Le Sanglier

Swedish Meatballs

Bear — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 11:24:25 +0000

To be fair to Sweden and other Scandinavian countries, they make far more interesting food than just there famous meatballs! However, since Ikea has been working hard trying to make them famous, I thought I better pen my recipe. The trick here is texture, or grain, if you like. Some people prefer a very fine grain, some a rather more chunky ball. Here I have gone for the fine version, but up to you.

The one common thing with Swedish Meatballs is that they are served with a creamy gravy of some description

Ingredients:

Mince (veal or beef and pork – I like half and half with pork)
Onion
Dill
Mustard
Eggs, beaten
White pepper
Salt
Parsley
cream
bread

Like most of my recipes, I do not put exact quantities as you can play with that yourselves. However, over doing the eggs will make them mushy, so use about 1 egg and 1/2 cup cream and per 500 grams meat.

Mince the onion in a blender till very fine, then put in a cloth and squeeze out as much juice as you can. Shove the mince in a blander to make it very fine and paste like. Add the bread and mince again.

In a bowl, mix the rest of the ingredients and add the meat/bread mix. Mix thoroughly with your hands, then put it in a bag and put in the fridge for an hour or more. This is important as it makes sure the flavours mix properly and the bread soaks up the juices. And to be honest, these are easier to mould cold!

Now, to make the balls. It is easier to make them with wet hands – you wont get stuck up so much. Make the balls fairly small rather than the huge things we make in the UK. Just take a spoonful of mix and roll in your palms, then put on a plate, dusted with a little flour.

Fry Them

I like mine fried in good olive oil – it adds a nice flavour. Fry them at a medium heat, rolling the round the pan frequently to keep the cooking even. Remember that if you use pork to cook them properly!

While they are cooking, make a gravy of choice. I like a creamy one made with cream, strong white stock and possibly some alcohol! Just fry off some flour and add hot stock to make a basic white sauce, then add cream, pepper, a little mustard and seasoning. I notice Ikea add soy sauce to theirs.

And that is it. Serve with potatoes and steamed veg. Oh, and more alcohol.

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Are we killing childhood by killing religion?

Joss — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 10:28:55 +0000

When we dispose of god, who is left to keep up moral?
Have we forgotten what an “adult” is meant to be?

Right, hands up here, I am an atheist – yes, I know that can be an unpalatable thing to be, but I have seen enough of the effect of religious struggle to make me think that large organised religions are a detriment to a stable world. However, in the West, as we throw away our religions (and yes, I think that Islam will run into the same problem in the west once it has reached its peak), are we leaving our society in a mess?

A new report from the home office makes the point that we should be controlling much more how and when we expose our children to sexual and violent imagery. The report’s 36 recommendations include calling for games consoles, mobile phones and some computers to be sold with parental controls already switched on. Other recommendations include:

A ban on “sexualised” music videos before the TV watershed
A ban on Job Centres advertising positions in lap-dancing clubs and massage parlours
Internet service providers to block access to pro-bulimia and pro-anorexia websites
The creation of a website where parents can report any “irresponsible marketing” they believe sexualises young children.

But if the Home Office is right, how have we managed to get it so very wrong? Although what is being proposed in this report will resonate well with lots of parents, and may well be things we should do, these are the symptoms of our modern society, not the causes of the problem. Two things have changed in the last 50 or so years in the UK (more recently in other Western countries.) One is a move away from religion, the other is how we define Adult hood. Both of these effect how we bring up our children.

The Religious Bathwater

Sometimes we Britons can be uniquely bad at understanding other cultures. I remember the arguments that French children were far more balanced and understanding about sex because the French had far more liberal attitudes – just look at their films in the sixties.

The problem was is that it was just untrue. While the French may have been less coy about nudity and expressions of love and passion, they were also very strict about what their children got exposed to and what freedoms they were allowed. My brother, when he was about 19, was surprised to be stopped by police in the South of France while he and his friends were talking to some 17 year old French girls in a small town centre. The parents were not around and as far as the police were concerned the girls should not have been out at that time of night.

