The broccoli pesto worked out pretty well. The result is thick, not liquid like herbal pesto, but the garlic, almonds, and lemon nicely flavoured the broccoli. I used the pesto with linguine (and minced pork meatballs), because linguine turned out to be the only pasta I had in the cupboard. That wasn't the best choice for a thick puree, but it would work nicely mixed with a grain as the recipe suggests. And I did use up all the broccoli. Now on to the swiss chard and pointed cabbage.
I signed up for the veg box scheme for the very reason that I am now forced to deal with difficult vegetables that I would not be drawn to choose on a quick trip to the market. I find the summer vegetables much less interesting than the winter vegetables. Partly that is because England does not have enough of a summer to grow the traditional summer vegetables that require lots of hot sunshine. Tomatoes were mostly sad Dutch agribusiness products of the pale and crunchy variety. Until the Isle of Wight tomato people started producing luscious varieties and selling them at Borough Market and now at farmers' markets, I had given up on eating tomatoes here. For some reason the Isle of Wight, in the English Channel off the mid-south coast, has more sunshine than most places. Corn-on-the-cob remains a problem however. We have had a few ears that were up to the standards of New England sweetness and flavour over the past 11 years, but sourcing has been random, and most purchases have been binned after a single bite. For the English, the variety of corn they love is called "Niblets," easily found in tins, and to be used to enhance all sorts of cold dishes, especially tuna salad sandwiches. They might also believe that Niblets are raw delicacies based on these two incidents. Years ago at a regional Food Festival, the Isle of Wight people were handing out cobs broken into small pieces for tasting. I bit into mine and said "this is not cooked." The purveyor looked at me in confusion saying "It doesn't need cooking." (We did buy some ears, took them home, cooked them, and they were the best we have had here in England.) Second, last summer when Susan was on an archaeological dig in Cyprus with students from a Welsh University, some local residents brought them ears of corn for their dinner, and she reported that several of the students were unaware of the need to cook corn. Fortunately she had a few allies who also insisted that corn did need cooking.
We stayed in to eat the broccoli last night instead of eating at Pizza Express with our good friend Pam who is 91. Pam and her grandson eat at Pizza Express every Thursday evening, and Bob and I often join them. After dinner, I remembered that I wanted to see Pam last night so that I could ask her where she was on the day 70 years ago. I know she was 21 years old, and a student at the London School of Economics after spending a half-year studying in Vienna. I know she moved back home to the family farm when she and her medical school student brother lost their digs on Lambs Conduit Street in a bombing raid. I know she lost her precious copy of Virginia Woolf's Flush in the raid, and was terribly pleased when a few year's ago a friend gave her a new copy of Flush, reprinted by Nicola Beauman's Persephone Press whose main office and shop is located on Lamb's Conduit Street. I know she worked on the family farm as a Land Girl for a time, before moving back into London to work in a government office where she helped to type William Beveridge's 1942 Report which laid out the framework of Britain's post-war welfare state, including the establishment of the National Health Service. But I don't know where she was 70 years ago yesterday. So I had to make do with a Melvyn Bragg narrated documentary from the Imperial War Museum on TV last night to mark the 70th Anniversary of Britain's (and France's) entry into the war. A war that has moulded every aspect of all our lives since the day it ended 64 years or demographically, two generations, ago: politics, international relations, economics, arts, education, land use, even personal relationships through parenting, feminism, and the rise of youth culture. Lots of good decisions were made and some very bad decisions were made in the hothouse atmosphere of the immediate post-war world in the US, in England, and in Europe.
Leading to why I spent the latter half of yesterday feeling down and depressed about how the US seems to have learned nothing from some of those bad decisions. A mid-afternoon (UK time zone) front page on the New York Times web-site told me that the US was ready to dive into a new Vietnam called Afghanistan -- which was something Garry Trudeau in Doonesbury had been sounding the warning bell on this week already. A second article on the front-page told me that the newly elected administration in Washington was allowing a truly stupid and mean-spirited minority rump of US citizens to once-again hijack the health-care agenda, thereby denying the right to decent medical care to more and more of our citizens. How can it be that my native land no longer wants to be seen as a civilised nation nor wants to be respected by the rest of the world? How have we moved from John Winthrop's "Citty on a Hill" to Cormac McCarthy's The Road?
