B-b-b-b-otato!

A jacket potato is one of the classic comfort foods. Admittedly, it does take quite a while to bake (if you do it properly that is), but it’s very much worth it. There was talk at the Guardian this week about how to get the perfect jacket potato: should you put salt on before putting it in the oven? What temperature should you bake it at? Should you prick the potato before baking?

Nigel Slater is quoted as saying that he reckons there’s a certain element of luck involved in getting a great jacket potato. Although I can’t really see how much luck can be involved in putting a potato in the oven and turning it on. It’s not exactly a soufflé we’re talking about here. Maybe the luck bit applies to the actual potato. Either way, I have to say where my jacket potatoes are concerned, I’ve always been lucky.

Here’s what’s involved:

Wash the potato, dry it, and then coat it in olive oil. Sprinkle coarse salt all over it and then place a metal skewer through it. Because the potato is cooked at a fairly high temperature (approx. 225 degree F), the metal skewer helps ensure the flesh is cooked properly and the skin doesn’t get too crispy before the inside is done. As I said, it does a while to cook (around an hour or so), but the end result is well worth it.

As for toppings, well I’m a bit of a purist and like nothing more than a chunk of hard salted butter and lots of black pepper. If I’m feeling a little extravagant, then I’ll have a handful of grated Cheddar on top – but nothing else.

The best part of this meal is the crispy, slightly charred potato skin, which by the time you’re ready to eat it is shiny with melted butter. Again, as with baking the potato, you have to wait a while to get to this part, but it’s a different wait altogether.

I know that some people cook their jacket potatoes in the microwave for a few minutes before placing them in the oven to crisp up the skins. This isn’t a bad way to go (much better than using the microwave for the entire cooking process), but having tried this method, I can guarantee you nothing beats baking the potato in the oven and not letting it anywhere near the microwave. Be warned, however, if you’ve never tried the oven method for the entire jacket potato baking process, once you do, there’s no turning back. You will be forever committed to spending at least an hour whenever you want to eat a jacket potato. But your life be improved considerably – or at least your dinner will!

Thinking 'bout your holidays

Travelling south to Montana a few weeks ago, I heard a report on the radio that said research showed people get more enjoyment from planning their holiday than they do actually having it. I can quite believe that. “Thinking ‘bout your holidays” was one of the aspects of working class life that Paul Weller sang about on The Jam track That’s Entertainment, reminding us that booking up a holiday months in advance gives us something to think about when the weather’s rubbish and we’re feeling crap.

I’ve always thought people looked happier when talking about what they were going to do on holiday than they did actually doing it. But then that’s probably because I used to spend my holidays in Greece and there is little that can be done comfortably – let alone with a smile on your face – in 35 degrees C.

But is that still the case now that we don’t plan our holidays in quite the same way we did thirty years ago. Back then we’d pick up a brochure from the travel agents at the beginning of the year, get seduced by photos of sparkling pools and romantic beach coves, and then rush to book up a holiday while the rain lashed against the travel agent’s windows. Most of the time back then, we booked early not to secure our place at a top resort, but to help us get through the remains of the dreary winter. At least that was how I used to plan my holiday.

But now, however, we’re much more likely to just pick somewhere on the planet and then work out how to get there and where to stay – either once we’re there or a few weeks before we get on the plane. That’s how I plan my holidays now. And maybe that’s why I don’t spend hours thinking about it before actually having it. The days spent shopping for “holiday clothes” are also long gone (as has the money with which to buy them!). And so I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s this way of planning a holiday – a bit last-minute – that ensures I always have a brilliant time. Either that or it’s the cynic in me that doesn’t expect too much from a holiday anyway!

One aspect of holidays that I do tend to get bored with after a while is eating out. It’s great at first: being on holiday you’re excused counting calories, even more so if you’ve spent the day hiking or walking around sight-seeing. But after a while I miss handling food, preparing it, and cooking it. And as much as I like fries and pizza, sometimes you can have too much of a good thing. That’s why on the last few evenings of my trip to Montana, I went to the local supermarket and bought provisions to enable me to “make” dinner in my motel room. When I say make, I don’t mean cook, I mean put together. Simple stuff such as bread rolls, cheese, potato chips, yogurt, and fruit makes for a great supper (I was also able to have a bottle of beer as there was a fridge in the motel room). This is something I regularly do when I go on holiday. Not necessarily to save money, but to break the tedium that can sometimes come with eating out every night. Maybe it’s a reflection of the places I holiday at but I don’t think so, as I’ve adopted this approach when in the south of France and Spain, and not just when in Western Canada and the States!