What was keeping French society in check to a greater extent was the moral influence of the Catholic Church – Ireland had the same moral system (sadly now undermined by the horrors of some paedophile priests) which although it sometimes seemed to choke Irish Society, also created a path that parents could follow with ease while they attempted to bring up their children.

In the UK we have discarded our religion for various reasons (the biggest one, I suspect, is that people find it boring) but in pushing away and objecting to its influence in our society, we have left a vacuum.

Although we have seen a rise in equally moral based religions like Islam, I suspect that after an initial peak, they will go the same way as they more and more they are seen as a hindrance by the young to their fun in modern day society.

But I AM Grown Up!

There is a problem, as far as I can see, that we have become confused about what an “adult” is.

I saw a complaint from a player of an online game when he was told to stop swearing – “But I thought this was meant to be an Adult game!!!!!”

My mother defines an Adult as:

Someone who has no need to swear, who is strong and supportive, who protects the vulnerable (especially their own children), who is in control of their emotions, who is against violence and crudity, who is fair minded and who does not selfishly put their desires above others.

That player defines and Adult as:

Someone who swears like a trouper, is cool enough to be able to watch the most violent of viral videos, who thinks messing up “weaker” people online is funny, who is “big” enough to drink 20 pints of larger and who “knows” that people who don’t like sex and violence are old fashioned prudes who are just out to spoil his fun.

Who is right? Much to my surprise as I get older I realise that my Mother is.

Pandora, her box and R. Kipling

As the US and Britain discovered in Iraq, when you destroy one system you better make sure you have another one to take its place or you end up with anarchy. That is exactly what has happened in the UK and other countries over the last century or so. In moving away from our religions (in itself a good thing to do) we are also moving away from some of the mature values that were not just taught, but enforced by those same religions. Society is fickle; although many would nod in agreement that porn is probably a bad thing, unless you threaten them with Hell if they look at it, half of those people will buy it anyway. The same thing applies to being an adult. Most people will probably agree that my mother is more right in her definition than is the games player, but we are also greatly relieved that there is no one to enforce the idea because we only want to pay lip service to it and then do what we want.

Human beings can be uniquely selfish. As society takes away our responsibilities, removes the dangers of the world, protects our children from hunger and disease, so we lose the reasons to make us be grown up. Kipling made being a man an aspiration in the poem If. However, he forgot one thing – for much of human history, reaching those goals was automatic; it was a no brainer, if you like. If the adults of that world were not responsible, caring, strong and the rest, their society simply collapsed. It was just what you did. It is in more recent times (I mean the last couple of thousand years) that it became necessary to teach and enforce those values as society evolved to a state where you could get away with being an anarchist if you wished – society would pick up the pieces.

Although I would not want to see complete backtracking into the stifling world of organised religion, we do need to start imposing some rules somehow and somewhere. The free-for-all that we wanted so much in the sixties is now blowing up in our faces, and we are putting sticking plasters on the problem rather than solving it.

I don’t pretend to know the answer to this, how to fill this moral vacuum left by the religions we have discarded, but I am pretty sure that sex education does not work, that more radical or fundamentalist structures do not work and equally sure that exposure to sexual and violent imagery and ideas at a young age does not work either. But until we redefine clearly what an adult is, what it is to be “grown-up” or mature, then we will continue to get the education of our children, what they are exposed to and how fast they grow up, wrong. Religion is not the answer, since that requires belief in a God, and that has long gone for many of us. We need a new morality, something that everyone can sign up to, including religions. Something that is apart from our practical laws or political battling, but which gives the ordinary person, the ordinary parent, the power to say to those that would corrupt and undermine society, “you will not shove your dirt under my door, and here are 50 million people who are on my side.”

Like Pandora, we have opened the box of our desires and now are desperately trying to stuff them back in. Putting a lock on that box is a start, but the box will still be there and people will still want to open it.

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Nick Robinson Twists Facts Live

Joss — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 16:19:16 +0000

Nick Robinson on the BBC Daily Politics today.

Today on the Daily Politics there was the most outrageous twisting of facts by Nick Robinson in regards to the bullying accusations. In the commons, Gus O’Donnell, the Cabinet Secretary, was questioned over the affair and was asked to respond to comments Robinson had made earlier. O’Donnell said:

“I cant be clearer. I have not talked to the prime minister about his behaviour in respect to bullying number ten staff.”

