On Sunday mornings we tend to extend our mid-morning breakfast into late morning so that we can listen to Desert Island Discs. This morning the guest was Steven Spielberg, an interesting man with a good choice of records to take to the desert island with him. He sort of apologised to sharks for giving them a bad name in his film Jaws, which apparently led to a lot of overfishing.
“But now, nearly half a century on, director Steven Spielberg has conceded that perhaps the Oscar-winning 1975 thriller was too effective at conjuring fear of the defamed creatures, admitting he is “truly regretful” for any influence he has had on the world’s rapidly shrinking shark population.
Since the early 70s, the world’s population of oceanic sharks and rays has fallen by 71% as a result of overfishing, a global study published in Nature found last year.
“I truly and to this day regret the decimation of the shark population because of the book and the film. I really, truly regret that,” the American director tells Desert Island Discs, to be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Sunday.”
A little later this morning I listened to bits and pieces of The Food Programme on BBC Radio 4. They were singing the praises of Christmas food, with no mention of turkey, apart from saying how well sprouts and chestnuts go with it, but more the diversity of food that in some cases have gone out of fashion. We’ve become limited in what we will eat on Christmas day apparently. So we heard about things that can be done with Italian chestnuts (the best in the world, the Italian chestnut growers claim - rather like the Galicians and their potatoes) and the wonders of Wensleydale cheese, among other things.
Christmas food would probably not be the same without pigs in blankets. I’ve got a couple of packs in my freezer. Apparently they come at the top of polls of favourite festive foods. (By the way, who knew they did polls,on favourite festive foods? However, I suppose it’s understandable. They want to know what to market.) Statistics show we spend over £30 million on them. But now it’s reached a point where there are crazy spin-offs such as pigs in blankets gravy, pigs in blankets pizzas (surely an aberration!), pigs in blankets dog treats (because crazy dog lovers think their dogs are people and have to share their food types if not their actual food) and, worst of all, in my opinion, pigs in blankets milkshakes.
I’m not a fan of milkshakes at the best of times but surely they should not be any kind of meat flavour!
You can get pigs in blankets in Yorkshire puddings, which one of my granddaughters would love, and there are meat-free pigs in blankets, made from pea protein for vegans. Although quite why vegans, who supposedly eschew meat and animal products, would want them I find hard to comprehend. When I was a vegetarian I was a whole-hearted and whole food veggie eater - no meat products anywhere near me and indeed to this day I find beef hard to deal with and avoid it.
Where did they come from? Some say it was Delia Smith who first put pigs in blankets on the festive menu in the 1990s when they appeared in her Christmas recipe book. And now chef Yotam Ottolenghi is suggesting home cooks try his sticky pomegranate and pistachio version. There’s a bit of me that says that’s fairly typical Yotam Ottolenghi, full of ingredients you can’t get at our local coop store. Yes, I just looked it up; here’s the list of ingredients:
24 pork chipolatas, each twisted in the middle, then cut in half, to make 2 smaller sausages
24 rashers smoked streaky bacon, cut in half widthways
20g pistachios
1 tbsp parsley leaves, finely chopped
1 tbsp dill leaves, finely chopped
80ml maple syrup
70ml pomegranate molasses
¼ tsp ground cinnamon
½ tsp urfa chilli flakes, or ¼ tsp regular chilli flakes
That’s enough about sausages for the time being.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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