or A Toss Up of Priorities
A health-fiend of a friend once gave me Gabriel Gaté’s classic, Smart Food, wrapped in best wishes and silver cooking foil. For my birthday. Predictably, I felt as suspicious as a marked-down cream sponge. Was her gift wrapping a recycling of unwanted material? Had she given up baking for good, for the good raw food life? But the foil was wrapped around a cookery book. A cooked savoury noodle dish with spinach lavishly adorned the front cover. With a wink she said, “This has some great ideas for cake alternatives.”
And if you are thinking that, without even a thank you, I was so desperate for nutritious desserts that I immediately flipped to the chapter on Sweet Delights, you are obsessively mistaken.
Time, not cake, was my luxury at that time. With a young family and paid work, something had “to give” and since I stopped wearing panty hose during my first pregnancy there was only “give” in my daily routine. So, no caring of pets. Stuffed pets OK. A self-mulching garden. A self-seeding herb garden. Even useful hobbies like knitting were dropped, mid-stitch.
This time factor, or lack of time factor, affected dinners. No home-made desserts. My memory of aromatic winter months, sitting round the table with stewed apple and hot vanilla custard, being one of the few childhood experiences I neglected to pass down. I was a cold-tongue mother. Tinned peaches. Tinned fruit salad. And always jelly, in every artificially natural colour known. Dessert was generally this wasteland, a desert, but somehow in the summer holidays, forests of ice-cream sprouted in my freezer. And frozen yogurt, once it became available, was a regular visitor and stayed overnight or even up to a week. But never longer. And then there was all the hard work associated with organising a replacement.
When on holiday, there was time for browsing my historical collection, both ancient and modern, of meal recipes and very occasionally attempting one. My many folders of mismatched colours and sizes, faded labels or non-existent, stacked as if ready for a jumble sale. So a smart Gabriel Gaté was welcomed onto my bookshelf. I followed one of his recipes, garlic mushrooms, so many times it lead me to cook the dish as an acceptable low-budget alternative to garlic prawns. His desserts are the result of healthy decisions: yogurt instead of ice-cream based on cream, traditional recipes modified to reduce sugar and/or fat proportions and wholemeal flour instead of floor sweepings.
He led me back to salads, but sadly, not the fruit-flavoured variety. Had I taken his advice and combined mango and strawberry with juice of 2 oranges, 1 tablespoon of sultanas and 1 banana, sugar optional, my family would have experienced a more organic heaven on earth than the one regularly accessed through 4 litres of Neapolitan Ice-cream, no matter how organically certified the ice-cream.
