any milk, partially because I had to be somewhere else and didn’t have time to queue, and partially because I had come to a sudden realisation.

Recently I have been hugely disturbed by the feeling that I might just be falling out of love with food. While I was waiting in a painfully slow line towards the checkout, I worked my way through a little mental checklist:

Do I still love eating food? ✔
Do I still love cooking food? ✔

and then the problem became clear:

Do I still love buying food? ✖

There it is then, I have had become complete disenchanted with the act of shopping for food.

A plan of action

Having come to this realisation and still being without milk (and having a five year old who loves the stuff), I decide that a plan is needed. I have to do something to change my food shopping habits so that I can start to enjoy it again. It’s been a few years (and a few countries) since I really loved shopping for food, it is just that I haven’t noticed that something has been lacking until this particular morning.

So, a plan is needed, and preferably a radical one, something that will create real change and not just a temporary buying of milk in a different place. Something a bit extreme, maybe.

NO SUPERMARKETS

I’m not about to go on a big tirade about how supermarkets are evil, because they aren’t. I’m not about to launch into a vitriolic attack on big businesses taking away custom from family businesses, etc. I believe that supermarkets have their place, and that they are bloody useful actually, I’ve just decided that I am going to try and do all of my shopping without going to one.

Day one – The quest begins

Not surprisingly given the way that this whole episode started, my first problem lay with milk.

Meat you buy in a butchers, veg in a greengrocers, wine in a wine shop, etc. but where do you get milk? I ended up getting it in the butchers of all places, but I did pay almost 30 cents a litre more than I would of in the supermarket, which was a bit painful.

The second problem was in buying anything at all. I can wander up to the checkout in any supermarket with whatever cash I happen to have and not have a problem. My local little fruit and veg man on the other hand couldn’t change my €50 note, neither could the bakery just down the road from him. Temporarily thwarted I retreated home to look for small change and contemplate which shop might be able to break my fifty for me.

A few hours later I was out on my mission again. In the off license I picked up the first Spanish chardonnay that I’ve ever tasted, which is fantastic and cost no more than anything I might of grabbed in the smarket. In the grocers I spent 10 minutes discussing different varieties of orange and came away with a big bunch of fresh mint for free (since used for Moroccan tea). I bought green assam tea in the tea shop, and got beautiful fluffy warm baguettes from the bakery just down the road.

After siesta I went on the hunt for some olive oil, I’d planned to buy some fantastic locally produced oil in a vegetable shop that I know not too far away, but when I got there they didn’t have any of that wonderful honey-yellow goodness, so I ventured just across the road to a shop specialising in ‘productos ibericos’, where after a bit of a chat and tasting of a couple of different extra virgins I came away with something fantastic, with a very mellow start and a lovely bitter aftertaste.

In less than 12 hours I had realised what it was that I was missing about food, and had enjoyed my daily shopping more than I have for months or even years.

Coming soon: Day two – the juice hunt

Parsley - Note! non curliness

The Italians use a lot of parsley, and they don’t use curly leaf.

The French use a lot of parsley, and they don’t use curly leaf.

Every well regarded chef you care to ask about parsley doesn’t use curly leaf.

Curly leaf parsley doesn’t taste of parsley, it doesn’t taste of anything. It’s terrible.

Still, somehow it happens that it’s in every shop, and somebody must be buying the bloody stuff.

Whoever you are, STOP IT!

It merits a place in my affections right next to iceberg lettuce, another flavourless thing that is used because of the way that it looks.

Good garnish though?

I’ve heard people justify the use of curly leaf parsley with the fact that it is pretty and makes a good garnish. Maybe it is pretty, but I’m of the opinion that anything on the plate should be there for taste value, and that if it happens to look good then that is an additional bonus.

Curly leaf parsley and iceberg lettuce don’t merit inclusion on any plate for taste value, no matter how green and pretty they look.

In the garden

Flat leaf parsley on the other hand is great, and I use it all of the time for all sorts of things, so I like to have plenty to hand.

I am by no stretch of the imagination a gardener, but I love having fresh herbs outside to pick at and chop up as needed.

We grow plenty of parsley (not curly obviously) and I love to rip a load out just a few days after it has broken through the soil and use it as a microherb. The little baby parsley has so much flavour, it tastes young and fresh, and it looks fantastic with an amazing vivacity of colour.

