Going French
While today marks Bastille Day I’m not suggesting you beat the drums and find a fortress to storm, but that you could enjoy a culinary revolution of sorts. It could be that you always eat fish on Fridays. There’s no reason not to, it’s just that it might be fun to mix things up a little. Conversely, and I suspect this is more the space you occupy, if you feel like you are constantly having to fight your way out of a cardboard box to make sense of things, and that eclectic ingredients land on your dinner plate by default rather than by design, perhaps it would be fun to wind things back and enjoy some classic cooking. I love doing just that. Instead of tinkering away reinventing the wheel, I find such comfort in dishes I have been making for years, decades in some cases, and invariably they are French as that was where I started my culinary journey, at Le Cordon Bleu school in London a lifetime ago.
Your own kitchen or culinary revolution could be a commitment to get rid of plastic containers in your pantry, and to replace them with glass. This sounds easy, but there is no point creating a mound of plastic to go to landfill; re-purpose as much plastic as you can for non-food tasks, and buy glass going forward. READ MORE
It might be that you are determined to ’get growing’. Start reading, start planning, then, come spring you will be ready to run with your ideas. Rather than planting direct into the ground, think about a raised bed because they are so much easier to maintain (saves the back!) and you are more likely to stick with it. And think about what the most useful thing would be for you to grow. If space is limited things like basil and mint, rocket or cos lettuces are really handy as herbs add colour and flavour, and salad greens provide an accompanying dish to a main course. Growing things from scratch, your own food, can indeed be a revelation, if not quite a revolution!
A kitchen clean-out is also a good idea. Start with spices. It’s easy to amass triplicate packs of spices. You go shopping, you can’t remember whether you have cinnamon, so you grab another pack, you open it and it gets mixed up with older opened packs … and on it goes, more and more packets of stuff that drop little bits of spice dust and mess in your pantry until you have a clean out. You’ve created wastage in the chaos, too. Transferring spices to glass jars keeps them fresher, looks fab – all sparkly and clean – with the added bonus that you can see how much cinnamon, turmeric or cumin you have at a glance and it’s easier to carry that image in your mind when you go shopping rather than an assortment of packets filled with unknown quantities.
And keep on culling kitchen equipment, passing on things you don’t need to those who do, and learning to purchase less frequently, with a mind to buying once, and for life.
That’s enough revolutionising for one go!
