A Thermomix for Christmas please…

10/27/2012 By 6 Comments

Having just reduced the third saucepan this week to a blackened remnant of its former self, I know what I want for Christmas – a Thermomix!

Yes, I know it looks like a cartoon character in the making – but it genuinely is an amazing creature – the result of over 40 years of German craftsmanship and attention to detail. And no one does attention to detail like the Germans….

I have known about the Thermomix for sometime but was finally convinced to have a full-on demo by blogger Adriana of www.glutenfree4kids.com. She is a total convert and uses the Thermomix in her gluten-free cookery classes as she says it is just so brilliant for those who find themselves having to actually cook for the first time, and not only having to cook but having to cook gluten or dairy free.

Effectively it is an immensely flexible liquidiser/processor which sits in heated cradle thus allowing you not just to chop or to purée but to cook while you are doing so. So how best to describe its multiple virtues? Well, I’ll try just listing them…..

The liqudiser/processor

This happens in the 2 litre (enough to serve 6) stainless steel jug.
• The jug, lid and blade all go in the dishwasher.
• The blade is removable, leaving just a hole in the middle of the jug, and is dismantleable. This means that both are very easy to clean really thoroughly – a matter of great concern to those cooking for severe allergies.
• There are no sharp corners in which allergens can lurk –  either in the jug or the cradle.
• The blade has sharp cutters on one side (for chopping veg, pulversing nuts or legumes into flours, making breadcrumbs, grating parmesan etc etc) but is blunt on the other side and is reversible. This means that when you reverse the blade it stirs/kneads instead of cutting – perfect for making bread dough, pasta dough, cake mix, a stew, risotto, white sauce, mayonnaise or anything which needs regular but gentle stirring.
• The blade revolves at anything from spoon-stirring speed (40 rpm) to pulverising lentils speed  (10,200 rpm) – you just set the speed on the dial.
• Any speed you set in controlled by the timer.
• Because it can revolve so fast it makes wonderfully smooth emulsions, far smoother than you would ever get in a food processor – you will not need to sieve your soup or sauce to get it really creamy.
• Because of the way the blade is seated in the bowl it creates a vortex sucking liquids down instead of spraying them around as happens in a food processor – no counter top covered in soup!
• You can can chop/mix all ingredients in one go – cheese straws, cake mix, bread dough – rather than having to do it bit by bit. So speedier and only uses the one jug rather than three bowls.
• Because of the shape of the jug you can use it to process/cook very small quantities – small amounts get lost in the bottom of a standard food processor. When combined with the cooking function (see below) this means that you could, for example, make half a pot of jam out of one punnet of overripe raspberries.
• The jug is thermal so will keep its contents hot for up to 30 minutes.
• You can use it as a kettle!
• The jug, sitting in the cradle, has a built in electric scales so you do not need to weigh your ingredients before adding them.
• The lid of the jug is gently concave and the central plug does not fit tightly, leaving a little gap all round. So, if you are making mayonnaise, Hollandaise or any other sauce which requires you to slowly drip in ingredients while stirring your sauce, you can just pour the olive oil or melted butter into the concave lid, turn it to ‘stir’ speed and leave it to drip in and get amalgamated….
• You can remove the plug from the lid and sit a double-layered steamer over the jug allowing you to steam your vegetables and your fish in the steam from your simmering soup below. Major saving in time, washing up and energy use/cost.
• The jug is extremely robust (as is its cradle) so that you can mistreat without fear! (Thermomix also offer a two-year guarantee and excellent customer service in the unlikely event that something does go wrong.)

The cooking part

This happens in the cradle into which the jug fits snugly.
• All gentle curves – no sharp corners to secrete allergens.
•  It will cook at anything from a gentle simmer to a rolling boil – just set the temperature dial.
• You can set the temperature as low as 37C –  low enough for baby food, melting chocolate or ‘cooking raw’.
• You cannot set a temperature without setting a time (max 60 minutes), after which it will turn off automatically. So you cannot go away and forget it and reduce your delicious sautéed vegetables to charcoal – as I do on a regular basis….  Oh joy!!!!
• Because the jug is almost entirely enclosed it is very heat efficient which means that it cooks a good deal faster than if it were in a saucepan with all sides exposed, and that it is a lot more energy efficient – and so cheaper to run.
• Because it stirs as it cooks, you can go away and leave it to get on with it without having to constantly remember to stir your pot.

