General Chat

I am staying at son's house with granddaughter while he is away. Son and his partner are excellent cooks and have a kitchen full of every possible exotic spice and sauce, lots of different oils etc, but can I find a bit of flour to thicken some gravy? Can I heck! Grrrr..... :-|

I certainly don't think they make gravy anymore Vera.

Recently I went to buy some gravy browning and the shop assistant didn't know what I was talking about :-0 :-0 :-0

When I go to Australia I have to take Bi*to gravy granules as they don't like the equivalent ones there.
I said that I always made the most delicious gravy with meat juices vegetable water ,flour,or cornflour,and gravy browning....think they have to have it easier than that now.
Can't always get gravy browning these days... :-0

People act as if I am talking about cocaine when I say I am making a rice pudding because , apparently, that is not 'healthy eating' because they put a bit of butter or some condensed milk or something in theirs.

My rice pudding, cup of rice, 3pts of milk, bit of butter, some sugar or sweetener(from Aldi), mucho vanilla and some cream if there is some in the fridge, costs about £1 I think, and does a good eight to twelve portions.

The same people will buy a little pot of Muller rice because it is 'lite' and pay more than ten bob for it. I think it is 'lite' because they use semi-skimmed milk, the same as I do.

Wetherspoons have stopped doing a roast on Sunday too. I want old fart food like that. I don't want burritos and wraps.

Do you put nutmeg on top Sharron and form a skin...if so,can I Come and scrape the dish after you've served all the portions? :-D

If I don't plain cook OH won't eat :-D :-D :-D :-D. He does not like quote Foreign stuff unquote

I like something a bit different now and then but for most of the time I do fairly traditional British. Today's was brisket of beef which I wanted to slowly pot roast in a nice gravy. At home I throw in any old stock I've got in the freezer, a slurp of red wine if there's any already open and so on.

I did eventually find a tiny bit of cornflour at the bottom of a packet, a rather damp looking Knorr stock cube and a small jar of Bovril that looked as though it had been there long enough to grow roots. So I mixed a bit of this and a spoonful of that with some water, put the piece of beef on a bed of carrots and leeks, poured this mix over the lot and said a quick prayer. We've just eaten it, the meat was tender and the gravy surprisingly tasty :-D

Quick and easy chicken pie: Some leftover cooked chicken, diced, put in a pie dish with a tin of Campbell's condensed chicken soup, (don't water it down), Cover with ready made pastry and bake for about 40 minutes. If you wish, put a few button mushrooms in the microwave for a minute or so and add to the mixture before cooking.

I grew up until I was six in the fifties with a grandmother who was a brilliant cook. Having been a vege since the seventies, I have spent a lot of time working out how to replicate the dishes I missed.

Quorn is a godsend, it provides the substance without the suffering and exploitation and I can make a very good shepherd's pie but have also made pretty fair rasher roly-poly using vegetable suet. I don't do this very often because the palm oil plantations are not doing the wild orang-utans any favours but have also made the odd imitation of a steak and mushroom pudding as well as pies.

Custard too, got to have custard, and blancmange. Do people still eat them now, never mind make them?

A woman after my own heart Vera :-D

I really can't be doing with all this 'fancy' food which wouldn't feed a flea. And as for all that dribbling sauces and coulis or whatever they are all around the plate, what a waste of time....makes the plate look as though it needs a good wash. :-|

The grandchildren enjoy my stews.......made in the pressure cooker :-D

My DH loves lamb shanks.

That was an economical meal, until the yuppies found them!

I was often asked at the checkout...... "is this dog food" :-0.....

30 years ago you wouldn't find shanks on a restaurant menu, now they're everywhere...... you get ONE shank and a couple of scrapes of a veg.

I don't like going to "posh" places where little bits of food are arranged on a huge white plate.......... I want to be fed!

People after my own heart. Tonight was chicken with broccoli, cauliflower, carrots and New Potatoes. Steak or chicken and mushroom pie, stew and a roast every Sunday. We have to make homemade soups too. Usually chicken, lentil or Scotch broth.

