i Lead Recipes

What healthier way is there to start the day than to have an egg for breakfast – something that has become an accepted thing in many households. Eggs are both nutritious and healthy, and it has been shown that they can both help cut calorie intake by up to 415 calories per day, and increase weight loss. If you are lucky enough to have your own hens, so much the better – there is nothing like a freshly laid free-range egg. There are literally thousands of different dishes that you can make with eggs, from the plain boiled, to poached, scrambled, fried, coddled and omelettes – and that’s just eggs by themselves. When it comes to cooking a quick and nutritious meal, there is nothing quicker than an egg dish. Eggs are a healthy, natural food that are packed with protein and essential vitamins and minerals and contain just 80 calories each.

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I love cooking with cream, but I have to admit that I don’t do so often enough. I am lucky in that I have never suffered from any weight or cholesterol problems, so I have as few qualms about cooking with cream as I have when eating streaky bacon. You can use cream for a simple sauce made by adding it to the browned bits left over in a pan, you can use it for a pasta sauce or for a rich crème brulée. When you find yourself at the cream counter at your local grocer, you’ll probably find several different types of cream there. Which one do you chose? If you were to stock only one kind of cream in your refrigerator, I would recommend a double or thick cream. It’s good for whipping, makes perfect sauces and if you need to it can be mixed with milk to thin it down.

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There are five great foundations to fine cookery

1. olive oil,
2. butter,
3. cream,
4. wine and
5. eggs.

Of these five ingredients the cheapest by far are eggs, and there are literally thousands of recipes for this extremely nourishing food. Compare the price of eggs to that of the others, or indeed to the price of fish or meat, and you will see that eggs stand out by far. Pure extra virgin olive oil is expensive, but there is absolutely no substitute. Butter, too, is expensive, but again there is no substitute – don’t let anybody fool you into thinking that you can use other vegetable oils or butter substitutes in fine cooking – you can not. In many cases where a recipe calls for cream, you can use whipping cream rather than double cream. It is cheaper and less fattening, but if the recipe calls for a cream that has to be reduced in a sauce, it can be better to use double cream. Reducing single cream to the correct consistency you may have to use so much single cream and reduce for such a time that it would have been cheaper to use double cream in the first place.

I will say only one thing about using wine for cooking – never cook with a wine that you would not be prepared to drink – if you wouldn’t drink it, don’t use it.

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It’s always a good idea to have a stock of emergency food that you can fall back upon if friends drop in and you suddenly need to cater for them. You’ve probably got most of these items stored away somewhere anyway, but for the person just starting out, maybe someone who has just started off in their own apartment, here are a few tips. Have a selection of powdered soups and stock cubes to hand. Keep a selection of two or three different pastas and a good supply of rice. Tinned fruit is always a good idea, as is tinned peeled tomatoes and tomato paste. You can get chopped peeled tomatoes mixed with onions – always good in an emergency. Have a selection of tinned fish – whichever is to your taste, and maybe some tinned ham or chicken. Finally miscellaneous items, olive oil and vinegar, tinned milk and mayonnaise, olives and pickles. If you have a deep freeze, you should keep a selection of frozen foods as well.

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I have a large collection of the Fanny & Johnnie Craddock Cookery Programme magazines published in 1970, but am missing a few individual copies. If anyone happens to have any of the following sitting in an attic somewhere, I’d be grateful if you would contact me here.The missing numbers are 9 – 13, 21 – 31, 47 and anything after 76, which is the last edition that I have. The magazines make fascinating reading even today. Little has changed in the last 37 years. There are far more gadgets and kitchen machines today, of course. Microwave ovens had only been introduces into the domestic market in 1967 and there’s a good chance that Fanny Craddock didn’t own one when these magazines were published. I can safely say that we’re spoilt here in the 21st Century.

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