Mushrooms. Gippsland. Mayhem.

This is just a fairly short post. I'm using a fairly topical and still under investigation because many people still want to know about what occurred here, but my lesson is VERY tangential to that, it's more of a question really - about us being very deliberately separated from our food knowledge.

Okay - the story here is that four people (possibly five) were struck down with food poisoning, three passed away from the effects of the toxin, one is in a stable but still quite acute condition, and the 5th may be the suspect. This revolves around a media circus, a bunch of sometimes contradictory statements, a lot of supposition, and a handful of facts. You read it, be the judge. I say it's just not able to be decided on the few things that have been revealed. 

UPDATE: 11 Sept 2023: One thing more to support my position that we've been dumbed down with reagrd to our food knowledge: A month or more after the events that prompted me to think about our relationship to food, mushroom sales are still down. (Also, sorry the article may have appeared disorganised before this update - in fact that was caused by me clicking the update button, without realising, before I'd re-assembled the article in its updated form.)

Why Is This A Subject?

How many of you reading this are competent at mushroom foraging? I consider myself a bit of a forager but not with mushrooms. You can eat any mushroom once, not quite so many twice. You can make a mis-identification and realise it after consuming them - and by then it's too late as the toxins in the wrong mushroom start destroying your organs, all you can do is pray you can live without your liver and kidneys and half a stomach or whatever. They are unforgiving. 

So?

Well, I was born in Europe at the edge of Alps country, but all of that area for thousands of kilometres around has abundant crops of mushrooms to be had. And many of my family there lived on the land and identifying the right and wrong types was almost second nature to them. Had I stayed out on the farm, I'd have absorbed the knowledge of that imperceptibly, and now know the hundreds of species of mushrooms from Belgium to Sicily to France and back that are edible and more importantly, the ones that are not... 

How many types of mushrooms are there in my local supermarket? Swiss Browns, White mushrooms, button mushrooms. If I went to herbs and spices and weird stuff section of that cooler, I might find styrofoam trays of Oyster, Shitake, Enoki, Pins, and maybe Straw mushrooms. There are quite literally thousands of others and many of them grow wherever you are. But unless someone shows you which ones are edible (and more importantly, shows you all the local ones NEVER to try) or you have an endless supply of test subjects and can wait for a fortnight for any to show ill effects, you won't know.

The Point - 

is that my folks back there would have known all that and passed it on to me. Someone in the past may have paid the ultimate price for identifying the wrong ones, but that lesson was passed down through generations so as not to cause more deaths. It's one of the reasons we have traditions, teachings, and recipes. 

I've just grabbed a stock photo thumbnail from a random image search, but you get the idea - for each species there, there are sub-species that are also okay, sub-species that are decidedly not, and a lot of other species that look similar but aren't. 

There are only two or three types there and they're likely to be non-toxic.

 And how's that working out for the supermarkets? Just lovely, thank you. They have customers that wouldn't know an edible fungus from a hole in the ground so if they want safe mushrooms they have to buy them at the supermarket. Or they can go pick 30 edible ones and one look-alike, and then everyone will avoid free mushrooms like the plague. 

There's a (very short) link to an article here before, the linked article is about food misinformation, long story short, things like kids thinking hot dogs and bacon and cheese are vegetables, popcorn is animal-based. 

I also collect stories like the mother chiding her child's teachers for teaching that fish come from the sea because "everyone knows they come from the supermarket." Or the person berating a person online, who admitted to being a hunter, and the naive person told them off well and good telling them to stop going out and "killing animals, just get your meat at the supermarket where it's just there on styrofoam trays." 

Have you heard that bacon isn't a meat but a garnish? I have. That cheese is vegan? I have. Follow me for more true facts like that . . . 

And the supermarkets continue to try to foster food ignorance - from things like replacing "HFCS" with "sweetener" and similar tactics. Food companies will also commit quite deliberate and bare-faced fraud. Don't let labels with great claims ("they wouldn't lie about it being organic, would they?") fool you, either.

What Does That Even Mean?

I present a well-known chilli pepper sauce with another meaningless term. "Aged for up to 3 years"

That can mean it was sold 3 weeks after being made. It's either aged for three years or it isn't. "Up to" is meaningless drivel, providing no assurance of any kind. And when you look at the ingredients you see that it's distilled vinegar and salt and chilli peppers. That doesn't generally tend to ferment any further as the acid and salt will inhibit fermentation bacteria. 

