We Bought The Farm

Dear Francesca

It took me a while to get to it, but I'm really enjoying Dear Francesca, by Mary Contini. It's a literary cookbook, billed as "an Italian journey of recipes, recounted with love." And that sums it up pretty well. The recipes are interspersed with Mary Contini's reflections on the road her ancestors (and her husband's) have travelled on their way to modern-day Scotland, where they operate one of the UK's most interesting delicatessens, Valvona & Crolla, in Edinburgh - a pilgrimage stop whenever we're in town.

What I'm really enjoying about the book is the mixture of hyphenated Italian and Scottish - the fusion that is emigre cuisine. It's a hand-me-down of the melange of family traditions from mother to daughter; the kind of thing more families should practice. She will just as soon pass along her granny's kitchen tricks as tell you how to tweak a dish to make it Chinese-y. And she's not afraid to tell you to add Bisto if that's how she does it.

That said, it's definitely not a brand cookbook. There's much emphasis on what is fresh, seasonal and of the highest quality. She explains the authentic (e.g, use of Roman greens) but then tells you what you can substitute if you can't get them. She passes on tips from the professional kitchen (how to make great fish and chips, and how not to). It touches on most of the threads that inform my own home style (although I've never used Bisto). Given that our household is full of hyphenated Italian and Scottish folks who rejoice in using great ingredients to make this kind of food, I am really inspired to give this cookbook a good workout in the year ahead. Annotated, I could see this forming the basis of a hand-me-down cookbook to our own children.

A Surfeit of Cherries

We were invited to a cherry picking party earlier this week. We thought maybe the hosts had a small orchard, but no - just a single tree - the likes of which I've never seen.

There were so many cherries on this tree, which is probably 40' tall, that they had hired, appropriately, a cherry-picker - a mobile man-basket to lift people right up into the tree to pick basket after basket of sweet ripe black cherries.

And as a happy consequence, we are awash with cherries. We have so many cherries we could never eat them all; we are looking at recipes (cherry soup, anyone? (scroll down)).

I am hoping our hosts will bear us in mind next summer; we could make a cracking cherry beer with 100% local cherry content. That would please me greatly!

Tasting Notes

We went last night for a Slow Food event at a new-this-year Swedish restaurant called Glas. The menu for the night was billed as a 'grazing menu', and the dishes were all surprises, although we were promised gravadlax and venison. Enjoyable evening...unsurprisingly, Slow Food is full of foodie people and the conversations were wide-ranging. I like the convivial table; you show up, knowing few if any of the people there (there are about 600 Slow Foodies in London), and the common thread and atmosphere holds the whole group together.

If I have complaints, well...for a foodie event, I would have expected more presentation of the dishes. An explanation of what we were eating, how Swedish it really was (being right in Borough Market, the owner told us that her chef wanted the freedom to experiment with the high-quality ingredients on offer)...you know, a little more context. The owner did answer all the questions we had one to one, and I suppose a presentation might have interrupted the conversations, so all was definitely not lost. Another grumble is that the waitstaff didn't know the dishes, which reflects a bit poorly on restaurant organisation, especially if these were regular menu items.

On the plus side, the food was delicious. Herring, roast salmon and the gravadlax, some spaetzle-like noodles made with mustard and served with mushrooms, guinea fowl with bacon, the venison in a licorice sauce that had only the slightest aftertaste of licorice over a berry sweet coulis. No faults there. Plenty of food with the grazing menu shared out among small groups of people. A shot of snaps (or aquavit) and a Finnish lager were included in the prix fixe, as was a tasty little morsel of soft gingerbread served with ice cream and a good cup of coffee.

With two small kids, we haven't really made the most of our membership this year, but it was definitely a special treat to get out and have some grown-up time, especially ahead of the holidays.

Also on the tasting front, I just thought I'd report back on the homebrews. The blonde, now that it's settled a bit, is tasting really lovely. It's a struggle not to drink it all up! It's got a grapefruit nose, which is what I was after and which Cascades are known for. I might try another US hop for the next batch of this one. Drinks very easy; not a citrus taste, and that nose dissipates quickly into a beerier flavour. The Poor Richard is more complex. Very grainy. Not corny, so it's probably the load of brown malt. It has what I would call a 'soy sauce' taste; sweet, but soy-ey. Not unpleasant. I am curious to know how this one is going to develop. I guess there will be some left in the barrel come Christmas, so it should have a good stand, which it probably warrants given its complexity.

