Preparing raw sardine to eat.

I buy frozen sardines. The shop says these are from Cornwall. They are a largish sardine but physically pretty much like the smallish ones found in tins.  Some six or seven weigh about 500 grms. I thaw them in water so that their scales are kept moist. This is important because if they are let dry on the fishes’ skin they won’t come off without tearing the skin.

I might be kidding myself but I think I have got a knack of getting these into remarkably bone free fillets with the minimal of effort and the use of scissors.

Having thawed them thoroughly I take one in the palm of my left hand, head end  at my fingertips and belly facing inwards and in one stroke use the scissors to remove the tail, slit off the base of the belly with the pectoral fins and vent and proceed towards the head and in an angling of the scissors take of the head and the same time eviscerate the fish in one go. It isn’t always that simple but it seems a good knack to pursue.

I then slit open the back of the fish and remove its dorsal fin. This is an irritating bone to find when one is devouring it.

With a smallish but really sharp knife I deepen  the dorsal slit to the backbone at the tail end on each side. This makes the beginning of two fillets falling off the backbone. Then grasping one of these in turn I pull it off from the rest working toward the the head end. It usually comes off clean from the gut cage bones leaving these attached to the backbone with the slime, lining and detritus of the gut cage.

Having got the fillets off, now really bone free, they are trimmed and packed in lemon juice and wheat free soya sauce.

I have a fillet each morning on a buttered slice of my own bread (very lightly toasted) with some sheep or goat cheese on top.

I shall try to show some pics to demonstrate this with the next batch I prepare.

On the matter of omega 3 and fish oil

The benefits of fish oil with its omega 3 content abound. There is a worrying issue that it might promote prostate cancer. There seems to be considerable confusion as to whether tinned fish offers the omega 3 stated on the can.

If indeed, and it seems likely, that omega 3 oil is sensitive to heat then the chance of getting that substance undamaged from a can of fish is remote and it indeed may be the damaged omega 3 that is responsible for the cancer issue mentioned above.

The classical can of fish, tuna, salmon, sardines are cooked by sealing and pressure cooking. Boyle’s law means that temperatures are going to be well over the hundred Centigrade mark and this probably ensures that any omega 3 contained therein is destroyed, and what is more worrying, that the destroyed omega 3 may indeed be damaging to the immune system. The reason I say this is because heat changes the structure of pretty much all food products. The advent of heat being added to our food, i.e. the use of cooking in our food preparation, is very much a recent thing, probably around 12,000 years ago and then almost certainly just the cooking of a butchered animal they had caught and so as to make it easier to eat.

In anthropological terms 12,000 years is as nothing and the guts of humans and the needs of that organ and their bodies for specific food components was ‘set in stone’ tens of thousands, if not hundreds of ten of thousands of years before the use of fire for cooking.

The drift of this is therefore that our need of or for omega 3 and our bodys’ way of identifying it as good is similarly set in stone.

Cooked omega 3 therefore is not likely to be treated as something good for oneself , on the contrary it would be something the body might see it as something to get rid of. On that basis we should ignore the advertising that presses us to buy tinned fish for its omega 3 content.

Also the worrying prospect that it might promote cancer should now become a point of focus.

I eat raw sardines. Occasionally I cook them, more like warm them up, in rice bran oil. If I have a batch of sardines which are plump and have lots of fat around their guts I carefully strip this fat off and put it aside to cook with instead of the rice bran oil.

I accept that I might be wrong in that omega 3, as it presents in healthy fish, is good as long as it not cooked, but feel think that it is not as risky as taking products from the health shops where its preparation has involved heat or for that matter any manner of preservation and I would completely ignore getting it from tinned fish.

My view on cream and butter

The pendulum as to whether butter is good for you or not has swung in favour of it being the former.
The fat on hunted animals millennia past would have been pretty thin as they themselves would have been using their energies keeping themselves from being predated upon. Thus the cattle we enjoy from our butchers graze and exercise little and thus accumulate the fat that we see surfacing our steaks, much more in evidence as compared with their wild counterparts deer, elk, moose etc. which are very shy of fat. It would seem therefore that we were not really designed to eat a lot of fat but no doubt designed to eat some as it would have inevitably been present those millennia ago. Of course we have to ask were we taking the fat off the animals we hunted and cooking it as we do now? It is likely such fat was eaten raw or best warm when fires were first used in food preparation.
The Inuit, as little as a few decades ago were eating seal blubber raw and they with, their enviable health record, seem not to have suffered the cardiovascular problems we associate with animal fat. It may be that cooking of animal fat is the problem. I find that cured pork belly fat is really delicious and that in my hands has never been cooked - it can be got with some nice muscle running through it, and can be cured by just drying and repeated coating during this process with Tamari or Bragg's soy - these being wheat free. Of course one doesn't won't to be allergic to pork!
Having owned up to my inadequacy in advise over animal fats on the heart and arteries I| think where we might be on firmer ground is where fat fits into the health of our immune system.
I have a hunch that many of the health problems that might accrue from dairy products is from the protein that they have. Milk, cheese, yogurt might not be innocent - they are essentially protein or have a protein backbone and this is the problem.
What upsets the immune system is protein and amino acids and it is these that that need to be compatible with ourselves. What we don't want is the system that keeps infection and cancer at bay to become exhausted. Eating the wrong proteins can do that and it is seen in many debilitating diseases eg coeliac disease and the anaphylaxis seen where a morsel or so of  peanut and seafood contamination has occurred and caused a life threatening situation.
Cream and butter are low in protein and high in fat. It is this that, to my mind, will make them a safer bet for many rather than the other high protein dairy products.
This should promote thinking of a healthy ice cream - usually rotten with sugar 20-24% in cheap brands and down to 11 - 15% in upmarket brands. I should say to be safe - a healthier ice cream!
This will be essentially pure cream mixed with fruit and maybe something healthy stabiliser such as psyllium to hold it together when it has come off being hard frozen.