It’s also worth remembering that while the leaves are pretty, it is actually the stalks that have the most flavour, so chop them finely and throw them into things as well.

Pune - the Indian Shrewsbury

A. It certainly isn’t anything traditionally Indian. It’s the Shrewsbury biscuit (also called Shrewsbury cakes), an English recipe that dates back to the 1500′s, and is apparently one of the bits of British culture that India decided to keep after colonisation.

I haven’t been to Pune (yet), but I used to love Shrewsbury biscuits when I was a kid. For some reason though they had dropped out of my mind, I had neither thought about them or eaten one for years.

Then at a flea market the other day I found a big bundle of old cookery booklets, magazines and newspaper cuttings all for sale for a couple of euros. Despite the fact that they are in four different languages and I only understand one of them, I had to have them. There, hiding away In a good housekeeping pamphlet on ‘cookies and biscuits’ from 1956 was a simple recipe for lovely Shrewsbury biscuits.

In truth the recipe was just a bit too simple, and the resulting biccies were not nearly as exciting as I’d hoped they might be, but they did set me off on a mission. A bit of research into recipes dating back to the 1600′s, a bit of experimentation, and an unhealthy amount of biscuits eaten later, and here we are with my recipe which gives fantastic biscuits every time.

Recipe notes

There is a stark difference between more traditional (c.1600-1800) and modern recipes for Shrewsbury biscuits. The old recipes all contain a high ratio of flour to sugar, probably because sugar was hideously expensive, whilst the modern ones have much more sugar than flour. This recipe uses equal quantities of both, because I think that if you add any more sugar the biscuits become too sweet and it overpowers the flavour of the lemon.

Original recipes also contained caraway seeds, whilst modern ones generally use lemon rind. I love them with lemon, but if you are a caraway fan, then you can easily substitute it in.

If you don’t have any rose water to hand, then don’t panic. Just skip that bit and add the butter as you would normally.

Let’s get biscuity

1. Preheat the oven to 170°C and line a baking sheet with baking paper.

2. In a mixing bowl, cream together the butter and the sugar.

3. Beat the egg in a cup with a little bit of rosewater, and add it slowly into the creamed butter/sugar, mixing well as you do.

4. Sift the flour and add it to the mixture together with the grated lemon rind, then mix it well until it forms a stiff paste.

5. Turn the bowl out onto a lightly floured surface and roll it out to about 4-5mm thickness, then cut the biscuits into circles (or whatever other shapes you fancy).

6. Bake the biscuits for about 15 minutes, until they are a very pale brown, then allow to cool.

The 1977 edition

Of course, once I’d got it home, it didn’t take long at all for the temptation to try one of these retro recipes to get the better of me. I don’t bake as much as I’d like to and don’t have a wide range of baking ingredients on hand in my kitchen right at this moment, so I had a flick through to find something fast, easy and containing only things that I already had in the cupboard.

Shortbread

Everyone loves shortbread, including me. In my case it might well be because I just love butter, I can eat it on its own, which other people regularly tell me is weird. So, I love shortbread because they are a good excuse to eat huge amounts of butter and not much else and not be told that I’m a freak.

The recipe that I normally use is completely different from the Good Housekeeping method. For one thing, my usual recipe contains semolina, and for another the proportion of butter to flour that I normally use is quite a lot higher. I was a wee bit sceptical about the end product of the GH method, but curious enough to give it a go.

The GH recipe

I haven’t changed the recipe at all, just dropped off a few of the ‘alternatives’, and rewritten it slightly into a much easier to follow form.

1. Preheat the oven to 170-180°C

2. Sift the flour and salt into a mixing bowl.

3. Rub in the butter and add the sugar.

4. Continue lightly kneading the mixture until it forms a dough.

5. Roll or press out the dough into a 15-18cm circle and put it onto a papered baking sheet.

6. Crimp the edges of the shortbread using your fingers and mark across it into six to eight portions and prick neatly with a fork.

7. Bake it in the oven for about 40 minutes-1 hour, until just coloured.

8. Take it out of the oven and cool it on the baking sheet. Dredge with caster sugar and break into portions when cold.

I like the the whole rustic handmade aesthetic, but if you prefer a properly round shape then of course you can use a 15-18cm sandwich tin, greased and with the bottom lined with greaseproof paper. According to GH you can also use a shortbread mould, which I’d never heard of until today. A quick google found one for sale at Lakeland, and now I want one!

