Recipe for a glorious chilli paste/spread

A couple of weeks ago I was inspired by something from one of the Moro cookbooks to make a roasted almond and chilli paste, to have with curry etc.

Anyway, I can’t remember it exactly but I’m still enjoying it from the fridge, one of my better creations and wonderfully hot.

You need

• A handful of whole almonds. I used ones that had not had the brown “chaff” removed
• 2 tsp of whole cumin seeds
• 1 clove garlic
• 25 or more large dried red chillis (the 10cm or so long ones from India)
• 1 tsp salt
• A little olive oil

How to make it:

1. Roast a handful of whole almonds in the oven – don’t burn them but bring the flavour out. Roast them at say 180C for about 20 minutes
2. Roughly chop the almonds
3. Fry in olive oil a couple of teaspoons of whole cumin seeds. Once browning and aromatic, turn off and add 1 crushed garlic clove and mix
4. Remove from the pan and put in a blender/chopper with the almonds and whole dried chillis
5. Process until you have a coarse paste

The end result is quite a “rustic” coarse paste, with very strong flavour. Try it!

Wake up and smell the food scarcity

You’ve hopefully heard about the problems with the prices of rice and other grain staples. This is serious stuff, probably more important than oil price and oil scarcity. Nothing makes people as hungry for change as being physically hungry.

Check out this excellent article detailing the thankfully widening appreciation that meat consumption at the levels we see in the West is simply not sustainable, especially on a global scale. China is entering the global food import market and the relative affluence developing there and in other countries is going to make it impossible for meat consumption to continue as it is.

You simply cannot feed millions of tons of grain to animals in order to eat them and ignore the fact that this food goes a lot further when fed directly to humans. It is deeply ironic that China, with a diet typically very low in dairy and meat produce, may well be the deciding factor as to whether people in Western countries do or don’t have meat on their plate most days of the week in 5 years time.

One thing’s for sure – its going to become a lot more expensive, which is as it should be. The gap between non-organic and organic prices is likely to narrow as the bottom-of-the-barrel produced meat prices increase due to scarcity. This is probably a good thing in the long term, as people will have notchoice but to eat less but better reared meat and dairy products. It might even in time turn around the prospects of our respective nations’ health – but possibly not so for the Chinese.

Yahoo Kids! encouraging kids to eat crap food?

I’m against censorship, but we all know controls are needed when it comes to children. In fact in the UK at least, advertising regulations for ads targeted at children are getting increasingly strict - especially when it comes to junk foods. We are after all becoming nations full of obese children doomed to an early death, according to many reports.

I was in London the other day and noticed a lot of Cadbury chocolate adverts for Dairy Milk bars, along the lines of  "There’s a glass and a half of milk in every bar". This is a very disturbing ploy for which the ASA should be punishing Cadbury – effectively trying to sell their awful chocolate (which it has been argued can’t be called chocolate due to the high level of fats relative to cocoa) as a "healthy" food on the basis that most people, incorrectly, believe cow’s milk to be a healthy food product.

The conspiratorial side of me wondered if there was a joint promotion going on between the Dairy Council and Cadbury to do what is effectively promotion of both products.

Instead, I happened on a link of sorts. Yahoo appear to be in the beta testing phase of a new service called Yahoo Kids! One presumes this is to protect children from all the potentially offensive and/or insanely boring parts of Yahoo – or you could argue its to collate as much marketing information on children as possible… there is a caveat at the footer of their pages about collection personal information.

Anyway, I found the Food and Eating section. Oh the horror. Take out a couple of entries from oxfam about chocolate and tea, and you have direct links to:

• 4 (yes you read correctly, four) Cadbury chocolate sites, presumably "educational" in nature
• The British Egg Information Service – hey we all need more cholesterol
• Kellogg’s – those bastions of sweet cereals
• A site selling sweets
• The Dairy Council’s website – cow’s milk is for… cows
• Ribena – mmm more sugar
• Walkers – makers of crisps (who notably -do- make unsalted crisps)

There’s a couple of minor information sites there too, but that’s the section so far. No doubt Yahoo! will say it is early days yet, but I have this one question:

How long will it be before advertising regulations on children’s junk foods are extended to places where children will be given false "educational" material on the web?
You can bet this tactic is in use elsewhere on the web, where frankly pathetic people are paid to find sites like this to list links to the "educational" content they are providing to suck kids into their products.