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How to make a perfect casserole: just add badger
Steven Morris, The Guardian
Arthur Boyt has no time for complicated new year diet plans or fashionable detox programmes. He reckons the healthiest and cheapest way to get back on track after festive overindulgence is to head out with a shovel and find a squashed badger.
Boyt, a retired biologist, has spent the past 50 years scraping weasels, hedgehogs, squirrels and even otters off roads near his Cornish home, and cooking them.
He has published recipe books and appeared on television cookery shows across the world and has now published his ideas for badger casserole.
… Boyt, 67, said: “We’ve all gone mad as usual and eating roadkill is good for the body, the environment and the pocket. It’s delicious and won’t cost much at all. All you need is some veg and herbs.”
(2 January 2008)
Boyt isn’t the only one. There is a small sub-culture devoted to the subject. And why not? -BA
Supermarket flies fish 5,000 miles from country where millions are starving
This is London
A major supermarket chain has outraged human rights activists by selling fish from Zimbabwe.
The campaigners said it is wrong to fly in food more than 5,000 miles from a country where millions are on the brink of starvation.
They are planning to mount protests at Waitrose outlets, all of which stock the Zimbabwean tilapia fillets.
… Dara Grogan, a Waitrose spokesman, said that Zimbabwean tilapia – which sells at £11.99 a kilo – is of higher quality than elsewhere and from a sustainable source.
“This is a question of trying to encourage our customers to try species that aren’t threatened but are just as tasty as cod,” she said.
“Secondly, we source the tilapia from a fair trade supplier called Lake Harvest, which is majority-owned by native Zimbabweans.
“The company and its tilapia product contribute directly to the support of 450 workers and their dependants.”
(1 January 2008)
The Invisible Ingredient in Every Kitchen
Harold McGee, New York Times
OF all the ingredients in the kitchen, the most common is also the most mysterious.
It’s hard to measure and hard to control. It’s not a material like water or flour, to be added by the cup. In fact, it’s invisible.
It’s heat.
Every cook relies every day on the power of heat to transform food, but heat doesn’t always work in the way we might guess. And what we don’t know about it can end up burning us.
We waste huge amounts of gas or electricity, not to mention money and time, trying to get heat to do things it can’t do. Aiming to cook a roast or steak until it’s pink at the center, we routinely overcook the rest of it. Instead of a gentle simmer, we boil our stews and braises until they are tough and dry. Even if we do everything else right, we can undermine our best cooking if we let food cool on the way to the table – all because most of us don’t understand heat.
(2 January 2008)
The Future of the Quik ‘N Easy Meal
Sharon Astyk, Casaubon’s Book
my job now is to think about food. That is no hardship – regular readers of this blog will know that the question of how we will go on eating is my great passion. So much so that I’m now working on book #2, co-authored with Aaron Newton, titled _A Nation of Farmers_ and coming out from New Society in spring ’09. The subject of the book is all of the agricultural acts we will need to undertake to survive and thrive in the coming decades – and on how reclaiming food – growing it and cooking it – might preserve or maybe remake our democracy. The title is drawn from Thomas Jefferson’s claim that it was a nation of independent farmers who were best able to create and sustain democracy, because personal independence made it possible for us to make moral and just choices.
My only trouble with my title is that it places so much emphasis on the growing of food, and thus distracts us from something even more central.
… how we grow food will always be secondary to how we cook and eat. If we are to survive the coming crisis, a surprising amount of it will depend on our ability to adapt our diet – and that will depend on our ability to cook and eat differently.
I suspect too many people it seems a small thing to talk about cooking, self-evident that when different things are in the stores or our gardens, we will eat differently. But I think further consideration will show that it doesn’t work that way. Consider the dual problem of hunger and malnutrition in the US. Overwhelmingly, these are problems of poverty, as you would suspect. But also, these are overwhelmingly cooking problems. That is, a number of people have shown that it is perfectly possible to eat nutritiously and cheaply – for example, that a whole grain, vegetarian, even organic and local diet is possible on a food stamps budget. No one in their right mind would rather see their kids go hungry than eat this way. So why is hunger so endemic in the US? Part of it is lack of time – single mothers and their children are among the most likely people to be hungry in the US, and they have little time to cook. Often, as someone noted on this blog recently, older siblings prepare food for younger children, and about all they can handle are boxed mac and cheese. Some of it is dietary preference.
But some of the problem is simply not knowing how to cook cheap foods.
(26 December 2007)
