In Praise of a 'Kid's Tea'

Make sure you have your 5-a-day, eat clean, organic, veganuary! How about you have some fish fingers followed by a bowl of Angel Delight instead…

Culture is soaked in nostalgia right now so there’s no reason why your plate should be any different. You’ve heard of comfort food, well a ‘kid’s tea’ is the ultimate comfort food. Nothing will make you momentarily forget that we’re living through a pandemic, unable to get on the property ladder, and on the verge of a climate catastrophe quite like tucking into a plate of chicken dippers, chips and peas.

We’re lucky enough to have a home-cooked meal nearly every day, usually made from scratch with fresh ingredients but that somehow makes the times when we have a ‘kid’s tea’ even more enjoyable. Nobody gets as much pleasure out of a bowl of pasta with sliced up hotdogs, in the cheapest tomato sauce you can find, covered in thickly grated cheddar, as we do.

Think of it as an act of self-care, it might not be ‘good’ for you but it’s certainly cheering. So forget being healthy for one night, worrying about your weight is so pre-pandemic, and if you want to see green google a tree or something. Instead get some turkey dinosaurs in the oven, squirt yourself the biggest dollop of ketchup and prepare to spell rude words with some Alphabites.

Grandma Fried Chicken

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Yes, that’s right, another recipe from Grandma! She’s a little less secretive about her blend of herbs and spices but to be fair it’s probably not that dissimilar to a lot of fried chicken recipes but it is delicious.

This recipe makes enough to coat about 4 (skin-on) thighs and two drumsticks or alternatively about 3-4 breasts sliced into strips.

For the coating you will need:

125g self raising flour

Then all the following are teaspoons;

2 x celery salt

1 x sea salt

2 x black pepper

2 x paprika

1 x cayenne pepper

2 x dried oregano

2 x dried thyme

2 x ground cumin

1 x ground coriander

2 x garlic powder

Mix all the ingredients together. For coating the chicken you want a larger surface area, so if you’ve mixed everything in a bowl it’s best to spread some out on a plate or shallow dish.

Beat an egg into a bowl (you may need more than one for this amount of chicken) and you’re all set up to begin your production line.

Fill a shallow frying pan with vegetable oil to about two inches deep and heat it slowly to a moderately high temperature - test with a small piece of chicken, it should sizzle instantly but no uncontrollably!

If you’re using chicken breast chop them into thin strips, not too thin, think chicken tenders not spaghetti. If you’re using whole chicken pieces pat the skin dry lightly with some kitchen paper.

Dip your chicken in the beaten egg and cover fully, then toss it gently in the flour mix. Make sure the chicken is coated well, you can double dip if you like, then carefully place the coated chicken in the hot oil.

Get a few pieces in the oil but don’t overcrowd the pan, you want to be able to manage everything in their with ease and without hurting yourself!

Turn the pieces of chicken regularly until the skin is crisp and a deep golden colour. Remove and drain on a few pieces of kitchen paper. If you have more chicken to coat and fry pop your already cooked chicken into the oven on a low heat, this will help keep it warm and ensure it’s cooked through.

Once all your chicken is done tuck in! It’s great while it’s warm and juicy but if you’ve made chicken strips it’s also great to let it cool and slice it up for sandwiches!

Serve with corn on the cob, coleslaw and sweet potato fries.

You could also make this meat free by coating tofu instead of chicken.

Sausage & Bean Thing

A recipe from Grandma that is somewhat like a cassoulet but if you made this for a French person they’d probably spit in your face. When it comes to food ‘authenticity’ is not only limiting it’s ultimately a foolish notion, especially as it seems to be applied with particular fervour to peasant cuisines, which are inherently improvisatory and uncodifiable.

Anyway! We call it ‘the sausage and bean thing’ and we love it;

Firstly, you need to cook the sausages until they’re just starting to brown, you can fry them in the pan you’re going to cook the whole dish in or bake them separately in the oven. We opt for bake, it’s easier and causes less mess than frying. You don’t want to cook the sausages through, just long enough to give them a nice colour. Remove them from the pan (or oven) and set them aside to cool slightly.

Heat a glug of olive oil in a heavy-based pan and add the chopped onions, chopped garlic and dried sage. Cook the onions until soft but don’t let them brown.

Chop your chorizo into bite-sized chunks and add to the onions, cooking it until the juices have coloured the entire pan.

Pour over the chopped tomatoes, rinse the tin with a little water and add his to the pan also. Stir in the tomato paste and sprinkle in the smoked paprika (be generous with it).

