Egg Overdrive

Decorated egg boxes for Alzheimers fundraiser

Rearing chickens and ducks for eggs, is truly either a feast or a famine. In the depths of winter what I wouldn't give for dozens of eggs instead of having to use them sparingly. Then in summer it's the reverse. How do I think of ways to use them up?

I don't think I would ever tire of my own eggs. They are free range, organic, fresh, deeply yellow and full of deliciousness and goodness. The insipid stale offerings from supermarkets quite literally pale in comparison.

To see poultry living the way mother nature intended, rooting about, dust bathing and sunbathing is good for my soul.  I inherited from my father a deep distaste of animals being confined and reared in unnatural environments. I would rather not eat the eggs at all from intensively reared birds.  Apart from the cruelty, the eggs are not healthy coming from chickens fed a diet laced with antibiotics and genetically modified cereals.

Apart from the obvious use in baking how many other ways can you think to use eggs?


Here are a few ideas.

Delicious brunch - poached eggs served on sourdough toast and wilted spinach with Parmesan shavings. The best hangover cure ever.

Spanish omelette with wilted chard and wild garlic.                                                                          


















Carbonara with my own bacon and eggs. Parmesan from Rome courtesy of my sister.
















Spinach, bacon and Parmesan quiche with a spelt and buttermilk pastry. Green lentils cooked in chicken stock and a green salad.


















Eggsellent (sorry, couldn't resist)



















Tags: Eggs, Egg dishes, Spanish omelette,  Irish Carbonara,  Irish food,  Free range eggs, Poached eggs

Buy the Shin of your Teeth

Let's start with a disclaimer - this is not normally a scrimping scroogalista blog but: every now and again I surprise myself with a discovery, so why not pass it on?

The first was that it was sooo much cheaper to buy a whole chicken and bone it out yourself. Fellow blogger Adrian Shanahan followed it up and calculated that it was 350% more expensive to buy the breasts alone.

My latest eureka discovery is that buying a great lump of shin beef and either cutting it up yourself and/or mincing it, is much cheaper than buying mince or stewing beef. I buy a kilo for around €8. I mince half and I cut the rest into stewing sized pieces. I calculated that with half the meat you could make a big pot of chilli which would easily feed 5-6 and with the remainder minced, a lasagne or whatever you normally use mince for.

To buy 500g of stewing beef alone is normally in or around €7 and the same again for mince.

You do need a good knife and a mincer. I got the mincer attachment free with my kitchen Aid in a deal one Christmas. However, I'm pretty sure you can buy the old fashioned ones that screw onto the kitchen table from Amazon.

To make the chilli use half the meat approximately 500g diced into bite sized chunks.

Chilli with Cocoa and Lime

Ingredients:

500g shin beef
1 tin tomatoes
1 tin of kidney beans 
2 large onions diced
2 sticks of celery chopped
2 cloves of garlic crushed
2 teaspoons of cumin seeds
1large heaped tablespoon of chilli powder
1 or 2 small red chillies diced
2 teaspoons of dark cocoa powder (try get it with high cocoa content)
Zest of a lime and half of it juiced
A good pinch of salt

Sweat the onions, garlic and celery until really soft. Add in the cumin seed, chilli powder and the chillies.  Cook for a few minutes. Then add the beef and brown. Add tomatoes, beans and two tin fulls of water and put in the oven for 3 hours on a very low heat. Just about 30 minutes before the end of cooking add in the cocoa powder and the lime zest and juice.

It improves unbelievably if you put it in the fridge for a day or two.

I'm not sure why but chilli with meat in pieces is so much nicer than with mince. Both the cocoa powder and the lime add a certain "Je ne sais quoi".


Tags: Money saving  Chilli beef dish  Chilli  Shin beef  Chilli with lime  Chilli with cocoa

Dipping is Dangerous

So apparently the EU is planning on banning olive oil served in jugs or bowls.  Instead we will only be "allowed" sample factory bottled and aseptically sealed oil from an industrial production process.

This is presumably in case a rogue dirty finger is accidentally dipped into a bowl of artisan cold pressed oil.  Horror of horrors.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/10064787/EU-to-ban-olive-oil-jugs-from-restaurants.html

However it's absolutely fine to eat meat produced from animals fed a diet of genetically modified grain, or antibiotic-laced feed or crops dusted with nenicotinoids (NNI) which harm bees. Ireland was one of four countries who abstained from voting to ban them recently. http://www.thejournal.ie/bees-pesticides-ban-890181-Apr2013/.

It's fair to say I became very disillusioned with our food safety "gestapo" a good many years ago.  Food safety to them was ticking boxes and filling in paperwork.  The paperwork and box ticking are almost always made up.  In fact I remember checking fridge temperatures to see why a product kept going off. The bakery worker in question had been diligently filling in the temperature charts. It was only when I looked back, I realised he was filling in football formations, 4 4 2 etc. It was a complete work of fiction.

And this minor example is far from being the only fictional paperwork I observed. I was once asked to forge metal detecting records in one job by the owner of the company.  Needless to say I told him he could do that himself. I could go on with more examples but it might not be such a good idea.

While it is necessary to make sure food is produced and served in a clean environment there is also a much bigger picture that these food police seem to be completely oblivious to.

After all food is dangerous.  It is now with them at the healm. 




Tags: Food Safety  EU Ban on Dipping Oils  Nenicotinoids