The result

Despite my scepticism, what came out of the oven was actually pretty good. Not as good as the butter heavy semolina ones that I normally make, but a pleasant suprise.

The only real problem is that they were slightly burnt, which is odd because I had my oven at the bottom of the specified temperature range, for the shortest time listed, and with the fan off. The recipe is good, super quick and super easy, and the shortbread are tasty, just keep a careful eye on them in the oven and whip them out if they look like they are getting too dark.

Anchovy fuelled Spanish cat

There are days though when the more frivolous part of your brain, along with your heart, beats all of that logical stuff into submission. It’s good that there are such days, because what kind of life would it be without them.

It was on one of these days not too long ago that I first idled the afternoon away in the best of ways. Sitting on the decking of a little seaside shack. I ate, drank, dug holes in the sand, all whilst watching the waves and enjoying light but inspiring conversation. What more could someone want?

Where I live, the temperature is dropping now, but the autumn climate means that you still get a fair few days where you can sit on the beach. The sea is just as blue as it was in mid Summer, and the burning sand feels just as hot as well. If you are willing to put up with the occasional vastly overweight and disturbingly underdressed tourist strolling past then the view is spectacular as well.

We found this little place (cafe? bar? restaurant? shack?) by accident. All that it asked of me was a willingness to overlook the fact that the toilets were last cleaned, don’t even think about refurbished, when General Franco was sill alive and kicking. For this selective blindness, I was richly rewarded.

I was born by the sea, and every time that I have lived inland, I have found that I miss it horribly. Anywhere that offers me a bit of decking and a wonky bar right on the beach sand, where I can look out to the and see all the way to the point where the blues of the sea and sky merge, has a piece of my heart from the first moment. I also love Belgian beers, and old faded signs advertising a variety of different ones can only add to the allure of a place.

Settling in with a glass of Kriek, I surveyed the random components of a touristy beach: huts, parasols, discarded cigarette ends and crisp packets, red and freckly Northern Europeans. None of the components sounds overly appetising, but it shocking how quickly this activity makes a man hungry. This man got hungry, and had no choice but to send his more linguistically gifted companion to see what can be done about something to sate his emptiness.

It turns out that the lunch on offer is a platter of tapas. Partially due to a lack of other options, the decision for tapas is a simple one, and it is duly ordered. What arrives is a surprise, a huge platter, piled up with interesting goodies: Calamari and gambas, anchovies and tortilla, olives, pieces of fried chicken, and breaded pieces of succulent white fish that Emma likes to call “proper fish fingers”. Everything is fresh and well cooked, and yummy, and is perfect washed down with a bottle of local white wine. At the end the platter for two has fed three humans and the beautiful shiny beach cat, who had been letting her appetites and desires known in a discreet yet very persistent vocal manner throughout the meal.

I’ve since learned that the cat is the resident quality control expert in this part of the beach. She has a bed on the outer ledge of the kitchen window which she regular keeps watch through, and is regularly passed ingredients to test by the chef. Highly industrious, she also undertakes wandering patrols along the other bars in the area. This fish freshness expert is more than slightly picky, and you can test if your fish or seafood is fresh by offering a piece for inspection. If she deigns to eat it, then you can be sure that it is from today’s catch, and cooked only moments go.

After coffee for adults and ice cream for the child came the moment to head back to home and desk. I’d happily wasted away four and a half hours achieving nothing, except for some serious cleansing of the soul. I’d also learned to speak a bit of Spanish cat, and can now miaow ‘anchovy’ perfectly.

I’ve been back for similar afternoons a few times since, and I’ll make sure to find the time for plenty more of them. I suggest everyone else should do the same whenever they can.

Apart from the addition of content, the site has undergone a lot of cosmetic changes, and has a new search system which is much better than the standard WordPress search.

In a nod towards the fact that the whole future of the internet seems to be based around social networking, each post contains a tinyurl, and buttons to share the content on the most popular social networks. From the front page, you can subscribe to the new johnonfood newsletter, and follow John on twitter.

