Austria

The barn swallow, Austria’s handsome national bird

I write about wildlife and food.  This blog covers a national dish from a different country each time. I then write about the wildlife of that country.  You can find out about the scoring system used to rate the different recipes here.

What’s cooking today? Tafelspitz is a clear soup of beef and vegetables from Austria.

Austria is home to multiple conservationist friends of mine, which might mean one of them will pop up in an interview before long. More concretely, the last time I came across Austria at work was during Climate COP 28. If I remember rightly, Leonore Gewessler, Federal Minister for Climate Action, gave a compassionate speech asking for a complete fossil fuel phase-out. She also used the speech to announce €35 million of climate contributions. The day after, Austria joined six other European nations in proposing a framework “to prevent greenwashing and restore integrity” in voluntary carbon markets. A positive showing, all in all.

Onion-burning stovetop fun

Recipes:  Tafelspitz Boiled Beef Recipe – Chef Thomas Sixt and, for the vegetables, German Soup Vegetables (Suppengrün) – The Kitchen Maus

Substitutions:  Instead of parsley root and celery, I used celeriac as per the Kitchen Maus recipe.

Cooking notes: Given some confusion over the number of bay leaves to use, I went with 3½.Doing the main veg prep during the first hour’s boiling time will increase your efficiency.

Makes: 4.

Carbs:   Pretty much 0, if served just as the soup, meat and vegetables.

Drink with: I cooked and served this with Lobster Shack 2021, a deliciously tangy South African Sauvignon Blanc.

Rating:  80.  Another wintry classic that exceeded my expectations.

Not exactly a clear soup, but it mostly worked!

Thus finishes a very tight Group 6, with Austria and Moldova having to go through to a play-off round of repeat cooking. Hats off to Serbia, though!

Serbia 81

—————–

= Austria 80

= Moldova 80

—————–

Finland 79+

Lithuania 79

Russia 74

Moldovan Musings

After the not-exactly-great outcome of COP28, what lies ahead for Eastern Europe?

I blog about wildlife and food.  Here, I cover a national dish from a different country each time. I then write about the wildlife of that country, and run a scoring system to rate the different recipes.  You can find out about it here.

What’s today’s dish? Mămăligă with jumari, which is Moldovan for polenta with pork rind.

Are mămăligă-filled Moldovans any good at looking after the environment? I think so. Moldova’s statement at this month’s COP28 climate gathering was fairly orthodox, but did make the point that it was one of the countries suffering severe effects from global change. Encouragingly, Moldova’s representative was an environmental activist and law specialist – much more appropriate than the career diplomats or fossil fuel chiefs that some other countries sent.

Moldova is a very poor nation in economic terms, but nonetheless offered to preside at COP29 next year to resolve the Russia-EU impasse about Bulgaria hosting the event.  This might have been a better idea than awarding COP29 to oil-rich Azerbaijan instead.  However, as that’s exactly what happened, we’ll never know. 

Some progress is being made on the international environmental scene, but plenty is still being lost. Azerbaijan may be small, but it’s still over twice the size of a Moldova – and, like the UAE (COP28’s host country), has a much worse human rights record. The global power-players have such influence over big decisions that affect millions of human lives on the frontline. It is so often the defenceless who need our prayers and our advocacy. 

Thankfully, though, every positive action taken for them can make a difference. And I’ll eat to that.

  

An unusual upcycling hack for a wedding invitation – slicing Moldovan polenta

Recipe:  Mamaliga – Global Table Adventure

Substitutions:  Couldn’t find coarse yellow cornmeal, so I made this with a mixture of fine yellow cornmeal and a few breadcrumbs.  Equally, I substituted hard goats’ cheese in for sheep’s cheese.

Cooking notes:  Mămăligă is traditionally cut with string… so, me being me, I used some string left over from our wedding invitations to add to the fun (and look after a small piece of the planet).

Makes:  2 portions for the average adult, as long as not too hungry.

Carbs:   36g carbs per portion, i.e., 72g in total

Rating:  80.  Another tasty variation on the ‘cheese and bacon’ theme.

My mămăligă with jumari, sour cream and goats’ cheese. I am aware this dish has an element of climate irony.

Chicken Tikka Manchester?

My family say I write my blog almost like I’m composing a cryptic crossword.  It’s probably time I simplified it a bit.

My chicken tikka masala.

On this blog, I write about wildlife and food.  I write about a national dish from a different country each time. The wildlife I write about is also from that country.  I also run a scoring system to rate the different recipes.  You can find out about it here.

This week’s country is the UK – or, more specifically, England.  A lot of people think our national dish is fish and chips.  This isn’t correct.  Our official national dish is chicken tikka masala. 