Still giving some thought to brewing this weekend, but it's hard to get motivated with the cellar full. Still, would be worth it come January to have another vat ready to tap, if the resolutions don't get the better of me. I have Friday off, which means I could get to the brew shop and be ready to start early on Saturday.

Oxtails

One thing I love about winter is the return of hearty fare. I can dust off my coq au vin, my cassoulet (which actually had a command performance summer airing this year) and my boeuf bourguignonne recipes, heat up the kitchen, fill the house with the wonderful smell of long stewing meat and slosh plenty of red wine around. It makes the weeks pass faster to imagine what comes next weekend.

This week memory took me back to Brazil, and the taste of lovely rabada, an oxtail stew served with watercress. We used to have it at work about once a month, a slithery plate of succulent meat stew glistening with a pool of, well, fat. But it's absolutely delicious. The cress, especially the Brazilian kind, is stalky and spicy and a perfect addition to the thick soupy stew.

Google took me to this recipe, which sounds reasonably like what I am aiming for. The recipe omits a temperature for cooking, but I'm going to stick this in the over for 3 hours at 150C (300F).

Rabada with Cress

3 hours, 6 portions

Ingredients:

1.5kg oxtail, cleaned and cut
100g diced bacon
1T butter
1 large onion
3 cloves of garlic
1 carrot
1 cup of white wine
2T tomato puree
2 cups of beef stock
parsley and chives, salt and pepper
one big bunch of watercress

Preparation:

Put the butter and bacon in a large casserole. Fry a little and add the onion, the garlic and the carrot in small pieces. Reheat.

Add the oxtail cut in pieces and cook for a few minutes. Boil with the white wine and season with salt and pepper (and parsley and chives). When the wine is evaporating, cover with beef stock in which the tomato puree has been dissolved.

Cook for three hours and top up the stock as required.

After washing and draining well, cut the cress and toss it into the stew, letting it cook a little.

Serve with white rice dabbed with a bit of butter.

How could this not work?

And now, if you'll excuse me, my kitchen awaits!

Bandwagon

Yesterday's Guardian takes on homemade sausages. (Note: they got their casings from the same place I got mine).

Sausage

Bismarck's adage about laws and sausages is quoted often enough in the political press to make it cliché. The presumption is that we like the end result, but we'd probably prefer not to know what goes on beforehand.

Bismarck might have been right. Here's Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall on the subject:

Everyone loves sausages, and you can buy them just about everywhere that has a chill cabinet - including corner shops and garages. They run the whole gamut of meat quality, from sublime to unmentionable. The very worst of them - which is, of course, most of them - are made from mechanically recovered pork slurry, blasted off the carcasses of factory-farmed pigs with high-pressure hoses, then hoovered up off the abattoir floor. After being sieved and ground to an even paste, stablised with the addition of chemical preservatives, this is mixed with cheap cereal binders (as much as 50 per cent of the final sausage), artificial flavourings and a few more preservatives to boot. It's finally squeezed into artificial casings that are crimped into sausages at the rate of several thousand per hour. Refrigerated, these have a shelf life of over a month.

But then, he might not. Again, Hugh on the rest:

On the other hand, the very best sausages are made by conscientious butchers, who use lean shoulder and fat belly, along with fresh pork trimmings from their own cutting room, a little (10-15 per cent) rusk made from dried bread, and their secret blend of herbs and spices. They won't keep for more than a week, but with a loyal clientele to support them, they won't need to.

I'm not a butcher, but I am after that quality, so, this weekend, with the casings I mentioned last week, we got around to making our first batch of homemade sausages.

Now, I've made sausage before, but not for nearly a decade and never in England. My last batch I made with my dad in the US, with a bunch of venison graciously provided by a friend with a lucky shot. Somehow, though, I've never found the UK as sausage-friendly. You can buy it in abundance, but you don't have a culture that supports making it. Maybe the point is that it's cheap and abundant and it's hard to beat a good butcher's house special. Maybe the EU straitjacket has put the fear of God into the good householders. Maybe Bismarck was right...

With 40 yards of casings in hand, we wasted no time in putting together our first batch.

