Whole wheat pita bread

I am always, always disappointed in supermarket pita bread. Even if you bite into your pita the moment you pick it up off the shelf at the store, it already tastes a couple of days old (and likely is!). I spotted a recipe for pita bread a couple of months ago, tried to make it, and was disappointed when it came out dense and sort of gross and heavy. But I am not one to quit, and today I tried again. And it was glorious.

In the same way that I always talk about how cool it is to watch bagels poof up when you boil them just before baking them, making pita bread is awesome because it is so cool to watch it balloon up like a bag of popcorn in the oven. I have no idea that the "pockets" in pitas are not man made, they occur entirely of their own volition. It is truly magical to watch the blow up like they do! And it is even more magical to rip them up when they're hot right out of the oven, and dip them straight into some hummus and devour them.

These pitas came out so light and lovely that Graeme and I could not stop eating them. I made them almost entirely out of whole wheat flour, so I was very pleased to see that they came out so light, and I'm excited to add a whole wheat bread recipe to my repertoire. I wouldn't see any advantage to making this with white flour.

I'll be baking up a couple of batches for the farmers' market this weekend, so I look forward to watching them go crazy in the over again!

The Recipe:

3/4 cup white flour
2.5-3 cups wholewheat flour
1 (7g) packet of instant dry active yeast
1 tblsp honey
1 tsp salt
1.5 tblsp oil
1.5 cups warm-hot water (should be warm enough that it'll stay warm for a little while, but not so hot that you can't rest your fingers comfortably in it)

Pour the water into a bowl, and mix in the honey until it disolves. Sprinkle in the yeast, stir a bit, and let it sit there for 10 minutes or so. The yeast should poof up and rise a bit--this means its been properly activated and that it will work.

Add in the salt, and mix in the flour, 1 cup or so at a time. I always prefer to mix with my hands, so that the transition from mixing, when everything is still liquidy, to kneeding, once the dough gets firmer, is effortless. Add in the oil as well, and once you've got a dough, turn it out onto a flat, floured surface, and kneed for 10 minutes. It should feel elastically, you should feel like your arms are tired.

Oil up a bowl, place the dough in it, and cover it with a damp, warm, wash cloth. Put the bowl somewhere warm and let it rise until its doubled in size, about a "Jewish hour" (ie a bit longer than an hour, go by your intuition not by these goyishe things known as "clocks"). Once your dough has risen all beautifully and you feel like a proud parent, remove the dough from the bowl, place it back down on the floured surface, and punch it down. Divide it in 8-10 pieces (depends on how big you want your pitas to be--I made 8 pieces, and they were huge!), make each piece into a nice little ball, and then cover with your damp washcloth and let them rise for another 20 minutes or so. Preheat your oven to 400F/205C, and stick your baking tray in there to heat up as well.

Once they've poofed up again, roll each ball out into a circle, or an oval, depending on which shape you prefer for a pita. They should be around 1/4-1/8" thick. Again, go by how thick or thin you like your pita!

Take out your baking tray and place the pitas on it and bake for approximately 4-5 minutes! Marvel at the poofiness, and devour while hot.

What is healthy about this recipe: What isn't? I'm so pleased to have been able to make such a delicious whole wheat pita bread--once you try this, you will never go back to the white variety!

What is seasonal about this recipe: Not really applicable.

What I learned from this recipe: That pita bread is awesome and the easiest ever bread to make and not to be feared.

What I will change next time: The bread came out so nice and fluffy, that I think I don't really need my crutch of adding a bit of white flour in there, to keep it from being heavy. I think I may try doing this 100% whole wheat.

Bulghar Wheat Smorgasborg Salad

It's been a long and sometimes difficult few months, which means I've been eating lots of comfort food. So sometimes, every once in a while, I get a moment where I crave a fully healthy, wholesome meal. Lately, I turn to bulghar wheat and a whole crapload of vegetables.

I used to be sort of meh about bulghar wheat, I think I found it too, well, wheaty, but I've come to love it. I treat it as a slightly more chewy, nutty, couscous, and I crave meals with it! My usual trick is to chop out a whole lots of tasty wholesome stuff and mix it together with the wheat, and scarf it down until I can wheat no more. This post illustrates one such example, and perhaps my most extreme one yet. I practically emptied my fridge in this salad attempt. Obviously, this is hardly a recipe that needs to be followed to a T--you can throw just about whatever you want together.

I served this with some salmon fillets doused in lemon juice, harissa, and something else that I've forgotten now.

