Food Pyramids and Star Charts

Beating Egg-White

Knives incl:
How to Cut Pockets in a Breast of Chicken
How to Bash the Living Daylights out of a Breast of Chicken so you can Roll it Around Stuffing ! :)

Oils and Vinegars

Breadcrumbs

FAQ: How To Get The Seeds Out Of A Pomegranate

Abbreviations

All the Tables:
Meat Cooking Times
Conversion Tables
Cake Tin Sizes
Scaling up Cake Recipes to Match Tin Size

Food Pyramids and Star Charts

James.

The kids are taught¹ the food pyramid in primary school here (Ireland). When they meet soup they're over-loved to find that this bowl of red/orange/yellow stuff in front of them boosts up their fruit & veggie count for the day.

A food-pyramid star chart for the kids is amazingly effective (AND also an interesting mini-science project for geeky adults). The kids love ticking off boxes or getting a star for each portion. Beware that they can be very disappointed if they don't manage to complete each daily chart! Doing the exercise for a couple of weeks really gives the adults a good idea what is being consumed as well.

Star charts for doing homework and violin practice (substitute activities as appropriate according to age of child) are something that can be used to really focus on something like behaviour maybe for a couple of weeks.

A treat can be agreed at the end of the week if all stars are achieved but having a prize/reward isn't necessary.

¹Teaching 5 year olds is funny. They can have amazing belief in what they're taught. Kate is saying some amazing things about God for the past few months. I have introduced her to the concept that not all people in the world don't believe in the same God and some people even don't believe that any God exists. I haven't yet broken it to her that there really isn't a God though! :-7 Funny as Daire never quite had that fundamental belief in God even though he would have done a little general God stuff in creche and then proper religion in primary school the same as Kate. Back

Beating egg-white

Right ... it's hard work. But made easier when you know a few things. James.

I have on occasion experienced the frustration of whipping & beating egg white severely for quite a long time with very poor results. After giving up after a half-hour say with my arm falling off, a more experienced cook would come along, whip for a few minutes and presto! Stiff egg! Yayy.

The reason for this is probably to do with the fact that egg white is a bit of a strange substance. Well, not really strange. I'd love to know the chemistry of what's going on. If anyone can enlighten me please do so.

So the tips:

The bowl the egg-white goes in must be spotless, as must be the whisk & fork. Make sure they're all dry too. Egg-white becomes impossible/much harder to beat if it encounters any grease.

WARNING: there is grease in egg-yolk so make sure it doesn't get in the white. I have managed to beat white after extracting a little yolk carefully though.

The idea is to get air into the egg. A whisk is much better than a fork ... but if reduced to using a fork don't despair. It's all in the movement. Hold the bowl on its side so you can really get under the egg with the fork. Whip it up from underneath almost picking the egg up. Arm must get sore ... it takes a few minutes of hard whipping but stick with it.
Use a huge bowl. Even for a small amount of egg. you can really let fly and whip it up better without spilling most of it all over.

You're done when the egg-white is white and bubbly and stands up in peaks. Very satisfying.

Knives

P.

I thought I'd put in a few comments on knives here. Why ? Because my knives are the most important thing in my kitchen. I love my blitzers and buzzers and food processors and food mixers, but a the end of the day my knives are all important. They are good. They are sharp, very sharp. They live on a magnetic knife board, because we don't have space for a knife block. They never, ever, ever go next or near a drawer, unless still in their original boxes as I don't want them to blunt from rubbing off other knives. They never, ever, ever go into a dishwasher (not that we have one – but still) cause I don't want them to blunt. I wash them as soon as I can after using them, especially if I have been cutting anything acidic (tomatoes, citrus fruits) again so that they don't get damaged. Spotting a trend here ?

I never appreciated how good a decent sharp knife can be till I got the ones I have now. I had some Victorinox ones, and sure they were nice, but now we have Wüsthof knives, and wow. They sink through tomatoes, Slice through roasts like they were butter, and slicing the finest of slices is an absolute doddle. John and Anita have Goldhamsters from Sollicut – same thing. Wow.

