Monday 26 October 2009

Fish is good for you but........

The sea covers over 70% of the world. The high seas are areas beyond national jurisdiction and are, therefore vulnerable to exploitation and mismanagement. For the last 50 years we have been abusing this resource and the impact of humans on the sea can be devastating.
Fish is rich in protein and low in saturated fat and rich in polyunsaturated fats, particuly the omega-3 fatty acids plus vitamins and iron, zinc, selenium and iodine. A new study suggests that fish protein can help lower high blood pressure. We now eat 5 times as much as we ate in the 1950s. Traditional fishing , of course, cannot possibly supply this demand. So the fish we eat is often farmed or caught by industrial trawler with hi-tech detection devices and nets which are a mile long. Overfishing has led to the fact that many species are at the lowest levels since records began.
Cod, for instance is now vulnerable and near to extinction. Fish stocks of cod, hake, haddock and tuna are only 10% of the levels of fifty years ago. Climate change also affects the plankton and makes the problem worse. Of total fish catches by huge fish factories about 75% is thrown away as bycatch. Sometimes this is simply because it is too small or the wrong species.
So what fish should we eat? Wild prawns from Iceland are caught in well-managed fisheries. Most warm water or tiger prawns are farmed. It takes 4-6 months for a prawn to grow to marketable size and this allows farms to produce two harvests a year.
It is okay to eat Pacific cod, Coley from the Artic or North Sea, Mackerel from Cornwall, Pollack (line caught), farmed salmon, tiger prawns, tilapia (farmed), Tuna from the Pacific. If in doubt look for the Marine Stewardship Council certificate.
Bearing all this in mind here are a few recipes you might like to try. You can if you wish use a fish kettle which is really useful if you are cooking lots of portions or a whole salmon, for instance. You can buy special fish knives and forks to eat the fish , or use a soup spoon to eat the chowder. I have made all these dishes on a regular basis and can recommend them.
Fresh herb crusted coley.
4 fillets of coley
1 garlic clove crushed
100g wholemeal breadcrumbs
zest and juice of 1 lemon
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 handfuls flat leaf parsley chopped roughly
1. Preheat the oven to 200C or Gas 6. Mix the garlic, breadcrumbs, lemon zest, juice, olive oil and parsleu. Season well
2. Top each fillet with the mixture and press down gently. Place on a non-stick oven tray and cook for 25 minutes approx.
Prawns, rice and avocado
125g brown rice
1 tablesp olive oil
1 medium onion, finely chopped
1 finely chopped (not crushed) garlic clove
200g raw tiger prawns
1 red pepper, deseeded and chopped
1 medium courgette sliced and then halved
1 medium avocado
1 tablespoon lemon juice
2 tablespoons half-fat creme fraiche
dash of chilli sauce (Tabasco sauce)
1 teaspoon sea salt
black pepper
Cook the rice until tender and drain and reserve.
Meanwhile heat the oil in a frying pan and saute the onion till soft. Add garlic, prawns, pepper and courgette and stir-fry for 2-3 more minutes.
Peel the avocado, take out the stone and chop the flesh and place in a bowl. Add the lemon juice, creme fraiche, chilli sauce and seasoning and mix roughly together. Pour this into the frying pan and still into the prawns etc. Toss the cooked rice through and serve, still warm.
Parcels of Tilapia, tomato and olives
1 teaspoon olive oil
2 tilapia fish cleaned
1 medium tomato sliced
1 fresh lime sliced
6 stoned black olives roughly chopped
2 tablespoons chopped fresh basil
for the tomato sauce
half a tablespoon olive oil
1 small onion finely chopped
7 oz or 200g can of choppped tomatoes with their liquid
1 teaspoon tomato paste
1 level teaspoon soft brown sugar
1 teaspoon lemon juice
1 teaspoon salt
black pepper
First make the tomato sauce. Heat the oil in a non-stick frying pan, saute the onion till soft. Add the garlic and stir for 1 minute. Add the remaining ingredients, simmer and cook uncovered for 30 minutes approx until you have a rich sauce. If too much liquid evaporates add a little water or tomato juice.
Preheat the oven to 180C/gas4. Brush 2 large sheets of foil with oil and lace the fish in the centre of each. Spoon the sauce over each fish and arrange the tomato and lime slices on top. Sprinkle over the olives and basil and seal up the foil tightly, though leaving plenty of air in the parcels. Cook on a baking tray in the oven for about 30 minutes.
Prawn Chowder
125g/4oz streaky bacon. Rind off and chopped.
4 chopped potaoes
1 large onion finely chopped
1 tablespoon plain flour
1/2 teaspoon curry powder
250g peeled uncooked tiger prawns
1 pint milk
2 tablespoons chopped parsley

