They say the key to being a great “everyday” sort of cook is knowing how to improvise. In AMERICA (FUCK YEAH) I never really had to scrounge for substitute ingredients unless I was doing some baked baking at 2am (which I guess happened fairly often..). Well of course that’s not the case here. The grocery store with the most variety that’s within cycling distance is Sainsbury’s. I guess I never realized before coming here that the grocery selection would be noticeably different. Even simple things, like Kraft Mac ‘n Cheese or canned soup varieties such as Chicken noodle (or something that’s not gross like pea and ham or bacon and bean) are somehow nowhere to be found. Moving here has even forced me to let go of my all-time favorite breakfast: everything bagels with full fat cream cheese topped with avocado and fresh ground pepper. Of course they occasionally have bagels at Sainsbury’s (I even bought everything bagels one time) and they have “soft cheese” which is basically cream cheese, but I mean, come on, I wasn’t kidding myself into thinking there would still be any decent avocados here in the UK once it became frozen outside. I know I’ve been spoiled in terms of fresh produce living in the Bay Area, so I was prepared to be deprived of avocado, an ingredient that made frequent appearances in both my breakfasts and lunches as an undergrad. However, there have been other times when (possibly due to my Yankee ignorance) I’ve gone to Sainsbury’s expecting/naively hoping there would be a certain essential ingredient there that wasn’t. I blame it in part on the fact that I’m living in a small town.. I’m sure the Sainsbury’s in London would blow my mind. But anyway, here I examine three stressful instances where I’ve gone to Sainsbury’s, freaked out because I was forced to find a substitute for (or simply forgo in one case) an essential ingredient, and then examine how this affected the overall final product.
(1) Canned Pumpkin Puree
Being alone in my dorm room at 6am while people in Berkeley were screaming drunk in the streets after Obama won the election was depressing. Having no American friends to give a shit about Thanksgiving with was also challenging. I was feeling pretty low the day before the big holiday and decided to cheer myself up with some homemade pumpkin pie (I was willing to run the risk that the piece of shit oven in my flat would take 3 hours to cook it properly). I went to Sainsbury’s and gathered all the ingredients for pumpkin pie and then realized four things. (1) British people don’t eat pumpkin pie; (2) British people don’t cook with pumpkin puree ever; (3) There were only two pumpkins left in the store that were half-rotting from Halloween; (4) There was no frozen pre-made pie crust in useful disposable tins. Well shit. I ran to Marks and Spencer but of course bougey British people are even less likely to appreciate my quaint American tradition of turning pumpkin into a dessert. In the end, I had to resort to pureeing the gross-looking leftover pumpkins myself. (I also ended up buying pre-made short-crust pastry because I was too lazy to make crust myself and bought a pre-made cookie crust thing just to get the pie tin it was in.) Pureeing pumpkin is actually really easy. Once you take it out of the oven, the flesh just scoops right out and is already in a pureed sort of form (no additional mashing or blending needed). The end result wasn’t too shabby. It didn’t even bother me that I was blatantly using the wrong kind of crust for the pie. (Pastry snobs would mos def disagree.) I even had some left-over pumpkin batter which I put into little souffle dishes lined with short-crust pastry to make mini pumpkin pies!
Sharing pumpkin pie with skeptical Europeans who had never tried it before was a very special end to this stressful pumpkin pie saga. The 10 or so different people who got to taste this pie said they liked it, and I choose to believe them.
(2) Ricotta Cheese
I guess this was partly bad luck, but also partly Sainsbury’s being unreasonably poorly stocked. I was food shopping on a Saturday night a few hours before closing and getting ingredients for lasagna. And of course, the one thing that is pretty much impossible to substitute for in some way in this recipe, ricotta cheese, was out of stock. There was one available brand of ricotta on the cheese shelf (which I find retarded) and it was out. SO WEAK. I was trying to think of substitutes for ricotta cheese. I mean it doesn’t really add much flavor to the lasagna; it’s more of a texture thing. I considered putting cottage cheese in the lasagna instead (which I know sounds gross and ridiculous at first but I mean think about it; it doesn’t really seem so unreasonable considering the flavor is mild and it has a sort of fluffy mushy texture) but decided it was too runny/too risky. I also considered putting in this ricotta-spinach pasta sauce til I looked at the label and saw it was only 10% ricotta. Then I ran into an Italian acquaintance who mentioned that a lot of lasagna recipes omit the ricotta cheese and have a white (bechamel-ish) sauce instead. I was too lazy to make one myself so figured I’d just buy the sauce in a jar (see below) and put it in between the different layers instead of ricotta.
So anyway, I got home and made lasagna exactly the same way I always do (with my dad’s delicious bolognese sauce recipe), began assembling the lasagna and added the white sauce to the first layer. It seemed sort of like going against nature, to be inserting this really gross looking sauce from a jar in between all those layers of homemade goodness so I decided to not be a complete idiot and tasted the sauce before putting it on the second layer. It was disgusting. I threw the rest of the jar away and assembled the rest of the lasagna sans white sauce. Luckily there were so many other layers that the finished product contained no trace of the horrid artificial white sauce flavour. But I gotta say, I really missed the ricotta. I think the mildness and the texture really add a lot to the lasagna that we shouldn’t take for granted. Never again will I attempt to make lasagna without ricotta, even if I’ve already gone through all the work of gathering all the other ingredients. Sainsbury’s really managed to fuck me that time. I mean it’s not like the lasagna wasn’t delicious; it definitely still tasted good. But it also seemed overly.. mozzarella-y.. which tends to translate into an overly stringy/rubbery texture.
Granted the others present said they were very pleased with the final product so maybe I’m just being overly picky. But when my daddy makes lasagna for Thanksgiving he always adds ricotta to every layer, and that lasagna is absolutely perfect. I’ve noticed a lot of shitty chain Italian places here like Bella Italia like to serve their lasagna without ricotta and with a bechamel (I’m not sure how or if this is different from the “white sauce” at Sainsbury’s.. do the lovely people of Dolmio assume shoppers are so unsophisticated that they have to refrain from using a French name on the label?), and it always makes for an inferior dining experience.
(3) Bisquick
I don’t even use Bisquick when I’m in America! And the one time I want to use it.. to make Rachel Ray’s Chicken & Dumplings recipe.. I’m in the UK, where products like Bisquick don’t exist. I tried my luck with this “Suet Dumpling Mix” I found at the Cooperative, a smaller, more expensive, “fair trade” grocery store that’s near my house. The dumplings were actually very delicious.. I added a shit ton of fresh parsley and garlic powder to the “dough” which actually ended up looking more like a batter when I dropped it in the soup (and therein lay the problem). But yeah.. about the texture. Maybe I put too much water into the dough (but I swear I followed the directions) or maybe I dropped too big of balls into the soup, but the dumplings fell apart and became a sort of dumpling mush. Still delicious, but not really dumplings. I guess this wasn’t really Sainsbury’s fault though, and probably could have been avoided had I rolled smaller balls and added less water to the mix. But I still maintain that making dumplings from Bisquick would have somehow been more straightfoward. In any case, everyone who tried this meal said it was delicious and I was very proud of it myself, in spite of the fact that the dumplings fell apart.
So I guess the running tally is Sainsbury’s – 1, Michelle – 2. Will I always be able to outwit the malevolent British food gods? Maybe I should just give up now and commit to only making British recipes like kidney pie and bangers & mash and mashed peas and mush and chips and mushy mush to have the security of knowing those ingredients will always be available at Sainsbury’s. But that would be the easy away out, and I’m a fighter goddamnit.