Showing posts with label food. Show all posts
Showing posts with label food. Show all posts
Friday, September 4, 2009
Thursday, September 3, 2009
A rainy night at The Globe (and broccoli)
The broccoli problem has been solved by blogging and the internet. Last week I signed up for an e-mail feed from the award winning food blog 101 Cookbooks (www.101cookbooks.com) out of San Francisco, and the first message came through yesterday with a recipe for broccoli pesto for when you have much too much broccoli on hand. Bob and I are big fans of pureed broccoli so I am optimistic. Yesterday I referred to the gourmet-foodie wasteland of the Highland Park, New Jersey years. That wasn't completely honest, I did buy a broccoliflower at Foodtown once, and my daughters still joke about the awfulness of that occasion. They also agree that my single stab at 1980s gourmet-foodie trendiness was the most horrible thing I ever tried to make them eat. I don't know if the recipe was actually from the Silver Palate cookbooks, but there were no fancy ingredients in pureed broccoli, just the veg, some, butter, some cream, and a Cuisinart. You can still say "pureed broccoli" to my grown daughters, and they will pretend gag and say "the colour, the awful colour. . ." Thus ended my attempts at trendy cooking. But children do grow up, and they leave home, and one night here in London a few years ago, with some broccoli on hand, I remembered that wonderful pure taste and lovely deep green colour. The butter, cream (now thick and organic from Riverford Farms), and the Cuisinart (well not the same one) were still on hand, and now we often eat our broccoli pureed. Since I am talking rather endlessly about broccoli, I will mention that the trick to cooking it is to way way oversalt the boiling water, then just bring it back to the boil for the shortest time. I learned this by accident of course, probably forgetting the first two times I had put salt in the water, but a few years ago, I was paging through cooking god Thomas Keller's French Laundry cookbook in a bookshop, and found him writing along the lines of: the trick of cooking broccoli is to use more salt than you think possible in the boiling water -- So I don't want to hear any of the faux-health advice from people who regard salt as the enemy of civilisation. (Especially since it is the saviour of civilisation being a sure way to preserve food for the "starving season" of whatever ecoclimate in which one is subsisting.) I don't eat processed food except for obvious junk treats (mmm Doritos and Reeses Peanut Butter Cups, now easily available in England), so I control my salt intake, and I have no qualms about oversalting the things that taste great (to me) when salty: mashed potatoes, French fries, macaroni and cheese.
London is such a cultural cornucopia, we could find an event or two every night of the year. In practice, we attend events in waves. We purchase tickets for a dozen or more events, become exhausted by the cultural input, spend a period of time watching worthless, but entertaining US TV programmes (Bones, Heroes, NCIS, CSI), agree that since we live in London watching this stuff is ridiculous, buy another round of tickets, and let the cycle begin again. August is always a buy-tickets season for us, as the programmes for next season are delivered, and newspapers announce the must-sees. So last night our cultural season opened with a trip to the Globe, the reconstruction of Shakespeare's theatre on the South Bank of the Thames. Now the Globe is not one of my favourite places. Partly this stems from the first production I saw with Megan on holiday, the summer before we moved to London. It was the theatre's first season, and they were attempting to do Shakespeare's whole 5 acts with an interval between each act. We left somewhere in the middle of Act 4, I believe. I'm not sure if they were yet renting cushions for the hard wooden backless benches, but the event was more painful than enjoyable. I hadn't been back for a dramatic performance since then. Bob has developed an interest in Thomas Paine, reading Paine's work and a biography of the man. Paine is a bit of an anomalous figure here. He was a heroic figure in two earth-shaking revolutions, but we are in England after all, and England was on the opposite side of both those revolutions, which makes Paine kind of a terrorist and traitor. I say kind of because the opposition party Whigs were supporters of American independence so they agreed with Paine, even if the government didn't. It was the French Revolution and Edmund Burke that did in Paine's reputation in his native land. Last year, in an interview in The Guardian, Richard Attenborough discussed his decades long quest to make a film on Paine. Over the summer, Bob saw that Attenborough's scriptwriter had turned his script into a play to be performed at the Globe. As we found our way over to the Globe the light rain turned into a slightly heavier rain and as the play began, the slightly heavier rain turned into a raging downpour. Our seats (yes uncomfortable backless benches) were under the roof, but the pit audience, and the actors who performed their parts in the pit, were drenched. When the wind gusted the plastic bag raincoats provided to the pit audience all crinkled at the same time. And of course Shakespeare did not have to contend with the flight path to Heathrow overhead. Cute idea rebuilding a mock-up of the Globe, not sure it's very practical, but the tourists seem to love it, so who am I to be negative. Sadly the play was not very good, lots of running around, lots of extraneous plot points such as the women he bedded, but not a lot of explanation of why he was important. Since much of the audience was probably American, perhaps they knew what Common Sense was and what it meant, but the brief mention of its publication hardly did the work justice. We were trapped for three hours, so there was enough time to offer a little more substance. In London fashion, the three hours of heavy rain ended as the play finished, allowing us a lovely walk across the once-wobbly Millennium Bridge to the Tube and home before midnight.
