133. Enjoyably Wasting Time

I don't know how it's happened but this post from December 2016, has suddenly appeared here and so if you think you've read it before, you're right.

TW 6-1-22

Around about 10 o’clock every morning, I start thinking about what we are going to eat in the evening.  I have responsibility for food because Caroline works and I don’t.  There are always three alternatives: eat out, buy a ready meal, or cook. 

I like cooking.  I’m no good at it but I rather enjoy everything that goes towards the outcome and sometimes I enjoy eating the end result as well - but not often.  Other people usually seem to enjoy what I’ve cooked more than I do.  There may be some psychological influences going on there or people are just being polite?  I suspect it’s the latter.

Eating out is the simplest and easiest option but it is expensive around here and not something to do every day.  When we lived in North London, we were within walking distance of tens of restaurants and maybe, it was the fierce competition caused by the high density of restaurants, that kept prices low. 

There are no cheap, independent restaurants in this area the way there are in London, just chains like Giraffe, Prezzo and Nando’s.   The days when we would pop out at seven and be back by eight because we had nothing in the fridge have gone. 

Every time we go to a restaurant nowadays, it is an “Event”.  Of course, the event is usually nothing more momentous than the fact that it is a Friday night, but our social life is such that Friday night is quite an event for us. 

I spend most midweek afternoons preparing food to be eaten for dinner that evening.  I made Prawn Caldinho the other day.  First, I had to marinate the prawns.  I had to grind the cumin, coriander seeds and peppercorns to a fine powder and then pound garlic cloves to a paste. After the preparation and cooking, I was left with four dirty pots that had to be washed up and put away. 

It was very nice but it took me more than two hours in all to prepare and cook.  Much simpler and easier to pop a ready meal into the microwave.  I have never had a ready meal from a supermarket that I didn’t enjoy. 

A King Prawn Masala ready meal for two costs £3.30 and it is really good.  As I said at the start, I only bother cooking because I enjoy it. 

I know that many people disagree, but growing your own food seems a particularly daft thing to do.  A couple of years ago, my brother, who appears to have turned horticulture and plant husbandry into an obsession, gave us a cucumber plant.  Cucumbers need to grow in soil that has to be kept moist.

We were supposed to go away for a few days but we nearly didn’t because we were worried that the cucumber might suffer from neglect.  We went but only after my son offered to stay at our house for the time we were away and water the damned thing.

What a to-do!  Look at it: prickly, stunted and thick-skinned.  We looked after it like a newborn baby on life support and at the end of it, all we “harvested” was just one cucumber.  Why bother?

Last March, we planted potatoes.  At least they don’t need nurturing while they grow but what you dig up is nothing like the potatoes you buy at Waitrose.  They are caked in mud for a start!

A few years ago, I spent an October afternoon making date pickle. That is not cooking.  There is virtually no preparation necessary apart from chopping the ingredients.  Mixing is the only technique required.  If you can measure weight and volume, it is impossible to get it wrong and it is worth doing because I’ve never seen it for sale in a store.

The first year I made date pickle, I didn’t know that you could buy pitted dates and I spent two hours removing the stones from two kilograms of them.  I also had to buy several ingredients that I'd never used before such as sumac, tamarind paste and asafoetida (on its own, it smells as its name suggests it might, but it adds an oniony flavour with no odour).

The date pickle I make in October is perfect by Christmas and two kilograms of it lasts a year.  It would all be gone earlier if Caroline liked it but she doesn’t and so I eat it all myself. 

“Why not make a normal pickle?” she suggested.  “Something that I like.”

I bought ingredients to make four kilograms of “Classic Pickle” and at ten o’clock on a Sunday morning, I began.  Apples, onions, beetroot, turnip and swede all had to be peeled and chopped.  Tomatoes had to be skinned before chopping.  It took hours!

I don’t know whether it’s an age thing but my eyes have recently become extremely sensitive to onions.  The moment I start to remove the peel from an onion, my eyes hurt.  It never used to be that bad.  In the end, I had to admit defeat and Caroline finished the job. 

She only moaned about it for about a week.

Unlike date pickle, these constituents of “Classic Pickle” have to be softened for an hour by simmering and it required regular stirring.  As the pan was cooling, I could see I was going to need more containers and so I went out and bought eight Kilner jars.

This pickle is fairly bland but it tastes good and goes particularly well with cheese.  It is unlike any pickle I’ve ever tried before as it doesn't have the sharp, vinegary tang of shop-bought pickle.

I’m making a rather special dessert for Christmas and I need glacé clementines.  I found that I could buy them online but the smallest quantity available is 1 kilogram.  I only need 100 grams and I wasn’t prepared to spend £12.99.  So, I spent 95p on three clementines and glacéed them myself.  It was very easy and they taste pretty good.

Is it worth it?  Making the glacé clementines and date pickle certainly is - but making the classic pickle most definitely was not. 

Branston Pickle in a supermarket costs around 35 pence per 100 grams.  The ingredients that I used cost £25 and so that works out at 62p per 100 grams.  However, if you add in the cost of the eight jars I had to buy at £2.99 each, that puts up the cost to £1.22 per 100 grams.  

But it doesn’t end there.  The value of my labour has to be worth the minimum wage and so that’s another £45.  I ignore the cost of the electricity used over six hours from the first peel to closing the last lid.

Consequently, to make my home-made pickle cost £2.50 per 100 grams.  A 360-gram jar of Branston Pickle is £1.29 in a supermarket. That low price shows the advantages brought about by economies of scale.  Making your own pickle really is not worth the bother. 