It is claimed that chicken tikka masala comes either from Glasgow, Birmingham or Manchester.  Some people say it originates from the Punjab region of India or Pakistan.  Others – including these Irish comedians – have poured doubt on this theory.

I’m from England and have worked in the environment sector there for several years.  If I had to pick a small selection of current wildlife stories from England, I’d choose three main ones.  One is a good news story, and two are bad news:

• The English government is tearing up a lot of good environmental policy;
• England is still polluting its streams and rivers very badly;
• England is doing increasingly well at reintroducing extinct native animals.

A lovely CTM cooking.

Recipe:  Chicken tikka masala by the BBC Good Food team.

Substitutions: I didn’t have mango chutney at home, but I did have apple and fig chutney – so that’s what I used.

Cooking / serving notes: served with five Bilash naan breads, and made using 750g (dry weight) of long grain rice.

Makes:  10 portions.

Carbs:   920g in total, thus 92g per person.

Rating:  89 – which really surprised me.  Cooking the sauce from scratch at home just makes it so much better than any cook-in sauce you can buy from a shop.

There is a phenomenon in performance poetry contests called “score creep.”  What happens in score creep is that the later a poet performs during the event, the higher a score they are likely to get.  This is because the audience usually gets more and more hyped as the event goes on.  Could I be inflating my scores as the project goes on?  Am I getting better at cooking?  Come for dinner one day and find out!

Meatballs!

During which: children sing badly, a Scandi academic writes about fish pudding, and biodiversity talks stall again.

Ah, the legendary comestible that is Swedish meatballs… .  Muppet sketches aside, Svenska köttbullar (as it’s known in its own backyard) is another Scandinavian dish that is a.) made with autumnal Northern European ingredients, and b.) not vegetarian.  More unexpectedly, it’s also the first national dish to come with its own song.  

The tune in question – Ge mig mera köttbullar – comes from a story by Swedish children’s author Astrid Lindgren.  The song is apparently meant to be sung whilst making the food.  While the version I found on YouTube was performed indescribably badly, I did enjoy this translation of the lyrics:

Meatballs, meatballs, meatballs

Give me more meatballs, small tasty meatballs

Give me more meatballs, fresh fried meatballs

Give me more meatballs, small brown meatballs

Give me more meatballs

I want meatballs right away

Because they taste so good and I like that

Step 1: mix.

The song also features in an academic paper in the Nordic Journal of Art and Research, which discusses the different foods featured in the song in their social and economic context.  The wartime children in the story hate “abominable” fish pudding, but are wealthy enough to be able to choose meatballs instead.  When it comes to life choices and poverty, there is a definite parallel with what is happening today.  Those of us with more resources and more choice need to be very careful to make those choices responsibly.  Otherwise, we will more and more end up confining those who have fewer resources to the bin-ends, left-overs and sacrifice zones.  That is not what a caring society does.

The fish pudding story is also a reminder that Sweden is a country with a 2,000-mile coastline.  Back on the last day of the Geneva conference, Sweden made a rare move in support of discussions for the conservation and sustainable use of marine and coastal biodiversity.  As with many issues, a number of parties felt that not enough time had been given to discuss a strategy (in this case for ecologically or biologically significant areas of ocean, or “EBSAs”).

The technical conversation around this has been parked for now, with the next round of UN CBD talks in Nairobi focusing instead on the existing draft Global Biodiversity Framework text.  The Nairobi meeting – which finished yesterday – was somewhat ambitiously shoehorned into a week, despite major differences between several parties on several matters. Some strides forward were taken, but overall progress was limited – so much so that a fifth intersessional meeting has had to be called prior to the final talks.

Steps 2 and 3: shape and fry.

Sweden will also hold the EU presidency in 2023, after France and Czechia.  By this time, the World Cup will have been won, the Global Biodiversity Framework agreed (finally), and Russia still be fighting Ukraine (probably).  Many plates of meatballs with creamy sauce and lingonberry jam will have been served, both within and beyond Sweden.  Will you be making one of them?  Who will win the World Cup?  What do you want to see in the GBF?  Any and all answers welcome below!

Steps 4 and 5: make sauce, combine.

Recipes: “Swedish Meatballs (Svenska Köttbullar with Lingonberries)” by Angela @ Bake It With Love; “Svenska Köttbullar – Authentic Swedish Meatballs” from All that’s Jas.

Substitutions:  I had to use redcurrant jam instead of lingonberry jam, which really isn’t easy to find in Glasgow.

Makes: 13 large meatballs (with sauce, circa 4g carbs each; 56g carbs for the whole lot).

Notes:  If using Jas’s soy sauce rather than Angela’s recommended Worcestershire sauce, only use a teaspoon.  If you’re wondering why neither of them sound very Swedish… well, that’s a great example of cuisine adapting due to globalisation.

Rating: 70 (explained here).