The original sauce actually was fermented for a certain period of time, but the acid content was provided by lactic acid which is produced when you add just the right amount of salt to a vegetable to favour the growth of a lactobacillus bacteria. It's how sauerkraut and kimchi are made, and also properly fermented gherkin and other vegetable pickles. 

So this is just an attempt to cash in on the mystique of the original product. Ah well... 

On the subject of total drivel is another pet peeve of mine:- "New And Improved!"

Ah... No... No, it isn't. It's either new, in which case it can't have been improved upon, or it's an existing product that's been improved. I know it's technical hair-splitting but it points out the exact kinds of bullshit food corporations get away with. Because we let them off the hook. 

KEEP THE BASTARDS HONEST!

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Food Autonomy- part 1 of many.

A Series Of Cooking Tips & Hacks For Sustainable Climate-Friendly Kitchens.

Hi! I've started this series in my Tuckertime blog for sustainable, fossil-fuel-free, climate-friendly kitchens. With the soon-to-be-enacted banning of new gas installations on the horizon, gas and wood-burning stoves are also being phased out. Here are some transitional technologies that will allow you to ditch the gas stove and start living in the 21st (and possibly even the 22nd) Century. The first two articles were my Lumina ice cream maker article and then the rice cooker article. Now dig in and enjoy this article. 

Future Kitchens

I firmly believe that "kitchens" as they exist today are going away. It's sad (having beautiful memories of having spent many cold evenings in a warm kitchen as a child and young adult) but with climate change sweeping over us, it's inevitable. The kitchen has undergone many metamorphoses in our time this last civilisation cycle, from a fire hearth in the open to caves then to communal hearths and once again private in huts and homes, then we've had markets and prepared food stalls and dining houses, and even now we have examples of all those types of eating/cooking facilities around the world.

But with climate change we're going to have to change once again. This article is part of a series on this blog, on ways that I see kitchens changing and things you can do if you prefer some food autonomy. 

Food Autonomy

I don't mean just that you grow your own food, although that's a cool goal. I don't mean just retaining your own kitchen, even though that's going to be an issue that I think has yet to be decided by the world at large. I mean being able to distinguish between bullshit foods and good foods, bullshit cooking utensils and and genuinely worthwhile ones. You'll find that some things are a valuable addition to your cooking equipment, others are just a good way to waste valuable resources by making a piece of crap that has no function other than extract some money from you and then some more when you have to pay (one way or another) for it to be recycled or it ends up as yet more plastic and heavy metal pollution. 

So this series of articles is going to explore as many scenarios as my fevered fertile imagination can come up with, from Star Trek food replicators to community solar cookers, or even - if the situation becomes dire enough, and who knows if that won't come to pass? - survival cooking in the wilds. One just never knows, do one? 

My articles are going to cover possible futures (This article) and then drill down to specific things as can be done right now. I'll maintain a list of them updated in this article, so when you come back in a week, the newest article will have become a link in the list below.

The List

1. Using Lumina Ice Cream Maker. This is a very old article about getting a very simple ice cream maker and putting it to a few less usual uses. 
2. Rice Cooker Meals. This really started me exploring alternatives. There are so many ‘Instant Pots’ and “Rice Cookers’ and ‘Eco Pots’ out there and I cover a few of them and also add a few recipes I've made with just rice cookers as the cooking device.
3. Food Autonomy. That's this article. 
4. Small Hotplates. There are several kinds of hotplates, resistive element and induction, and of course, the old favourite, the camping gas cooker, using bottled or cartridge gas.
5. Ovens And Ovens. There are several varieties of tabletop ovens from the ridiculous to the sublime to air fryers and steam ovens. Any good?
6. Mixers Blenders Juicers. 
7. Slicing and Dicing. 

These are going to come out at irregular intervals as I have time to write, and more importantly - money to test some options. You can help yourself by using the links in the graphic just below here to subscribe to my once a week newsletter where you can find out what I've most recently posted. You can also help me by using one of the support options to send a few bucks my way so that I can obtain more devices to test, pay for costs involved, etc.