What about other behaviour, he was asked?

“I don’t talk to him about behaviours, I talk to him about how to get the best out of his staff….”

Nick Robinson read this out, very clearly and then said that O’Donnell had “Felt the need to talk to the PM about his behaviour.” He repeated this accusation continuously, twisting O’Donnell’s statement more and more.

NOT ONCE did O’Donnell say any such thing. All he said was “when I talk to the prime minister … You really get the best out of your staff when you congratulate them, and the prime minister said yes…”

There was no implication that he HAD to do this or FELT THE NEED or any implication that this was anything more than what he advises the PM when they are talking about staff matters or congratulating the Civil Service about something specific.

Nick Robinson simply INVENTED the whole idea, live on the Daily Politics, with no evidence, justification or any thing else. And then had the nerve to declare it was now a FACT.

“What he has clearly confirmed, the Cabinet Secretary, is that he felt the need to talk to the Prime Minister about the way to get the best out of his staff. That is a fact.”

It is amazing that Robinson made such a wild and inaccurate conclusion when we all had just heard very clearly what O’Donnell really said.

If the BBC’s political editor can so easily twist people’s words when we can clearly see that he has done so, one has to question what other things he twists when we CANNOT double check what was said or what has happened.

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Online TV – Solving a problem that does not exist

Bear — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 10:33:12 +0000

Culture Secretary Ben Bradshaw creating problems to solve

Last June, the UK government, in their wisdom, decided that getting everyone on broadband is absolutely vital for the future of this country; if a member of the public cannot watch Eastenders via the Internet then we have somehow eroded their fundamental rights and the quality of their existence. Currently, the plan is to add a tax to everyone’s phone bill to help pay for this right, though some MPs are not happy about this brainwave.

There are two systems for “broadcasting” television programmes.

System One

(the governments preferred option)

We run loads of bits of wires from a TV channel, under the ground, through an incredibly complex web of relay stations, exchanges, sewers and so on, and plug the other ends into people’s houses. We add an alternative where you can individually connect to the end of one of the bits of wire using radio waves. We then connect hundreds of computers to the TV Channels end of the wires and invite people to connect and watch the programmes. As more people connect, we have to add more computers because every person is trying to read from the same hard disks and memory.(...)
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Homeopathy versus the MPs

Old Boar — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 12:11:06 +0000

Chairman Phil Willis

It is not often that I note that MPs are actually getting to grips with a subject, but today came a report from the cross-party Commons Science and Technology Committee that really puts the boot into Homeopathy. They have been looking at the question of Homeopathy and in particular how it relates to the NHS.

“The Science and Technology Committee concludes that the NHS should cease funding homeopathy. It also concludes that the Medicines and Health care products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) should not allow homeopathic product labels to make medical claims without evidence of efficacy. As they are not medicines, homeopathic products should no longer be licensed by the MHRA.”(...)
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BBC Becomes Apple’s Promotional Tool

Old Boar — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 10:12:13 +0000

Apple's Promo Department

Anyone who reads the Technology section of the BBC news site will be aware that they are treading very close to the line when it comes to promoting products from companies. Gone are the day of “sticky back plastic” to indicate using Selotape and now the BBC talks constantly of Pod Casts, referring to generic MP3 players as the iPod, websites for your your iPhone and are going nuts with loads of blogs about the new, rather pointless iPad and here, and here, and here and so on.

So why have the BBC, hopefully unwittingly, become the advertising arm of Apple computers?

Two things always stood out for apple

1. When it came to professional media work such as sound or video or graphics, Macs were generally more powerful than windows/intel PCs, with good monitors and so on.

2. For the home, they were far more stylish looking, though very over priced.

However, that is all changed. When Apple bought Emagic/Logic (professional music composition and recording software) they dropped support for Windows. THOUSANDS of people moved over to Steinberg or Mark of the Unicorn. Mac then moved over to Intel chips, levelling the playing field, and generic monitors. The very things that made them uniquely useful faded away and now for the same price as a Mac you can buy a more powerful alternative that you can run Windows or Linux or whatever you want on.

