The Great Kebab Debate

Last week, after officially welcoming in the festive period with ice skating and mulled wine at the Natural History Museum, my friend and I found ourselves peckish, and decided to head down the Old Brompton Rd. Turning down the Argentine steak place, the Scandinavian eatery and the ever so English restaurant-cum-pub that was bursting at the seams with South Ken power families, I finally dragged my wilting companion into the strip-lit Lebanese, the window of which was completely taken up with kebab skewers.

‘Is this not a kebab shop?’ she asked, somewhat hesitantly… ‘Yes.’ I replied, and strode straight in.

Because this is the sort of kebab shop that it’s socially acceptable to visit. The sort of kebab shop that will serve you chargrilled chicken and lamb in marinades exploding with flavour, sitting atop fluffy flatbreads and mountains of crunchy salads, drizzled with yogurt so creamy it tastes like it just came from the cow. In short, it’s one of the best meals I can think of.

I feel a bit sorry for the poor old kebab. It’s got a bad rep. Visions of staggering drunks, doner spilling out of their mouths while they swear at the pavement are arguably the first things that spring to mind when you think of one. My housemates at university used to suffer from what they called ‘kebab remorse’ the morning after a particularly heavy night, and it’s painful to recall those hideous few months when an ex of mine discovered the doner pizza…

But grotty takeaways in the wee small hours aside, what exactly goes into a kebab? It’s really not that bad. Of course there’s the choice of meat. First and foremost is the doner meat (doner in Turkish literally meaning rotating roast.) Please resist the urge to shudder.

In authentic kebab houses, this inverted cone of flesh is merely lean lamb slices, stacked on top of each other and topped with a good portion of fat to keep the meat moist while it cooks. OK, in many of the takeaways you’ll find on the high st, these have been replaced by a block of solid unidentified ground meat (like a giant pointy meatloaf I suppose), and these are the ones to steer clear of.

This rotating method of cooking is actually very effective, as it gives the sinews time to break down and makes the meat deliciously tender.

If the lamb doesn’t take your fancy, there’s usually a chicken option. Again, in a good kebab house they will have marinated chicken on skewers, which they will chargrill to order, giving you an end result that tastes like the best barbecue ever. Nothing frightening there.

Once you’ve decided, you will be presented with a flatbread full of salad and pickles, topped with your meat and finished off with a generous slug of sauce. Spiced yogurt and chilli is delicious. Garlic sauce is less acceptable.

Now, a friend of mine may still laughingly bring up the time that I tried to justify my midnight takeaway choice as being ‘just a chicken salad pitta Nancy, what’s the big deal?!” , but really, that is all it is! In terms of fat content, a well-made kebab is right at the back of the queue. Lean meat, loads of veggies, flatbread and a lick of yogurt. It’s hardly sinful. And if you’re not too inebriated to notice, the complexity of flavours in your mouth is just fantastic – the piquancy of the marinade mixing with the smoky meat, the cool yogurt and the sharp, vinegar hit of the pickles. It knocks cheesey chips into a cocked hat any day.

So let’s not leave the kebab to languish in the alleyway of drunken regret any longer. If you are lucky enough to live near a good Lebanese or Turkish restaurant, try it for dinner. They’re always reasonably priced, and you really won’t be disappointed. Just steer clear of the establishments where the clientele are singing rugby songs…

This diet will change your life.

Another day, another inflammatory article about Britain’s eating habits. This time it’s in the Daily Mail (shock horror), and concerns a new book entitled The Obesity Epidemic by Zoe Harcombe.

In her book, Ms Harcombe supposedly blows the traditional myths of what makes us fat wide open, advising that exercise doesn’t help you lose weight, carbohydrates are the dietary bad boys, and that the modern lifestyle is not to blame for our collective expansion.

Is it just me, or is the fad diet bandwagon simply groaning under the weight of the self-righteous and their bulging files of questionable research?

I think the problem seems very simple. A lot of people don’t know how to cook, and ready meals and junk food are the cheapest things you can buy. The manufacturers of these products pump them full of additives and sweeteners to compensate for the inferior ingredients. People eat them, develop a taste for over-sweetened and artificially-flavoured foods, and so keep eating them. Because the nutritional content is minimal compared to the sugar and fat contents, they eat more to keep feeling full, and the weight piles on.

I don’t know exactly when this series of events began, but it’s certainly been going on for many years. Frozen ready meals were around in the fifties – the era of the eponymous ‘TV Dinner’. When I was a child in the eighties, my all-girls high school had recently dropped home economics from the syllabus as it was considered, and I quote ‘not in-keeping with feminist principles’. How feminism dictates that there should be a generation of women who don’t know how to feed themselves is anybody’s guess. Whether or not for the same reasons, I know that most schools now don’t offer home economics, and subjects like ‘Food Science’ are often more concerned with teaching students how to market ready meals, than with how to cook basic dishes.

And, contrary to what Zoe Harcombe says, I do believe that the modern lifestyle is having an impact on our weight levels. With fewer and fewer women staying at home during the day now, the concept of a home-cooked family meal in the evening has dwindled alarmingly. There seems to be very much a grab and go attitude to eating which I find rather sad. Although my mother worked a (very) full-time job when I was growing up, she still insisted that we all ate together in the evening, and what she cooked was proper food. Not fancy, not time consuming, but balanced, filling and nutritious. This simple act of taking time to eat and appreciate what we were eating has stayed with me, and I believe is one of the secrets to maintaining a healthy diet. The times I find myself putting on weight are when I’m rushing around from one thing to another, grabbing a sandwich here and a croissant there, snacking all day to keep my energy levels up. It’s surprising how quickly you notice the difference.

So how can we help matters? I’m rather in the Jamie Oliver camp with this one. I think children need much more education about cooking and food, and they need to be encouraged to take an interest. And the prices of ready meals have to be raised. It’s absurd that you should be able to buy any complete meal with meat in it for £1. Where are they getting their meat from?!

And please, please, the next time you read an article claiming that it can change the way you eat, take it with a very large pinch of salt. As long as it’s not over 6g of course. We don’t want you getting heart disease…

So what don’t you eat?

Having got into rather a heated debate about vegetarianism over the weekend (ie people who just don’t eat red meat then say they are veggie ….), I’ve been thinking recently about why people don’t eat certain foods.
 
True vegetarians are easy to understand as they avoid meat, fish and animal by-products such as rennet either because they don’t like the taste, or more commonly because of animal welfare issues. Vegans are even easier as they refuse all animal products entirely, including butter and honey. But for carnivores and dairy eaters, our preconceptions about the foods we eat are much harder to justify.
  
Some people are violently against British veal. Why? It’s a product of the dairy industry as much as the milk we pour on our cereal. If we don’t eat British veal, the calves will either be slaughtered at birth or exported where standards are not as high as ours. Some people won’t eat lobster because they can’t bear the thought of them being boiled alive. But they’re more than happy to roast an intensively farmed chicken that never saw day light, and was grown so quickly its legs couldn’t support its weight. What is it that makes one thing less cruel than the other? Or is it that it’s just easier to avoid veal and lobster than it is milk and chicken?

I think the most that any of us can do is to buy the best quality food we can afford. And if this means swapping a premium cut of intensively farmed meat for a cheaper cut of free-range, then so be it. Better for all of us to eat vegetarian more often and save our money for high-welfare meat and poultry. We’re always moaning we cook the same things over and over anyway. Try something new!
 
 
Some food for thought … what do you think?