London is such a cultural cornucopia, we could find an event or two every night of the year. In practice, we attend events in waves. We purchase tickets for a dozen or more events, become exhausted by the cultural input, spend a period of time watching worthless, but entertaining US TV programmes (Bones, Heroes, NCIS, CSI), agree that since we live in London watching this stuff is ridiculous, buy another round of tickets, and let the cycle begin again. August is always a buy-tickets season for us, as the programmes for next season are delivered, and newspapers announce the must-sees. So last night our cultural season opened with a trip to the Globe, the reconstruction of Shakespeare's theatre on the South Bank of the Thames. Now the Globe is not one of my favourite places. Partly this stems from the first production I saw with Megan on holiday, the summer before we moved to London. It was the theatre's first season, and they were attempting to do Shakespeare's whole 5 acts with an interval between each act. We left somewhere in the middle of Act 4, I believe. I'm not sure if they were yet renting cushions for the hard wooden backless benches, but the event was more painful than enjoyable. I hadn't been back for a dramatic performance since then. Bob has developed an interest in Thomas Paine, reading Paine's work and a biography of the man. Paine is a bit of an anomalous figure here. He was a heroic figure in two earth-shaking revolutions, but we are in England after all, and England was on the opposite side of both those revolutions, which makes Paine kind of a terrorist and traitor. I say kind of because the opposition party Whigs were supporters of American independence so they agreed with Paine, even if the government didn't. It was the French Revolution and Edmund Burke that did in Paine's reputation in his native land. Last year, in an interview in The Guardian, Richard Attenborough discussed his decades long quest to make a film on Paine. Over the summer, Bob saw that Attenborough's scriptwriter had turned his script into a play to be performed at the Globe. As we found our way over to the Globe the light rain turned into a slightly heavier rain and as the play began, the slightly heavier rain turned into a raging downpour. Our seats (yes uncomfortable backless benches) were under the roof, but the pit audience, and the actors who performed their parts in the pit, were drenched. When the wind gusted the plastic bag raincoats provided to the pit audience all crinkled at the same time. And of course Shakespeare did not have to contend with the flight path to Heathrow overhead. Cute idea rebuilding a mock-up of the Globe, not sure it's very practical, but the tourists seem to love it, so who am I to be negative. Sadly the play was not very good, lots of running around, lots of extraneous plot points such as the women he bedded, but not a lot of explanation of why he was important. Since much of the audience was probably American, perhaps they knew what Common Sense was and what it meant, but the brief mention of its publication hardly did the work justice. We were trapped for three hours, so there was enough time to offer a little more substance. In London fashion, the three hours of heavy rain ended as the play finished, allowing us a lovely walk across the once-wobbly Millennium Bridge to the Tube and home before midnight.
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Too much good food
Where was all this good food when I had my children at home and cooked for more than two. I pretty much missed the whole US Foodie Revolution of the 1980s because the Highland Park, New Jersey Foodtown didn't stock anything beyond the basics of fresh and processed agribusiness, and there were no other food stores in town. When I moved to Hingham, Massachusetts, the Fruit Center Market was a revelation. What a shock to find out you could actually buy all those ingredients in the Silver Palate Cookbook recipes.
(Well here is a sad aside, I just googled Silver Palate and learned that author Sheila Lukins died yesterday, according to the LA Times. Another brain cancer death . . .)
By the time we were in Hingham, cooking had become a bit of a chore, and my daughters insist I cooked the same two dishes every night. I remember cooking at least four dishes. There were so many rules to follow, no chopped beef or pulses for Megan, no onions or green coloured food for Susan, no peppers for either of them. No wonder I grilled chicken or beef, baked potatoes, and filled the meal out with carrots every other night.
We had the great good fortune to move to London on the cusp of a massive revolution in local food production. Borough Market in Southwark, South London has become an overcrowded tourist site, but we were at the first Food Festival at Borough Market in 1998 that was such an overwhelming success it became first a monthly, then a weekly market. For years, Bob and I went to Borough Market nearly every Saturday to buy the week's worth of groceries. Then the New York Times featured the Market as a place to ogle food and buy sandwiches for lunch, and soon food shoppers couldn't get through the crowds of tourists. I haven't been down there in years now.
