Quarantine That Bacon Over HERE!

So the much-dreaded Swine Flu is officially here n NZ, and it's officially a Level 5 Pandemic worldwide.

It seems that either nature has caught up with us, or us meddling with nature has caught up with us.

There is, however, one tragic misconception associated with the Dreaded Swine Flu: that the Swine Flu came from pigs. This awful failure of understanding has seen pigs across the world slaughtered, in much the same way that birds across Asia and Europe were murdered during the Avian Flu scare a couple of years ago.

This is crazy. For starters, there is still no evidence to suggest that this strain of flu, which is similar to but not identical to a strain of flu which affects pigs, is in any way actually related to pigs, or that it any way jumped from pigs to humans. However, the panic buttons were slammed home, and scared people - particularly in poorer countries - put thousands of animals to the knife, ruining businesses and leaving people starving. Who needs a Pandemic when we have man-made famine?

You cannot get Swine Flu by eating bacon. And if a pig sneezes, you will not get Swine Flu. OK, I'm not a scientist or a veterinarian, but I'm pretty sure from everything I've read on the subject that these two positions are verifiable fact.

It is only the fact that we are so ready to mess with nature that even allows the spectre of this fear to rule our perceptions and thus, our actions. On the basis of a purely imaginary fear, thousands of pigs were killed for no good reason. Where on earth will we be when biotech and genetic engineering do actually tip the scales of science against nature's delicate balance, and a real plague is unleashed? We'll all be wishing we had done more to support our organic farmers, that's where.

On that note, I want to prove a point: I ate bacon. I didn't get Swine Flu. Sweet, bro.

For a couple of weeks there, Bulls Bacon had a stall at the Hutt Riverbank Market. I was savvy enough to swipe up some of their wares, locally raised and prepared free-range organic bacon, with nothing added. No Swine Flu here.

I've written more than once about what I think of free-range, organic meat. Bring it on, I say.

Bulls Bacon was no exception.
Most commercially produced bacon is pumped full of water and nitrites to preserve it, and to give it some flavour. This is especially true of most stall-bred pork, which has very little flavour of its own anyway.

Of course, a lot of the bacon we eat here actually comes from China, so we have very little way of knowing how it has been raised or prepared before it reaches us, and that, to me, is more of a worry than Swine Flu. Conversely, this bacon was the real deal, 100% meat. And the difference was obvious immediately.
Put this stuff in a frying pan, and the pan doesn't suddenly fill up with water, bubbling and hissing away as the chemicals are forced from the meat, causing your breakfast to boil. Rather, it actually fries. Seems to fit with the concept of the FRYING PAN.
Just look at that. My mouth is watering again just looking at it.
The taste was stronger than normal bacon, a bit smoky, slightly gamey, and it had a tougher texture due to the thicker cut of the rashers. Overall the Bulls Bacon was by far a superior product to anything other than Freedom Farms Bacon that you can get from the supermarket, and worth paying a little more for.

Unfortunately, I haven't seen them back for a couple of weeks now. I'm hoping that their pigs didn't start sneezing.

(Disclaimer: As usual, I have nothing to gain by promoting what I see as responsible farming practices. I just think it matters.)

Decadent Lamb Steaks

It's been a few weeks since I wrote about lamb, (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) for no reason other than it having been a busy few weeks. As usual, I'm actually weeks behind in my posting, but that's been OK because we've been mostly having simple summer fare anyway.

Usually I like my lamb simple, a little bit of seasoning and maybe a few herbs to bring out the flavour. But sometimes the allure of dressing up a lamb steak to the nines becomes irresistible, and if there's food in the fridge to make this happen, then I can see no reason not to.

This was one of those times.

Take some of the best organic, free-range lamb steaks you can lay your hands on.
Prepare them with a gentle seasoning of freshly ground pepper and salt, and a generous dose of chopped garlic, fresh mint and drizzled olive oil.

Heat some olive oil in a pan, and cook the steaks for about 4 minutes on the first side. At the same time, slice a tomato or two in half, season and grate over some parmesan, and sit them in the pan as well.
Turn the steaks over and layer with slices of brie cheese. Fry for 4 minutes.

Pop the whole pan under the grill for 5 minutes to brown the cheese.
Serve with the tomatoes, boiled new potatoes and crispy steamed veges.

(Disclaimer: Once again, I have no affiliation whatsoever with Wai-Ora Lamb. I'm just a very, very satisfied customer, and I think you should be too).

The Taste of Pork

It seems that pork just isn't what it used to be.