So maybe, as with the holiday itself, in order to enjoy eating out I need to forget the planning and thinking about it all and just do it. But then again, I really enjoy eating cheese rolls and chips in motel rooms!

Heavenly hummus

As well as excess body hair and zero resistance to gravity, old age also brings a certain OCD approach to some commercially produced foods. At least for me it does. Like a lot of people, I don’t like seeing too many ingredients I don’t recognise the names of in lists attached to the products I buy. And in something as simple as hummus, which is really just mashed chick peas, there shouldn’t be too much else involved (even I know that). But it’s perhaps not only a question of ingredients control, making your own means you get to make it just the way you like it. And while I haven’t done the math (as they say), I’m sure it works out less expensive than buying the commercially produced stuff in the supermarket.

While I had been meaning to make my own hummus for a while, I wasn’t too sure how easy it would be to get tahini paste (even when the idea had occurred to me back home in Blighty). But apparently it’s very easy – even in the outback here. So I got out the blender and found a Jamie Oliver recipe online. All very straightforward: 4 oz of chick peas, 2 tbs of tahini paste, a couple of crushed garlic cloves, and some lemon juice. The first batch I made was good: the right consistently, and a good garlicky taste. However, I then decided to up the quantity and it seemed the blender couldn’t quite cope and I was left with a slightly course hummus with the old half or quarter of chick pea hidden in the mix. Admittedly the blender isn’t that great but if it can crush ice then surely it can squash up a few chick peas.

And then I stumbled upon an article on the Guardian website where the issue of the perfect hummus was discussed and I picked up a few good tips.

1. If you’re boiling dried chick peas, you need to boil them so that they are mushy.
2. You need to add a little liquid to the ingredients in order to get a creamy consistency to your hummus (if boiling dried chick peas, save a little of the cooking liquid; if using tinned, use water – not that horrible gloopy stuff that’s preserving them!).
3. If using tinned chick peas, it’s best to take the skins off. This may sound a bit tricky but all you need to do is to rinse them and then place them in a bowl of water and gently rub the chick peas between your fingers and the skins will come off. They will float to the top of the water and then you can just skim them off.

Three great little tips that mean now my blender is able to cope with blending my hummus and I get a nice consistency to it. Technology – great, eh?!

Tree Stone Bakery

There’s a delectable little bakery over the road that makes me feel as though I’m living back in England at times. Admittedly, there’s usually a huge 4x4 parked outside whenever I go in, and the shop itself is situated on a busy main road along which more 4x4s and pick-up trucks thunder pass, but you can’t win them all.

What’s so lovely about this little place – and it is little – is that there’s usually something different in there every time I go in. They don’t seem to stick to the usual fare. I think the master baker must like to experiment. So far I’ve tried three different loaves, the baguette (excellent!), and a few pastries. Last week I had a poppy seed pastry (pictured). It wasn’t made in the usual way with the poppy seeds scattered throughout the pastry, but rather with a lump of poppy seeds (more a sort of spawn of them), dolloped in the middle. And it was delicious!

What’s also nice about this place is that they put all the goods in natty little brown paper bags which carry their logo. And this helps me feel at home when I walk from the bakery to my house (which is a few blocks away). Mainly because I am actually walking home carrying a loaf of bread which I’ve bought in a bakery. Something I took for granted when I lived in England, but which living here in Alberta, I rarely get to do, mainly because these little independent bakeries are few and far between (although having said that, I now recall there’s another one three or four blocks around the corner from the Tree Stone!). But that one’s not as quaint as the Tree Stone, nor does it have a little door chime that sounds every time you walk in and out.

They say that surrounding yourself with things that remind you of home can help with feelings of homesickness - especially when those things are poppy seed pastries and baguettes!

