Food

Don’t laugh, but one of the highlights of my workday is settling down on the couch at noon (I work at home) with my bowl of vegetarian soup, flax crackers, and mug of herb tea to watch You Are What You Eat on BBC America. But when I tuned in this Monday, they’d replaced my hour of poo analysis and junk food banquet tables (if you watch the show, you know what I mean) with some show that’s a cross between How Clean is Your House and Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, wherein a hospitality expert exposes the filth she finds in hotel rooms. Boo!

Tell me I’m not the only YAWYE addict out here. I know Gillian Mackeith gets a lot of flack about her medical qualifications and how she treats her subjects (quite rudely!), but watching the show makes me never want to eat things like hot dogs, pork rinds, and gummy bears ever again.

At least it’ll still be on weekends at noon.

Many of you may have read this already — the letter is making the rounds of the Internets — but in case you haven’t, read this hilarious complaint letter written by an peevish Virgin Atlantic customer to Sir Richard Branson about the horrendous meal he was served aboard a Virgin flight from Mumbai to Heathrow in December. The customer, who since has been identified as an advertising executive named Oliver Beale, received a call from Branson afterwards, who apologized for the disgusting slop and offered Beale the opportunity to choose meals and wine for future Virgin flights.

I love that the letter was accompanied by photos because that food does look abominable and I’m afraid the hyperbole alone wouldn’t have been as convincing. On that note, two of the best airline meals of my life were on British Airways flights to and from Heathrow and Mumbai. Maybe Virgin Atlantic should send some spies to check it out.

First off, when I read Toby Young’s memoir about his stint at Vanity Fair, I think I laughed so hard a few times I knocked one of my cats off the bed. And I was thrilled to hear this British food critic was going to judge this season on one of my favorite shows, Top Chef. But I was severely disappointed with him last week — he just wasn’t that funny and his condemnations of the cheftestants’ dishes were too overwrought.

Luckily he redeemed himself this week. He still went for some truly awful similes but I loved it when he said when he gets served a pork product, he wants to make love to it. (Or something like that.) It was very funny.

Anyway, an interview with Mr. Toby Young on the LA Times‘ Show Tracker blog for your reading pleasure.

Cadbury announced this week they’ll be printing a new warning, in bright yellow caps, on its Dairy Milk chocolate bars. Brace yourselves. The warning is CONTAINS: MILK. And to eliminate any doubt in consumers’ minds, Cadbury Dairy Milk Fruit and Nut bars will include the warning CONTAINS: MILK, NUTS.

Cynical me thought Cadbury was announcing this news to shift attention away from the other ingredient starting with “M” in their chocolate bars. But no — it’s just the government butting in with their labeling laws.

This is insane. I’m all for ingredient lists on food labels. Several of my son’s friends have severe food allergies. But an additional warning? Does the government really think someone with a nut or milk allergy will pick up a Cadbury Dairy Milk Fruit and Nut bar and think, “Yummy!” (I’ll point out a young child might bite into the bar, but if he can’t read, the special warning is pointless, isn’t it.)

Here’s the deal. On average 20 people die each year in the UK from anaphylactic reactions, some of which (not all) are triggered by foods like nuts and dairy.

On the other hand, the British government reports that 30,000 deaths every year can be attributed to obesity. The Cadbury Dairy Milk bar includes 9.1 grams of saturated fat. Why not add the warning CONTAINS: SATURATED FAT ? Isn’t saturated fat killing more people? ETA: Saturated fats are a tad sneakier than the dairy in a Dairy Milk bar … after all, they’re not called “Cadbury Sat Fat Bars.”

Nothing against Cadbury Dairy Milk bars, by the way. I’m just against silly regulatatory laws. </rant>

Before Christmas I drove to my post office to pick up my business mail and as usual, there were a couple books waiting for me behind the counter. In my day job, I’m a freelance writer for magazines, so publishers send me tons of review copies. That sounds good, but for some reason I’m the writer who gets books about potty training, quitting smoking, and beating drug addiction. I’ve no idea why I get all the drug addiction books. I’ve never written about drugs in my life, never mind done them, unless cookbooks, chocolate and coffee count as illegal substances.