Leave the sauce to simmer and thicken slightly while you cut the part cooked sausage into fat coins. The longer you’ve left the sausage to cool the easier this will be.

Add the chopped sausage to the pan and still to combine. Simmer until the sauce has thickened to a consistency you prefer and add the drained beans and chopped parsley when you’re ready to serve.

You can serve this on it’s on with just some nice bread. We’ve also served it with couscous which is nice but the best way to serve it (the way Grandma would serve it) is over a baked potato that has been split open and the filling mashed slightly with a knob of butter and a sprinkling of parmesan cheese!

Serves: 4

6 good quality pork sausages

250g cooking chorizo*

1 teaspoon dried sage

1 onion, diced

2 gloves garlic, chopped

1 x tin chopped tomatoes

1 tablespoon tomato paste

1 teaspoon smoked paprika

1 x tin cannellini beans

1 x bunch parsley, chopped

* We use the small linked sausage that look like …erm anal beads

#MeatFreeMonday

We can’t lay claim to Meat Free Monday in the same way we can with Fish Thursday, Meat Free Monday is an international campaign whereas Fish Thursday is more …local. Still, both form part of our weekly routine and both help our health and the health of the planet!

Just like with Fish Thursday having a designated day to do away with meat, far from being a constraint it actually pushes you to be more creative, and it broadens your culinary horizons. Forgoing meat once a week (but you should totally do it more than that) forces you to try new things and makes you realise that a meal can be tasty and satisfying without having to feast on flesh.

You can also approach it with as much or as little commitment as you wish, an elaborate Ottolenghi vegetable cornucopia would be a delicious (and pricey and time consuming) treat, but beans on toast is also a meat free option!

Curry in a Hurry

This is our go to recipe for a quick curry base. Not very authentic so apologies if that is something that’s important to you, but it’s hassle free and tasty, and you can add whatever you like to it - chicken, cauliflower, fried paneer, chickpeas and spinach. It’s a blank curry canvas!

Gently heat the oil in a heavy-based pan and add the cumin seeds, mustard seeds, chilli flakes and ginger paste. A moderate heat is enough to warm through the spices, you don’t want to burn them as this will ruin the entire flavour of your curry.

When the mustard seeds start to pop add the onions and fry until soft and golden. Season well with salt. Add the garlic, chopped, sliced or grated (or use Very Lazy Garlic for additional haste), and fry for a further 5 minutes. Add the turmeric, garam masala, curry powder and tomato paste and stir until well combined.

Pour over the chopped tomatoes, rinse the tin with a little water and add his to the pan also. Simmer gently until the sauce has thickened slightly, or for as long as your hunger will allow, and when you can bear it no longer add whatever further ingredients you wish.

Chicken works well or chickpeas and spinach are a favourite for a vegetarian option. We also like to mix chicken and chickpeas for what we call ‘chickenpea curry’.

Finish everything off with a good sprinkling of chopped coriander and serve with boiled rice or naan bread (or both)!

Serves: 4

3 tablespoons vegetable oil

3 teaspoons cumin seeds

2 teaspoons mustard seeds

1 teaspoon chilli flakes

1 tablespoon ginger paste

2 gloves of garlic

1 onion, diced

1 teaspoon garam masala

1 teaspoon turmeric

1 tablespoon curry powder*

1 x tin chopped tomatoes

1 tablespoon tomato paste

1 x bunch coriander, chopped

*use whatever heat of curry powder you prefer. We have a jar of mild and medium mixed together and provides a nice gentle heat

Fish Thursday

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After university I moved in with my grandparents for a couple of years. My Sister had taken my room as soon as I moved out and my Mum couldn’t afford to have me back without board (and I couldn’t afford the board)!

However, one positive aspect of being the product of a teenage pregnancy that you don’t see touted often is that it provides you with a pretty young extended family, so my grandparents are active, fun and pretty enjoyable to be around. They like a drink, have a wicked sense of humour and really appreciate a good meal. They also loved their routines and rituals, one of which was ‘Fish Thursday’. Yes, you read that right, Fish Thursday.

I’m fully aware of the various religious traditions of abstaining from animal meat on a Friday as penance to mark the day of Christ’s death, with many families opting for fish instead, but we are a family with a complete absence of religion. Beyond hymns at school we were raised without religion, it wasn’t even a conscious thing, it just wasn’t on our radar. Fish Thursday stems from nothing but routine.

Every Thursday my grandparents would take the bus to Hebden Bridge, (the lesbian capital of the UK just FYI), to walk the canal, browse the second hand shops and visit the market. Part of the market is formed by a travelling fishmonger where they would always pick up something fresh for dinner that evening.