A taste of honey

I have arrived. Yesterday I received my first ever organic vegetable delivery box. Precisely. Actually, it was my first ever vegetable delivery box. But it being organic, you can understand how I feel that my life is getting on for being almost complete now.

It felt like Christmas-time, especially as once I'd opened my 'present', I had to cook the dinner!

I signed up to this scheme some weeks ago. I’m not sure why (probably just my general pessimism), but I did wonder at one stage whether Danny and Miranda were going to be able to pull this off. Something in one of the emails Danny sent out maybe gave me the impression that they weren’t getting the numbers they wanted. Anyway, they did it, and what a great job they've done so far. Lots of lovely salad vegetables, plus a big bruiser of an avocado were packed away in the box. I was pleased to see that the box was sturdy and completed covered the contents (I had visions of the squirrels munching away at my tomatoes). It was also good to see that packaging inside the box had been kept to a minimum. As well as all the veg, there were bananas, oranges, and apples. And it was great to see apples that weren’t the size of footballs and impossibly shiny like the ones at the local grocery store.

Danny and Miranda’s delivery service is called The Organic Box. It’s based in Edmonton, Alberta, and it’s a new venture which I hope is going to prove very successful. I’ve signed up for a trial three-week period, with delivery every other week. I wasn’t too sure that my husband and I would get through all the contents of one standard size box, which is why I opted to receive a box every two weeks. But I now realize that that won’t be a problem - today's Wednesday and we’ll be lucky if it lasts out the weekend! The cost is $50 a week for the trial three-week sign-up, or $45 if you sign up for the full 13 weeks it’s offered for (another reason I opted for a box every two weeks instead of every week). I did the math before signing up, and I worked out that we only spend about half this sum a week on fruit and veg (hence the delivery every two weeks). So while it's more expensive than shopping at the local store, it does mean that I'm not buying (and eating) suspiciously shiny apples the size of footballs, and I do get all the heavy stuff delivered.

What I've tasted so far of the fruit and veg has been good. Maybe I'm raving about the box because it contained Jerusalem artichokes (sunchokes as they're called here), and last night was the first time I had tried them. And they were delicious! However, I think I should reserve judgement on the whole organic veg box delivery thing until I've eaten everything that was delivered.

Even so, although I’m an impoverished writer, I’m seriously considering signing up for the whole shebang: weekly delivery for however long they’re doing it. How can I go back now? As Smokey Robinson knew only too well, a taste of honey is worse than none at all.

The right funk

So the snow’s gone and I’m now out of my funk (as they say here in Alberta). Not too sure what a funk is exactly, but I think the English equivalent might be 'having the hump', or as any wannabe-Cockney would say, 'the right 'ump'. Anyway, with the snow gone, I was able to finish off the beds, and rather fetching they look, too.

As luck would have it, while the ground was covered in snow for those few days last week, a flyer was put through the door advertising a compost sale. A local swimming club was having a fund-raiser and selling bags of organic compost. As my compost isn’t ready – at least not in any amount that’s worth digging into the soil – you can imagine how deliriously happy I was to receive this flyer. I quickly called and placed an order for one 40-litre bag, at the price of $10. I worked out that I would be able to get the bag of compost back home (the sale was being held about 20 blocks or so from my house) in my shopping trolley. Brilliant!

So the compost is now dug into the beds, and I’ve sown some seeds directly into the ground. I’m hardening off the plants I started off indoors from seed. Unfortunately, I think the cucumbers must have had quite a shock at the weekend when I placed them outside for a few hours as they’re looking very sorry for themselves. The tomato plants seem to be doing well, as are the onions and parsley.

I also bought some bedding plants at the weekend for containers and the one hanging basket the previous owners left in the back garden. However, I’m not planting any tender plants out just yet as there’s every chance that we’ll get another dump of snow before the summer really starts – which will give me the right funk!

Well iffy

When I said that May is a little iffy, this is what I meant. This was taken at 9.30 this morning. R.U.B.B.I.S.H.

