Are you getting a takeaway tonight?

But you could have a pretend take-away, Ian.

Buy some ready meals or ‘dinner-for- two’ boxes [you can probably get them on-line and Yodel will deliver them for you], heat them up, put them in a big cardboard box, strap them to the back of a motor-bike and ride around for half an hour, fall off in your drive, then ding-dong the doorbell, and hey presto! you have a gorgeous take-away.

Not recommended on Wedding Anniversary night.

Yodel might even save you the bother of putting them in the bin. 😭

Wonderful! 🙂

And thats more likely if it was Hermes -voted worst in Britain along with Yodel in survey after survey of the British public Alfa.

I used Yodel as the example as I had read Ian’s opinion of them and knew it would get him excited.

My goodness Mr Ward. That sounds like trawling – fishing for an emotional response. 🙂

It’s Mr Deliveroo and his ilk that puts us off the whole experience. We have occasionally had a take-away from a very good Indian establishment that only does take-aways because it is on an industrial estate and has no passing trade. The food has been excellent, and service and delivery by van very good – and it’s cash on delivery which is good as well. If we want fish & chips it has to be Thursday evening between 4:30 and 6:00 when the van turns up next to the church and community centre. It’s only a five minute walk but we rarely use it.

We used to do that, but then found we were not very good at inspecting the contents of our freezer, so food got overlooked until too late. We have now become more lazy.

alfa, assuming you buy the coleslaw this, like many meals, is simple and relatively quick to prepare. We cook our steak in a very hot pan, but use a mesh cover to contain the splattering, and a cooker hood to remove the fumes. Oh, and a dishwasher afterwards, otherwise washing up can detract from the experience.

Our Beef Stoganoff (delicious) last night took 10 minutes to cook but we (mrs r) did cook rice. If we’d been really lazy we could have bought a microwaveable pack.

Never tried microwaveable rice. Seems to go against the grain…

Sometimes we make the coleslaw but we can get a very nice dairy-free M&S coleslaw at a local garage so M&S usually wins.

A very hot pan is the trick of a good steak. We bought a table top grill when we didn’t have a kitchen and still use it for steak. A wipe with kitchen roll when it is hot then wash the griddles next day (when it has cooled down is my excuse) and the rest in the dishwasher.

Jacket spud in the microwave, then put steak and spud on rack over tin to catch drips in low oven for 20-30 minutes to brown/rest/check out the wine and yes, a tasty meal (better than any restaurant steak) with very little work involved.

We get the Tilda (steamed) microwavable rice, handy to have in the cupboard, usually £1 on special offer, lots of flavours and one pack is enough as I don’t eat a lot of rice.

Coleslaw turns up in unexpected places and I hate it. I’ve been served a ‘ploughman’s lunch’ that included coleslaw. I doubt that any self-respecting ploughman ate coleslaw with his lunch.

Please explain “portions”, Vynor. This would be an alien concept to me. If it comes out of the oven it goes on the plate and is consumed at once. I don’t think I could cope with “portions”. It would be too distressing to see something put in the freezer. What if . . . No, I won’t go there.

If I make a stew or cook up some mince, I always do a big batch and freeze some for further quick meals. Same with a roast, make enough gravy to freeze some roast meat in it for a quick meal.

Not exactly sure what there is to explain John. I thought a portion was an individual (or in my case two or three) meals-worth of food, separated into packages and frozen for later use. Am I missing something here?

But…but you’re cooking Shepherds?

I have a vivid image of you, Alfa, labouring over a huge cauldron on a vast open fire…

Only in portions John. I was trying to hide our cannibalistic tendencies. A good shepherd takes some beating. And that’s another ambiguous statement if ever there was one. Cannibalistic with sado-masochistic tendencies. I’m doing well here. Not sure about the cottage though, unless my name happened to be Hansel.

Thanks, Vynor. I understand the literal meaning of “portion” but I find it hard to come to terms with cooking something and not eating it all immediately. I am a gourmand, rather than a gourmet; or pig if you want the technical term for it.

I find that, generally, a batch cook tastes better than a small cook, designed to be eaten all up. More ingredients and a better combining in the oven. Also if enjoyed straight from the pot, one can anticipate the next one from the freezer, without the effort of cooking from scratch. If one makes a mistake, however, this might be one that stays in the freezer for a while so it pays to be careful. Likewise a whole chicken may be too much to eat at once and it can be carved and frozen for use with a tasty sauce or as a pie. The carcass is then ready for soup/stock. This too can be frozen in ice cube trays and used for gravy. One would cook quantities for a dinner party too.
I’m reminded of a wacky sci-fi story by Saki I think. Food came in the form of a small tablet. When added to water it produced a delicious dinner for six. On one occasion the tablet was left unattended and the dog ate it…… I think it’s time for bed.

I used to enjoy lamb pasanda in a local restaurant but it changed hands and the version produced by the new owners is pretty average. At least it is helping me to explore the many other alternatives on the menu. My own efforts at pasandas have not impressed me either.

It would be interesting to look at the scientific evidence behind this decision. I suspect there are greater health risks that could be tackled.

