The Wednesday saddo-slot

Burning women? NO! … Smoke your own foods? YES!

David Davis

Thought you might all like this. In case it ever goes off, I’ve put on the whole thing. Libertarians ought to be concerned about the creeping State campaign to abolish food that tastes of anything whatsoever. Also, as bought food becomes scarcer owning to clampdowns on lilberal capitalism and free sale of goods without rationing, people will need to know how to grow, farm, gather or otherwise get their own food, and then how to make it taste nice and also LAST LONGER (there is likely to be less electricity to run fridges, even those which survive the coming endarkenment and are still working:-

Smoked foods: how to make your own

It may be illegal to light up a cigarette in a pub, but home-smoked foods are a trend that’s being ignited.

By Rose Prince
Last Updated: 4:38PM GMT 06 Jan 2009

Home smoking: Rose Prince with a plate of trout and prawns Photo: Andrew Crowley

My father used to smoke Player’s Perfectos. They were short, plump and fantastically strong. I knew this last bit first hand, having stolen a handful when inadmissibly young, and tried them out in a hollow box hedge in the garden. He stopped keeping his cigarettes in a box after that.

I didn’t really resent the smoking – as far as I knew he had been born with a cigarette in his hand – except in the car. Our family car had no back seat belts and, in addition to the wind up windows, little sail-shaped vents that opened outwards; especially convenient for smokers to flick their ash, but ineffective ventilators. On long car journeys, we four children bounced around on the back seat, gradually kippered.

I miss cigarettes in pubs, or at least those people who like a cigarette with a drink. Most days the tumbleweed blows through our local, even though it sells quite decent food. In September this year, the British Beer and Pub Association reported that between January and June, there were 36 pubs closing each week, five per day. It is impossible to predict, with fuel and beer prices so high, what proportion of the blame falls upon the government’s decision to ban smoking in pubs. But why did the pubs kill themselves by never installing proper ventilation? Most just stank.

The only smoke to be sniffed now in restaurants is a whiff of it wafting off a slice of smoked salmon. Occasionally, however, something more interesting is going on with chefs “home-smoking” their own fish, pork and duck. The latest trend is to hot-smoke food over burning tea. ‘Lapsang smoked’ is the thing, turning up in a number of restaurants as a long-lost Chinese method. Salad of tea smoked venison with parsnip and quince was an inviting item on a recent Claridge’s menu.

It does not work, of course. Most recipes for tea smoking insist you combine the tea leaves with rice and sugar and the food tastes like it was stuffed up the chimney of a waste incinerator. I tried smoking over the leaves alone, only to get a less confused, mildly smoky tang. It all became rather expensive, too. For any real effect you need lots.

Using wood chips might not be innovative, but their vaporising resins genuinely transform something relatively humble, like trout or pheasant, into an elegant delicacy. Buy a cheap stove-top smoker (see below), or sacrifice an old roasting pan and metal rack to the tar, using foil for a lid. It is all very easy. A whole fish can take as little as fifteen minutes and a duck breast about 30-40 minutes.

But which foods work and which do not? With raw prawns, I found only the shells tasted smoky. Far better were foods like whole fish and breast fillets from game and poultry, all of which benefit from gentle cooking, after which they taste delicately of the oils in the smoke and are unusually juicy. Slices of aubergine also taste good, if dressed after smoking with olive oil, ricotta cheese and a few toasted sourdough breadcrumbs.

Remember that the hot smoking method ‘cooks’ the food – you will not end up with transparent slices of fish, as with cold smoked salmon. And, once you start smoking your own food, it is a good idea to keep a record of your successes and their related weights and timings, variety of wood chips and any additional herbs or spices.

If there is anything left to say about this easy cooking method, it is the bleeding obvious: remember to open the window.

• rose.prince@telegraph.co.uk

• www.roseprince.co.uk

SHOPPING BASKET

You can build your own stove-top smoker by placing wood chips in the bottom of a roasting pan, a sheet of foil on top, a wire rack on top of that – for the food – and finally a lid made from foil. I found it better, in the end, to buy a purpose built type.