Anyway, later on I went through the packages, and one jumped out at me because it was sent to my Hail Britannia address. Cool! Something to feed my Anglophilia, I thought, tearing the envelope open. Inside I found a slim book with a nerdy looking bald guy on the cover.* The title proclaimed I Can Make You Thin.

Ooookay. The book’s publicist must have been reading my posts about my adventures in Fortnum & Mason, fondness for Cadbury Fruit & Nut bars, and how I rendered beef fat for my orange almond mincemeat, and she or he figured I could slim down after all this outrageous piggery and who knows? maybe I’d write about it.

What really got me curious, though, was that it was written by a British hypnotist-guru-type. It looked like this British version of Tony Robbins was planning a full-scale invasion of our American self-help book sections, and quite honestly, I didn’t know how I felt about a Brit elbowing in on a feel-good industry that belongs to America.

I did a little research on McKenna, figuring that British journalists would be ripping him a new bunghole in print. They do this kind of verbal surgery brilliantly … usually without Novocaine. The Daily Mail came down on him hardest, claiming he’s “flashy, ambitious and more than a little prone to psychobabble.” Catherine O’Brien at the Times of London went fairly easy on him, considering the session she had with him didn’t make her wealthy (which was the focus on his last book; he can also make you quit smoking). The other articles I read spoke of his new Beverly Hills home, his serial monogamy, and a penchant for designer suits with nary a hint of journalistic malice. And speaking of smoking, Ellen DeGeneres gives McKenna credit for helping her quit this nasy habit. Supposedly Stephen Fry likes him too. I adore Ellen and Stephen, so if they like Paul, he can’t be all bad?

What really grabbed my attention was the “Includes Guided Hypnosis CD” sticker on the book’s cover. Shortly after Christmas, I tore the CD out of the back cover envelope, uploaded the tracks to my iPod, and gave it a listen while stretched out on the sofa watching Gillian McKeith berate an 18-stone woman about the sorry contents of her fridge. (You want to see a British journo rip apart a self-help guru? Read this.)

Hmm, I thought, it’s quite nice to listen to a hypnotist with a British accent. His voice alone could convince me to do just about anything: toss junk food from my pantry, run five miles, or more to the point, strip off all my clothes while pleading, “Make love to me, Paul!” We silly American women will overlook almost anything anyone says if it’s cloaked in the Queen’s English, including, “Sod off, you cow.”

After a few minutes of listening to McKenna, though, his voice began to irritate me. I couldn’t tell if it was McKenna pushing his voice to be all low and hypnotic and mesmerizing, or a weird sound effect they did during recording – it sounded kind of electronic and jumpy. But I pressed on with my two-week trial. I skimmed the book to see if there was anything else I needed to know to help Paul’s melodic voice melt the lard off my ass. McKenna gives readers four rules:

1. Eat when you’re hungry.
2. Eat what you actually want.
3. Eat consciously and enjoy each mouthful.
4. Stop when you think you’re full.

Solid advice and pretty much how I eat anyway, except for #4. I really, really love food (I’m a food writer, for heaven’s sake!), and have been known to keep eating something because it tastes so good, even though I’m ready to pass out.

Every night for two weeks I went to bed listening to McKenna’s voice on my iPod. I didn’t clean out my pantry, or run out to the store for special diet foods. In fact, I made a few changes to my diet over the last month that might encourage weight gain:

First, I switched from skim milk to whole milk in our milk deliveries. I’ve been reading a lot about the health benefits of unprocessed foods, including milk, so I asked our local dairy to make the switch.

Second, I gave up my Splenda habit and have started using pure maple syrup to sweeten my coffee. Pure maple syrup, while intensely sweet, has a lot of calories per teaspoonful.

Last, while I don’t eat a lot of meat anyway, it has been harder for me to buy grass-fed beef, as well as locally raised chicken and pork, this winter. Instead, I’ve been eating foods like avocados, nut oils, nuts, seeds, and cheese, none of which can be considered low-fat.

This morning I stood on the scale and was surprised to see I’d lost four pounds in two weeks. I didn’t expect it because my clothes still fit the same and I’d had a bad moment the night before with some corn chips. On the other hand, it’s kind of weird because I’m not really overweight — okay, I could stand to lose ten pounds– so four pounds is pretty substantial weight loss here.