Fry bacon till the fat runs and then increase the heat till it begins to brown. Add the potatoes and onion and fry for 5 minutes and then stir in the flour and the curry powder. Add the water gradually, stirring all the time. Season with salt and pepper and bring to the boil stirring. Add the prawns and simmer for 30 minutes until the potato is tender. Pour in the mikl and heat through gently. Check the seasoning and sprinkle with chopped parsley.
Salmon Parcels
4 salmon fillets
juice of 1 lemon,
good handful of chopped corriander
ground black pepper
small knob of butter for each fillet
Heat oven to 180C/ gas 4
You will be making 4 parcels so you need 4 pieces of kitchen foil. Place a piece of salmon on each and put the other ingredients on top. Seal the parcels and place on a baking tray in the oven for 15 minutes. Stand for 5 minutes.







Thursday 22 October 2009

SATs tests should be banned

I do agree that SATs tests for primary school children should be banned. What on earth is the point of them?
Schools will automatically teach to the test and so the curriculum becomes narrower and narrower. Children are under pressure. Teachers who work with the same primary aged children day in and day out know what individuals in their care can do and what they are finding difficult. Teachers can devise their own light touch methods of finding out what a child can do. Teachers know what children have achieved with having some test imposed from outside to try and catch children out.
Why on earth do we expose such young children to such pressure? Surely there is time enough in later life for all that. Can't they just have time to be children and enjoy life a little bit more? Why do our children have to be subjected to more tests than any other children in Europe? So that schools can be judged according to test results? These results are so very predictable. Do we really need league tables to tell us where the well-to-do professional people live or where the areas of social deprivation are?
What happened to trying to make books fun? We should all be bending over backwards to ensure that our children absoultely love books and reading, that they enjoy having stories read to them and discovering the imaginative world of fairy tales and treasure islands, magical tales, myths, legends, adventure stores, stories about children like themselves who do wonderful things, poems, books full of interesting information about the world around them, the stars, ancient history, dinasaurs....... so that they soon wish to read these for themselves. If we could achieve this, the rest would be a walk-over.From reading would come a love of writing. Of making up stories, writing notes, reports, accounts, writing poems and plays to perform,opinions......But what do we do instead? We grind away at phonics, dull exercises, comprehension tests which simply ask children to tell us what we told them.
Have you ever had a primary school child bring a worksheet home where they have to read part of a Greek myth and answer questions on it and then find out that that is all they will be doing about Greek myths and legends? It is utterly soul destroying to compare this with the wonderful Greek legends they could be enjoying and the wonderful writing they could be experiencing.

We kill the love of books stone dead by making reading a chore, by testing, re-testing and testing again. These produce an incredible amount of stress and anxiety for both teachers and children. There are even booster classes, SATs clubs, mock tests! SATs tests are not the best instrument for levering up standards.