Child labour, hard at work in her Sunday finest

We started off aiming for a fairly traditional English pork sausage. I bought in a kilo of pork belly and about 1.5 kg of shoulder. We aimed for two varieties, pork and leek, and pork, garlic and chili. For rusk, I put in about 14 oz of bread crusts, the majority left over from our recent homemade loaves.

A peeled sliced leek went into the pork and leek, two chilis and six cloves of garlic went into the spicy. Sage, salt, pepper, sugar and water went into both.

The results were good.

Leek on the left, spicy on the right

5 lb, 12 oz of sausage in total. We reckon three family meals. The meat cost £7.60 gross (there was some skin and bone throwaway and the net meat yield was 4lb 7oz). The other ingredients were minimal (although the casings aren't necessarily cheap). Depending on how you cost the bread the total ingredients would be less than £10, so well below £2 / lb.

That stacks up pretty fairly. The Sausagelinks site says this:

Typically a good sausage will cost around £3 per pound (which is £6.75 per kilo). In comparison cheap supermarket sausages cost less than £2 per kilo. Top quality organic or rare breed sausages are around £4 - £5 per pound (which is £8.80 - £11.00 per kilo).

These were decent cuts of meat, but not organic nor rare breed, so there is some home economy involved, although Round One was pretty labour-intensive.

I will say this - a three-year-old can be very helpful in the kitchen. One of my projects is to raise our kids with a high level of involvement in preparing the foods they eat. Cat is a crack potato-masher, pasta and pizza maker, and she's no slouch in the sausage-making department either.

And if the proof of the pudding is in the eating, well, mmmmmmmmm! These were great. Not perfect, but delish. We had a good feed on both types this evening. The leek sausages, I find, were more bound - I think the leek fibre replaced the need for some of the rusk. The spicy were better. I would not have minced them so finely (room to experiment, but I think two passes on the coarse mincing blade rather than one coarse, one fine), and they could have had a bit more fat to them (more belly, less shoulder).

You can't taste sausage in the making (because of the risk of trichinosis), so it helps to make notes on the recipes and improve them as you go. These weren't the butcher's secret recipe, but I've got lots of ideas on how to improve them from here. I will report back.

Casing the Joint

Today's post brought my first order of sausage casings from the Natural Sausage Casing Company, a company so slow they don't have a website.

I've been itching to make sausages for a while now. I used to do this when I lived in the US, but finding casings in the UK is a little more challenging than in the US, where I used to buy them at the supermarket (ah, Chicago, hog butcher to the world).

I ordered up a bunch of pig and sheep casings (yes, intestines). I can't say they're without odour. A slightly whiffy box of guts has arrived on my desk, along with a list of the few additional products they sell (different beef casings, for making salamis and haggis and the bigger diameter stuff, a few books and some equipment).

I guess this is as good a place as any to plug a new site I've come across since I started my search for Italian sausage (since satisfied, BTW). I give you Sausagelinks.co.uk. Looks pretty useful. I found the Italian sausage at the deli across the road (they keep it in the back). It wasn't perfect, but it was fennel-y and worked okay on our pizzas.

Sourdough

I got to wondering if it would be possible to make sourdough breads in the bread machine. Because you need a yeast 'starter', and you have to be a bit kind to your starter, and you need to hold some it back for the next batch, and the machine might not have a cycle that's starter-friendly. So, I had a little look around. The answer is, "yes, you can make them." But, you've still got to tinker around a bit, and you have to put in some additional yeast or you're not going to achieve the rise in the time allowed. Sounds a bit fiddly and unauthentic.

Still, it made me think that maybe we should just make some sourdough in a more traditional manner(I love the stuff!). A project right up my alley. There's more information out there than you can believe. And there's a deep mine of aficionado-quality information from newsgroup FAQs.

In the process, I wound up sending off for a free tried and tested 160+ year old starter from the US. I wouldn't mind trying to make one of my own, but I'd also like a reliable fall-back.

Since my earliest days on the Internet, reading the Homebrew Digest on CompuServe, I've been amazed and inspired by how much good quality information is made available by communities of like-minded people who care about doing things traditionally, and about sharing the love - good for karma! I'll post back when I get 'started' with the sourdough.

