Recovery position

I think we've all survived Christmas.  Our girls, Dau.I and Dau.II, who left home 4.5 and 2.5 years ago and promptly enrolled in the University of Life have been working in the catering trade. They came home for several days over the holiday and owned Christmas dinner.  All I had to do was slave away at the kitchen sink acting the plongeur for a mountain of used delph, saucepans, chopping boards, glassware and cutlery.  "Do you have a dish-washer?", people ask; "Yes, me", I reply. "Don't you realise that dish-washing machines are mega-efficient in their use of water?", they continue; "Piss off", I reply.  It's a policy decision we've taken: washing the dishes by hand makes you aware of their use, helps you reflect on the process of cooking and eating food. It's the opposite of the take-away, throw-away society we might embrace if we lived close enough to an Indian restaurant to make ready-meals convenient.

I missed the starter of spinach-and-adds salad because I was on the phone to my pal P in Boston.  I was on the phone because my service supplier Vodafone offered free national and international calls on Der Tag. I was talking to P because we go back a long way and her father is dying and I thought she could do with a boost. With 4 at the table, we had a meat end and a meat free end: two of us believing that chicken and ham was both traditional and necessary. The lads at the other end of the table had some rather fine aubergine roulades dressed as you might do cannelloni; they were delicious. I'm with Thomas Jefferson on this, a man who ate meat only “as a condiment to the vegetables which constitute my principal diet.”  For me the main point of Sunday/Christmas/Thanksgiving dinner is the roast potatoes; if these are done right then the whole meal falls into place. Yesterday, they were done right. The girls could do this long before they left home, but formal training can give even the most mundane dish a bit of a lift. There was gravy, of course; the traditional Brussels-sprouts were roasted with chestnuts and pancetta; there was a dark red dish of red cabbage and lemon; a taster of cranberry sauce; and final dish of roasted carrots-and-parsnips. All delicious on their own, a feast together.

After a gasp and a gap of an hour and a Kobayashi shake to settle things, we came back for self-assembled 'trifle' of Pandoro slices with autumn berries, custard and cream. Let us be thankful for a fully-functional gall-bladder to process the tsunami of saturated fat. Really looking forward to hang-sangers today: it's like the dinner yesterday was just a prelude.  But first I'll have another go at some dish-washing.

Boudin blanc d'Irlande

St. Stephen's Day, when we have a second go at the food.
This story needs some background music, so you might open Le Boudin in another tab for the five minutes it will take you to read about John Paul O'Connor [above] who makes white pudding within sight of Carrauntoohill [above] in Co Kerry.  I met him the other day in Tramore. I was looking after Pat the Salt and nipped up to Supervalu to buy some bread and milk . . . and came away with 250g of white pudding. Hard to refuse a man who has driven 200km to sell something that he believes in. Very nice it was too: it even got a 'like' from The Beloved and she's a vegetarian. O'Connor is about my age, but he missed out on the very expensive education bit; indeed he left school and left the country when he was 13 to go and work in England. One of his jobs was in a sausage factory in London, before he got his start in construction. He has erected steel all over the British Isles and also across the pond in America. The boom was good to him and in 2007 he was employing not only himself but 20 others besides. We treat our entrepreneurs shockin' poor in this country, expecting them to take all the risks, take people off the live register, and put money aside for retirement or disaster.

Everyone was washed up and laid off in the Crash.  In 2012, when the last sliver of construction had worked itself through, O'Connor looked across the kitchen table at his wife Kathleen and they agreed they were too old to emigrate again. They decided that they could make a better sausage than the dreadful concoction they had a hand in when they were young - turns out that she had also worked in the sausage trade in London.
They'd been in business for less than a year when they entered their products in a competition organised by the Harry Potter School of Food Wizardry Commanderie des Goustiers du Duché  d'Alençon in Normandy and came away with a Best in British Isles cup and certificate. [L with M.Dupont et M.Dumbledore].  The O'Connors have decided to take Sásta Sausages and Puddings up-market rather than competing with the Big Boys on price. That way they'll be able to keep the quality of their ingredients high. Unless you're starvin' you wouldn't want to go down-market with sausage. I had a choking revelation in Boston  when I read the ToC for hot-dogs after I had eaten half a packet: what in heck are chicken non-meat byproducts? apart from being pink? Sásta puddings retail at €12/kg compared to Tesco Finest at €3.34/kg. If you treat meat as a condiment to the calories, like Thomas Jefferson, then you'll be able to justify paying for something that is genuine. Quite apart from supporting a company (and all its employees) that wouldn't exist but for a couple with conviction, courage and a good product.