On the matter of the natural sweetness of fruit

When thinking about natural sweetness the spectrum is indeed large, from that intense sweetness of really dried dates and ripe tropical soft fruit like mangoes to the subtle in green bananas and just yellowing plantains. For most who think themselves healthy fruit is undoubtedly one of those foods at the forefront. Yet the sugar content of so many ripe fruit is high, too high some therapist think for the good in patients who have cancer. ‘Cancer likes sugar’ is the cry and it might well be the case. A malignant  lesion developing apace, outside the normal factors controlling body growth, is a little like a pregnancy, which we know and see grows exponentially towards term. Similarly a cancer will, when spread and uncontrolled emaciate and engulf its owner. It is therefore easy to see how such a malignancy will have an appetite for energy i.e. sugar.

A safer way perhaps to enjoy fruit is to get used to it at a slightly less than ripe state, or use fruit that is naturally tart like the English Bramley cooking apple, green bananas, barely ripe pears, and berries - some many of these are sharp and low in sugar even when ripe.

Abstaining from fruit might be hard but if one can’t cope with this at least avoid sweetened fruit. This means no tinned fruit, for at its best this is canned in fruit juice and worst in syrup. Fruit in yoghurts and dairy products is usually accompanied with sugar especially if of the berry type. Fruit on and in  cakes, and especially fruit jams, even those which have no added sugar for they are in fruit juice, this of course a sweet type to make the product widely acceptable.

I have a problem with dried fruit. Sultanas in the UK can be bought for a fraction of the cost of raisins especially as a ‘in house’ product or as they sometime call them ‘Basics’. I rinse and soak these and use the swollen fruit and the water they were soaked in as the only sweetening when I make cakes - definitely not adding sugar above what is in this.

It gives a barely sweet taste to the end product and the swollen sultanas, still with a touch of sweetness but lots of moisture make the cake quite nice.

The compromise I mentioned brings home the difficulty of giving up sweetness altogether.

The realistic ambition is therefore to cut sugar out as much as one can and develop a contentment with what is barely sweet. This contentment can be improved by things like texture - a crisp or crumbly casing, - moisture, where for instance lemon juice is trickled over a cake, the addition of particulates like sultanas, nuts, or the addition of cream especially whipped cream and some chopped fruit.

Giving up sweetness is tough.

Some thoughts on sugar.

Sugar seems to have been around for a long time. The Persian emperor Darius appears to have brought sugar out of India in 510 BC. In Britain it seems to date from 1099 and between those two dates the crusaders were involved in it reaching Europe.
But sweetening, which sugar does very effectively, goes back beyond sugar into the evolutionary past because it is in fruit and honey which means big numbers of millions of years ago.
However sugar, really a 'Johnny come lately', seems to have been first cultivated in New Guinea some 10,000 years ago spreading to South East Asia, China and thence India. It's history involving slavery is a sad one .
I think it's present and future are worrying because it is so tied up in the health of all the world with the expectation almost everywhere that it should be freely available.
Sugar in the UK is cheap, so cheap that is not just used to sweeten but that it forms the backbone of the item as candy bars etc.
Sugar is everywhere, even used with salt, in canned vegetables and of course by itself in canned fruit.
That sugar has the elements of an addictive substance is hard to refute but much of this is due to constant exposure where in some manner or other it encroaches on the fabric of almost everything we eat.
The glycemic index of sugar being what it is, high, ensures that we feel energised after having it in one form or another. Its presence, in high order, in the dessert that gives us the kick we get that keeps us awake after a heavy main meal.
What is needed is to change peoples tastes - to get people to get used to no sugar or a sweetness that is just detectable - a new value in sweetness called 'barely sweet' - the minimum sugar content to actually realise that the eaten object is actually sweet.
This means new standards which will be generated out of surveys.
What will pick up the tab in terms of acceptance is texture and appearance.