Hi!
Andrew... the naked pastry chef
We probably share at least two things in common: a wish that we could wander around our own kitchen semi nude without being papparazzied, and the ability to spot economy sized insincerity when you see it. So before I talk about diet, it’s important for you to know that I am far from perfect.
Sure I “Zone” .
I’m a Crossfitter, and that’s what Crossfitters do.
We Zone.
Without sounding like a besotted groupie, Greg Glassman the founder of Crossfit told me to Zone, and in the process saved my life. So I’m sort of biased, and I Zone.
I’m not perfect though.
Sometimes I eat “bad stuff”, hence the fact that some of what I write can be a bit insincere… I eat some crap… you ought to know that.
But what I have pledged to do is this: If I eat bad stuff, I’ll take the trouble to cook it myself from scratch.
Cooking your own stuff is one of the ways you begin to empower yourself. If you have food problems, it’s partly because you have lost all respect for what you eat, and in the process, you have lost a bit of respect for yourself. Cooking for yourself means you get back in charge of what you put in your body, it means you get to know what actually goes into your food, and it probably brings home the amount of effort real cooking takes.
The headline photo is our home-cooked Valentines day “love steak and kidney pie”.
We could have nipped to and from Sainsbury’s in five minutes and bought a steak and kidney pie, packed full of salt, preservatives and God only knows what passes for meat filling these days. This Delia pie took about four and a half hours of labour. A labour of love.
Christmas has been and gone, Pancake Day is here, and Lent is about to start. Without any particular reference to religion, it got us thinking about the traditional feast days celebrated for centuries in Britain. The good yeomen and yeowomen of England would tightening their belts for months on end, just waiting for the next festival when they could literally “feast”.
So use feast days to break the monotony of frugal living, and cook. Get control of what you eat. If there’s any crap in your food, then it’ll be you that put it there!
Also, cook with people you love.
kate cooks......
And focus on love as subject (ahhh…)
LOVE shortbread. DIY
And, the funny thing is that once you measure and mix and pound and roll and cut and sprinkle and heat and wait and burn your fingers taking the damn tray out… you sort of don’t stuff it down in one gulp… you want to savour and enjoy.
So, enjoy.
Related posts:
And needless to say, this was the most incredible and scrummilicious pie ever! If you want to make your own, here’s the recipe
http://www.deliaonline.com/recipes/main-ingredient/meat/offal/mums-steak-and-kidney-plate-pie.html
Kx
and perhaps there is another message. make sure your kitchens are nice love filled places. Dont’ let them become the thiefdom of an emotional cripple, who dictates what you eat. Equally, don’t make it a place where you imprison people to ‘do” for you.
Learn to understand what food it, what it does, etc etc
Amen to that! Food and all that surrounds it can be an emotional battleground. Let Food be the food of love
Kxxxxxxx
I’m filling up here!
oh, trevor, your so emotional…..
So, when are we learning how to make pastry from scratch?
Here’s a bit of ‘bad stuff’ I made (with love) on Sunday – chocolate mousse. Based on a delia too: http://www.deliaonline.com/recipes/cuisine/european/french/a-very-chocolatey-mousse.html – but didn’t add the sugar or have the cream, and used a sugar free dark chocolate. Plamil’s good: http://www.plamilfoods.co.uk/chocolate/
I also added a bit of orange zest to the melted chocolate/egg mixture before mixing in the whites. Needed a crossfitter to do the very hard whisking of egg whites until stiff bit (thanks Trev) – then I may have rushed the ‘folding in very carefully’ bit as the mousse was a little dense nonetheless very very bad and lovely.
Hx