Stovetop Smoker with Lid costs £43.99 from Nisbets, which can home deliver (0845 1405555; www.nisbets.com This spacious, simple gadget is made from stainless steel that holds the smoke inside without allowing it to escape. It made a good job of my brown trout (see recipe) and duck breasts. As it’s made of steel it warps slightly when hot, which makes the sliding lid a bit sticky, but it is otherwise practical and cleanable. Put the wood chips in the bottom of the pan, lay over a specially designed tray followed by a rack. Oil the rack, put the food on top and then the lid. Place over a medium heat – timings for cooking are provided. Four varieties of wood chip are available: alder, cherry, hickory and white oak – £5.49.

The delicate flavour of brown trout, cooked over alder smoke, turns out to be quite extraordinarily gentle and subtle. Waitrose is the place to go for brown trout from an organic British farm.

Franklins (01767 627644 for prices; www.franklins.co.uk sells duck breasts, quail, game birds and chicken. John Franklin rears, kills and dresses poultry on his Bedfordshire farm. Visit the farm shop or ask for home delivery.

DIVERSITY: Let’s all now celebrate “indigenous” cultures and “native peoples”. Let’s do this in, say, Bolton, and see what “The Sun” says…

I seem to remember that we pretty much supressed Suttee in India, by agreeing that although is was “their custom” to burn the widow, it was “our custom” immediately afterwards, to hang the murderers.

The pictures are quite high-res: what the f*** was the f*****g   journalist doing, then? Stopping this obscenity, or filming it?

David Davis

If it’s bad-in-Bolton, and we still couldn’t get away with it, isn’t it equally Nasty-and-Gross  in New-Guinea?

I expect it’s a young woman who’d been shagged by one too many “tribal” “elders”. Yep. Burn her. That’s all right isn’t it.

These buggers clearly “love death” (but not, er, ummmm, their own.)

It’s all about diversity of course, and we need to undergo sensitivity-training, to be able to understand why they need to burn this poor young woman.

Car tyres help of course. Oh, and petrol! How could I have forgotten…..?????  Not only can they thumb their nose at our morals, but they can use our technology to make their rituals more exciting.

How long before this sort of thing creeps back to Bolton, or Liverpool?

Tom Harris MP: let’s have a cheer for him, sensible man.

Now then….this is the sort of thing our MPs OUGHT TO BE saying!

David Davis

Apparently “marking schoolwork and tests in red ink” …. wait for it …  “could upset children”. Well, I never! What will the Gramsco-Marxian liberal-culture-razers think of next? But Tom Harris joins us in debunking such pointless PC-nonsense. Hat tip The Devil.

The point that Tom I suspect would like to make, but can’t be seen by his mates to, is that all this rubbish is about destroying institutions, and abolishing cultural and folk links with the past (which is evil and anathema to lefties.) It is the “Year Zero” mentality. Until we can get rid of this meme, we are fighting on the back foot.

ITEM:- I remember that, a while back, Tom Harris bravely published a comment thread which was (a) very long, and (b) largely critical of him and his views, on…..er…..I forget what. Ummmm. Oh, here it is! It’s about our growing progress towards being a Police State. But he was brave and fair (Tom Harris, that is.)

Tungsten light bulbs: buy them now…..

…while you can.

David Davis

Chris Taylor, of Shakespeare Street Southport, tel 01704 544047, still has them, for a bit.

….and Knirirr has something to say about sockets and fittings, and the EU or at least how the EU is projected to people by shops….. (the second one may get you diect to the paragraph.)

HOW TO DISPOSE OF CFL/modern/low energy light bulbs:-

(NOTE: I had in fact typed a carefully-worked out series of instrictions, for how to inconvenience bureaucrats in the course of their “business”, for this slot. But the blog would probably get shut down if I published it.

So, what you should do instead, is (a) smash the bulb, and (b) put the remains in your wheely-bin.)