 The word mortar comes from the Latin term for a vessel used for pounding. Pestle comes from the same root and means something that is used for pounding. But the tool they describe is far older than Roman, with examples in museums dating back tens of thousands of years. This tool was one of the major advances in stone age technology after fire, edge stone tools and the related technology of the Quernstone and it founded the modern human species food system. The enjoyment of using this is as much therapy as food preparation but once you discover the depths of technique to its use, it's extremely versatile. The base part, the mortar, weighs about three kilos with a pit about 14 centimetres wide and deep. The pestle weighs about half a kilo but very quickly you learn that using this tool is more than just hitting things that are of rock. There are different techniques to discover, each of its own finely controlled use of force and different kinds of food require their own special treatment to get just the right result. I'll skip over a lot of detail today. Don't worry, I'll come back to it in future blog posts. What I want to outline here is the general pattern behind this blog and the approach I'm trying to demonstrate. When I cook, I do not measure. Going by feel with what your experience says you need to do rather than impose measure is how people cook for most of human history up until a century or two ago when cheaper mass-produced scales were first available. What I advise you to do is get away from those externally imposed hierarchies of weights and measures and instead develop your skills of tactile sense and observation. That's where anarchist cooking begins, an acceptance that there are no hierarchies in food culture or a need to honour standards with which you might not agree. The root of that is to develop, through practical experience, a confidence in your own judgement which, outside the issue of food, will take you to many other places besides. Today I'm making what are probably my most expensive version of these burgers because of the ingredients, lots of nuts. The important thing is, this recipe uses the same method irrespective of the ingredients chosen. Today I'm using nuts, but I could have used cooked grains and pulses or beans. It makes very little difference in the end except for the price. A nut burger is basically nut meal, that's ground nuts, bound together with something starchy that goes solid when cooked. That's where the pestle and mortar comes in. It turns nuts into nut meal easily. I begin by making the binder, the mush that will stick the nuts and other ingredients together into a fairly solid burger. First I hand mash chickpeas. Next I add some seasoning to give the usually bland binder some flavour. I take half a dozen harder ones and gently squeeze them until they pop in the pestle and mortar. Then I remove the pod and leave the seeds inside the mortar. I add black peppercorns and cumin seed and grind everything to powder. Grinding seeds takes practice. If you hit them hard they fly around the room. Start by using the weight of the pestle to tap gently down and break the hard outer shell of the seed. When that's done you can certainly begin to hit them harder and harder until they turn into powder. The reason for using seed, not ready ground spices, is the flavour is more intense. Seeds are nature's low impact organic flavour storage vessels designed to keep all those oils and the flavours they carry inside. Peel and hand grate a carrot. The thin grated carrot will soften more quickly during the short cooking time compared to lumps of sliced carrot. Essentially adding finely chopped or grated veg adds flavour, texture and colour, which makes it more pleasant to eat as well as more varied nutrition which makes it better for your diet. With everything in the bowl I mix it all together. Now I make the nut meal. Why bother bashing nuts? Crushing nuts and seeds makes the nutrition they contain more easily available to the gut because they are more easily digested and so more beneficial to the body which was a great nutritional advance that the pestle and mortar gave to humanity at least 40,000 years ago. Which fellow am I using today? First, cashews. These are a doddle. A good nut to practice with at first. Gently press down and let them break under the pestle. When you have a lot of broken chunks press a bit harder. Hit them too hard and they will turn into powder which you don't want or the burgers will be like a slimy paste inside. A good method is to hold the pestle firmly and rotate the end in a circle inside the mortar and gradually the cashews will break into a sort of lump and flour. Next, walnuts. They put up no resistance whatsoever. Gently press to break them then rotate the pestle around until they make a sticky crumbly mass. Finally, snapped brazils. Brazil nuts are very nutritious and if you buy the broken ones they are a tiny bit cheaper. They are much harder than other nuts they do have a strange behaviour. If you hit them hard they shatter and once you shatter them they grind down to a lumpy powder quite easily by rotating the pestle around the mortar. Now mix up everything in the bowl and add a little hot but not boiling water to help everything glue together. What you are trying to do is make the mix liquid enough to stick but not so well that it turns into a paste. I add turmeric and mixed herbs. I also add flour to the mix to bind it a little more. If you did make the mix too wet you can always add a little gram or wholemeal flour to make the mix solid again. When well mixed together pack it down flat and leave for 20 or 30 minutes to allow the water to soak into the mix and make it more solid. Making the burgers. Two plates. Sprinkle one little wholemeal flour to stop the burger sticking to the plate and on the other tip a small heap of flour. Now take the hopefully solid bowl of mix and divide it cleanly into portions. Very roughly each portion should form a ball inside the cupped palms of your hand. Take a portion drop it into the heap of flour and turn it over to the flour sticks. Then take some flour in the palm of your hand dump the floury ball on top sprinkle flour on top of the ball then cup your other hand around the ball and squeeze hard until you feel the moisture begin to ooze. With your thumb slightly bent with the thumb on one hand just blow the wrist on the other. Squeeze the mix between your palms then rotate a third of a turn and repeat over and over again until you have a fairly flatish rounded hexagonish shaped burger. This is a skill you probably won't get it right first time. When you've got something that looks like a burger put it on the other plate and go to the next portion in the bowl. Carry on until you've processed all the mix into burgers then leave them to stand and harden a little for another 20 or 30 minutes. I need three