Due to the fact that the site has been getting more and more traffic, there have also been a lot of changes to the backend to improve the speed at which the site runs. Static images are now offloaded to a CDN (Content Distribution Network), and the whole site is heavily cached to reduce the load on the server.

There are a lot more changes in the pipeline which will be appearing very soon indeed.

The answer to all troubles?

The perfect example is that on the day that I was diagnosed with testicular cancer, the immediate reaction to the news from my grandmother was “I’ll put the kettle on, I’m sure you’d like a cup of tea”. Right at that moment there were actually few things that I desired less than a cup of tea, but I just didn’t have the heart to say so.

It may well be a national stereotype and a horrible cliché, but I have to admit that it really is hard to think of many things that are as calming, as satisfying, and as easily affordable as a good cuppa.

A ‘good’ cuppa

Herein lies the problem, whilst a good cup of tea is a wonderful thing, I have also been socially conditioned to never drink a good cup of tea.

With the exceptions of India and Kenya, wherever I travel, the tea that I am offered invariably comes from a tea bag, which is full of a dust that gives itself up easily when submerged in water, but really doesn't taste of anything much at all.

Despite the fact that they proudly proclaim themselves as a nation of tea lovers, the English are the worst of all, supermarket teabags generally bought because they are the cheapest are the order of the day, and they often taste quite appalling.

The strangest thing is that I've either never realised, or never stopped to think about the fact that what I drink is actually total crap. The reason that it is strange, is that I spend a fortune on shopping for food and drink, and I pay very careful attention to every ingredient that I buy.

I read about and go to speciality shops to buy coffee. I can taste the difference between good and bad coffee, as well as more subtle variations from different regions, and if it isn't great, then I don't want to drink it. Why is it then, that I don't have the same pickiness, why actually do I have total indifference to the quality of the tea that I buy.

I'm not alone, apparently the population of the UK drank more than 200,000,000 cups of tea a day last year. That's a hell of a lot of tea, and I really wonder how much of it is actually worth drinking. Approximately 3% of the tea sold in the UK is loose leaf, the only way to make a really decent cup, which means that the vast majority of people settle for tasteless and uninspiring brews like I have.

My resolution

My tastebuds have recently had some decent tea passing over them, and they have dictated that I have to do something, so I’m making a simple resolution.

From now on I’m going to apply the same rule to tea as I do to everything else that I put in my mouth. Get the best that I can afford, and if it doesn’t taste fantastic then don’t bother with it at all.

The answer

In my quest for the perfect cuppa, I should start out by avoiding all of the Tetley and other supermarket bought teabags, because teabags are evil, and no matter how good the quality of tea inside them will never make a good cup because they do not let the leaves swell and expand.

I then need to start making tea properly, and since I’ve consistently bought and drunk crap tea throughout my adult life, I am probably not the best person to tell anyone how to do that.

The lovely Henrietta Lovell, aka the rare tea lady, is the perfect person to provide some answers, as you can see in the following video, with written instructions on her website here.

Where to buy good tea

I currently live in Spain, and I’m going to have a good search around my local area for a decent tea supplier.

For anyone living in the UK, it’s fairly easy. You could do a lot worse than pointing your web browser at Henrietta’s company website: Rare Tea Company, or Postcard Teas, and having a look through their wide selection.

You don’t necessarily need to spend a fortune to get better quality tea, if you don’t want to splash out on one of the speciality teas on those websites, then you will already see an improvement in taste by buying loose leaf tea from the supermarket.

I’ve recently subscribed to a new website which gets people to record what tea they are drinking and then give it a rating and tasting notes. Checking what other people are saying about the taste is always a good idea before buying anything new. You can find the site at steepster.com, it’s free to join and really quite fun.

Garlic is good, and confit garlic...

Garlic is one of the most popular ingredients in the world, it grows everywhere and is used in virtually all cuisines. Garlic has a huge number of pluses, but it needs to be used carefully, otherwise it can end up making a dish too sharp or bitter, and it can overpower subtler ingredients.

Confit garlic is a good way to overcome those problems, it has a mellower and more subtle taste than raw garlic, but can be used in all of the same ways.

I really like garlic, and I love confit garlic. You can do just about anything with it, substitute it for fresh garlic in any recipe, just use double the amount.

Personally, I like to add it to pasta sauces, make a simple dip by combining it with natural yoghurt and lemon juice, make the best garlic butter in the world, or just squish it straight onto hot toast.

