Chicken and Cooking Skills

It is something that I find rather amusing, but my better half cant cook. Or to be more accurate, she never learnt to cook. Therefore, I wonder if she is with me for my looks? Or my erudite wit? Or my ability to delight her pallet? Well while I could play are gargoyle I can not yet do it without make up, and when we are together the air is filled with laughter. But I suspect that my ability to cook is a major bonus.

I explain this as while we had been together on Tuesday and Wednesday morning, she had left and I was not expecting her to return. However her plans were forced to change as the result of others changing their plans and not letting her know until she was already on route. So when she telephoned and asked if she could come back, I was pleased. But as that also meant she needed feeding, we talked about what she could get on the way so we could have dinner together.

The difficulty for her is that as she never learnt to cook she lacks the ability to spot an ingredient that a meal can be built around. I am learning what she likes and enjoys, so I made a couple of suggestions, then the cell signal dropped out. Living in a village, I have a very poor mobile phone signal and while this can be useful when I don't want to talk to someone, here I did. After trying a couple of times I got through. We agreed on some chicken, and I planned the rest my end.

When she arrived I was more or less ready to start cooking, and the Free Range Chicken Breasts were great, but the price was more than I would have been prepared to pay. She had visited the posh supermarket, and while the quality from them is always excellent, they are not cheap. These Chicken breasts from Waitrose cost £5.32 Yet for £5.99 I could have purchased a whole Free Range Chicken from the Granger Market and it would have taken only ten or fifteen minutes to fully joint the fowl.

The incident illustrates for me the problems that so many people face, they lack the kitchen skills to enable them to make cost effective choices. I have no problem with the choice she made, the chicken was succulent, tasty and was of the welfare standard that I would have bought myself. Yet even if I talk to other people who are buying chicken pieces from a cheap (caged) range of birds in another supermarket, they seem not to realise how much they can save by buying a whole chicken and jointing it themselves.

Now I know that people often live busy lives and often cooking from scratch can seem daunting or time consuming, but often it requires a degree of planning or preparation. Taking the example of chicken as an example, when the issue of chicken welfare was in the news, I pointed out to a couple of locals that for the price of the low welfare chicken pieces they had bought, they could have bought two Free Range birds for the same price and have ended up with more portions.

While my better half has come from a more affluent background than me, locally in my village the majority struggle to make ends meet financially. Therefore while I would have made a different choice, it was not as imperative for us than it is for the people who are living on the breadline.

In previous posts I have levelled some of the blame towards the education system and various governments. However as my GF was educated at a private school and also did not get any education in cooking or home economic skills, perhaps the failure is not as much in governments hands as I have been saying. I would love to see all children, Boys and Girls, are taught how to cook at home, but that requires the parents knowing how to cook first. Yet it seems that we are loosing culinary skills with each new generation. So perhaps cooking and home economics should be taught in schools, all schools.

Even before my better half got back from the city with the chicken pieces, I was thinking about making a posting on a very similar topic as a couple of weeks ago, knowing that my FF was going to be visiting, I had bought some fresh Place. I always check that the fish I buy is from sustainable sources and this was. However even I was surprised at the low price, 99 pence per pound. For two pounds cash I had four beautiful whole fish. As A flat fish there is not a great deal of flesh on them, but it is really easy to fillet them and that was exactly what I did. Then latter at the supermarket, I spotted that for the same weight of the fillets frozen Place was four times the price.

Was this simply just another example of up being willing to pay extra, a lot extra for things that we have lost the skills to do? While that is partly true, the answer came in a television programme that I was watching just before my better half turned up. In a visit to Peterhead Fish Market, the largest wholesale fish market in Europe, while there was plenty of fish there, most of the fish was destined for export as in Britain most people will not eat anything but Cod. The presenter even highlighted a box of Place that the fishing boat would only get forty pounds for. Therefore while it means that by going to a reputable and responsible Fishmonger I was able to get a bargain, the processors are the people who make the real money and not the fishermen. Its the same principal with chicken pieces, the retailers and the processors make the money.

Before anyone asks, a box of fish at wholesale will have a stone of fish, that's one hundred and twelve pounds of fish. That's less than thirty six pence per pound. So if we in Britain ate more of other species, caught sustainably, there would not be the problems with over fishing while still retaining the fishing industry. Equally if more people stopped wasting money buying chicken portions especially from low welfare standard birds and started jointing their own from free range, well folks could rapidly make a difference.

And incidentally the way I cooked the chicken pieces was to coat one side with a mixture of red Thai spices mixed with Greek style Yoghurt and slow cook for an hour in a covered casserole. Fragrant, tasty, low fat and it made my better half's tummy happy.