A Cook's Library

When I say I eat the Slow Food way people often assume this means I spend a fortune on food, create elaborate banquets full of rare ingredients and wash it all down with equally pricey wine. If only this were true! But I appreciate that one of the common   accusations that has been levelled at Slow Food is that it is elitist and only for foodies or that it is an expensive hobby for those with a sizeable disposable income.

Well, this simply isn’t true. Everyone can eat the Slow way whatever your budget; in fact, the benefit of dedicating a little more time to cooking a simple meal and sitting down to eat it with friends or family is even more appreciable when you are sticking to a budget.

One of the easiest ways to do this is by eating seasonally. Eating seasonally is one of the best ways of eating sustainably, and as Carlo Petrini wrote in his mission statement for Slow Food ‘…Our movement is founded upon this concept of eco-gastronomy – a recognition of the strong connections between plate and planet’.

Furthermore, when you eat seasonally, particularly if you shop at local farmers’ markets you are meeting a further criterion for eating the Slow Food way and that is making sure your food is clean and fair, and that producers receive fair compensation for their work.

September is a wonderful time to start eating the seasonal way. Forming a bridge between summer and autumn you have a glut of produce from two of the best British food seasons. Take raspberries for example, a berry associated with high summer that has a second crop in September, and plums, greengages and damsons, the stone fruits that we use so well in jams and puddings in this country. Making jams from a glut of fruit now is an investment of time that will save you money and be a pleasure to eat for the rest of the year.

Unusually for England fruit is plentiful at this time of year with soft and stone fruits but also the apple season is getting into full swing. There are plenty of heritage varieties of apple that need preserving so seek out orchards and farm shops and taste the forgotten flavours of an Ashmead’s Kernel or Laxton’s superb.  A simple lunch of apples and English cheese such as Cheshire and a few oat biscuits beats a sandwich any day.

There are a huge array of vegetables to choose from: summer lettuces and salad leaves are still plentiful but hearty roots such as glowing purple beets, turnips and larger bunched carrots as well as new-crop onions and main-crop potatoes are appearing marking the beginning of stew season; roughly chopped vegetables, slow-braised with a little meat or stock or even just with some hearty pearl barley are economical dishes that take care of themselves in the oven and the steaming pot can be brought to the table for the whole family to dip into.

Slow Food is an organisation that is keen to preserve biodiversity, heritage varieties of grains and vegetable and rare breeds species of fish and animal via its Ark of Taste initiative. Plenty of the 24 products in the UK Ark are good eating at this time of year. Red grouse for example, found mostly in Scotland and the north of England is a fading delicacy but without grouse shooting the heather moorland of Scotland would revert to scrubland. Grouse is not exactly a budget food but for a rare seasonal treat use every last scrap of this bird, serving a feast with bread sauce then making the bones into stock (something you should do with all your roast carcasses for economy and taste) and perhaps making a soup of grouse stock and oatmeal with the result.

Kentish Cobnuts are a delicacy local to London that are abundant in markets and even supermarkets these days and are delicious shelled and toasted in a dry pan then scattered over a salad, of seasonal watercress and a roasted wood-pigeon breast, finely sliced; pigeon is another (cheaper) game bird that is worth preserving.

It is not necessary to spend a lot of money on eating well. Buying an inexpensive cut of meat (and it needn’t be large) such as beef shin or ham hock and braising it with seasonal vegetables, bulking meals with inexpensive grains such as the British spelt grain and using a glut of seasonal vegetables for soups are all ways of stretching good produce over a number of meals.

The Slow food ethos is not about food snobbery but about respecting the food you buy and eat, however much or little it cost. And by eating in tune with the seasons you will both respect what nature has to offer at different times of year and save money too.

This piece was originally published on the Slow Food London Blog.

Photograph by gorgeoux.

I was at Petersham Nurseries the other day, where the unique atmosphere, a cross between English country garden and Provencal farmhouse never fails to inspire me. I come away wanting to plant blowsy flowers and beautiful pots overflowing with culinary herbs, as well as cook something vibrantly fresh, local and seasonal – albeit with a Mediterranean bent.

I also come away with serious pot envy. There is something uplifting about cooking in deeply coloured casseroles of the sort you would find in French country houses, tossing salads in simple, textured wooden bowls and filling your home and kitchen with objects of beauty. And most things taste better out of a great-looking dish; in this case these ceramic casseroles are functional too.

So here are some pictures to make you wish you had the kind of budget you need to buy the beautiful things on sale in the shop at Petersham or inspire you to trawl round the local markets next time you’re in Provence, though these days that might not even be a cheaper option.

I also look at these snapshots to remind myself that part of the pleasure of cooking and eating is the sensual aspect of creating and serving meals in a calm setting and this mixture of garden and kitchen is one I particularly like. Mind you it is heartening that the small, cramped wooden-shed of a kitchen that chef Skye Gyngell and her team manage to work in, dancing around each other with masterful cooking choreography and still managing to produce exquisite food, is no bigger than my tiny galley kitchen at home.

Last week for Guardian Word of Mouth I wrote about how bad breakfast cereals are, how many of the most popular brands, particularly those aimed at children contain up to 35% sugar and as many are based on an extruded version of refined carbohydrate, the non-sugar ingredients are not much better.

As Felicity Lawrence puts it in her book Eat Your Heart Out: Why the food business is bad for the planet and your health:

“As one of the earliest convenience foods, processed cereals represent a triumph of marketing, packaging and US economic and foreign policy and somehow they have wormed into our confused consciousness as intrinsically healthy when by and large they are degraded foods that have to have any goodness artificially restored”

Despite the fact that before the campaign in the early 20^th century of the vegetarian Kellogg Brothers to persuade eaters to give up ‘unhealthy’ breakfasts of eggs and sausages processed cereals were unheard of, a gullible America and soon the rest of the western world,  jumped on the bandwagon and breakfast cereals became part of the fabric of the kitchen.

Giving up highly-processed breakfast cereals of the kind that the supermarket shelves are stacked high with is one of the fastest ways to cut the amount of processed food in your diet. Although there are some cereals and granolas based on wholesome ingredients with natural sugars and less-damaging grain-processing (such as the ones created by Rude Health) these are few and far between. Instead an old-fashioned breakfast of eggs and toast or porridge is a better option, for your health, your wallet and especially your children.

Once the weather turns cooler there is nothing more satisfying and worth getting out of bed for than a bowl of steaming oats, topped with milk, cream or butter and a little honey or maple syrup.  And porridge-making stirs up some heated debate amongst the milk versus water crowd, the sugar versus salt devotees. After much experimentation over the years I have settled on the following method of overnight soaking of a mixture of steel-cut and rolled oats (this has the double advantage of breaking down some of the phytates that can make grains less digestible and meaning it cooks relatively quickly in the morning), then cooking in water and salt and adding butter or cream and a spoon of honey before eating. Delicious.

Porridge (Serves 3-4)

1 cup steel cut oats or oat groats roughly blitzed in the food processor

¼ cup organic rolled oats

1 tsp yoghurt

500ml water

pinch of salt

cream, milk or butter, honey or maple syrup to serve

Up to 24 hours before eating put the oats in a bowl and mix the tsp of yoghurt in the water and pour on top. The yoghurt slightly acidifies the water to help break down the phytates.

In the morning put the oats and water into a pan and add a pinch of salt.

Place of a heat diffuser on a gentle heat and cook for around10-15 minutes or until all the water is absorbed and the porridge is bubbling volcanically.

Serve with a spoon of double cream or a knob of butter or splash of milk, honey or maple syrup.

Photo by londonbrad

This post is part of Two for Tuesdays at A Moderate Life