Joined-up Eating

Yesterday's evening meal made me think about how proper cooking is not just about individual dishes. We had a mushroom risotto (I can never write or say the word risotto now without thinking of Stephen Fry's deliberately pretentious enunciation of it in a sketch years back - riso.........tto) made with lovely jellied stock from a ham hock cooked on Sunday for eating cold in a light first course on Monday. Joe, my harshest critic, said the risotto was the best thing I'd cooked for weeks. He meant well.





Joined-up also tends to mean economic. The hock was I think £1.69 from Morrison's (best of the big-four supermarkets as regards butcheries, their animals have both extremities and innards, Sainsbury's beasts these days are only made of roasts and chops it appears) and it did that starter, much of my lunch yesterday, and the risotto, plus the last shards were eaten at breakfast today). A chicken does at least three substantial dishes - roast, the remainder in a stir-fry, ragout, curry or similar, and always (or nearly so) broth or if already picked clean stock made from the carcase. By my reckoning the risotto cost about £3.50: £1.50 for mushrooms, say 50p for half a box of risotto rice, and £1 for a lot of parmesan, plus pennies for onion, 'basic' tiny pepper, and garlic.