The Preferred Options

Food Authenticity

It's difficult for us to keep up a good diet when forces of capitalism and money are involved. It invariably comes down to the most inexpensive. If a manufacturer can shave a cent per kilogram off the cost of a food or add one cent's worth of extra value to the pric

e of it, they will make more money - and that makes them a more successful predator than their competitor. One of the ways this always plays out is with the health-promoting and nutritional values of foods. There's no way around this, cheaper is less nutritionally valuable, less beneficial to health - all the way down to Soylent... 

So buying a ready-made meal is always a throw of the dice. Going to a fast food outlet is a gamble. Even going to a restaurant or cafe or diner can have poor outcomes. The more processed a food is, the more processors are operating on that food on its way to you. Each one shaves a cost, takes a shortcut, adds an adulterant. Cumulatively, the result is something that isn't 100% food any more, which can in fact be far less nutrition than you'd be led to believe.

For instance, when the entire world consistently produces only enough olives for the preserved olive market (which are hard to fake) and one hundred million litres of olive oil (which is easy to fake) and yet year after year sells two hundred and fifty million litres, you know that one hundred and fifty million litres aren't actually olive oil. 

Your job is to guess which brand is genuine 100% olive oil, which ones have the least corn oil added, and which ones are just any crap oil which has been boiled with olive pits or in some other way made to smell and taste a bit like olive oil... 

THAT is what I mean by food authenticity.

And it isn't just the bottle of oil for your pantry in this case. Those pickled vegetables in 'olive oil' you just bought - what oil are they floating in really? The pasta aglio e olio you just got served at your lunchtime restaurant - where did they get their oil from? And so on. 

And this train of thought gets infinitely worse when you consider another particularly revolting trend that at this stage seems to be mainly concentrated in China - 'grease trap oil.' And it's every biut as revolting as it sounds. Restaurateurs (or someone they buy their cheap cooking oil from) who go around skimming the oil off rubbish skips and bins of restaurant food waste, from the grease traps in the kitchen sewage, and anywhere else that they can, sometimes filtering or boiling it and then re-selling and re-using it. 

That's also what I mean by food authenticity... Don't forget that some of your olive oil may have even come from this inexpensive source. If you buy some lesser-known brands of Asian cooking oil, there's even a possibility that they're selling reprocessed grease trap oil directly and not just as an additive.

So our kitchens are a place where we can do our best to only have wholesome authentic food cooked in ways that preserves the nutritional value. To me that's one of the most important functions of a home kitchen and so I hope we keep having that room in the house. 

Food Preparation

As the world currently stands, many (mostly, the developed) countries are living a lifestyle where a kitchen almost doesn't make sense any more. They wake, get dressed, and have breakfast at a diner or stall on the way to work, then have lunch at an eatery local to their workplace before picking up a cooked takeaway meal on the way home. The kitchen gets used to re-heat leftovers and make a snack now and then, and is almost a wasted room. This is saddening because it indicates a swing away from home-cooked meals and with that, a departure from the 'nuclear family' which in this case means a family forming a nucleus, not the Jetsons.

That's not to say that this is entirely unknown. In ancient Greece and Rome there's evidence that there were a lot of fast food places - almost certainly indicating that people below a certain income ate almost exclusively food prepared by street vendors or people who cooked meals in their homes and took in diners much as a restaurant does. There's evidence that families sent the children away to apprentice, or to work at farms or other businesses, or to get an education. 

So we're used to families being a somewhat fragmented concept. Don't forget that early families often bred profusely precisely because limited local resources would either kill children or force them to move away (or be sold, indentured, or just chased away) and so the best course of action was to keep replenishing the youthful workforce by having more of them. 

We've also had 'stone age nuclear' families - in the stone age - where we probably had a hearth and kitchen wherever we happened to be, but the child was valuable and so was kept along with the family to learn the skills and become a new successful hominid. Sorry to bring families into this essay about kitchens but the fact is that partially, the things we do around kitchens and food is to do with one other uniquely human thing, our extremely long upbringing of our children. That ties in with culture and education and is another reason that kitchens are one of the focii of our civilisation. 

But also - and if managed properly and operated with a focus on quality over profit or cost - the idea of abandoning the home kitchen altogether makes some sense. We got to our current state of technological and cultural achievement through specialisation - one person farms, one person logs timber, another person makes furniture and utensils for the kitchen, a miner mines metals, a smith makes the pans and metal utensils, and so forth. Remember those ancient fast food places? They were operated by specialists too. 

