Observer Food Monthly - January 2007
I wasn’t that impressed with this months issue of Observer Food Monthly. Did they have a bumper issue last month; making this issue seeing thinner than normal? So not much of interest this month…. apart from Nigel Slater’s recipes of course.
His Fast Suppers kicks off with scallops on toasted ciabatta, which might tempt me later in the week, and moves through mushrooms stuffed with olive and mint until Baked Shallots With Goats’ Cheese catches the eye. Shallots? Check. Goats Cheese Cheese? Check. How simple can it be.
A drizzle of olive oil over the French Echalion Shallots - that’s the long ones, a sprig or two of herbs scattered over the top and in the oven for 30 minutes at 190C. The flesh becomes soft with a concentrated sweetness but mild in ‘onion-flavour’. A small tub of Sussex Slipcote Organic Goats cheese (High Weald Dairy) and plenty of home-made bread makes for a surprisingly filling dinner. Just add a Sauvignon Blanc!
At the very back of the magazine is a piece on a ‘rustic Italian dish’ - bagna cauda. The point of the piece is to criticize the UK’s plans for traffic-light food labeling and how it just doesn’t work giving McCain Rustic Oven Chips four green lights because it doesn’t contain any sugar, just a trace of salt and only 55 fat. Potatoes of course are just “essentially stodge that rapidly releases sugar into your body, disrupting your blood sugar levels”
“The Rustic Chips Affair illustrates how food traffic lights are not only besides the point but also actively counter-productive when it comes to helping more Britons develop a more rounded, more intuitive feel for the health properties of food. To be practically useful, cut the bullshit and get results, government dietary advice cold be summed up in one simple sentence: eat as little processed food as possible and base your diet on home-cooked meals, made from scratch from raw ingredients. Unfortunately, the government seems to regard any such advice as a lost cause.”
The Bagna Cauda meanwhile is a high fat, high-salt nutritional nightmare. But the mix of melted anchovies, olive oil, garlic and either butter or cream is eaten with prodigious quantities of marvellously healthy quantities of winter veg - cardoon, broccoli and cabbage. Sounds good to me!
I completely overlooked the piece on the Rustic Chips Affair, but how fitting that it comes out at the same time as Michael Pollan’s essay in the NYT Magazine. Observer was certainly more concise, of course.