Now they are a company completely reliant on hype, producing products in the messy old horrible way of “if the market does not exist, create it.”

They have gone the way of the rest of the technology sector – solving problems that don’t exist.

I work in the media, mostly composing music for advertising now. I use Internet connectivity and computers for composition and production as part of my day to day business. It is all very cutting edge stuff.

But what do all my clients do when they want to discuss an idea?

They phone me. In the same way as they have done for the 30 plus years I have been working. They use their desk phone with its nice comfortable handset. They sit in their office chair so they can concentrate. They and I take rough notes of the conversation with paper and pencil.

If they do phone me from their over priced iphone in the car, it is to tell me that they will phone me later when they are back at their desk where it is quieter. And these are mostly people in their 20s, the mobile phone generation if you like.

They will buy the over priced new gadgets that the BBC technology deportment have sold out to utterly and completely. And they will use them to their full potential, ummm, sometimes, perhaps.

But when they want the fully immersive, high value, tactile, holistic, 3d, super highspeed, ultra experiencorsized (yes, I did read that word somewhere the other day), touch sensitive, multi-sense, personal communication, fit for the 21st century ….

They will knock on my door. Or give me a ring for the “lite” version.

And we know this because the amount of business miles travelled by car, train and plane has increased, year on year without fail – enormously.

Even the IT industry know this. There is an advert for computer communications where a man and his team in a meeting have forgotten the proposal, and the pigeons fly off to get his computer.

The mad conceit of the advert is that the man has physically gone to the meeting in the first place. Here is a computer company trying to sell a product that allows you to communicate back to your office that you have had to leave because computer communications is a really bad way of presenting a proposal.

Apple have become the embodiment of this hype.

So when the BBC talk about Job’s company and the super hi-tech useless gadgets, they ignore how people actually work, how they NEED to work and just become part of the HUGE advertising machine selling us what we don’t need half the time and can’t afford. And the fact that the talk more about Apple’s incredibly high priced offering more than any of the cheaper competitors is adding insult to injury.

The direct tax funded BBC’s remit it to Educate, Inform and Entertain – not sell on behalf of another company!

Related posts:
Will we lose Africa to Technology?

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Hot Lentil and Roasted Squash – The Soup Diet

Bear — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 20:12:28 +0000

This soup, though a little hard work, is as filling as anything and is a perfect candidate for making spicy, and therefore even more filling. Lentils are a wonder really, there is little I love more than Dhal and Rice, and they are stuffed full of most things that you need. The addition of roasted squash and other veg, just makes this spot on.

This recipe produces a very heavy soup that I strongly suggest you add water to when you reheat – works perfectly.

Ingredients

Couple of cups of lentils

Chicken Stock (or veg)

One butternut squash or pumpkin, skinned and chopped

finely chopped garlic

1 teaspoon of curry paste or powder, or make your own.

4 carrots chopped up.

bunch of coriander

Peanut Oil

garden peas

salt and pepper

Cooking it

Soak the lentils in water (less necessary for red lentils) then cook in chicken stock at a simmer in a closed saucepan till soft and tender. How long this takes varies enormously and can take up to 40 minutes or so. Chop the coriander very finely and stir into the lentils with the peas and the curry paste. Now normally I like to fry off my paste a little, but I am trying not to overdo the oil!

Place the squash, garlic and carrots into an oven dish, sprinkle with just a little peanut oil and a little salt and pepper and roast in the oven till they are tender and just browning.

Remove from the oven and stuff the the chunky roasted veg into the lentils. Add extra chicken stock to get it to the right consistency and salt and pepper to taste. And that is that!

As it cools and you store it, it will thicken up – the lentils will keep soaking in water – so as I said, you may need to add more water or stock when you reheat.