Home Bake

My wife and I decided not to buy each other Christmas presents this year, but I couldn't help myself. I'd heard her talking about a bread machine with friends this summer and the idea stuck. I used to be pretty resistant to the idea as being gimmicky, creating a dependency on pre-packaged ingredients and taking up more scarce counter space, but with a little research I overcame my objections.

In searching for a machine, I came across the Panasonic SD-253. I was impressed by the user reviews on Amazon, and I thought the price was reasonable. Since we've bought it, we've had two loaves - the "large" loaf (pictured) raises so high it's hard to slice, so we're probably heading back to the smaller recipes (I'm afraid extra-large would cause the top of the machine to lift!). The products we've sampled so far are excellent, and as estate agent cliche as it sounds, there really is something magic about waking to a house full of the smell of baking bread.

I plan to take a look at the economics of home machine baking. You have to spread the cost of the machine over a large number of loaves to make it pay, and I'll only be able to guess at the electricity cost. Overall, I reckon it's about the same cost as buying store bread (bulk buying of raw ingredients would help here), but you have the advantage of the freshness, the lack of any additives, further independence from supermarkets, and, well, that smell.

Homecoming

We've finally got our espresso machine back in service. Ahhhh, bliss.

We have a Gaggia Classic (as above), which was a wedding gift to ourselves. When we went overseas, we decided not to take it with us as it is heavy and would have busted our air freight allowance. So, we left it with my brother. He then moved away and left it with his neighbour. I drove up to Oxfordshire and reclaimed it from the neighbour at the end of October, but when we got it home it didn't work.

I tried to troubleshoot the machine, including speaking with the helpful Gaggia UK people, but in the end I was unable to solve the problems. Fortunately, they have a special deal on servicing. You pay them a fixed fee, they collect the machine, service it (including any spare parts it needs) and then return it. Ours came home yesterday with a new steam valve and a new boiler - possibly the two most expensive parts. And some new bits on the brewhead.

Yesterday, by chance, knowing it would be home soon, I had purchased some nice Lavazza coffee for it at the new Italian deli across the road from my office (civilisation reaches our neck of the woods). And so, this morning we were able to greet the day with "only-if-you-can-be-arsed" lattes.

Cor, I'm still shaking.

This may not seem the measure of frugality, I admit. On the other hand, it does pretty well eliminate purchased coffees, which can add up. My latte-on-the-train had just reached £1.80, or £9 a week if I had one each morning.

(Incidentally, we originally bought the machine directly from Italy (Best-Of-Italy.com), and even with delivery charges they still have a lower price than I've seen elsewhere in the UK).

Thinking Inside the Box

This morning's BBC Radio Four Farming Today (very short-term link) called attention to an increase in instances of unacceptably high levels of pesticides in imported foods. The programme particularly featured grapes and apples.

The government's pesticide watchdog threatens to get tough over chemical levels in imported grapes, after chemicals three time the safe limit for children were found. In the UK the level of use of pesticides has been falling over the past few years. Derek Hargreaves, a horticultural advisor explains how this has been done. Meanwhile Friends of the Earth tell us excessive pesticides are being found in imported food because we're eating it out of season.

They called attention to the useful-looking UK government website Pesticides Safety Directive, which has as its remit ensuring that pesticides are safe for "users, consumers and the environment."

This brought to my mind another very useful consumer-orientated site, the Environmental Working Group's Shopper's Guide to Pesticides in Produce, which I've also seen referred to as the "dirty dozen". They are now listing both the worst and best actors in produce. It has an American focus, but since it seems that we're increasingly sourcing our food globally, it's definitely relevant for UK shoppers as well.

Here's their dirty dozen:

Highest in Pesticides

These 12 popular fresh fruits and vegetables are consistently the most contaminated with pesticides — buy these organic.

          • Apples
          • Bell Peppers
          • Celery
          • Cherries
          • Grapes (imported)
          • Nectarines
          • Peaches
          • Pears
          • Potatoes
          • Red Raspberries
          • Spinach
          • Strawberries

They've prepared this listing in a handy-to-laminate card size so you can take it with you when you go shopping.

With our recent move to the organic box scheme, we're less impacted by these bad actors, although we are starting to wonder what to do with all these Brussels sprouts!