The next food revolution was starting up at the same time when American Embassy staff member Nina Planck organised the first London Farmer's Market in Islington, North London in 1999. The Farmers Markets have taken over London in the past 10 years. There are now 15 of them spread across the city including Wednesday 10-2 at Swiss Cottage Tube Station, a short bus ride away for me. This market is quite small and new and doesn't draw many customers, so I'm not sure if it will have a long life span, and while I will miss it, the truth is that I don't need it because I have so many other sources of good food.
Most of our supplies are delivered right to the house. The best smartest thing I have ever done is sign up for the organic vegetable delivery box scheme from Riverford Farms in Devon. Riverford picks their vegetables on Tuesday and delivers them around the country on Wednesday. Between Friday and Monday night I order the box I want on-line (size and contents vary). I also order organic fruit, meat, milk, yogurt, and cream at the same time. Could anything be easier? And the cost is essentially no different from supermarket produce and nothing like the cost of fancy food halls. The supermarket basics are delivered by Ocado, a service set up by Goldman alums a few years ago to distribute Waitrose supermarket goods. I order on-line and a new flat fee delivery option will bring me a delivery every week (every day if I want, but there is a minimum order). The Wine Society delivers boxes of wine when ordered on-line. Beer deliveries are handled by Bob from several places including local breweries and the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA).
If I need or want anything else I can walk to a dozen different places within a few minutes. There are four fruit and veg stands (costermongers! -- one of whom sells organic fruit and veg) that I pass within a block or two, plus a gourmet organic shop that sells lovely produce from France and Italy. We have an excellent fishmonger. The terrible loss of our butcher shop two years ago has been filled by the Riverford delivery, and now also by an itinerant meat provider who sets up between the fishmonger and one of the costermongers, several days a week. Our supply of bread and baked goods is met by four notable named bakers: Raymond Blanc's Maison Blanc, the Hungarian Louis, London's Gail and Paris's Paul (who opened their shops across the street from each other the same week three years ago), a fourth small chain called Euphorium, and a large Belgian chain Le Pain Quotidien. While I have had disappointing meals at Carluccio's restaurant since Antonio sold the chain a few years ago, the partner deli to the restaurant on our corner offers wonderful Italian ingredients including excellent Parmesan and mozzarella. Of course I could also walk to Giacobazzi's Italian deli famous for its prepared food and fresh pasta instead. The Rosslyn Deli is famous for its supply of American food products in the back room at laughable prices, but hey when you need molasses, corn syrup, Liptons Onion Soup Mix, or Pop-tarts, what can you do. (I buy only the first item in that list.) The deli's quality has slipped, but they are still a source for cheeses, pates, and are the closest croissant to home, when a croissant becomes essential. Bulk grains and other health foods are available at the health food store on the High Street and more intriguingly at the Mistry Chemist who takes the idea of full service health provision seriously by combining a health food store with the standard stock of a drug store. Finally, we have the supermarkets: a tiny Tesco which is useful, the giant Marks and Spencer whose offerings are as much a revelation as the Fruit Center in Hingham was 18 years ago, and the once slightly scruffy Budgens, which has now been spiffed up into a great place for lots of unusual items.
That gets us back to the title here: Too Much Good Food. I used to buy too much quilting and sewing fabric, or yarn or cookbooks. At least they have the property of keeping for a good long time -- don't they just do that, as I look at my fabric and yarn cabinets and cookbook shelves. Now I have to discipline myself when confronted with the riches of food all around me. My lovely Riverford order has just arrived, but I see that this week's broccoli now joins last week's broccoli which only looks marginally healthy. Cooking more food is one solution, but that brings us up to the fact that I live in London which means tonight we have theatre tickets, tomorrow we are having dinner with friends, and Friday we have concert tickets. When I ordered my food on Saturday, it was August, it was summer. I didn't check my calendar to see that September was here, and the autumn cultural season was beginning. What will happen to my poor broccoli.
(Well here is a sad aside, I just googled Silver Palate and learned that author Sheila Lukins died yesterday, according to the LA Times. Another brain cancer death . . .)
By the time we were in Hingham, cooking had become a bit of a chore, and my daughters insist I cooked the same two dishes every night. I remember cooking at least four dishes. There were so many rules to follow, no chopped beef or pulses for Megan, no onions or green coloured food for Susan, no peppers for either of them. No wonder I grilled chicken or beef, baked potatoes, and filled the meal out with carrots every other night.
