My New Kitchen is Different
This picture shows the view I get when I cook.
My New Kitchen
It has evetrything a man should want totally to hand.
- The TV for watching something more interesting like football than a pot, which never boils. The screen incidentally turns through about 240 degrees, when the guests turn up, so everyone can see it.
- Plenty of space for drinking while you work.
- The bread bin handily placed for toast. As I’m effectively one handed the toaster is to the right out of sight.
- Also out of sight to the right is Delia’s little chopper, as I won’t give publicity to anyone associated with Norwich City.
- The pots with essentials like tea, coffee, biscuits in front of the cook.
- The one-handed pepper and salt.
Anyway it works efficiently, despite the rather delapidated fridge and the manual-less cooker.
Pea Therapy
I have my son and his friend to lunch today. I’ve just been shelling peas, which is something that I haven’t done since I was a child.
It seemed to be good therapy for my bad left hand!
An Old-Fashioned Tablespoon
I have one old-fashioned tablespoon, that is the right size for cooking.
An Old-Fashioned Tablespoon
If anybody has any spares they don’t need, please let me know!
Cooking Like An Engineer
My culinary skills aren’t that good and as the stroke has left me with a slightly gammy left hand, I have changed the way I do things.
I’m also lucky in that, I’m not hard-up, although I do try to eat fairly economically. So if I see a gadget that might help, I buy it.
Here are a few gadgets and products that have really helped.
- My saucepans have a lid with a built-in strainer, so I don’t burn my hands when I pour the hot water away after the vegetables have cooked. I could use a collander, but that would mean extra washing up.
- I have a large box-grater, which has a big handle on the top. I use this to make my fish pies, just as Jamie said in the original recipe.
- I also have one of Delia’s little Kenwood choppers, as my knife skills may be good enough for peeling potatoes, but chopping anything very small is difficult.
- Some food packaging is difficult, so I always have a good pair of scissors handy! Even with this some foods like pasta and frozen peas are a nightmare, as an out-of-place cut means a kitchen floor covered in food. I now only use one type of pasta, Doves Farm gluten-free pasta and keep it in a storage jar.
- I also buy things like ready-peeled onions. My mother would have been horrified.
It may not be easy for everyone to install, but I have a wooden chopping board built in to the work-surface, where I prepare vegetables. It has a hole in it, with a wooden stopper. Underneath is the bin, so all the rubbish you get when you prepare vegetables, is just chased through the hole and into the bin. The system is also good for disposing of things such as used tea bags.
I also time foods rather than taste them. I have a big clock on the wall and would give something the correct time, rather than taste it. C always felt potatoes, when she baked them in the oven. I don’t, as I just give them an hour on the floor of the oven. Sometimes, they are nhot quite right, but at least, it is a lot easier.
The other thing I do is use the dishwasher a lot more. I know that is not very eco-friendly, but it means I don’t have to wash-up as I cook. Try and do just one thing at a time and you don’t get in the sort of mess,k which means that you drop something and have more work to do.
So analyse how you cook and do things as efficiently as you can. Ignore, what your mother or your friends, who can really cook, might say!
A One-Handed Fish Pie
When I Cooked my last Jamie Oliver’s Fish Pie, I hadn’t had a stroke and had full use of both hands. Now my left hand has a lack of feeling in the fingers and tends to drop things a bit. But at least my right hand is almost unaffected.
Making the pie was surprisingly easy, using mainly my right hand :-
- Peeling the potatoes wasn’t too difficult, especially as I used a plastic chopping board to cut the potatoes into smaller chunks for boiling.
- Jamie said to use a big box grater in the middle of the baking dish and my left hand was strong enough to hold it completely steady, whilst I grated the carrot, celery and cheese. It was very easy and it was almost if Jamie had people like me in mind. Good on you, Jamie, if you did!
- For chopping the chilli, I used one of Delia’s little choppers.
- I did have a problem getting the skin off the salmon, but the simple solution to this, is to get the fishmpnger to do it as I did with the haddock. Waitrose and good fishmongers are happy to do this.
- Mashing the potatoes wasn’t too bad as I have a proper one-handed potato masher.
It’s amazing how much the good and sensible tools helped.
Peeling Potatoes
Would anybody describe this as a go0d exercise for someone who has had a stroke? But I’m making one of Jamie Olivers’s fish pies and that needs a kilogram of potatoes to be peeled.
I peel potatoes with the potato in my left and the knife in my right, but then I’m right-handed. I also tip the potatoes into a largew bowl of cold water and in fact just retrieving the next potato is quite soothing. But the action of holding the potato and then twisting it so that the next bit of peel is removed, seems to be a good exercise.
It’s also rewarding to yourself, as you see your naked creations gradually filling the saucepan.
I think though that peeling potatoes is one of those mundane jobs, which because a knife is involved, you concentrate about to get done well and then get a large degree of satisfaction, when you complete it.
I found the same satisfaction, when I cleaned my shoes on Saturday. Perhaps stroke recovery is all about getting back to normal and that means doing all those day-to-day tasks.
Ethnic Cooking
With my problems over the Digestive biscuits and their codex gluten-free wheat starch, it is worth looking at ethnic or traditional cooking around the world.
Indian – Thickened with chick-pea flour.
Chinese – Rice-based and often unthickened. My local and very safe and goodChinese restaurant uses potato flour, but what do they use in China.
Provencal – Everything is thickened by reduction.
Italian – Take out the bread, pasta and pizza and most Italian cooking is about pure and fresh ingredients.
Fish – Traditionally cooked plain or smoked. Look at some Scottish, Greek, Spanish and Italian traditions.
Sausages and cooked meat – Proper ones are usually just meat in Europe.
English – My mother and her generation used corn-flour. Didn’t we always have meat and two veg. It could also be argued that traditional English food is what is in season in the garden or has been trapped or killed, like rabbit or chicken.
So if you take out bread, a lot of traditional food is gluten-free.
We were all and I don’t just mean coeliacs, a lot healthier.
Cornflour
My mother was a traditional English cook, so when she made a sauce, she didn’t use flour. She used cornflour. Often it was Brown and Polson. As it was gluten-free, this was actually good for me and probably helps to prove the theory I have that good proper cooking is actually better for you. Flour is a cheap way of putting bulk into ready made and processed food.
There has been a discussion on the UK-Coeliac group about cornflour and corn in general.
This illustrates the differences between English all over the world.
Farmers in the UK and probably a lot of other places, use corn as a general term for any cereal, including wheat and barley. They call maize, maize. Whereas in the US, maize is corn.
All confusing. Truly we’re all dvided by a common language.
To make matters worse, according Wikipedia, cornflour in Australia is made from wheat. The article also talks about cornstarch, the name used for cornflour in the US.
It all makes me, want to do more cooking from scratch.
The Anonymous Widower 