Jump to content
By fans, for fans. By fans, for fans. By fans, for fans.

We only eat 4 things


cymrococh

Recommended Posts

http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/food/s...2038091,00.html

 

The makers of Lloyd Grossman sauces have commissioned a survey which yields this depressing information: foodwise, most of us have around four staple meals, and that is pretty much all we cook. This means that we eat on average 2,960 portions of spaghetti bolognese in a lifetime, which is the equivalent of eating it every day for eight years. Other British staples that loom large are sausage and mash, chicken tikka masala and chilli con carne. It turns out that our Jamie Oliver- fetishising, cookbook-buying habits bear about as much relation to our actual nutritional lives as reading Heat bears to an actual social life. And as a result we are heartily bored of almost everything we eat. We have lost our eating mojo. Foodwise, we are in a deep rut.

 

I have to say, in terms of our collective health, that this is not necessarily a bad thing. There is compelling evidence in Jeffrey Steingarten's iconoclastic book The Man Who Ate Everything that the more tedious and unvariegated each plateful is, the less likely we are to overeat. But really, who wants to be bored as a way of avoiding obesity?

I have some tips for achieving a varied diet. My first tip is, don't buy Lloyd Grossman sauces. Of course, you may well start talking about being "too busy" to make your own sauces, but that is rubbish. It's not that we're too busy to cook any more, it's about priorities - it's that we think watching Time Team is more important than finding a delicious new way to cook spinach.

 

The very first way to get bored by anything is to adorn it with a sauce out of a packet, even if these sauces are very posh and might even be from Waitrose. Part of the excitement of cooking is that even when you do exactly the same thing as you've done a thousand times, it doesn't necessarily taste the same. Sometimes you have a heavier salt pinch, or other times your basil is incredibly springy and woody. Sometimes you are in a bad mood and you mush things in a cross way or cook them too fast. The payback for sauces on occasion being unbelievably delicious is that sometimes, under what look like the same conditions, they are really very mediocre. You can be rewarded or disappointed, but what you will maintain is the element of surprise. You will never be surprised by a bought sauce. This pretty much knocks out the Far East for a workaday staple, I think, since a nice from-scratch chicken tikka masala is going to take a lot of pestling and dry-roasting and thought. Would it be overbold to suggest that a good Indian restaurant will do a curry better anyway, and for probably the same amount of money? That is tip two. Go out for a curry. I know, I know; it's controversial!

 

Tip three is that of course we are all going to do things more than once, and things that are delicious a lot of times. The trick with staples is to concentrate on skills rather than cuts or particular dishes. If, for instance, you were watching Junior Masterchef in 1989, and someone took a chicken breast, squidged some gruyere into it, wrapped the whole lot in bacon and fried it till it wouldn't do you a mischief, that would be tasty and, I can see, tempting to repeat, but none of that is, strictly speaking, a skill. A roux is a skill; so is a hollandaise; gutting, filleting and boning a fish is a skill; anything with a lot of steps is a skill, so a salsa verde is a skill, even though, in the end, it's also just a sauce. The point is, once you have made salsa verde 20 times, you will never again have to look up how to do it, you'll never run out of anchovies, you'll know exactly how much of what you want in it, and you'll stop cutting pointless recipes out of Sunday supplements which look delicious but, in fact, boil down to "piece of fish + salsa verde". (By the way, never make pasta one of your staples; you gain nothing by the repetition. A blind alien could come down and make it just as well as you. It's like golf.)

 

Tip four is that food is really no different from any other kind of consumption - let's call the other two clothes and interiors. New things look/ taste better. You buy a new top, you love the look of yourself in it. Probably, to the untrained eye, you look the same as in your old top, except now you're walking differently, so everyone else thinks you look nice too. Food is unique in the consumer experience, though, in that you are on a constant mission to replenish, and can do so without guilt. This is a feature that none of us makes the most of, and those of us with a very narrow range of staples make the most of it the least. And yet, if we were constantly looking for total variety, that would take a lot of imagination and, furthermore, it wouldn't maximise the other feature of human experience, which is that when you light upon something really nice/tasty, you want to wear/eat it all the time, but only for a short time.

 

So repetitiveness can be great, only not in the decade-long cycles that we're doing it at the moment. Your cycles should last one week. I do this: I get a signature food item for the whole week. It could be a vegetable, but the most traditional version of this is to take something like a pork shoulder, braise or slow roast it for the Sunday, make a stew or pie for the Monday and Tuesday, stick some in risotto for the Wednesday, boil up what's left for soup on the Thursday, go to the pub on a Friday (that, by the way, is tip five - sometimes don't cook. If you have a family, you can call this Trash Friday and everyone can choose their trashy treat, and eat it) and you're almost back to the beginning.

 

You could do the same with an octopus, or if I saw a meaty white fish on special, I would get them all, bake one, use another for a stew, maybe even bake one in dishwasher salt for a laugh, flash fry the fourth ...) This week, I have a glut of cauliflowers. Ha ha! My poor boyfriend. He has no idea. I don't think he's even seen them. Tonight, I'm doing cauliflower stuck in ricotta with olives and radishes, which is a cool-looking 90s recipe from Rowley Leigh, and tomorrow I will Madhur Jaffrey it with turmeric, in total defiance of my own "go out for curry" advice, and the next night I will do something I saw in Weekend magazine with saffron, and then I'll do a straightforward cauliflower cheese, and then we probably won't eat cauliflower again for about four months, but for the time we do have to, it'll be a real cauliflower event.

 

Tip six is to always have your nuclear ingredients - that is, things that you can add to your week's signature ingredient which will change its nature completely. Most often, this occurs via salt or some other explosion, and in that bracket will be anchovies, capers, olives, pancetta - they bring different things, but it's the salty tang that makes them nuclear. Sometimes, it's fat and salt, as in the case of chorizo and cheese. Other times, it's none of that, it's just a change of texture. Molecular structure, if you like - eggs can solidify or lighten, turn a side dish into the main event, turn scrags of yesterday's main event into today's starter.

 

I think that's it. Until I get a smokehouse in the garden, that is the full battery of my fun with food. If I wanted to be health-crazy, I could probably do better, but I haven't eaten spaghetti bolognese since I left home.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...