One thing though – and it is important. If you are going to use decent knives then you need to have a few. Different knives are suited to different jobs. Might sound stupid, but it's not. It's actually a safety thing. These knives will take the top off your finger before you'd even notice it. Using the wrong knife is a recipe for disaster. Similarly fecking the knife into the sink with the rest of the dishes to be washed off not only runs the risk of you chopping half your fingers off, but will also damage your knife.

So if you're looking to spoil yourself with something a little different, or need a gift idea for someone who loves to cook then think about investing in the start of a collection. It won't be cheap – but it's well worth every penny in my view.

Using your knives
So now that you know about knives here's a few related topics on using them:

How to Cut Pockets in a Breast of Chicken
How to Bash the Living Daylights out of a Breast of Chicken so you can Roll it Around Stuffing ! :)

How to Cut Pockets in a Breast of Chicken

Here's a description I originally wrote up for boards. JC...
(with extra diagrams by me - numbers in on the diagram are referred to in the text. Red lines in the diagram are cutting guides. P.)

On a breast of chicken, there's usually a "mini-fillet" on the back. Remove this and keep it for later. There's often a bit of white sinew running through this - carefully cut it out (with a sharp knife, its pretty easy to run the knife underneath it, removing a minimum of meat with the sinew).
The breast will usually be thicker on one side than the other. Cut a shallow slash from the *thin* side (carefully and using a sharp knife) towards the thick side down the length (1). Continue using shallow slashes to deepen the pocket. This way, if you start going towards the edge, you can easily correct the direction on the next slash.
You now have created a pocket you can stuff.
When you have the chicken stuffed, you can then bat out the "mini-fillet" you removed earlier, and use this as a cover for the pocket opening. Make sure that this part of the chicken is in the middle of the ham when you wrap, and you will get no leakage and avoid having to use a toothpick or something to hold the chicken closed. Additionally, if you have made a mistake during your cutting of the pocket, you can use the minifillet to close over whatever hole you cut.

How to Bash the Living Daylights out of a Breast of Chicken so you can Roll it Around Stuffing ! :)

Right so this is really similar to the previous method, and it's fun :) . As before there is a diagram that might help if you don't understand any of the steps. Numbers in on the diagram are referred to in the text. Red lines in the diagram are cutting guides.

Generally follow the cutting steps, although in this case you will be slicing the breast in half, not just cutting a pocket into it (1 + 2). DON'T cut it all the way through (2) you want to be able to open it out – like butterfly wings for want of a better analogy.
Now once it's open out place it on a piece of cling film, using you knife put a few small slashes into any thicker parts of the meat (3) and cover it with a second piece of cligfilm.
Take your wooden/plastic rolling pin, or if you don't have this a saucepan will do fine ( hold by the handle and hit with the base), and bash, bash, bash away till you have a nice flat piece of chicken. Do be careful not to over bash it though or you'll have chicken pulp and not a flat piece of meat.
Remove top layer of cling film, use a piece of bashed up minifilet to help cover any holes if needs be, spread filling on chicken and with the help of the cling film underneath roll it up like a swiss roll (4).
And if it's not chicken ?
The same principles outlined above can be applied to other cuts of meat. For example the first method is ideal for using on pork chops, fillets of lamb or a nice chunk of steak if you want to stuff them.
The second method works well on pork fillets, fillets of lamb, beef and any other cuts of meat you want to roll a stuffing into.
To keep it all together while it's cooking
Once you have stuffed / rolled your piece of meat there are several methods available for sealing the securing the stuffing in place.

You can use a skewer (1), or skewers to hold the meat closed, and be sensible use small skewers (or toothpicks(2) if you have no skewers), not those giant barbeque ones !.
You can stitch it closed (3) – yes stitch it (although not for recommended barbequing meat as the thread will just burn away). We do this with pork fillets at home. A large needle, a double strand of a brightly coloured cotton sewing thread and a rough overcast stitch does the trick. NB. Use a brightly coloured thread so you can easily see it to pick it out afterwards. Use cotton thread 'cause it's not going to melt with the heat of the cooking.
Wrap the meat in rashers / parma ham (4). This works really with chicken.

