What to do if you don’t like offal

This whole journey has been about me trying to make a change in my life, to balance what I saw as something wrong with how I viewed and ate meat. I am eating offal for a year to balance out my ‘meat debt’. I’m lucky. I like offal. Some people (some friends amongst them) don’t. I thought it was about time I did a post for YOU. My valiant readers who follow what I’m doing even though you don’t like looking at the web page.

I believe there are two important parts to eating meat. The philosophy you use and the practicality behind it.

In the western world we are all  used to eating meat when we want and pretty much however much of it we want. As an undergraduate student I regularly bought the well cheap mince and chicken in the packets in the supermarket, making the excuse of “I’m poor, I can’t afford quality meat”. What I was eating was from badly looked after animals, filled with artificial drugs and probably killed in an unfriendly abattoir where their bodies filled full of fear hormones just before their death. Not very tasty. What I didn’t realise was that BEANS, LENTILS and CHICKPEAS are all much cheaper and also excellent sources of protein. If you’re using the poverty excuse, I have done too, and appreciate it. However think about how you can shop differently …

There’s the psychological factor there as well – if it doesn’t have meat in it, it’s not a meal. Going off to uni for the first time, I would have probably agreed. Now I think a meal can be whatever you want it to be.

My offal journey has been over for a while now – but the changes I made have continued on – I eat much less meat in general and have a “think twice” rule while shopping – it goes something like this (in my stream-of-consciousness). “I really fancy mince, where am I? Morrisons. I’m not buying the frozen mince.  [First though] Hmmm. The fresh mince looks dubious. Sweaty. Sweaty mince. Sweaty, unhappy mince from animals I don’t know where from and where they died. Do I really want mince? I probably just want protein. What other protein would I like? [Second thought] Tofu? Not today! Quorn? Quorn mince exists. Bolognaise is back on the menu.”

My lasting advice would be to always think twice about what you put in your body.

I’m so hungry, I could eat a …

Horse?

Several people have asked me recently about the HORSE MEAT SCANDAL, since it appears I’ve started to be known as “the offal lady”. What do I think? I’m not bothered about eating horse (however it appears that all these horses were actually PETS and that makes me quite sad). Horse is delicious. Findus pancakes are delicious. Am I the only person to see a common denominator?

However, naughty huge companies shouldn’t lose track of their labelling, whether through translation, a lack of sticky tape, or a Blind Eye. They make enough money to have better quality control. The thing that keeps striking me was summed up on the news:

Yup, that’s a map of Europe that various meat parcels have travelled across. The number of hands it all passed through increases the likelihood of a mess-up considerably.

I think the whole thing is the best advert for choosing a reputable butcher and going and choosing your own meat and then making your own food at home. Convenience food is convenient, but delicious as crispy pancakes are, you can make proper pancakes in the time it takes them to bake!

Happy New Year

Well, December slid by didn’t it? My last month of offaltarianism morphed (mostly) into vegetarianism. I think I just got a bit tired of being inventive. I fell back to random tomato based curries and soups. I did invent a new soup to get around the fact I couldn’t use bacon in a brussel sprouts soup – Brussel and Anchovy Soup. Much more delicious than I thought it would be!

I had two Christmas dinners: with my family in Norfolk we had a big chicken, so I had a wing (thanks Anissa); then in Leeds with my partner and his son we had sausages. Getting others to agree to an offal Christmas dinner was harder than I had anticipated! I introduced a friend to the joys of chicken liver curry (the livers marinated in pomegranate juice … mmmm mmmm), but mostly I made the most of my veg box and as it got closer to the festive season, tried to make toblerone the major component of every meal.

So what now? To be honest, I don’t really know. I have eaten only offal for a year. I have relieved my offal debt. I can return to how I was eating before?

I won’t. My whole year of experiences has made me think much much more about what I put in my body. In this flush of eating what I like, I’ve scoffed a lot of bacon and am planning KFC VERY SOON. I’m excited to roast a chicken one weekend. Once this flush is over – what then?

