Cooking With Ginger

Vegetarianism was once considered a crime in my family. Some parents worry about their child bringing home an undesirable boyfriend or a venereal disease, but the worst thing I could have done was saunter in with a bag of lentils or a Linda McCartney sausage. We raised sheep and cattle on our farm; pigs too until the late 80s when we sold off their pink unprofitable asses. Meat truly brought home the bacon for us.

We only ate what had once roamed the fields. Our freezer was brimming with home grown roasts and mince and little plastic bags of lamb chops. And in the springtime my sister and I bottle-fed the abandoned baby lambs, fattening them up for market then pocketing the profits.

Our beef was chopped up by a proper butcher, but if we needed lamb my stepfather did the slaughtering himself. I don't think he enjoyed the task one bit, and was always as kind and merciful to the sheep as one can be in these situations. But I liked to imagine things were more ghoulish. He'd always tell us stay in the house, but I listened out for the telltale sound of the chosen sheep doing its final woolly twitch. It would always be at sunset and my stepdad would turn on the headlights of the truck to see better. I'd peer through the trees at this silhouetted scene, finding it all quite macabre and dramatic. The red sky, the dogs barking and straining against their chains, the unmistakable scratch scratch of the knife separating wool from flesh.

Today I would love to have access to what was essentially an endless bounty of free-roaming organic meat. But as a surly teen I resented the homegrown stuff. I envied my friends and their cheap Woolworths sausages on styrofoam trays. "Lamb chops AGAIN!?", I'd bitch at the dinner table, rolling my eyes in anticipation of the reminder that meat was our livelihood.

There was just no escaping meat. I even had a meaty weekend job, selling the Colonel's finest goods at KFC. I'd come home on a Saturday night reeking of chicken grease and secret herbs and spices, only to be greeted by a sheep carcass hanging on a hook in the laundry. On Sunday morning my precious slumber was disturbed by the sound of said sheep being buzzed to pieces with my stepfathers meat saw.

So it amuses me somewhat that after all that, I ended up marrying a vegetarian.

I asked Gareth why he chose to abandon the flesh ten years ago, expecting it would be about economics, taste, or sympathy for the poor little lambies. But his main reason was because it makes a mess!

"Too many dishes," he said.

While the lad likes good food, he hates cleaning, and vegetarian fare generally means less scrubbing afterwards.

When we got married and moved in together, he was adamant that I should cook and eat meat as much as I wanted. He is not one of those militant vegetarians. But I think perhaps I'd had my fill of red meat as a child. Since I moved to the UK I'd gone semi-vegetarian anyway, mostly due to budget restrictions. I've also found weight loss easier when I go meatless, although I still eat fish.

But above all, I am a lazy bastard, and I don't miss the flesh enough to cook two different dishes. So the past year has been an interesting challenge, coming up with repertoire of healthy vegetarian meals that are quick and easy, and address the following criteria:

1. Not be too reliant on butter, eggs or cheese
2. Not be too reliant on meat substitutes such as Quorn
3. Not make you fart all freaking night.

Number three is often the biggest challenge.

I cooked this Pumpkin and Spinach Frittata last night and there were no ill-effects. While it is heavy on the eggs, I am not one of those Egg Whites Only nutters. Divided by six is only an egg and a half each! It also has a smidgen of cheese, and I used Marks and Spencer Half Fat Mature Cheddar. Unlike super low fat cheeses, it doesn't taste like a monkey's rubbery armpit, but is far less calorific than the original.

I scrawled this one down from my sister's copy of the CSIRO Total Wellbeing Diet in a godawful hurry, so excuse the sloppy instructions. And furthermore, please excuse the extremely ordinary photos here. I cooked this after a gruelling Spinning class, and I just needed to EAT, dammit!

As with everything I make, tastes better than it looks.

PUMPKIN AND SPINACH FRITTATA

Source: CSIRO Total Wellbeing Diet
Serves: 6 (or 4 gluttons)

400g pumpkin, cut into 2cm cubes (I used 600g of butternut squash)
1 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp soy sauce
2 leeks, washed and sliced
2 cloves of garlic, chopped finely
300g baby spinach (I only had a wee 180g bag)
8 eggs
400g low fat yogurt (I used 3 x 150g pots Total 0% Fat Greek Yogurt)
50g mature cheddar cheese

Preheat oven to 170'C. Place pumpkin cubes on oven tray, toss with half the olive oil and soy sauce. Bake for 25 mins (I did 230'C because our oven is crap and I was impatient and hungry).