Extra virtues for those cooking ‘freefrom’

• It extremely simple to use and comes with an excellent 300 recipes cookbook (many more available) which effectively allows you to ‘cook by numbers’. So if you are not a good cook and the thought of cooking at all, let alone cooking gluten or dairy free, scares the life out of you, it will really hold your hand throughout the process. You can also get a gluten and dairy-free cookbook specifically for the Thermomix.
• However, if you are a keen cook, it is so versatile that you can experiment endlessly – Adriana made almond milk for the first time while I was there.
• If you find yourself having to cook several meals to accommodate everyone’s  diets, the fact that it cooks so much faster than on a standard hob is very helpful.
• If you want to create your own flours, your own ‘milks’ etc you can do so very easily.
• It is really not much bigger than a standard food processor and plugs into a standard 13 amp plug, so you can take it away on holiday with you and be entirely in control of your own food.
• It is very easy to clean and  has no hidden corners in which allergens can lurk.
• Given that cooking ‘freefrom’ can cost a good deal more that ‘normal’ cooking, it enables significant savings on ingredients as nothing need ever be wasted.

 

OK – enough, enough…….. What is the downside?  There has to be one. Well, of course there does – and there is – and it is the cost….. Such a potpourri of perfection does not come cheap. Like £885′s worth of not cheap – although that does allow you to put down and deposit of £427 and pay the rest off over a six month period. (That does include VAT, by the way.)

It seems like a lot of money but if you compare it with the cost of the liquidiser, processor, scales, coffee grinder, steamer, sauce maker and kettle that it will make redundant, it is not quite so horrendous. Not to mention the savings you are going to make in electricity and gas… And the savings in time spent scraping blackened stew remains off the bottom of saucepans…

If you want to know more you could talk to Adriana on 07770 265114 or email her here or check in at her site, www.glutenfree4kids.com  where you can also find out details of her gluten-free cookery courses at the Miele Experience Centre in Abingdon or at the Waitrose Cookery School – next one on December 11th.

Meanwhile, I am going off to count my pennies….

Filed Under: Allergies, Dairy-free, Food, FreeFrom Food, Gluten-free Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

An almost amazing gadget for dustmite sufferers – and introducing Sugru

08/02/2012 By 4 Comments

A few weeks ago I got very excited when Michelle Redmond of Minx PR (they did the PR for the food awards for us a few years ago) sent me some details about a new cordless vaccum cleaner that she was promoting called AirRAM.

It looks very cool (as you can see), is very light, battery operated (no cord to trip over) and uses, apparently, only one twentieth of the electricity needed to run a ‘normal’ vacuum cleaner of the same size, and….  It sucks the dust straight up into the dust receptacle which is within a couple of centimetres of the floor – so no dust whooshing around inside the vacuum and escaping into the air (and your lungs). And, even better, ’AirRAM technology collects and compresses the dirt dust and fluff into tidy, dust-free bales stored only 5cms from where it is collected….. The dust-free bales are then simply dropped into the bin with no messy dust cloud.’

Yes! Perfect for dust and dustmite sufferers, I thought – and asked for one to experiment with.

But sadly, although it  delivers on absolutely every other claim (light, flexible, adaptable, low energy, efficient) those dust-free bales did not materialise – merely a handful of dusty fluff which puffed out the normal cloud of dust when removed from the container….

I did contact AirRam and got the following back:
Thank you for your email. The AirRam will only compact the dust into tight bales if there is a lot of it. If it is just fine dust and crumbs, it will be loose in the dust tray. Hope this answers your question.
But sadly that does not seem to be the case as we went on using it until it was so full that it was no longer able to pick up anything at all, but, still no ‘bales’ – just a larger  handful of dusty fluff….

