Another year been and gone and the festive season is here again. This is a time of year where food and celebration are simply inseparable. Food is central to so many families traditions and memories and brings us together in a way never achieved at any other time of year. Not all families are likely to have the same traditional foods, but what is usually common is the central part of the meal - the christmas bird! Most common is the well known turkey, for others it may be duck or goose, and for a few they may leave the bird and enjoy a nicely prepared ham. Perhaps Christmas is not quite the traditional, home cooked meal it once used to be.
With the supermarkets and food companies all trying to grab a piece of the lucrative Christmas market many foods that were once home-prepared are now sold to us ready to be simply heated in the oven. We are sold these on the back of convenience and taking the strain off the primary cook on Christmas day. Strain? Why should preparing Christmas dinner be a strain. What happened to enjoying the cooking and preparation of such an important family meal? Time, care and love are all unseen ingredients that make the Christmas dinner just that little bit better. There is no way that powdered, reconstituted mashed potatoes, budget sausages wrapped in bacon, a do it yourself trifle kit or even a cheap frozen turkey come any where near the standard that Christmas dinner should reach. We have waited 365 days for this meal so it needs to deliver a more satisfying feeling than processed foods are capable of.
Instant mash is certainly quick and easy to make, but we can hardly believe it is that healthy or tasty. With over 140 million servings of Smash sold in the UK each year it is still a very popular food. Additives like sodium metabisulphite and butylated hydroxyanisole, that also make up ingredients in this product, have been shown to cause nausea, asthma, diarrhea and possible damage to the liver and kidneys. It's not really that difficult to peel and boil some locally grown, organic King Edwards potatoes then mash them with some organic butter or cream and a dash of unprocessed sea salt. They taste much better and will really complement the meat on your plate.
The law only requires that a sausage contain between 26-32% meat as a minimum to still be allowed to call it a pork or beef sausage. The legal definition of 'meat' also allows for up to 25% of the said meat to be made of connective tissue, ligament, tendon and even bone fragments. Despite this disgustingly low level of meat in the sausage, surely you may wonder what the other 68% of the sausage is made up of? It varies from product to product but it usually includes, wheat, rusk, added animal fat, sugars, additives etc. Take a look this year before you buy, then make a wise choice to buy something better. Visit a local butcher or farm shop and seek out sausages no less than 80% meat from quality reared, free range pigs with no fillers, additives or other junk in it. Wrap these in local, free range streaky bacon from the same butcher and cook gently under the grill or with the roast in the oven.
Turkeys today have been selectively bred to produce larger and larger breast meat, to the point that some farms can produce birds with so much breast meat that the birds struggle to walk due to the shear weight. This is not natural selection, but forced breeding under man's greedy direction. Intensive breeding may cram thousands of birds, even as many as 25,000 into windowless barns to meet the high demand around Christmas time. The darkness helps to reduce aggression throughout the 12-26 weeks of growth until they are taken for slaughter. During this time they will reach a size nearly double that of a bird produced over 25 years ago. Their legs fail them and they often suffer hoc burns due to their legs being in contact with urine and faeces. How can anyone think that this is a healthy nutritious centre piece to their Christmas celebrations? Supporting local, sustainable farmers by purchasing your Christmas bird from them will provide a tastier, more nutritious meal as well as decrease demand for such unethical farming practises. Why not try a different meat like duck or goose to reduce demand for turkey?
As Christmas is only a once a year treat you should be able to eat a dessert without feeling guilty. But after such a filling and nutritious roast, mash, sausage and local, organic winter vegetables in support, you may find you need to wait a couple of hours before you are ready to tackle it! Don't even bother with the DIY trifle kit, nothing but colours, flavourings, preservatives, sugar and processed food in a packet. Home made trifle is a possibility, but can be quite time consuming, so if this is on the cards you may want to start some of the preparations, like making the cake and jelly the day before. On the other hand you may want to draw on the few winter fruits we do have here in the UK and make a delicious apple, pear or rhubarb crumble or pie to warm you through in the cold Christmas evening, topped off with some baked egg custard. One of our recent blogs looked at this very topic.
Some people call Christmas dinner a feast and so it should be. A proper celebration of everything that is good and wonderful about food at this time of year. Don't believe the endless message driven at us by the supermarkets, that this annual meal is too much of a burden and so we need them to prepare and process the food to help keep it simple. It will take more time to cook and prepare quality, local food from scratch, but enjoy the process and know that the love and effort you put in will add so much more to this time of year and somehow it makes the food taste even better.
Have a nutritious and healthy merry Christmas!
From all of us here at Natural Food Finder
