Mexican Food - Wk 1 - Healthy Eating Alternatives to Fast Food/Takeaways

Last year I started teaching a lot of healthy eating courses across London which have proved very popular as we can't avoid the internal or external pressure of eating and providing healthy meals for ourselves and our families and friends. This particular course is six-weeks long and focuses on working with families to provide them with healthy alternatives to fast food and takeaway options. This course takes place at the Sebright Children's Centre in Hackney, London that offers all sorts of amazing courses, creche, advice and support for families and young children.

In the UK we spend over £30 billion on convenience food each year with the average person consuming over 84 fast food meals and 64 ready meals throughout the year. We have all probably eaten a take away or fast food meal due to reasons of convenience, cost, time constraints, peer pressure, environment or cravings. As with everything, takeaways and fast food meals eaten in moderation or as part of a healthy diet and lifestyle are not detrimental to our health but over-reliance on these types of food can be due to their high fat, sugar and salt content. This course intends to educate and promote healthy eating by providing healthy food and healthy recipes that are tasty, nutritionally rewarding, easy to prepare and financially comparable or cheaper than their fast food alternative.

Week one covered Mexican food and as far as fast food and takeaways go Mexican food can be one of the healthier options if care is taken to avoid over-sized portions and care is taken with additional toppings such as sour cream guacamole. I lived in America for a long time and Mexican food has long been popular there and as with anything you can find options within a wide range of price points and levels of quality ingredients.

As we were having so much fun, this is the only evidence that I have from this first week of a six-week long course I am teaching on Healthy Eating Alternatives to Fast Food/Takeaways.  We made beef tacos and vegetarian black bean tacos with hard corn shells and soft flour shells with a homemade salsa and homemade guacamole. We omitted the sour cream and served with a bit of shredded cheese and lettuce.

For today's session we used Jamie Oliver's recipe for beef tacos as a basis and just substituted black beans for the ground beef for our vegetarian tacos. We made ground beef tacos, black bean tacos, our own guacamole, our own salsa and served these with some shredded lettuce, tomato and cheese.

This week was an excellent first session and we had some parent and children preparing and trying avocado for the first time and everyone agreed that Mexican is a great option to prepare at home. We also noted that it is so easy to create your own guacamole and salsa and so much better than the ready-made options that are on offer in the shops. I also shared with the group that you don't need to buy specialist salsas or "Mexican" ingredients available in the shops. For example there was a tin of "Mexican black beans" that was basically black beans in water with a jazzy logo for £1.45 and I was able to get a box of organic black beans in water for £0.75. Personally my own type of fast food would be a burrito or tacos as they are filling and you can customise them according to your own tastes but they are indeed that much better prepared at home and with a bit of practice and experimentation which is the whole point of the course.

• 1 onion, diced
• 1 red pepper, diced
• 1 green pepper, diced
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 2 garlic cloves, sliced
• A pinch of paprika
• 1½ tsp cumin
• 500g minced beef or a 400g tin of black beans*
• 250ml beef stock
• 12 corn or flour taco shells
Grated cheese, lettuce and tomato to serve

*For the vegetarian black bean taco option, use all the ingredients above except beef and substitute beans for ground beef and vegetarian stock for the beef stock.

Salsa
• 2 tomatoes, roughly chopped
• Juice of ½ lime
• 1 spring onion, finely sliced
• 1 tbsp coriander, roughly chopped

Guacamole
• 2 avocados
• Juice of ½ lime
• 2 tbsp chopped tomatoes

1. Preheat the oven to 180C/gas 4.
2. Soften the onion and peppers in the olive oil in a large pan over a low heat. Add the garlic, paprika and cumin and cook for 1–2 minutes.
3. Add the beef and stir until it has browned. Pour in the stock, cover, and cook for 45 minutes.
4. Meanwhile for the salsa, get the kids to mix the tomatoes with the lime juice, spring onion and coriander, then season carefully to taste.
5. For the guacamole, have the kids mash the avocados with a fork. They can then squeeze in the lime juice, add the tomatoes, season, and gently mix it all up.
6. Spread the taco shells out on a baking tray and place in the oven for 3–4 minutes until crisp. Get the kids to fill the shells with the meat, salsa and guacamole or lay everything out and let everyone help themselves.