Related posts:
Mediterranean Chunky Soup – The Soup Diet

Best Chicken Soup

Fast Soup

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Mediterranean Chunky Soup – The Soup Diet

Old Boar — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 19:49:40 +0000

Right, here we go with the first soup I cooked my partner. It is very difficult to go wrong with anything that has carrots and tomatoes in it, to be honest, especially if influenced by the gorgeous people round the med. This soup would be as equally at home in Tuscany as Spain, probably, but more important, it is a good, easy mainstay of your Soup Diet. Like anything this is always at its best fresh, but it freezes quiet happily, so make as much as you like. Here is what I did in a very large saucepan, but remember, you can vary the quantities – just treat this as a rough guide.

Ingredients

1 large onion, finely chopped

4 cloves of garlic, finely chopped

4 large carrots, chopped into small cubes

2 courgettes, chopped

2 sticks celery, destrung and chopped

1 turnip, peeled and chopped

1 large red pepper, chopped

1/2 white cabbage sliced into small squares

2 tins chopped Italian tomatoes (or peeled and deseeded fresh ones)

1 table spoon concentrated tomato puree

2 cups peas

Salt and Pepper

big handful of chopped oregano, parsley, thyme, or dried equivalent.

couple of litres of stock – chicken or veg.

And that will do. To be honest, as long as you have the tomatoes and onions and carrots, you can bung anything in here. Note, cabbage is useful as it helps give the soup texture!

Okay, cooking time.

In your huge pot, fry the onions, garlic, carrots and celery till the onions are soft. Use just a little good olive oil – it wont matter in this sort of quantity and is rather nice!

Once the onions are soft, add the tomatoes and the puree and all your stock – that is your soup base and not a bad drink already, to be honest!

Now add everything else except the cabbage, courgettes and the herbs. Bring to a boil briefly, then simmer for 10 minutes or so. Now add the cabbage and courgettes and continue till the hard veg are tender, but not too soft! (especially if you are freezing!)

Now add the herbs and taste. Season till its about right – dont over salt!

And that is it. This really is very easy, and is both fresh and warming at the same time. The herbs and the tomatoes should give real richness in the background – if you think it is a little thin and weak, add more tomato puree and some dried oregano, which has a satisfying meaty taste to it. You can also add tinned butter beans or chick peas when you reheat the soup for a little variation without starting from scratch.

Note on Freezing. Water expands when frozen and veg are very high in water, especially things like cabbage and spinach. If you cook your veggies too soft, when you thaw them out and reheat they will go to mush! These recipes work best when they have some firm chunky bits and are closer to a stew that a soup.

Related posts:
Hot Lentil and Roasted Squash – The Soup Diet

Fast Soup

Start The Soup Diet

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Start The Soup Diet

Bear — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 19:28:07 +0000

Over the last week or so I have been cooking for my partner soups to allow her to diet as easily as possible. The theory is that a soup can be made to feel filling while being low in calories and high in good stuff. This has been fine and in her first week she has lost 8 pounds in weight! The trouble is that all her work colleagues now want my soups as well, and my partner has put her foot well and truly down and said I am not cooking for the whole office, even though they are quite prepared to pay! But there is no reason why they cant have the recipe is there?

Well, that may be easier said than done, for when it comes to soups I do tend to just throw things at a saucepan and see what happens. But then I have been doing that with most of my cooking since I was ten years old, and that has not stopped me from writing a recipe before. My compromise, as you will see in the following recipes, is to tell you how to make a soup while allowing you freedom to choose your own quantities. This absolves me a little from the responsibility of getting quantities wrong, while hopefully allowing you to go your own way and have your own fun, and perhaps even lose some weight.

The diet itself is in two parts – what you eat and keeping you going.

Really, it does not need a fake nutritionist selling you loads of expensive books or courses for you to know how to diet. The theory is dead simple – lower the number of calories while keeping it healthy. The reason why there are so many diet books around are because a) they are ripping you off and b) they are trying to offer ways of keeping you dieting. And to be honest the keeping you on the diet bit is the hardest! Many systems use “treats” as a bribe – eat tasteless low calorie mush all week and you can have a cream cake at the weekend. Or they use unscientific things like “don’t eat late at night, you put more weight on.” Complete gibberish since the body has such a long cycle that it does not matter “when” you eat, only how much in total over, say, a 24 hour cycle.