The puff on the packet claims that the recipe is inspired by JP's grand-mother who used to lash in gorse flowers Ulex europaeus and wild garlic Allium ursinum. That would be interesting, gorse smells of coconut with a hint of vanilla, and ramsons A. ursinum would make your eyes water at ten paces. So I've left pictures of those Summer flowers up [R] so that their whiff will beguile you while you read the modern ingredients:
Pork (80%), onion, pinhead oatmeal, water, rusk (wheat flour, water, salt), spice mix (wheat flour, rusk (wheat), salt, soya flour, preservative sodium metabisulphite, emulsifier: sodium tripolyphosphate, spice and spice extracts, antioxidant E301, rapeseed oil, herbs and herb extracts, flavour enhancer E621).
Notes:

• The emboldened words are, as usual, flagged as potential allergens
• E301 is ascorbic acid - vitamin C
• E621 is MSG monosodium glutamate the Queen of Umami.
• sodium tripolyphosphate [ahem that's E452], the emulsifier, we've met before as a 'builder' in the chemistry of detergents. Here it helps keep things damp.

The most striking element of this recipe is the fact that the main ingredient by far is pork. You might compare the list with that of spice burgers [9% meat] or Irish sausages [70% meat]. But unless you're a fan of Frank Herbert's Dune, you'll be less impressed with spice and spice extracts and herbs and herb extracts. If you're going up-market you don't have to rely on generic catering-pack herbs and spices. You could try simplify simplify and make a truly rustique gastronomique food like my much loved caldo verde. Use cracked black pepper not spice and gorse flower and allium not herbs. That would be distinctive and a bit brave.

Caldo verde

As Thoreau had it "Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify, simplify!"  There is something to be said for fritters (anything fried is good after all) so long as they are not filled with Spam. We used to get Spam fritters for school dinner and even then, as a starveling, I knew there was something wrong about the inside of those things.  So let's concentrate on the simplify, simplify.  I thought about this as I tucked into a humble supper after the slap-up feed that marked the end of term at The Institute.  Even having opted for the goat's-cheese quiche at lunch, there was a lot more saturated animal fat than I'm used to at lunchtime. I felt this in spades last night after a traditional Irish Christmas meal mid-afternoon.  When you have three generations of competent cooks there is likely to be more food than can be consumed at one sitting. And when it is all mmmm so good, it's very hard to hold back. So there were a couple of hours between dessert and bedtime when I felt like a hyena (Crocuta crocuta) who has scarfed down so much gazelle (Eudorcas thomsonii) that he just can't move.  But that feeling passed in time for cold ham&pickle sandwiches to help make bearable watching Morecombe & Wise and Stephen Fry on the telly.. The humble supper, alluded to earlier and thinner, was caldo verde: a soup I came to relish during my walk up the coast of  Portugal in 1989.  (Almost) nothing to it:

• water água
• potatoes batatas
• kale couve manteiga
• onion cebola
• smoked sausage lingüiça calabresa defumada
• olive oil azeite

After trogging 20km a day along the beaches and cliffs of the Atlantic coast, often I was only capable of slumping into a seat and croaking "caldo verde pelo amor de deus".  Because everyone has it on the menu, it was always available and always piping hot.  After half a bowl of this, my equanimity (and my manners) would generally return and I was ready to order a glass of wine and a plate of carne de porco assada or bacalhau à brás.  But several times, the caldo verde was so damned good I just ordered up another plate of it, and devil take the glances from the staff at the restaurant. Also note that the sausage can be a tiny fraction of the whole, only a little more than the dash of salt&pepper; just enough to lift the whole dish to heaven.  I'm with Thomas Jefferson on this, a man who ate meat only “as a condiment to the vegetables which constitute my principal diet.”