While this is happening, sautee leeks for five minutes in remaining olive oil, then add garlic and spinach, cook until wilted. Tip mixture onto work surface and chop roughly (I didn't do that because I was lazy and hungry).

Whisk eggs, yogurt and cheese. Tip in pumpkin and spinach mixture, stir to combine.

Pour into a greased baking dish. Bake 20 minutes until set. (I turned down the oven to 180'C and it took 20 minutes to set with a nice pale golden top)

The Ultra-Classy Sloppy Leftovers In A Chinese Takeaway Dish shot.

. . .

Oooh lordy, this frittata was deliciously creamy and subtly cheesy. Creamy and cheesy are two things you don't get much on a diet, but it's all happening here, thanks to the magic of Total 0% Greek Yogurt! The spinach and pumpkin are fantastic together, but I can't wait to try it again with different vegies. Or with feta cheese.

Or bacon.

Posted at 10:32 PM in Vegetarian | Permalink | Comments (11)

Gareth has some pals drop over unexpectedly last night, and there we were without any biscuits to offer. These evenings typically consist of the lads sitting around on the couch in a cloud of smoke, playing records and scoffing tea and biscuits into the wee small hours. It soon became apparent that without something buttery and sugary to dunk into their mugs it just wasn't going to work.

I happened to be leafing though the latest copy of Good Food magazine, which I'd purchased in spite of my New Year's resolve to buy less food magazines. D'oh! They had a great Mother's Day feature in which readers sent in favourite recipes handed down from their mums. I pounced on these Simple Jammy Biscuits, because the title says it all! Simple, jammy, biscuit - how can you go wrong?

The blokes usually tear into packets of nasty supermarket-brand Custard Creams, Rich Tea and Bourbons. How can I put this nicely? These biscuits are shite. They cost about 59p for a huge pack and they're full of hydrogenated vegetable oil, partially inverted glucose syrups and a rainbow of colourings and flavours. I usually sit frowning into my tea, watching the boys demolish them by the handful and thinking, that ain't good for you!

Butter, sugar and jam are hardly have a place in the temple of health foods but at least you know what you're dealing with there. So I had an attack of the 50s Housewife, disappeared into the kitchen and had these babies in the oven within ten minutes.

The biscuits in the magazine picture were golden discs of perfection. Mine were lumpy and sprawling but they were happily scoffed by Gareth and friends. I'm still being a Sugar Martyr so I only stole one bite. They were beautifully buttery, simple, soft and Mumsy - ideal for mindless dunking into tea.

I'll scan the magazine picture later so you can see the more appetising, non-deformed version!

SIMPLE JAMMY BISCUITS

Source: Good Food, March 2006
Makes: 12

200g/8oz self-raising flour
100g/4oz caster sugar
100g/4oz butter
1 egg, lightly beaten
4 tbsp strawberry jam (I used Bonne Maman Raspberry. Choice!)

Heat oven to 190°C, Rub the flour, sugar and butter together until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs. Alternatively, you can do this in the food processor (Yeah right. I did it by hand, less washing up that way!) Add enough egg to bring the mixture together to form a stiff dough.

Flour your hands and shape the dough into a tube, about 5cm in diameter. Cut into 2cm-thick slices and place on a large baking sheet. Space them out as the mixture will spread while baking.

Make a small indentation in the middle of each slice with the end of a wooden spoon, and drop a teaspoon of jam in the centre. Bake for 10-15 minutes until slightly risen and just golden. Cool on a wire rack.

Note: Next time I'd probably make 24 wee ones instead of the recommended 12, so you'd get more jam per bite!

Per Biscuit: 170 calories, 5g saturated fat. WW Points: 3.5 (ouch!)

Posted at 01:15 PM in Baking | Permalink | Comments (2)

As I approach the business end of my Fat Busting adventure, I'm having to fight for every tiny wee ounce I lose. My body seems reluctant to surrender any more lard. All it takes is a stray slice of toast, one skipped gym class or merely breathing in some Lamington Fumes and I'll wind up with a nasty result on my Wednesday Weigh Days. So lately I've been scouring my food journal, looking for things to cut out or modify in order to get some results.

