Oh, Delia, what have you done?

[red]

nah you are fine, WW - i have ranted all over the internet on this subject!!,

[ina]

It will taste BETTER but if you are so used to said pasta and frozen potato, you won’t know the difference, think you have done it wrong ergo you can’t cook so you don’t bother…..!

In fact - folk will prefer the stuff out of a tin or frozen, because that's what they are used to - if it doesn't have additives etc it won't taste "right"!

Comment on a lovely homemade rice pudding of mine: it was OK, but not quite like the "real" stuff - i.e. out of a tin.

I'll share the soapbox with you, if I may - one of my favourite rants!

[maggienetball]

I have been watching Delia's new series with horrified, open mouthed addiction. I CANNOT believe what I am seeing and hearing from her and I continue to watch as I don't want to miss what daft thing she does or says next.
I nearly passed out when I saw her take produce to a food lab and ask about E numbers. "Oh they're alright" she was told "E stands for European. It's just a way of listing ingredients"
She is (almost) single-handedly undermining all the slow good education that the public have been getting about additives, farmed, organic, genetically modified, healthy produce etc etc etc.
Whether I like it or not, Delia has always been a standard that the general public have accepted. Unfortunately her interests now appear to lie solely in self publication and she has little regard for the health of the country. I would place money on the fact that she doesn't feed any of her family the expensive (environmental, moral and financial) crap she is trying to persuade the British public to eat.
My blood boils over..... and yet I still watch!

[ina]

I nearly passed out when I saw her take produce to a food lab and ask about E numbers. "Oh they're alright" she was told "E stands for European. It's just a way of listing ingredients"

I love that! So the ingredients in my shortbread, for example, are Ebutter, Eflour, and Esugar? Wooohoo - how did I ever manage without knowing this!

[Hawthorn]

Previously I was of the mind that the 3 for a fiver chickens were just grand, thank you very much.......then I watched the Jamie oliver thing.
Since then, we've eaten much less chicken. As a family of six on a low income, the cheap chickens were probably our main source of protein.

What I didn't realise, and probably what your average joe in the street doesn't realise, is that we eat, as a nation, far more protein than the body actually needs.

I still can't afford to go organic, but what I DO do, is buy local meat from our butchers. It's good quality, cheaper if you buy in bulk, and much nicer than the supermarket stuff. Also, supporting a local business, rather than a supermarket.

What I would be interested in seeing (sorry to the likes of Jamie Oliver) is good basic home cooking books. None of the fancy ingredients that are quite frankly, difficult to source. Not all of us have the cash for these fancy ingredients.

I'd like to see how to make a good, tasty, shepherds pie, or a steak and kidney pie. Stews and soups. In essence, a return to the older days where fancy ingredients weren't available.

I can't comment so much on Delia smith, as I've never read her books, but I don't like what she's doing promoting the 'fast food' issue. It does nothing to support local businesses and if she carries on like that and everyone listens, then supermarkets will rule and your average street trader will go bust.

Besides, have you ever had tinned mince? It's FOUL.

We need to see a return to home growing too, IMO. The working garden is becoming pretty scarce in the UK. There are lots of very nice flower gardens about, and ones that are professionally landscape designer sorted, but what a waste of space, honestly. Everything today is about how things appear.......we want pretty, not functional.

Even people putting aside enough space for a square foot garden dedicated to growing veg would improve the nations health, if everyone did it.

I'm sure that was really not on topic, but hey ho

[ina]

We need to see a return to home growing too, IMO. The working garden is becoming pretty scarce in the UK. There are lots of very nice flower gardens about, and ones that are professionally landscape designer sorted, but what a waste of space, honestly.

Actually, I think the veg gardens are on the up... I read or heard somewhere that garden centres are noticing a difference; fewer flowers sold, more veg seeds and plants.

There is a garden (connected to one of the "big houses", in Arbuthnot) near here that I really enjoyed last year: they have all the usual pretty stuff - although it's not so terribly landscaped, more as if an enthusiast got carried away somewhere along the line, plus they have their veg beds in amongst all that! So we could compare their broccoli with ours at home...

[cathousefood]

Does nobody understand the market Delia is trying to reach? It certainly isn't the hard up!

It is for people who probably work, don't have the time to cook and or have never really been able to. So instead of continously eating TV dinners or buying take aways she is giving you a chance to mix some pre-packed foods with wholesome good food.

Nothing wrong with frozen fish or indeed frozen vegetables, if you look on the packaging they are very natural and probably fresher and have more goodness in them than the stuff in the fresh count which has be drenched in chemicals to preserve it.

As for the chicken debate, who remembers the days (and they weren't so long ago) when chicken was a luxury? I don't blame the farmers or the likes of Delia, the Government made us farm chickens and fish in the cruel way we do today. They told us eating meat wasn't good for us and chicken and fish were better, this is where the crulety in farming chickens and fish stems from!

I think her programme is superb

[MKG]

See - parallel universes do exist.

[contadina]

Hi Hawthorn, I'd recommend trawling through your local charity shop recipe books as I've picked some wonderful no-nonsense cookbooks form the 60s, 70, and 80s this way.

[oldfella]

Hi Hawthorn have a look on the net for wartime recipes; Most families lived from their allotments during this time, in fact I was in an orphanage and the we used grow most of our veg and kept chickens and we were as fit as fleas and never went hungry, and ate a lot of this

[the.fee.fairy]

Does nobody understand the market Delia is trying to reach? It certainly isn't the hard up!