For someone of her generation my Grandma is a pretty adventurous cook. Sure she does all the specialities grandmas are general known for; Sunday roasts, Yorkshire puddings, pies and cakes, but she also isn’t afraid to give something new a go, especially on a Thursday.

We would have everything from homemade fish fingers to steamed mussels with cider, trout en papillote, cod and chorizo stew, I even recall an attempt at sushi!

I have long since moved out but I like to keep the tradition of Fish Thursday alive, partly out of nostalgia but also having a designated day for an ingredient far from constraining you actually forces you to be more creative.

Sure there are days when it’s just tuna mayo on a jacket potato (or even a trip to the chippy!) but for the most part it’s a break from the cycle of the more routine meals during the rest of the week and an opportunity to try something new. Fish is also good for you! Plenty of omega-3 for your brain and vitamin D for your immune system, you should really be trying to eat fish at least twice a week, another benefit of which is it reduces the consumption of red meats, the farming of which is much more harmful to the environment, so it’s good for the planet too.

Every family (and individual) has their food routines and rituals, both mundane daily or weekly ones and those reserved for special occasions. Fish Thursday is a great one to take up if it fits in with your diet, it’s beneficial to your health and the environment, and it’s a boon to your cooking repertoire!

What food rituals do you have?

-M

The 5 Cookbooks We Use the Most

Kicking off #FoodieFebruary we’re sharing the cookbooks that we turn to most often when in need of something delicious for dinner:

The Roasting Tin Rukmini Iyer

This is the cookbook we’ve dined out on most often, it’s also the one we recommend frequently to fellow foodies. When you’re short of time and energy you can’t beat a good one pot recipe and this book is full of them, it’s all it contains in fact. Every recipe is a tasty traybake - just bang the ingredients into a tin, whack it in the oven and in a short time you’ll have a great dinner and even better - very little washing up!

There are also a lot of different variants of the book available; The Green Roasting Tin for vegetarians, The Quick Roasting Tin for when you only have half an hour and The Roasting Tin Around the World for a well travelled palate.

Recipes to try: Tarragon Roast Chicken with Potatoes, Onions and Garlic / Smokey Sausage, Sweet Potato and Red Onion Traybake / Crispy Baked Gnocchi with Tomatoes, Basil, Mozzarella and Pine Nuts

Table Manners Jessie Ware/Lennie Ware

Beautiful woman, beautiful music and beautiful food, is there anything Jessie Ware can’t do!? Not to be confused with their also excellent podcast titled Table Manners, here the mother and daughter pair don’t just talk about food while sharing it with their celeb pals they share some of their beloved family recipes with us.

It’s the best kind of fuss free but delicious home cooking, catering for everything from a solo lunch to a pretty impressive dinner party. It’s also the cookbook that managed to push us to master rice, a fairly simple skill that has until recently managed to allude, goes great with the chicken with olive tapenade, which is the only way we will currently roast a chicken. Slap on What’s Your Pleasure? and get dancing around your kitchen.

Recipes to try: Quick Lentil and Tomato Soup / Microwave Onion Rice / Provencal Roast Chicken with Olive Tapenade / Bella’s Cod in Sherry with Roasted Tomatoes and Butter Beans

The Art of the Larder Claire Thomson

The Art of the Larder (that’s cupboard to us non-Tories) is in our opinion one of the best ‘store cupboard cookbooks’ on the shelves. While you won’t strictly be able to create a complete dish from ingredients you already have laying around, some fresh elements are needed for most of the recipes, you will learn new and interesting ways to utilise those packs of lentils and tins of kidney beans collecting dust at the back of the cupboard.

We love being able to create something from nothing and this collection of recipes is a great basis to start learning that skill. The semolina gnocchi is probably the best way to make use of semolina ever envisioned and the chocolate stem ginger flourless cake has become a birthday staple.

Recipes to try: White Beans with Toulouse Sausage, Broccoli and Garlic / Little Gem Caesar Salad / Semolina Gnocchi / Chocolate and Stem Ginger Flourless Cake

The Little Library Cookbook Kate Young

You may have noticed by now that we love a cookbook with a great concept and this one is pretty special - each recipe is plucked straight from the pages of some of the most iconic literary fiction. Who among us hasn’t wondered what it would be like to share a marmalade sandwich with Paddington, or sit in the White Witch’s slay devouring Turkish Delight, slurping some wonton soup with the ladies of The Joy Luck Club is right up our street for sure!

