Category Archives: Food

Rustic (Sweet) Potato and Leek Soup

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Posted by Lloyd Morgan on January 21, 2007 – 12:28 am
Filed under Food

It seems the theme for this weekend is ‘food‘. After my earlier Tesco-related post I’ve decided to give a quick hashed-up recipe for my rustic sweet potato and leek soup. I made this earlier today and it tasted great - a welcome lunch when we’re having temperatures hovering around the 0-5°C mark. Plus, who better to make leek soup than a Welshman, right? It is our national symbol, after all!

Ingredients (per person) (Photo 1)

  • One large leek
  • One small (or 1/2 large) onion
  • One small sweet potato (can use normal potatoes, obviously)
  • One cup (250ml - just under half a pint) vegetable stock
  • Olive Oil
  • Salt and pepper (and spice if required) for seasoning

Prepare the leek. Remove the outermost layer and cut off the majority of the green leaves, leaving just a hint of green on the main leek body. Retain the leaves for the stock and wash them thoroughly along with the main leek body.
Slice the leek. (Photo 2)

Slice the onion. (Photo 3)

Fry the onion and leek on a low heat along with a tablespoon or two of Olive Oil, a pinch of salt and a lot of pepper. Do not let any of it burn as it will totally destroy the flavour. (Photo 4)

Dice the sweet potato into small pieces and boil for 10 minutes on a medium-high heat. Don’t worry about it going soft and mushy; this is fine. In fact, it’s desired… soft, but still retaining its shape. As a guide, I used half the potato you can see in the first photo. (Photo 5)

Prepare your vegetable stock. (Photo 6)

After 10 minutes or so your leek and onion should be soft and the sweet potato should be boiled well. Drain the sweet potato and add to the leek and onion. Stir well, adding more seasoning if required (I usually add a bit of extra pepper).

Add the stock to the pan containing the onion, leek and sweet potato, and stir. You may optionally add the retained leek leaves to add flavour, but do not stir them in. (Photo 7)

Cover and simmer for 20 minutes on a low heat.

Enjoy, with bread (some people add an optional spice/herb or add some extra pepper before eating. I had some chilli ready but decided against it). (Photo 8)


Tesco: Friend or Foe?

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Posted by Lloyd Morgan on January 20, 2007 – 7:25 pm
Filed under Food, Money, Politics

By spending a few pennies more in Tesco when I last went food shopping there I picked up this pack of Cherry Tomatoes:

Tesco's Cherry Tomatoes

Why am I telling you this? For 8 pence less I could have bought the regular pack that had, maybe, 5 more tomatoes in. These cheaper tomatoes were a less vibrant red and were obviously not as juicy. That wasn’t why.

The reason was a simple one: this packet was produced from completely biodegradable and compostable organic materials. The paper label with the barcode and nutritional information, the biodegradable polymer wrap and the container itself all would degrade on your household compost heap. As they are made from organic materials too, that means that there would be no net gain in emissions when the gases created during decomposition are released.

I then read the following; an excerpt from the front page of the Financial Times:

Tesco will become the world’s first supermarket chain to assign a “carbon label” to every product on its shelves. The UK’s biggest chain said it would make the labels by measuring the amount of carbon dioxide emitted during the production, transportation and consumption of the 70,000 products it sells. “The market is ready… We have to make sustainability a significant, mainstream driver of consumption,” Sir Terry Leahy, chief executive, said last night.

Coming from a company that takes £1 of every £8 spent in the whole UK retail sector, this is promising news. Or so you would think. As the Guardian puts it:

The company sells more DVDs than HMV, more shampoo than Boots, and its £4 jeans outsell Levis, Wrangler and Gap put together.

These are the figures Tesco wants us to remember, but there are other, less palatable statistics. For every £1 spent on bananas at Tesco, for instance, only 1p goes back to the plantation growers in developing countries - far less than they need to feed their families. Indeed, the company makes a profit of £1m per week purely from the sale of bananas - enough to employ 30,000 plantation workers full-time and pay them a proper wage.

Indeed, the globalisation of food production - buying it from the cheapest source rather than the closest - has been taken to ridiculous extremes. In a typical year, 126m litres of milk are imported into Britain while 270m are exported.

It continues this furore into the classic ‘food miles’ argument quoting statistics from the lobbying group Sustain. They estimate that the average UK Sunday lunch travels 26,234 miles.

It also states the statistic that an average of one sixth of the money spent in Tesco goes on packaging. In fact, “only 26 per cent of the cost is accounted for by food; the rest is packaging, processing, transport, store overheads, advertising and the mark-up”.

It’s a good start Tesco, but there’s still a hell of a lot more that you need to do.