So could it be McKenna’s hypnotic suggestions before bed every night? Or those four tips, which, to be honest, I’ve really taken to heart these past couple weeks? Like a couple nights ago at a restaurant, where I ate about a third of my meal and decided I’d had enough instead of plowing through because it tasted good?

At any rate, I’ll be curious how McKenna does here in the U.S. I’ll keep you posted on any additional weight loss, although I think I’m going to lay off on McKenna before bed. He’s been robbing me of my dreams about Colin Firth and Ralph Fiennes.

*No diss on nerdy looking bald guys, by the way. I kind of like the look!

Nigella, Jamie, Gordon, and to some degree, Delia — these British celebrity chefs and cooks all have books that dominate shelf-space in American bookstores. Their recipes look no different from those you’d find in one of Ina’s or Martha’s cookbooks. You measure out ingredients in cups, add a tablespoon of this or that, and bake your creation at 350 degrees Fahrenheit and voila! A sticky toffee pudding fit for the Queen herself.

But say you can’t wait for Nigella’s new cookbook to show up in Des Moines, so you go order it from amazon.co.uk. You might be confused the first time you start cooking from it. There are lists of strange ingredients like aubergines, cornflour, courgettes, and what the heck is sheet gelatin? And nothing’s measured in cups! You’ll need to drag out your postal scale to measure out five ounces of “strong flour,” whatever that is. Why can’t they just tell you what it is in cups? Then it comes time to bake … if you’re lucky and were good in math in school, you can figure out what 200 degrees Celsius is in Fahrenheit, but sometimes these cookbooks will tell you to bake a cake at Gas Mark 4. Or worse, in a “moderate oven.”

A British cookbook can be slightly puzzling to an American, so here’s a primer for you. I own about 50 cookbooks from the UK and Ireland alone, and I have to say, I prefer them to American cookbooks … and not because I’m an incorrigible Anglophile. I always try to buy the original printing of a British cookbook, not the version that’s been translated for American cooks. Here’s why.

British cooks (all Europeans as well) are not as dependent on measuring utensils as Americans are. Measuring dry ingredients like flour and sugar by volume can lead to disaster, especially when you’re baking, because volume measurements aren’t as accurate as weight. Instead, Brits weigh out most everything because everyone’s got a scale tucked away in the kitchen. Indeed, they’re confused when they pick up an American cookbook and see all this “half-cup” and “two cups” business. If you buy an inexpensive digital scale that gives you weights in grams as well as ounces (most Brit cookery books give weights in grams), you’ll be 75 percent of the way to cooking nirvana — and I suspect your recipe success rate will improve dramatically. You’ll actually save time cooking with a scale because you weigh one ingredient, tare the scale, weigh the next ingredient into the same bowl, and so on. Here’s the scale I reach for most often in my kitchen, a MyWeigh 3001P.

British teaspoons and tablespoons are also different from American ones and are slightly bigger. Here’s a chart to make the conversion:

1 Brit teaspoon = 1 American teaspoon (too close to matter)
1 Brit tablespoon = 1 American tablespoon (too close to matter)
2 Brit tablespoons = 3 American tablespoons
3.5 Brit tablespoons = 4 American tablespoons (or 1/4 cup volume measure)
4 Brit tablespoons = 5 American tablespoons

There’s also some difference between British and American liquid measures, especially within older British cookbooks like Jane Grigson’s or Elizabeth David’s. You might have a recipe that tells you to add a “pint of water” to a soup, but a British Imperial pint is 20 fl. ounces while an American pint is 16 fl. oz. so adjust accordingly.

Brit recipes will include ingredients like aubergines, courgettes, swedes, and marrow. Rather than provide a long list of translations (they’re eggplant, zucchini, turnip/rutabaga, and extra-large zucchini, by the way), here’s a link with some of the most common ingredients you’ll come across. Others you can figure out with a Google search. That “strong flour”? It means bread flour, which has a higher protein content than all purpose flour (called “plain flour” in the UK). Still others are easy enough to figure out by context. For example, bicarbonate of soda = baking soda, a “knob” of butter = a pat of butter, and gelatine = gelatin.