Oils and Vinegars

I tend to buy a lot of unusual oils and vinegars, and people often ask me what they are like and what I use them for. So here's a few notes on how I see the whole oil and vinegar thing. I might be completely wrong, but each to their own and all that. If you don't use anything other than the bog standard oils and vinegars then I hope this might inspire you to be a bit more experimental. P.

Oils
So every time I turn on the TV there's the latest TV chef drizzling olive oil over and into everything. Cooking with it, frying with it, dressing with it. Problem I find is that if I am going to use olive oil for all those things then I'm going to need loads of different bottles of the stuff. Why you ask ? Well last year we were in Avignon and we found an olive press, and bought us a bottle of oil. WOW. It's like nothing I'd ever had before. The flavour was (and still is) amazing and I wouldn't dare use it for something like cooking. It's reserved for the drizzling and dressing where it's flavour really gets appreciated. Same goes for the Palestinian olive oil we have - it's not for mundane cooking use.

Years ago I was always told that olive oil wasn't good for cooking, or frying to be more specific, especially extra virgin oil. Something to do with it burning – which makes sense because if you look at a good olive oil then it'll appear cloudy or you'll see some sediment at the bottom of the bottle, which is the stuff that burns. The other problem is that let's face it olive oil isn't flavourless, so it really isn't suitable for everything. So what it boils down to is that I usually don't use olive oil for frying etc. but like to splash out on good stuff for dressing etc. For frying I use rapeseed or peanut oil, or sometimes coconut fat in the deep fat frier. They are all flavourless, and better than the many of the other cooking oils out there e.g. sunflower oil, generic vegetable oil etc, many of which aren't actually suited to use at high temperatures.

When it comes to salad dressings and flavourings here's where oils really start to come into their own. We all know the usual ones but nowadays there is an increasing large range of oils available out there which are great for adding a twist of flavour to a dressing. Nut oils are becoming increasingly popular – walnut, hazelnut, pistachio, pine nut (okay so this one's not really a nut) to name but a few. I find these great just drizzles over some salad leaves with a bit of balsamic. Then there's seed oil. I've had pumpkin seed, hemp seed and there are more out there. Again great for dressings, or in the case of the pumpkin oil to drizzle a bit over pumpkin soup before serving. Then you can get flavoured oils, and with the exception of truffle oil most of the rest are a waste of money as they are so easy to make. When I was still in Ireland I used to make good use of Mums' rosemary bush to make rosemary oil which I'd use for cooking roasties with the leg of lamb. Or an olive oil version for drizzling over the cooked spuds.

Vinegars
Flavoured vinegars work pretty much the same way as the oils. These are not something I use as much as oils though. We have the basics – malt vinegar for the chips, red and white wine vinegar for sauces mostly, and then cider vinegar, herb vinegar and other assorted flavours that are mostly used for salad dressings and sometime for pickling.

Finally there's the balsamic. We actually have three bottles of this – white and 2 of the normal dark stuff. One of these is AA quality, it's pretty much a normal nice balsamic. The other is AAA. It's dark, it's like syrup is quite thick, it's sweet and a little goes quite a long way. Finger licking good (and would be plate licking good too – but manners !). I know a lot of people don't like balsamic vinegar, and I can see why when I see the watery stuff they've tried. Like a good olive oil a good balsamic vinegar is a good investment in my book. A little goes a long way and if you really like it why not treat yourself . The white one doesn't get used very often – I mainly use it to drizzle over a Mushroom Carpaccio that I make and on the odd salad where I don't want the colour of normal balsamic.

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Breadcrumbs

I thought I'd put in a quick note on breadcrumbs seeing as I seem to have used them in several recipes. I use home made breadcrumbs. Always. I never use shop bought ones especially since they are so easy to make, and since half of what seems to be available in the shops doesn't look at all like breadcrumbs to me.

You can use brown or white bread, whatever your preference is.