Making confit garlic also has an additional bonus of ending up with a fantastic garlic infused oil as a byproduct.

What is confit?

The French word confit literally means conserved, and is most often applied to duck or other meat that has been slowly cooked in its own fat.

Things, like garlic, which don’t have their own fat can be slowly cooked in fat or oil for a similar result. For this confit garlic recipe, we are going to use olive oil.

Ok, then let them confit

There are a couple of different ways of making confit garlic, some people do it in a pan on the hob, but I prefer to do it in the oven. Once you have peeled the garlic you just throw it in and forget about it.

Absolutely nothing is difficult here. The only hassle is peeling all of the garlic cloves, I know that you can buy pre-peeled garlic cloves in Asian shops, but I’ve never tried them.

1. Preheat your oven to 90°C.

2. Peel all of the garlic cloves.

3. Place the peeled garlic cloves in a small oven proof dish, and pour in enough oil to just cover them.

4. Bake the garlic for about 2 hours.

You can store the garlic in the oil for about a month in the fridge, and once you have finished the garlic you are left with the lovely garlic infused oil, which is perfect for adding to salad dressings.

Use garlic to get rid of this little bugger.

Despite the fact that it tastes fantastic, and is incredibly healthy for humans, a lot of insects don’t have the same opinions and reactions to it.

While I feel a bit sorry for aphids, etc. that they can’t experience the great joys of garlic, it does make it even more useful to us, because we can make a very effective natural pesticide out of it.

This particular concoction will kill aphids, mosquitos and onion flies amongst other things.

The ingredients

The trickiest bit of this whole process is finding the ingredients. Aside from the garlic you will need fish emulsion and mineral oil.

Fish emulsion

Fish emulsion is a fertiliser that is produced from the fluid remains of fish that has been processed to make fish oil and fish meal. It is completely organic and has a high nitrogen content.

The biggest problem with fish emulsion is that it comes accompanied by a pretty minging smell. You can buy deoderised versions but they aren’t completely fragrance free.

Fish emulsion is pretty easy to find in any decent garden centre. It’s quite inexpensive and because it is a concentrate a 500ml bottle will last for ages.

I can’t imagine why you’d really want to, but if you would prefer to make your own fish emulsion rather than buying it, then you can find a good article on how to do it by clicking here: Make fish emulsion

Mineral oil

Mineral oil is a clear odourless liquid that is a by product of the distillation of oil into petrol. It is used for all kinds of things, from protecting wooden surfaces to medical uses as a laxative or emollient.

It’s really easy to get hold of mineral oil, you can buy it in any pharmacy, most beauty shops, cookware shops, and also in some supermarkets. It’s inexpensive and available in bottles of various sizes. If you have the option, then pay slightly more and get ‘food grade’ mineral oil, you are going to be spraying it on things you might want to eat later after all.

How to make it

1. Peel and roughly chop the garlic, put it into a container with the mineral oil and leave it to soak for 24 hours.

2. Dissolve the fish emulsion in about half a litre of cold water, add the garlic/oil solution to it and stir well.

3. Strain the liquid through a sieve into a glass container and store it until needed.

The pesticide will keep for quite a while in a cool dark place, but make sure that you don’t store it in a metal container because a chemical reaction will take place.

How to use it

1. Give the container of pesticide a good shake, because mineral oil is not soluble in water and the mix will have separated while it has been standing.

2. Dilute your solution with water at a ratio of 1:20.

3. Spray using a normal plant sprayer, remembering to shake it every so often so that the mineral oil doesn’t separate out.

The Negroni - A classic cocktail

Apart from the fact that everyone (except me) seems to love it, there is another good thing about this drink. The Negroni is surely one of the simplest cocktail recipes to remember ever. There is only one rule to remember – it’s equal parts. Equal parts of gin, Campari and sweet vermouth.

Questionable history

There are two popular stories about the origins of the Negroni. The first is that it was invented by General Pascal Olivier Count de Negroni, a Corsican living in France to aid digestion.

The second and more popular story is that the drink was invented at Caffè Casoni, Florence in 1919, when Count Camillo Negroni asked the bartender to make his favourite drink, the Americano with gin in place of the traditional soda.

