In oven chicken breast bathed in our own homemade BBQ dressing

Since Christmas we've been trying to lose weight by following some ancient meal plan from the long defunct Closer magazine, a plan that is, almost certainly, now scientifically discredited. We have both lost a fair bit of weight though. Lunch still usually comes from those diet sheet recipes but we're nowhere near as strict and disciplined as we were during the first couple of months. Nowadays we go out for meals whenever we want and I drink beer in bars and if they put crisps on the table I'll wolf them down. If anyone can explain to me how it takes a week of carefully controlled eating to lose a few hundred grammes and just a single chocolate biscuit to regain a kilo I'd be pleased to know.

Today's diet meal recipe was new. I'd not tried it because it involves aubergine and courgette. I don't really care for either. The recipe also called for a splash of chilli and tomato sauce. There was none in the cupboard and I knew it was hopeless to go and see if it were available in any of our local supermarkets, it's just not the sort of thing that they carry. Easy to make some though as the name gives away the principal ingredients. Whatsmore a nearby supermarkets is one of the few I know that stocks chillies in a routine way. It reminded me, but just to be sure I just checked, and it's true, that we have nothing "pre-prepared" in our freezer. There's pitta bread and frozen peas and chicken breast and some very chemically ice pops but there are no prepared meals - no lasagne, no spag bol, no microwaveable burgers or kebabs and obviouslly no chilli con carne. Most Spaniards don't go in for prepared food. Frozen and chilled pizzas are popular enough and there are pre-prepared things in the freezers and chiller cabinets of most Spanish supermarkets but they are not a usual purchase. Glance at the person in front of you in the checkout line and you will see raw materials for building dishes rather than packets of ready to go meals. Spaniards don't even eat a lot of things like breakfast cereal and fancy biscuits. 

I don't know whether this is good or bad. I'm just saying it's different. I know, for instance, that my mum gets lots of ready made meals from a company which delivers frozen meals to her door. She says that they are first rate and save her money and waste. When I lived in the UK, years ago, I would often pop something in to the microwave, when I came home from work, and it would heat through as I went to shed my suit and tie. Life would have been harder without those frozen meals. I know that the urban myth is that, nowadays, no British family still sits down to eat together, unless they order in takeaway and, even then, there will be no conversation, just the movement of thumbs on the mobile phone keypad. I have no idea whether that fireside scene is real or not but I have seen the takeaways of every colour and hue on English High Streets and I know from our infrequent visits to one of the "British" supermarkets on the coast here that there is lots of interesting sounding food in boxes and packets. 

Back in Culebrón I sometimes wonder about the time it takes to prepare a detailed shopping list and the time it takes to cook the food as compared to the time it takes to eat and to do the washing up after. And the aubergine and courgette thing? Even with the splendid sauce it was horrid.

Roast saddle of venison, tortilla and beans

I'm not much of a cook though I can usually produce something that is, at least, edible. That's not always the case; new recipes tend to turn out badly and, recently, I have had a series of culinary disasters. I did some beef, tomato and olive thing that tasted of salt and nothing else. There was another concoction that I ended up tipping directly into the bin, something with lots of cream and garlic. I'm safer when I cook up the lentils or one of the student favourites (well favourite with the one time students who are now beginning to draw their pensions or die) like spag bol and chilli con carne. Nonetheless my version of kebabs with chorizo is OK and that spaghetti with yoghurt and mushrooms and bacon isn't bad either. My shepherd's pie's perfectly tasty and there are plenty more in my repertoire that, whilst they may not exactly thrill the palette, do, at least, maintain the calorie input without hardship.

The stuff that goes into my meals comes from the shops in the form of veg and pulses and meat and cheese and eggs and stuff like that. The food may come in packets and boxes. It may have been grown under hectares of plastic, sprayed with hideous chemicals, never have felt the soil on its roots or the sun on its seed-pod but it still looks like a carrot, a lettuce or a chickpea. If it's an animal product then I wouldn't like to speculate as to whether the beast spent it's life confined in a tiny feeding station eating high protein feed made from fracked oil or recycled fish. Nonetheless, basically, whatever the food and however it got produced, it would still be recognisable as food to my forebears. The raw material of a meal rather than the finished product.

There have been prepared foods in Spanish supermarket freezers as long as I have lived here and somebody must buy them because they are still on sale. In fact I've noticed that much of the extra space in the newer larger store of a local supermarket has been taken up by new lines of pre-prepared stuff. I still don't see a lot of people buying it though. Usually the stuff on the supermarket belt in front of mine looks much like my stuff except that they have always remembered something that I've forgotten. I think it would be fair to say that most of the Spaniards around here do not buy things that come ready prepared. It's a sweeping generalisation and there are plenty of exceptions from pizzas to ready shaped meatballs. It may well be different in the bigger cities too but I think that most people in most homes still cook their food from scratch rather than heat up something they have bought.

Now I saw an advert on Spanish TV today for C&A. It's the first ad that I've noticed with a Christmas theme. This reminded me that we'll be due our annual trip to the coast to the Overseas Supermarket/Iceland store. It's not that I often wake up thinking of Piccalilli and Bombay mix or Melton Mowbray pies and Quality Street but, confronted with shelves full of products that were staples with me for forty years, there is always lot of gratuitous overspending. We usually go to buy something specific that's either expensive or unavailable locally - gammon, pork and mustard sausages, twiglets - but we nearly always end up buying lots of things that sound great but turn out to be soggy, tasteless or otherwise disappointing. This year I really must remember to say no to the pre-prepared stuff however good the photo on the box looks.

By the way I apologise if I've done this blog before. Checking the blog is a bit like watching the photos, my own photos, that pop up randomly on my laptop as a screen saver. I sometimes find myself watching the slide-show of half remembered photos and thinking that some of them aren't so bad. Then one of the many blurred pictures pops up and my hubris evaporates. When I thought of blogging on pre-prepared versus fresh food I popped some search clues into the blog and I found myself re-reading long forgotten blog posts, sometimes from years ago. I thought they were OK until I bumped into two in a row which were the literary equivalent of those blurred snaps. I gave up, ashamed of my prose and the out of date information. Mind you if I've forgotten the chances are that you have too.