Christmas Food Markets and Festive Treats

Food is just as much a part of Christmas as tinsel and fairy lights. But while supermarkets have been stocking mince pies since early September, it’s only now that the real festive treats are out in force.

Just look at Hyde Park’s Winter Wonderland. Yes the rides are over priced, the ice rink is over crowded, but the traditional German market selling gingerbread, mulled wine, roasted nuts and Bratwurst is where you really want to be.

If you want something closer to home, Christmas Farmers Markets are popping up all over the shop. Local fruit and veg, delicious meats and other specialities are on offer starting from today, so only the freshest ingredients will make it into your Christmas feast.

Finally, the Real Food Market in Covent Garden has award-winning Christmas pastries and cakes, artisan cheeses, smoked fish and gourmet pies. Needless to say, it’s incredible. But it closes on Monday, so cancel any weekend plans and get down there as soon as possible. Trust me on this.  

If you have sensibly decided to stay well away from London this Christmas, there are plenty of festive food markets across Britain. Just click here.

London Design Week features a Black Banquet

A “monochromatic feast” of naturally black food will be served up as part of a Black Banquet to celebrate London Design Week.

On 23 September, a razor, a shiny knife – a Brooklyn-based company specialising in theatrical culinary experiences – will serve up 8 courses of food that reflects the darker side of London’s history. Jellymongers Bompas & Parr, known for striking architectural food displays, are providing theatrical installations for the banquet.

The concept of the Black Banquet is rooted deep in London’s past, which tends towards the macabre. The meal itself was inspired by a supper held in 1511, when a Renaissance dining group served food buried within repulsive creatures like bats, serpents and scorpions. What better way to whet your appetite than prizing open a dead bat?

The banquet, tickets for which are on sale now at a non-recession-friendly £100 per head, sounds intriguing to say the least. According to the event’s publicity, it is designed to “explore boundaries of creativity through spectacular and unusual dining.” I only question how far the boundaries of creativity should be pushed when you’re trying to enjoy a nice meal.

To reserve tickets, email: banquet@jellymongers.co.uk

MPs’ Expenses for Food

Food shopping is never easy. You step inside a supermarket and the carefully budgeted list of necessities in your hand seems ludicrous. So I only need bananas and floor cleaner, do I? But what about this expensive looking pate? What about those individual fruit tarts? And freshly baked croissants… Who can resist all that temptation?

Clearly not our MPs. They managed to spend almost £1.2m on food in 2007-08. But here’s where it starts to grate – they were allowed to claim it all back. So when Mark Francois, Conservative MP for Rayleigh, got a little carried away in Tesco and racked up a £111.77 food bill for sweets and pate, he simply claimed it on expenses.

It’s not just the big spenders either. MPs can claim up to £400 a month for food, but Gary Streeter, Conservative MP for South West Devon, only claimed for a flapjack, some fruit juice and teabags (£4.66 in total). 

The cost of the items almost seems beside the point. We would all love the opportunity to wonder around Tesco and pick up anything we fancied. But times are undoubtedly tight. Not only are we forced to avoid “finest” ranges like the plague, we have to stop ourselves from buying those little things that eventually add up (like flapjacks for example).

It’s the system that needs changing. Who can honestly say they wouldn’t jump for joy if their boss allowed them to claim expenses for the weekly shop? But that won’t hold back the frustration as you stare longingly at the expensive Belgium chocolate ice cream while dumping a tub of Tesco’s own-brand in your trolley.

Low Fat, Low Fun?

Two health issues constantly debated in the UK are:

1.  Britian’s expanding waistlines. Obesity cost the NHS £4.2bn in 2007 according to the Department of Health, and the government has predicted this will rise to £6.3bn in 2015.

2. the pressure young people are under to lose weight. The charity Beat estimates that 1.1 million people in the UK suffer from either anorexia or bulemia.

Solutions to obesity could well make matters worse for those who have psyhcological problems with food. The prominance of low-fat and low-calorie food in supermarkets is a prime example. Think about the names of low-fat ranges: Be Good To Yourself (Sainsbury’s), Healthy Living (Tesco), Eat Well (Marks & Spencer). Low-fat food, which is intended to help people lose weight, is being sold as the key to a healthy diet.

But is everyone influenced by the promotion of low-fat products? Thankfully not. The taste of low-calorie food has always been an issue, and the added sugar and salt in many ”healthy” products has cropped up in the media for a while now. More people seem to be disillusioned with low-fat food, which in my opinion can only be a good thing. 

