I can’t remember
the exact time I first met Chris, but he is married to my best friend
Becks, who I've known since we were 8 years old, so he’s basically part of my
family and it feels like we've known each other forever. I don’t get to see him
and Becks as often as I’d like since they live in the UK, but we’re fortunate
to be able to see them once or twice a year when they visit family in the
States. Next time they visit I’m going to try to convince them to sneak me some
fantastic English butter in their luggage somehow (see below).
Chris and Becks got
married in 2007 and now live near Reading, England (about 30 miles west of
London). Chris’ professional work includes working as a teaching assistant at
the University of Reading, as well as being an amateur nature enthusiast. Be
sure to catch his blog over at http://consideringbirds.wordpress.com!
He is also kept busy by
his part-time PhD studies looking into new ways of monitoring the distribution
of insects across landscapes, which will hopefully lead on to a research
career, however his dream job would be become a best-selling nature writer.
When it comes to food,
Chris has gotten very interested into wild food and foraging as a way of
combining his interests in wildlife and cookery. As well as cooking pretty much
all of his and Becks’ meals, he enjoys baking at home, especially baking bread,
cake and cookies.
Q&A With Chris
Why do you cook at home? It's so much cheaper, and honestly, eating in a
restaurant or getting take-out (or as we say in the UK, takeaway) is so
hit-and-miss that it's often easier to get reliably tasty food by eating at
home.
I first started out
cooking the family meal a few times as a 16-year-old when my mum was in the
hospital for a time. Since then, I'm not sure when I really started to get into
cooking…it's kind of crept up on me over the last 7 or 8 years, but now I enjoy
it enough to consider it a hobby. Though, of course, there are still plenty of
days when cooking is still a chore I just do because we've got to eat something!
Another good reason to
cook at home is cutting down on our meat and fish intake. Becks and I aren’t
strict vegetarians by any means, but due to cost and, quite frankly, boredom
with basing every meal around a lump of meat, we rarely eat meat in an average
week. Ordering vegetarian in restaurants locally often leaves you with an
uninspiring choice between one or two mushroom-based dishes, while home cooking
allows us to explore all the possibilities of vegetarian and vegan
cuisine.
What are your favorite ingredients to cook with and
why? Butter and salt. So, I suppose if I had to pick just one
ingredient it would be salted butter! These two noble ingredients get a lot of
bad press, but when cooking at home we get to control the quantities and can
probably “get away” with using more than we imagine, having still added way
less salt than you'd find in an averaged process meal.
As
luck would have it, science is beginning to rehabilitate butter, realizing that
saturated fat intake isn't as closely linked to incidence of obesity
and heart disease as they originally thought. Sugar, especially in highly
processed forms, seems to do a lot more damage. Unfortunately I have a sweet
tooth as well as a salty one, so I do have to be careful!
There's another reason for
my choice: given the agricultural
history of these islands, it would be daft not to cook with real butter. With a
high percentage of British dairy cattle still fed on grass (kept nice and green
by all that famous rain) in low intensity farms (relative to the average dairy
operation in the US) we are lucky to have affordable access to a lot of high
quality dairy produce. Dare I say the best in the world? It's been really good
to see high quality, grass-fed dairy produce become more and more common in the
USA in recent years, but good food does seem to be a lot more expensive on your
side of the pond in our experience.
If you could travel anywhere in the world just to try
the cuisine, where would you go? I
would have said Italy, but as it happens we were lucky enough to travel there
this April! Overall I must confess to being mildly disappointed in the Italian
cuisine…not to say that all the food we had wasn't delicious and beautifully
cooked, but somehow I was expecting to be bowled over more than I was, given
how influential Italian cooking has become on our daily diet. Perhaps we built
up to it too much!
Having said that, we did
find the very best examples of pasta, pizza and gelato I've ever eaten.
Especially the gelato: walnut, pistachio, ricotta and bilberry, blackberry and
lavender, chocolate and Grand Marnier, Chianti wine sorbet....out of this world
flavor!
So having been to Italy (though every region's
cuisine is different and we've only 'done' one) I need a new destination:
Scandinavian food and culture is very “now, so perhaps I'd pick Copenhagen or
Stockholm for my next food-based travel adventure.
Most of my favourite recipes are basic guidelines that
can be tweaked depending on what end result you're aiming for or what
ingredients you have, e.g. a simple, adaptable risotto or curry. Along those
same lines is this versatile 'rough puff pastry' recipe by Hugh
Fearnley-Whitingstall, a British TV chef and food writer whose work is hugely
influential on the way we cook and eat every day. I've also given the recipe
for my basic vegetarian pasty filling and a couple of other suggestions for how
to use the dough.
That recipe sounds delicious! I'll look forward to trying it.
ReplyDeleteI thought it might be right in your wheelhouse! :)
DeleteI wish for the great of success in all of our destiny endeavors
ReplyDeleteExquisite platform for all of the residents close by!telephone numbers
ReplyDelete