I think it's likely that a number of very disillusioned Dems are going to start questioning the validity of electoral politics over the next few weeks.

When I did the same, some years back, I was very lucky that the people I followed, followed back, and conversed with on Twitter (at the time) were pretty gentle with me as I worked through, basically, Anarchism 101 ("but what about burglars?" "you don't mean, like, ALL police, though, surely?" and all sorts of "yeah, I suppose, but..." that I had whilst I was unlearning a lifetime of propaganda - whether I was inclined to unlearn it or not, it was still *hard work*)

I hope we can be as gentle and welcoming to them as the people I spoke with back then were to me.

Not even a murmur of "irregularities" or "rigging" or "demand a recount"

Just...welp, that's that then.

@TheDailyBurble @FinalOverdrive @simon_brooke @HeavenlyPossum @SallyStrange @Shivviness @MAJ1

I think I'm just struggling to understand what you mean by wilderness. I'm not sure if you mean "places where people live but only live very lightly", or "places where people don't live, but can visit, as long as they don't take anything or leave anything" (like a National Park, or something like the New Forest in the UK, off the very top of my head)

I mean, I'm totally up for more "wilderness-like" spaces and less mono-cropped farms and fences. 100%. I've just got an idea that we're talking about different things.

People still have to live though, and involves an amount of altering the environment, there's just no getting away from that.

@TheDailyBurble @FinalOverdrive @simon_brooke @HeavenlyPossum @SallyStrange @Shivviness @MAJ1

Yes, but we don't have a history of knowingly killing off vast swathes of "wilderness" for most of our existence*, up until the past few centuries.

And yes, it's about making money - or more accurately, in concentrating money into fewer and fewer hands.

*heavy caveat: Obviously there'll be exceptions where mistakes have been made, either honest ones or greed-driven ones.

@TheDailyBurble @FinalOverdrive @simon_brooke @HeavenlyPossum @SallyStrange @Shivviness @MAJ1 Balance is what I meant by equilibrium, for sure.

Even in a wilderness, it's a constantly shifting environment as some creatures move, some die off, new plant life is introduced by migratory animals and so on.

And whilst we have been spectacularly bad at stewarding the earth we live on - no disagreement there from me! - there have been times and places when we were actually, overall, pretty good at it.

It's only really over past maybe 300 years that we've got *catastrophically* bad at it, and the reasons for that aren't that "we" (humanity, I mean) are naturally bad it overall, but that we changed our relationship with the planet as new forms of society became embedded (capitalism, basically).

@FinalOverdrive @TheDailyBurble @simon_brooke @HeavenlyPossum @SallyStrange @Shivviness @MAJ1 I don't know why we'd want to?

We can hope to achieve some kind of "equilibrium", sure, but letting it "just be" implies an, I dunno, inertness which is literally impossible. Every living thing acts upon the earth in some way, consciously or not, just to live.

Hey all - my disabled friend is struggling physically right now and unable to cook.

Will need to order in - can anyone help him get some food on the table today?

https://kolektiva.social/@psychoalpastor/113336993731145831

@dentangle @skinnylatte @arichtman

If I can batch the meat/protein, that would be ideal - superplus ideal if I can do the sauces too.

(In the same way that British Indian Restaurant cooking is largely batched and then stir-fried to order)

I've done beef in black bean a few times for them, that went down well.

In terms of authenticity, this might sound questionable, and I'm very aware of this - but I need it to be within shouting distance of what they'd get from a take-away, as my primary purpose is "feeding them".

I've spent enough weeks/months/years in my life all over China and Hong Kong to know that a chicken chow mein from the local "Mandarin Palace" is *not* authentic, but I need - right now - to be able to replicate Mandarin Palace

@dentangle @skinnylatte @arichtman

That seems sensible - I can see that doing a batch of sauce, and pre-chopping the veg would make things easier.

I can't imagine that marinading/cooking the meat/protein in batches or ahead of time would be sensible , but again, very open to correction.

Feels do-able, given my limitations; probably just not every night.

Is there anything you'd be happy batch-cooking for microwave/easy re-heating later?

This is me thinking more about the people I deliver food to, more than myself, and is why I specified Cantonese - they'd love a "Chinese Take-Away", and Cantonese is largely what British Chinese Takeaways are.

@dentangle
@skinnylatte @arichtman

Not urgent, but at some point: I wouldn't mind learning if there's any pre-prep tricks that could make things easier for Cantonese cooking?

I enjoy the cookery, and love the food, but haven't done it for ages, due to (in my *very limited* experience) having to do the whole dish from scratch on the night, which is often beyond me nowadays.