Basically take some stale bread – it must be stale, but not rock hard – and blitz it. What could be easier. You can do this with sliced pans, batch loafs, bread rolls, anything you like as long as it is stale. Fresh bread will just turn into mush in the blitzer. But if fresh bread is all you have stick it in the microwave for a few secs, leave it cool and you should find it has dried enough to blitz. These store really well in the freezer, and for most dishes you can use them from frozen.

At home Mum has a large plastic box she keeps topped up when there is stale bread. I don't have as much space so I just go with a Ziploc bag.

Oh and one other thing. You'll often see chefs on TV making their breadcrumbs with the inside of the bread only. I don't bother with this. It all goes in crusts and all. When it's cooked it pretty much looks the same anyway so I really don't see the need to leave the crust out.

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FAQ: How To Get The Seeds Out Of A Pomegranate

This one's from Waider.

Chop the pomegranate in half, like you were hacking the head off a fanboy. Hold half the thing with the cut side facing down,over a plate, bowl or tray. Repeatedly beat the top of the pomegranate with a wooden spoon, as if attempting to cudgel a small child to death. The seeds will rain out of the pomegranate into your chosen receptacle.

Quick evening snack: handful or two of pomegranate seeds, one sliced banana, lightly crush a bunch of shelled walnuts in your hand and scatter, mix and eat with a spoon somewhere away from me because I have work to do you bastards.

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Abbreviations

This might seem elementary, and most people should know these but to avoid any confusion I'm putting them in. The only real reason is that I know that the tablespoon as such doesn't exist here in Switzerland. On that topic I have checked with Anita and any of the measurements she has given me should now all be corrected so that there is no confusion. If it say tablespoon in her recipes it means tablespoon.

Spoons:

Teaspoon = tsp
Dessertspoon = dsp
Tablespoon = tblsp

As I rule of thumb I use
1 dsp = 2 tsp
1 tblsp = 2dsp

Other Quantities

Cup = c
Ounce = oz
Pound = lb (16oz)
Gram = g
Kilogram = kg (1000g)
Fluid ounce = fl oz
Pint = pt (20fl oz)
Millilitre = ml
Decilitre = dl (100ml)
Litre = l (1000ml / 10 dl)

All the Tables

Meat Cooking Times
Conversion Tables
Cake Tin Sizes
Scaling up Cake Recipes to Match Tin Size

Meat cooking times

My parents last oven had this really handy metal sheet above the grill that had loads of meat roasting times printed on it. I copied it into an old diary years ago, and still keep referring back to it when I need to know how long to roast something for. I thought it was about time to copy it somewhere else before I lost it. So here it is:

	Fan Oven(cook from cold)
	Beef	Mutton/Lamb	Pork/Veal	Chicken
	170°C	180°C	180°C	180°C
2lb	1hr	1hr	1hr 15 min	1hr
3lb	1hr 20min	1hr 20min	1hr 40min	1hr 20min
4lb	1hr 40min	1hr 40min	2hr 5min	1hr 40min
5lb	2hr	2hr	2hr 30 min	2hr
6lb	2hr 20min	2hr 20min	2hr 55min	2hr 20min
rule:	20min per lb plus 20min over	20min per lb plus 20min over	25min per lb plus 25 min over	20min per lb plus 20min over

	Non-fan Oven (preheat oven first)
	Beef	Mutton/Lamb	Pork/Veal	Chicken
	180°C	190°C	190°C	190°C
2lb	1hr	1hr 15 min	1hr 15 min	1hr
3lb	1hr 20min	1hr 40min	1hr 40min	1hr 20min
4lb	1hr 40min	2hr 5min	2hr 5min	1hr 40min
5lb	2hr	2hr 30 min	2hr 30 min	2hr
6lb	2hr 20min	2hr 55min	2hr 55min	2hr 20min
rule:	20min per lb plus 20min over	25min per lb plus 25 min over	25min per lb plus 25 min over	20min per lb plus 20min over

Conversion tables

This pretty much a copy and paste from volume 1, so I am assuming there were no mistakes in there. And if you don't want to do the conversions for yourselves go to http://www.onlineconversion.com/ or use the Google Calculator