Friday 16 October 2009

Royal Mail Industrial Action

Twenty four hour strikes by Royal Mail Staff will begin on 22nd October when mail centre drivers and staff will strike. On 23rd October, delivery and collection staff will strike.
A document leaked to BBC Newsnight said that Royal Mail will deliver the changes it considers necessary "with or without union engagement".
What are these strikes about? The CWU represents 121,000 postal workers and says the dispute is over pay and work schedules at Royal Mail. The CWU wants to see the Royal Mail business plan for the whole planned transformation programme. They want Royal Mail to agree that "change will be introduced by agreement". They want new job security arrangements, a rewards package for delivering success. They want Royal Mail to agree with the union on what constitutes a fair day's work. They are claiming bullying and harassment of postal workers and a resolution to pension issues.
The damage to on line businesses will be immeasurable. This is the run up to Christmas. It should be the businest time of the year for thousands of businesses selling on line. Many businesses are struggling, anyway , because of the recession and this will be the last straw. Larger businesses such as Amazon or Argos have been able to put together contingency plans but small businesses do not have that option.
Charities fear they will lose millions of pounds as a result of the strike as it will hit fundraising and Christmas Card sales.
A postman writing on an on-line forum gave his point of view. He said that older people do not have the option of email and still write letters. Peter Mandelson went on TV in May to press for part privatisation saying that, because of email and technology fewer people were sending letters.
The postman on the forum says he objects to having to work longer hours without extra pay because "figures are down" and that this phrase has become a joke. Workers are only supposed to carry 16 kilos maximum in each of their bags but he overloads the bags rather than carrying up to 10 bags of mail a day.
He says he is paid 1.67 pence for each item of unaddressed mail over and above his wages and he objects to the fact that he can't claim overtime if, because of such items, he works longer than his usual hours. He objects to the fact he cannot refuse to deliver them and he objects to what he sees as his "personal contributuion to global warming" even though he admits this advertisng material is very profitable for Royal Mail.
He maintains that people have never really sent many letters apart from greetings cards and that bills and bank staements and such like are sill sent by post. In addition there are packages from the likes of Ebay and Amazon and the small firms which in his words "clutter up the internet".
Royal Mail's figures show that mail volume went down by 5.5% last year and is predicted to fall by 10% this year because of the growth of electronic communication and the recession. He believes these figures to be false because his round now takes over 4 hours and sometimes he works for 5 hours with no tea break. He wonders why he has a bad back (something to do with overloading his bags, maybe?)
He points out that private mail companies may bid for Royal Mail contracts and that companies such as UK Mail, TNT or City Post undercut Royal Mail in city to city trade. They pick up the mail, sort it, transport it to mail centres and sort it again and then Royal Mail delivers it. In his view Royal Mail does the work but these companies take the profit. They are not obliged, like Royal Mail, to deliver to every house in the land.
In his view volume of mail has risen, even if figures have not. Staff levels, he says, are down by 30%. There are now workers who work six hour shifts and those who work for four hours. The former prepare their own frame of streets and numbers after the mail has already been sorted. They also prepare the post for the 4 hour shift workers. He says only the full-time staff have old fashioned contracts with pension rights whilst the part-timers do not. There is a pension deficit.
The strike in 2007 led to a national agreement of pay and modernisation but he maintains that more and more pressure has been put on full-timers including the sharing of rounds during quiet periods or when volumes fall. He believes this to be provocation and resents the fact that Royal Mail is trying to become a profit making business rather than a public service.
I would be very interested to see what you think of his arguments.

Friday 9 October 2009

Eccentrics in the world of food

Why is it that the world of food and dining is littered with eccentrics? There are some truly wonderful and yet truly strange personalities associated with dining and eating. There are some very determined people out there.

The people we hear about today, for instance, are non the less strange than those of former generations.Take Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall for example, he of the famous "chicken out" campaign. He began his career with conservation work in Africa and then became Sous Chef at River Cafe before he became a journalist. Do you remember his "Cook on the Wild Side" programmes where he picked up road kill and cooked it? I remember a recipe for squirrel and he ate from hedgerows.

Another of my favourites is Marguerite Patten who worked for the Ministry of Food and broadcast advice and ideas on BBC radio during World War 11 in a programme called "Kitchen Front". She had been cooking for her family since she was 13 years old when her father died. Bearing in mind that during the War in 1942 a typical week's ration for a man was 2-4oz cheese (50-100g), 4 oz marg (100g), 1 egg, 2-3 pints milk, 4 oz (100g) bacon then compiling her recipes was no mean feat. Yet they say we were far healthier during the War than we are now.

I also find Delia Smith quite an interesting character. She is the U.K.s best selling cookery author and, indeed, her books helped teach people in this coountry how to cook. She left school at 16 but didn't pass a single "O" level and started her restaurant career washing up. She is joint majority shareholder of Norwich City.

Perhaps the most celebrated celebrity chef of all time , though, should be Alexis Soyer who was the chef of the Reform Club in London. In 1848 when the Irish potato crop failure had caused widespread famine, thousands of people were dying of hunger, Soyer set up a public appeal to fund his soup kitchen.

He went to Dublin and set up a huge tent which contained a coal-fired boiler which held 1360 litres of soup. When ready the first batch of soup was ladled into eight large saucepans. The queue was allowed in 100 people at a time. Each person was given 6 minutes to eat 2 pints of soup, clean their bowl and spoon and leave. In this way he managed to feed 1000 people an hour for 8 hours a day. Those who were too ill or frail had their food delivered to them in carts. Soyer published recipes for cheap and nourishing food and even suggested that vegetable peelings should never be thrown away.

