ANNABEL LANGBEIN
Cheap thrills
It’s a discomforting fact of modern life that industrial, processed food is cheaper than fresh, real food. Fizzy drinks, potato chips and other processed snacks have taken the place of a glass of milk and a piece of fruit, delivering a slug of sugar, fat and salt that provides instant gratification but little nutritional value.
New Zealand households now spend proportionally a third less on fruit and veges than we did 40 years ago, and less than half as much on meat, fish and poultry. Overall, the proportion of our money we spend on food is about the same, making up around 17.5 per cent of our expenditure, but these days a big chunk of it goes on processed foods and takeout.
There’s a well-worn saying — you pay now or you pay later, but you will pay. You only have to look at New Zealand’s mushrooming stats around obesity and diabetes to know that we are already paying for the flaws in our modern diet.
I’ve thought about this a lot in putting together my new Cheap Thrills annual, which gives today’s time-poor and budget-conscious cooks the tools and recipes they need to eat well without compromising their diet and health to an industrial food chain.
When I was in India a couple of years ago I visited a little farm where the family insisted that my kids and I share a meal with them. A cauliflower was picked from the field and in less than 20 minutes we were sitting together enjoying a fragrant cauliflower curry, accompanied by a quick millet flat bread, a soothing nutty dhal and a freshly pounded coriander chutney. Delicious and nutritious, this satisfying meal was cooked over a fire with nothing more than a couple of old pots and pans, a knife and board and a wooden spoon. What struck me about that meal, apart from the generosity and graciousness of our hosts and the utter deliciousness of the food, was how quick and easy it was to prepare.
In peasant cultures all over the world, this is how people eat — they have only the simplest of ingredients, but they eat well. Traditional peasant cooking fills your belly cheaply and nutritiously, with amazing flavours. You don’t need to get out your wallet and head to a takeaway shop to get a fix, it’s quick and easy to make at home.
In writing Cheap Thrills, I’ve sought out some of the flavour trails that I discovered and loved when I was a student backpacking my way around the globe, and applied them to ingredients we can source cheaply and easily here in New Zealand. For example, there’s a whole chapter of interesting ways with mince, including Mexican beef burritos, Burmese curry, Spanish pasta bake, Turkish flatbread pizza and the Moroccan meatball subs I’m sharing here this week. So many different directions using just a packet of mince, ingredients you have in your pantry and less than an hour in the kitchen.
I’ve also included lots of recipes that make the most of fresh fruit and vegetables when they’re in season and at their cheapest, including a chapter of delicious baking and dessert recipes that use only apples and a few storecupboard staples.
This week I’m delighted to share three recipes from Cheap Thrills — an easy Pad Thai I call Hangover Noodles because it’s such a soothing morning-after breakfast, but which is equally useful as a weeknight meal, plus my super-tasty meatball subs and my delicious new Apple Crumble Muffins. Enjoy.