Crewed Feud

There is something else I have an obsession with, and it also begins with C, and it's not what you're thinking, P.

It's cooking. Or, more precisely, Crude Cooking. That, as I define it, is the art of making cheap meals from cans. I am not a Jamie Oliver, nor a Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, and although I swear a lot, I'm not even a Ramsay.

I'm a vegetarian, of sorts, but Little Petal gets outraged every time I claim to be such, because she points out I still eat chicken, and turkey, and fish. True, although I have recently cut back drastically on the amount of chicken I eat, but I do love tinned fish. It has two distinct advantages over fresh fish.

1) It doesn't go off, so you're not forced to eat it the same day, and that means you can hoard it!

2) It comes in tins which you are left with after you've eaten the fish, and so you can start a collection. And as you'll know from my first post on this blog, it was a painted sardine tin which started me off on the compulsive collecting of apparently pointless items.

However, a tin of mackerel or pilchards or herring is not by itself a full meal. There is plenty of protein, true, and a variety of sauce, but not much in the way of staples. This is where ingenuity comes in.

Recipe for Mock-kedgeree

Requires: boiled rice, tanned mackerel fillets in oil, an onion, some mushrooms, curry powder or similar suitable spices.

Nice to have: a hard-boiled egg to chop up as well.

Let us assume that you have some left-over boiled rice from a previous meal. (Unlikely in my case, I admit, but it could happen). If not, then it won't take long to boil some. If you need help with boiling rice, then I don't think this blog is for you, but I will point out that buying cheap tinned fish allows you to spend your money on more expensive wholegrain rice, and that is more important than you might realise.

Into a frying pan put a little olive oil, a roughly-chopped onion, and some sliced or chopped mushrooms. You only need enough oil to get the onions and mushrooms warmed up without them sticking to the pan, because most of the cooking part is going to be done by the oil in which the fish are smugly sitting.

(If you make the mistake of tipping out the oil from the fish into an empty frying-pan and then adding the onion and mushrooms, you'll find it goes into a vicious spitting mode and will not do it's job properly.)

As soon as the onion and mushrooms are frying nicely, tip the oil from the tin into the frying pan, then add the fish, having first chopped them up into chunks with the wooden slice as they lay in the tin.

Add the rice almost immediately, (it will stop the frantic spitting from the fish oil), and then the spice, stirring vigorously to be sure it doesn't stick and burn. Season well with salt and pepper before serving. You do serve, I presume? Even I am not desperate enough to eat straight from the pan.

And now, for the ranting part. I hate Tescos anyway, but I hate them with a renewed fervour, and I also hate the people who supply the tins of peppered mackerel or kipper fillets in oil on which this recipe depends, but not quite as much as I hate Tescos, because I do have some sympathy for them.

You see, first of all, last year, (ACC1), Tescos started ramping up the price of these items, until they were no longer at 89p per tin, but £1.49. What happened to every little helps? And then, to compound the fault, they went and re-introduced the tins of fish at a lower price of about £1.09 a tin, but the tins were smaller. They don't fit in with my existing collection! Now I'm faced with either having to throw away my entire previous collection of empty tins, or or having to re-arrange my collecting racks to accommodate two different sizes of tins. And, to make it worse, the things I collect which fit into the older, larger tins will not fit into the newer, smaller ones, so I am faced with having to find something else to collect in which I can store those things, and something else again which is small enough to fit into the newer, smaller tins!

And don't you try blaming the fish-tinnery business for this, Tesco, your game is known to all from other incidents. I don't believe that the fish industry suddenly decided it wanted to scrap all the old fish-tinning equipment and substitute new plant just because it made economic sense; it doesn't. Since the tins are smaller, and the same volume of fish sold therefore requires a greater number of tins in which is contained, the cost of tinning the fish has therefore increased. Oh no, this is Tescos "Driving down the prices", saying to the fish business that they want tinned fish on the shelves at £x.xx per tin, to "meet their customers expectations", and the fish industry has therefore responded by providing a reduced volume of fish per tin. They're not going to let themselves be forced into the ground like the dairy farmers.

So dam you, Tesco. May you be ever beset by brigades of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstalls from now until the cows come home to their bankrupt dairy farms, and the chickens come home to their "freedom-chicken" roosts.

Footnote: ACC1 = After Credit-Crunch 1.