Short and sweet

The growing season here is Alberta is relatively short. It’s a fairly safe bet that June, July and August will be snow- and frost-free. May is a little iffy. Last year we had frost in May and a few tomato plants I had in the ground didn’t fare too well. The first autumn frosts, or rather two inches of snow, came fairly early in October last year, which is a pity because my cucumbers were still going strong and I could have got a few more if the snow hadn’t killed them off. So if you want to grow anything in this part of the world, it pays to make hay while the sun shines – as they say.

Given the short growing season in Alberta, it’s surprising that anything is actually produced. However, once the summer gets going here, it brings with it very long days of sunshine. There’s little rain which means that you have to make sure you water often. Last year I was watering my veggies at least twice a day during most of the summer (last year I made do with a watering can; fortunately, the previous owners of this house kindly left us a watering hose which we’re already finding very convenient).

Having now hit May, we’ve already had a taster of what’s in store with some very nice warm and sunny spells so far this year. Looking to the summer to come (which is hugely anticipated by everyone after five months of snow covering the ground!), I’ve dug out two vegetables patches in the back garden. Each is about ten feet by about four. I collected my compost from my old house last week (I couldn’t bring it with me - literally - when I actually moved house as it was frozen in the ground, it being the middle of January then). Anyway, it’s looking – and smelling – good. Unfortunately, there’s only about six months’ worth so not really enough to dig into the newly created vegetable patches just yet.

Not that I’ve been waiting for all possibility of frost to pass in order to start planting, though. I’ve started a few vegetables off indoors. Cucumbers, onions, tomatoes, and thyme and parsley I started off in the basement a few weeks ago. However, it wasn’t light enough for them down there and they germinated a bit spindly. Having moved them upstairs to the kitchen table, they’re doing much better now and I’m hoping that they will be established enough to hold their own when planted outside. As well as placing these few plants into the vegetable patches, I’ll also sow some seeds directly into the ground – lettuce, beets, maybe carrots, and perhaps a few more herbs. And then the race is on to see how much produce I can harvest in the months ahead!

Puffed wheat squares cross the great divide!

As well as cooking with Swiss chard, another cookery first for me on this side of the Atlantic was using a ‘cup’ as a measure. In the UK, we measure in weight and use ounces and pounds, or grams nowadays I suppose. However, over here, as in the US, the measure in recipes is by volume. One US cup equals 8 UK ounces (apparently, there’s also a British cup which is 10 ounces but I’ve never used a cup as a measure when cooking or baking in England.)

This conversion of US cup to UK ounces would seem pretty straightforward until you realise that the volume of an ingredient isn’t always the same as its weight. For example, a cup of brown sugar may weigh 8 oz, but a cup of plain flour may only weigh 4 oz. I worked this out when I made puffed wheat squares a few years ago. A friend gave me the recipe with the measures in cups. I converted those measures to ounces and off I set. However, when it came to the puffed wheat, the recipe called for something like 6 cups. Six cups converts to 2 lbs. There’s only around 4 oz of puffed wheat in a giant-sized packet! I realised when the puffed wheat started flowing over the sides of the saucepan that something was amiss.

Fast-forward two years and I am the proud owner of not one but two sets of measuring cups. (And I realise now why I had a bit of difficulty trying to buy a set of scales when I first moved to Canada.)

The following is my friend’s recipe for puffed wheat squares (thanks, Ann!). I don’t even know exactly how many cups of puffed wheat goes into this recipe. My advice is to pour slowly, stirring and coating the puffed wheat with the sticky cocoa mix as you go and stop when it looks as though you're out of mix.

I’ve used both sets of measurements for this recipe and they both work fine.

Puffed Wheat Squares

¾ cup (6 oz) brown sugar
½ cup (4 oz) margarine or butter
½ cup (4 oz) corn syrup
3 tbsp cocoa powder
1 tsp vanilla extract
Puffed wheat

Place the top four ingredients in a big saucepan and heat gently until the margarine has melted and the ingredients have all combined. Stir on heat for about three minutes. Take off heat, stir in the vanilla extract. Slowly pour in the puffed wheat, stirring so that all the wheat gets covered. When it looks as though there’s no cocoa mixture left to coat any more wheat, stop! Spoon into a large rectangular cake tin (or similar). Leave to cool and then cut into squares.

You can also add mini marshmallows as well as the wheat. I’ll leave it to you to work out how many of those you’ll need!