It is for people who probably work, don't have the time to cook and or have never really been able to. So instead of continously eating TV dinners or buying take aways she is giving you a chance to mix some pre-packed foods with wholesome good food.

Nothing wrong with frozen fish or indeed frozen vegetables, if you look on the packaging they are very natural and probably fresher and have more goodness in them than the stuff in the fresh count which has be drenched in chemicals to preserve it.

As for the chicken debate, who remembers the days (and they weren't so long ago) when chicken was a luxury? I don't blame the farmers or the likes of Delia, the Government made us farm chickens and fish in the cruel way we do today. They told us eating meat wasn't good for us and chicken and fish were better, this is where the crulety in farming chickens and fish stems from!

I think her programme is superb

You are correct, it is not the hard up, she is not pushing 'value' or 'own label items.

You are also correct in the fact that frozen veg are just as good as fresh nutritionally. however, having been trained to taste, i can tell you for a fact that there is a whole different world of taste. Frozen and tinned fruit and vegetables also only come in a number of types - carrots, peas etc. By eating fresh veg, you get more of an appreciation for the tastes and textures of different vegetables. There are so many ways of cooking fresh veg, yet frozen and tinned vegetables can't be cooked in those manners (i have tried, on occasion to roast frozen carrots...).

For me, the biggest problem is that people are losing their sense of taste. We are becoming much more american in our appetites. We like sweet, salty, seasoned food. This is because it is fed to us on a daily basis. We are made to believe that cooking is a chore that should be over as quickly as possible, as long as it looks good. Not that cooking is something to be enjoyed, eating is something to enjoy.

Most of the Delia recipes i've seen from this new recipe remind me of school mush - that reheated, stewed stuff that was supposed to be spaghetti bolognese or whatever but looked exactly the same as yesterday's roast beef... I like food, i like eating, i LOVE tasting, i enjoy texture, and sound and colour. Therefore, personally, i choose fresh food, if i'm not going to use all the carrots i have before they go beyond nice, i'l cook them, mash them and freeze them. Then i have some to go in soups, or to be mixed with mashed swede, or just as a side vegetable with some butter and black pepper.

If Delia was showing people how to cook these things properly, there would be less waste, less rubbish to throw away, and more enjoyment. If the media on the whole took a second go at the food phenomenon, then we as a nation would enjoy our food more. As it is, we are made to feel guilty for eating.

That's why there are so many cooking programmes. It is food p0rn. We look at the cooking programmes because its almost guilt free pleasure. We get to watch James Martin cooking up some gorgeous looking cake, and we enjoy it in a voyeuristic manner (some of us more than others...i particularly enjoy James Martin, but its not necessarily for his cooking skills...), the same way that people watch adult films. A voyeuristic pleasure. That's why fet1sh films are so popular, a lot of people enjoy watching them but they wouldn't do it in real life. Its the same with food. People like watching the programmes, but feel a little guilty if they bake their own cake. Look how many calories are in a cake...but T**cos say that they have a low fat cake...better buy that one.

The chicken argument, i'm not getting into. I refuse to eat anything that's not free range. I don't believe in another animal suffering for me to eat.

[wulf]

I watched one episode on the BBC iPlayer. It seemed a very odd sort of cookery programme - mainly about opening tins and packets combined with a visit to the people who stock supermarket shelves (so in bed with big business) and a trip out with Sister Wendy (art critic and nun... no comment on the food they were eating).

Are we sure Delia didn't get kidnapped by Aliens? Perhaps this is an elaborate set up for a Dr Who plot (now there's an idea for immersive television - unrelated programmes that start to interact with each other!).

I don't feel inspired to go back for another helping but I was wondering if she addresses the reuse or recycling of all the tins and jars she is getting through? That is another significant impact of our "can't be bothered to cook from scratch" culture because, between us, we generate frightening levels of waste.

Wulf

[ina]

Are we sure Delia didn't get kidnapped by Aliens? Perhaps this is an elaborate set up for a Dr Who plot (now there's an idea for immersive television - unrelated programmes that start to interact with each other!).

Sounds frightening, but not impossible! Anything to get the viewer numbers up...

[MKG]

Naaahhh ... Kidnapping implies that either the aliens wanted her or that we would want her back ...

Just as a matter of interest, I timed myself the other say. Although I would normally leave it for appreciably longer, I discovered that you can produce a Bolognese-type sauce, completely from scratch apart from the tinned tomatoes (but then the British climate isn't my fault) in twenty minutes. You can beat this easily by buying a jar of Bolognese-type sauce. On the other hand, doing it the current Delia way (tin of mince, pre-softened onions, garlic puree, etc. etc. is, I reckon, going to take you at least 15 minutes. Is anyone so sadly desperate as to want to save 5 minutes? Only, I suggest, the same people who insist upon dangerous traffic-queue jumping (you know - the in and out merchants). It's been calculated by the police that doing that during a fairly standard 15-minute run in heavy traffic will save you (trumpet fanfare) - a whole minute.

[Millymollymandy]

As for the chicken debate, who remembers the days (and they weren't so long ago) when chicken was a luxury?

No!

Chicken is a luxury NOW because of the prices, and because anyone who cares don't buy those cheap disgusting tough intensively reared birds!