However, if you do not suffer with asthma or dustmite allergy, and you are looking for a new vacuum cleaner, can I thoroughly recommend the AirRAM – more details here. It does an excellent job of cleaning, with a lot less effort than my old and much loved upright Sebo – although, I have to admit, with a rather more annoying high pitched whine…. Jolly good value for £229 from their site.

And, while on the subject of gadgets which are of absolutely no use at all to allergy sufferers…. Have you heard of sugru?

It is a sort of silicone rubber that sticks to absolutely everything (yes, I mean everything – metal, ceramics, glass, wood, motor-cycle leathers and motorbikes, plastics, fabrics) and which sort of moulds itself to what it is sticking to….. So that you can use it to stick things together – or to mould round the toe post of your between-the-toes sandals to make them comfier!! And it is waterproof and dishwasher proof.

In allergy terms it does not smell (for those with chemical sensitivities) but it does contain Methyltris(methylethyketoxime)silane and Gamma-Aminopropyl Triethoxysilane, both of which, they warn, could cause reactions, although only when the sugru  is still ‘uncured’; once set it should be fine.

So far we have used it, very successfully, to mend bits of car, a garden sculpture on which no other glue was working – and one of the Webmaster’s many Grammy’s on which I had dropped  a shelf thereby snapping off its horn!

 

Filed Under: Allergies, Chemicals Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Smart meters – what are they and why should we be campaigning against them?

12/05/2011 By 2 Comments

So, what is all the fuss about Smart Meters? What is wrong with your utility company checking your meter via a radio controlled meter rather than sending round a man to read it, or asking you to read it yourself and tell them what you have used? Sounds rather efficient…

Well that is what the energy companies are telling us anyhow, adding that it will help them and us to be ‘greener’ in our use of energy. ‘By understanding how we use our energy, this will help us all to find ways of reducing our consumption and also help make our individual contribution to the overall carbon reduction targets….’

But…..  And there are lots of buts. For much more detail on smart meters, their possible effects and who is doing what elsewhere in the world, see articles and research on the FoodsMatter site. However, for a very brief introduction – the ‘buts’, fall in to three main sections.

Efficiency/practicality

Energy companies claim that smart meters will enable them to save costs as they will not need to employ meter readers (can this really be regarded as a virtue in these times of high unemployment?) and that the readings will be more accurate and will allow them to plan and monitor usage so as to make more efficient use of energy. In fact, the experience of several states in the US where smart meters have already been installed and where bills have suddenly soared into thousands of dollars, have suggested that this may be far from the case.

Privacy/security

There are huge concerns about the data that will be collected: how it will be stored and how it could be used. The meters will be operational 24/7 and will collect data an ongoing basis or at very frequent intervals. So that if you choose to get up in the middle of the night to go to the loo, make a cup of tea, watch TV, or work in your workshop because you can’t sleep, that information will be logged via your smart meter.

In a comment on a Which? blog on smart meters, the NPower Press Office says:
‘Customer privacy and data security is key to the work being done in the industry and we are working with Ofgem to ensure that the appropriate customer protections are in place when the mass rollout starts next year. There are already customer protection mechanisms in place, such as the Data Protection Act, European Convention and Human Rights and the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations, that will ensure data is used in an appropriate way and that marketing information is only sent to those customers who have agreed to receive such messages.’ 

Ouch – that does not sound reassuring. Who decides what is appropriate? And do we really want them to have the information anyhow? Seems to me that Big Brother has finally found the ideal tool for monitoring our every move and I, for one, do not have faith that those ‘customer protection mechanisms’ are sufficiently robust to prevent me being harassed by sellers of everything from roof insulation to garden mowers.

But even if one believes in the integrity of the utility companies, what is to stop a hacker with more malign motives accessing the information – information such as when you are normally out so it would be a good time to burgle you could be deduced from your power usage. Or, on a much larger scale, a hacker could successfully bring the whole country to a standstill  by breaking into the system and just turning it off! The energy companies maintain that their systems are ‘secure’ but history suggests that no system is truly secure against a determined and skillful hacker.  (For more on this see this article in the Denver Post.)