Wherever it was born, the Negroni has grown up to be a classic cocktail. You can find it just about anywhere, and anyone should be able to make it. Somehow it doesn’t always taste right though, the problem is that if the proportions of the ingredients are even slightly out then it throws the whole drink out of kilter.

Dangerous

Although you are only ending up with what seems like a small drink, don’t be tempted to make it bigger. Bear in mind that this drink contains nothing but high strength alcohol ingredients, and it can be a bit dangerous. It’s not one of those things that make you instantly feel pissed, but it’s a creeper, you’ll think you are fine until you decide to stand up.

The garnish question

The traditional garnish for a Negroni is a lemon twist, which is unusual, because the traditional garnish for just about every other drink that contains Campari is some kind of orange.

I like to use an orange twist, but lemon also works, it’s really up to you.

What to do

I’ve included a dash of orange bitters in this recipe. It’s not part of the classic recipe, but I think that it enhances the flavours of the other ingredients.

1. Prechill a glass.

2. To a mixing glass add plenty of big ice.

3. Add the ingredients to the mixing glass.

4. Stir well and strain into the prechilled glass.

5. Garnish with an orange twist.

Clementiney goodness!

Taking a tip from the Italians, I reckon that you can’t go too far wrong if you start off with an aperitivo, a drink designed to sharpen the appetite for the meal ahead.

There are a few classic aperitivos, with the best known probably being the Negroni. The problem is that I don’t really like Negronis, so I had a bit of a search and play and found something that I really do like.

Created by Paul Mant at Quo Vadis in London this drink has it all. The bitterness of the Campari is balanced out with the sweetness of the simple syrup and the citrusy taste of the orange juice.

Like the Negroni, this drink contains Campari, but that is where the similarity ends. It’s lighter, sweeter, and has effervescence from the sparkling wine.

Notes on ingredients

I like to make this drink with cava, but you could also use champagne or prosecco. Whichever sparkling wine you choose, the most important thing is that it should be as dry as possible. If you are using something a bit sweeter, then you will need to reduce the amount of simple syrup in the recipe.

Mant’s original recipe calls for clementine juice, but if you don’t have any then you can just use the juice from regular oranges. For the sake of presentation, the drink should really be finely strained from the shaker into the glass, but at home I prefer to drink it with the bits of orange still floating around it in.

The recipe

1. Pre chill a rocks glass or champagne flute, and put some big ice into your cocktail shaker.

2. Add everything except for the cava to the shaker and give it a good shake.

3. Finely strain the drink into the chilled glass.

4. Top up the glass with cava, and garnish with a twist of orange zest.

5. Sit back and watch the lovely colour for a few seconds before enjoying the perfect start to your meal.

As tasty as it is unpretty

Bigos isn’t either of those, it looks like an unappetising mess with lumps of fatty meat swimming in a strange brown water, and it smells like something you might run a mile from (especially while it is cooking), but the taste, oh the taste, more than makes up for it.

This is not something that you are likely to find on any fine dining menu, and it is tricky to imagine how you could present it to look like Michelin star food, but when it tastes like this, who cares.

Bigos and the bleak midwinter

The Polish winter isn’t the most hospitable climate in the world. Fields carpeted with snow and ice covered trees glistening in the crisp wintry air can be breathtakingly beautiful, but they aren’t the best conditions for growing anything very much.

The solution to the lack of fresh produce has always been to pickle, smoke, salt, and otherwise preserve fruit, vegetables, meats and fish.

Apart from the fact that you can’t find anything much fresh, there is also the fact that when it is 28 degrees below zero outside, you really want some meaty warming food inside you.

Which leads us neatly into bigos, a mixture of pickled cabbage, dried mushrooms, and smoked meats, which is very meaty and hearty and warms you right up right away.

A million variations

Like traditional food the world over, every grandmother and aunt in Poland will give you a different recipe (or two) for bigos, and everyone will staunchly defend the one that they ate in childhood as the best in the land.

I haven’t tried every variation of bigos in the whole of Poland, but since I love the stuff, I have tried quite a few. Of all those that I have sampled, my favourite comes from ciocia (aunt) Karolina, and the recipe that follows comes from her.

Some parts of the recipe may seem quite vague. This is due to the fact that the ingredients are so variable, and will take different lengths of time to cook every time you make the dish. After you have prepared it a few times you will learn to judge when it is and isn’t the right moment to add the next ingredient, or how long to simmer something for.