We had the great good fortune to move to London on the cusp of a massive revolution in local food production. Borough Market in Southwark, South London has become an overcrowded tourist site, but we were at the first Food Festival at Borough Market in 1998 that was such an overwhelming success it became first a monthly, then a weekly market. For years, Bob and I went to Borough Market nearly every Saturday to buy the week's worth of groceries. Then the New York Times featured the Market as a place to ogle food and buy sandwiches for lunch, and soon food shoppers couldn't get through the crowds of tourists. I haven't been down there in years now.
The next food revolution was starting up at the same time when American Embassy staff member Nina Planck organised the first London Farmer's Market in Islington, North London in 1999. The Farmers Markets have taken over London in the past 10 years. There are now 15 of them spread across the city including Wednesday 10-2 at Swiss Cottage Tube Station, a short bus ride away for me. This market is quite small and new and doesn't draw many customers, so I'm not sure if it will have a long life span, and while I will miss it, the truth is that I don't need it because I have so many other sources of good food.
Most of our supplies are delivered right to the house. The best smartest thing I have ever done is sign up for the organic vegetable delivery box scheme from Riverford Farms in Devon. Riverford picks their vegetables on Tuesday and delivers them around the country on Wednesday. Between Friday and Monday night I order the box I want on-line (size and contents vary). I also order organic fruit, meat, milk, yogurt, and cream at the same time. Could anything be easier? And the cost is essentially no different from supermarket produce and nothing like the cost of fancy food halls. The supermarket basics are delivered by Ocado, a service set up by Goldman alums a few years ago to distribute Waitrose supermarket goods. I order on-line and a new flat fee delivery option will bring me a delivery every week (every day if I want, but there is a minimum order). The Wine Society delivers boxes of wine when ordered on-line. Beer deliveries are handled by Bob from several places including local breweries and the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA).
If I need or want anything else I can walk to a dozen different places within a few minutes. There are four fruit and veg stands (costermongers! -- one of whom sells organic fruit and veg) that I pass within a block or two, plus a gourmet organic shop that sells lovely produce from France and Italy. We have an excellent fishmonger. The terrible loss of our butcher shop two years ago has been filled by the Riverford delivery, and now also by an itinerant meat provider who sets up between the fishmonger and one of the costermongers, several days a week. Our supply of bread and baked goods is met by four notable named bakers: Raymond Blanc's Maison Blanc, the Hungarian Louis, London's Gail and Paris's Paul (who opened their shops across the street from each other the same week three years ago), a fourth small chain called Euphorium, and a large Belgian chain Le Pain Quotidien. While I have had disappointing meals at Carluccio's restaurant since Antonio sold the chain a few years ago, the partner deli to the restaurant on our corner offers wonderful Italian ingredients including excellent Parmesan and mozzarella. Of course I could also walk to Giacobazzi's Italian deli famous for its prepared food and fresh pasta instead. The Rosslyn Deli is famous for its supply of American food products in the back room at laughable prices, but hey when you need molasses, corn syrup, Liptons Onion Soup Mix, or Pop-tarts, what can you do. (I buy only the first item in that list.) The deli's quality has slipped, but they are still a source for cheeses, pates, and are the closest croissant to home, when a croissant becomes essential. Bulk grains and other health foods are available at the health food store on the High Street and more intriguingly at the Mistry Chemist who takes the idea of full service health provision seriously by combining a health food store with the standard stock of a drug store. Finally, we have the supermarkets: a tiny Tesco which is useful, the giant Marks and Spencer whose offerings are as much a revelation as the Fruit Center in Hingham was 18 years ago, and the once slightly scruffy Budgens, which has now been spiffed up into a great place for lots of unusual items.
That gets us back to the title here: Too Much Good Food. I used to buy too much quilting and sewing fabric, or yarn or cookbooks. At least they have the property of keeping for a good long time -- don't they just do that, as I look at my fabric and yarn cabinets and cookbook shelves. Now I have to discipline myself when confronted with the riches of food all around me. My lovely Riverford order has just arrived, but I see that this week's broccoli now joins last week's broccoli which only looks marginally healthy. Cooking more food is one solution, but that brings us up to the fact that I live in London which means tonight we have theatre tickets, tomorrow we are having dinner with friends, and Friday we have concert tickets. When I ordered my food on Saturday, it was August, it was summer. I didn't check my calendar to see that September was here, and the autumn cultural season was beginning. What will happen to my poor broccoli.
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