Now this gas mark business. Many European gas stoves have a knob with numbers instead of degree markings. You want to bake a cake? You turn the knob to gas mark 4, which is about 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Older British cookbooks might not even give you a degree setting or a gas mark number, but simply tell you to bake the pudding in a “slow oven.”

Here’s a handy chart so you’ll never be puzzled about oven settings again:

225° F = 100° C or Gas Mark ¼ (Very cool)
250° F = 130° C or Gas Mark ½ (Very cool)
275° F = 140° C or Gas Mark 1 (Cool or slow)
300° F = 150° C or Gas Mark 2 (Cool or slow)
325° F = 170° C or Gas Mark 3 (Warm)
350° F = 180° C or Gas Mark 4 (Moderate)
375° F = 190° C or Gas Mark 5 (Medium hot)
400° F = 200° C or Gas Mark 6 (Fairly hot)
425° F = 220° C or Gas Mark 7 (Hot)
450° F = 230° C or Gas Mark 8 (Very hot)
475° F = 240° C or Gas Mark 9 (Very hot)

Thanks to a great exchange rate right now, you can get some awesome deals on British cookbooks you can’t buy stateside.* Nigella Christmas: Food, Family, Friends, Festivities, for example, won’t be available in Ameri-speak until November 2009, but you can have the British version for £12.50 ($18.92) from amazon.co.uk right now (plus shipping, which I find is quick and reasonably priced). Or Jamie’s Ministry of Food, which doesn’t seem to have an American publishing date, for a mere £9.75 ($14.75).

* A few dealers do import a selection of current British cookery books. Try Kitchen Arts & Letters in New York City and Rabelais Books in Portland, Maine, both shops where I’ve personally purchased British imports — they ship, too. If you stop by Kitchen Arts & Letters, purchase a copy of All You Need to Know About the British Kitchen: Names, Terms, & Measures for the American Cook by Jane Garmey. They published this slim, helpful pamphlet; I keep my dogearred copy tucked next to my English cookery books.

The suet is ready in the fridge. All the dried fruits and candied orange have been procured. A new bottle of brandy was purchased this morning for the event. Now it’s time to make the mincemeat.

Here’s my final ingredient list. I don’t cook with measuring cups (except for the brown sugar), instead relying on a more accurate digital scale, so if you want to do this at home, either buy a scale or eyeball everything. Mincemeat is forgiving, so go for it.

Everything except the suet, almond extract and brandy

8-oz. golden raisins
4-oz. currants
1.5-oz. black raisins (one of those small boxes you stick in lunchboxes)
2-oz. candied orange peel (I buy mine from King Arthur Flour)
2-oz. blanched almonds, chopped finely
1 cup light brown sugar, lightly packed
3-oz. suet
Zest and juice from 3 clementine oranges
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. nutmeg
1/2 tsp. allspice
1/2 tsp. cloves
1/2 tsp. almond extract
3 tbsp. brandy

Dump everything, except the almond extract and brandy, into a heavy 3-qt. or larger saucepan and heat over medium heat, stirring frequently. Eventually the brown sugar will melt into the suet, leaving the fruits all glossy and extremely fragrant.

Once everything’s all melty and fragrant (about 7 minutes), turn off the heat and stir in the almond extract and brandy. Give the mincemeat a final stir, then pack it into glass jars before storing it in the fridge. I like to let my mincemeat sit for a couple weeks before using it; it gets even tastier. But if you can’t wait, feel free to use it immediately. It’s delicious over ice cream, stirred into yogurt, and of course, baked in a pie. The yield here is enough mincemeat for a 9″ pie.

Now, the big question. How does my mincemeat compare to the orange almond mincemeat I had at Neal’s  Yard Dairy? It stacked up pretty well, thank you. The mincemeat I had in London didn’t have any dark raisins or currants that I remember (they may have stuck only with golden raisins and maybe apple), but my mincemeat has a distinct orange flavor, thanks to the excellent quality of candied peel I used and clementine zest, and the almond flavor was very subtle and nice. Oh, and my kitchen smelled heavenly while this was cooking on the stovetop.