Notes on ingredients

Polish kapusta kiszona is very simply cabbage preserved in salt. In most of the rest of the world, what you will be buying is German sauerkraut. The sauerkraut is pretty much the same thing, but you should be careful to buy one without the anything added to it, i.e. carrots or white wine.

Both the pork and the beef should be tougher cuts of meat with a good amount of fat in them. If you have anything too delicate or too lean then it will disintegrate during the long cooking time of the dish.

You can use either smoked or unsmoked bacon, but smoked is better as it adds an extra dimension of flavour to the whole dish. Like the other meats the bacon should have a decent proportion of fat in it. Note that you need a joint of bacon, not slices.

The best ham to use is a pack of offcuts from your local butcher or supermarket, then you don’t even really need to chop it up later.

Ideally, the sausage should be lightly smoked, but if you can’t find one then any decent pork sausage will do.

In Poland, you would use grzyby leśne, which you’ll find in any supermarket and are a mixture of dried forest mushrooms. You can probably find something similar just about anywhere, but make sure that they are wild forest mushrooms and not something like champignon as they simply don’t have enough flavour.

Let’s do it then

1. Put the dried mushrooms in a bowl with enough warm water to cover them completely, and leave them to soak.

2. Fry the pork and beef in half of the fat until it is browned. Add the sliced onions, cover and braise until the meat is half cooked.

3. Squeeze the excess liquid out of the sauerkraut, either using your hands, or put it in a colander and press it down with a wooden spoon.

4. Put the sauerkraut and bacon together in a large pan with a little water, some allspice and the bay leaves. Bring it to the boil, and then turn it down and let it simmer.
   There are a couple of important things to note at this point. Firstly that the finished dish should be quite thick and not swimming in liquid, and that you will be adding wine as well as liquids from the mushrooms and the meat a bit later, so you should add just enough water now to prevent the cabbage from burning and allow the bacon to boil.
   Secondly, it is important not to add any salt to the dish at all until the cabbage is completely cooked, otherwise it will prevent the cabbage from softening.

5. When the bacon is half cooked, remove it, and leave the cabbage on the heat.

6. Strain the mushrooms, and cut them into slivers, then add both the mushrooms and the water they were soaked in to the cabbage.

7. Cut the cooked pork and beef, together with the bacon into medium sized chunks, and add them all together with the onions and any juices from the meat to the cabbage.

8. Cook over a medium heat till the cabbage and the meat are cooked through and soft. Sauerkraut has a tendency to stick, so it is very important not to use too high a heat, and to remember to give it a good stir from time to time.

9. While it is cooking, cut the sausage into half moon slices, and the ham into cubes, and fry them in the rest of the fat. When they are cooked, add them to the cabbage, together with the remaining spices and red wine.

10. Bring the whole thing to the boil, and then lower the heat and simmer for about 15 minutes.

At this point your bigos is finished and ready to eat, and it should taste wonderful. If you want to be really traditional and really get the very most flavour into the dish though, you have a lot more work to do.

(optional)

Traditionally bigos was cooked, cooled down and then reheated and recooled for seven days in a row in order to ensure the perfect mingling of all flavours.

11. After cooking allow your bigos to cool completely and then refrigerate it overnight.

12. The following day slowly and gently bring the whole thing up to the boil and then turn the heat down and simmer it for 10 minutes. Take it off the heat and let it cool completely before putting it back into the fridge for the night.

13. Repeat for another 5 days.

(end optional)

14. Drink either with shots of good quality frozen vodka or a bottle of the same red wine that you put into the bigos itself.

This is not a meal.

The topic of this particular little expulsion of vitriol though, is something that bothered me for as long as I remember.

Saladpushers

Maybe it would be good to start by defining what I mean by the term.

I’m not talking about the people who try to use some kind of health guilt trip to make you order/eat a healthy salad instead of a juicy bloody steak served with potatoes drowning in butter (although they also bother me).

What I’m talking about is a certain section of the female population (this is not sexist, just observation) who go out to places where they could have the most fantastic food and order a ‘light’ or ‘healthy’ salad. They then don’t actually eat any of it except for one lettuce leaf, but spend the next half an hour using their cutlery to manoeuvre the rest of the food around the plate. They don’t choose the restaurant, they generally don’t pay for the meal, and they don’t enjoy it, so why are they there?

