International Food Evening #1

For those of you who read this blog (thank you, by the way!) but aren't friends or family, a little introduction to provide some context to this post.

I'm currently the President of the Erasmus Society at my university. That means that if I ever decide to go into teaching, I'll have had a years' experience of trying to herd Europeans into various clubs, coaches, castle and college tours - and lived to tell the tale.

Last night, we held an International Food Evening. It was, to toot my own horn, a total success (beep beep). I'd booked one of the larger rooms to hold the event, and when I got there at 7 and remembered just how big it is, I definitely had an "oh crap" moment. I had images of 40 people standing in the middle of this room that has a seating capacity of about 80, none of whom had brought food, trying to make my Victoria Sandwich and my VP's banoffee pie stretch to feed all of us.

Turns out I needn't have worried. By 7.05 there was a queue outside of people - most of whom had brought food - and by 7.40, pretty much all of the food had gone. I don't think any of us on the committee got even a look in, which was a shame because it all looked gorgeous.

This just taps into my long-held belief that food is something that really unites people. Whether it's offering to make a cake for a fundraising event or sharing food from your country with people who might not otherwise have a chance to try it - food brings people together.

So that's why, despite losing my voice and not getting a bite to eat last night, when I looked down from atop the chair I was standing on to speak to the society and saw everyone's plates full and all of the food on the side gone, I felt an enormous sense of accomplishment.

Ultimately, while I think that for these students, getting the opportunity to explore the UK and get a sense of what it's like to be a student in the UK for a year is incredibly important, food evenings like last night's give people a sense of pride - that was my dish I heard someone enthusing about! or noticing that all of the dish they'd made has been eaten - and it gets people mixing and talking to new people and trying new things.

It also gets you a cheap meal. What could be better?

Just a quick reminder as well - I have a twitter now, it's here, it'd be great if you could pop by and follow me there if you're a twitter-er (twit?)

Rachel Khoo tweeted me!

This lady became my food hero after I watched her programme and saw the kind of amazing meals she could turn out of a kitchen that was honestly no more than a camping gas stove and an oven about the size of a microwave. My dream of moving to Paris after graduation suddenly seemed that little bit more possible.

If she can make meals that make the French sit up and take notice from possibly the world's smallest kitchen, then I can do it in my full-sized (if somewhat cramped) kitchen in my student house.

As you can imagine, my housemate has begrudgingly agreed to be my guinea pig for when I do make something from her book. What a trooper.

Avoiding "Fresher's Panic" Part 2: Shopping solo

I’ve been back in my house for a week now, and the food I’ve eaten since then has been delightfully and almost disconcertingly healthy. I’m very lucky in that my new housemate doesn’t have much of a sweet tooth, and she prioritises vegetables over meat. It’s remarkably easy to copy the eating habits of someone like that when you don’t want to be the only one leaving the house to do an “emergency chocolate run” or eating meat every single day.

It won’t stop me from baking, so don’t worry too much about me!

Since I moved in and waved goodbye to my parents, I’ve cooked Jamie Oliver’s amazing stew (recipe can be found here) for when my friend came over to keep me company and a return to an old favourite, ratatouille; and Cat has made an amazing bacon, leek and sweetcorn chowder as well as leek and potato soup that we had with Marmite and cheese on toast (the Marmite was purely because the cheese from the corner shop was offensively tasteless).

Today I decided that I really needed to do a food shop – I couldn’t keep on just expecting Cat to cook for me, it was probably my turn again! So two of my friends and I piled into my car and off we went to Asda to do the dreaded food shop.

I don’t know what impression people have of students (no, don’t answer that!) but when I went up to the till and started chatting with the lady about how busy it was, she rolled her eyes and laughed. “Oh, it’s all the students coming back and getting their parents to get the first shop in!” I smiled, amused, and said that I was coming back for my last year. She paused in scanning the smoked mackerel fillets (they’re going towards a firm favourite later this week, mackerel risotto) and looked at the pile of vegetables and distinct lack of ready meals – or, indeed, booze; and smiled.