Patterns of 2016 - Week One

Here are some patterns that I have created from polymer clay slices of canes that I have created over the past fifteen years, some are even earlier. Creating these prints has me so excited and some of my earliest memories are of staring at the wallpaper in my room and letting my eyes go funny. My mother loves wallpaper and all manner of interior design so there were always new elements going up on the walls and around the house. This year I will be releasing some of my favourite patterns in series of prints, paintings and more.

sesame seed kisses print

yellow sun print

purple haze

grey gold wheel print

som print

yellow crab print

grey cloud print

yinka 2 print

Meringue-apés

winter berry meringue--apés

mincemeat meringue-apés

Here are some little bite-size meringue-apés that I made. The top set are filled with a one-off compote of redcurrant, pomegranate and cranberries in a quince sauce while the bottom set are filled with Smy Goodness mincemeat. I love making meringues as a desert because they are delicious and best prepared the night before which means more time to focus on further cooking, drinking, hosting or all of the above. I had also made a set filled with lemon curd but they disappeared before I could photograph them. There will always be more meringue-apés, full size meringues and over-sized meringues as I have so many different delicious preserves to fill them with.

I recommend and use Delia Smith's recipe of 110g caster sugar and the egg whites of 2 large eggs. For these meringue-apés I used the whites of 6 organic large eggs and 330g caster sugar which yielded 40 meringues roughly 6cm in diameter. They were two-bite meringue-apés and obviously would have resulted in lots more bite-size meringue-apés. Preheat the oven to 150°C and prepare a baking tray lined with baking paper. Using a glass bowl you whisk the egg whites on a lower speed and increase the speed until the egg whites create stiff peaks. Then add in a heaped tablespoon of the caster sugar into the egg whites and whisk until combined and then repeat with another tablespoon until they are all gone and the mix has gone glossy with strong peaks and if your bowl is turned over the mixture stays put. I used an ice cream scoop to place evenly sized balls of the meringue-apés mix onto the baking paper and then used a teaspoon to make little depressions into the balls. For smaller sized meringue-apés a melon baller is perfect for even sized balls and then a knife can make a little hole in the mixture. Give up the ghost of getting them to all look identical, part of the charm is in their uniqueness and individuality with different peaks. Pop the meringue-apés in the oven and immediately reduce the temperature of your oven to 150°C and leave them in the oven for 30 minutes. After 30 minutes turn the oven off and leave them inside until the oven completely cools down. I tend to make my meringues in the evening and then leave them overnight to completely cool down. Just be careful to not forget them and then preheat the oven for something else the following day. You can store your meringues in an airtight tin for roughly a week or even freeze them but I do prefer to have made them a day earlier than I plan on eating them.

Meringue-apés are tasty, glamorous and a crowd-pleaser as they are fat-free, gluten free and you can mix and match what they're filled with to please the varied taste buds of your guests.

Spaghetti Frittata with Cavolo Nero

Above is the spaghetti frittata with cavolo nero, gorgonzola dulce, crushed pine nuts, basil and seasoned with some smoked paprika. On the left is the underside before I flipped it and on the right is the finished product before I had half of it for dinner with a radish salad which I will be sharing later. The spaghetti cooked again gives a lovely texture that is still moist from the egg binding all the ingredients together. The basil, pine nuts and gorgonzola dulce worked really well with the smoked parpika to add just enough flavour while keeping those flavours simple and well balanced. I love a spaghetti frittata as a way to use up left over spaghetti and I always have a bit of left over spaghetti because I hate not having enough spaghetti when eating pasta. It's basically one of the items that I will always overestimate and follow up the next day with a leftovers meal for example with extra potato which I turn it into fishcakes.

Dreaming of Marmalade Making

Soon it will be time to make Seville Orange Marmalade and I cannot wait. This year I plan on doing some experimentation on my usual recipe. The photo above is of a toast breakfast with fig and cherimoya from last year and also holds a clue to the intended experimentation. Until I get my hands on some Seville oranges I will be daydreaming and doodling as shown below.

Dr Andrew Boorde

I came across this poem several years ago in W. T. Fernie's 1905 book Meals Medicinal:  With Herbal Simples (Of Edible Parts) Curative Foods from the Cook in Place of Drugs from the Chemist. The poem is originally found in Dr Andrew Boorde's Dyetary of Helthe but today I found it again and it stuck with me. When making preserves I always feel part scientist, part witch and part alchemist and I think this is what Fernie is referring to when he notes Boorde's quote that "A good coke (cook) is half a Physycyou (physician)." I do love the poem but was taken by the gender issues hidden within it as he is passionately calling for women, dames and maidens to up their game so that men need not live on bread alone. Then I started looking more into this Andrew Boorde and he seems like he was indeed a character. A brief look at his 16th century CV notes he was a physician, satirist, traveller and writer. His Instagram would have been on point as he travelled to every country in Europe except for Russia and Turkey and wrote his Fyrst Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge in 1542 which is considered the earliest continental guidebook slash commentary on customs and peoples abroad and at home as well as introspective commentary on his own inclinations. More interesting to me is that Boorde is purported to have brought back my favourite fruit from Catalunya and that fruit is rhubarb. Apparently he sent rhubarb seeds from Catalunya to Thomas Cromwell over two hundred years before we started cultivating rhubarb in England. For this reason alone I will be looking into Boorde and his works. My love for rhubarb runs deep and I even made a video ages ago which features my friends from Barcelona trying my rhubarb chutney and asking what rhubarb is, which in spanish is "ruibarbo".