But you don't want to get doctrinaire about diet, particularly not at Christmas. Pass the ham, please.

Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify, simplify! - See more at: http://quotationsbook.com/quote/36353/#sthash.eGWjNb0v.dpuf

Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify, simplify! - See more at: http://quotationsbook.com/quote/36353/#sthash.eGWjNb0v.dpuf

Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify, simplify! - See more at: http://quotationsbook.com/quote/36353/#sthash.eGWjNb0v.dpuf

Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify, simplify! - See more at: http://quotationsbook.com/quote/36353/#sthash.eGWjNb0v.dpuf

Bean Harvest

Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little!
It is easy to let inertia set in when you have a garden that is 7 hectares in extent and you drive past ALDI five times a week coming home from work.
Q. Why go to the hassle of watering food plants in the poly-tunnel when you can buy dew-picked snap-frozen green beans in the supermarket?
A. Because Dau.II came to visit at the beginning of May and ordered us off to the garden centre to purchase, at the very least, beans and tomato plants. "so she'd have fresh food when she came again in August". By mid-July they were bearing.

If you've done kitchen-garden at all, you know yourself that it is feast or famine. The beans come thick and fast for several weeks. Even if you eat beans three times a day you can't consume the abundance. Your neighbours are of little help  because they have their own glut to process. In August, I started to fill the freezer with rough chopped and blanched green beans. But I also noted pods which had grown to maturity hidden in the abundant foliage, these were marked for seed-corn for planting next year. It wasn't until the end of November that I did a final triage of the 6 or 8 surviving bean-stalks and sent the greenery to the compost. Some of the mature pods were starting to get furry, but many had dried out as nature intended. At the kitchen table we shucked a couple of small buckets full of pods [see above] Too too many for planting next year, but they are dry enough to store without freezing. The fact that they are a glossy black, I am treating as a bug not a feature.

I've been throwing a handful into my cocido invierno. They say that Cocido Madrileño and Cocido Gallego are simple; but they are real heavy on the meat. Me, I base a lot of my comfort food my version of Caldo Verde. Our neighbour's neighbour now has an unending supply of potatoes too big and/or lumpy to be sold in shops. Big spuds don't bother me none, if they are smaller than my head I'll wrastle them into submission and the pot . . . with a chopped onion, some shredded kale or green cabbage, and a handful of chopped salami you have a meal that sticks to the ribs. Garlic, olive oil, a couple of bay-leaves are welcome but not essential. And did someone mention beans? Of course you can some throw in - for protein, like. We don't need sides of beef here: for me, as for Thomas Jefferson, meat is a condiment. Same cocido principle [cured ham, peas and rice] applies in China.

Food burden

Damme, it used to be simple. You'd have a limit budget with which you had to feed the family, so you bought a large sack of spuds because they were cheap and filling; and then you eked out the rest of your food budget on a tin of beans or a packet of sausages to act as condiment to calories as recommended by Thomas Jefferson. The Market should work so that the commodities that were most valuable would have the highest price because demand would ensure that. Then came 'organic' and you were made to feel like a heel if didn't pay extra for something so labelled.

We had just about nailed this other dimension to food economics - there wasn't a particularly clear relationship between price and organichood. - when my sister came to visit and told us we should worry about the air-miles . . . as well as the O-word. That started us looking at the country of origin and refusing to eat new potatoes in the early Summer because they all came from Cyprus or Egypt. As I say, it all got too much for my little brain and I went back to price. If regular milk is 75c and organic milk is 100c, and it is, then I save the 25c towards giving myself a clock when I retire. And the hell with thin milk, fat-free milk, and other adulterated products where you pay the same price and don't get all the ingredients. And I certainly don't buy other white beverages made with seaweed, palm oil, emulsifiers, and soy | almond | rice | oat. I tell ya there's a killing to be made with Genuine Irish Potato Milk.