After nine days of curing, I'm ready to cook this.

I've taken a small amount off for tonight's dinner, which I'm going to cook separately, then re-tied the rest with kitchen string to hold the shape. I've rinsed the cure off, and it's now in the oven at 150c, in a covered casserole, with a cup of water, for 3 hours. I'll turn at 1 hr 30, but I'm hoping 3 hours should do it.

When I've done salt beef before, I've cooked it entirely submerged in liquid, so it will be interesting to see how this comes out with only a very small amount of liquid.

(I had a bit of a panic when I found the previous post and it said "6 days ago". Definite benefits of being able to check the meta-data on my earlier photo, plus checking back through my bullet journal to confirm that I originally put it in the cure on the 10th!)

@dentangle

This looks good!

@skinnylatte @arichtman

Bugger.

I need some help, I'm afraid.

I currently have £87.90 to last me until the 25th October.

My utilities are covered, but I need to cover food for me, a friend, and her two children. Anything beyond that goes outside of my immediate circle and into people worse off than us.

Very roughly, £150 covers me and people who literally have nowhere else to go. I think with that I can cover it all. Anything more and it will go to people outside of my immediate circle.

https://ko-fi.com/neonsnake

At the same time, I'm also doing some preserving, based on some older recipes I've found.

This one is salt beef, slightly distinct from my normal salt beef in that it's a drycure. Apparently it was popularly known as ""Spiced Beef" or "Huntsman's Beef", and was a breakfast dish eaten by people hunting away from home.

Now, I'm a little uncertain about the veracity of this. I regularly make salt beef, and my recipe is a *wetcure* of salt-petre, salt, sugar, juniper berries, black pepper and allspice (ie. the meat is covered by water with the spices mixed in, and then is cooked after a week or so in the cure)

This time, I'm attempting as mentioned, a drycure - the spices are exactly the same, just in slightly different proportions.

What I'm struggling to do is verify that this is genuinely a British dish - this isn't to ignore influences, at all, but normally I can at least have a stab at the history.

Here, I *think* this might primarily be a Pakistani dish, as most sources for "Hunters' Beef" bring up a version spiced with cumin, cinnamon and other Pakistani spices (and are labelled as "Pakistani Hunter's Beef"), so I'm unsure.

Obviously, with our history in the UK, colonialism plays a huge part, so it's hard to tell which way the "exchange" went, when it comes to food. Whilst I very much appreciate the "exchange", I also don't like to be able to fully understand the history, and on this one I'm not sure I do.

Either way, I'm going to give it a go. This needs to cure for a week or so, being turned every day, after which I will boil for a couple hours before slicing. The cure should mean that the cooked slices will last for a good few weeks in the fridge (as, in earlier times, they would last if taken out on the hunt)

Ok, pies!

Pies are, of course, a quintessentially British invention. Apparently, 75% of the British population eat a pie once a month or more. Pies are very much associated with the working classes, and indeed a common football chant dating from the 1890s includes "who ate all the pies?" aimed at those deemed to be overweight through poor diet.

So British, in fact, that we, uh, had to send someone to Egypt in something like the 10th Century BC to invent them.

*cough*

Tongue now removed from cheek:

The earliest record we have of pies is in ancient Egypt, a pastry casing around a filling of honey, grains, and dried fruit or meat.

Records from 500 BC Greece and Rome have similar recipes.

Often the pastry casing was not intended to be consumed, but was intended to keep the filling fresh by protecting it from the air, and would be discarded. Think of it like a air-tight tupperware.

Over time, and as we get into the Middle Ages, the pie evolved. The casing became part of the meal itself, and the distinction between savoury and sweet became more distinct

Pies became on one hand, a way of showing off at expensive banquets ("four and twenty blackbirds"), but also still a way of stretching small amounts of meat for portable lunches.

I made here, a chicken and ham pie. Pie fillings have some regionality, this would be from Cornwall, roughly.

The meats were both cooked and leftover from previous meals. The pie filling is flavoured strongly with nutmeg and parsley, both commonly available, not expensive and by no means the exclusive province of the rich, as I want to start demonstrating the incorporation of herbs and spices into our meals. This is an easy start without suddenly moving from pottage to full-fledged spice mixes.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wY8yDGreaZDSYRRTfwVR0-iJKFuWTEinLqRuZYJGqp4/edit?tab=t.0

(I made it with mashed potatoes and peas, and leftover onion gravy that I made a couple nights back. I made it using a few of those rectangular tinfoil dishes to get the shape/portion size right, and because they're easy to take to other people - I got 4 portions from the recipe, and each "tin-sized" portion could arguably serve two people!)