Twice in the past month or so I've had conversations with family members from older generations who have lamented the decline in the taste of pork from how they remember it. As I understand it, the old adage that you are what you eat applies to livestock as well. I've commented before on the way free range meat tastes so much more real than bulk-produced stuff. We're lucky in NZ that our beef, lamb and mutton are pretty much free range by default, and it's only our chickens and pigs that are raised in confinement and fed grain.

Much as I take issue with pen-bred meat, I've also discussed on this blog the dilemmas of trying to eat well, and trying to retain some sort of ethical compass while keeping ourselves nutritionally healthy on a budget that we can afford. I imagine that I'll draw some criticism just by raising the issue of animal rights, but that's OK. Debate is healthy.

Like I've said before, if we could afford to eat all organic free range meat and produce we would, just like if I could grow all the fruit and veges I needed to feed my family I would. No doubt if we were forced into the situation of having to keep animals as a food source we would find ourselves eating a whole lot less meat overall. But the social and economic realities are that I only have so much time in a day, and while I make an effort to do what I can to support humane and sustainable food production, there comes a point when we have to look at what's on the shelf and what's in the wallet, and take what we can for what we can afford.

We all find different ways to manage the minefield of existing as an omnivore in a social order where our eating habits are largely driven by profit-geared corporations, their market placement and their advertising machines. I'm aware that we don't co-exist with our food sources, but exploit them and the land (or sea) that they live and grow on, not simply to survive but to fully enjoy the bounty that agribusiness can supply us with. However, for all my good intentions, I can't provide my family with protein and nutrients simply out of goodwill. And I've listened to all the arguments in favour of vegetarianism, and while I agree with a lot of it, particularly the stuff that relates to how we treat animals, I'm still an omnivore. I feel guilty only when I think about it too much, but never when I'm eating.

As a rule, we only buy free range eggs, and that's a win all round, since good FR eggs have more taste and thicker contents than cage eggs. I also get them from the market, where they're cheaper than similar products at the supermarket. I also buy lamb from the Wai-Ora stall at the market every week, as I've posted several times. I've been pleased to see these guys are bringing more product to the market now than they had been previously, which hopefully means that word-of-mouth advertising like mine in support of suppliers like them is working. And that in itself is a step in the right direction.

I've also made the point before, and I'll make it again: We all (and I mean all of us, not just the Kiwis reading this) need to learn how much is enough when it comes to eating meat in particular, and cut down. There are so many good reasons to do this that it would make a post all of its own, but suffice to say that it's better for the land, the animals, our wallets and our bowels to eat less meat. (I don't shy away from that image - after all, we're all animals made of meat and offal too, remember).

So far this summer, we've only had leftover meat after one barbeque, rather than after every one like we used to have, and those leftovers were eaten up the next day. Reduce the excess, reduce the waste, cook what you need, and enjoy it. And your finances will appreciate it too.

Which brings me back to my original point: If our pork is raised in pens now and is accordingly of a much lower quality and inferior taste to what it used to be, then that might go some way towards explaining why the old methods of cooking pork were fairly simple, letting the meat speak for itself (apologies for the bad imagery), while nowadays there seems to be a fixation with dressing pork up with chilli, herbs, spices, nuts, fruits, and other bits and pieces to give it flavour. Instead of being a taste explosion all its own, pork has become a blank canvas for a good chef to demonstrate his skills on.

It seems a shame. But until free range pork becomes affordable, I'll still eat what they stock in the supermarket (we have a butcher across the road from where I work who stocks organic, free range meats, but at $16.00 for 2 pork steaks, you can see why I'd prefer to pay $6.00 at the supermarket for unethically raised, bland, but affordable meat).

There's always wild pork, of course, but that's just as expensive, and a completely different flavour that Dessert Chef can't abide, so we won't be going down that road anytime soon.

And on that note, here's one of my most recent entries in the Dollying up the Pork stakes.

Pork Chops with Sage and Apple Crust

(Serves 2, with a bit sliced off for the little fella)

In a small pan, heat some olive oil and fry the following:
2 Cloves of Garlic, minced;
1 Onion, finely chopped;
1 small Apple, finely diced;

Once the apple and onion have started to soften, add a splash of worcester sauce and 3T of brown sugar. As this reduces, add the leaves stripped from 3 stalks of fresh sage and 3 stems of fresh mint, roughly chopped. Once this has heated through and is a bit saucy, remove to a bowl and heat fresh oil in the pan.
Season two large pork chops with freshly ground pepper and salt, and place in the hot oil. Allow the chops to brown a little, then add a splash of white wine. Shake, and allow the wine to be absorbed. When the underside of the chops is nice and brown, turn over and repeat. Cook until there is no pink in the juices.