Fresher’s Week starts up next week for us, so I’ve really been out of the student bubble for quite some time, but the one thing I never really forgot was the horror of finding how much food costs. I am aware that I am in the very lucky position of being able to choose to buy more expensive food rather than always having to settle for the cheapest possible version of things, but there are some things that I think can do a lot to ease the panic of doing that first solo food shop when you come to university.

Back all those many years ago when I was about to start university, my parents suggested I do something very sensible – it’s helped me work out budgets ever since. We sat down and drew up a hypothetical shopping list, including the kinds of things you’re unlikely to need to be buying every week or month, like coffee and pasta. By the end of it, I had a rough idea of how much money I’d be spending on an average month’s food; and now that I’m in my fourth and final year of university, there are some things about doing the Great Food Shop that have become clear to me. And, being the kind soul I am (stop laughing), I’m going to let you in on some of the things that kept me sane when I was doing these food shops.

Learn to prioritise what you save on and what you splurge on.

You probably don’t want to take the risk on value chicken fillets, and unless you know you’re going to wrap them up and freeze them immediately, I wouldn’t advise getting them when they’re yellow-stickered. Rice, on the other hand, is rice. Unless you want your grains of rice to be hand-picked and individually inspected, I can’t see any particular benefit to spending more on it.

The better quality it is, the less you’ll need

I’m thinking of cheese in particular here. You’ll need twice as much if you’ve bought it and it gave you change from a pound, so you’ll have to buy twice as much to get the same flavour as you’d get from something more expensive – where’s the real saving in that?

Look for deals…

Especially on things that tend to be very expensive or are particularly high-quality. Today in Asda, they were selling the Debbie & Andrew 97% pork sausages for £2. I bought three packs, wrapped them up in twos and put them into the freezer.  They’ll keep, and now I know that for quite some time I’ll have some there in case I suddenly have a yen for sausage and mash.

… but be sensible

If you’re being a bit brave and are trying something you’ve not had before, don’t buy six of them because they’re on offer. If you don’t like it, you’ll probably leave it languishing at the back of your fridge until it can walk out itself and throw itself into the bin.

Work out a menu for the week

It’s sounds incredibly OCD, and to a degree I suppose it is – but having a menu means that when you come to doing a shop, you have a basic idea of what you need to buy. Even if it’s a very general menu and you don’t stick to it entirely, it means that you will have things to make some form of a dinner. I sit down and make a menu on a weekly basis; and sometimes I don’t make what I’d had written down, but if I’ve bought, say, pasta sauce, lasagne sheets, mince and white sauce, even if I don’t want to make lasagne I could still make spaghetti Bolognese.

Always have these things in your cupboards

They are invaluable.

• Rice
• Pasta
• Couscous
• Dried herbs
• Stock cubes
• Chopped tomatoes

Other things might be on some people’s lists (baked beans for instance), but if you’ve got nothing but these things in your cupboard, you’d still be able to make pasta or rice with tomato sauce. Not particularly interesting, but it’s better than not eating anything.

Next up is how to make sharing a kitchen bearable – I’ll give you a hint, it’s all to do with a song by Aretha Franklin…

Avoiding "Fresher's Panic" Part 1: What you actually need in your kitchen

If the middle of August is the time for the “back to school” rush, then the middle of September is what I like to call “Fresher’s Panic”. With that in mind, the next few posts are dedicated to easing this potential panic.

The new wave of university students have got their results, they know which university they’re off to and what sort of accommodation they’re going into, and there’s a blissful fortnight where you look around and think, “the rest of my life is about to start.”

August has disappeared and is replaced by September. While everyone else has gone back to school you sit there, smugly awaiting the beginning of term. Town is yours again – you can go in the middle of the day, safe in the knowledge that the only people sitting in the park are going to be pensioners and other smug university students.

But then suddenly you’re into the second week of September. You haven’t even started sorting through the stuff you want to take to university – and then one day your mother comes into your room and announces that it’s Time To Make A List.