I did have the idea of trying to only eat meat where I knew exactly where it came from. In a way, that is so much harder than just eating offal. Questioning people? Conversing, rather than mumbling “I’ll have two kidneys please” – not sure about that. When we’ve got our shed sorted and a chest freezer purchased I do want to buy a whole/half animal and eat it across a year. Not yet though …

So Happy New Year! I’m still cogitating on my offal journey and how it will impact on the rest of my life. Please look through the archives – I’ll be adding some outstanding ones including Homemade Haggis over the coming months. Enjoy offal. It is delicious. Respect the animals by eating it too. I would be well pissed off if I was killed for my meat and then my heart was passed over – wouldn’t you?

This and That

Please don’t think I’ve not been busy in the kitchen! I have, I promise, but the offal has been a bit of a slow burner lately. Health issues and a natural inclination to scale the offal feasting back, mean that mostly we’ve been eating a lot of vegetarian food. Yeah! If you know me personally, you could see that as a Bad Thing – mostly because of my epic curried parsnip in white sauce episode. Kind of gross.

Yet, lately I’ve not managed to curdle white sauce with a parsnip. I did make some AMAZING parsnip burgers:

That’s parsnip and fenugreek burger, on a layer of red pepper and walnut pesto what I did make too!

I’ve also learnt how to keep my kale perky:

That’s right – kept in a pint glass of water in the door of the fridge, it keeps for BARE TIME. You also get new tiny baby kales growing in the middle and they are just so cute. So cute.

And that Waitrose labels the fish that is sustainable that it sells! I felt same eating these fishcakes.

I would like all fishes to have this label. BUT it is confusing because I saw some cod with that label (aparently it was a very specific cod catching area and method) AND cod is meant to be almost an endangered species. I still won’t eat cod. I don’t think you should eat any endangered species, even if the bit of it you’re eating isn’t. That’s why I don’t like to eat tuna nowadays. Some tunas are worse off than pandas.

I also thought people might be interested in my CURRENT BEST INGREDIENTS. Only capitals will do. I have phases in my cooking. The blood phase. The lovage phase. The aromatherapy oils in cooking phase. Some of these are with me long time – neroli in the Christmas cakes as we speak. Others – like lovage – are waiting for Spring. The blood phase, well, I will make black pudding and I will make it soon. The point is these are my current favourite things and if you have the (mis)fortune to dine chez moi, these things will probably be in the dishes. Maybe all together, maybe separately, who knows? I’ll keep you guessing.

So there’s Herby Salt from Dilston Physic Garden, Fenugreek seeds which are apparently a cholesterol buster and Nomu dukkah which I got in FPP parcel. I know there’s a lot of talk about how salt isn’t healthy and YOU’RE RIGHT, but we do need salt for our bodies to work and I reckon having a bit of lovely delicious salt used in either the cooking or the condimenting bit, you’ll be OK. Don’t eat it by the spoon though. Personally I find it quite strange ‘using salt’ because I grew up cooking without it (aged grandparents) and it wasn’t until recently that I began. Now I’ve flavoured some of my own salts: lovage salt, juniper and orange salt, rosemary and lavender salt. All are good. I’m working on an ‘Asian’ salt currently! Fenugreek has a lovely gentle curry flavour. I also love how knobbly the seeds are, like potatoes for Borrowers. The dukkah is basically ground up nuts and spices and I can’t wait to start making my own when this is used up. You sprinkle it on whatever you want – soup, stew, vegetables, burgers, all the things. A word of warning though: if you put it on everything, all the time, don’t be surprised that everything tastes the same. It is pretty powerful stuff!

If you’re missing me talking about fresh and juicy offal. Don’t worry, the offal is rising and I’m defrosting an ear as we speak!

The versatility of Cold Oxtail – part 2

In the part the first, we saw an ox tail ramen soup made purely from the ox tail stock. You can find that post here. It was of course concerned with the stock. Now we turn our salivating attention to the meat. Lovely, sticky, cardomanny, tamarindy meat.

The reson I decided to cook an ox tail and eat it cold was due to the paucity of cold offal snacks available to your average offaltarian. Do you ever see kidney sandwiches in the supermarket? No. Is there a liver salad waiting to be dressed in the chilled cabinet? No. I work. Sometimes I get tired of cheese sandwiches. Or tongue sandwiches (also packets of cold pressed tongue are phenomenally expensive – 75p per slice – I’m not Midas). Anyway you don’t get pre-made tongue sandwiches in Leeds.

So, to cold lunches. Salad. And ox tail. Ox tail salad. Lordy lordy! I was well addicted to ox tail salad for a while.

