Here are some more patterns that I have created from polymer clay slices of canes that I have created over the past fifteen years, some are even earlier. I am having so much fun with these patterns and I almost forgot how much I love creating them as well as finding them in nature, life and within myself. This year I will be releasing some of my favourite patterns in series of prints, paintings and more.
yinka 2
jade squiggle
grey storm
blue brains
original trade
blue spot red atomic
I am working with families to discuss the fat, sugar and salt content in fast food and takeaway meals and we are preparing much tastier and healthier options. I am working with a diverse group of families and they share a lot of tips and techniques around the pressures of providing healthy meals with busy lifestyles, fussy eaters, adding new meals to their family cookbooks and stretching food budgets. This is our second week of a six-week course.
This week we focus on what i believe is the the worst culprit of the fast food takeaway options, the chicken shops. In London, and elsewhere, you cannot walk too far without sensing some evidence of the chicken shops; the horrible smell due to cheap chicken and overused cheap oil, the discarded boxes and bones or the shops strategically placed so close to schools. It's not just teenagers eating at these shops and it is big business, the fried chicken market is worth £15-£20 billion pounds a year and they are interested in profit, not quality or nutrition. I struggled to even find statistics on what is in these takeaway items but an average chicken shop meal contains 60% of your RDA of calories, 45% of your RDA saturated fats and 85% of your RDA of salt. I gathered a lot of information from Nominet Trust and Shift (formerly We Are What We Do and it was in an article by Shift that sums up the ethos of this six-week course:
“As Fiona Godlee, editor in chief of the British Medical Journal states, “Rather than restricting takeaway food we should seek to transform it, by making healthy food as visible, tasty, and cheap as unhealthy food.” We’re looking forward to contributing to that ambition. ”
This weeks recipe is one I picked up in New Orleans for blackened chicken, a cajun style way of seasoning and preparing that can also be applied to fish, shellfish, pork, beef and vegetables. We also prepared blackened vegetables as in each course we offer vegetarian options and we also made a large salad to be served with our blackened chicken and blackened vegetables.
Our ingredients for our salad and blackened vegetables
We preheated our oven to 200 C° and then we prepared our chicken and vegetables separately and took extra special care with utensils, surface and cleaning as we do in every class. We made two batches in separate bowls of the blackened seasoning one for the chicken and to that we added 1 TBSP of flour and one for the vegetables which we did not add 1 TBSP of flour.
Blackened Seasoning recipe:
We tossed 700g of chicken sliced into 2-3 cm wide strips in the bowl with the blackened seasoning mix with the flour, covered with cling film and put in the fridge. In the second bowl of the seasoning without the flour we tossed our vegetables which included brocolli, peppers and carrots and stirred them until the mix was evenly on the veg. Them we sprayed a non stick baking tray with a few sprays of our coconut oil cooking spray and added a few more sprays on top of the veg and put them in the oven on the uppermost tray. We cooked them for 30 minutes but set a timer for 15 minutes so that we could check them and turn the veg so that they were cooked nice and evenly without burning.
With our veg in the oven we made our salad and decided as a group to leave it undressed as we had so much flavour in our chicken and veg we wanted the salad to act as a palate cleanser and to enjoy the taste of the salad ingredients, in this case we had gem lettuce, carrots, cucumber, peppers and tomato.
Then we heated our pans until they were at medium hot to high heat and put 3 sprays of our coconut oil spray and then placed our chicken in the pan which should be so hot that the chicken immediately starts to sizzle. Make sure you let the chicken have enough space to cook and depending on the thickness of your strips cook them for 4-6 minutes on each side so that each piece is thoroughly cooked and a nice dark brown colour all over. Leave the strips to rest for a few minutes and remove the blackened veg and serve together with your pre-prepared salad.
Pan searing our blackened chicken strips
This was our lovely feast which was thoroughly enjoyed by all and everyone commented that the seasoning wasn't spicy but very flavourful and enhanced the chicken and vegetables. This recipe works wonderfully with salmon and can be adapted to a salmon pasta or blackened prawns in a stir fry with some vegetables. You can even make the seasoning and rub it into a whole chicken and have left overs for salads or curries and turn your stock into a soup. Next week we will be preparing a Vegetable Daag curry with homemade mango chutney.
Behold the beautiful heron that I spotted on Friday morning along the Regent's Canal close to King's Cross. It was a beautiful morning at around 08:15 and the sun was rising amidst a beautiful blue sky tingeing the fluffy white clouds with pink. I was particularly full of new year, early morning joy at the day that was unfolding when out of the corner of my eye I spotted this large bird and I immediately got off the bike to watch it. The previous day Istopped to feed some slightly stale bread to the birds and it turned into a bit of a bird-blood-bath. As soon as I pulled out the bag with the bread two geese made a bee line for me and about 15 pigeons and 20 gulls came as well to try to grab any and all of the bread before the geese could. Anyway, this bird that I had not spotted before along the canal was different. It was stood in the water on one foot and was watching a group of about five runners running along. This bird was so majestic and I felt that there was an old soul within it's body with far more knowledge than I could ever imagine to have. I stood for about five minutes and just watched it but besides observing the runners it made no other movements. Later that evening I sent my photo to my friend Tom who is rather twitchy for an identification and he simply responded, "Heron!!!" This confirmed my guess and Tom went on to say, "Herons are incredibly exciting to watch. Everything they do is thrilling; stalking, fishing, taking off, flying. The whole package. Probably tops my chart."
I had a quick look through my symbolism and dream books and several words kept coming up regarding herons; versatility, intelligence, patience, calm, grace, solitude and determination. These are all words that I can and try to improve upon. I certainly took seeing the beautiful heron as a good omen and felt incredibly lucky to have seen it.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.