Eating Local

We made it out for dinner again last night - this time with the kids. A welcome treat since we used to get out so often in Brazil, but haven't managed much here. We tried a new Italian place, La Nonna, on the Broadway in Wimbledon. The food was excellent (I had the beef with mushrooms, my wife had monkfish and our daughter had what she always has - pasta!). Prices were reasonable, service was friendly, wines were good (if a little expensive), and they were very kid-friendly. I think it paid to go early, as the place started to fill in later and it seemed a bit more hectic.

Thankshifting

The fourth Thursday in November is just like any other day here in England. Gives the sentimental Yank in me saudades for a long weekend and oyster dressing. Alas, it's off to work for me today.

But still, I feel the need to celebrate this holiday, and to raise my multinational kids with an attachment to and awareness of their American roots. To make up for the gap in festivities, we're going to have Thanksgiving this weekend instead, inviting some English friends (and their kids) over to celebrate a thoroughly American holiday.

While we were over in the States last month, I picked up a box set of the Peanuts holiday specials. They're bundled with some additional materials, so we've got a decent introduction to the Pilgrims and Indians for sharing with the kids (and even the Great Pumpkin stays in season a little longer).

Speaking of pumpkin, well, it's kind of a challenge to put together a Thanksgiving dinner over here. Not impossible, mind you. While you won't find Thanksgiving trimmings, the stores are already stocking Christmas turkeys. And we've managed fresh cranberries, and I'm going for a second pumpkin this evening (think I know where). I've given up on finding canned pumpkin, but in the process have learned how to make pumpkin pie from scratch, and it's mighty good.

One thing we probably won't manage is fresh oyster meats for the oyster dressing. Oh yes, I could just buy them on the shell and shuck away (and I still might), but I do miss the convenience of picking up a pot of oyster meats at a place like Wholey's in Pittsburgh and bunging the whole pot, liquor and all, into a crock of dressing. That's living. That's Thanksgiving.

Don't Get Around Much Anymore

My in-laws are in town this week, so for the first time in ages it's date night for Mummy and Daddy. Not feeling terribly anxious to travel to central London (despite today being "Le Beaujolais Nouveau est arrivé!" day), we're going to stay local and have dinner at The Fire Stables.

What's this?

Why, this...

Nightcap

In keeping with the frugality programme, I made a resolution to work my way through our collection of exotic liquors and liqueurs with the aim of reducing cash output on alcohol and reducing the storage space required from those “typical products of the region” that have wound up cluttering our dining room shelves.

Here’s an idea of what’s to come: Krupnik (Poland), Ouzo (Greece), Metaxa brandy (Greece), Sambuca (Italy), Strega (Italy), Vin Santo (Italy), Limoncello (Italy), Genever (Belgium), Gammel Dansk (Denmark), Supercassis (France)…

And there’s more. Lots more. Whiskies, rums, brandies, cachaças, some stuff you’ve heard of (Drambuie, Frangelico) and some you probably haven’t.

Like last night’s trauktine, from Lithuania. Lesley brought home a sampler of Lithuanian drinks during her brief visit in 2001. Last night I had 50ml of Malunininku trauktine. It’s a bitter, and at 50% alcohol it was an effective nightcap. Taste? Bitter. Herby. You don’t gulp this one down.

The other 18%?

Now that we’re back in the UK, land of choice and overstocked supermarkets), I’ve been leaning on my wife to be a bit more aware of what she’s buying. We had our first “awakening” the other day.

In the fridge:

Lunch meat. Sounds innocent enough. Ingredients?

Hold on. This is ham. 82% pork? First red flag. That should have left it on the supermarket shelf.

But wait. It gets worse. What else could there be in there? You really don’t want to go here.

Water (9%). Salt. Honey (1%).

Oops. Forgot to tell you just how much salt, but it's more than a percent, right?

But now, with pork, water and honey we’re only up to 92%, and we know at least 1% is salt, probably more.

The package says that each 100g of this product contains 0.8g sodium ("High"). There are other sources of sodium in this product beyond salt, but if you read here, you find:

1g of salt contains about 0.4g of sodium.

and

The average sodium intake by adults is 3.5 g per day (equivalent to 9 g of salt). The RNI (recommended nutrient intake) for sodium is 1.6 g per day.

So, it could be up to 2% salt.