Here is one salad I made. I won’t insult anyone’s intelligence by telling you how to make a salad. This one was based around spinach, broad beans, oxtail and a stale packet of mixed nuts.

Here is a tupperware salad, made of spinach, coleslaw mix and ox tail.

The secret behind these salad is of course the dressing. This I will tell you about, at length and naturally in excruciating detail, for my laws on salad dressing are Gospel.

The joke is, my dressings are pretty easy. Oil (I use Neals Yard Beauty Oil) which is a blend of hemp, avocado, flax seed, pumpkin seed and evening primrose oils. I think it tastes really nice. Then I use usually either lemon or lime juice. And I’ll add maybe some garlic, or some harissa, maybe mustard!

This summer I got well into flavouring my own vinegars! The idea first came to me on the old herb course as vinegars are another traditional way to preserve the qualities of medicinal herbs. I didn’t make any medicine-grade vinegars, but I did make strawberry vinegar, thyme vinegar and honeysuckle vinegar. Now I’m adept at the vinegar-making, I’m going to make some Autumn vinegars too – bramble and elderberry are on the list.

Again, it’s another fancy thing that’s really simple to do. For the strawberry vinegar, you add some strawberries to some cider vinegar, leave it on the windowsill for a week then strain. For the honeysuckle a couple of weeks. For the thyme one month. Strain and bottle.

Ox tail salads, in their infinite variety, are IMMENSE. Next time you buy one, reserve some meat and eat it cold. Yumyumyum!

Venison Liver and Holistic Cauliflower

Less of a post, more of  a handy hint: did you know that venison liver is awesome? Try it. I got mine from Round Green Farm at the Kirkstall Farmers Market and it is SUPER TASTY. I’ve eaten it before and always look out for it. The simplest way to cook it is to flour it all over and then fry for 2-3 minutes on each side.

Did you know that you can eat the leaves of cauliflowers as well as the florets? I didn’t and I come from the Land of the Brassica (tip courtesy of the lovely lady a B Whiteleys Vegetables). Don’t eat the woody tough bit that runs down the middle of the leaf, but the floppity leaf bits at either side. I snipped them away with scissors and them steamed them briefly. Lovely, cabbage but not, if you will. I’m sure this is old hat to some people, but it was flash of enlightenment for me! What other overlooked leaves can you eat?

I also made a cauliflower cheese. What a nice dinner! I do like going to the Kirkstall Market …

And I’ve been on the radio too …

5.45 On BBC Radio Leeds:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p00vq6g9/Andrew_Edwards_01_08_2012/

a less fine hour was on the breakfast show when my phone went strange, but still …

7.48 ish

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p00vq6g1/Martin_Kelner_01_08_2012/

UPDATE:

Radio 1010 Newstalk in Toronto – the clip has a picture to make it easier to upload:

 

SoupTuesday Cookbook Swap …

Hello my name is Lucy and I like cooking things and posting things. You would have thought that foodie penpals would be enough for me. Well, you’re wrong. I signed up for a cook book swop too. Hosted by the SoupTuesday blog, you get matched with a person to send to and a person to get from. Oh yes.

This month was the first month so I’m hoping it goes well for everyone. The theme for this month was RETRO. I’ll confess striaght away that I couldn’t find a retro cookbook at home (at least one I was going to give away), so I trundled to British Heart Foundation and found a nice 80s one where you have to add cans of soup to lots of recipes. The reminded me a lot of an earlier but much older boyfriend’s cooking style. Retro indeed.

My cookbook came from Hannah at HomeBakedOnline. She writes a great blog about all the nice things and does it fantastically. It was ‘The Wholefood Cookbook’ by Pamela Westland. It is out of print now, but if you want, you can pick it up second hand off the old Amazon. The tagline is “Natural recipes for health”. Naturally I turned the pages to see if there was an offal recipe … I find all the older cookery books are generally pretty good for offal. There was one for Mushrooms and Liver Provencal. Fate.

So here is the recipe, photographed from the book:

Basically, you quickly fry the liver on both sides, then add it to a simple ragu of tomato, peppers and mushrooms. The herb used is marjoram. You serve it with ‘noodles’ but it is really tagliatelle!

