Tag: food

May 6, 2013

…and (the weekend) ends here

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.

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March 1, 2013

A little find!

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.

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February 25, 2013

On a brighter note…

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.

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February 25, 2013

I want food suppliers who care

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.

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February 23, 2013

Supermarkets – do I really need them?

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.

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December 1, 2012

In the soup

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.

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November 23, 2012

The Kitchen Tablet

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.

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October 16, 2012

Experiments with pears

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.

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September 17, 2012

Salt Beef – Results

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.

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September 5, 2012

Pulled Pork – a disappointment

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.

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September 4, 2012

Salt Beef & Pulled Pork

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.

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August 22, 2012

Tired but happy

… 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”.

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