Nuggets

" nugget - a small piece or lump, especially of gold in its natural state" or "something small but valuable or excellent" Cambridge English Dictionary

"nugget - Spontaneous nickname for a child who is excessively cute, funny, innocent-looking, etc." Urban Dictionary

Well small bits, that are hopefully valuable in some small way. Excellent is a bit too much to aim for I suspect. Ditto for cute or funny.

With respect to food of course, it's chicken nuggets - rubbish food for kids that most of us think they are and indeed probably are in places like MacDonalds. Jamie Oliver, whilst doing his school dinners campaign tried to show a group of kindergarteners how awful they were, by grinding up the chicken carcass, with the skin and other bits and then forming it into a ball, breadcrumbing and frying. When done he put them beside the 'real' pieces of chicken that he had first shown them and asked them who would now eat the nuggets. And to his horror they all said they would. Which is sad is it not? But then probably many of us occasionally eat food of whose origins we are oblivious, or things we know we shouldn't. And of course, chicken nuggets in themselves are not necessarily bad - as shown above from a recipe on the BBC Good Food website. Well it's just chunks of chicken fried with a breadcrumb coating. You can make themselves. Air fryers must be a boon in this instance.

They were first made back in the 1950s by one Robert C. Baker a food scientist professor at Cornell University, as a result of trying to get batter to adhere to pieces of meat. Bakers made it:

"possible to form chicken nuggets in any shape by first coating the meat in vinegar, salt, grains, and milk powder to make it hold together and then using an egg-and grain-based batter that could be fried as well as frozen."

In 2013 an American study:

"analyzed the composition of chicken nuggets from two American fast food chains. It found that less than half of the material was skeletal muscle, with fat occurring in an equal or greater proportion. Other components included epithelial tissue, bone, nervous tissue and connective tissue. The authors concluded that "Chicken nuggets are mostly fat, and their name is a misnomer." Wikipedia

Which sort of proves Jamie's point.

Anyway a few nuggets - lumps of information, not necessarily words of wisdom - from here and there.

Stretched cheeses

This one probably deserves a post all of its own. For now I'm just pointing you to a list on Wikipedia of stretched cheeses; stretched cheeses being:

"The cheeses manufactured from this technique undergo a plasticising and kneading treatment of the fresh curd in hot water, which gives them fibrous structures."

I knew of mozzarella, bocconcini and burrata of course, and when I perused the list I did recognise halloumi and oaxacata, but didn't know they were stretched cheeses, although if I'd thought about it I would have realised. I also recognized provolone and scamorza - but believe me there are plenty more, from other parts of Europe and central Asia, as well as the Middle East and South and Central America. And that lady may be in Taiwan but she is making mozzarella - which just shows you the influence of Italian food around the world. The Asians themselves are not much into cheese, but even they have the odd one - rushan from China was one that was mentioned.

And who on earth was the first person to think that you could knead cheese in hot water? Why was the cheese in the hot water in the first place? and why would you knead it? Wouldn't you burn yourself. I sometimes think that the true genius cooks - those who thought of something that nobody had ever done before - not someone who was building on something that went before - those people must have been way, way back in time, and were the true original geniuses of humanity.

Strascinati

More nuggets, and more stretching. Strascinati are the pasta shapes that are formed by stretching little lumps of pasta dough into shapes, such as orecchiette and cavatelli, although some of them are just called strascinati. The one thing they have in common seems to be that they are handmade. Well I'm guessing the big pasta manufacturers have figured out how to do it with a machine.

Rachel Roddy tells us how to make orecchiette:

"To make orecchiette, which means little ears, use a knife to drag the lump into a circle that curls at the edges, then invert back, so it looks like an ear or little cup. Put on some music, pour yourself a glass of wine or cup of tea, and make another, and another, and another."

Or you can make a thin rope with your dough, cut off little bits and either stretch them towards you with your fingers flattening them a bit as you go or, or stretch them across something with ridges as shown here. I watched this brief video - the pasta is not just being rolled across the strings, they are being pulled out as they go.

Time consuming but possibly meditative, or communal.