Off my trolley with delight!

Sometimes you just know you’ve made a great purchase. Not immediately, perhaps, but after using/wearing something a few times, you know then. This is the feeling I have about my new shopping trolley. It’s absolutely fab!

When I lived my solitary life in the UK, I used to transport my shopping in a variety of ways. Some days I’d cycle it home (packed in my panniers); other days I’d walk it back packed into bags which I’d carry (and/or in a pack strapped to my back).

It’s rare that I carry groceries on the back of my bike nowadays. For one, I’m shopping for two; and for two, I’m only on the bike for about seven months of the year. I still tend to do the one big shop each week. Up until I moved a few months ago, my local supermarket was only a few minutes away so I was fairly content to take my bags over and walk back with the groceries. However, my new supermarket’s now a good twenty minutes’ walk from home. At first I was walking back with the bags and backpack but then decided that my quality of life would be much improved if I were to get a shopping trolley. And so I did and it has. Actually it was my lovely boyfriend (aka my husband) who bought me the trolley (one reason being that he doesn’t now have to come and meet me after a particularly big shop to help transport the stuff back).

The shopping trolley was a steal at about $22 CAD (which is about £14 – I still can’t believe that!, especially as it’s still in one piece). It’s by Canadian company Kitchen Stuff Plus (although I can’t see any trolleys on their website). I opted for the classic black as I didn’t want to draw too much attention to myself (just walking along the streets with a carrier bag around these parts is enough to elicit a few strange looks from people: “That woman’s walking – carrying something.” But I have to say that I feel really quite modern, edgy, and alternative when I’m out with my new shopping trolley. The whole reduce reuse recycle concept is just about making a dent nowadays in the community of Edmonton and I’m probably being seen as some sort of trailblazer no doubt. Maybe I should have got the red one after all.

A one-of-a-kind bargain

I love thrift stores. In the UK we call them charity shops. I have inherited this love from my mum. When I was growing up, most Saturdays I'd accompany my mum to the local jumble sale. Jumble sales are pretty rare nowadays, having been superceded by charity shops and eBay. But when I was a kid, jumble sales were everywhere. Looking back, there's a tendency to romanticise about such things, but I remember the jumble sales I went to as being great things. They were often held in old church halls, run by volunteers, the items having been donated by members of the local community in order to raise funds for the church so they could send a bunch of kids on some or other trip.

Jumble sales always had that sense of wonderment about them. You never knew what you might unearth at a jumble sale. When you shopped in the high street you always had a pretty good idea as to what each shop held, but not a jumble sale. Admittedly, a lot of the stuff I saw at jumble sales I didn't want - and couldn't imagine anyone else wanting either. But every so often, I'd come away with a treasure. For example, the tin of gorgeous smelling tanning butter I bought when I was in my early teens (this was when subathing was still fashionable).

I've never been a great believer in a bargain, and so shopping in charity shops and thrift stores has never been so much about saving money ('getting a bargain') as it has about other things. Similarly, the word recycle wasn't heard that often back in the 1970s. And while I do recycle now and am committed to the whole reduce, reuse, recycle way of living, shopping in thrift stores is about more than just saving money and recycling (as important as these are): although buying something I really like that's recycled does add to the satisfaction I derive from the purchase.

Apart from the hope that I will find something truly wonderful, I just find the whole experience of shopping in thrift stores way more enjoyable than shopping in the mall. I like the idea that there's a story behind everything that's sold in a thrift store. I like the idea that I may find an item of clothing that no one else, or very few other women are going to be wearing (yes, I know there are two ways of looking at that!). But sometimes when shopping in thrift stores you do find a one-of-a-kind. And that's what I did today. I found this lovely cushion cover. There was another smaller one in a similar design, but it was spoiled with paint, not a lot of paint but enough for me to leave it on the rail (something I'm regretting a little now I have to say).

I have a feeling that this cushion cover is hand made. There's no label in it and no sign of there having been one. It's amazing to think that it found its way into the thrift store after someone has obviously put so much effort into it. My husband likes it so much that he's asked me not to put it in the basement, which I'm in the process of kitting out having recently moved into our new house, but to leave it upstairs. "It's cheerful," he says, and he's right.

