I want to eat with the common people

I saw this interesting article by Ashley Miller posted on Facebook: The food of my childhood, the food of Southern poor white trash. At the end of the article, the author gives a list of foods that are considered lower class. And many of them sound yummy, though I have no idea what some of them are.

It's sad but true that what you eat is often construed as a class marker, as much as what you wear. Posh people eat caviar, poor people eat chips (allegedly).

Remember when Edwina Currie was rude about working-class eating habits?

However, I think we should celebrate regional food, and food that is considered "lower-class". It's often fun, cheap to eat, quick to make, and comforting.

Here are a few delicacies that are probably considered "not quite the thing" but are wonderful.

• Chip butties
• Crisp sandwiches
• Black pudding (why hasn't someone invented a vegetarian version of black pudding?)
• Mushy peas

And then there are the "posh" foods that are also yummy, like olive tapenade. Now there's a thought, how about olive tapenade on chips?

Ooh and does anyone else roll white bread into balls of dough?

Please add more examples in the comments and say where they are from.

meal-planning

I decided that I needed to plan meals, so that we wouldn't be eating junk food, and wasting food that we can't work out what to do with.

So I wrote a list of all the meals I would make over a week, using cookery books for inspiration. Then I made a list of all the ingredients we would need, and went to the supermarket (the Co-op) to buy them. I also decided to alternate between vegetarian and omnivore meals.

On the first day of the new regime, I made Moroccan chicken with lemon and olives from a recipe by Nigel Slater. It's very easy - just fry garlic, turmeric and cumin in a pan, add strips of chicken, 100g of chopped green pitted olives, and the juice and zest of 2 lemons. I served it with pitta bread fried in butter, but you can also use pilau rice. The green salad on the side was lettuce, watercress, rocket, spinach, and fennel, dressed with olive oil and lemon juice. Delicious, and it tasted like the dish I had at a Moroccan restaurant recently.
On the second day, I made stir-fried vegetables. Stir-fry vegetables (ready chopped) from the Co-op, plus sliced chestnut mushrooms, sprouted mixed pulses, chopped root ginger, half a packet of mung-bean sprouts, sliced sugar-snap peas, fried in sesame oil, and glazed with some hoi-sin sauce I had left over from a Chinese takeaway. I forgot to get any noodles, but it was quite filling without them. You definitely need some sort of sauce on it, though, otherwise it's a bit boring.
On the third day, I made Thai green curry. 2 pieces of haddock, plus 2 sliced courgettes, a packet of Sharwood's Thai Green Curry paste (I don't normally use mixes but this was a good one and you waste less that way), sliced sugar-snap peas (the other half of the packet from yesterday), some fennel, chopped root ginger, lemongrass paste, chopped Savoy cabbage (which might have been a mistake), and some spinach. Served with boiled wholegrain rice.

Definitely enjoying the new system so far. I get less bored of cooking and less frustrated by not having the right ingredients in the cupboard, or wondering what to do with a weird collection of leftovers, and we get a balanced diet.

I also discovered that it's quite difficult to compose photographs of food. However, considering that I took these photos on my mobile, I reckon they're not too bad.