ia play

This cheesecake is one of those all day baking exploits. It is very easy (apart from the flipping at the end which really requires two pairs of hands) but you have to make sponge cake, bake, mix up the cherry layer, make crumb topping, make cheese layer, put it all together, bake, bring to room temp, refridgerate for hours, flip, remove foil, eat.

I made it more complicated by using fresh cherries so there was the extra painful step of stoning cherries. It took me all day and a lovely day it was too. So what if I got nothing else done?

The resulting creation is huge and PW will be able to feed off it for days, sparing him last week’s fate of eating a whole box of muesli.

And yes, we did eat some for breakfast.

Also on the Thinking Allowed ‘Hoodies’ episode that I mentioned a while back was a piece on city planning.The piece covers ‘the traditional and futuristic notions of what makes a good city’ and decisions that we now perceive to have been destructive but at the time were motivated by a desire to get rid of Victoriana, to build better roads etc.

It seems that one generation’s modernisation is often the next’s wanton destruction. The romanticism that my generation has for things from my grandparents time horrifies my parents. They see it as a retrograde attitude. They have none of the nostalgia for period properties & antique fittings, they merely associate them with the hardships and limitations of their childhoods (cold & drafty houses, filled with dark wood and laboursome devices). Their values are of the 60s, warm, clean, light modern houses, scandanavian furniture and labour-saving, electronic devices.

My mother-in-law was amused to see we have a manual coffee-grinder and politely inquired if we knew there were electric versions available. We got it partly because we’ve been looking at our electricity consumption and also trying to buy devices that last longer. I’ve been increasing shocked at how many electronic devices I end up chucking. But there’s also a kind of motivation that I call the From Scratch Diet i.e. you can eat as much as you like of anything that you make from scratch. Sod Atkins…bread can’t make you fat if you had to knead the bloody dough yourself. Not that coffee makes you fat but you get the idea.

Mum just thinks we’re on some weird puritanical kick.

It’s been a postively pastoral bank holiday weekend, in which I…

• skinned the bunny. Urgh. Not much choice about this as Pileswasp had killed it the day before and then broken his collarbone and two ribs, putting him out of bunny skinning action.
• made rabbit & leek pie. Our leeks and homepage pastry. Herculean effort but tasty.
• made bread. With old fashioned yeast rather than the speedy packet stuff. A faff but way more yeast smells in the house. And biscuits.
• made chicken of the woods pasta. Another picking up the baton for the injured husband. He brought the giant mushroom home from a pre-injury forage and it needed eating.
• harvested shed loads of herbs for cocktails and yoghurt sauce for burgers (lemon balm, borage, fennel, chives and mint, I think)
• made pork, leek & noodle hotpot. That’s the last of our leeks.

All gently satisfying in “I grew this/picked this” way. Or in a gruesomely satisfying way for the “I butchered this” bit.
Continued the pastoral theme with garden activities:

• potted on the morning glories, mina lobata and fuschias
• sowed late courgettes and pumpkins
• weeded lots (and then fed it all to the rabbits)
• moved some succulents around to try and defeat the blasted slugs

But it wasn’t all John Seymour. I did some 21st Century stuff too.

• wrote my FUMSI editorial for June
• started my latest OU course - Archaeology (going to be a challenge to get IA themes out of that one!). Admittedly the topic is a bit backward looking but the OU is all digital these days.
• wrote lots of blog posts
• started secret mission, inspired by big sis. More on that later…

Why so productive? Well three days feels like space to do stuff. And being around someone who is only really able to watch telly and surf the net made me really appreciate my ability to do practical stuff. And I guess the coffee was good.

Blatant conference-promoting-linkbait but there you go:

Women 4 times more likely than men to give passwords for chocolate

As I got increasingly disaffected with newspapers I got to a stage when the main reason I bought weekend papers for the food section. No matter how predictable the news stories, infuriating the fashion pages and relentless new media bandwagoning (folksonomic zeitgeist anyone?) I always liked the recipes. But then I like recipes. At the time I also subscribed to a food magazine and bought cookbooks all the time.

