Friday Five: Killer Vegetables

Because yesterday was Halloween and lots of people were doubtless carving Jack o'lanterns, it  made me reflective on the nature of pumpkins. I love pumpkin - in spicy coconut type soups, in rich tomato stews or roasted with the parsnips and potatoes to accompany a joint. I've never been a huge fan of pumpkin pie but that's part of my dislike of mixing savoury and sweet. There are some wonderful pumpkin ales that I look forward to seeing on the market in autumn, but that's a post for another time. (Autumn, perhaps.)

But I hate chopping it. I even consider buying it pre-chopped from the supermarket, although I never acually have because that seems to me be the height of laziness, along with pre-grated cheese or pre-peeled oranges - they sell those in Marks and Spencer. Well, I am vindicated, because it turns out that pumpkins are top of the dangerous vegetable list  yes, there is one. According to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) tens of thousands of people every year are admitted to hospital with injuies inflicted from trying to chop pumpkin, and root vegetables are responsible for two-thirds of kitchen injuries.

Advice to avoid such injuries includes the ostensible paradox of having sharp knives, and choosing a vegetable peeler for the task where appropriate. Chopping your vegetables too fast is also hazardous admonishes the survey of more than two thousand customers carried out by an on-line takeaway service (slightly biased motives, anyone?). Two fifths of the participans confessed they had injured themselves by trying to imitate the methods of the TV chefs.

5 Most Dangerous Vegetables:

1. Pumpkin - I agree with RoSPA - tasty but dangerous (a bit like Christopher Eccleston)
2. Onion - I don't suppose it helps that they make me cry so I have to close my eyes while cutting them up
3. Beetroot - they stain everything, and if you forget that you've eaten it, the next time you go to the toilet will be terrifying
4. Artichokes - the social embarrassment of not knowing what to do with it can be crippling
5. Leeks - one was thrown at Ashley Cole in a Wales v England match in 2011 (what an original insult) and Fluellen beats Pistol up with one and then forces him to eat it in Henry V. Depending on how badly this is taught in schools, it can poison children against Shakespeare for life. 

Friday Five: Beetroot Brilliance

I read today that Australians eat more beetroot per capita than any other nation. I have a friend who describes it as the devil’s vegetable (I disagree- that is surely turnip) and another who uses it to make her chocolate cakes moist – no, I don’t know how. I have also heard tell that you can slice it finely and sautee it as a crisp. Personally, I would rather just buy crisps.

And I’ve never been a huge fan of the pickled variety. I do like pickled things – eggs; onions; gherkins; herrings; 40-something year olds in the pub on their birthday – but I think it’s a shame to do that to a vegetable with such inherent vibrant personality.

Aussies (and Kiwis) put it in their hamburgers to make them quintessentially antipodean apparently (and they also often add an egg, which is irrelevant to this post). This seems slightly odd as beetroot is originally a southern European vegetable and is now most commonly found in North America, Central America and Britain.

It has several health-giving properties and is a rich source of anti-oxidants, nutrients and vitamins. Obviously the colour is an issue – it will stain everything you wear or touch it with. Disposable gloves are a good idea, but opening the door wearing red-stained surgical gloves is not, unless you want to get rid of cold-callers of course. I find it also pays to remember you’ve eaten it either you will give yourself one hell of a health scare when you next go to the toilet.

5 Top Ways to Serve Beetroot:

1. Roast it with other winter vegetables with a touch of olive oil and rock salt
2. Turn it into borscht – I prefer it hot with crusty buttered rolls
3. Shredded in a salad, with carrot, fennel, walnuts and feta; colourful and tasty
4. Hummus – add it to the chick peas, olive oil, garlic, lemon, cumin and tahini for a spectacular dip or accompaniment
5. Add it horseradish and ginger for a perfect pink addition to baked salmon

Friday Five: Vegetables

This week, the Quick Quintet is back by popular demand (well, a couple of people asked why I'd stopped). Posting every day proved to be quite exhausting so I cheated a little here and there. I have decided to make the Quick Quintet a once-a-week thing: hence, the Friday Five - catchy, huh?

A while ago some friends and I had a heated debate over what was the Devil's vegetable - we ended up sort of roughly divided between turnips and beetroot. I didn't realise root vegetables could be so emotive.

