Comfort Food

[jacey]

I realised when I posted my bit about the vegan food at Milford that I'm such a typical product of my post-war Yorkshire upbringing that my comfort-zone, food-wise is fairly limited, however lest you think meals chez-Jacey consist of nothing by meat and two veg a typical autumn/winter week at our house might include (but not exclusively) any of the following:
1) roast dinner - i.e. chicken or roast gammon ham (sometimes roast beef but not as often) with roast potatoes, carrots, cauliflower or broccoli, Yorkshire pudding (because Best Beloved loves it) and gravy
2) stir fry chicken - heavy on the chinese veg and light on the chicken - with a chow mein (or similar) sauce
3) fish and chips (home made) or oven baked fish (maybe salmon or sea bass or, if I'm feeling rich, arctic ice fish)
4) Thai green curry (mild) or mild Indian curry made with potato and cauliflower; sometimes with chicken sometimes just veggie
5) slow braised pork steak with gravy
6) casserole with beef or chicken and lots of vegetables with tomato, garlic and red wine (a one-pot meal)
7) sausage (made by local butcher) and mash
8) lamb mince stew with leeks, potatoes, carrots, and anything else that's in the fridge
9) Italian style meat and tomato sauce served with pasta of some sort - maybe as a lasagne or a spag. bol.
10) liver and onions in gravy
11) tuna and rice bake
12) cabbage and leek casserole.with pork chop or chicken thighs slow baked on top (another one-pot meal)
13) cauliflower cheese with bacon
14) omelette (I meak great omelette - very light. Plain or with a variety of fillings - most often cheese)
15) stuffed chicken breasts wrapped in bacon and oven cooked in 'parcels'

Veggies include: mashed potato and swede (together or separate), boiled potato, baby new potatoes, (and very occasionally frozen oven chips), carrot, cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, onion, leek., green beans, peas beetroot (roasted, yum), sprouts (in season) and sometimes sweet potato. I will put courgettes and tomato and occasionally very small amounts of squash in some specific dishes, but not often and I tolerate the squash barely. I won't ever use aubergines or peppers of any description. And I always cook with salt. I especially can't eat potato cooked without salt - adding it afterwards is not the same.

Plus I make my own bread and I make a wide variety of soups, both veggie and meaty, chunky and blended.

Comments

[ferlonda.livejournal.com]

Here I am, full of a very hot, Thai red curry (pork meat and quinoa for grain) and I'm practically drooling all over my keyboard. Mmmmmmmm...

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

You haven't suffered too badly from my cooking in the past!
:-)

[ferlonda.livejournal.com]

We LOVE your cooking! BIG sigh, swallow and another sigh. February seems a long way away...

[klwilliams.livejournal.com]

Yum. What's a swede (in this context)?

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

It's a solid orange-fleshed ugly round root vegetable, about 8 inches across, that we also sometimes call a turnip (we always call them turnips in Yorkshire though a real turnip is white and smaller http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turnip)

I think you call a swede a rutabaga - though since I've never eaten rutabaga in the US I'm not 100% positive. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutabaga

They have to have the thick skin cut away and then the orange flesh needs boiling until soft. Once boiled they can be mashed on their own (a bit of cream and seasoning helps) or mashed with potatoes (gorgeous). They ake longer to boil thsan a potato, though, so if you're making swede and potato mash get the swede on to boil about 20 minutes before the potato.

A lot of people like them mashed with carrot though I'm not one of them. I'm also not keen on adding them to soups and stews as I think they can make a stew taste a little harsh.

Swede is not a vegetable you'd want to eat raw, so serving it slightly crunchy doesn't work for me.

[klwilliams.livejournal.com]

It sounds interesting. I don't believe I've ever had one (unless I did last year and just didn't know it).

[desperance.livejournal.com]

*comes to dinner*

(And all uninvited, too - sorry about that. Only, I drifted over here from mevennen's Milford report, when she mentioned that you differed about the food, so I was curious. I am curious no more; now I am hungry...)

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

We did differ about the food (happily not in a bad way) and I'm totally happy to concede it's probably my limited palate to blame, but in a closed environment where choice of food isn't an option and neither is going down the pub for a pie and a pint it does rather become an issue when, for the sixth day running, you get an evening main course you push around your plate for a bit and then return mostly uneaten to the crockery tray.

When everything else about Milford (and Trigonos) is so great I'll work round the food even if it means being way more specific about what I can and can't eat next year. The trouble is there's a limit to how much trouble you want to put the chef to. Cooking a different main item is one thing but asking him to cooke my vegetable separately in salted water would be a no-no. I'd be a right prima donna. I'm already turning into one, I fear.

Oh gods, I'm turning into Foodzilla!

I need to work out the best way of not being miserable whilst not expecting the kitchen to pivot around me.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

I don't think your palate sounds limited at all, only pointed in a different direction; which leaves you caught at the wrong end of that default line of reasoning that runs "of course carnivores can eat vegetarian; of course vegetarians can eat vegan; therefore everyone will be happy with carrots and sesame seeds. Oh, and salt is bad for you..."

Hmmph. There may technically be enough nutrition on a plate, but where there is no pleasure in your dinner, there you have not dined.

Can you take a picnic hamper with you, next time?

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

I'm thinking the picnic hamper would be a good thing.
:-)
And I'm fine with the lunches because I'm a soupaholic, so soup whether veggie, or vegan is fine for me. There was a goregous stilton and broccoli soup one day and also a very nice carrot and kale one and a beetroot one.