My liver stack, waiting to enter the ragu

 

Part of the joy of the cookbook swop is being reminded in these recipes of things you’ve not seen for a while. I would like to know what happened to the savoury loaf? You know the ones NOT BREAD but things like asparagus and parmesan in a loaf tin, or a stripey one with carrot and fennel or whatever. Because I haven’t seen one for a while (especially not in a restaurant), not only am I going to resurrect them (Surprise Offal Loaf!), but I feel sure they will be the latest great food trend.

I’ve also enjoyed the 80s food photography in the book.

There is what the book reckons my provencal liver should look like. And here is what it actually looked like:

Note the two pieces of roast potato. What a nice extra. The best thing about this swop and the recipe I chose, is that it introduced me properly to the pairing of offal and pasta. I had been dubious after reading other recipes, but am pretty sold. I’ve also really liked the tomato liver sauce. And the fact that one herb (marjoram) is the star. I know I can get herb happy and toss them all in and I think its a good change for me to think consistently about single culinary herbs.

I hope there’s going to be another cookbook swop, so do get involved!

Oxtail Soup – the Heinz Kind

Sometimes you just need an offal quick-fix.

This is my go-to for that. it contains 3% oxtail, so it’s not the most oxtailful of oxtail soups, but it does hit the spot. You can also buy it in lots of supermarkets. And it comes in two sizes. The smaller size is shown above.

What I’m really meaning to say is that offal doesn’t have to be complicated. There are very easy and simple things you can buy. The ox tail soup is one of them.

I really like it with some sourdough toast. I always have a tin or two in my cupboard (just in case).

Apparently a few years ago Heinz did a tinned kidney soup too. There is a mixture of love and hate on the internet about it. Yahoo links you to this recipe for it which I’ll probably try and copy when I’m feeling energetic. I also enjoyed this one from Ron. Maybe with enough pressure more offal soups will return! Maybe you could make an uber kidney soup with lots of species? I’ll write to Covent Garden Soup about it – I saw an carton in the supermarket today that was cheese and piccalilli soup. To me, kidney sounds a bit more tasty …

Did you have to eat tinned kidney soup? Can you buy it where you live? Am I the odd one out in preferring kidney to piccalilli soup?

While I’m on the soup subject*, get in on the Baxters Royal Game Soup action. Its VERY DELICIOUS. My housemate adds a can of Spam to it for extra meaty action. (That is however, a step too far for me.)

 

*I’ve not been sponsored, don’t worry. I am above selling myself to The Man. If The Man is feeling generous then I’m happy to accept sponsorship to my half marathon http://beatms.mssociety.org.uk/netcommunity/lucymooreruns – that’s you Heinz and Baxters!

Foodie Penpals the Third

So this was my third month of being a Foodie Penpal. I send a box. I receive a box. Said box is full of delicious things. Everyone is a winner. If you want to win like that too, then go and have a shufty at RockSalt’s Sign Up Page.

This month I was paired with Jess to send to and Rhian to receive from. You will be able to read all about what I sent Jess here. (I won’t give any secrets away, oh no!)

Rhian sent me a fantastic package that was pretty generous. So spoiled am I! Her internet presences can be found here, but really you should follow her twitter @rhiandaniel – there’s a lot of good goings-on there.

So Ta-DA:

Here you can see my lovely card with macaroons on at the top left, then clockwise: a packet of Zoo pasta (actually amazing – I can’t wait to eat through the jungle), some handmade cinnamon and coconut macaroons (more later), TWO BARS OF WELSH CHOCOLATE (one dark, one caramel), a recipe book all about iced things (more later toooooo) and finally a packet of Rooibos tea (just because I’d said I like the loose leaf stuff, fancy pants that I am). What a haul. I can’t think of a better advert for foodie penpals than this.

The pasta, I’m waiting to eat because I really want to share it with my partner’s 6 year old son – we’ll going to make a well amazing cheesey sauce to go with it. Lions love cheese. Just like Shaggy loves haslet.

The chocoalte was very delicious. I took the caramel one away with me to my course at Dilston Physic Garden and nommed it to keep my brain cells going on a massively busy couple of days. The dark is delicious, but I’m saving it to make some delicious something with – maybe dark chocolate fudge? Really nice chocolate deserves to be shown off.

