6 Cents a Kilo

Basic white icing layer goes onto the cake

€0.06 a kilo! That is the ridiculously low price at which our most-used supermarket, Lidl's is currently selling carrots as a Christmas promo. They are obviously moving a good few too, and the sales 'gondola' is backed up by an 8 foot tall pallet of new trays sitting still on its jack-truck ready to re-stock the position as the stock is snatched up and the empty boxes tossed aside.

Making pastry.

Now, these 'loss-leaders' are nothing new. The technique of putting highly visible, fast moving 'staples' out at prices lower than cost has been in the retailers' armoury since well before anyone had heard of Lidl. It is common knowledge that this attracts in the 'footfall' and there is enough margin on everything else that the supermarket still makes a tidy profit across your whole basket. The marketing boys do occasionally get it wrong; Tesco famously added so many loyalty points to bananas, that people were buying them by the pallet and giving them away in the car park outside

The problem here is that Lidl have chosen to do it with an obvious farm produce line in a rural area. There is already enough flak coming in quite rightly from farmers for the well known squeeze being put onto farm gate prices on produce such as milk and meat which is forcing many farmers out of business. This is wrapped around further with the habit of the supermarkets for moving the goalposts after the contract is signed and the crop is in the field, or the animals half grown; they add 'marketing subsidies' and demands for the grower to help out on promotions by dropping the price still further. Then there is all the stuff around food waste - supermarkets are well known for demanding the correct size and shape of carrot and taking only 2/3 or less of the grown crop (sometimes none of it!).

Now, I am not suggesting that Lidl will have dropped the price to the growers of carrots, sprouts and so on, to 4 cents a kilo but that is the smell it gives off, and there have been howls of anguish from farmers and growers who are a big industry here and the social media networks like Facebook have seen a bit of this. People who know me will probably also know that I have no moral high ground to stand on, here, having been, for 29 years in working life, a part of the super-marketing industry. In my case it was Sainsbury, where I worked in chilled food depots and distribution, so you could certainly accuse me of working hard to promote this kind of behaviour and spending all day trying to make my supermarket ever more successful.

We also shop regularly in supermarkets, so we felt both sad and guilty when our much-loved local Indian cookery ingredients shop, Hidiyat's, went to the wall last month, throwing in the towel having been undercut by their local supermarket, SuperValu. The Balla-D branch of SuperValu has steadily been increasing its range of Indian ingredients and selling all of them cheaper than Hidiyat's. Again, this is nothing new and all over the UK town centres have been stripped of their small business shops as the big boys have swallowed up their customers. We're just a little behind 'over here' and the towns do not have the really big boys (there is no real Tesco presence and no Sainsburys out here). Plenty of small businesses cling on, even through the recession. SuperValu manage to keep it a bit local, maintaining ranges of local produce such as cheeses and bacon rather than having it all in Central Distribution. There is no equivalent in Ireland of the 500,000 square foot 'Fulfillment Factory' Distribution Centres run by Sainsbury's round the M25. Ireland does not have the population to support them.

Anyway, 6 cents a kilo was a silly enough price that we grabbed up 4 bags for the feeding of rabbits over Christmas, and maybe a bit of Christmas dinner for Cody the horse. It is cheaper than any rolled barley, oats or 'meusli' you'd buy for them in a feed merchant. It would be good at that price, to be feeding the pigs on carrots! To be fair we then bought a €2 bag at the next shop of old tired carrots and parsnips past their sell by date in what Liz and Diamond would call the "Salmonella Corner" (the discounted racks) so we have done our bit there to reduce food waste.

Chestnut Mushrooms grow for free in the Polytunnel

You will have noticed that I have been waffling on for 6 paragraphs about carrots, but all my pics today are from today's Christmas Cookery operations, nothing to do with carrots. Liz has been on the mince pies, this time with homemade shortcrust pastry. The 'Jusrol' brand 'puff' which got used last time proved to be too puffy. I have had a first go at marzipan-ing and icing a cake and I am quite pleased with the results.

Sharp eyed readers may note that this is a 'Happy Hogswatch' cake, not actually a Christmas Cake. Hogswatch, for the uninitiated is the spoof version of Christmas which appears in the Terry Pratchett 'Discworld' series of books but if you need to know any more about that, then I'd ask you to go look it up. TP is a writer who both of us and all of the Silverwoods follow, and as it is likely that we, collectively, are the only people likely to see or eat this cake........

The mushrooms are a goody crop of chestnut mushrooms now coming out of the 'spent' mushroom compost in the poly-tunnel. I gave it all a good water and then closed the door on it and in this mild weather, it is keeping good and warm in there. The only problem I have is that the bales of compost we brought back, I found it easiest to invert them onto the ground to tip the contents out and pull off the plastic wrap 'tray', so the wads have gone down upside down. The mushroom fruiting bodies do not seem to be able to cope with this and are growing downwards, so you only see the crop to harvest, when the base of the mushroom pushes up the substrate enough to break it. Finally a nice pair of Panda slippers which Liz spotted while out shopping for presents in Carrick.

