Bran indulges in more retro treats. By Bran
My second blast from the past in the world of retro treats is, ironically, a dish I doubt we ever had at home when i was small. No one really liked fish fingers and I suspect my mum refused to cook them because - as I realised as I ate them - they are disgusting. I was cruising the freezer isles in a hurry for some oven chips but instead decided to go nuts and get myself some McCain Potato Smiles, as they seemed like something the kids would enjoy - after all, who doesn't love a sensible vegetable processed and mushed up into a uniform and slightly creepy Halloween style smiley face for their dinner. And yes, potatoes are a very sensible vegetable - toned down colour, uniform shape and very versatile, not like his fellow root vegetables such as the carrot or butternut squash. I teamed this with some Tesco Value (read low budget and tasteless - even more so than the rest of the junk Tesco rams down everyone's throats) fish fingers. I had peas and a tasteful slices of cucumber and tomato pub 'garnish' style salad to go with it and I was ready to eat. On a later trip to the supermarket I also discovered a half price frozen strudel and some low fat instand custard - now you're talking.
Like I said none of this food is retro in the sense that I used to eat it - in fact, now I think about it, I remember demanding fish fingers from the supermarket in Lithuania (why on earth were they selling them?) and my mother refusing to have anything to do with them. Potato smiles had never before passed my lips. Peas I find to be a particularly pointless vegetable, probably because I have always been restricted to the Birdseye frozen variety - stripped of flavour and texture and merely present to add a green section to an otherwise unbalanced plate. Small, round, annoyingly elusive when presented to a fork and bound to be found on or around the table for at least three days after you eat them, peas are the useless flop of the vegetable world. However, whenever I open my freezer it is packed to the brim with bags of the frozen devils.
My dinner was very easy to prepare, which is probably why it is a kids' meal. All it required of me, when normally I find boiling the kettle for pasta an exhausting chore, was popping it all on a tray and shoving it in the oven at 220 degrees. Simple. I even remembered to set the timer for 14 minutes.
Hopes brimming, I prepared my peas (place frozen lump in bowl of hot tap water, leave, drain, repeat until mildly thawed and rest of food sitting on plate getting cold) and sliced my tomato and cucumber. I chucked it all on a plate, pub artistic style and waited for the oven to beep.
Once I had finished arranging it all in an attractive way on the plate, I took a photo. Usually I don't bother with making my dinners look nice. Usually this is because I'm not the world's best cook and the food itself tends to look a little unappetising but also because when you're cooking for one and you have ten other things to do, you don't really care if you've burnt the pasta (yes, it happens) or mangled your stir fry. It's all food in the end. Anyway, here is my delicious retro dinner.
Well, despite what I said, it wasn't delicious. There's something very...disgusting about unidentified fish chunks pressed into a rectangle and coated in mystery orange crust, and my stomach did not care for it. The potato smiles tasted neither of potato or smiles. In fact, their slightly sinister or deranged grins made me uncomfortable and their soggy white insides did not entice me. The peas were, of course, only marginally defrosted and bounced off my fork as I tried to stuff them in my mouth, hand cupped under my fork in case of an accident. I'm still finding them under the tablecloth. The garnish salad was delicious, but the tomatoes could have been better. It's asking for a lot in England, where even the ripoff £5 'vine ripened' variety come from a shed in Spain, but they didn't make the meal. Another retro snack disappointment for me, alas.
I did, however, notice that all kids food is processed and storable. No wonder we have the highest child obesity rate in Europe when the kids are eating stuff packed with sugar and E numbers instead of delicious vegetables like peas. Everything is freezable - the small convenience Tesco I go to has no fewer than four freezer isles, dedicated to ready meals, potato and vegetable products, puddings and ice creams. Kids food these days seems to come from the cupboard. My food snobbishness (says the girl eating frozen peas and potato smiles) causes me to bulk buy bunches of floppy herbs ensconced in huge amounts of plastic packaging (don't even get me started) and chuck them in whatever pasta/chicken/pasta and chicken dish I prepare for my dinner, to get some flavour into the otherwise mass produced and cardboardish produce that the Tescos of the world supply us with. Sigh.