Consider this my lesson to you, future freshers: the list of things your mum thinks you’re likely to need at university bears little resemblance to what you are actually going to need at university. Especially in your kitchen.

Firstly, a disclaimer: if you’re going into catered halls and you’re pretty certain that on the days you’re not given food you’re just going to be having a microwave meal or you’ve already planned on making friends with someone in a self-catered hall who can provide you with food, you really won’t need any of the things I’m about to list. The kitchen you’ll have will be pretty Spartan. As long as you have a mug, a cup, a bowl, a plate, one knife, one fork and one spoon, you should be okay to sort yourself out if you’re not getting a meal provided.

But for those of you going into self-catered halls (or indeed a house share), you’ll need the following for your kitchen:

•  Plates: make sure you’ve got plenty so that if you haven’t done your washing up, you can still   eat off a plate rather than straight from the saucepan. 
• Bowls: Same again 
• Cutlery: Same again, particularly for teaspoons. Buy fifteen, twenty – hell, go all out and buy forty. I can almost guarantee that you’ll not come home at the end of the year with all of them.
• Mugs, glasses: As many as you think you can be bothered to wash up regularly. Pint glasses from pubs tended to appear as if by magic in my kitchen in first year – I’m not advocating this at all, but if one should make its way into your kitchen… Just think about how much money you’ll have spent in the pub by the end of the year. That’s all I’m saying.
• Saucepans and lids: You want a small saucepan for heating up things like baked beans; a medium one for making pasta; and maybe a larger one if you’re likely to make pasta for more than just you. 
• Frying pan: Get one with decent non-stick and you’ll be laughing. There are so many meals that you can make just by using your frying pan – invest in one where the non-stick doesn’t come off the first time you wash it. 
• Wooden spoons, fish slices: if you’ve got these you’re sorted.
• A baking tray: I wouldn’t have touched the one that lurked at the bottom of my oven in halls with a bargepole, let alone cook my dinner on it.
• A slow cooker: Honestly, you really should have one of these. You can get them quite reasonably. Mine cost a tenner, my friend got one for fifteen and Lakeland is currently offering a small one for about £20. They’re so, so worth it.
• Bottle opener and/or corkscrew: Obviously.
• If you’re that kind of person, storage containers. I used them for pasta, rice, coffee – but that’s just who I am. I hated having hundreds of packs of pasta cluttering up my (small) cupboard. At least this way, you can see exactly how much you’ve got left so you don’t end up leaving with half a kilo of assorted pasta shapes.
• Washing up sponge and liquid - and a scourer for when you decide to make pasta when drunk, forget about it and burn it. (Actually if this happens, just throw the pan out. You’ll never get cremated pasta off the bottom of a saucepan – believe me, I’ve tried.)

There are all sorts of other things that you’ll need for uni (bedding, for one), but as far as I’m concerned, these are the main things you’d want for in your kitchen if you’re in self-catered halls. Different people have different priorities – for instance, I had a steamer because my logic was if I could cook vegetables at the same time and in the same pan as my potatoes I’d be more likely to eat them because it didn’t take up much space; whereas one of my floormates seemed to rely on the tomato sauce in his spaghetti hoops for his five-a-day. I came away with a box absolutely laden with stuff for my kitchen that barely saw the light of day once I started uni – bag clips to keep things like bread fresh, an infuser for if I didn’t want to make tea straight in my mug, some fancy contraption to cut cling film. All that happened was that they lurked in that box for the entire year, gathering dust, because I was far too busy having fun and doing first year university student things to worry about using a cling film container with a concealed sharp edge to cut it neatly. And you will be, too.

I'm off to Snowdonia tomorrow morning and will be entirely without internet for a week, but on my return expect a post about the lovely bake-y, cake-y things I made for the holiday and the continuation of my anti-panic guide to moving to uni - starting with the first food shop.

Making the best of a bad bake

These were supposed to be lavender macaroons with a lemon buttercream filling. As you can probably tell - they aren't.