burgers for dinner. I will freeze the other three. The reason I make big batches and freeze them is it saves time in waste and creates a supplier frozen goodies for when I haven't the time to prepare real fresh food. When soft the burgers need only 15-20 minutes hot frying in a shallow amount of oil perhaps 10 minutes on one side then flip over and do the other. Cook from frozen put on a tray for about 25 to 30 minutes on gas mark 5, 190 Celsius, 375 Fahrenheit. I came across rice and bits at a peace camp in the 1980s. Rice is mostly carbohydrate though brown rice is a dollop of protein and more useful minerals in comparison to white rice. To make the rice more nutritious add bits. What you add is up to you. I'm using sunflower seeds and pumpkin seeds. Then just boil as normal which are brown rice is anything from 35 to 50 minutes until soft and fluffy. I also add a few bay leaves which are removed before serving. Cold raw food chops small to make it more easily digestible. What could be better? Except it's winter and I really don't want to eat energy intensive industrial greenhouse food that's been trucked thousands of miles over continents. In winter there's a cheap and simple alternative to greenhouse salad. Sprouting seeds at home. That's the subject of the future blog I have planned so I won't go into that here. Essentially you just have to use whatever you can be eaten raw and is seasonally available and packed with nutrition. I'm using alfalfa sprouts, grated carrot, half a small onion finely chopped and a finely chopped apple. Of course salad is always better with a dressing. A salad dressing is a dodger of a pestle and mortar. Put a little mustard seed in the mortar. Tap with the pestle to crack the shell then rotate to grind into flour. Put a small amount of oil in a small container that has a watertight lid. Add the same amount of vinegar and the same amount of warm water. Or if you skip the vinegar add twice the amount of warm water. Add the mustard powder and stir. I had a finely chopped clove of garlic. Another stir, pop on the lid then shake till it's all blended. If it separates then just give it a shake again. A dressing just adds flavour to a salad which might otherwise be a bit bland. If you forage your salad it's also a good way to make tough leaves and it'll easier to chew. Tahini. Ground sesame seeds with a little oil added to make it into a paste. Ok so it's not really that simple. What colour do you like your tahini? Like tahini is ground seeds. Usually hulled seeds as a husk makes it a little grey. If you like dark tahini you need to roast your seeds for 5-10 minutes on gas mark 4, 176 Celsius, 350 Fahrenheit until they start to change colour. And the longer you leave them the more dark and bitter they will taste. Take your seeds and fill the bottom of the mortar to not more than 1cm or half an inch deep. Then pound. No, I mean pound. Sesame seeds take a lot of effort to turn into flour. Tahini needs fine flour. I don't mind bits of husk but for the equivalent of shop bought tahini you need to sieve and then pound the lumps again. If I were doing a large amount I would tip the flour into a bowl as I pounded each batch. Then add the oil when it was finished. As I only need one batch today I'll pound to a flour then add a small amount of oil in the mortar. Then stir until it reaches the right consistency. Today I'm making tahini dip dressing. After adding almost enough oil I stir in a spoon of mango chutney. I've made this tahini to spoon on top of the burgers when they are cooked. Equally I could have made gravy with miso and or a fried onion or apple sauce. Again this is just a quick 5 or 10 minutes of preparation that boosts the flavour and adds nutrition. The final task, clean the pestle and mortar. A warm rag or a sponge, perhaps a dab of detergent or soap if you just made it oily, then wipe the surface until the smears have gone. That's it, done, 30 seconds at most. For me the joy of the pestle and mortar isn't just in its use, it's the ease of cleaning compared to all those alternative options. I love cooking good nutritious food but that's not my only motivation. Human food culture has become a monoculture. Lots of products but they're all made from the same small group of ingredients. It's that same lack of diversity, not simply the scale of farming, that is killing global biodiversity. The point about a pestle and mortar is that it can be the practical heart of a more diverse and so more resilient personal food culture, much like the one that existed for millennia until industrialism and urbanisation appeared four centuries ago. Adopting the older, less intense and far more diverse food culture is one of the things we need to do to avoid that outcome. This table shows the ingredients in today's meal and how much they cost. Per person each serving costs £1.26. In this table I've taken the weight of the ingredients and calculated the total protein content of each serving. Each £1.26 serving delivers 18g of protein and costs 6.3 pence per gram of protein. Each 125g burger has 11.7g of protein or 5.6 pence per gram of protein. As I said at the beginning, these are my most expensive burgers. There are many other options to vary the ingredients to create a different result. Checking the McDonald's website in early February 2021, the cost of a Big Mac was £3.19 and provided 26g of protein. That's 12.3 pence per gram of protein. I'd have to eat 1.4 times more food to get the same amount of protein but that's still only 9.1 pence per gram. A six pack of Morrison's own meat-free burgers costs £1.49. Each 56g burger contains 8.8g of protein. I'd have to eat one of the third Morrison's burgers to get the same amount of protein as my food so in the end the price comes out to about a third less. At the upper end of the market, Sainsbury's Moving Mountain Plant-Based Burgers, £4.50 for two, each contains about 17g of protein at a cost of 13.2 pence per gram. That's twice my own. All these burgers are made from highly processed soya and pea protein, the two alternative ingredients to nuts which are even cheaper to make. Whether you are a vegan or not doesn't matter. In future there will be less meat available. If climate policy doesn't kill our farm animals then carbon taxes will make the meat unaffordable for many. We will all have to get used to cooking more of our own protein. That's because it is the only viable alternative to the consumerist vision of the intensely manufactured vegan product. In a society that idolises the product, do-it-yourself is a deviant act and in the era of mechanical power which seeks to avoid personal effort using hand tools is a revolutionary act. The more bizarre fact that, unlike many of the approaches to saving the planet is this DIY approach is cheaper than the equivalent everyday mainstream offerings from shops and supermarkets. And it's fun to do.