Now…

Healthy eating is good.

Sensible portion control is also good.

But…

The whole point of going out for a meal is for pleasure, it’s not about sustenance, it’s about enjoyment.

It might be lovely to have a very slim sexy girlfriend who never eats, but don’t take her out to dinner and waste the time and money. Instead, keep her at home, feed her salad leaves like an overgrown rabbit and spend the time that you would normally allocate to going out and enjoying a lovely meal to shagging like overgrown rabbits.

An insult to the kitchen

When you are going to a restaraunt, you should order something that you wouldn’t or couldn’t make at home. That could be because you don’t have the skill, or because you don’t have access to the range or quailty of ingredients, or because you don’t have the specific equipment needed to make a dish. Or, it could simply be because you don’t have the time.

You should order a dish that thought and care has gone into creating, and then, then you should eat it. You should savour every flavour and every texture, you should appreciate the quality of the produce, the thought that has gone into the development of the dish, and the skill and sweat of everyone in the kitchen that it has just come out of.

What you should not do is look at it, push it around your plate a bit, find a fake reason why you don’t like it and return it to the kitchen where the chef will immediately launch a huge inquisition into why the dish wasn’t good enough, and some poor commis will probably get a heap of shit for absolutely no reason at all.

An insult to the starving

Personally I’m quite often struck with a major moral dilemna. If I go somewhere to eat and the portion of food is larger than I would normally choose to eat, then what should I do?

I don’t want to eat too much for a couple of reasons.

Firstly I don’t like the physical feeling of being stuffed with food, it’s not comfortable, and why would I want to pay for sitting there feeling bloated and slightly sick.

Secondly I don’t want to gain weight and be fat. I know that I drink too much and the calories in wine are already expanding my waistline, and I don’t want to compound that expansion any more than I have to by eating food that I don’t really want.

On the other hand, I hate leaving food on the plate when there is nothing wrong with it. I’ve lived and worked in Africa and I’ve seen people literally starving to death. I find throwing food away, whether it is half a portion left on a plate, or even worse because you have bought more than you needed and it goes off in the fridge, highly offensive.

What might be a bit of greenery that you aren’t paying for to a saladpusher, is the difference between life and death to some people.

Is it just me?

No, it would appear not to be just me being all twitchy and moody.

Here’s another (female) point of view, that agrees with mine:

“I grew up in communism. I was never hungry but food was scarce to come by and was to be respected as it represented hours and hours of somebody’s time given to standing in a queue or standing over a stove in order to prepare that jam.

Next time, suggest the gym, hey?”

It's far sexier than it looks.

What you might not know is that beetroot crops up in mythology and legend all over the place.

You probably also don’t realise that beetroots are all about sex and love.

Here then, in absolutely no particular order at all, are ten things that you may or may not have know about the red veg much beloved by Central and Eastern Europe.

1. Eating a lot of beetroot turns your pee pink/red, eating more makes your poo pink as well.

2. The Lupanare – official brothel of Pompeii (the brothel still stands, despite the best efforts of Vesuvius in 79AD), has its walls adorned with pictures of beetroots, amongst the frescoes of people busy at it.

3. You can use beetroot juice to measure acidity. When added to an acidic solution it turns pink, but when it is added to an alkali it turns yellow.

4. The Oracle at Delphi (Greek mythology, not software companies) claimed that beetroot was second only in mystical potency to horseradish, and that it was worth its weight in silver.

5. Betanins – the natural red coularants in beetroot, are used in the food industry to colour a number of other things as well, they help to make the red redder in tomato pastes, various sauces, jams, and even ice cream.

6. To “take favors in the beetroot fields” was a popular euphemism for visiting prostitutes in the early 20th century.

7. Beetroot contains betaine, which in other forms is used to help treat depression, and trytophan, the feel good chemical in chocolate.

8. In many cultures the belief persists that if a man and a woman eat from the same beetroot then they will fall in love.

9. If you boil beetroots in water, and then massage the water into your scalp each night, it works as an effective cure for dandruff.

10. In 1975, during the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, cosmonauts from the USSR’s Soyuz 19 welcomed the Apollo 18 astronauts by preparing a banquet of borscht (beetroot soup) in zero gravity.