That's the thing about baking, it can be an awful lot like life sometimes. You can follow the instructions to the letter, do everything in the right order, keep a watchful eye on things; and yet sometimes, just sometimes, it all goes wrong. A new recipe can go just as wrong as one you've made hundreds of times before; and no matter how often or not you've attempted this creation, the sense of disappointment when the cake hasn't risen or the flavours just taste off is always the same.

And here lies your choice. You can choose to throw it in the bin and vow to never try making this thing again - or you can say to yourself, "oh well, I'll try doing it a slightly different way next time" and make the best of a bad bake.

They weren't lavender macaroons - but they were quite suitable as Eton Mess - particularly with homegrown blackberries and a drizzle of crème de mûre.

The start of a whirlwind romance

Once upon a time there was a 21 year old student called Rebecca. She loved cooking, she loved being with her friends, and she loved surprises. Then, one day, she met a slow cooker. And it was the beginning of a lifelong romance.

A few days ago my parents bought me a slow cooker to take to uni. I don't know why I'd been hesitant about using one - maybe because I kept confusing it with a pressure cooker which still frighten me a little bit. It is potentially the best investment I've ever made. I'm a big fan of anything where you just throw food into something, forget about it for a few hours and then suddenly go, "oh, there's something in there" and then are presented with a meal you've made without even realising it. Suddenly I can see myself heading out of the house for university having put, I don't know, stuff into the slow cooker, working all day, then coming home and having a meal already made. If that's not the perfect scenario then I really don't know what is.

I'm moving back to university in about a months' time, so I thought I should probably get acquainted with the slow cooker. After meeting up with someone for a very long coffee and planning session, I came home and added sausages, bacon, the remnants of some chorizo, two tins of chopped tomatoes, a tin of cannellini beans, an enormous clove of garlic, and half an onion to the slow cooker, seasoned it, gave it all a stir, then turned the heat right up, stuck the lid on and forgot about it for almost four hours until my parents came home making all the appropriate "yummy" noises as they walked through the door.

I'd consider anything that gets cooked in a slow cooker to be fast, although you could easily argue that anything that takes four hours to cook is hardly quick - but to my mind, if it's something you can get started and then leave for anything from three hours to overnight without constantly needing to poke and prod at it - it's fast food. And it really does fit in perfectly with a student lifestyle - throw the ingredients in and stick the cooker on when you leave the house to go onto campus (high if it's, say, a lecture or a seminar; low if you're going to be particularly studious and go to the library afterwards), come home and dinner's ready. I think that it really should make the list of student necessities. With hindsight, it probably would've made mine - although, my list three years ago (when did that happen??) included a corkscrew, a cafetière and a garlic press so maybe I'm not the best frame of reference for a typical student...

Falafel

It was exactly a year ago yesterday that I arrived in Montpellier, absolutely terrified out of my wits as to what the coming year would entail. I don't think I've quite processed the fact that not only is my year abroad over; it's been over for nearly two months.

Opposite my university was a little falafel place that did falafel wraps and chips for the princely sum of about 4€. I only ever tried it once, which is possibly my biggest regret of the year. There is something incredibly satisfying about a flatbread filled with salad and falafel, and it's hard to describe how it feels to be sitting in a foreign country where you speak the language - but not the language that the owner of the restaurant was chatting to his friend in. It feels more authentic somehow, to be sat eating a traditionally Middle Eastern food surrounded by people speaking Arabic.

What I had for lunch today was somewhat less authentic, but no less satisfying. A while ago, on one of the weekly trips to the deli, I spotted a box of falafel mix and decided I had to buy it. It was simplicity itself to make - just add water to the dried mix and give it a good stir, leave it for 2-3 minutes then fry for about 30 seconds in hot oil. In the absence of pitta bread, I decided to have my falafel as part of a salad, and dressed it with a yoghurt and mint dressing. The mint was sourced all the way from our back garden, and pre-washed by the sudden shower that lasted just long enough for the laundry on the line to get soaked and for me to rush out into the rain to get it in.