I guess that in his own way George lV was another eccentric who , in his own way, has added to our dining experience. It was he who transformed the banquets from messy medieval-style to the style we know today. Without him the Queen's dinners would look positively dull. It was he who put together the 4,000 piece Grand Service which makes every banquet at the Palace so special. It is made of silver gilt and includes 140 dishes, 288 dinner plates and a huge inventory of knives, forks, spoons, marrow scoopes, ice spades and table sculputures.

Leading from this , our great cutlery manufacturers lead the way in the manufacture of fine cutlery. Arthur Price used to work so hard in his tiny workshop that his wife used to walk round their little garden with him late at night to help keep him awake and eventually his beautiful cultery was being used even as far away as Russia. His family still run the country's best know cultery company to this day.
There are also our great potter such as Wedgewood....I could go on and on.

Finally, I just want to mention a pair of newcomers to the culinary scene. I am mentioning them because I admire their detirmination (and determination is what all the people above have in common. ) They are Kim McCosker & Rachael Bermingham who wrote a cookery book called "4 ingredients". Every recipe in the book consists of only 4 ingredients. It is simple to read, easy to follow and you find you often have the 4 ingredients in stock anyway. They sent their manuscript to every publisher in Australia and not one of them was interested. Undaunted they re-mortgaged and printed the book themselves. They had delivered the books and self-funded book signings all over Australia. Today they have become the number one selling book in Australia and have their own T.V. show. .....so it all just goes to show what a little determination can do!

(information)

Thursday 1 October 2009

Plagio, Brachy - More Awareness and NHS Help Needed

Plagiocephaly, Brachycephaly are medical terms for mis-shapen heads on babies, now known to many parents as flat head syndrome. This can easily be treated by wearing what I call a special helmet for the growth to be redirected into the correct parts. The helmet is very light weight and shaved out inside where the head needs to grow to get a better symmetrical shape. NHS class it as cosmetic, but you can get all sorts of cosmetic surgery on the NHS, however no one will accept this is a problem in children, yes some children with flat head syndrome will grow out of it over time and given the exercise early and follow it, it can be corrected. There are many older children around you see with the flatness on their heads but I feel there is more needed to be done with the health service on this.
Speaking from personal experience, our little girl was born, natural birth but we noticed at six weeks her head shape was just not right, flat on one side, wide and her forehead slightly bulging and her ear alignment slightly out together with one flat ear, concerns were brought to many of our GP’S and health visitors but no one would accept there was a problem and advised it will grow out, checked out many searches but in the region of £3000 plus for treatment.
Anyway whilst shopping noticed two sets of parents each with a child in a special helmet that I had read about, very nervous I asked each of them if it what I thought it was and showed them my concerns, i was told me to get it checked out and you will get no help from GP’s etc. Found a clinic local to us, they scanned my daughter and she was classed a suffering from severe plagio and brachy, they gave me all the figures of her head measurements and told me if we wanted to achieve good results we need to put our plan into action as soon as possible, she was now at 9 months old. Treatment started two weeks later and at a cost of £1850.00 to us, she completed her treatment at the age of 2 with fantastic results. As she was slow growing, very petite little girl, there is very little flattening left but nothing anyone will notice. During treatment our local newspaper carried a story, also we were on the local news all to bring awareness for other parents not to suffer and banging their head against a brick wall, this should not have to happen, the NHS needs to bring awareness to everyone.
Parents of children with plagio and brachy are not aware that there is help out there, the NHS class this treatment as cosmetic. There are a few hospitals now that will treat your child after a referral from your doctor, but the lists are long and by the time you get seen your child may have missed their chance for treatment. My argument is mother intuition is always right you know there is a problem and wish for someone to help you. It turned out my daughter probably had tightening of the neck muscles (torticollis) at birth and may be a factor in her plagio. There are many forums available for anyone to obtain advice, from other mums including http://www.plagiocephalycare.org, http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/AllAboutPlagiocephaly The one I was joined too is no longer running PlagioUK - MSN whenever you need advice pop onto the forums, there will always be someone there to help you. If caught early some children can be treated and a helmet may never be needed. You are given every sort of leaflet when you have your baby on all different things I feel there should be one on Plagio to bring awareness, the only advice I can give if you feel your child has flat head syndrome -please seek advice, many of the clinics will see you and give you advice and the first consultation is free so you have nothing to lose. Many parents have had to have fund raising events to raise the money for their child. I feel you shouldn’t have to do this, you pay your taxes and national insurance and I personally feel should be taken out of the NHS funds.