Health risks – more electrosmog

For anyone who is already electrosensitive – and potentially for all of us – smart meters pose a greater hazard than having Big Brother breathing down your neck;  they will effectively ‘irradiate’ your house or flat 24 hours a day and you will have no way of turning them off.  Although in some countries (such as Italy) the information is sent down a cable network, the proposal for the UK (along with much of North America) is to use a wifi or wireless network. This effectively means that every dwelling in the UK that uses energy and has a meter will be connected through a wifi network to a hub in the street which will then pass the information on to a central data processing centre. It is even possible that some meters may act as relays to boost the system, in which case they will be using an even stronger signal.

A wifi smart meter system is already up and running in Canada and its emissions are currently significantly higher than the international Bioinitiative safety limit for mobile phones. Indeed one calculation suggests that, working at two thirds of its maximum capacity, one meter would give off the same amount of radiation per day as the recent Interphone study suggested would be enough to increase cancer risk over a period of 10 years.

In some countries (such as the Netherlands) you can opt out – although opting out yourself will not protect from the emission from your neighbours which, if you live in a flat, could be very high. However, as it stands, in the UK there will be no opt out on health or any other grounds, so we will all have the ambient electrosmog in which we are forced live to dramatically increased, with whatever health consequences that may have.

As far as those who are already electrosensitive are concerned, they know only too well what the consequences will be: considerable extra expenditure to try and shield themselves from the emissions and an almost inevitable decline in their health as it will not be possible to entirely exclude the meter emissions from their homes. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, the effect will largely depend on whether theories like Andrew Goldsworthy’s (outlined in my previous post) that conditions such as autism are directly related to the increase in man-made electromagnetic radiation, prove to be true – in which case it could be catastrophic. Certainly, the low level reactions (headache, fatigue, ear tingling, general malaise etc etc) that many people who are not overtly electrosensitive already experience to excess mobile phone or computer use, compact fluorescent bulbs, dirty electricity, power lines etc are likely to get worse with the resultant loss of population-wide productivity and general well being.

So, what to do?

Well, in the US, where the grid is far more advanced than ours in the UK, there are a number of groups, such as Stop Smart Meters and the Center for Electrosmog Prevention campaigning vociferously, and in some cases successfully, to stop the roll out or even to have smart meters removed. In the UK MCS-Aware, ES-UK, The Radiation Trust and Wired Child have joined together to petition the government to install a fibre-optic wired network instead of a wifi one and to allow an opt out on health grounds for those who are electrosensitive. This obviously does not address the larger concerns of the invasion of privacy, security and efficiency raised by the universal installation of smart meters, but it certainly does address the main health concerns.

If you feel you should get involved – and you should – they have set up a website, www.SmartMeterPetition.org from which you can sign the petition. They also give you templates for letters and emails  to be sent to your MP, the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) and anyone else who could be relevant, lots addresses plus suggestions as to how you can protect your own home against smart meters.

For other ideas as to why the government should think again about their Smart Meter roll out, check through some of the other articles on the Foods Matter site. Even though it is unlikely that they will actually take it on board, you might also want to quote Dr Goldsworthy’s appeal to the Nuremberg Code; it might at least make them think!

‘One thing that I did not mention in my original communication, but is very relevant, is that the enforced introduction of wireless smart meters is a clear contravention of the Nuremberg Code which forbids the performance of experiments on human beings without their consent. Insofar as the long-term safety of continual irradiation from these devices has never been tested and many people (including many eminent scientists) believe that it is potentially harmful, the whole nation is being made a part of an uncontrolled experiment on their electromagnetic safety. 

In fact, it doesn’t matter whether they turn out to be harmful or not; the fact that the experiment is being performed at all without the expressed permission of the consumer is a contravention of the Nuremberg Code. If we are to adhere to the Code, no consumer should have a wireless smart meter fitted without their voluntary consent after being warned that some scientists believe them to be a health hazard. Furthermore, should the property change hands, any new consumer should have the right to ask for the meter to be removed and replaced by a conventional one.’ 

 

Filed Under: Electrosensitivity, Environmental Issues, Food/Health Policy Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,