Lunch at The Spark

Here is lunch at The Spark, the wonderful publication I edit.

I am still at the Soil Association two-days a week as contributing editor. Now I am editor of The Spark on two more days. My inner-Gemini loves having two jobs, especially as both have ethical, sustainable values.

Every week, we stock the small Spark office fridge with fresh provisions from Better Food, the organic supermarket. On my plate is:

• organic hummous
• Aconbury organic sprouts
• Natural Vitality winter salad with barley and beetroot
• pickled beetroot from a jar
• olives
• slices of fresh local organic chickory.

Wise healers in Ancient Greece counselled eating from a wide range of food, the origin of mezze. Lunch at The Spark fulfils this criteria for nutritional variety.

It fulfils my appetite on other levels too. Free-thinking and alternative, it’s been part of my life since publisher, John Dawson, bought out the first issue in 1993. It’s now the biggest free ethical quarterly in the southwest.

An independent publication, The Spark is a precious thing. Instead of celebrity gossip and relentless doom, it offers inquisitive editorial and practical solutions. The Spark is optimistic. It embodies the idea that it’s better to shine a light than shout at the darkness.

If I want to shine that beam at myself, The Spark can steer me to self-knowledge. I feel I can be more useful and peaceful for acknowledging my demons. As Gandhi put it:

“Be the change you want to see in the world”

The Spark is brimming with creative ways to make a difference, both inner and outer. Whether looking for a therapist or a course on permaculture, it is THE place to advertise if you want to catch 99,000 like-minded people.

The spring 2009 Spark goes out today to indie food shops and local libraries from Glastonbury to Bristol and beyond Bath.  Join The Spark on Facebook and visit The Spark website (heading for its revamp).

Back to my lunch. We have an hour to eat and clear up. Civilised with time to digest. The conversation ranges wide and is, well, sparky.

How was your lunch?

Valentine halibut

Valentine’s day: will I be forgotten or cherished? It’s annoying – an artificial date designed to heighten expectation and thus commerce if not convention. Yet Valentine gets me in his grip each time.

When single, a mystery Valentine card would keep me in romantic reverie for weeks. In a relationship, a special meal is called for.

Do not eat out.  It’s courting gastronomic-folly to dine in a restaurant on one of its busiest nights of the year.

Save your money and eat like a king at home.

I bought a special fish, halibut.  The thick cutlet cost nearly £15. That was for two of us. Yes, expensive, but you’d be lucky to get one serving of its firm-white flesh for that price if eating out.

I am lucky, near both a farmer’s market and an organic supermarket from whence I bought the beautiful ingredients in pic above: all-organic spinach, mushroom, red onion, olive oil and Desiree potatoes from Better Food organic supermarket; and line-caught halibut from David Felce Daughters & Son at Bristol farmers’ market in Corn Street.

We ate our Valentine meal last night because the fish was fresh. Why wait for a good thing?

Under instruction from Mike, I grilled the thick halibut cutlet for about 20 minutes. According to his method, there is no need to preheat the grill. Eco-friendly, I like.

I ground black-pepper thickly on the cutlet as it lay in the grill-pan on a film of olive oil to stop it sticking.

Impetuously, I added a big fat mushroom to the same oiled pan, and adding a teaspoon extra of olive oil on its upturned gills to keep it moist. As Mike does not like garlic, I covered it instead with onion. The red onion looked good.

I slid the grill-pan under the (un-preheated) grill and set the grill to max.

Meanwhile the potatoes were doing their thing in boiling water going from impenetrable to soft as potatoes do.

I steamed the spinach leaves over the potatoes in my triple-steamer – another eco-saving in fuel. I secretly snipped the spinach with scissors to devoid them of too much chew-action.

The red onion softened magnificently while the halibut, an oily fish, was succulent-crispy from its time under the grill.

Afterwards we had hard organic ewe’s cheese (apparently hard cheeses have very little lactose in them and sheep is easier on the gut than cow’s), served with membrillo, or quince jelly, as in Spain. You can buy membrillo in Taste’s new deli in Corn Street – another Bristol supplier to be grateful for.

Then Mike wanted to go out so I had to eat lots of vegan dark chocolate with ginger to wake me up. The music and joyous dance-vibe at the Leftbank bar late last night also helped.

And tonight, it’s Valentine day-proper and Saturday night-to-boot so Bristol is bursting with balls and dances and venues with live music for both couples and the footloose-and-fancy-free. Let’s celebrate love!

How was your Valentine?

Homemade yogurt

I made this yogurt. If I can do it, so can you (I am not known for my technical expertise). It tastes wonderfully-different from anything I can buy in a plastic pot. And ’tis joy-supreme not to be adding to the plastic-pot recycling mountain in my hallway.

I stopped making yogurt after being diagnosed as lactose-intolerant last autumn, but I missed all those zillions of friendly bacteria in my gut. I know I could have made it with soya milk, which I do love (in tea and on oats) but somehow could not bring myself to embrace in yogurt.

So I figured I would experiment with my lactose-intolerant boundaries. For surely my fellow lactose-intolerant eastern-european/middle-eastern ancestors ate yogurt? As a fermented food, yogurt is pre-digested so must be easier to tolerate. Is there a nutritionist in the house? What do you think?

Anyway, on a gut level (so to speak) all I know is my intestines smile when yogurt comes its way, saying hi in a welcoming way. Unlike with milk, which feels too viscous and hard work for my sensitive insides.

Now let me introduce you to my friend, the yogurt-maker. This fairly low-tech device that costs about £20 to buy and pennies to run has enabled me to become yogurt-literate.

You can’t see from my pic but the plastic yogurt-maker has a plug. That’s how it works: switch it on and the yogurt-maker keeps the warmed-milk-that-will-be-yogurt at an even temperature.

Hugh Fearnly-Whittingstall says a wide-mouthed warmed thermos flask does the trick and ditto, a towel to wrap it up in and a radiator – but it’s the nifty yogurt-maker for me.

I say low-tech because it does not switch itself off after the regulatory eight-hours. So it does take planning. I have to ask myself before starting: will I be here in eight-hours to turn off the device?

Here are the ingredients you need to make longevity-boosting yogurt:

1.5 pints (850 mls) of organic milk

2 teaspoons of of natural, bio-live, organic yogurt (or from your last yogurt batch)

You have to boil the milk until it bubbles to get rid of bad bacteria and then let it cool down to blood-temperature i.e. I stick a clean finger into the cooled-down milk  and it feels pleasant and warm – not scalding-hot or, at the other extreme, brrrrr on the chilly side.

I found this operation the most taxing because after the novelty of testing too-hot milk wore off, I then forgot all about the cooling milk and by the time I remembered, it was stone-cold again. So my top tip is: try to keep conscious of time as the milk cools.

Once the boiled milk has cooled to blood-temperature, I put it in the yogurt-maker (that I’ve switched on five minutes beforehand to warm up). Then I stir in two teaspoons of yogurt, which always seems too measly to do the job but that’s all it takes to start the fermentation process. Amazing.

I find yogurt very acceptable first thing in the morning because it is non-demanding and soothing. And I add freshly-ground health-giving spices, such as cinammon, cardammon and cloves for extra zing.

Now for my yogurt-award acceptance speech. Thank you, Martin Smith, ex-propriétaire of  Danescombe Valley Hotel, who demystified yogurt-making; my Indian food guru, Mallika, who has inspired me to use freshly-ground spices from scratch; Maninas, for adding cinammon bark and whole cloves to my repertoire. And finally thanks to Beccy and Hannah at the Spark for explaining how to use the grinder-attachment on my blender…

Who would you thank in your oscar-award speech?

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