Spoon the apple mixture over one side of the chops, grate some parmesan cheese over top, and place under the grill to brown.
Serve with couscous cooked in chicken stock, fried mushrooms, and fresh veges.

Lamb Steak

I know I keep going on about this, but I did the maths and it still works out that buying this delicious free range lamb from the market on the weekend is better financially than getting it from a mass supplier like a supermarket. How can that be?

Well, here's the thing: shortening of the supply chain. In a world where we have been brought up to believe that efficiencies lie in the mass consumer market, we conclude that small operators without huge buying power simply cannot participate in a competitive marketplace driven by the megasuppliers. But as we enter tighter economic times, it is these monopolistic leviathans that feel the pinch as they try to keep their swollen infrastructure costs under control.

Maintaining a supply chain even for a country as small as New Zealand must be a huge logistical challenge with a multitude of costs at every level. Incoming expenses from vendors supplying the big stores go up as everyone feels the bite of rising fuel costs. As this happens, there are only a few ways to recover those costs: Either increase the cost of the product, or reduce expenditure within the business framework. Both of these can be a painful blow to a mass producer/retailer.

With a small operation, those pains are still felt, but not quite as often. When you buy from a grower-seller, the product you're eating has been provided down a very short supply chain indeed: Grow the product, harvest it, package it, store it, transport it to market, sell it. No warehousing, no freezing costs, no overflow, no returns written off as bad debt (and thus wasted as food), no huge promotional overheads to meet.
These three lamb steaks cost me $4.00. In the supermarket the equivalent quantity would be worth about $7.00. So for once, a premium gourmet product can be found for almost half the price of a mass consumer equivalent in the supermarket. That seems to me to be something worth shouting out about. I've gone on enough about cooking and eating this lamb. That's not to say I won't do so again in the future (I have knuckles in the fridge right now!), but I won't bore you with the details of how I did these lovely steaks, other than to say that the garlic was just on the side of the pan, infusing the oil as the meat cooked to add a subtle fragrance to the lamb and fresh herbs.

Lamb Sausages

I promised I'd review these sausages, so here it is.
What more can I say? Once again, the fine folk at Wai-Ora have outdone themselves. These are no ordinary bangers. I love it when you can have something like a sausage and really taste what you're eating. For the price-tag of $5.00 for 6 sausages, they were expensive in comparison to the ones you might find at the supermarket, other than the very high end ones, but the difference here is simply the quality of the product, the way it tastes, and knowledge that the meat isn't processed all to hell before it gets to you. It's the taste of honesty.

I cooked ours up with vege hash, preboiling the sausages slightly before grilling them.
Dished up with peas and veges fresh from the market, these were really superb. Not even any need for gravy, as the sausages are just so flavourful on their own they just don't need it.
My next Wai-Ora review will be of the Forequarter Rolled Roast, which we had on Labour Weekend. Watch this space!

Market Day Lamb

It was a beautiful day to swing by the Hutt Market last Saturday (Yes, my posts are at least a week out of date right now, mainly thanks to one little boy who has decided that 9pm is a fine time for him to go to sleep.). I was cheeky and took Isaac's buggy, even though I had no Isaac. After loading up with the usual fantastic array of fruit and veges, I stopped at the little stall selling Farm Fresh Lamb. We've been by these guys a couple of times and often been tempted, and I decided I'd give them a go. So this is a review, if you like, of Wai-Ora Farm's product.

Wai-ora have a small stall at the market with a refrigerated display, where they sell portions and cuts of lamb, but thier prime sales drive is in half and whole joints, prepared to suit you. Your meat will be waiting for you to pick up on the day if you order by the Monday prior. I spied a piece I liked the look of and asked the salesman (who I see smiling out of the website photo, which is encouraging) what the cut was and how best it should be cooked. It was a cut of rump steak, and he told me that about 15 minutes in the oven at 150C would be just beautiful.

Do excuse me for being dubious.

Anyway, I brought it home, and duly prepared it while the oven preheated. I took mint from the garden, along with a few loose sprigs of thyme and oregano that came loose when I got excited and did some weeding. Seasoned with the chopped herbs, freshly ground pepper and salt and rubbed with olive oil, the lamb duly went into the thusly preheated oven with a few mushrooms for good measure. While the 15 minutes ticked away I did the obligatory pile of fresh market veges (I know, its repetitive, but its important), and decided that it needed at least another 5 if not 50 minutes. I don't like to eat my meat raw.
Finally, after 20 minutes, I gave up on the oven and put that piece of steak where it belonged: In a hot pan. Hot fry, 5 minutes per side.
Dished with boiled new potatoes, the fried whole button mushrooms, and steamed green stuff.
The Verdict: The meat was absolutely divine. It was fresher and had more taste to it than anything I can ever recall buying from the supermarket. It was a $5.00 cut, which is at the top end of our meat for 2+1/2 budget, but it was more than worth the money. The cooking advice I was not so impressed with. It's a steak. Whole fillet beef steak is best sealed in a hot pan before being roasted hot in the oven, so I'm not sure how a low oven heat alone was meant to bring out the best in a slice of lamb steak. But it was saved, and it was delicious.