The Rooibos tea, I will confess, had my heart fall a bit. Not because it wasn’t a really thoughtful and kind thing to send, but because I forgot to say I don’t really like the stuff on the times I’ve tried it. However, I’m not going to let my pre-conceptions rule my life like that. In fact this rooibos is pretty nice and has very little of that metallic aftertaste I associate with the tea. I think it’ll make a really nice iced tea (maybe the weather will hold enough for a nice jubilee/commonwealth iced tea).

The macaroons turned out to have several lives in them. A flagrant rebel, I put the tea and the macaroons in separate houses (consolidating at the moment) so couldn’t follow Rhian’s suggestion of having them together. Instead I put the macaroons in my handbag *intending* to eat them very soon. By the time they swam to the top of my handbag again, I thought “uh oh I am an ungrateful selfishperson”. Yet, the miracle of Rhian’s baking meant they were still pretty moist and flavorsome. So I apologise, but also thank you Rhian. I’ve enjoyed them in some different ways. One was to crunch one up and add it to my post-netball smoothie:I also crumbled another one on the top of my fudge flavoured ice-cream. Cinnamon and coconut both go well with fudge and ice-cream, so a macaroon of both was bound to be awesome. It was. I felt a bit of a culinary genius. You don’t need to be Nigella and make hot chocolate sauce on a whim. Just crumble a biscuit. (Though these macaroons were a lot more than biscuits.)

Then to the recipe book. I love books. I really love recipe books*. I really love cold things. I under-use my ice-cream maker. What a perfect choice. I’d said to Rhian that I’d enjoyed getting a recipe in my previous packages, so would like one if it was possible from her. A book full of them is indeed inspirational. Lots of ideas for fruity lollies, sorbets, granitas and a host of other iced things. The recipe that caught my eye the most was ‘Watermelon Granita’. It caught my eye because I’d just bought a watermelon from the market and when I got it home and cut it open, well, it had lost it’s bite, but wasn’t manky. Spongy watermelon isn’t what you want.

So I took inspiration from the recipe (I say that because I’ve left the recipe book at my other house and can’t remember it all).

What I did was use my juicer to juice the flesh of the watermelon. If you’re familiar with juicers, you have a pulp compartment and the jug comes out a spout into a jug. After the juicing of my medium sized watermelon, I noticed that the pulp part clearly had a lot of juice in it too. I scooped the pulp into the middle of a clean tea towel and squeezed the rest of the juice out. I think I probably had close to 2 pints of juice.

Then I heated 200ml of water with 150g caster sugar until the sugar was all dissolved. I let this cool down while I grated the zest of a lime to the watermelon and then added the juice of that same lime. The sugar syrup was cool by now, so I swished it in with my watermelon/lime juice. Then I plugged my ice cream maker in and churned it til it was like a slushy that you get at the cinema.

Here my watermelon syrup is churning silkily. I am aware that it sounds like I have all of the kitchen kit. To be fair I do. If you don’t, you can I am sure get the same result by mashing the watermelon and squeezing it all through a tea-towel. The to freeze, put it in a tupperware and keep taking it out and stirring it with a fork. Granita is I think meant to be a bit chunky, a bit crystalline.

I had to try some and it was GOOD. Much more limey than I had anticipated. I don’t think I need to buy a brightly coloured Slush Puppy again. I even caught the last of the sun in the garden. And inspiration struck once more:

I hope growing watermelon seeds inside a watermelon isn’t some sort of fruitarian cannibalism. I do think its a natural plant pot. Maybe even looks a bit stylish? Eat your heart out Chelsea, Beeston is where the cutting-edge gardening is happening. Just you wait til you see my entirely imagainary rockery.

With my muses flowing, I began to make another iced thing. This time a ‘Chilli and Lime Sorbet’, but I had to go to work, so the syrup is growing some muscles in our fridge to be churned tomorrow:

That is some sugar, some lime, some chilli and some honey, waiting to be churned with more lime juice. Tingly tastebud ahoy!

To close, thank you very much for my package Rhian. Little did I know when I opened it that I would be led to ruminations over cannibal watermelons. I did know (pretty much as soon as I saw Rhian’s name on the list) that she’d send a lovely thoughtful parcel, and she totally came up trumps.

Thanks Rhian, Thanks RockSalt.

Keep offalling!

*If you’d like to participate in a cookbook swap – go to SoupTuesday!