Oven Temperatures
Fahrenheitt	Celsius	Gas Mark	Description
225 F	110°C	¼	Very cool
250 F	130°C	½
275 F	140°C	1	Cool
300 F	150°C	2
325 F	170°C	3	Very moderate
350 F	180°C	4	Moderate
375 F	190°C	5
400 F	200°C	6	Moderately hot
425 F	220°C	7	Hot
450 F	230°C	8
475 F	240°C	9	Very hot

Liquids Imperial to Metric / US
Imperial	Imperial oz	Metric ml	US oz
1 quart	40	1140	38.5
1 pint	20	570	19.25
1 cup	10	285	9.6
1 gill	5	142.5	4.8
1 fluid oz	1	28.4	0.96
1 tbl	5/8 (1/16 cup)	17.8	0.6
1 dsp (1/30 soc)	1/3	10	0.32
1 tsp	1/6	5	0.16

Liquid Metric to Imperial / US
Metric	Imperial	US
1mm/cc	0.03 fl oz	0.028 fl oz
1dl	0.35 fl oz	0.33 fl oz
1 litre	1.76 pt	2.1 pt

Weight
1 ounce		28.35 g
1 pound	16 oz	453 g
I kilogram	2.204 lb (35.3oz)

Cake tin sizes

I've made my cakes in square tins for as long as I've been making them. But square cake tins are apparently so old school. I get looks of amazement every time I bring out a square cake here in Switzerland, people wonder why it isn't round ! But I like my square tins, and after visiting a few of those real old style hardware stores (you know the ones that sell everything from china cups to chicken wire) and are probably run by a little old man whose been there for the past 60 years (at least) I manage to pick up some spares so I'm sticking to them.

However if all you can get is round then you can work from the following table if you want an idea of what size cake tin refers to what. The general rule of thumb is that the round tin size is generally 1" larger than the square, i.e. 9" round = 8" square.

Capacity	Round tin size	Square tin size
Metric (Imperial)	Metric (Imperial)	Metric (Imperial)
800 ml (1.1/2pt basin)	140 mm (5 1/2")
1.1 litres (2 pt)	180 mm (7 ")	125 mm (5 ")
1.2 litre (2 pt basin)	150 mm (6 " deep)	125 mm (5" deep)
1.7 litres (3 pt)	200 mm (8 ")	180 mm (7 ")
2.3 litres (4 pt)	230 mm (9 ")	200 mm (8 ")
3.4 litres (6 pt)	250 mm (10 ")	230 mm (9 ")
4.5 litres (8 pt)	280 mm (11 ")	250 mm (10 ")
5.7 litres (10 pt)	300 mm (12 ")	280 mm (11 ")
1 kg (2lb) loaf tin		180 mm (7 ") shallow tin or 130 mm x 230 mm (9 ") swiss roll tin

Scaling up cake recipes to match tin size

The other problem that can arise with regard to cake tins is trying to scale up recipes from cake tin to cake tin. James suggest that you get out calculator and work out volumes and quantities if, for example, you want to make a 3-layered tier of circular cakes. Please note that the important phrase here is volumes. You need to take into account the height of the finished cake. A 2" high 8" square cake may look perfect, but the same height won't necessarily work for a 12" square cake. You'll need a higher cake, and hence a lot more volume to your cake mix. I've had a quick look around, and based on wedding cake / Christmas cake recipes I have (which usually give options for several cake tins sizes), and the fact that a square tin holds approximately 25% more than a round tin of the same size, here are the best recommendations I can make. I haven't tried these out so I won't guarantee they work perfectly, but they should be close enough. They are based on the 8" square, 9" round being the norm. Oh and you should note I still work in inches when it comes to cake tins (most of my favourite recipies and my tins are old so why would I change). Refer back to the previous table if you need to know what's what on this one.

Square size	Round size	Scale factor
5"	6"	1/3
6"	7"	½
7"	8"	¾
8"	9"	1
9"	10"	1 ¼
10"	11"	1 ½
11"	12"	2