Feeding the Sick

The dreaded Winter Flu has run its path through our house. First Isaac, then me, and now C have all been knocked down by the bug. Thus, attention to cooking and, by association, this blog, have both been neglected. Suffice to say that there have been several repeats of the usual fare, including Chicken and Corn Soup and Curry. Meals have ticked away in the slow cooker, and leftovers have been defrosted. But there is one good thing about the raw throat, chesty cough, unexpected bouts of sneezing, aching joints and muscles, and alternately blocked or running sinuses: that thing is called Scrambled Eggs.

I was taught how to make proper Scrambled Eggs by a Doctor in Amsterdam, of all places. Its not the usual New Zealand way, and for that I make no apology. These eggs come out moist, fluffy, and silky, perfect for sore throats, and the only difference is in the technique. For a start, leave the frying pan in the cupboard.

Dutch Scrambled Eggs

Break 4 large Free Range Eggs into a small pot. Add 4T of milk and freshly ground salt and pepper. Whisk up with a fork and heat gently over a low heat, 2 - 3 on the dial. As the egg on the bottom starts to cook, whisk it gently, allowing the uncooked egg to run down the bottom of the pot. Meanwhile, cook some toast. Keep gently whisking the egg until it has cooked through but it still moist. Grate in a tiny bit of either cheddar or a hard salty cheese like parmesan. Allow the cheese to melt through and dish on toast. Great with avocado and sweet chilli sauce.

Poll Results: Whats more important?

On the surface, I guess it seemed that this poll was really a bit of a no-brainer.

The options were: Organic; Free Range; Both; or Neither.

Essentially what was being asked was:
What matters more: our health; the welfare of the animals we exploit; both; or neither?

Not surprisingly, an overwhelming 50% of readers (4) voted for both. 25% voted for organic, 25% for free range, and no-one voted for neither. Whether this is indicative of the moral norm of the traffic through this site or the simple failure of the poll to really pose a challenging moral dilemma cannot be known. If I had qualified this with the consequences of these choices, particularly the financial impact, then would the survey result have been the same? Or was the number of responses too small to draw any real conclusions from?

I'll say this much: If we could, most people would chose products that are both free range and organic, because most people have it in them to care both for the well-being of the creatures that we eat as well as their own long-term health concerns. But in reality, as I've said before, most families in NZ can't afford to exclusively eat free range or organic meat and produce. The extra costs of producing food this way - the real costs of producing healthy guilt-free food - are more than most of us can absorb in these days of higher interest rates, soaring fuel costs, and the general trend towards recession and the tightening of the purse-strings. The fact is, of course, that we have become accustomed to these cheaper prices for mass-produced food simply because the produce market is driven by intensive agriculture, fueled by cheap oil and the indiscriminate application of fertilisers to thousands of acres of farmland, the true costs of which are now starting to show themselves. For several decades, we have been indulging in this short term gain for what will amount to a nett loss in terms of the environmental and health costs which we are seeing appear now.

So why can we not afford to pay for food that is natural and humane, when it is the food we would have been eating barely a hundred years ago? Ironically, it would seem to be the same consumerism that has made everything else so desirable, cheap, and wasteful. So many families are mortgaged to the hilt and bogged down with credit card and HP debt in this country that we now struggle just to provide the basics. But just like trying to spread the word that it's worthwhile to grow a garden if you can, and that the more we can live as smaller communities sharing what is good between us and the less we rely on mass consumerism the better off we'll be, it's a monumental task for most families to try and wipe out their debt and take steps to break away from the economic models that chain us to our possessions, our desires, and our debt.

Which brings us back to the poll. No-one voted for Neither. Of the whopping 8 votes that the poll received, everyone wishes that they had the option of buying and eating better than what the mass market offers. But there is a cycle of economic hardship and financial ignorance in NZ that needs to be broken. The only question is, will that happen as a matter of market forces, as a result of the potential recession which is threatening, and in the process hurt everyone from big business to mum and dad?; or will it come from the ground up, from people's desire to rise above the economic machine that ties us down? With babies crying in one ear and creditors howling in the other, it's pretty hard to predict.