The Recipe:

150g bulghar wheat

1 small aubergine, chopped
1 big courgette, chopped
3 cloves of garlic, chopped
1 small head of broccoli, divided
2 medium carrots, chopped
Small bunch of salad greens
Handful sprouting beans
Half an avocado
1 orange
1 tblsp fresh harissa
1 tblsp stilton
Lemon, for juicing
Olive oil, for frying
Salt and pepper

Boil up some water, pour the bulghar wheat into a large bowl, cover with the water until it covers it and then some. Cover the bowl and let sit for at least 20 minutes.

In the meantime, heat up a frying pan, throw in some olive oil, and fsautee the garlic, broccoli, aubergine, courgette. Add in the harissa, and let the veg sautee until they're nice and soft.

Once the bulghar wheat is ready, throw in both the raw veg, and the cooked veg. Combine, season, and douse it with a little lemon juice, until it's too your liking.

Eat, and feel virtuous.

What is healthy about this recipe: Everything! A good meal for when you are craving something that will fill you up, but not weight you down. And bulghar wheat has a puny glycemic index and lots of fibre. Lucky us.

What is seasonal about this recipe: This was made with seasonal veg I had on hand. And the great thing about these sorts of smorgasborg recipes is that you can use whatever you'[ve got, no matter the season. I'm a big fan of meal ideas that are this versatile.

What I learned from this recipe: I love bulghar wheat!

What I will change next time: I loved the addition of the orange, which was the first time I'd done that, and I'd love to experiment more with citrus in salads. Also, beets! Beets should really be in everything!

Rice 'n' Beans

Due to our impending relocation back to Canada, Graeme and I have spent a fair bit of time reflecting on the transient nature of Oxford. It can be bittersweet--you live in this place, become accustomed to the faces you see and the places you go, but while the old stone buildings have not changed in centuries, everything else comes and goes very quickly. We've formed our attachments here: workplaces, friends, favourite cafes and our infamous market, and while it's time for us to go, it is certainly difficult to let all of that go.

The good thing about this transience, though, is meeting and befriending people from anywhere and everywhere, and bullying them into cooking you their regional specialties. When those people inevitably leave you and return home, they may at least let you have their recipes. I have gained countless recipes over the past 4 years that I've lived here in that way, and I'm all the more richer for it.

The following instructions for cooking good 'ole Louisianian style rice and beans came from my dear friend Brooks, who I spent a lot of time with in my second year. Brooks would cook up whole pots of this stuff for large groups of friends, ranging from Canadians, Americans, Italians, Greeks, Germans, etc. Brooks is now back in New Orleans doing her thing, but I forced her to teach me how to make this wonderful comfort food dish. I made it a couple of weeks ago when I was craving kidney beans so bad it was unbearable. Yes, I know I'm the only person who craves things like kidney beans.

The Recipe:

Rice and Beans à la Brooks

Ingredients

200g kidney beans (soaked overnight)
1 large onion, chopped up relatively finely
Several cloves of garlic, minced
Several stalks of celery, chopped up relatively finely
Meat (I tend to use bacon), chopped up
Seasoning: I use salt, pepper, bay leaves, Tony Chachere's Cajun Seasoning (this was a gift from Brooks from a recent visit to Oxford!)
200g or so of rice

Put the soaked beans in a large pot, and cover them in about an inch or two of water. Cook this over a low heat, with the pot covered, while you do everything else.

Sautee the meat in a pan until it's well cooked. Add the meat to the beans, but save the drippings in the pan. Use the drippings to fry up the onion, garlic, and celery (and I quote Brooks here, affectionately called 'the holy trinity' by Catholicchefs down in New Orleans"). Add said trinity to the beans as well. Season the beans.

This concoction will have to cook for a while--like making chili, the longer you let it cook, the better. I'd say that at the bare minimum, you want to give it a good 45 min. As the beans get softer, smash some of them up against the wall of the pan while you stir it--this will give the mixture a creamier texture. In the meantime, boil up the rice, and serve rice and beans together, in harmony. Delicious, filling, and comforting.

3 of us ate this with at least a serving and a half to spare. We served it with my housemate's awesome Slovenian stuffed peppers on the side, making a truly Oxford international dinner.

What is healthy about this recipe: Depending on the meats you add, what kind of rice you use, etc, this recipe can be super healthy (wouldn't be hard to make brown rice and vegetarian rice and beans), or not so much (white rice and bacon, like I made it this time). Everything in moderation.

What is seasonal about this recipe: Celery is in right now, but otherwise rice and beans defy all seasons.