That is probably my lot pre Christmas, so I will sign off but first, wish all my readers the best possible time over the break and a Happy and Prosperous New Year. Happy Christmas, or possibly Hogswatch. Look after yourselves.

Personal Taste

Growing up in Hastings (Sussex) with our Mum (The Pud Lady) as an excellent cook we tended to be fed good UK fare - meat and 2 veg, steak and kidney puds, roasts, stews, grilled cod and so on. We had an excellent butcher in Ore Village (nearer to us than Hastings Town itself) and a fine game supplier within easy range so we occasionally went in for venison casseroles but never cared to venture into spicy 'foreign' stuff like Chinese food or curries or chillies. I don't remember ever sending someone out for a take-away or even fish and chips (though surely as three boys we were in a chip shop individually now and then). The most adventurous we seemed to get was a lovely spaghetti bolognese recipe. At one stage Mum was Librarian in Hastings College of Further Education and had access to the staff-shop which sold some of the output from the college's most excellent chef-school so there were sometimes exotic fare like dressed crab and the more exotic casseroles. I might be remembering this inaccurately and the brothers or Pud Lady will correct me if I need it, but it all seemed to be good stuff and it never did us any harm.

As a result, I grew up very shy of anything spicy or hot. Once I'd left home and was looking after myself through Uni I did get into Chinese cooking and made some nice chillies but never went too hot and I still steered clear of Indian restaurants. In those day, for University lads anyway, getting a curry was all about lager as Dutch courage before a macho-test of who could eat the hottest curry. I was always going to lose those contests and would always be asking trusted friends who knew their way round menus, to choose me some mild stuff which I'd then dilute further with as much rice, yogurt or tzatziki (mix of yogurt, mint and cucumber) as I could get hold of and a glass of water. It all seemed a bit pointless to me. The courses seemed to be largely a very small quantity of meat in a lot of very spicy sloppy sauce. I couldn't identify the meat half the time and wondered why I was there. Maybe I was just in a succession of poor restaurants? I kept hearing that this wasn't REAL Indian food, but just some spiced up fare cooked to suit the appetites of the westerner lads on the way home from the pub.

Recently, I am delighted to find that this might actually be true, and that you can eat Indian food which is just 'interestingly' spiced, not lip-tinglingly hot. It can have plenty of good, identifiable meat in it and real fresh vegetables. It does not have to be drowning in sloppy sauce. Meet Indian celebrity chef and cookery book writer, Madhur Jaffrey. Admittedly most of you probably already have and are well familiar with this stuff and you may have kitchen store cupboards full of tupperware and jars stuffed with sachets and packs of cumin seeds, fenugreek seeds, peppercorns, black mustard seeds, termeric, cayenne, tins of coconut milk, and fridge-door shelves full of fresh ginger root, fresh chilli and so on.

We treated ourselves to the book last August (for Liz's birthday) and have since been on an exciting voyage of discovery through the spice and ingredient shelves of our excellent Indian shop in Balla-D, "Hidiyat's" and through the recipes in the book. We have done some veg dishes (including an okra one) and no end of different stuff involving our own lamb; the 'meat', but also the liver, hearts etc. We have done some excellent rice dishes and egg dishes. Without exception they have been delicious, interesting, 'bright' and fresh. Not once have we had to recoil from anything too hot and to decide to try again with smaller quantities of chilli or garam masala (and not once have we been asked to include "curry powder").

Yesterday was Mothers' Day so I decided to treat Feigh's own Mother-to-Many to a day off cooking and, further, that I'd do the whole day out of Madhur's book AND cook nothing I had ever cooked before. A bit brave, maybe? Well, I am delighted to say it all worked well, all be it, there were two small lapses away from this original plan. Breakfast was Madhur's "Spicy Scrambled Eggs" which I had done before. Then the lunchtime snack plan for her Goa style mussels fell foul of lack of mussels, and I subbed in a savoury-bite recipe using anchovy, cheese, olives and cayenne pepper which wasn't actually out of the book.

The main meal, however, stood up to the ideals and we a great success. Liz said it was so nice that she could have kept on eating away snacking on it , returning all night for a wee bit more if only we had one of those hot plate things. It was in three parts, a chicken course, a cabbage/peas recipe and a mushrooms and rice thing. The chicken (Chicken with roasted coriander in a coconut curry sauce) involved browning the jointed chicken in oil flavoured with mustard seeds and cinnamon, then simmering it in a coconut-milk based sauce with all the other stuff in it. It was mild, tender, meaty and gorgeous. The chicken was actually our first home grown bird, one of the young roosters hatched before Christmas. The cabbage and peas thing involved shredding the cabbage finely and then sweating it in oil flavoured with bay and cumin, with turmeric and cayenne. The rice dish involved frying off mushrooms and onions, garlic, ginger, garam massala, then adding the rice and then the water so that the rice boiled to soft picking up the flavours of the rest.

All very yummy. Hard concentration work but not that complicated (I managed it!) and a delicious reward. Indian food without blasting your taste buds. What's not to like?