Tag Archives: fruit

The Art of making Shopping Lists

09 Monday Jan 2012

Posted by in Gerard Oosterman

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Perhaps there are others but I collect shopping lists that the careless shopper discards after its use has been extinguished with the items on the list having been bought. I have always had a fascination for Homo sapiens and their living habits. What I would not give to be invisible and spent time under their dining table or better still underneath their conjugal nests. What rich pickings that would offer. It will never happen and I’ll just have to do with the flotsam that one can pick up from the streets or discarded shopping trolleys.

I am not alone in those habits. In fact, TV now has shows totally dedicated to assuaging the curiosity of others about others. We had a long list of “Big Brother” type of programs including much footage in the dark of the night, of the antics of couples on top of endless rows of mattresses. Millions were glued to their TV’s with special cameras focused from all angles to the cavorting or sleeping couples, all in a very convincing blue-black-grey colouring adding greatly to the authenticity of a hoped for glance of something exposed and naughty. Millions of people became instantly good old perverts with unbelievable riches rolling in for the Media Moguls. Of course, our rapacious need for the sensational became jaded with “Big Brother” and moved into “Big Cooking” and “Big Family Fare” shows, with expulsions and similar psychological tactics, trying to woe us back to TV and advertisers.

Anyway, with the shopping lists, it’s not just the items on the list but also the manner of writing, the attention to details and the pain that some go through making the list. I found a list that included snail bait and had in brackets (safe for pets). Another might have 2 liters of milk and specify ‘full cream’ or another ‘low fat’. I picked up a list from a trolley that had just been emptied by a somewhat overweight man. His list included ‘low fat’ cream. Good on you, I thought, you are on the right track. The lists that give me the greatest satisfaction are those that include lots of fruit and vegetables. I once found a list that included 3 bunches of celery. Three bunches, can you believe it? I could just imagine the frank, honest and sonorous voice of the husband calling out to his wife; “don’t forget the 3 bunches of celery and the apples dear.” They might have been starting their celery and apple juicing diet. Such heroic efforts in health and vigorous bowel maintenance don’t go unnoticed by me.

Just when I thought I had about exhausted all the ‘oeuvre’ in making shopping list I discovered a new form of ticking off the items. As you probably all do, most tick off (or not) the items by pencil or ball-point ensuring each item gets bought. Amazingly I discovered a totally new form of ticking off. This person, their sex remains a mystery, ticked off the items by a very precisely executed little tear next to the item on the list. This whole and very extensive list had all those little tears next to each and every item. I surmised it would have to be an academic or perhaps even a scientist. A professor in statistics or may be just a top person in charge of the Bureau of Meteorology. Could it have been a person in charge of ‘Birth Certificates or even a Mortuary, a Boeing pilot?’ The good thing though, was, plenty of fruit and vegetables.

There is hope for all of us.

 

Like Peas in a Pod

10 Friday Jun 2011

Posted by in Gerard Oosterman

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Like peas in a Pod

June 10, 2011 by gerard oosterman

Anyone having visited the main supermarkets of late could not but have noticed that we as consumers have now entered a totally new world of devastating health. Gone are the bleak advertisements of chocolate bars or croissants. It’s all health, health and more health. Giant posters of apples, Pink Ladies or Jonathans, all pink and roseate, viridian green Granny Smiths, a tsunami of huge fruits have now been posted and pasted on every square metre of wall or window at the supermarket entrances. Let’s not also forget the vegetables though. Yesterday at Aldi’s there where peas in their pods so well photographed and blown up in size they almost looked dangerous.

There is now the push on in earnest for all to get violently healthy and no excuse for getting girths above the OBM measurements anymore. This is how so often things are handled. Obesity as a result of supermarkets pushing very profitable but dodgy foods still continue as ever but a veneer of concern for robust health is cleverly being promoted.

Those giant posters of fruit and veggies not only soothes those that have genuine concern for the millions of overweight people but it soothes above all the shopper thinking that entering the supermarket now delivers them from junk food. The mood is set in believing all is well and their shopping continues as before. The trolley still features the same cooking sauces, the same chips, biscuits, choky brekkies and other high carbon junk foods. The relentless race to diabetes goes on and the millions of overweight no doubt will queue our surgeries and hospitals as never before.

A cooking and food expert interviewed on ABC FM radio gave an account of a person faced with a fish and a saucepan and could not relate that to cook the fish it needed to be placed in the saucepan and heat applied. Jamie Oliver some time ago travelled through UK schools and found some children could not identify the potato. They simply thought it came in golden coloured strips.
Despite all those TV shows and all the cookery books with millions watching and reading, cooking wholesome meals at home is getting less. Just because our large Mansions now have Caesar stone kitchen benches, butcher blocks and huge knifes hanging from the wall, doesn’t mean that families sit down to eat a well cooked and healthy meal.

On the ABC program of QA, the panel was asked why Solariums were not being banned. The answer; It is a State issue and there are many warnings on the use of Solariums causing cancer anyway.
Apparently a similar answer was given on junk foods with the opinion that ‘surely’ adults can make up their own mind and take care that their children eat healthy foods and don’t become obese. We ‘should all exercise good and healthy choices’ and that should not ever be taken away by banning junk food ads during children TV, one opposition minister , Christopher Pyne, suggested. This was also T. Abbott’s refrain when health minister during the Howard reign.

No one came up that ‘the free choice’ available for decades had not resulted in improved dietary habits. Would it not be prudent to try something else? Free choice also gave us thousands clogging hospitals with people dying from smoking. It was tackled very successfully. Plain packaging again will lower the number picking up smoking and many will give the habit up.
Surely, with food, the same can be tried. No-one wants to deny a chocolate or the biscuit, the frozen meal or the soft drink. But why not have those foods costing more and made less attractive. Much of the junk food exterior packaging are depicted with images of healthy food while in fact the food inside is just rubbish of very dubious nutritional value.