I have to say the pudding was an improvement, although I have recently developed a grudge against frozen strudels when I caught my grandparents defrosting one to feed me. Grandparents, especially mine, are supposed to spend all day cooking delicious home cooked delicacies from better times, not defrost convenience food in their new tiny apartments with their stupid tiny kitchens. I was more than a little shocked at the time, not to mention put out that they hadn't spent the morning preparing for my arrival by cooking a home made strudel. However, the frozen one was delicious and I made a mental note to buy myself one.
Birds instant custard is always a hit, although to my surprise, when my friend Rosie with whom I was dining confessed to never having before sampled the deliciousness that is instant custard from a packet, I nearly had a stirring accident. Apparently some people only have it from a tin. But when you live abroad and consolidating your delicious western imported food into one suitcase, it's packet over tin for ease of maneuvering heavy bags through Heathrow. The strudel and custard combined only gave us mild inner-mouth burns and we both agreed it was delicious, although not that retro. Tune in next time for another retro snack and almost definate negative analysis.
Like I said none of this food is retro in the sense that I used to eat it - in fact, now I think about it, I remember demanding fish fingers from the supermarket in Lithuania (why on earth were they selling them?) and my mother refusing to have anything to do with them. Potato smiles had never before passed my lips. Peas I find to be a particularly pointless vegetable, probably because I have always been restricted to the Birdseye frozen variety - stripped of flavour and texture and merely present to add a green section to an otherwise unbalanced plate. Small, round, annoyingly elusive when presented to a fork and bound to be found on or around the table for at least three days after you eat them, peas are the useless flop of the vegetable world. However, whenever I open my freezer it is packed to the brim with bags of the frozen devils.
My dinner was very easy to prepare, which is probably why it is a kids' meal. All it required of me, when normally I find boiling the kettle for pasta an exhausting chore, was popping it all on a tray and shoving it in the oven at 220 degrees. Simple. I even remembered to set the timer for 14 minutes.
Hopes brimming, I prepared my peas (place frozen lump in bowl of hot tap water, leave, drain, repeat until mildly thawed and rest of food sitting on plate getting cold) and sliced my tomato and cucumber. I chucked it all on a plate, pub artistic style and waited for the oven to beep.
Once I had finished arranging it all in an attractive way on the plate, I took a photo. Usually I don't bother with making my dinners look nice. Usually this is because I'm not the world's best cook and the food itself tends to look a little unappetising but also because when you're cooking for one and you have ten other things to do, you don't really care if you've burnt the pasta (yes, it happens) or mangled your stir fry. It's all food in the end. Anyway, here is my delicious retro dinner.
I did, however, notice that all kids food is processed and storable. No wonder we have the highest child obesity rate in Europe when the kids are eating stuff packed with sugar and E numbers instead of delicious vegetables like peas. Everything is freezable - the small convenience Tesco I go to has no fewer than four freezer isles, dedicated to ready meals, potato and vegetable products, puddings and ice creams. Kids food these days seems to come from the cupboard. My food snobbishness (says the girl eating frozen peas and potato smiles) causes me to bulk buy bunches of floppy herbs ensconced in huge amounts of plastic packaging (don't even get me started) and chuck them in whatever pasta/chicken/pasta and chicken dish I prepare for my dinner, to get some flavour into the otherwise mass produced and cardboardish produce that the Tescos of the world supply us with. Sigh.
I have to say the pudding was an improvement, although I have recently developed a grudge against frozen strudels when I caught my grandparents defrosting one to feed me. Grandparents, especially mine, are supposed to spend all day cooking delicious home cooked delicacies from better times, not defrost convenience food in their new tiny apartments with their stupid tiny kitchens. I was more than a little shocked at the time, not to mention put out that they hadn't spent the morning preparing for my arrival by cooking a home made strudel. However, the frozen one was delicious and I made a mental note to buy myself one.
Birds instant custard is always a hit, although to my surprise, when my friend Rosie with whom I was dining confessed to never having before sampled the deliciousness that is instant custard from a packet, I nearly had a stirring accident. Apparently some people only have it from a tin. But when you live abroad and consolidating your delicious western imported food into one suitcase, it's packet over tin for ease of maneuvering heavy bags through Heathrow. The strudel and custard combined only gave us mild inner-mouth burns and we both agreed it was delicious, although not that retro. Tune in next time for another retro snack and almost definate negative analysis.