This week I focused on milk.

I normally drink semi-skimmed, which contains about 1.5% fat. That's the bottle with the green lid. Here in Britain the milk is colour coded and it all makes perfect sense to me. Full fat milk is blue, which makes one think rich, lush, indulgent - fat jersey cows ambling over pastures. Green is wholesome, inoffensive, natural - a happy compromise. Red means pain, suffering, deprivation - the mournful moo of a malnourished bovine. Red is evil. Red is for skimmed milk. So that's what I drank last week.

Here's where I need to insert the disclaimer. I hate Skimmed Milk. I hate Non Fat milk too, which is the American equivalent. I even hate Skim Milk, as it's called in Australia with our fine traditional of abbreviation.

I hate skimmed milk as I was forced to drink it as a child. Well, I wasn't forced very forcefully, it was just often all we had left in the fridge. The Mothership liked to stock healthy foods such as brown bread, green vegetables and sensible cereals like Weetbix. The typical parent/child conversation went thus:

"Muuum I'm hungry."
"Have an apple."
"I don't want an apple."
"Well you're not really hungry then, are you?"

The Mothership's milk of choice was Shape, which was allegedly not as evil as Skim as it contains half a percent or so of fat. But I couldn't taste a difference. It was still pale and watery. Even if you added Home Brand Chocolate Topping and blasted it for ten minutes in the milkshake maker, it was still pale and watery. Just BROWN, pale, watery. I used gag and screw up my face and clutch my stomach most melodramatically, counting down the days til the weekend where I could guzzle full cream milk and sugary cornflakes at my dad's house. And I always thought the design of the Shape carton somehow made it taste worse. It was white with gold stripes, the word SHAPE zapped across it in a neon 80s font. There may also have been a silhouette of a lady in a leotard and legwarmers, because that's how we all dressed back then.

Despite this troubled history I decided to give it another try. I'm all for revisiting the Food Foes of ones childhood - I used to say I hated avocados because they seemed pale and nasty to my ten-year-old self. But now? Mmm, avocado. I pity the fool I was back then.

ANYWAY, in my quest to save calories and fat, skimmed milk seemed a good place to start. Plus they tell me that low fat dairy is higher in calcium. How can you go wrong?

I subjected the brew to a number of different taste tests.

First test:   The Smoothie
Hidden amongst frozen berries, yogurt and orange juice, the half cup of Skimmed Milk wasn't a dominant enough player to really make an impact. I sniffed and sipped, looking for the tell-tale notes of water and evil, but it was indetectable. So score one for the Skimmed Milk. But then again I used full fat Yeo Valley yogurt. I guess that cancels out the benefits. D'oh!

Second Test:   The Porridge
After trudging to work on a winters morn, there's nothing better than zapping ones oats in the microwave for a hearty breakfast. I usually make my porridge with a 2:1 ratio of semi-skimmed milk and water, but this time it was pure Skimmed. I thought there wouldn't be much difference between 0% skim and 1.5% semi + water. But there was! It was rotten, ROTTEN I tells ya! Usually the oats are burbling after two minutes, white and creamy and begging for a pinch of brown sugar. But in their insipid Skimmed Milk bath, they just sort of blinked up at my, grey and sludgy. They hadn't melted at all, and the addition of sugar just made it murky and sickly sweet. Never again!

Third Test:   The Glass
One of my favourite snacks is grainy toast with almond butter. But it has to be accompanied by a glass of cold milk, so you can swirl it round your mouth and hose all the sticky bits off your teeth. So I made the toast and poured the glass and sat down in front of Ready, Steady, Cook.

All I can say is, BLARRRRGH! On its own, the Skimmed Milk tasted like not just all the fat but the SOUL had been drained right out of it. And when gnashed around with a bite of toast it just got lost completely, instead of being part of the overall flavoursome mess as the Semi-Skimmed does.

Conclusion: Definitely the taste of evil.

I shall stay loyal to the green cap. While I envy and applaud those healthy folk who manage to chug this stuff down, for me the 1.5% fat I'd save is not worth sacrificing 100% of the taste.

Posted at 02:46 PM in Diet Food and Food Foes Revisited | Permalink | Comments (32)