Now The Beloved has pointed me at yet another dimension of food-guilt. As well as the organic, fair-trade, forest-friendly, kosher, nut-less, milk-less, gluten-free; we now have to get all WIGged out over the Warming, Index of Global. It hasn't yet appeared on the labelling but the BBC has a helpful starter pack to see just how your self-indulgence over pork, coffee, wine is quietly destroying the planet. According to this BBC app, I should be putting almond 'milk' in my porridge:

. . . but it ain't gonna happen. You can jump out of the global warming frying pan and find yourself plunged in a toxic maelstrom of carcinogens from these made-in-lab commodities. I'd rather skip the white stuff altogether and have my porridge protestant plain.

Condimental

The EU is a great force for civilisation. Through the Erasmus Scheme, students get sent foreign, learn through another language, meet people with a real tan, eat the local food. Heck, they might fall for someone who was born in a different parish. Without the compulsions of the EU's Water Framework Directive, Irish towns would still be discharging raw sewage into the nearest water-course; and getting fresh cryptosporidium straight out of their taps. Irish people would rather not pay for Irish Water; so it is taking forever to build waste-water treatment plants to replace dumping just off-shore from the famous white sand beaches.  The craven Minister of Finance refused to add a penny to the price of fossil fuel in the last budget although that is one step towards meeting our carbon emission targets [imposed by the EU]. If it cost €5 in gas to drive to the corner-shop for the Sunday newspaper, some of us would start to walk, even if it is 800m away . . . even if it's raining.

The MinFin is craven because he wants to get himself and his government re-elected the next time we exercise our democratic rights to not pay for water [I gave already; it falls from the sky] and not to take ownership of our carbon emissions. We the People, by being part of the EU have committed to reducing our carbon footprint by 80% from 1990 levels.
Q. How are we doin'?
In 2017 the carbon foot-print was 61 million tonnes - down 1% from 2016.
A. not so good!
And according to the EPA that reduction was a fortuitous result of a warmer winter requiring less fossil fuels up our domestic chimneys, rather than any change in government policy or deliberat[iv]e change in public practice. A third of the atmosphere-depleting carbon is from agriculture - mostly cow burps - and that sector was up 3% C year on year; exactly matching a 3.1% increase in the number of dairy cows making far more butter, milk and cheese than we can consume locally.

Last week John Gibbons, head of An Taisce's Climate Change Committee, suggested that schools could implement a meat-free Monday as part of the organisation's Green Schools Pack - chekkitout! Because he can do the math, he must have seen cows as the low-hanging udder in the carbon equation. No meat on Mon seems rather measured to me: no out-right ban, just a suggestion that one day a week, Ireland's children would have one meal without meat . . . to see how they liked it . . . because it might be better for the sclerotic 11 year old arteries . . . because a bowl of rice and dal is cheaper than meat-and-potatoes and mmmm good. You may keep your food of kings, give me megadarra any day. My office at The Institute has a window! which looks out onto the canteen¡ I know when it's Friday because the office smells of haddock. I often wonder what our Chinese students make of meat-and-two-veg-and-gravy lunch. Is it excitingly exotic and super-Bisto-tasty?

That humble suggestion from John Gibbons was met with a shit-storm of indignation from Joe Healy head of the Irish Farmer's Association. As if the idea that we eat a little less meat (on Mondays) was an existential threat to all Irish farmers. If you follow Gibbons on twitter you'll get ironic comments about how fighting the farmer's corner for beef and dairy is giving a poke in the eyes of Irish farmers who are struggling to make a living growing vegetables. Wait, Joe Healy is . . . a dairy farmer. Pat McCormack, president of Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers Association (ICMSA) also rowed in to condemn the suggestion. Well he would, wouldn't he?

I mentioned this contretemps between Joe and John at a Research Strategy Meeting at The Institute. I suggested that we-the-environmental-scientists might help promote a Green Ireland where agriculture was less intensive; where inputs were more sustainable; where food was consumed locally. That evoked a really quite intemperate response from two of my colleagues: they liked meat, their kids liked meat, and meat they would have.

You can't get more efficient feed conversion ratios than by cutting out the middle-cow and eating corn and soya directly. Well not soya, which of all beans I find peculiarly repulsive, but you know what I mean. Let's follow Thomas Jefferson who thought of meat as a condiment to a meal mainly of vegetables . . . rather than great wet slabs of the stuff on every plate.

Colour supplement: Dan Giusti doing school dinners for $1.25/head.