I could always take a few of those little ready-to-cook meat-done-fancy things that supermarkets have these days in the little oven-ready foil trays - but I wouldn't want to tread on the chef's toes. It's a question of being helpful while not insulting his cooking. Also since I don't know the layout of his kitchen I'm not sure whether he'd want to put on a huge oven for a single portion or put something meaty in an oven in which vegan/veggie food was cooked on a regular basis.

He doesn't seem to have anything as lowbrow as a microwave.

The daft thing is that one of my favourite quick meals is ready-made Quorn cottage pie in a packet. (Suitable for vggies and probably suitable for vegans as well.)

There's nowt as strange as folk!

On the 'salt is bad for you' thing. I'm diabetic and I though I could live without sugar if I really had to (thank goodness I'm balanced enough to bend the rules without hurtling up into the 'red' though) I could never give up salt. I tend to cook with it rather than adding it at the table because the flavour is completely different.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

I could never give up salt. I tend to cook with it rather than adding it at the table because the flavour is completely different.

Oh, me too. Both parts of that. Add it at table and it unbalances the dish, besides - as you say - tasting different; use it during the cooking process and it's a part of the colour-palate, a necessary part.

Also, yay soup! Love soup...

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

Oh, thank goodness - someone who groks salt! It doesn't always need much, but some things are horrid without it.

I once learned my lesson the hard way when as a child I was given a hunk of bread my grandma had baked to which she had somehow forgotten to add the salt. I have never tasted anything so vile in all my life. I make bread now. It only takes a teaspoon and a half of salt for a large loaf, but without it (apart from the yeast chemistry not being right) the thing tastes like baked wallpaper paste. My granny - ever practical decided that we could still eat the bread if we sprinkled salt on it.

Er... no.

And what was the quote from King Lear (probably mangled)? 'I love three as fresh meat loves salt.' That Shakespeare kiddie knew a thing or two about cooking too, obviously.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

I have about half a dozen salts in this house - grey sea-salt and white rock-salt and red lava-salt and...

And yes, bread without salt is horrid. Besides, as you say, upsetting the chemistry.

I think the as-meat-loves-salt quotation is a variant; there are a lot of Lear-like stories out there, and I don't remember the line from Lear itself. Which is not to say that it isn't there, of course - but I studied the play at school and acted in it too, and pretty much knew it by heart at one time.

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

Red lava salt! Wow! I take my hat off to you!

As for the Lear thing - it wouldn't surprise me if I'd mangled the quote and transferred it into the wrong mouth completely. Lear is not one of the plays I know well. My school Shakespeare experiences included Othello, The Tempest and Julius Caesar (sadly I can still quote most of the funeral speech) and I've seen a few decent productions of the popular plays such as Hamlet (most recently with David Tennant and Patrick Stewart). Oh, yes, and I once played a short run at the Swan Theatre in Stratford, but not Skakespeare and for a theatre company other than the RSC. It hardly qualifies me to be a scholar.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

A little googling leads me , to lots of salt-related tales, starting with the obvious scene in Lear, where you'd always look for that quote: and no, it isn't there. Which I think is probably definitive, in context...

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

Thanks. Great site.

That also just shows how my brain works. I attribute the Cap O' Rushes folk tale (and others) to Lear, but of course there are similarities with the three daughters and 'How much do you love me?'

The Bard was never one to turn down a good meme and the three-sisters + how-much-do-you-love-me? are always great plot bunnies.

[maeve-the-red.livejournal.com]

I was going to risk being shot down in flames and post, on your original Milford entry, something to the effect that Trigonos made a nice change for me, as my no-meat diet was considered normal for once, rather than being awkward and/or leading to being told to 'pick the meat bits out' (something which doesn't happen often these days, thank gawd).

Anyway, I didn't. Except, um, I just did, here. Sorry.

Assuming you're still speaking to me after that, can I book my meals now for the next time we stay at the Birdesdge Hilton? We'd like to start with the soup (I have fond memories of your soup) then I (or we if himself is there) would like to order number 3 (himself particularly likes this one), number 11 and number 14. And don't forget you can rely on my to drink any left-over booze.

Alternatively, you tell me to camp in the effing garden and cook on a primus stove for being such a cheeky sod.

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

Nope, I don't do shooting down in flames.

Besides, meat is not the real issue. You know that part of the problem for me at Trigonos was not the lack of dead animal, but purely the fact that the food wasn't to my taste and wasn't particularly easy on my digestive system. I don't love meat so much as I dislike many vegetables.

I'm always happy to cook veggie food for veggie friends (though, oddly enough, veggie friends don't often do the same for me* - go figure!) And I'll make sure I have your number 3, 11 and 14 ready for when you come up (at Easter if not before).
:-)
You'd be fine at the moment because I have a big pan of leek and postato soup on the go in the kitchen.

And I'll remember not to cook Quorn at Easter because bluehairsue is allergic to it. So that weekend I'm going to have as houseguests two vegetarians and four omnivores one of whom can't eat the staple I often use when I have veggies as guests

I'll cope!
:-)
The company is more important than the menu - which is ultimately why I'll keep coming back to Milford.

And I do appreciate how tricky it can be for vegetarians or anybody with dietary restrictions (allergies, intolerances etc.) I've had my share of dramas about getting food suitable for diabetics before I got myself so well balanced.

(*Of course I know you can deal with meat if you have to, even though you don't like it.)