Why is it that the Sunday roast is so ingrained in our culture? All over the UK tons of meat must be stuck in ovens as people simultaneously sit down for a family and friends gathering around a chunk of roasted meat.
The humble and traditional roast consists of roasted meat, typically beef, chicken, lamb or pork. Each one unlocks new flavours and is enhanced by it’s own special secret (or not so secret) sauce. Beef has horseradish, lamb has mint sauce and pork has apple sauce. And who knows about chicken. Anything will do.
So why is it that we started this lunatic show of mass roasting? Well it started in medieval times when the Lords would treat their serfs with a roast oxen every Sunday. It seems that we liked be rewarded by meat so much that we still do it today. Even if it isn’t a gift.
We are so fanatical about our roasts and have been for so long that the French (cursed frogs) call us “Le Rosbif” or the roast beef. Referring to our insatiable lust for roast beef. It’s now become ingrained in their culture too, describing any roast.
And it’s true, we do like them. I remember going on a trip to visit a friend in Portsmouth and waking up on Sunday to be asked if I wanted to got to a “Toby’s”. Inquiring as to what it is, I was told that it’s a carvery. And not just a carvery but a buffet carvery of loads of different meats.
If that’s not your style then you can order off the Sunday Roast menu of any pub up and down the country. That’s how much we love them.
There are so many upsides to Sunday roasts and it goes beyond the tastiness of them. There are far more empowering and underlying sociality to roasts.
It a chance for family and friends to congregate and discus their week. There are some places, that a family roast is obligatory despite competition from the old KFC bucket. People barely go to church these days but the roast is holding the family unit together in a place that God was not even able to. All hail the Sunday roast, the meal more powerful than God.
We all need food to sustain us. But in this modern age of fast food and fad diets we overlook this most basic of necessities. We catagorise by what is healthy or unhealthy but overlook that most most basic of things. What is good food?
The latest marketing stunt by the supermarkets is local food. If it’s bought to you locally then it must be good. What was raised near you lowers the carbon emissions and must be better for you. But is this truly the case? Probably not. As long as it’s fresh then I don’t care if it’s come from a world away.
Equally, the other big hitter of the last decade is organic food. Who can tell me what organic food is? Without using Google. It’s a label. And I doubt that the Tesco’s organic range is even that much more different than the other stuff that they produce. It’s a way to add a few more pennies. Call me cynical but if you have an organic field next to an inorganic one then surely it matters not. Everything we buy these days is already pre-washed and processed by the time we eat it anyway.
Whenever you watch one of these shows done by celebrity chefs like The Restaurant or the F Word all we hear about is local and fresh food. We can’t all grow our own food in our gardens but we can surely source food in London that is a little better than the average crap you buy in Tescos.
Why not go to your local butcher or market for example. Sure there aren’t many left due to the supermarkets and stuff but there are alternatives around.
What I think is missing from the cooking shows and things like that is the fact that cooking can be fun. It shouldn’t be a chore that has to be done at the end of a hard days work. Some of the best dates I’ve ever had have involved sourcing and cooking good food. If it tastes great then what’s the problem. It beats sitting in front of the TV watching What Not To Eat.
So we all know that we’re meant to eat in a healthy fashion. If you don’t get your 5 a day then you end up as an obese northerner. And nobody really wants that. But nobody ever talks about how difficult, inconvenient and expensive it is to be healthy.
Have you ever tried to eat 5 different 5 a days before? It means eating vege with both meals of the day and having fruit for breakfast and having a banana as a snack in the afternoon. Which sounds pretty plausible but if you have a job that means you eat at your desk and have no time which makes things really hard.
If you eat out at a restaurant then it normally means having to order side dishes as the main comes in the form of protein and carbohydrate. The smart money is to take vitamin tablet but I don’t really see that as a natural and valid alternative.
As for snacking. If you get hungry in the middle of the day in Oxford Street there are very few places that you can stop off for a healthy and fulfilling snack. Pret and Eat, as healthy as they portray themselves, are nicer Macdonalds with ingredients from the same suppliers.
It gets worse past 8 in the evening. If you’re hungry then the places you can eat within a healthy lifestyle diet is very limited indeed. Kebabs and Mcdonalds. It would be interesting to see how a late night healthy food place would fare in central London on a Friday night.
And as for supermarkets, it gets worse. The produce gets worse and worse and there are few organic alternatives. Whole Foods is one of the best but it’s looking pretty frayed in the middle of the recession.
We need a good food guide for healthy food places. If anyone knows of one, let me know. The demand to be good is there but there is a limited supply of options!
As the Festive period draws to a close and the New Year one night stand of hell approaches rapidly, I can’t help but feeling a little cabin fever. I haven’t left the house in two days, part in fact to my purchase of Rock Band and partly because it seems every “poor East London student” actually has a massive house in the country. Which leaves me searching for creative cures for boredom.
Everyone seems to go away at this time of year to escape the lull in London. Many of the clubs are shut and unfortunately for us this year, the lull falls on a Sunday and Monday meaning that most of the clubs are shut anyway. Being used to drinking most nights it seems that the only cure for boredom is a subtle blend of alcohol and marijuana.
It’s now been two days since Christmas Day and there are still vast reserves of alcohol remaining. Vast reserves that are being steadily depleted as New Years looms. Because let’s face it, even the crappiest Channel 5 movie can be entertaining when you’re hammered.
The other obvious cure for the boredom created by not having to go to work and not being able to go out is weed. Cannabis Sativa also alleviates boredom by putting you in a coma like trance, perfect for monging in front of the TV. Not that I’ve tried it, obviously.
And it seems that it’s not just my commune of friends round here that are getting involved with getting wasted as a cure for boredom. A brief soiree to the supermarket saw a raft of stoned 20-30 year olds congregating in the snacks aisle, stinking of weed and blinking at the bright lights. The booze section had been ravaged and a group of boozed up middle aged people grabbed more red wine.
So it seems that the cure for not having to work and having to wait for New Year would be to stay in a permanent state of inebriation. Not that I’m recommending going out and getting wasted, at this time of year it seems the place to get trashed is the front room.
Ok, so it’s Christmas Eve and despite Christmas scrooge cynicism and retail horror that is prone to take over, who doesn’t have that little heart-fluttering excitement that it’s Christmas tomorrow. But what is there to be excited about? Or a better way to phrase it is, “what isn’t there to get excited about?”
Firstly, a little explanation. I am on a Christmas induced high due to the fact that one side of my family is continental European so celebrates Christmas more on Christmas Eve. We have a dinner and open presents in the evening the night before everyone else in the UK does. Which is pretty sweet, only made sweeter by the fact i get to do it all again tomorrow with my English dad.
So, Christmas. Possibly the best thing about Christmas is the food. As long as it isn’t turkey, which is dry and bland. Even if it’s well cooked. Any bird that’s name is used as an insult is pretty lame. Though even if it is turkey, there’s still the whole land of plenty idea about Christmas. You can eat till your sick and I like that in a kinky kind of Roman way.
Plus, there’s the presents. Not normally as exciting as the food as you normally get a whole load of crap that you won’t even use and will end up collecting dust and give you that guilty feeling when you move and have to throw it away. But then again sometimes you get something nice from someone who you didn’t think would get you a present. And that’s nice.
This Christmas I’ve been cunning about the presents though. Instead of having disappointment as I open presents to the dawning realisation that no-one, “gets me”, I decided to pre-empt it by going and buying myself a Rock Band full band set. Then I bought a song pack and bought credits to download more songs. So at least I’ll be having a merry christmas no matter what dodgy gifts everyone else gets me. Merry Xmas!
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