In a few days there'll be a post about corporate food BS, look for it after Sept 6th. For now, I'll close this with a hint to the next part: What Are You Cooking With? If you rent or are cost-conscious, the old-style electric range consumes far too much energy for what it does. Induction cooking ranges are more energy-efficient but costly to buy. And electric ovens still have to have resistive heating elements. But there are appliances that will allow you to try these things out and bypass gas or resistive electric cooking and big expensive-to-run whitegoods. See you on the next one!

Go on - use the pic above to subscribe to my once a week newsletter, or help me with a donation to keep these blogs and experiments running, or use the Mastodon link to chat with me. 

Dual ReBeans

NAME: _ReBean

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INGREDIENTS/UTENSILS:

1 small onion

2-3 cloves garlic

1 small tin black beans

150g approx green beans

1 beef stock cube

1/2tsp each ground cumin, coriander, currypowder, raw sugar 

Olive oil

water

cooking salt
ground black pepper

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METHOD:

Wash the green beans and cut into 2-3cm pieces, set aside.

Peel and cut the onion into thin longitudinal wedges, (about 16 - 24) place oil and a sprinkle of salt in a frying pan, add the onion and drained black beans (retain the liquid for other recipes if you like) when the oil is hot, fry gently until onions begin to brown and beans to soften and become almost refried.

Add the spices and green beans and gently fry for another minute or two, add enough water to cover, crumble the beef stock cube in and stir.

Peel and mince the garlic, add and stir, then let gently simmer for about 20 more minutes.

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SERVING:

Serve as a side dish for something like my Ted-style "Corn" chips (which are actually beef coated in fine polenta) or similar.  

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NOTES:

The flavours go with Mexican, Spanish, or Indian/Curry cuisines.

Serves 2 - 4 depending on sides

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ENJOY!

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Ted-style "Corn" Chips (Meaty!)

NAME: _Mex Flavours Thin Rissoles

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INGREDIENTS/UTENSILS:

Rissoles

250g not too lean minced beef

1/2cup quick oats flakes

2 eggs

2 tbsp mayonnaise

2-3 tbsp dried crumbled onions

1 tsp salt

1 tsp raw sugar

1-2 tsp garlic powder

1 tsp smoked paprika

"Breading"

2cups fine ground polenta

Olive oil for frying.

Sauce

Jar of salsa (I got mine at a "good. different" supermarket chain.)

splash of olive oil 

pinch of ground cayenne, cumin, coriander

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METHOD:

In a suitable mixing bowl, add the beef, oatflakes, break in the eggs, add the rest of the "Rissoles" ingredients and mix well. I suggest spoon mixing for a few minutes, letting it sit for a few, mixing again. You're aiming for a slightly thicker consistency than sugar cookie dough. 

Keep it cool (maybe in the fridge) until ready to make. (You could make this a day ahead.)

When ready, put about two cups of fine polenta  in a deep plate, take rissole mixture and form into balls about 3cm diameter, then roll them in the polenta and flatten them into thin disks. Pat more polenta onto both sides, shake off, then in batches fry crispy on both sides in olive oil and set aside. 

Make sauce by simmering salsa, olive oil, and spices in small saucepan, drizzle over rissoles and toss to coat. 

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SERVING:

Serve with rice and a few sides. (See later recipes, I'll add recipes for some reasonable side dishes.) 
Serves 2 - 4 depending on other dishes / side dishes.

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NOTES:

As noted in Method, the rissole mix can be made up to a day ahead of time if covered and refrigerated.

Refried beans, spicy green beans, and spicy fried cabbage are all good matches to these. You don't need to coat them in the salsa but damn - it makes them sing.  I suspect they'd also go well with my Green Tomato Chutney.

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ENJOY!

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Green Tomato Chutney

NAME: _Green Tomato Chutney a la Ted

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INGREDIENTS/UTENSILS:

For every:

1 kg green (un-ripe) tomatoes 

Use:

2 - 3 onions ~~450 - 550 grams, diced a bit chunky

4 tsp salt un-iodised table salt

2.5 - 3 cups raw sugar

95 ml Ezi Sauce *see my recipe for clone Ezi Sauce here.

1 teaspoon mustard powder

1 teaspoon curry powder

1 teaspoon cornflour

1/2 teaspoon ground turmeric

Also needed:

Quantity of pickling jars with lids, washed and sterilised, enough for the quantity you intend to make. 