Six Pepper 'Tchup

Ketchup is not my favourite condiment by a long shot. I only really eat it with chips and even then not consistently. Heinz was founded in 1869 and had over 60 varieties of sauces and products on offer when in 1876 it began offering Heinz Tomato Ketchup. Ketchup were traditionally sauces made from other ingredients with mushroom ketchup being very popular in England. Since 1907 Heinz have become synonymous with "ketchup" when it began exporting it all over the world.

The ingredients list of Heinz ketchup is:  Tomato Concentrate , Distilled Vinegar, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Corn Syrup, Salt, Spice, Onion Powder, Natural Flavoring. The two types of corn syrup are worrying and my own mother looked down on ketchup and discouraged it but did not outright ban it. Parents attending a 6 week jam and chutney making course told me of their frustrations of their children wanting to add ketchup to all their food and worried about the syrup and salt levels. The following week we made a healthy alternative ketchup and the children loved the taste and the parents loved giving them a homemade option using fresh tomatoes with minimal amounts of sugar and salt. I was so impressed with the results that I decided to make my own version but the idea was overtaken by the business end of the summer fruit season.

Fast forward a year and there was a deal on tomatoes at Swiss Cottage Green Grocers that I couldn't resist and the memory of the tomato ketchup popped back into my mind. What I didn't count on was that the entire process would take me about twenty-four hours and that at the end of it when I shut my eyes I would see a psychedelic array of tomatoes like those above.

I roasted 9 kilos of tomatoes along with some onion and garlic with olive oil until they had carmelised and released their juice. Next was the most labour intensive part of the process; putting all the roasted ingredients through a passaverdura which separates the skin and seeds from the tomato flesh.

The countless cranks were worth it as the resulting paste from the passaverdura cannot be matched from sieving as it really does scrape every last bit of the tomato that you want in your sauce and leaves the rest.

Next up was to place all the tomatoes that had gone through the passaverdura into my trusty pot, well one of my trusty pots, and add a very secret seection of spices. The only sugar I added was about half a jar of six-pepper jelly to give it a bit of sweetness and a bit of heat. and let it simmer and thicken for about two hours. The resulting sauce is thick, tangy, spicy and flavourful but it's all about the tomatoes.

Twenty-four hours + 9 kilos of tomatoes = 5 x 250ml bottles of Six-Pepper 'Tchup. I have been enjoying the 'Tchup with eggs and invariably adding it to sauces and recipes. I'm not offering these jars for sale at the moment as I've already been through two of them and gave two away as Christmas presents. I will definitely make some more once tomatoes are back in season and the memory of cranking the passaverdura has faded. In the meantime I will be rationing the remaining bottle and trying my hand at some other traditional ketchup recipes, perhaps mushrooms or walnuts - watch this space.

New Years Day Black Eyed Beans

The Beaneater by Annibale Carracci c.1580-1590

Most of my stories start, end or veer in to stories about New Orleans where I was lucky enough to live for three years. One of the many traditions that I took from there was that of having black eyed beans on New Years Day (NYD) to bring luck in the upcoming year. A New Year's dish of black eyed beans was always accompanied by a ham hock, rice, cabbage and a few pickled onions. I thought this was a spin on the famous red beans and rice dish served throughout New Orleans on Mondays. However I discovered several years years ago that beans and pork were popular NYD dishes throughout the world. Black eyed beans are eaten throughout the American South and are mentioned in the Talmud as being good luck to eat them on Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year. In Italy a popular NYD dish is cotechino e lenticchie or pork sausages and lentils. The lentils symbolising abundance and the round sliced sausages mimic the shape of coins and are meant to bring wealth. The eating of round foods is also practised in the Netherlands, the Phillipines and many other places throughout the world.

So each year regardless of how the previous year has gone I prepare my good luck black eyed beans. This year I prepared them with onion, garlic, carrot in a six-pepper t'chup and stock sauce served with bacon, griddled cabbage and pickled onions.

New Year's Day

Here's wishing everyone a Happy New Year full of peace, health and happiness. There will be lots of exciting things coming ahead for and from Smy Goodness and we can't wait to share them with you.

Happy New Year