While I'd love to find a tried-and-tested, genuine falafel recipe, a mix like this definitely fits the bill in the interim.

"La petite madeleine"

Because I am, as we have already established, broken as a student, about a week ago my mum and I sat down and looked through the Lakeland catalogue, making a wishlist like children at Christmas. Something I've noticed about Lakeland is that for every item that you wonder when one would actually have need for such a thing (banana guard), there will be something that you don't need but have to have (silicone cupcake cases that look like flowerpots), and something that you absolutely need in your life right this second. For me, that was a silicone madeleine tray.

Marcel Proust wrote about the experience of dunking a madeleine into a cup of tea, and how this simple act took him back to his childood in the first part (Du côté de chez Swann) of his unnecessarily long work, À La Recherche du Temps Perdu. Since then, the delicious treats have become synonymous with French childhoods - possibly helped along by the famous little girl who lived in an old house in Paris all covered in vines...

This weekend, as the weather has been ridiculous, making some lovely treats to make me feel like I was in Paris was really the only thing to do.

I looked all over the internet for a suitable recipe for my little madeleines but the ones I found seemed lacking in something. There were a couple that sounded lovely but I couldn't make as I was missing some ingredients (ginger madeleines, you will be mine!), but some seemed to have too much butter, or too much flour, or too many eggs. Getting thoroughly fed up, I suddenly had a brainwave. "Hey!" I thought, "I speak French. Let's put my degree to good use by looking up a French recipe." For surely, surely, if something is so quintessentially French and appears to be the Gallic equivalent of making fairy cakes, then every French person would have a suitable recipe, right?

Happily my theory was correct and here is my translation of the one I found and used, which originally came from here. This makes 48 mini madeleines from this mould, and would make around 20 normal-sized madeleines 

2 eggs

150g flour

1/2 tsp baking powder

125g butter

150g sugar

Zest of one lemon

1. Mix together the eggs and sugar until the mixture is frothy.
2. Melt the butter completely, then add to the egg and sugar mixture.
3. Sift in the flour and baking powder gradually, stirring well to ensure everything's well mixed.
4. Add the lemon zest or, if you prefer, 1/2 tsp of vanilla extract.
5. Spoon into the madeleine moulds and bake in the top half of an oven set to 200 degrees (that's for a fan oven) for 5-7 minutes.

I was incredibly grateful to have had warning that the mixture is incredibly liquid - probably due to melting the butter rather than just softening it - and if you're making mini ones, the ten minutes it takes for the first batch to bake, cool and for a few to be eaten is just long enough for the mixture to firm up a bit. A few recipes I found advocated letting the batter sit in a fridge for anything from 2 hours to the entire night - but honestly I couldn't say I noticed a difference in taste between the ones that were baked right after the batter had been mixed and the ones where the batter had rested.

Yummy, especially just out of the oven, and also pretty divine dipped into a cup of tea - particularly the next day when they'd gone all sticky. Maybe Proust did know what he was going on about after all.

Bacon, lettuce and cannellini stew

A few months ago, I found a really lovely blog that's become really quite famous, Loveaudrey. With hindsight, finding it in the middle of exams was perhaps not the best as it meant that when I really should've been revising the history of the French language, I was reading back through her posts and feeling... Well, feeling like a massive underachiever, if truth be told.

I'm pretty sure that Loveaudrey is actually a superhero in disguise. She managed to juggle two degrees, with all the stress and essays they entail, with being a wife and a mother to two kids - and she always leaves the house with really lovely lipstick on. To say she's become something of an idol to me is putting it mildly.

As I read through her posts, I realised that I really don't have the excuse of being too busy to make a decent meal every day. If she can do it, then I definitely can.

I'd copied down one of her recipes because it had really appealed to me, and last night, with the house (read: the kitchen) to myself, I decided to give it a bash.