My solution to the problem is in these recipes – I am trying to cook such rich tasty soups that eating them for the next 6 months or more is going to be fine, or at least not too boring, and the need for treats is going to be less. Also, with a little bit of bulk cooking, you can make a weeks worth, if you like, put them in the freezer and just heat them up. If good food is dead easy to serve, you are more likely to do it. Many of the celeb chef diets are so complicated that lets face of it, you wont last till Thursday. Of course, my partner is doing particularly well as all she is not even having to cook in the first place!

Personally, for me, who also needs to diet, if every meal is not tasty and satisfying I am just not going to get there. Now I have to admit here that I am not a great vegetable soup lover , at least, not all the time, but I will slip in some of the things that I am eating myself to keep things interesting. So this series is primarily going to be aimed at those who are fine with a nice bowl of veggies – sweet and rich and luscious. (and pretty cheap, too.)

The diet it self is simple. Porridge for breakfast (no sugar!) and then soup for lunch and soup for dinner. If you feel peckish, have something to drink, water, diet coke, orange juice, or chomp on some fruit. And that is it. I mean, how easy can this get?

The first soups will be:

Mediterranean Veg

Lentil and Squash

Cauliflower and Squash puree soup

All of them will be thick, chunky, hearty and tasty. Go on, try it!

Related posts:
Mediterranean Chunky Soup – The Soup Diet

Hot Lentil and Roasted Squash – The Soup Diet

Fast Soup

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Eggplant Heaven – Imam Bayildi

Bear — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 13:27:12 +0000

Well, the Imam Fainted. That is what Imam Bayaldi means and certainly, many people find this a heavenly dish. Quite why the Imam Fainted is open to speculation, though it may have been at the cost of all that olive oil! However, it was also the third main dish of my recent family dinner and accompanied the Lamb in a Pot and Porchetta, and everyone looked pretty conscious last I checked.

Imam Bayildi has its origins at the Eastern end of the Mediterranean, and is especially associated with the middle east; though you can find it throughout the region. Like many wonderful dishes it is simplicity itself, relying heavily on the richness of the oil and tomatoes. Aubergines or Egg Plants or Brinjal are like sponges when it comes to liquid and flavours, and this dish takes it to the limit.

Hot or Cold?

Imam Bayildi can be served hot, but the intention is really to serve it cold, or at least at room temperature. The flesh of the aubergine and the onions and tomatoes are much firmer, making this a meaty dish. Hot, and to be honest, it is all a bit sloppy!

How much oil?

Well this depends on how rich you are feeling. I like a lot of oil, and a really good Greek extra virgin if possible – but go with the flow here and you may not want too much oil.

1. The Stuffing

1 very large onion

1 tin chopped tomatoes, or 6 fresh skinned and seeded tomatoes

3 cloves garlic

Parsley

ground cardamon and cumin (optional)

Salt and Pepper to taste

Best Olive Oil

lemon juice

Chop the onion in half, then slice very thinly. Crush the garlic. In a saucepan, saute the onion and garlic at a medium heat in plenty of oil till soft. Add the tomatoes, parsley and cook until the tomatoes have completely collapsed – salt and pepper to taste. You can add a little cardamon and ground cumin if you wish to migrate the dish further east than turkey! Do that while frying the onions.

2. The Aubergines

Cut your aubergines in half length wise. Put two or three slits lengthways in the flesh. Sprinkle with a little lemon juice. Some people like to also sprinkle with sugar, but I find this is unnecessary if you are using really ripe, good quality, sweet tomatoes. Pour some oil in the base of an oven dish and put in the aubergine halves skin side down. Open the slits up a little and fill with the onion and tomato mixture.

Bake in a medium oven till the aubergine starts to collapse and you see just a little carbonization. Take out of the oven and leave to cool.

Imam Bayildi will keep quite happy in a sealed container in the fridge for several days because of all the oil used. Make sure you keep ALL the oil from the cooking process around the aubergines. Serve cold with warm flat bread or as a vegetable accompaniment.

Related posts:
Magic Chilli Con Carne

Dahl and Rice – Bear Style

Lamb in a huge pot

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Post tags: aubergine, eggplant, Garlic, imam bayildi, onions, tomato, turkish

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