Next week, I’ll bake this into mincemeat tartlets for Christmas Day dessert. Stay tuned.

When I was in London a few weeks ago, I fell madly, rapturously in love with an orange and almond mincemeat being sampled at Neal’s Yard Dairy in the Borough Market. I had planned to run back there after lunch, but after hours wandering the market and my brain dulled by a heavy meal, I completely forgot my errand. No worries: I’m a professional recipe developer, so I thought it would be fun to recreate this most delicious food memory.

When I was a kid, I have to admit I was seriously revolted by mincemeat. My great aunt always made a mincemeat pie for Christmas dinner, and it looked and smelled disgusting. Plus, the word mincemeat itself turned my stomach as I imagined chewy, gristly bits of meat chunked up with squishy raisins and doused with booze, all baked up in a pie crust. Back in the old days (like in the 1500s, smartasses, not the 1970s) cooks did include bits of meat in mincemeat because liquor, vinegar, and fermenting fruits helped preserve it — the technique was a great way to stretch the food dollar/pound, so to speak. These days, the only thing meaty in mincemeat is suet, which is the fat from around the cow’s kidneys. In the UK, you can purchase vegetarian suet; here in the U.S. I’ve never found it, and I’m not sure I want to because I’m positive it’s filled with all sorts of nasty, unpronounceable chemicals.

So if you want to make mincemeat here in the colonies, you’ll need to have some suet at the ready.

You can find suet in the meat aisle of most grocery stores. Grocers usually keep it near the chicken livers and ham hocks; it is also a seasonal ingredient, meaning it’s easier to find in the winter months. Not only do cooks use suet for mincemeat, animal lovers use suet to make bird food cakes for songbirds. Normally I buy organic suet from my butcher, but he didn’t have any — so it was off to Stop & Shop:

(Vegetarians/Vegans may want to stop reading.) What recipes don’t tell you is suet has to be prepared before you use it. You can’t just chop it up and throw it into your dish. Once you get the plastic off, you’ll see that not only is suet fatty, but it contains blood, connective tissue, and other nasty little bits that I certainly don’t want to eat. Do you? No, I didn’t think so. What you have to do now is render the fat so these unpleasant bits can be removed. Here’s how I do it.

First I chop the suet up a bit so that it can fit through the shredder attachment on my KitchenAid stand mixer. You want to get the fat shredded as finely as possible so it melts quickly, and a shredder makes short work of this. (Tip: freeze your small pieces of suet for a few minutes so that they don’t gob up your attachments.)

Here’s the suet going through the shredder:

I had a little over 2 lbs of suet here and once shredded, it filled up a 5-qt. mixing bowl. I set a 7-qt. enamel cast iron pot over low heat, added 1/4 cup water to the bottom, then added the shredded fat:

I let this cook/render down for about 20 minutes, stirring occasionally. When you’re working with fat and fire, it’s never a good idea to leave the kitchen, so keep a close eye on it. Don’t be tempted to turn up the heat to make the fat melt faster — low and slow is the way to go. Eventually, the solid fat will render down completely and you’ll be left with clear liquid fat with bits of brown stuff in it. That brown stuff is the blood, connective tissue, and other grizzlies you don’t want to eat. Now it’s time to sieve it out. I line my conical fine-mesh sieve with cheesecloth and set it over a clean soup pot:

Then I ladle the fat into the sieve. Be careful — that fat is hot!

Et voila, lovely pure suet. Um, not quite. You’ll see that this clear liquid is starting to firm up. What I do is let it cool down a bit, then melt it over a low flame and re-sieve with clean cheesecloth to make sure every impurity is removed.

The purified suet gets poured into a container once cooled, labeled, then stored in the fridge. It looks like this when it’s done:

It has no smell at all, at least none I can discern with my sensitive schnozz. It also becomes quite hard when refrigerated, but when it’s added to mincemeat, it’ll melt into the base, giving it a rich flavor and mouthfeel – no meaty flavor at all. If you want to make mincemeat at home, don’t be tempted to try Crisco — it’ll just turn your recipe into a greasy mess.

OK, next up — orange and almond mincemeat. At least my fair approximation of what I tasted at Neal’s Yard Dairy last week.