Here's the recipe as written up on Loveaudrey's blog:

6 rashers of bacon (or a generous handful of chopped black olives if you're craving something vegetarian)

2cloves of garlic

4 tbsp olive oil

1/4 tsp fennel seeds

1 x 400g tin of chopped tomatoes

200ml chicken stock

1 x 400g tin of canellini beans (I also used a small tin of pinto beans and a drop more stock)

150g lettuce (the recipe calls for cos but I used 2 little gems)

salt and freshly ground black pepper

1. Chop the bacon and garlic. Heat the oil in a pan and add the bacon. Cook for a few minutes, then add the garlic and fennel seeds.

2.Pour in the tinned tomatoes and cook on a high heat for 5 minutes.

3. Add the stock and the drained beans, and cook for a further 5 minutes.

4. Season well, add the chopped lettuce, and allow to wilt before serving.

5. Drizzle with a little olive oil and sprinkle with lots of black pepper.

I made a couple of adjustments - firstly I halved(ish) the quantities as I was only making it for me and I still had some left over for lunch the next day. I also added a spring onion as we had a few that were languishing in the vegetable drawer of the fridge, looking very sad indeed. We didn't have any tinned chopped tomatoes either, so instead I just cut up a big beef tomato and added some water. The final change I made was to throw in a glug of white wine.

I've really become a convert to adding lettuce to hot dishes and just letting it wilt down, but I think the trick is to pick a variety that won't just go totally soggy. Cos lettuce or baby gems have quite a rigid 'spine' (anybody know what that thing is actually called??), which means that the leafy bits go soft but there's still enough crunch for it not to just turn into mush.

It was really delicious and felt very virtuous - the fact that there was plenty left over for lunch the next day is always a bonus; and it's the kind of dish that would be perfect in the middle of winter when you're really craving something warming. It was still delicious even at the height (ha!) of summer because it's not too heavy. I cooked the sauce down so it was quite thick and resembled a stew, but it'd be easy to let it stay quite clear so it's more like a soup.

I can highly recommend giving Loveaudrey's blog a look - as long as you've got plenty of time to waste going back through all of her posts! 

Loveaudrey| loveaudrey-loveaudrey.blogspot.co.uk

De-stress your Sunday

I have been home from France for three weeks and somehow, I have managed to eat five roast dinners in that time. I think that’s something of a personal record.

The thing I find fascinating about roast dinners is how much they vary from family to family, given that they are all essentially the same thing: meat, potatoes and vegetables. Some families will only ever serve Yorkshire Puddings with beef, whereas others consider it a staple of every Sunday roast. Some people only cook chicken, while others would always choose to cook lamb. Potatoes are mashed, or roasted, or boiled – or, if you’re Irish, all three. Red sauce is either ketchup or redcurrant jelly or sometimes even cranberry sauce. Sometimes broccoli is the vegetable that can always be found on the table, in other houses, it’s carrot and parsnip.

While I don’t advocate a pub chain’s equivalent of a roast dinner over one that your mum or grandmother has made (they can never, ever cook vegetables without making them taste vaguely school dinners-y); there is something quite pleasing in that fundamentally, there is no difference between that kind of a roast and the elaborate affair that is the Christmas dinner.

Which is why I can never understand why there is always so much fuss made over how difficult the Christmas meal is to make. It’s not as if we Brits are inexperienced when it comes to roasting meat and serving it with potatoes and vegetables – a fair few of us do that every weekend. But for some reason, Christmas dinner is meant to be:

a.     incredibly stressful and demanding

b.     more complicated than any other meal you could make and

c.      a total disaster from start to finish.

My mother has always approached Christmas dinner like she would any Sunday roast. “The only difference is that the turkey’s bigger, because for some reason we think that we need three times more turkey for this particular roast dinner than we would any other Sunday,” she said to me this Christmas. At the risk of making my mother sound as if she doesn’t do Christmas dinner properly, I have to say, she takes a fairly relaxed approach to making Christmas dinner. Which is probably why she insists on cooking it for the family every year and would possibly have a bit of a wobbly if someone else volunteered for the task.

