A charlotte is a kind of baked bead pudding. It is traditionally made with apples and cinnamon but the pear and rosemary together with a little drizzle of agave is incredibly tasty.
I don’t have much more to say about this recipe except that it is in honour of the lovely Charlotte who I haven’t seen in ages.
I haven’t updated as much as I should recently but that’s because I’ve been locked away in a small room, heavily supervised, roaring and snorting and soiling myself. Why?
Because I made a terrible mistake and paid the ultimate price.
I bought a plastic squeezy bottle of Marmite.
What was I thinking Why did I do it? It is the crappiest little nugget of shit I’ve ever seen. It actually hurts your thumbs to squeeze and the majority of the marmite quickly shifts itself into an unsqueezble position, meaning you waste more than you do trying to scrape out the shoulders of the glass version. The sheer pain and frustration of operating the squeezy bottle has forced me to cut down my marmite consumption, leading to severe withdrawal symptoms and the disjointed mental state outlined above.
Despite this tragic setback I have bravely returned to the kitchen and will be posting a selection of tasty morsels over the next few days including a non-tofu alternative to fish and chips, a classic pudding and some proper up-north comfort food.
In conclusion? Bollocks to the squeezy bottle.
Hot fluffy apple, crunchy brown sugar and warm spices make baked apples one of the simplest and one of the loveliest puddings. Ancient British law states that you have to eat it with vanilla ice cream, in front of an open fire, fussing a red setter.
Welsh onion cake is a gorgeous slab of buttery potato and soft, melting onion. I had mine with roast tofu and baby leeks and it was the food equivalent of being wrapped in a warm fluffy blanket or getting a cuddle off of Gok Wan.
Hooray, it’s the vegan month of food!
In theory this is a glorious celebration of vegan cooking. In practice I will be updating slightly more often than usual and probably posting some pictures of my arse. Stay tuned kids!
Oh and I couldn’t resist doing the survey. Only read on if you give a shit about my favourite kitchen appliance (spoiler: it’s a fork).
Jam roly-poly is classic school dinner food. For some people this may be a good thing, for others a very very bad thing.
For the first three years of my time at primary school we had beautiful school dinners – home made chips, stew and fresh gingerbread. It was idyllic. Then everything changed. The school was trying to cut costs and they hired a new set of dinner ladies who served an exclusive menu of sick, snot and teeth. Seriously.
They ruined jam roly-poly for me, serving up a limp, bloated monstrosity, a flabby suet chod with no jam and a teaspoon of weird gritty custard. I can’t say I was surprised to learn (from Wikipedia, obviously) that the pudding is nicknamed ‘dead man’s leg’.
It was a million miles away from proper roly-poly pudding which is truly a thing of beauty. It is also great fun to make and achingly retro so all your cool friends will like it too.
In one of my cook books I found a recipe for Cornish red mullet soup. It sounded like the most amazing soup: warm, spicy and filling. Except for the mullet.
Lentils work perfectly in this vegan version and the lovely rich smell of this soup fills the whole house. I think you’ll like it.
I apologise for using the blog for something non f00d related but this is something I feel quite strongly about.
You may or may not have heard that British scientist Simon Singh is being sued by the British Chiropractic Assosiation. Singh holds that the chiropractic industry has made claims in their literature which are not supported by evidence, in particular claims that chiropractic treatments can cure childhood illnesses such as asthma and ear infections. Singh made these comments in the Guardian and when the British Chiropractic Association were offered the right to reply and present their evidence they took him to court instead.
This case has highlighted a major problem with English libel laws. As the Sense about Science website says, ‘freedom to criticise and question in strong terms and without malice is the cornerstone of scientific argument and debate’. Our current libel laws stifle scientific and journalistic inquiry and discussion. To support libel reform please consider signing the Sense about Science statement here. You can read more about the case here.
Ta.
When I read wartime recipe books I am always impressed by their cheerful conviction that bright colours and cute cartoons of vegetables and smiling ladies will make everything ok. Egg powder for breakfast? ‘Meat curry’ for dinner again? Don’t worry, here’s a funny picture of a leek wearing a hat.
The thing I love most about British wartime recipes are their deeply unappetising names. These range from the arbitrarily foreign (Mexican Cream, Welsh Wonder) to the totally inexplicable (Coquet pudding, Potato Jane) via the utterly naff (fairy toast, equality pudding). When I read wartime cookery books I imagine some poor beleaguered housewife, up to her thighs in a bucket of tea, muttering “what the screaming fuck are wheatmealies?”
So here is a classic WW2 recipe, Woolton Pie. Only this isn’t really a Woolton pie because Woolton pie is disgusting. Created as a means of keeping the population healthy during rationing, this desperately unpopular dish featured spongy old root veg, oatmeal, and a floppy potato pastry crust.
This version is more like a really good shepherd’s pie, with a rich lentil and vegetable filling and a creamy leek and potato topping.
Whenever I speak to other vegans I find out I’ve been missing out on all kinds of goodies and treats because I assumed they were off the menu. It turns out there’s loads of vegan-friendly junk food so we can be smug and fat at the same time. These are my favourites but please do add yours to the comments.
And before we get started I want to point out that I’m not making any comments on the ethics of individual companies here (i.e. on animal testing), nor the nutritional rights and wrongs, just products which happen to be vegan. So don’t flame me or put dog shit through my letterbox. Ta.
