I have become quite a familiar face in several of my local supermarkets amongst staff and customers alike. I make lots of enquiries about products and am quite fascinated by what people are putting into their trolleys, fortunately most people are receptive to my inquisitiveness.
Take today for example, I chatted to an Asian lady in my local Aldi who had a basket full of fresh fruit and vegetables and a free range chicken, she said that she endeavours to buy her ingredients on a day to day basis and always cooks from scratch, her skin glowed and her hair was shiny, she looked a picture of health. Counter this with the twenty something girl in front of me at the checkout shopping with her young son, without exaggeration I tell you, her items consisted of tinned meatballs, a stash of individually vacuum packed hamburgers and hotdogs, those things you microwave for 2 minutes, frozen pizzas and fizzy drinks. Not a piece of fresh fruit or a vegetable in sight and the pity of it was that those microwaveable burgers were destined for her little boy. These vacuum packed burgers include chemicals such as TBHQ, an antioxidant derived from petroleum, TBHQ helps preserve freshness but ingesting just 5 grams of TBHQ can kill, and this is but one of the awful chemicals found in processed food. Call it coincidence but the young girl was pallid and spotty, I could have wept. I would have loved to of encouraged her to ditch the processed food for some outdoor reared pork sausages and a punnet of tomatoes with which she could have doubled her quantity of meatballs for just pence more. Or some free range mince, a couple of onions and some lettuce, again, enabling her to make her own burgers. Sadly she told me she cannot cook.
And that is the sad indictment of todays society! Young women who have the time to cook but lack the knowledge or the incentive. A young friend of mine tells me she 'cooks' chilli con carne, spaghetti bolognese and chicken curry, actually the cooking amounts to adding a jar of sauce to the appropriate meat. The jars of chill sauce/bolognese/curry sauce sit on the supermarket shelves for months on end for a reason, namely because they are full of chemicals and preservatives!
The longer I write this blog the more I understand my motivation. Ok, I occasionally cheat and buy a ready made pizza or some frozen chips (I always regret it) but these things should not be staples in our diets!
When my mother married my father she bought a good housekeeping cookbook, whilst she had already learnt to cook, taught by my grandmother, she wanted to extend her cooking repertoire and mastered various recipes through trial and error. Nowadays we are bombarded with seventeen thousand new food products a year many of which can be cooked in a microwave.
Frighteningly the National Farmers' Union have concluded that the UK will import half of its food by 2040 as agricultural output fails to keep up with the rising populations high demands for food products.
As I've said many times, we now have the luxury of cheap chicken breasts, cheap mince, cheap whole chickens and burgers, these are staples in many families diets, yet not so very long ago women cooked with all manner of meat, mostly because they had a budget and an understanding and reverence for ingredients, also because they didn't have the option of choosing from overstocked supermarket shelves.
We regularly ate dishes such as liver and bacon when I was a child and whilst many young women today may find the idea of eating offal abhorrent it's worth remembering this dish is bursting with vitamins and minerals.
My friend Karen is a good old fashioned cook, she delivers hearty delicious meals reminiscent of those my mother used to make. She invited Glenn and I for dinner recently and we ate the most delicious liver and bacon. The liver, from Marks and Spencer, cost £4.50 for more than 2lb, a very economical dish.
Liver and bacon
Recipe
450g liver, sliced
25g butter
1 onion, peeled and sliced
125g free range smoked streaky bacon rashers
Vine tomatoes
1 stock cube dissolved in 500ml of boiled water
1 tablespoon of plain flour
Drizzle tomatoes with olive oil, season and place in a warm oven for 45 minutes
Heat butter in a large frying pan, add bacon and onions and cook on a medium heat for 8-10 minutes until onion is pale golden-brown and bacon is crisp
Remove and set to one side
In the same pan, fry liver 1-2 minutes each side until lightly browned, remove and set to one side
Add flour to the pan and gradually add stock, scraping up all the meaty juices
Bring to a simmer and cook until the gravy is thickened
Return liver, bacon and onions to gravy and warm through for 1-2 minutes
Serve immediately with tomatoes, potatoes and peas
This meal was so delicious I made it myself but served it with mashed potatoes
'Depending on how we spend them, our food pounds can either go to support a food industry devoted to quantity, convenience and profit - or they can nourish a food chain organised around values - like quality and health. Yes, shopping this way may cost you more money and effort, but you can begin to treat that expenditure not just as shopping but also as a kind of vote.
- Michael Pollan.
Love Donna xxxxxxxxxx
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