Mum insists that there are five core principles when it comes to making a roast – whether it’s a typical Sunday roast or Christmas dinner.

1.     Make your life easier by preparing vegetables ahead of time.

Prepare the vegetables or potatoes as early as you feel you can get away with. Peeling carrots, parsnips and potatoes on Christmas Eve has become as much a tradition for our family as me going to Midnight Mass and sneaking in with the neighbour for a cheeky glass of red after the service.

Even when it’s not Christmas, get ahead with doing the vegetable prep. Are your carrots really going to suffer for sitting in a saucepan full of water for a couple of hours before you need them? Cook the cauliflower before you need to make the white sauce – you don’t need to faff with making sure that’s not overcooked and that the white sauce is smooth, too. Do the vegetables, then do the sauce. It’s going in the oven anyway.

2.     The microwave is your friend.

Seriously. Put aside any snobbish misconceptions you may have. Make your carrot and parsnip, mash them, and then when everyone descends for dinner just put the bowl in a microwave to reheat it. It’ll not ruin them. Honest. If it’s good enough for a whole wealth of celebrity chefs, it’s good enough for you and your Sunday roast.

3.     Timing is everything.

Work out how much time your chicken (or turkey or lamb or beef) is going to take and plan accordingly. If you’ve prepared the vegetables ahead of time and aren’t frightened to use the microwave, it’s okay to just swan into the kitchen every so often and give your veggies a gentle prod.

4.     Let the meat rest before you carve it.

It’s much easier and you don’t end up with some bits that are the size of house bricks and others that are thinner than the slices of Tesco Value wafer-thin ham.

5.     Don’t be a Sunday roast martyr.

There is nothing more annoying than to be really enjoying a meal someone’s cooked for you, making all the appropriate ‘yummy’ noises whilst they sit and prod at their dinner, complaining about how much effort it took and how the honey-roast parsnips just taste like nothing. It doesn’t half put you off complimenting the meals – and then the cook gets all huffy because nobody appreciates the food.

The bottom line is, Sunday dinners are not complicated. Christmas dinners are not complicated. All it takes is a bit of common sense and a basic idea of how much time has passed.

The other option, of course, is to do what my mother does and just get a joint of beef, brown it gently in a Le Creuset-style pot with olive oil and herbs, pour in some wine, a stock pot and then just stick it in the oven at a low heat for some number of hours.

The Deli: A Discourse

Soon after I came away to university, I (like many of my peers) quickly realised something I hadn't quite processed in the eighteen years I'd had in my parents' house: food is expensive. It's not something you really think about when you're living at home - food just appears in the cupboards and the fridge, as if by magic. You never really sit down and wonder "how much is a loaf of bread?" until your mum asks you to nip down the shops and get some, at which point you become pretty determined to get your £1.39 back. As a child, the game in the supermarket is always to try and sneak food into your trolley and see if your mum notices; as a student, it's debating whether you're really prepared to risk it on the basics chicken fillets to give you more money to spend on vodka.

When I did my first supermarket shop on my own at uni, I very quickly became that mental woman that everyone tries to ignore in Tesco, shouting at the cabbages. "ONE POUND THIRTY-NINE FOR A LOAF OF BREAD?" I exclaimed, startling an old dear buying crumpets. "I'm going to Asda - they're on two for £2.50 and I can just throw one loaf in the freezer," I informed nobody in particular, as a group of schoolchildren backed away from me clutching their sweets and looking terrified.

Meanwhile, while I'm barging through shoppers to get yellow-stickered, discounted food and having a heart attack at the price of bread, my parents are stocking their cupboards with all manner of Nice Things - olives, fancy crackers to go with posh cheeses, locally-produced rapeseed oil, Fortnum & Mason biscuits - okay, okay, those were a Christmas present. And it's all (apart from the biscuits) the fault of "Lots of Lemons" in the village.