You may be familiar with Kate Young from her pieces in The Guardian, she’s an excellent writer as well as a great cook and you can enjoy this cookbook just as you might a novel and completely by pass the recipes, but why would you pass up the chance to whip up some green eggs and ham!? (Much nicer than you’d expect, we do like like them Sam I am).

Recipes to try: Green Eggs and Ham / Crab and Avocado Salad / Brown Butter Madeleines / Steak and Onions

Cook, Eat, Repeat Nigella Lawson

Don’t trust anyone who recommends cookbooks to you and doesn’t include the undisputed queen of home cooking, all hail the Domestic Goddess. Previous to this latest collection we’d turn to Nigellissima on the regular but in the short time we’ve had Cook, Eat, Repeat we’ve done a lot of cooking, eating and repeating. It’s an instant classic and has so many hits to cater for every mood you barely need another cookbook.

The old-fashioned sandwich loaf is the most hassle free way to bake bread we’ve ever come across and the fish finger bhorta has almost been as prevalent in kitchens across the UK as banana bread! There’s a recipe for brown butter colcannon that seems as close to culinary heaven as you can get, and though we don’t like to use it there’s no one but Nigella who could get us firing up the mee-cro-wa-vay.

Recipes to try: Old-Fashioned Sandwich Loaf / Fish Finger Bhorta / Chocolate, Tahini and Banana Two Ways (the pudding way) / Brown Butter Colcannon

Just get it done!

Your birth was registered. Your school was allocated by where you live. You’ve had a National Insurance record since you were 16. HMRC know where you work and how much you earn. The Council and utility companies know where you live. The DVLA know what car you drive, where you live and how good a driver you are. Your doctor has a complete record of your health since birth. You carry a phone with GPS that can track your location to within inches. Your supermarket loyalty card knows what you buy. Your internet activity is monitored so adverts and other content can be tailored just for you.

But yeah, governments of the world created a deadly virus to kill over a million people just so that they could put microchips into a vaccine so they could ‘see what you’re doing’.

Give it a rest!

A Public Elf Announcement

Have a safe and happy Christmas

Reading *is* fundamental

In the not so distant past the goal regularly was - fifty books a year. It was a goal that was never achieved but the high thirties low forties were not an unfamiliar place.

Having always been an avid reader, a twenty minute train ride to and from a job where I didn’t want to speak to anyone on my hour long lunch break made for a good environment to get through tome after tome but cut to 2016, with a new job only a ten minute walk away, a meagre thirty minutes for lunch and a world rapidly falling to pieces I was reading less and less. Well, that’s not entirely true…

I was actually reading plenty. Plenty of live news feeds, plenty of articles about Brexit, about Trump, about the continuing woes of the Labour party, plenty of tweets!

I could tell you in great detail how the polls were looking in Wisconsin, I could give you an in depth account of exactly the problems exiting the European Union would cause, I couldn’t just give a lecture on why Jeremy Corbyn would never be Prime Minister I could provide a whole university course on it!

Could I share my thoughts on Zadie Smith’s newest novel Swing Time though? No. I had bought it but not read it. In fact I still haven’t read it. I did read The Underground Railroad by Colson Whithead though, stunning, you should pick it up if you haven’t already.

Trump had his great political upset and then began to upset us all on a seemingly daily basis, Corbyn stumbled from crisis to crisis losing not one but two general elections, the world was experiencing forest fires, flash floods and other extreme weather at a rapidly increasing rate and just when it seemed like things couldn’t possibly get any worse…

Surprise! Who had a pandemic down as the next big bad we’d be battered with?

As the catastrophes increased my ability to even start a book decreased. The advent of the 24 hour news (along with social media) having a detrimental effect on our concentration span is nothing new and this is not a ‘woe is me I can’t even enjoy a novel’ whine, we’ve all had to deal with much worse this past few years! But as we begin to come to the end of another awful year and a ray of light from a syringe shines down on us, it’s time to address the reading problem. Because after all, reading is fundamental.

Not only does reading help keep us informed but it can also broaden our horizons, expand our experiences, empower us to empathise with other people, increase our vocabulary and comprehension, and reduce our stress.

Reading is just as much of a boon for our mental health as exercise is, perhaps a little of the energy that went into campaigning to keep gyms open during national lockdowns should be transferred to keeping public libraries open!

We all know a new year is an excellent time to start a project or change old habits, and while the goal in 2021 won’t be to read fifty books, I will certainly be making an effort to shut the world out more often and enjoy a few pages of escapism.

The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett seems like an apt place to start, I (shamefully for a Northerner) haven’t actually ever read any Bennett and at only 128 pages it’s not a daunting task. It’s a task that will have to wait until January though, let’s get Christmas out of the way with first!

-M