FT: Tesco to ‘carbon label’ its products | Guardian: Why supermarkets are getting bigger and bigger

Resolutions, Schmesolutions! Part 2

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Posted by Lloyd Morgan on January 11, 2007 – 9:29 am
Filed under Everything Else, Food, Money, Photography, Work and Business

That New Year came and went a bit quick: I didn’t even get ’round to producing my Resolutions Schmesolutions Part 2 post – shame on me! Although, here it is, slightly delayed… better late than never hey?

So, I may be what a lot of people call pedantic and slightly obsessive compulsive. No matter how much truth lies in this it is definitely true that I like to organise things, for better or for worse - and usually the latter, which annoys me! This blog acts as a great place to organise thoughts and construct plans. That’s why, this New Year I am going to use this blog as a regular place to organise and discuss my various plans.

So what are my ‘non-resolutions’ for 2007 then? They can easily be categorised into four broad categories: Food/Health, Work, Hobbies/Travel and Money.

Food/Health: I need to start a proper diet. Not diet in the 21st Century meaning of the word but in the actual dictionary definition of the word: a diet as an eating regimen. One that is healthier than my current one and that is more enjoyable. I’m talking more eastern fresh food and less western modified products; fish; prepared lunches; a lot less junk food and more experimental, colourful and flavourful cooking.
‘Menus’ would be a good idea too as with forward planning I can buy nicer, fresher, cheaper food from local markets rather than plastic-laden, reformed goods from supermarkets.
Playing sport regularly would be good too as my once weekly Squash sessions are turning into once monthly.

Work: A third of my life is spent at work: 8 hours a day, sat in the office, writing code and not progressing - just earning. Investing in myself is key to progressing whilst also earning. Building my work-life reputation and increasing my future worth will in turn further my prospects and undoubtedly make this third of my life more interesting and, dare I say it, fun! Courses, certifications and training will all help me to obtain this, as will offering myself up for opportunities that arise in work and at home. Also, enthusiastically working on projects outside of my day-to-day employment can’t fail but help.
As well as working, a further third on my life is spent sleeping. This leaves, after preparing for and commuting to work and preparing and eating meals, around 6 hours. I plan on rising earlier in the mornings and getting into work at a more respectable time, allowing myself to get home from work much earlier and hence reducing my travel time considerably (no rush-hour to contend with) leaving myself with more time at home during more sociable hours.

Hobbies/Travel: I want to learn to take much better photographs than I currently do, make good progress on my personal projects and travel more: all whilst still being able to sit down, watch a film and have a drink.
A big one though is that I want to make the Internet profitable for myself. How? I’m not quite sure yet, but I do know that I do not want to do it with auction websites and in an ideal world I would like to think that it could open up some doors for myself and possibly lead to another income stream.
Writing for an average of 30 minutes a day would also be nice but is ambitious. It’s not something I’m going to do straight away and give-up on within a few weeks, but rather something I want to work towards. Undoubtedly blog based, I hope this will be a method for me to improve my style and content here.

Money: The ‘big gun’ of my New Years plan and something that I won’t discuss here right now to avert a fully blown (and boring) essay.

I’ve given myself a fair bit to do here and the hardest part is going to be how to start and how to continue. I’ve come up with a simple, two step process for hopefully completing all my objectives or, at least, realising that it was futile: progressive goals and ‘freeware’ testing.

Progressive: These goals are the ones that I neither plan on or hope to achieve immediately and hope to achieve in the long run by working towards a goal slowly. These include writing; photography; project work; exercise; and my work plans.

Tests: You can download ‘freeware’ programs from the Internet to use for a 30 day trial period. When these 30 days have passed and if the program is something you cannot use or can do without you delete it and do not use it again. However, if you realise after this period that it makes your life easier, better, or is something that you cannot now live without you purchase the program and make it part of your life. This is what I plan on doing with a few of my objectives: testing them for a month and seeing if it was worth it or whether the goal was futile.
If after this month trial something has made my life better or I want to continue it, it will be a lot easier to continue as I would have already been doing it for a month. If I want to quit: I will.
The foundation of this test is: if something is difficult I can continue doing it with ease for a month (”I don’t like getting up every day at 7am but I’ll continue for a month and then give up.””) but when that month passes I may be used to it and it’ll be easier to continue (”I hated getting up before but now I’m used to it.”). Whereas if something was not enjoyable or not as expected I’ll simply quit (”I ate fish at least twice a week but didn’t enjoy it so now I’ll stop.”). This will be a better method for my diet, early rising and some of my money plans.

How are you planning on sticking to your resolutions or plans?