Timed beautifully to coincide with my second year of university starting, a lovely couple in my village opened a deli. It boasts an impressive array of food, most of which is locally-sourced. Bread from Hobbs House Bakery in Nailsworth (as featured in the Channel 4 show "The Fabulous Baker Brothers"); rapeseed oil from just down the road in the Cotswolds; local cheeses - not to mention Sarah's incredible home-made quiches and pork pies. My parents make a point of going in there pretty much every weekend. They say they're being selfless and are helping to keep local businesses afloat. I say they're just greedy and like having nice food in the house.

I went in with them on Saturday and got chatting to Sarah, telling her a little bit about my corner on the web (that's this blog) and what my motivation for writing it was.

"There's this assumption that students only eat Pot Noodles and takeaways - and that's just not me," I explained. "I like cooking, I like knowing what's gone into my food - but I can't necessarily afford to buy really expensive ingredients." Like the Hobbs House bread, I thought sadly, because it isn't cheap but it blows Warburtons out of the water and into space. "I like making food that's good for you and tastes luxurious, but doesn't cost an absolute bomb. But I'm always caught between spending a little bit more on something that's higher quality; and getting food that's cheaper, but is lower quality or less ethical."

"Take these stuffed peppers," Sarah said (which I was disappointed to discover wasn't an invitation to just take the entire bowlful). "You can get these in a supermarket for maybe 20p cheaper, but they're nowhere near as good." She paused. "The issue is whether you care more about quality or price."

Well, maybe I'm just broken as a student, but my instinct is always to go for quality. If you go to a deli like this one or a specialty cheese shop and get a really decent cheddar - okay, it will cost more than what you could buy in the supermarket, but you need a lot less to get the same amount of flavour. The products stocked in Lots of Lemons are always going to be more expensive than what you can buy in supermarkets - but you pay for what you get, and what you get hasn't been shipped halfway round the world, and is likely to come from a place where the production methods are more environmentally-conscious and use techniques that have worked with nature, not against it, for hundreds of years.


In an age where chains are absolutely starting to dominate the high street, it's still somewhat novel for me to have a place I can go to where that is its only location. There isn't one up in York or down in Exeter; I can't nip into a Lots of Lemons Express to grab a sandwich on my lunch break or order my shopping from Lots of Lemons online - and thank goodness.


A trip to the deli is a treat, not a chore. When you walk in, there is always something different to try - a new bread, or a posh new dipping sauce (I can highly recommend the Cotstwold Gold Raspberry Drizzle, in case anyone's interested). Sarah and her husband Brian are always happy to help you pick out a cheese, or just have a bit of a natter about how your week's been. They are people who know what they're selling and as such are really engaged with the food they stock - you'll get no shrugs and "dunno"s from them if you ask what would really go with this interesting jelly or whether that cheese is particularly strong. And for me, this is really the heart of why you should occasionally allow yourself a little induldgence food-wise. 

Local, small business owners like Sarah and Brian need people who love food and are passionate about local, sustainable produce to come in and be prepared to part with a couple of pounds extra for their bread or their meat or their vegetables rather than automatically going to the supermarket. They need people to become interested in the origins of their food and for them to be a little more picky about what they buy.

One thing I noticed from my time in France was that meat - especially chicken - was much more expensive than at home. But you hardly ever saw massive trays of chicken at crazily reduced prices, and all of the chicken was certified by some board for poultry. The French eat less chicken but when they do have it, they'll spend more money and get higher quality food in return.

I think we should take their example and agree to spend a little bit more on bread, every so often, and get a really fantastic loaf that you actually enjoy, rather than just seeing as an edible plate for your sandwich filling. We should eat less meat but when we do, go to a butcher and spend a little bit more for a massive difference in taste - and knowledge. Nature doesn't want us to have strawberries in January, so just wait six months and then you can go to the greengrocers and have the ones that are grown in the country rather than halfway around the world, picked before they're ripe and forced to ripen in crates. We should go to delis like Lots of Lemons because the food is better, local businesses need support - and Sarah and Brian are just lovely people who care about their stock and are doing what they can to support local producers.

And isn't treating yourself to something really nice that you take delight in eating just one of the best indulgences ever?