 For the purposes of this post, we are avoiding salad vegetables (the tomato: fruit or vegetable argument can thus be neatly sidestepped) and although avocados are lush, they are equally excluded. In a singular high-handed fashion I have also decided to remove fungi from consideration, although fresh field mushrooms sauteed in butter and served on sour dough bread with a sprinkling of tarragon and chives is one of the delights of breakfast.

5 Favourite Vegetables

1. Potatoes - is any vegetable as versatile as the humble spud? No, is the answer to that, and I should know: I lived off them for six months as a student when my grant ran out
2. Asparagus - for the two weeks in season you can get them, they are almost all I live on - and I don't care if they turn my wee green
3. Courgettes - I like them crunchy (they make great crudites as well) and they are fabulous creamed in soups, in quiches, salads, ratatoille or simply as side with crushed almonds to accompany a nice piece of steak, or perhaps trout
4. Aubergines - love the colour; love the texture; love the taste. Some people have claimed to found religious iconography inside; they are probably bonkers. Incidentally, we went to Amisfield for dinner one evening, and the lovely waiter was thrilled that we were English so that he could offer us courgettes and aubergines rather than zucchini and eggplant
5. Onions - they are the base of almost any sauce - pasta; curry; soups; stew; tagine; etc. And spring onions are great in salads, and you don't even have to be Welsh to like leeks

Supermarket creep

I hate supermarkets; they sap my soul.

There is so much stuff – so many varieties of things we don’t need in packages that we will just take home and throw away. We are faced with a plethora of options but no real choice. How many cereals can one person handle? I find myself standing in front of them staring at the multiple versions of maize and my eyes glaze over.

It starts with the vegetables. There are simply too many and they are all evenly spaced and displayed in colourful regimented mounds that seem plastic in their uniformity. And it’s so cold that I lose the circulation in my hands, while my mind loses the will to live.

The music is vile, and the forced jollity of the announcements telling me what’s on special in aisle four makes me want to cry at the thought that the real world is out there somewhere, but it’s not in here. What’s in here is bored-out-of-their mind women pushing trolleys and pandering to their brattish offspring.

It’s one of the domestic chores I like least, right up there with cleaning the toilet. And yet, I love a farmer’s market.

Here there is something seductive about the produce on offer. Even the names are alluring; the pale and fragrant lemon cheese; the still-warm vine-ripened tomatoes; the personally-pressed virgin oil; earthy new potatoes; regal purple aubergines; spiky but soft artichoke hearts. Some people believe that any list can be poetry if the right words are used, but that’s another matter.

I’m currently reading the brilliant Eating for England by Nigel Slater. He writes of the farmer’s market; “I shop there because I want to meet the people who grow what I eat, to experience the joy of seasonal shopping, to be as close as I can to where my food originates without actually getting my hands in the soil. And I suspect that, as I trundle up the hill with my recycled bag of cheap corn on the cob still in its fresh green husks and a swaying bunch of three-foot-high sunflowers, it probably allows me to feel just a wee bit smug about those shoppers with their supermarket packet of identically sized, overpriced, cellophane-wrapped green beans from Mozambique.”

When I was a student, I used to go to different shops to collect my groceries. There was a herbalist, a greengrocer, a fishmonger, a delicatessen (I couldn’t afford anything from there), a butcher, a baker and yes, even a candlestick maker (and I was going through that late teen/early twenties obsession with smelly incense and cinnamon and spiced pumpkin candles).

Things were cheaper, and I could talk to the people who sold them. Sure, it took all day to collect my bits and pieces wrapped in waxed paper but that was okay, because I had all day – I was inevitably procrastinating about writing an essay on eighteenth century English drama.

Now it’s far more convenient to drive to one soulless sterile building with blinding bright lights and no heart. (To be fair, when Big Fresh in Christchurch introduced singing vegetables to the greengrocery section it was truly terrifying).

And yet, some people like it. As I returned a trolley to its berth (is that what they call them? They should) a bloke smiled happily, “I love the supermarket; it’s full of hot women. I’m going to come here every day.” And there you have it; it may not be a bustling bazaar or a social souk, but it can be considered a meat market.