It was an expensive way of getting something to eat. So these days I get cookbooks from the library and <a href=’http://www.swapshop.co.uk/default.aspx?referrerid=4c3b6e30-6031-4bde-bdc7-a57ae8f30baf’>swapshop.co.uk</a>

I’ve unsubscribed from the magazine until I’ve cooked all the recipes I’ve clipped from it (i.e never). And I’ve subscribed to loads of RSS feeds of recipes

The internet is a great thing for recipes. It’s also a terrible thing for recipes. There’s lots of noise… lots of dodgy recipes. Definitely a field where I welcome a bit of curatorship. It was always a bit frustrating that there were so many Ready, Steady, Cook recipes in the BBC recipe finder. I wanted great recipes not those ‘conjured’ up with whatever the contestant happened to bring.

The top food blogs are fine, sites like Nami-nami, Hooked on Heat, Zaiqa, What’s For Lunch Honey. These are the new curators. But my favourite source remains the weekend newspapers so I was very pleased with myself when I realised I could subscribe to food feeds from the newspapers.

I subscribed to the Guardian, Independent and Telegraph, all no problems. The Times doesn’t seem to have an RSS feed for the food section. And the Daily Mail, The Sun & The Mirror don’t seem to have recipes online.

For all the newspapers though there is a frustrating lack of information in the shortened feeds, making it hard to make a snap decision about which recipes to read. Which seems ill-thought out with recipes. I mean you could provide 95% of the article in the feed and a cook would still have to go to the site for the final 5% of the recipe. The bloggers win on this point.

In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop

Oh, for (insert expletitve) sake.

Obsession and excess are bad for you. It doesn’t matter what the thing is. It could be carrots. Too many of them turns you orange. Ask Kim.

But only because they eat whilst watching TV, apparently.

“Changes in energy intake, but not changes in physical activity, were differentially related to changes in the targeted sedentary behavior. Reducing television viewing could affect energy intake by minimizing cues to eat and by decreasing exposure to television advertising.”

A Randomized Trial of the Effects of Reducing Television Viewing and Computer Use on Body Mass Index in Young Children

I read yesterday in London Lite that £14 million from the National Lottery has been awarded to two projects with the aim of making London a happier place.

Today in London Lite the letters page is full of outrage:

“why don’t they just make a big bonfire out of the notes? Same effect”

“what a stupid idea. Why do they think that wasting more and more money on things like this is a good idea. Londoners are miserable - no amount of cash will make them smile!”

“what a way to waste money. Throwing cash at this initiative is about as worthwhile as flushing it down the toilet. People aren’t suddenly going to be happy because someone shows them how to plant vegetables, it’s much deeper than that.”

I’m guessing that the last correspondent never saw Making Slough Happy or read any of psychologist Dr Richard Stevens’ research. One of the ten steps to happiness listed in the programme was “plant something and nurture it”.

The two schemes are Well London and Active 8 London, run by the Peabody Trust, a charitable housing association.

Well London projects include:

• schemes to make it easier to buy quality, cheap, local food
• cook and eat clubs to increase rates of healthy eating
• training local people with direct experience of mental ill health to deliver mental health awareness training
• using the arts and cultural activity to improve environments and provide accessible physical activities
• increasing physical activity levels through increasing the range of sports and active recreation activities available to the community

Active 8 London plans to set up:

• food days to broaden people’s understanding of nutrition
• gardening schemes to show high-rise residents how to grow their own vegetables
• a week of events and workshops that will address common mental health problems
• the Fifty-Five Alive Club that will lead social activities for older people
• a project that will provide exercise sessions and advice in women only environments
• Pukka Tukka, which is a project to encourage single men off takeaways and processed foods and show them how to make healthy, fresh meals on a budget

So you can see why the correspondents are so disgruntled. Projects to encourage us to eat better and exercise more, what a terrible waste of money. After all £14 million does seem like a lot of money.

Amongst the information to support Well London’s bid is the fact that “ten per cent of people over the age of 65 are malnourished and account for approximately half of the £7.3 billion per year that malnutrition costs the UK.” Which isn’t the sort of information that London Lite has room for.

£7.3 billion? Now, that is a lot of money.