Sorry....

Primarily I must apologise for the lack of posts over the past few months. The truth is that I have simply been far too busy to even turn around twice in a day and my ranting about food has had to take a back seat. However, I am back and a little bit cross.
A few weeks ago I was driving home to a pile of marking when, on the radio there was a report on the quality of Hospital food.
Hospital food, like Airline food has been the butt of jokes for generations and I understand that an NHS Hospital is not an hotel but there can be no excuse for feeding people who are poorly or recovering from operations poor food.
Just to reiterate, here's the logic path: People in hospitals are in need of care and cost the country a great deal of money. So, it is in everyone's interest (especially the patient's) that they get well quickly. So, in order to help this healing they should be fed high quality and appropriate nutrition. So, we should be supplying hospitals with fantastic cooks, producing great meals. So, the patient spends a shorter period of time in hospital. So, each patient is less costly to the exchequer.
To me this seems like the simplest equation in the world, though there are those who I am sure have much "bigger" brains than I who just do not see it. Several celebrity chefs have tried to make a difference in this area and whilst their efforts are to be applauded, the overall effect seems to be small.
Here comes the sadness - Most of the food production in hospitals is done by large. highly diversified companies who also tender for the cleaning contract, the waste disposal contract and other services to the hospital trust. Often these are rolled into one contract so supplying the nutrition to people who are trying to get better very quickly becomes a set of sums on a proposal (probably based on cost reduction) rather that a drive to improve the "wellness" of individuals.
If I were a senior medical professional I would probably be pulling out the last remnants of my hair at the fact that I was providing (by and large) first class healthcare with the handicap of poor nutrition.
It is high time that we stopped racing to the lowest cost with these issues and climbed our way to the highest benefit.  

Let the madness begin!

It is that time of year again, we are less than a month away from the Christmas dinner! A host (some heavenly some not) of food writers will be tell us how to have a stress free Christmas day with their easy recipes and methods. So here's the truth. Christmas dinner is just a roast dinner on a slightly larger scale. It may require a little more planning than your average Sunday fare but lets not get things out of all proportion here.
However it would be remiss of me not to offer some advice on how to produce the Yule feast in a relatively stress free way and on a reasonable budget.
So today I have two bits of advice for you:
1. If you have a lot of guests for the big day, order your meat now. Many years ago, the Beautiful Wife and I were planning to have a duck for the roast. I left it till the 24th to buy the bird and found myself trouping round the whole of North London to find one - not a particularly pleasant occupation on Christmas Eve,
2. Buy chestnuts now. They will be sold out when you go on the 20th to do your last shop. The vacuum packed ones are fine for the purpose of sprout re-invention.

Sometimes it's not all about the food.

The beautiful wife is a Brown owl to a local brownie pack and last weekend was their annual pack holiday. It was a joy to see so many young people with healthy and unfussy appetites. In fact most of the Brownies ate adult portions and then came back for seconds. Fresh air, excitement and activity are wonderful sharpeners of the appetite. However, it is not the quality or quantity of the food or indeed the ferocity with which it was eaten which will stay with me from this weekend.
Sometimes you encounter a situation where you know instinctively that, for a few minutes, everything is "right". God is in his heaven, the stars are aligned, the fates are on your side, however you want to describe it. This sense of "right" is not a learned response, it comes from within, a sense of settled calm and comfort; you simply know that all is as good as it could possibly be in that moment. You also know that you would not choose to be anywhere else in the world.
On the Saturday evening the Brownies had a fireside picnic. At the Guiding centre where they stayed there was a fire pit on some open ground and the Brownies made their choice of sandwich grabbed a piece of fruit, a cake bar and a bag of crisps and headed out to sit around it and eat their Tupper (A cross between Tea and Supper, I'm told).
The adults managed the fire and sat on benches among the youngsters who, all in a circle tucked in. One of the Young Guiders, a 19 year old on a gap year, brought out a guitar and as soon as the food was finished she played and we all sang. The weather had been fine and there was the tiniest hint of autumn's chill but the fire soon saw that off and there we sat in the shadow of the beautiful Chiltern Hills. The most glorious sunset was taking place around us, lines of pink and blue and grey thrown across the sky. For one precious hour, everything was perfect, so perfect that it made me want to cry. Lifelong memories were made that evening and I, for one have never enjoyed a plain ham sandwich more.

.....mellow fruitfullness....

I have always loved this time of year. As a child, whilst September meant the end of the summer holidays it also meant the start of the rugby season and I considered that was a fair price to pay for spending hours working my way through Chaucer or drawing Ox-bow lakes. If early spring is the hungry period then surely late summer is the period of full bellies. There is an abundance of food available at this time of year, some of it is even free (think blackberries). But September can be a month of contradictions. The two photos above illustrate this point perfectly: The tomatoes were picked from the tiny garden of Corner Cottage and they are to me the symbol of a fine summer yet it was so chilly last night that the only option was toad in the hole!