My granddad didn't like any of that foreign muck as he called it so my mum always made "plain" food whenever he was around.

Yuk every time the Eurostar comes out of the tunnel I get this sinking feeling at the culinary disasters to come ... Thank goodness I live in Holloway.

Ou est le garlic (Len Deighton 1974)

God so loved the English that he saw that they were sorely troubled and the lair of the biscuit dragon was in Carlisle so he sent a flood. He soon found out that there is no pleasing them and they delight in their fatness and tea. Armagnac

We usually have a roast on Saturday for dinner (evening)........quite often a leg of lamb, with rosemary and GARLIC. :-D If I do roast beef, the roast potatoes usually are cooked with a couple of cloves of GARLIC.

During the week, we may have pasta with a sauce......... sometimes seafood, sometimes meat........ but most times with GARLIC :-D Stir-Fry at least once a week, lots of veggies.. and GARLIC.

These are often accompanied by GARLIC bread (made at home, not shop rubbish).


and........ I use real GARLIC, not that awful rubbish in a jar :-P

and......... I grow my own rosemary, oregano, basil & parsley!

my "little" brother often emails me, asking for recipes "like mum used to make".

I was just looking at his FB page and saw his latest post.....

https://shop.abc.net.au/products/way-mum-made-it-pbk?WT.mc_id=Commercial_Shop-ShopOnline|TheWayMumMadeItBook_FBP|over60


I look for recipes on the internet.... but there are few like "mother used to make".

I won't be buying the book, I still have my school cookbook from the early 60s!

:-D

I count garlic as an everyday ingredient.

The point I was really making I suppose is that even the best cooks need a few basics in the cupboard in order to produce a good meal. "Plain" or "Fancy" doesn't really matter, there's a place for both, but a good dish should be made from fresh ingredients, sourced locally if possible, and done enough but not overcooked.

I am glad you enjoy living in Holloway, Rollo, but even we country bumpkins can eat well out in the sticks. Fwiw, the worst, most inedible meal I have had in my life was in France (though, tbh, so was one of the best).
:-D

A few years back a German friend that I hadn't seen for around 10 years was in the UK for just 2 days, so we met up in London and the first thing she said was "Where can I get chips like the ones your mother used to make for me?"

There’s nothing wrong with Plain Cooking – you’re more likely to savour the true flavours of the dish if it’s unadorned with garlic, herbs or spices. Once you get used to meals that have those additions, you lose the ability to identify the subtle, natural flavours.

My bête-noir is anything from the Chilli/Peppers family. Include that and you may as well have fed me a Scotch Bonnet. Carrying that forward, there are a similar number of people sensitive to other bulbs, herbs and spices.

Added - we use a lot of garlic, tomatoes, onions and home-grown herbs in our cooking.

Garlic is the devils food.-vile smelly stuff........yuk.so eating out is limited as it seems no one is able to cook without it,,,,,,,,,,or peppers and other horrible tasting things.

I know all my veg is fresh as I fetch it from the allotment 10 mins away. :-)

The only herb I use is mint as a homemade sauce or in early fresh dug new potatoes.

Gravy browning comes in bottles and places like Morrisons sell it,along with other places I imagin.......

We dont eat anything that been doctored with flavours of other stuffs..

I love garlic and onions and don't mind fresh herbs.

Spices are a different matter and I have recently become very sensitive to cinnamon, which I now find quite unpleasant and I don't know why. As for chilli, well I can't see what the point of it is, it just overpowers the subtle flavour of other things but it is creeping in to our food more and more.

My mother was a lovely cook and her pastry was wonderful.
I had lots of veg from the garden with our meagre ration of meat especially during the war.loads of salads etc as well.
My father loved his food but frowned on my mum and me as we had brown sauce occasionally ...he said it was made from bad fruit!...and there was something wrong with our taste buds if we needed it!
What he would have made of today's food I shudder to think!
I went to Paris in 1951 with school and couldn't eat a lot of the food because of the garlic...these days I love it....tastes do change!