I should and will note that "pies" are one of those dishes, like bread, that seems to appear in most cuisines that I know of across the world (in the sense of "a filling wrapped in a flour-based casing"), but I'm concentrating on British food right now.

Toad In The Hole with Onion Gravy

Having spoken about Yorkshire Puddings yesterday, and with a half-dozen sausages on hand, I decided to make Toad In The Hole.

Again, it's not a particular mythical dish, with origins lost in the mists of time - it can be dated to roughly the late 18th Century, and is another way of stretching a small amount of meat.

Typically nowadays we use sausages, but all sorts of meat can be used - for instance, a cheap cut of beef, diced, was reasonably popular at the time.

I also made onion gravy - if you're vegan/vegetarian and miss gravy, I thoroughly recommend this. Whilst I've stuck with traditional ingredients this time, any umami that you want to add will work (Maggi liquid seasoning is a good one).

Other than the gravy, I served with swede & carrot mash as I had leftover swede, and peas to get some green on the plate.

Vegan sausages work in this very well.

(I've not personally made batter without milk and eggs, but I see no reason why it wouldn't be possible with something like oak milk and aquafaba)

Recipe links below:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jCM0KfwYAGMZa0vzaOxrRXRUpl00GqaakYTHWoLf6O0/edit?tab=t.0

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gFARiD9FXM5FOmFPDCHgRbVmLskFUGh1VFXJMzAIncY/edit?tab=t.0

From about 3lbs of beef (1.4 kg) for a cost of just shy of £15, I got - initially - four portions of roast dinner, 2 adult and 2 kids size.

The next day, I put the leftovers in the freezer for half hour, and then ran about half through a meat slicer, on about 2mm. From this, I made 4 portions of roast beef sandwiches, served on baguettes with rocket (arugula) and horseradish. The rest - about 3/4 lb (350g) I diced very roughly for stew (I got 4 good sized adult portions from it)

I have a large number of recipes for "meat and barley" stews - the one linked below uses swede rather than potato, but they're all similar. Use a small amount of meat, and stretch it using barley, vegetables, and flavour it with stock and herbs.

Meat, used frugally, and padded out with vegetables, herbs, spice, and broth, served with bread, is what used to be know as "pottage", the famously stereotypical dish of British peasants. All of the various dishes - be it the below, or Irish stew, or Scotch broth, or the others, are (as best as I can tell, and I'd love others' opinions) variants on pottage that have survived to modern day.

The one I made (beef with carrots, onions, potato and beef, with the barley) is known as "lobscouse", is a regional variant from Liverpool, and is why Liverpudlians are known as "Scousers".

Purists will say that it *has* to have carrot, potato and onion. I'm trying not to stray *too far* from the original dishes, but I also believe that as a "thrift" meal, adding swede instead of/as well as potato does not render it inadmissible.

I probably added more barley than is traditional, but, uh, I really like barley (some recipes don't use it at all, just the meat and vegetables)

During the cooking, if using potato but not, one would mash the potato a little once it's softened, and that would add as the thickener.

It's worth noting that as well as herbs like thyme, marjoram or rosemary - which would be available in many a kitchen garden, that it would be seasoned *heavily* with pepper (often white pepper, not black), which would give it a certain amount of heat. Without getting into the whole "spice" conversation right now, we did use more pepper than I think is generally understood, given that's what we had access to for everyday meals.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1k9koRuz1svZZu8oDWd_pf5kAuZaniJ1acDiGyuEUbVM/edit?tab=t.0

@dentangle Yeah, I don't *think* I remember it ever being cooked in a pan underneath, but that's apparently the origin - I'm guessing that was back in the "cook the meat in an open hearth" days?

@dentangle I wonder if that's a difference between typical kitchens? From memory, we'd use the oven much more than the stove (don't hold me to that, though)

Heh. My parents were both 1946 babies (Nan and Grandad evidently having, uh, somewhat missed each other whilst separated during the War...), so I had a mix. I definitely had to finish everything on the plate, but also was expected to be, I dunno, polite and well-mannered about it.

@dentangle Yorkshire pudding is a thing of beauty. I don't *wholly* remember, but I'm pretty sure my own mum served with every roast, regardless of meat.

She generally made them small - like, I think she used a muffin tray to make them. A bit like the Aunt Bessie size, I guess.

I made them larger for the photo (it's a very old photo in the individual shot) for aesthetics, but I normally just use the biggest loaf tin I have - bigger the better, as far as I'm concerned

...I'm gonna have to do toad in the hole next, aren't I?