Tag: food

May 6, 2013
Was fairly busy at home (and places near) Saturday and Sunday. On Saturday I got two troughs planted with salad leaves, sugar snap peas, carrots and courgettes. All of these were “cheats” – baby plants bought from the local garden centre – but they will kickstart the garden after a non-productive spring, and I can plant from seed for later in the year.

Also on Saturday, I played with a new toy for the BBQ – GrillGrates. Will be writing more about this on my Food Adventure blog later, but had a great time experimenting, and managed to achived high temperature grilling on my pellet grill, something I had been told wasn’t possible.

March 1, 2013
Before I foolishly got distracted with my new guitar-toy, I had plans for today.

Following on from a previous post, I spent an evening earlier this week, googling for likely alternate food retailers. It was a surprisingly long list, and I intended to check a few of them out today.

February 25, 2013
Yesterday, I had friends round to play boardgames, and I planned to cook some burgers, as it is fairly effortless with the pellet grill, and doesn’t keep me away from the games table.

Mindful of what I said on Saturday, I visited my butcher, only to be told they had had a big run on their beef burgers, presumably by others defecting from the supermarkets. I could come back later when they had made some more; I could buy some mince and make my own; or they had some pork and apple burgers.

February 25, 2013
My last post hasn’t raised any comments here, but I know it has been read. In the last couple of days, I have been lectured twice in person. Once by a friend who explained to me how “organic” was all a con, and it had been “proved scientifically” that it was no better than non-organic. Another friend spoke to me as if I was a child, explaining (or rather parroting) that the horsemeat scandal was not a food safety issue, but simply a question of food labelling fraud.

Frankly, they are both totally missing the point.

February 23, 2013
A month back I restarted my vegetable box, from the good people of Riverford Sacrewell. I stopped the box last year, simply because I was getting so much veg from my garden. I should have restarted it when my garden’s production ended, but I got into my bad habits of not planning, and buying from the supermarket as and when I ran out of something.

This seemed to coincide with my other bad habit of buying prepared food and ready-meals. But it is not a coincidence. Walking round a supermarket (whether it is Tesco, Coop, Waitrose or whatever) it is just so easy to see things and think “that looks nice” and put it in your basket.

December 1, 2012
Another new toy – a Cuisinart Soup Maker.

I eat a lot of soup, working from home, as it makes a quick and (usually) healthy lunch. However, although I have plenty of practice in making soup, lately I seem to be eating more shop-bought soup than homemade. Which generally means more salt, more fat and more additives.

November 23, 2012
Further to buying my Nexus 10, I still haven’t shopped around for a suitable music mount. But I have been thinking about what I need to use it in the kitchen.

I already have a couple of cookery resources that can be usefully used on a tablet. The original recipe book for my pellet grill, for a start, and recently the 40 page recipe guide for my breadmaker got too sticky to be hygenic, and was replaced with a pdf kindle sent to me by Breville.

October 16, 2012
I have a pear tree in my garden, which is productive more years than not, with this year being no exception.

However, it is fairly rare that I get an edible crop of pears from it. I have been nicely surprised a couple of years, but usually I end up with a pile of nicely sized fruit that never ripen. I am not sure what the factor is that made things work on the good years, but it seems to be all or nothing.

September 17, 2012
My attempt at making Salt Beef (Corned Beef) didn’t work out as I’d hoped. After rinsing the brined brisket, I decided to cook it in my slow cooker overnight.

The resulting meat definitely has the right consistency – it falls apart, and is moist with a good texture. But the flavour is lacking, and is a little oversalty.

September 5, 2012
So I finished cooking the pulled pork last night, and it pulled fine. However, I soon ran into a problem. On first taste, it seemed ok, but then I was reaching for a drink. Somehow, I had managed to overseason it – not hot, but just very salty.

I suspect it is a (commercial) rub that I used, that I hadn’t used previously. Had another roll for lunch, after an overnight in the fridge, and it is no different. Pleasant tasting at first, but overbearingly salty.

September 4, 2012
I haven’t done much recreational cooking recently. A mixture of being busy, bad weather and not having a working fridge-freezer.

I finally got my act together last week and made some pulled pork, using a couple of inexpensive rolled pork shoulders from Tescos, rather than the bone in joint that my recipe calls for. I adjusted a few things, and foil-wrapped the joints once they had had a good six hours exposure to smoke, and they came out very good. I ate quite a bit – in rolls, with salad, on pizza, but I also gave away some good-sized portions to some of my board-gaming pals.

August 22, 2012
… After a very successful shopping trip to London.

Will write more at another time, but one thing I will mention is the hot beef sandwich I foolishly bought in Harrods at lunchtime, which while pleasant enough, was not exactly hot, and left me feeling “meh”.