This is my question: if it's more than 1% salt, how much more? And if it's not much more, how much of all of that other stuff is in there? Between salt and all those other nasties, that's 8% of the total product.

We binned this, BTW. Ick.

Update: I almost forgot, this product proudly boasts a seal of approval!

Presumably that only refers to the fact that it contains British pork (it also boasts Mexican honey!).

SweeTarts

This is an amazing blog entry about the candy SweeTarts, filled with real passion. Took me right back to grade school and Mandel's pharmacy. Damned if this hasn't got my mouth watering, and I don't even particularly like the sour little buggers.

From the usually excellent Tasting Menu weblog.

Easter Feast

So, I've been having a pretty challenging Lenten season. I decided to keep the traditional (pre-Vatican II) Lenten fasting and abstinence, and also to abstain from all alcohol (with the exception of our week in Chile, which was designed as a wine-tasting trip, for which I gave myself an exemption). In the process, I've lost 10kg (I had it to lose). I've been to mass daily (except Chile), which has given my conversion a real kick in the pants (and my comprehension of Portuguese as well!). All the early-to-bed, early-to-rise has been tough on the family, and I can't say it's been 100% habit-forming [man are those botequins temptation made real]. But now the time has come to break the fast.

We are especially looking forward to Easter Sunday this year - for it being Easter and my wife's birthday. I am also celebrating a fact I only learned by research at the American Family Immigration History Center, which publishes the immigration history from Ellis Island.

I am 25% Italian. The rest of my ancestry is, broadly speaking, British, and those families have mostly been in the US for hundreds of years. But my Italian ancestors came to the US in the 20th century - they were the last ones to arrive in the US. My great-grandmother came to the US from Avellino in 1903, and my mother's paternal grandfather arrived in the US on April 11, 1904, from a small village called San Nicola Manfredi, in the hills above the city of Benevento, inland from Naples. He was 15 years old, trained as a hat-maker.

My great-grandparents became American citizens after the required interval, sometime in the 1910s, before the birth of my grandfather. All of my grandparents were born American citizens, as were my parents and myself. It's pretty hard to deny my all-American-ness, and I don't (I just don't live there).

In the summer of 2001, we had the chance to visit Avellino and San Nicola Manfredi. We stayed in Benevento, and it was an opportunity to be a little more familiar with my own roots. We tried to visit a distant relative, who was not at home. Still, this is the only real lead I have on any of my ancestors in "the old country", and it awoke in me a desire to stay closer to those roots and pass them down to my own children, who are not only American citizens, but also European citizens, and who are, by my marriage to a 100% Scot, slightly more than 50% Scottish and just ticking over with 12-1/2% Italian.

Anyway, that brings me back to Easter. Celebrating Easter as Easter, for my first time as a Catholic, celebrating my wife's birthday, and commemorating my Italian ancestors on the centenary of their arrival in America. Okay, and celebrating Easter the carioca way. We've designed our feast as follows (I pay homage here to Erik Keilholtz of Erik's Rants and Recipes, whose writings about his own Easter feasts (2003, 2004) has inspired me to roll our own instead of ducking out for a nice buffet brunch):

We will go to mass in the morning (I'll have been to the vigil the evening before), and will probably incorporate a walk on Ipanema beach if the weather is nice. Then, while our daughter has her morning nap, we will hide some eggs around the apartment. While she hunts for the eggs, we'll enjoy pannetone (or columba, if we can find it) with prosecco.

For dinner, we will start with bolinhos de bacalhau, a Rio tradition at Easter, and follow with roast leg of lamb (just delivered from a local supplier fresh from her farm) with rosemary and garlic, served with roast potatoes and green beans. We'll have a cheese course and follow with passionfruit (maracujá) creme brulées. I'm planning on Strega for a digestif, and good coffee and cantuccini biscotti.

We're going to drink Chilean wines with our dinner - wines we bought on our trip and have been patiently awaiting since. Two red gran reservas (Merlot, Carmenere)from the Bisquertt winery and a late-harvest white dessert wine from Viu Manent. Oh, and we'll drink Baden-Baden (Brazilian) lager, bem gelada,with the bolinhos de bacalhau.

And after that, I'll need to rethink my regime if I have any hope of keeping off any part of these 10kg I've parted with!