Ok, so quickly, a recap of Thursday.

I started the morning by bolting upright in my Frette-sheeted bed and noticing daylight. Oh (as they say here) bollocks. It was 9:31 a.m. and I was supposed to meet our group in the lobby at 9:30 a.m. The alarm on my brand new Google phone didn’t sound at 7:00 — a much bitched-about Android flaw — and I’d been hit with a nasty case of insomnia between 1:30 and 4:30 a.m., so I flew about the room in a panic for a few minutes. The phone rang, and it was Alison. “The good news is, we’re not leaving till 10:30, so you’re safe.” Whew!

Fortified with coffee and strawberry yogurt, I headed with our group over to Lamb’s Conduit Street with the lovely Clare Dowdy, a journalist and shopping expert here in London. To be honest, I wasn’t excited about a personal shopping tour and fretted I wouldn’t come up with story ideas, but I knew after a couple minutes chatting with Dowdy that this would be fun. It was like shopping with a friend who really knows the area, and who’s eager to point out the places she knows you’ll enjoy. She pegged me for Persephone Books, which quickly earned itself £27 (3 books, all work-related), and the cafe next door that sold some interesting London-produced foods (and smelled heavenly). I was sad to see Clare go. And wonder of all wonders, I *did* get some very good story ideas.

Alison and I went our own way after this. We stopped by another bookshop, then famished, headed off to Notting Hill with my list of cookbooks and appetites. We ended up having fish and chips at the Duke of Wellington Pub, accompanied by pints of beer (Guinness for me, a lager for Alison) then made our way around the corner to Books for Cooks. I didn’t go too crazy, but I did squeal when I found The Avoca Cafe Cookbook #2, which is very hard to find in the U.S. I also purchased Pasties by Lindsey Bareham, who did the Roast Chicken books with Simon Hopkinson (books which I adore), along with the two latest Books for Cooks recipe compilations and some other book, which I’m too lazy to dig out of its sack.

Then it was off to The Travel Bookshop across the street, which I understand was the model for the shop Hugh Grant ran in Notting Hill. I am hoping the gentleman at the till was pleased we didn’t ask him any embarrassing questions about his resemblance to Hugh Grant or whether he has a girlfriend who looks like Julia Roberts. Instead, we were all about the books. Alison found me a delightful little book called Instructions for American Servicemen in Britain in 1942, a pamphlet from the U.S. government reprinted by the Bodleian Library at Oxford that dispensed little gems for our fighting men. My favorite: “The British don’t know how to make a good cup of coffee. You don’t know how to make a good cup of tea. It’s an even swap.” (Times have changed, even from the early 2000s — I’ve found some excellent coffee around the city.)

Geez it gets dark early, and we knew we had to head back to our hotel, so we caught the tube at Notting Hill Gate, first stopping at a cozy place for tea, then settled in for some work in the hotel lounge since we weren’t hungry. Suddenly it was 10:00 p.m. and we needed a quick bite. Our concierge recommended Nobu. NOBU. Um, not quite what we had in mind, so we headed to a Turkish restaurant over in Mayfair, where we ended up getting more than a meal, but some eye-widening entertainment.  On one side we had a table with a gentleman and two young ladies, a blond and a brunette, who were all three sheets to the wind. On the other side of us were two women of a certain age who were clearly entertained by the shenannigans going on next to us, and who provided amusing commentary on their drunken antics. When the blond stood up to go the bathroom, she knocked our salt shaker over. She could barely stand, never mind walk, so the guy made out with her a few minutes and she was off for the loo. The minute she was around the corner, the guy started making out with the brunette! Shocking! Then when the blond returned he snogged her some more, and they were off, not before cheerfully saying goodnight to the two older ladies who obviously hadn’t seen entertainment like this in quite some time. (Nor had I, to be honest. I live a sheltered life.) Anyway, we talked to them for awhile about Gordon Brown, Obama, tourism, and red light districts, and then ate our meal. Then it was back to the hotel — we passed Whisky Mist, where Prince Henry and company are frequently photographed, stumbling drunk on their way out; no sightings — and I actually got a great night’s sleep, but woke up with the scratchy throat.

So that was Wednesday. Now off to detail today, Thursday.