Preserving the summer to eat in the winter.

A few weeks ago I ranted about the fact that we do not need fresh strawberries on our Christmas dinner tables. Much better, I suggested, to make jam. In a very rare display of following my own advice I have been producing preserves with any fruit that croses my path. It started with some raspberries from the kitchen gardener and then came the visit to my mother in Devon.
My mum hails from the Northeast and whilst living in the South for 55 years has softened the accent it has not changed that region's unending ability to understate almost anything.
So, when we arrived and were told to pick the remainder of the blackcurrants, redcurrants and goosberries left in the garden, I felt a slight feeling of diquiet. "There can't be very many left" she asserted.
A few hours later and having avoided the wasps and the rather agressive gooseberry thorns I returned to the kitchen with4lbs of blackcurrants, over 3lbs of gooseberries and just under 2lbs of redcurrants.
On our return to Corner Cottage I set to with the fruit and some sugar. We now have four jars of gooseberry jam, 9 jars of blackcurrant jam and 2 jars of redcurrant jelly. Adding this haul of conserves to a couple of jars of raspberry jam made earlier in the summer and we are set until next summer arrives.

The joy of the summer holiday

One of the great joys of being a teacher is the summer holidays. They are not quite as long as they seemed when we were young but they do provide a proper break from the battle to educate. One of the nicest aspects of this time off is the fact that it provides the opportunity to take lunch rather than grabbing lunch.  For the beautiful wife an I this is often some homemade bread and a lump of pate or maybe some cheese. This is sometimes accompanied with a salad or two and followed by fruit. There is no better way to use up cold cuts from a roast or any over left overs than an idle lunch which is not limited by time. We have been working hard in the garden at Corner Cottage during the last few weeks so lunch has been taken at any time from 11.45 to 3pm.
A few days ago I made the following recipe for lunch. It's based on an idea from the food phenomenon that is Rick Stien.
Take five or six ripe tomatoes and cut them in half. Place them on a baking sheet and smear some finely chopped garlic on the cut side of the toms. Season them well and pop them in a low to medium oven and allow them to dry in the heat. After about an hour they should look like jelly when gently squeezed with a pair of tongs. (Do not do this with your fingers, the juice of the tomatoes will be hotter than the sun!) Take the toms out of the oven and allow them to cool a little. Take a sheet of puff pastry and roll it to the same size as a heavy baking sheet. Cut a magin around the outside of the pastry without cutting completely through the pastry. Place all of the toms on the inner area of the the pastry and sprinkle over a blue crumbly cheese. Bake in a medium oven until the pastry is cooked and the cheese is all melted. Cut up into "hungry man" slices and serve with salad.

Long time no write...

It has been a while since I have written and there is so much to write about! So in the next two or three weeks I will write more but many of my blogs may be shorter as a consequence. The Academic year is drawing to a close and this leaves those of us who teach in a position of looking forward to six weeks of holiday. I love teaching and couldn't see myself doing anything else but the idea of being able to get up (at a reasonable hour), go shopping (somewhere nice) and then spending the late morning producing something lovely for lunch is very appealing at the moment.
A couple of weeks ago I visited the Haddenham Vale Harvest market (First Saturday of every month) and picked up two products that blew my socks off!
The first was a pack of sausages from Orchard View Farm - The initial idea was to promote these sausages to the role of Toads and pop them in their respective Holes but the weather has been so hot of late that the idea of Toad in the Hole covered in onion gravy was not as appealing as it might have been in January. They ended up sliced, still hot and cast over a salad of leaves and beetroot (from the Kitchengardener's (AKA The Mmusician) plot. Incidentally, he has recently joined the blogosphere and writes about his vegetable adventures. Just because I had some in I threw some chunks of feta over the salad and dribbled over a lemony dressing. With all these flavours going on, the sausages still stole the show. The rebirth of the British sausage has been gathering pace over the last few years and long may it continue!
The second product was some UK made Bresaola from the guys at Egg House Charcuterie. This was not what was expected at all. For those of you who expect your bresaola to be even coloured, circular and wrapped in cling film this is not for you (Which means all the more for me!). These were beautiful, delicate strips of Hereford beef full of real beef flavour. The term "melt in the mouth" is overused and had become a bit of a cliche in recent years, but this beautiful meat did melt in the mouth leaving a long and gentle flavour on the palate - fabulous! What's more the beef grew up within a few miles of Corner Cottage.
I hope this market is a success for the stallholders because I, for one, would happily see it turn into a fortnightly or even weekly event. The fact that it is a half hour walk from Corner Cottage makes it the perfect Saturday morning adventure.