Pesto Trapanese aka Sicilian pesto

One of Rachel Roddy's Italian friends said:

“only Ligurians follow strict rules when making pesto; to everyone else, pesto is subjective”.

Well maybe. I'm guessing that there probably Sicilian nonna's who maintain there is only one way to make Pesto Trapanese - their own. The example above is from Tavolartogust - an Italian website, so you would need to know Italian, but I'm assuming it is therefore authentic, and it looks more tomatoey than most. But one thing is sure - it's made with basil, pesto, almonds instead of pine nuts, garlic - lots (well to taste) - and olive oil. The ingredients shown below are Rachel Roddy's, the finished pasta dish is from Cooking with Ayeh, but I suspect the method for both is pretty much the same:

"The pleasure is in not really measuring: a big handful of basil leaves, another of almonds, one or two cloves of garlic, a pinch of salt and a good amount of olive oil (say, 120ml), which is then blended in your appliance of choice (or mortar) until it resembles a coarse rubble. Add three peeled tomatoes, then blend everything again until fairly smooth and creamy. As always, taste and adjust before tossing though pasta." Rachel Roddy

11 authors on the cookbooks that shaped them

Penguin is celebrating 90 years of publishing, and so my Happy Foodie newsletter last week had an article on cookbooks that shaped 11 'famous' cooks - not that Penguin have been publishing cookbooks for 90 years. I think their first effort was The Penguin Cookbook by Bee Nilson. I may once have had that, but I'm not sure.

Most of the authors in their list would be known to you, with some exceptions, but even the exceptions sometimes have interesting choices. Those you know - Jamie, chooses The River Café Cookbook; Ottolenghi - Claudia Roden's Jewish Food; Claudia Roden herself chooses Elizabeth David's A Book of Mediterranean Food; Rick Stein - Jane Grigson's Fish Book; and Jay Rayner - Roast Chicken and Other Stories by Simon Hopkinson with Lindsey Bareham. Probably not very surprising choices but a few minutes mindless and entertaining reading. Which also makes you wonder what you would choose if it were you. You had to choose a recipe from the book as well.

So for me? French Provincial Cooking by Elizabeth David and Potage Bonne Femme or Robert Carrier - Great Dishes of the World - and I cannot pick just one recipe. Too hard really.

Seedless watermelon

Deb Perelman's Smitten Kitchen newsletter lat week directed me to an article in Eater about how seedless watermelon has taken over our grocery stores. It doesn't look right somehow does it? And yet, it's obviously much more practical, and apparently: "seedless watermelon flesh can be crisper and firmer." The seeds apparently produce ethylene gas which makes the fruit ripen faster and can lead to mushiness. Watermelons tend to be smaller today as well . Well families are smaller, so the breeders did their thing and now we have seedless, smaller watermelons which taste just as good as those with seeds. And ironically because they are taking over the watermelon growing world, varieties with seeds are becoming more popular. Nostalgia seems to be gaining traction. I bet photographers prefer the ones with seeds as well.

A recipe

The recipe is Mathilde's tomato tart, and it was another thing from the Smitten Kitchen newsletter. It's a Deb Perelman recipe but she was inspired by a novel The Margot Affair by Sanaë Lemoine, which I suspect is one of those foodie kind of romances. But Deb Perelman was so inspired by the description of a tomato tart, that she set out to reproduce it and I have to say it looks gorgeous. A dish to lash out and buy those expensive heirloom tomatoes for. Or grow your own if you have green fingers, and no possums. Underneath those wonderful tomatoes is a thin layer of Dijon mustard, a parsley and garlic pesto and a layer of grated cheese. Yum.

Not very gourmet food tonight though - leftover minestrone leftovers soup but with a pesto kind of garlic bread.

YEARS GONE BY

August 5

2024 - The joy of meatballs

2023 - Nothing

2022 - A quickie on baskets

2021 - Parmigiana - an Australian love story

2020 - Missing

2019 - Nothing

2018 - Restaurants, bread and Port Douglas

2017 - Old cookery books falling apart

2016 - Paris Go