Gannet

This is, I know illusory but I feel as if I have spent the last 9 days eating at twice my normal rate! This is because I have been working as a volunteer with a venue management company at the Edinburgh Fringe. I worked shifts in the kitchen rushing about with trays of food and also walked miles around Edinburgh. The food was provided to volunteers for free and every day there were big cauldrons of soup made from fresh vegetables, also lots of veggie casseroles and bakes. So it was possible to eat pretty healthily. But my energy expenditure was huge! So not CR'd but I do feel that the sheer buzz of Edinburgh at Festival time and being surrounded with so many young creative people had a rejuvenation effect all of its own. It was a fantastic experience and if anyone is keen to sample what the Fringe has to offer without breaking the bank (accommodation and many of the shows were also free to helpers) it can recommend it!

The meeja

I was contacted recently by someone wanting to interview a CR'd woman prefereably aged 25-45 in the UK for a magazine article. Obviously I am way out of the age range, but I thought I would ask anyone out there if they might be interested. If you are let me know and I will pass on the journalist's details. She writes for magzines like Marie Claire etc.

Patty pan delight

Apologies for not posting recently - I can only plead the hectic and exhausting life of a retired person! Last autumn I loved experimenting with the many varieties of little squashes I was able to get on the farmers' market and have felt a bit bereft over the spring, however the first little disc shaped patty pan or summer squashes have arrived and I have been able to try something I had on mind - quiche. They are so lovely and tender you can eat the lot - even the thin skin and soft little seeds. I steamed one, then cut it across into two discs. I then scooped out the centre and mashed it with herbs, tomato paste and a few chopped olives. (There have to be a gazillion variations on this) Then as the mixture is a bit watery I added a teaspoon of powdered eggwhite. The mixture was put back in the cases and microwaved until set, which didn't take long. Hey presto, quiche without the pastry!

Easy peasy lemon cheesy

I tried three more shops to get citric acid without any success. In the end I went to the market and got lemons, 7 for £1. At one shop (the local Boots the Chemist, and I know they used to sell citric acid as many years ago I worked for Boots as a dispenser) they said they didn’t stock it any more as people were buying it and using it for the wrong things. I wasn’t sure what those things could be, but as usual Wikipedia had the answer. Golly gosh. Hope no-one thought I wanted it for that reason! Anyway I have my lemons now and if the cheesemaking works out and I want to do it regularly I can always get citric acid online from a homebrew supplier. At least no-one looked at me strangely when I bought seven lemons.

I tried the simpler recipe first, it is called superquick ricotta, and the online recipe stipulates 1 gallon milk, 1 tsp citric acid dissolved in ¼ cup cool water and 1 tsp cheese salt which is optional. In my version I estimated I would need 5 teaspoons of lemon juice for a quarter of that quantity. I started by zesting two lemons and squeezing all the juice. (I had other uses for the zest and excess juice) I poured 1 litre of skim milk into a pan, and whisked in two tablespoons of skim milk powder to give it more body. I then added 5 tsps lemon juice, put the meat thermometer in place, (I thought I would have to hold it but it propped quite neatly against the handle of the pan) and started to heat the mixture gently stirring with a plastic paddle so it wouldn’t burn. I watched as the temperature rose gradually to the required level according to the recipe (185-195F). Hmm – at 195F I had a nice pan of lemony milk. I added some more juice, about another teaspoonful, and hey presto the mixture broke into curds and whey. I turned off the heat. The mixture has to sit for ten minutes and this gave me time to cut a square of butter muslin and line a strainer over a colander. Ten minutes later I ladled the curds and whey into the muslin. It didn’t take long to drain and I stirred in a quarter of a teaspoon of low salt seasoning. It is supposed to drain for something like 30 to 45 minutes but I found it didn’t take as long, I suppose it is all a matter of the texture you want and I was looking for a soft cheese. The recipe says that if you want a firm cheese you can tie up the cloth into a bag and hang it from a hook.

This idea brought back hugely nostalgic memories, of when I was a small child and my mother bought unpasteurised milk and let it sour naturally in a big bowl. Sometimes she would tie it in a cloth and hang the cloth from the kitchen taps. When I was in my teens I remember some student friends deliberately allowing their bottled pasteurised milk to sour and then eating the curds out of sheer nostalgia for their mothers’ homemade soured milk. I did explain the difference between naturally soured raw milk and milk that has simply gone off, but they didn’t want to know.

But I digress.

I have chilled the cheese in the fridge and it is fairly dry and crumbly (perhaps it would be moister if I only heated it to 185F?) but with a good very fresh taste, different enough from the products I can buy to make me want to make this again. The faint tang of lemon is rather good! I found I could make it a bit moister by adding a little skim milk. It would be heavenly with sliced strawberries. I might try using it with eggwhites to make a cheesecake.

Oh – and the extra zest and juice? I simmered them gently for about 15 minutes until the zest was soft, topping up with a little water when necessary. I then cooled the mixture and used it with a few drops of culinary lemon oil, as a flavouring for ice milk. But that’s another story.

Please cheese me, oh yeah.