Could we include much more dietary advice with perhaps a star system the same as on white goods. The Mars Bar a single star, the apple or stick of celery 5 stars. I read that at Saturday school sports, the tuck shops still sell sausage rolls and junk sugar stuff that no one seems to question. Kids don’t buy the treats if they are healthy, some complained. Well, let them go hungry and see if they will get into the apple or fruit salad, the chicken and cheese or egg and tomato sandwich?

The check-out counter inevitably pushed the worst of junk foods and many a mother despair going through without the child throwing a tantrum for another sweet crunchy bar or sugary drink. At petrol station we are exhorted to spend another $5, – to get another 4 cent per litre of petro discount. The extra money is for either soft drink combined with sweet bars etc. Again, a pushing of junk food is featured. It is wrong, wrong, wrong.
When it comes to ‘free choice’ we are in the grip of very clever advertising giants with millions to spend which drives us now in  their clutches, dressed up with good health posters . The ‘free choice’ morphs us all into very obedient but overweight people.

Now is the Discontent of our Winter

07 Monday Jun 2010

Posted by in Emmjay, The Dining Room

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Persimmons - the offal fruit

There’s a time of year that I for one have traditionally come to dread.   It’s marked out for all to see in the fruit and veg in the local greengrocers.

I’m talking about the arrival of truckloads of persimmons.

Persimmons have no reason to resist extinction.  No more reason do they have to exist, than do chokoes.  Yes, they are cheerfully orange at a grey time of year and yes, they have a squishy texture. But they have a dreadful mouth feel – not unlike something hacked up from a lower lobe of a diseased lung.  And they have a more-or-less total lack of flavour.  Sorry, I meant to say that they have a very delicate perfume, quite reminiscent of Clag glue – that favourite staple of my early school years.

Not far behind the persimmons we notice the mandarins.  I personally have no axe to grind with mandarins.  Except the ones that have a seed content approaching 87%.  I quite like the mandarin zest that accumulates under the fingernails, the sticky fingers and the bucket load of skin one needs to dispose as part of the after-lunchtime ritual.  Or not.

There are of course pomegranates to widen the choice of inedible fruit during the colder months.   Pomegranates remind us that we are a culturally diverse nation, doffing our hats to Persia, North Africa and the Middle East.  And like the inhabitants of those climes, they bring colour and texture to our otherwise bland Anglo fare.  But they bring seeds.  Man oh man, they are a seed-rich experience

And quinces – that intriguing cross between apples and rocks.  Thirty cents and the greengrocer will fill up the boot of your car with quinces – because they are a such a sought-after delicacy.  As an alternative, you might consider drying them and using them as a carbon-neutral source of bio-fuel.  Or road base.  Strangely, quince paste is sometimes flogged as an antidote to blue cheese.  The idea being that one smears some on a cracker, followed by blue cheese and then (incredibly) it’s supposed to be OK to eat.  In my experience, quince paste makes an excellent emergency alternative to axle grease and should be part of every caravanner’s kit.  Particularly if the tub is inexplicably lost interstate.

So what do these phoney pretenders to green-grocer shelf-space have in common ?  Answer:  they need to have the absolute bejesus stewed out of them with the addition of two thirds of the Bundaberg sugar crop to be made into the kind of preserves that jostle for space up the back of the fridge behind the coleslaw.  And compete, unsuccessfully with the rock of the school fete – Lemon Butter.

In recent years we’ve seen the arrival of new exotic fruit.  I’m mindful of the dragon fruit – with lovely red, triffid-like skin and fruit with the flavour and texture of jellied sand with black sesame seeds thrown in by way of contrast.

What to do ?  It’s depressing to wander the aisles of the green grocer in the months lacking an “r”.  Best to stay away for a while.  I prefer to go for mainstream preserves during the discontent of our winter.  I eke out a meagre existence on Poire William or Calvados, maybe Slivovitz, and Kirsch – at a pinch, Vodka citron.  Sometimes I even resort to eating Californian pesticides harvested and imported as heavily disguised navel oranges or ruby red grapefruit.

In a desperate attempt to make it through to the first mango of the season, I sometimes revert to purchasing chestnuts – a relative newcomer to the Australian green grocery.  These can sit in the pantry for months until the first mango of the new season arrives, pristine, in its orangey-red hugeness direct from the mango fields of the Northern Territory.  Like the first swallow returning to Capistrano, this mango is not for eating.  The five dollar price tag covers just the transport cost.  Flavour and texture are not included in the price.  Colour, yes, but flavour and texture, no way.

But the chestnuts are divine.  Not for eating, for reminding one of the romance of roast chestnuts in the snow on the Champs Elysees.  I recommend that you do remember them this way – even if you have never been to Paris, I can faithfully report that winter fruit does not get better than this.

Purchase enough chestnuts to pan roast for two people.  That would be two chestnuts.  Then leave them in the pantry until the first stone fruit of the new season appears – and – throw the chestnuts out – saving you the trouble of third degree lacerations from trying to peel them, or third degree burns in the unlikely event that you CAN peel them and inadvertently put one in your mouth.  Oh, and if you’ve made it this far with the chestnuts, they will have a texture and a taste not unlike pencil erasers – completing (with the persimmon-Clag combination) the daily double of infants’ school taste reminiscences.

Not a good memory, but a memory, none-the-less.  Glad to have one.

This was first Published by the ABC at Unleashed – Christ knows why – they disappeared it totally – after just three days …..

This version has the spelling mistakes fixed and a better photo.