I will sell a 400-gram jar of my pickle for just £9.00 and that is a saving for you of 10%.  However, you can have one for £6.00 - but I would like to have the jar back, please.

112. Sugar, Sugar, Everywhere...

Why have I become so fat?  There is really only one reason why I, or anyone else, gains weight. 

As long as I burn off the same number of calories every day through exercise as I consume as a result of eating, I will not gain weight.  If I don’t burn off my daily calorie intake, I gain weight – simple!

I don’t eat a lot.  Honestly, I don’t!  Much to Caroline’s consternation and she was brought up in a northern household where to waste food was a sin and plates were always left empty after meals, I often leave quite a lot of food on my plate.  I stop eating once I am no longer feeling hungry.  I accept that it is wasteful but as I paid for it and no one is offended as I cooked it, it doesn't matter.  I rarely eat between meals.

So, it must be the kind of food I eat.  I must be eating high calorie food.

According to the medical profession, the maximum sugar intake per day for a healthy life is 30 grams.  Have you any idea how little this really is?

Breakfast is the meal I look forward to most.  First thing in the morning is the only time of the day when I am really genuinely hungry.  I eat a sort of lunch every day, which is maybe a sandwich or something like a boiled egg and I always eat in the evening but I am never hungry before either of those meals.

I have come to realise recently that I eat lunch and dinner every day almost out of a sense of duty - I’m not really hungry but as it’s a mealtime, I eat. 

I am retired and I no longer work.  Caroline works full time and gets home between six and seven every evening.  She is always hungry because she leads an active, sometimes frenetic life, both physically and mentally:

“I didn’t have time for lunch,” is an almost daily refrain.

What we eat in the evening is whatever I have prepared that afternoon.  I sometimes wonder if I would prepare and eat dinner every day if I lived on my own.  I am fairly sure that I would not.

When I was 55 and before my liver problems, I weighed 165 pounds (11 stone, 11 pounds).  During my illness, my weight fell to 138 pounds (9 stone 12 pounds).  Since I have made a full recovery, cooking and eating are two of the few remaining pleasures left open to me.

I don’t smoke and obviously, I never drink alcohol.  My ongoing problems with severe arthritis mean that any type of aerobic physical activity is beyond my capability.  I cannot walk more than 50 metres without experiencing severe pain and I can’t jog any distance at all. 

Consequently, almost all my time is spent sitting and not moving and therefore I am burning very few calories.

My weight is steadily rising.  I have kept a record:

In August 2009, it was 147 pounds, 10st, 7lbs.

In August 2010, it was 165 pounds, 11st, 9lbs.

In August 2011, it had risen to 186 pounds, 13st, 4lbs.

By August 2012 my weight had risen to 195 pounds (13st 13lbs) and it has stayed there, ± 3 pounds, for the past three years.

As a result, I am 35 pounds, or more than two stone heavier than I should be.  

Before I put any sugar on my Weetabix and All Bran this morning, I put two and a half dessertspoons of sugar that I always add (I know!), on to the scales.  I was astounded by the weight of sugar: 35 grams!

I put the sugar back into the jar and then weighed the two teaspoons of Demerara sugar that I would have had with the first of my two cups of coffee that accompany my breakfast: 9 grams.

That means I consume 50 grams of sugar and that is almost twice the recommended healthy daily intake.  That is just at breakfast - no wonder I am so fat!

You probably think that more than 50 grams of sugar a day is an outrageous amount and I agree, but I do have an excuse - of sorts: I was a child of the 50s.  In September 1953, when sugar came off ration, I was 6.  This was the opening paragraph in the Daily Telegraph the next day:

Children all over Britain have been emptying out their piggybanks and heading straight for the nearest sweetshop as the first unrationed sweets went on sale today.

My diet as a 6-year-old was quite unlike that of a child of today.  In August that year, my 4-year-old brother and I had sat in a sidecar, alongside our parents on a motorcycle combination, as my father drove to Barcelona and back.  The trip took over five weeks. 

There were no official campsites in central France in 1953 and every evening we sought permission to camp in a farmer’s field and the following morning we drank warm, unpasteurised milk from that farm.  I can still recall the distinctive taste. 

The water wasn’t safe to drink.  There was no bottled water and so my brother and I had to drink rough, local wine.  We never liked it.  Butter and margarine couldn’t be stored in mid-summer without refrigeration and so bread and jam was just that – bread and jam.

I can’t remember it but I expect that after rationing ended, only a week after our return to the UK, I was spoiled by having sugar with virtually everything.  I even remember going to nursery with a sugar sandwich as a packed lunch.  Hence, I suppose, my problems with sugar until today.

As I write this, at 4 p.m. on Saturday afternoon, my sugar intake today, so far as I know, is zero grams.  I say “so far as I know” because I have no idea how much sugar is in processed foods.  I have looked at the sugar content of a 150ml tin of Schweppes tonic water: 5.1g per 100ml. 

That means that there is about a quarter of the recommended daily intake of sugar in just one small tin and I sometimes drink three tins a day.  Not anymore!  How much sugar is in supermarket bread?  What about ‘healthy’ yoghurts and soups?

Weetabix without sugar is just about edible but hardly enjoyable but coffee without sugar is fine.  If my experience with coffee, mirrors that which I had with tea, when I gave up sugar in it some forty years ago, I will soon adapt.