This homemade cheese stuff is amazingly healthy. Not that I have made any of it yet, but I have had some really good exercise footslogging from shop to shop trying to get the equipment and ingredients I need! I found the recipes on the internet and I deliberately chose the ones designated as easy. The first requirement was a dairy thermometer, or at least for the ricotta recipe one that would read 185 to 195 degrees and for the mozzarella, between 55 and 145. Problem number one – there are two sorts of cooking thermometers easily available; one for confectionary which records really high temperatures, and one for meat which goes from about 100 to 200 F which was the one I got. So I am OK for part of the range but for the lower temperatures it will be a clean fingertip, and a spot of luck. Luckily the recipe does describe what the mixture should be doing at various stages, so that will be my guide. Cheesecloth was hard to get but I managed it at the fourth shop.

I never thought I would get rennet but I finally tracked it down. The one thing I still haven’t got is citric acid, but Wikipedia tells me that lemon juice is 5% citric acid so I will have to use that for the time being. I didn’t even bother to look for cheese salt, which sounds very specialised, and is supposed to be optional anyway.

Both the recipes stipulate using whole milk, but of course I will be using skim, and I may decide to whisk in some powdered skim milk to increase the yield.

Phew! Now I am too tired to make the cheese.

Drop Zone

I have just stepped on the scales with some trepidation as I have been away for a few days but thankfully it has not resulted in a weight gain. Always tricky when you are not in a position to cater for yourself. I usually reckon that holidays mean a choice between being CRd by just eating less at the cost of not being ONd, or going for good quality food and accepting that I will not be CRd. So far the latter course has worked out as I am pretty active on hols so burning more calories than usual, and it was after all only for a few days, on the first of which I took packed food of my choice. This was another of our battlefield tours, the follow up to the Normandy beaches one we did last year, this one being Arnhem and the Rhine crossings. It was excellent and I learned a great deal. I think the highlight was Remagen, where there is a wonderful museum located in one of the original towers of the bridge. We were in Holland for two days and Germany for two. I don’t know if either of the hotels was typical, so can only comment on what we found. The breakfast buffet in Holland included a good selection of fresh fruit as well as yogurt and quark. The cereals tend to be refined, but for those who eat bread, there is good coarse wholemeal and rye often with sunflower seeds. Obviously I avoided the cooked breakfast in both countries! In Germany it was trickier as there was no fruit at breakfast and just plain yogurt but there was coarse bread, and one morning boiled eggs. Lunch was pretty easy as it is possible in hotels restaurants and supermarkets in both countries to get really good crisp fresh mixed salads. I can find my way around a German menu without any problem but in Holland we had some difficulty as neither of us speaks Dutch, and some restaurants don’t have a menu in English. In one really beautiful place we found a helpful waitress who did her best to translate for us. I pointed to an item on the menu. ‘What is this?’ She gave it a long hard consideration and eventually said ‘It is - part of a cow.’ No further elaboration was forthcoming. I decided to go for the vegetarian option and it was a good choice, a big platter of vegetables and chickpeas in a spicy tomato sauce, with far more couscous than I could eat. Being Holland it also came with a sort of egg and cheese bake on the side, which I had a taste of. We had a set dinner for two nights in Germany so I simply had to be a bit careful, but we did get a good salad, plenty of vegetables, and tomato and vegetable soups. I am sure I ate far too much on those occasions but was able to adjust later! In the end it is not about what one does on any particular day but what one does overall. Back home I have raided the markets for vegetables salads and fruit, and have settled back into my normal healthy CRON diet. No temptation to depart from it! After all, as I said to my other half when we were in a cafe getting coffee ‘that chocolate pastry twist looks good, but not as good as the way my jeans fit’.

Bookends

I have read The CR Way with great interest, and now I am hoping that MR will someday be able to produce a book with his own views of how CR should be practised. Then I will be able to buy it, study it and put it on my bookshelf; but at the opposite end to Paul’s book as the fizzing and crackling that would go on between them if they were placed together could be distracting. I read what both Paul and MR say on the CRON daily list, I plough through the archives, (not as easy a task as one might think, as following the long threads of debate sometimes blurs exactly who is speaking, but I think I can make sense of it) and of course the differences are obvious. A recent comment on the raw food/cooked food issue added another item of divergence, but the main one as far as I can see is the question of protein. If I followed Paul’s guidance I would consume 0.8gm per kg body weight, that’s 32.8g a day, or approximately 11% of my total calories. MR on the other hand advocates at least 1.5g per kg for AL people and believes there are good grounds for 2g per kg for CRd people. Following MR’s advice I would be eating 82g of protein a day which would be just over 27% of my calories. This is a huge difference, and when one lives at the cutting edge where every calorie must do its job or be evicted from my diet, the choice achieves measures of importance unheard of by those whose greatest dietary decision is whether to have another beer.

The problem is that while in the CR society mailings it is possible even for the ignorant layperson to winnow out the anecdotally based theories from the ones with sound scientific underpinnings, the whole area is so vibrantly a work under construction, that differences will happen (and boy, do they happen!) even amongst those whose opinions I respect, and who know more about CR than I will ever know – in other words, the very people to whom I look for my guidance. So here I am being pulled, protein-wise in two opposite directions.

In the meantime I look forward to the day when MR and April can find time in their incredibly busy schedules to encapsulate their practice of CR in a book, both the scientific side and the practical.

I have done some number crunching on CRON-o-Meter and it is possible to achieve my DRIs (or at least the average woman’s DRIs, which I have to use in default of being able to find out what mine are) on both a 11% and a 27% protein regime, so that at least is good news. The one thing I can’t do is get those DRIs from food alone on 1200 calories a day if I include any but the most modest amounts of cereals or legumes in my diet.