Thursday 23 April 2020

The Cottage and Cookery - Part Four

If you are an Australian, have you been bottling peaches and drying grapes over recent months?

Food is obviously physical, as is drink.

Have you been experiencing this month as dangerous?

Are you utterly incompetent in the culinary arts?

Perhaps you have an inadequate familiarity with onions.

Or you have spent too little time learning the difference between sweating vegetables, sautéing them, stir frying and braising.

Do you have expensive tastes in food?

Do you know how to eat cheaply and well?

Saturday 18 April 2020

The Cottage and Cookery - Part Three

When a person is perfectly capable of doing a job satisfactorily without assistance, and possibly even without supervision, that is a highly efficient situation, as long as the person is satisfied with the job.

The preferences of extroverts are likely to give introverts indigestion.

The preferences of introverts are likely to give extroverts cabin fever.

Do you prefer easy to prepare meals of readily available, seasonal ingredients or do you prefer to search for gourmet extravagances or mass produced convenience foods?

Do you have a tendency to overeat?

Do you often have less than enough to eat?

Have you ever attempted to feed too many people with not enough food?

Is cookery something you intrinsically enjoy or is it something you only do for money or out of reluctant necessity.

What do you know about cooking in medieval Europe?

How were meal times around the world transformed as a consequence of the Columbia exchange?

Which foods are native to the area in which you currently live?

Do you think much about religious meanings associated with meals?

Why do people give meanings to food beyond its nutritional aspects?

How do you find out whether someone has a food allergy or food intolerance?

What do you know about food preservation?

What do you know about food preparation?

What do you know about fermentation?

Do you know much about food drying?

Do you store a wide variety of dried foods?

Do you prefer you meals to be as natural as possible?

Do you prefer whole foods as much as possible?

Do you do your own pickling?

Do you make various preserves?

Do you have an efficient approach to making and using frozen foods?

Are you familiar with various types of food storage?

Do you know enough about food safety?

There is much to learn from food history.

Have you ever made stone soup?

How can you prove you are simultaneously doing enough to meet your own needs and the needs of other people?

Do you usually associate cookery with meeting needs?

Wednesday 15 April 2020

The Cottage and Cookery - Part Two

Do you usually associate the word economics with food or cooking or cleaning or gardening or money?

Do you consider all economics, in practice, to be home economics?

Have you recently made a hot pot, a pease pudding, an eintopf, a casserole, a nabemono, a cawl, a pot-au-feu, a curry, a ragout, or a perpetual stew?

Do you spend much time sprouting?

Do you parch grains, dry roast seeds and nuts, make nut roasts, and substitute local ingredients for imported ones whenever possible.

Friday 10 April 2020

The Cottage and Cookery - Part One

What are the types of foods and drinks you usually associate with cottages?

Have you ever eaten porridge or a potage or a pottage or a baked potato in a cottage?

Do you enjoy frumenty?

Do you enjoy lentil soup?

Do you enjoy cottage pie?

Have you made a mess of pottage recently?

Are you fond of bubble and squeak?

How many types of porridge have you tried?

What is your repertoire of soups and stews?

Do you make dumplings?

Do you bake bread?

Monday 6 April 2020

The Cottage and Controversy

Cottages are usually associated with tradition rather than fashion.  They also tend to be associated with crafts rather than arts.

There is much controversy whenever cottages are excessively gentrified, and especially when they become holiday homes

How do you usually compare digital developers with real estate developers?

Friday 3 April 2020

The Cottage and Politics

Living in an intelligently frugal way is rarely supported adequately by the state. 

It is certainly not properly encouraged by most politicians.

Thursday 2 April 2020

The Cottage and Beliefs

How do your beliefs shape your expectations of people and places?