Shops can sell a wide range of products here so long as they are correctly and properly described. There is nothing wrong with selling orange juice from a carton, whether ‘pressed and never from concentrate’ or ‘from concentrate’ so long they don’t say it is ‘freshly squeezed’. There was a time when a lot of cafes had a glass container full of orange liquid with plastic oranges floating on the top; that had to stop, but ‘freshly squeezed’ is still open to interpretation as to whether it is done there and then on the premises or is done in a food factory, piped into cartons, and then chilled. To remain ‘freshly squeezed’ It needs to be kept refrigerated all the way through to the point of sale. Many establishments in the UK do now use whole oranges and squeeze the juice out before your very eyes. Most people who ask for an orange juice in a pub or restaurant get juice made from concentrate. There is nothing wrong with it but it will have been homogenised and have little evidence of any fibre.

I suspect selling freshly squeezed oranges in the USA is a matter of commercial choice and not a food safety requirement. With good oranges from Florida and California being ten a penny in the States there is no need to sell juice made from concentrate or out of a carton – that juice can be pressed from imperfect fruits and exported to Europe at greater profit. Or perhaps in America there are laws to protect home grown production. That’s irrelevant in this context here – we can’t grow oranges so they are going to be imported in some form or another. In the UK the food inspectors probably do not routinely examine the orange juice supplied in establishments but I hope they make a hygiene inspection of any appliances used to make ‘freshly squeezed orange juice’ on the premises. They should also be checking for correct labelling and dealing with any incorrect description at the point of sale, and should follow-up any complaints about the product.

On the orange juice, it certainly is a commercial decision, as many smaller outlets sell it straight from a chilled bottle. The other aspect of the US diet is its delight in sugar. Almost everything has sugar added, which makes breakfast rather hard to take in our case. One reason why they keep a firm hand on food inspections, however, is because of the average temperatures in much of the USA. The southern states, popular with visitors, become very hot at times, and therefore food storage and safety assumes a much higher priority than it does in places like Iceland.

America also has a rich history of shysters and was quite late on the food safety and hygiene scene.

“We estimate that foodborne diseases cause approximately 76 million illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations, and 5,000 deaths in the United States each year. Known pathogens account for an estimated 14 million illnesses, 60,000 hospitalizations, and 1,800 deaths.” [Centers for Disease Control & Prevention 1999 – wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/5/5/99-0502_article]

I used to believe Doner Kebab was a Turkish pop star… or Russian pop Tsar?

On the word “concentrate ” it means that the whole orange is used not just the inner core.

Having eaten in many an American eating establishment, I can’t say I have noticed a particularly high quality of hygiene and food standards.

We usually avoid cheap all-you-can-eat establishments but sometimes don’t have a choice especially for breakfast, and the orange stuff they serve up certainly is not pure orange juice and I don’t know how they get away with calling bits of fat – bacon. Scrambled eggs are a strange consistency so it is best to ask for a fried egg – over easy.

Then there all the faded label Heinz ketchup bottles on tables that are refilled with cheap ketchup.

And if you have been in a busy kitchen, there is more food on the floor than on plates. I have never seen rats, but plenty of cockroaches after dark. 😖

I don’t think so, Duncan. It should not include the pith and the peel and any pips. Concentrated orange juice is made by drying and later rehydrating the juice, or by concentrating the juice and later adding water to the concentrate. Before drying, the juice may also be pasteurised and have oxygen removed from it, necessitating the later addition of flavouring, generally made from orange products which could include some of the pulp or fibre from inside the orange rendered to a liquid form and integrated with the juice.

It is almost certain that eating an orange is better for you than drinking just the juice because ingestion of the high sugar content is slower and the natural fibre provides roughage. I eat two oranges most days. I also have one drink a day of pressed pineapple juice not from concentrate. A couple of gins and bitter lemon makes my five-a-day! [Not true – my current fruit intake includes apples, banana, grapes and soft fruit if I can find good quality produce – some excellent South African peaches last week].

Alfa- my wife told me all the drug stores and res truants she went to were clean and to a high standard as well as the food , obviously different places visited as you should have reported the cockroaches to the US Health+Safety authorities . They sound more like our equivalent of the old “Transport Caf ” that used to frequent motorways like the M1 and yes I have been in many.

Reading the small print of some of the concentrate I observed — all of the orange used – has this stopped John ?

It’s easy to consume a large amount of sugar as a result of buying fruit juice. I stopped buying juice years ago and just eat the fruit. It’s more time consuming to peel fruit, which helps to limit consumption.

As far as I know, Orange juice is just the juice (and vesicles or juicy bits in some). According to Wiki “Commercial squeezed orange juice is pasteurized and filtered before being evaporated under vacuum and heat. After removal of most of the water, this concentrate, about 65% sugar by weight, is then stored at about 10 °F (−12 °C). Essences, Vitamin C, and oils extracted during the vacuum concentration process may be added back to restore flavor and nutrition (see below).

The vacuum concentration process removes volatile components and I don’t think they are restored, judging by the rather flavourless nature of juices made from concentrated juice.

Duncan: cockroaches are endemic in most of the southern states in the US. They do try to stop them getting into diners and use a lot of fly screens for the airborne season, but they still get in.