Podcast: Low-fat food

Tell! Magazine Launch

For the past two weeks, a team of dedicated journalism students (myself included) have slaved away to bring you the fantastically unique tell! magazine. Everyone did their part and we’re very proud of our publication despite a certain editor of Take A Break magazine turning his nose up at it (I’ll let you spot the irony there).

In keeping with the theme of this blog, I worked as Food editor on Tell! magazine and Tell! online: www.tellmag.co.uk. On the website you’ll find reviews of quirky restaurants and diners around London, like Garlic and Shots, where even the beer comes with garlic and there are 101 different shots to choose from (thankfully not garlic flavoured).

And we’ve found some excellent recipes, tried and tested by members of the Tell! team. Here’s an example:

Chicken Risotto

2 chicken breasts or 4 chicken thighs

1 large onion

1 large clove of garlic

1oz butter

1tbsp olive oil

6oz risotto rice

2 chicken stock cubes

1 glass of white wine or Cinzano Bianco

Optional: mushrooms, green peas, lemon, parsley, parmesan cheese

 

To prepare:

Chop the chicken into bite-sized pieces.

Chop the onion and garlic finely and cook slowly with the butter and olive oil in a wide sauté or frying pan over a gentle heat. Add the chicken.

Add 6oz of risotto rice and stir gently so it is covered with the oil/butter.

Dissolve the stock cubes in about one and a half pints of boiling water.

Pour a glass of white wine – or better still, Cinzano Bianco – into the rice and stir. When the rice has absorbed the wine, slowly add some of the hot chicken stock.

Over the next 15-20 minutes, let the rice mixture cook over a gentle heat. When the rice looks like it has absorbed all the liquid add some more chicken stock. Don’t let it dry out. At this stage, chopped up mushrooms and/or a handful of frozen peas can also be added.

When the risotto is ready, check seasoning and add salt if required. Add well ground black pepper and serve with chopped parsley, lemon wedges and grated parmesan.

 

So if you like what you see, pick up a FREE copy of Tell! magazine from newsagents around London (the precise locations are undecided but some are likely to be distributed around Brick Lane) and in the meantime, visit our website!

Supersize vs Superskinny: Positive change or nonsense?

Channel 4 are notorious for broadcasting crude and distasteful programmes, then mumbling something about educational value when the complaints come pouring in. Enter Supersize vs Superskinny (Tuesdays 8pm, C4) where presenter Dr Christian Jessen forces one extraordinarily fat person and one microscopically thin person to swap diets for five days.

The skinny one gains weight after eating chocolate gateaus and deep fried pizza, while the fat person loses a couple of stone by feasting on bread crumbs and air. Dr Christian pats himself on the back for a job well done. End credits.

Maybe I’ve missed something, but I was under the impression that gallons of saturated fat was always a bad thing regardless of your size. Being skinny isn’t going to stop your arteries from clogging up. And is it sensible to force-feed mountains of sugar to people who havn’t so much as sniffed a chocolate bar in the last two years? Ever heard of a little thing called diabetes, Dr Christian?

Some poor 6st girl choking down her third steak while the huge guy opposite finishes his thimble of soup is pretty entertaining stuff, but healthy it most certainly is not.

Having said that, I am going to put my judgements aside for a moment and help Dr Christian out (he is a member of the medical profession after all). For any skinny boys and girls who want to follow Dr Christian’s particular dietary advice, here’s a selection of ultra fattening, calorie-laden treats from www.thisiswhyyourefat.com. Tuck in (and good luck living past 40).

 The Homewrecker

A fifteen inch deep-fried hot dog topped with jalapeños, habanero chili sauce, coleslaw, diced tomatoes and a mound of cheese.

 

 

  

Lankford’s Gluttoneer

Half pound prime rib/sirloin/rib-eye patty, American cheese, onions, maple bacon, hot link sausage, ketchup and honey mustard.

 

 

 and my personal favourite…

 

The 30,000 Calorie Sandwich

Sandwich filled with ground beef, bacon, corn dogs, ham, pastrami, roast beef, bratwurst, braunschweiger and turkey, topped with fried mushrooms, onion rings, swiss/provolone/cheddar/feta/parmesan cheeses, lettuce and butter on a loaf white bread. 

 

Fair Trade Recipe: Fridge Cake

To mark the end of Fairtrade Fortnight, I decided to try my hand at a recipe I found in the Guardian Weekend magazine: Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s Fairtrade Fridge Cake. (It doesn’t involve ovens or any particular cookery skills so it was ideal.)

