Grow your own; make your own

Last year local libraries handed out packets of seed. I pre-planted the beans and peas in 4cm micropots to be germinated under the sofa. But I couldn't be dealing thus with spinach; so I cleared 1 sq.m. inside the polytunnel; lurried in a few buckets of compost; broadcast the spinach seed; and raked them in. In a couple of weeks, the weeds were back in numbers but the spinach came up as well; and I had to water c a r e f u l l y lest the wispy seedlings were carried away in the flood. Since then, for the whole of July and half of June that spinach has kept on giving [R below for one day's harvest]. [R above] is the too-small-to-pick abundance left for  another day. It's true, however, that I often hand-pick a sandwichful for lunch.

I never wash own-self-grown salad leaves because I know there is no coliform in that part of the garden; and who wants wet leaves in a sandwich?? In contrast there's been another national recall of contaminated produce: this time spinach (and rocket, mixed leaves). The only advantage of _buying_ fresh picked greens is that there's a chance they are packed in nitrogen which will (until opened) protect the product from spoilage much better than a bag in the salad drawer of my fridge.

I say another national recall of contaminated produce because we had one also involving Listeria just two weeks ago! That was at the value added end of the food chain in Ballymaguire Foods up in Lusk, Co Dublin/Fingal. If you've ever eaten a chilled 'ready meal' in Ireland [Aldi, Centra, Supervalu, Tesco] chances are it was made by Ballymaguire, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Hoey Family at Country Crest Ltd. The Hoeys used to grow and sell spuds but, like Keogh's Crisps, worked out they could do better by processing produce and now have 400 on the payroll. This recall list  gives some idea of the cross-contamination possibilities:

• Bolognese with Pancetta
• Chicken & Chorizo with Baby Potatoes
• Goose Fat Irish Potatoes
• Ham & Mushroom Tagliatelle
• Irish Angus Beef Meatballs with Pappardelle
• Mashed Turnip or potato [€6.50/kg "gluten free"]
• Potato Gratin
• Rainbow Root Vegetables
• Salmon Penne Pasta
• Three Cheese Cauliflower Bake
• Veggie Lasagne
• Wholemeal Pasta Bolognese

You can buy organic potatoes for less than €2/kg, so getting them mashed by strangers for your family is [€4.50!] costly . . . even without dicing with Listeria.

make your own? An earlier Me might have expressed amazement that adults in 21stC Ireland couldn't mash their own potatoes, let alone construct a basic chicken pie. Last year we went through a jag of buying and eating Aldi Deluxe Special fancy pot pies. They were tasty [food engineers know their onions] even if they had 30 different ingredients. Well obvs home-baked pies would likely max out at ~10 different ingredients, so convenience isn't about limiting the inventory in your pantry. My judgey gripe is imaging the cliché office worker unable to cook because they're exhausted from pounding the keyboard all day. Really? Not all office workers! but I reckon some of them would live longer and happier lives if they cared about food prep and did it well rather than shirking it as an invidious chore. 

I confessed this a tuthree days ago when I was having lunch with Cookie Dau.II. She invited me to check my privilege. There are far too many people living in B&B hotel rooms with no chopping board & only a microwave for cooking. And cohorts of elders living alone but not eligible for Meals-on-Wheels. And folk with the palsy or registered blind. I accept that, but I suspect there aren't enough such edge cases to justify a whole industry processing food for profit. The business model depends on healthy, fit, people who can afford the price of convenience and choose not to donate that discretionary income to people who cannot.

One result of eating a few dozen Aldi pot pies in 2024, is that I have a stack of those dinky aluminium foil dishes. For me it is the work of minutes to make a batch of short-crust pastry, enough for a week's worth of pies, say, Mo We Th. There is a good bit of Lebanese genes culture swilling about in the family: many of my rellies are unable to stop over-catering for The Unexpected Guest. There is always something to fill a pie in a left-overs tupperware tub in the fridge. The example [R] contained an interesting mix of brown lentils, green beans, red onion, beige garbanzos, with a smidge of diced chorizo.  It's probably more efficient to take a leaf out of Hoey Inc's playbook and assemble a batch of pies all at once - say a half dozen, not a half tonne. They'll keep a few days as >!Shazzam!< convenience in the fridge and much longer in our freezer rather than Aldi's. Pricewise, I'd guess the mark-up between my pie and Ballymaguire pie is about the same as for mashed potato. And any contamination from sloppy kitchen practice will just be asymptomatic family-own-self coliform. I wouldn't serve Uncle Dan from Canada one of my pies - his microbione is a different, susceptible, kettle of fish altogether.

I don't know any specific cases but it's Lombard Street to a china orange that some of 'my' Food and Ferm microbiology students from my working days in The Institute finished up doing QC for major food producers in Ireland. I reckon they're better at doing Gram--stains from production line samples now than when they were on my watch.