This cushion cover cost $1.99, and the cushion I found - also in the thrift store - to put inside it also cost $1.99. Maybe there is such a thing as a bargain.

The real thing

Given that the province of Alberta is nowhere near the sea, I was quite surprised at how good the fish and chips I had here in Edmonton a few months ago tasted. The fish was obviously frozen but it was tasty, and the batter was cooked just right. In fact, there wasn’t much in it between this fish and chips and the fish and chips I had at my local chippie when I went back home at Christmas time; although on the batter front, I’d have to say that Brits, which is the chip shop here in Edmonton, was actually better.

I’m not too sure why Brits serves its fish and chips in a plastic basket although I’m guessing that it’s got something to do with the whole ‘chicken in a basket’ concept of food (although there’s no dimmed lighting or dodgy cabaret singer in sight in the restaurant). And the black and white chequered paper is obviously an attempt to replicate the newspaper in which people may (although probably may not) believe fish and chips is served in the UK. Maybe it is in some parts, but I haven’t had fish and chips served in newspaper in England for decades (and my memory of fish and chips served in newspaper may just be some sort of romanticised, rose-tinted spectacles one).

I can’t help thinking, though, that it would be a much better experience all round if Brits ditched the plastic and the paper and the Styrofoam saucer for the mushy peas, and just served it all on the one plate. But they do use real knives and forks so at least that’s something!

Bread and poses

As this blog is about thrifty living, it has to include an entry about baking bread. Obviously. I started baking bread last year and was surprised that I actually managed to create something that was edible. This spurred me on to try different types of breads and very soon I was pulling out fruit loaves from the oven like there was no tomorrow (in the sense that there was no tomorrow so I didn’t have to worry about fitting into any of my clothes). One disadvantage to making bread is that you end up eating it. That’s why when the summer came, I moved on to vegetable kebabs.

But making bread has got to be one of the most satisfying things you’ll do in the kitchen. And it’s so simple, which is especially gratifying as this technological age marches on. No gadgets, no wizardry, nothing's needed but a few simple ingredients, and a little time and patience (patience, of course, being one of the things that's perhaps too often missing living in today's modern world). And that's the beauty of making bread: producing a healthy and nutritious staple of the average westerner's diet at very little cost and with such a simple process. It makes you feel completely self-sufficient, as though you wouldn't have any problem surviving come Armageddon (provided the supermarkets are still open and you can get a bag of flour and some instant yeast).

What you need to make homemade bread is a good strong flour, yeast, water, and a little oil; and in terms of apparatus, apart from an oven and a baking tray, just a bowl for mixing (although Jamie Oliver encourages us all to do away with the bowl and just mix the ingredients together on a clean counter-top – still haven’t quite managed to pull that one off, Jamie…). In terms of effort, if you're going to bake bread the "old-fashioned" way (i.e. without the use of any wizardry such as a bread-making machine), you’ll need to knead the dough to a silky and elastic texture, although the Guardian’s master baker Dan Lepard’s recipe for the perfect white loaf calls for no more than three 10-second kneading stints, which means you won’t even work up a sweat (and yes, it does produce a perfectly acceptable loaf).

You do need a bit of patience though when making bread in order to let the dough rise (prove), but again, all it takes is a couple of hours at the most. And this is something that you can just leave and come back to at the appropriate time - you don't have to stand over it and baby it while it's doing its thing.

If you place a bowl of boiling water in the bottom of the oven when you put the loaf in, you will get a lovely golden, crispy crust.

I love the way that Dan Lepard nonchalantly says that if you throw in some olives and chopped herbs you’ll get one of those “wow” breads you see in magazines. How cool is he?! As if that isn’t the ultimate goal of anyone who’s ever taken to making bread!

Once you’ve pulled one or two basic white loaves out of the oven, it’s natural to want to move on to something a little more exotic, which is where Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s fig and walnut bread recipe comes in. I didn’t use figs when I made this, but instead used dates and walnuts. The bread was excellent. Again, I placed a baking tray of boiling water in the bottom of the oven when I put the loaves in to get a nice crust on them. I would advise only making this bread when you have the opportunity for hours and hours of exercise though!