350g milk chocolate, broken into pieces

150g unsalted butter

3 tbsp golden syrup

120g of any good, chunky biscuit

250g dried fruits (a mixture of dates, apricots, sultanas, raisins and mango work well)

70g dark chocolate (optional)

 

The hardest thing about making the fridge cake is finding Fairtrade ingredients. The recipe doesn’t help much. Hugh assumes that Fairtrade products are available in abundance, but extensive supermarket searches prove otherwise. Apart from coffee, chocolate, and bananas, very little else carries the Fairtrade logo. I had to turn to the internet for the biscuits and various dried fruits.

There were certain ingredients that had no Fairtrade alternatives whatsoever. The recipe says that Crazy Jack makes Fairtrade golden syrup. Actually, it’s organic not Fairtrade. To find out about the difference between organic and Fairtrade, click here.

After a lot of online shopping at EthicalSuperstore.com (delivery is pretty quick and free if you spend over £15), I had all the ingredients. I went to Sainsbury’s for the Fairtrade mango and the organic raisins and sultanas. It wasn’t exactly cheap: all this cost £19.38.

 

Making the fridge cake was easy but messy. You melt the milk chocolate into a bowl with the syrup and butter, then break the biscuits into smallish pieces and add them and the dried fruit (also cut into small pieces) to the chocolate. Stir until everything is well coated. Then spoon the mixture into a baking tin (the recipe says 23cm but I found a smaller one worked better) and drizzle the melted dark chocolate on the top. Refrigerate for four hours or overnight.

  

And there you have it. Fairtrade (and organic) Fridge Cake. 

Done.

Make a Smilebox slideshow

Fair Trade Fortnight: Coffee Tasting

To celebrate Fairtrade Fortnight (running from 23rd Feb until 8th March), Cafedirect has organised Tastefair - a series of events promoting fair trade.

 

 

I went along to the Whole Foods Market on Kensington High Street, where an expert coffee taster from Tanzania showed us the stages of making coffee from seed to cup.

 
Amen Meui, our coffee expert, was brilliant. He could taste the acidity and the body of all types of coffee by sucking the coffee onto his tongue and spitting it back out seconds later. We all had to try it and needless to say it’s a skill no one else in the group could quite master, including our British host.

video by L. Vanderkar

Coffee tasters, known as a liquorers or cuppers, work in cooperatives and help fair trade companies like Cafedirect choose the best quality coffee. In return, they get a guaranteed minimum price for their coffee so the coffee farmers don’t have to compete with larger organisations.

The coffee tasting that Cafedirect set up was pretty impressive, not least because of the photo exhibition which illustrated how coffee is made in African countries. You don’t often go along to a free event and learn something useful about other continents. The coffee wasn’t bad either.

James Martin versus Rachel Allen: Cooks on TV

I learnt something about cookery shows this morning. There is a world of difference between programmes hosted by male and female TV chefs. 

Saturday Kitchen hosted by James Martin is an entertaining, fast-moving show. You’ve got your Michelin-starred chefs cooking fillets of lamb in ways I never thought possible. There are practical tips on how to turn your leftovers into seven different meals, and ingredients from parts of the world I didn’t know existed.

When that’s over, BBC 1 gives us a second foody installment…Rachel Allen: Bake! And bake she certainly does. For every second of the fluffy pink 30-minute programme, Rachel bakes everything a 1950s housewife could dream of.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was watching one of the Stepford wives. Rachel’s smile remained fixed even when students in her cookery class failed to properly separate an egg - something my three-year old neighbour could probably manage.

With the camera on soft focus, Rachel walks you through simple baking recipes in a haze of pink and even takes her class out for a tea party on the lawn. Next to Loose Women on Channel 4, I can’t imagine anything men would rip the piss out of more.  

The worst thing about it is that the food is amazing. Cakes oozing with chocolate fudge sauce, a mouth-watering quiche, hot choc-chip cookies. But no one – from Michelin-starred professionals to amateurs who set their ovens on fire – could ever take her programme seriously.

Pancake Day!

Another holiday devoted to food. I celebrated Shrove Tuesday at Ed’s Diner in Soho, where the Kindness Offensive continued their good work by handing out free pancakes to anyone and everyone.

The Kindness Offensive is made up of three guys – David Goodfellow, Benny Crane and James Hunter - who perform random acts of kindness. On this occasion they managed to persuade Ed’s Diner to give up its premises, and McDougalls and Betty Crocker to donate truck loads of ingredients to make the pancakes, completely free of charge.

David Goodfellow of The Kindness Offensive said: “All we promise these companies when they donate food is that we will give it away , and have as much with it as we can.”

Altogether they gave away over half a million pancakes to charities such as Great Ormond Street hospital and Help the Aged as well as members of the public (including myself, of course).

video by L. Vanderkar