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METHOD:

Chop tomatoes to roughly 1cm - 2cm. Keep seeds and gel with them. 

Chop onions roughly around 1cm - 2cm. Add to the tomatoes.

Use a bowl big enough to hold those quantities of ingredients, add the required amount of salt, stir through, then cover and leave in a cool place or the refrigerator for 12hrs at least. 

Put the tomato/onion mix into a pot, keeping all the liquid that the salt drew out as well, bring to the boil over low heat. 

Add relevant amounts of sugar and Ezi Sauce and stir together, then simmer it uncovered over low heat for 2 hours, stirring occasionally. Make sure it doesn't catch and burn. 

Turn off heat, add remaining ingredients (curry and mustard powder, turmeric, cornflour) and stir then turn heat back on for ten minutes to simmer and combine. 

Put into the prepared sterile jars, put lids on, let cool. 

 

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SERVING:

Look up uses for chutney, hehehe. I cook with it sometimes, and we definitely have cheese/chutney and cold meat/chutney sandwiches regularly. 
 

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NOTES:

A weird and late start to my tomato plants gave us around five kilos of green tomatoes  towards the end of the season, and you can only eat so many fried green tomatoes . . . So I dug around in my recipes and found an old recipe I've used in the past (also works for apple cucumber chutney BTW, just adjust cooking times and cornflour a bit) and then realised it used Ezi Sauce so I hunted down a recipe online, tried it, realised it wasn't the way I remembered Ezi Sauce, and put that recipe on here as well.

Make sure your jars are well cleaned, sterilised, and boiled for this, get the chutney into them very hot and seal immediately, and they'll keep a few months in a cool place. (Ours won't last long enough to be a problem...) We had around 4kg of tomatoes and used 12 jars of 210ml size with a bit of chutney left over. 
 

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ENJOY!

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Home Made Pickling Vinegar (Ezi Sauce clone)

NAME: _Home Made Pickling Vinegar (Ezi Sauce clone)

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INGREDIENTS/UTENSILS:

15 grams whole cloves ---------------\

15 grams whole black peppercorns---- (See Note 1)

7 grams chilli flakes mild

30 grams ginger fresh, washed, scraped, and chopped (See Note4)

400- 500 ml double-strength white vinegar 8% acidity

1 tsp un iodised cooking salt 

1 litre double-strength white vinegar 8% acidity (See Note 3)

 

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METHOD:

Use a glass jar with tight-fitting lid that's 1.2 - 1.5 litres in size. Put in the vinegar, salt, and sugar/molasses if using, stir or shake until dissolved. Add in the other ingredients, put the lid on tightly and shake. Leave it to stand for at least 12hrs, 24hrs preferred, then strain through some fairly fine weave like calico or handkerchief cotton into a clean glass bottle. It'll keep for ages, months, if left unopened. (Note 5)

 

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SERVING:

It's not actually a serving idea per se, instead it's used in pickles and chutneys etc. I've also added a small splash to a salad vinegar/oil vinaigrette for interest. 
 

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NOTES:

Note 1: Purists will say "whole" black peppercorns and cloves, I say put them in a piece of parchment paper then into a teatowel and crack them with whatever you have. Don't pound them to dust, just break them open a bit. 
Note 2: Experiment - I've improved over the original recipe by adding 1 tsp of crumbled cinnamon bark as well. Also 1 tsp raw sugar or molasses (molasses preferred) adds "body" to the end product.   

Note 3: DON'T be tempted to use the normal white vinegar, pickling needs more acidity that only double-srength can provide. Usually only a half litre is used for the amount of ingredients but I've found that the flavour is overpowering at that strength so I opted to add half a litre more vinegar. Start with the 500ml, taste test after 12hrs, and if, like me, you found it unpleasantly strong, add 250ml - 500ml more double strength.

Note 4: I don't peel the ginger, rather wash and scrape lightly with a spoon, also thin slices with a mandoline are as good as chopping.

Note 5: The vinegar goes dark - it's meant to. Also - keeping it in a dark brown bottle will retain the colour, clear glass lets light in and that fades the colour after time. 

Also, you can find my recipe for Green Tomato Chutney here where I've already used the vinegar to make several batches.

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ENJOY!

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