What I learned from this recipe: I have only recently finally learned how much better it is to cook with dried beans as opposed to canned beans. So much more texture! Not as scary as it seemed to just need to soak them beforehand! Dehydrated beans forever.

What I will change next time: Someday, when I own a slow cooker, this would be a perfect slow cooker recipe. Just throw your stuff in in the morning, and leave it stewing all day at a low heat, and voila, a gorgeous dinner in the evening. I want a slow cooker.

Farmers' Market Adventures: Installment #2

This past Saturday we trudged out in the crazy rain to sell at the farmers' market once more. Due to the abysmal weather, the market was held indoors. The indoor setting was fine, and allowed for more chatting as we were all crammed closer together, but the Too British even for the Brits showers that were happening outside did mean that things were quieter than usual. And we discovered how unpredictable the public was: while last time the pies and the pierogi were what disappeared quickest (we nearly sold out of both!), this time, we couldn't seem to get rid of those guys. The bagels, cornbread (this time, gluten-free, which pleased the allergic folk), and scones, sold well.

Unfortunately, my camera's batteries died somewhere on the way to the market, so all I have our photos of the cooking process beforehand. Things were much less hectic this time--no cooking disasters like we'd had last time around (pierogi all gluing together, an entire loaf of cornbread not cooking in the middle and getting chucked, not nearly enough shortcrust pastry), everything timed in such a way that we didn't wear ourselves out completely, and even a good 6 hours sleep for each of us the night before. Seriously! I woke up at quarter to 7, and somehow managed to have produced four dozen bagels (and two dozen cornbread muffins) by 10:30am. We ended up having to sit around for a while because we'd finished our cooking so early!

Here are a few choice moments in the process, which unfortunately only feature scones and bagels, and not our other excellent products:

Action shot! Scone master Graeme removes a batch of his tasty scones from the oven.

An army of bagels, waiting to be boiled.

Somehow the neat process of watching bagels poof up when they boil never gets old. I still think it's the coolest.

This is likely the oddest thing that happened during the baking process. Graeme pulled a batch of scones out of the oven and we found one scones, the one on the bottom right in the above picture, in the above state. It seems to have exploded? We could not figure out how exactly it is that a scone can explode.

Bagels and scones, cooling! (It should be noted that, in true DIY fashion, our cooling rack is actually the grill for our bbq.) Don't they look pretty?

Next market date is May 26th! Pray for good weather! Hopefully we'll be more on the ball with our camera then.

Broccoli, Aubergine, and Pea Tart

We were recently given a couple of bags of whole wheat flour from our flour supplier who encouraged us to experiment with it as he was proud of its mixture of grains. He suggested that it would work well in my shortcrust pastry, but I was skeptical as shortcrust can be a bit finicky to work with. I wasn't sure what to make for dinner tonight, but we received our organic veg box and I had this bag of flour so I decided to make a tart.

Tarts seem difficult to make, but once you know how to make a good shortcrust pastry, they're relatively simple and are extremely versatile. This one was made with vegetables and other ingredients I had on hand, but the tart filling can be virtually anything.

The whole wheat crust worked out really well. It was a little bit more difficult to work with than white flour, and I had to patch up holes in the crust, but it was impossible to tell this in the end. It was also delicious and didn't taste in any way inferior to the white flour version.

Serve with salad, bread, or whatever else strikes your fancy.

The Recipe:

For the shortcrust pastry:
200g whole wheat flour
100g butter
1 medium sized egg

For the filling:
1 medium sized aubergine
1/2 head of broccoli
1 medium sized onion
about half a cup of frozen peas
small bunch of coarsely chopped flat leaf parsley
soft goat's cheese
parmesan cheese
2 medium sized eggs
1 small container of single cream

To make the shortcrust pastry (this can be done in advance): Chop the butter into cubes and add to the flour. Keeping the ingredients as cold as possible will yield the best results. Work the two ingredients together until the mixture has the consistency of coarse breadcrumbs. Add in an egg and mix together until you have a dough. Put this into a clean plastic bag and either refrigerate it or freeze it, if you are making the pastry well in advance.

When you're ready to make the tart, butter up a tart pan, flour your work surface, and roll out the pastry (if it's frozen, allow it to thaw first) to about an eighth of an inch thick. Place the tart pan on the rolled out pastry and cut a circle about an inch more than the diameter of the pan. Place the circle of dough in the centre of the tart pan and press the outer part of the dough against the walls of the pan. Press the dough into the pan and try to push out any air bubbles. If the dough has cracked anywhere, just patch it up with the excess dough that you will have cut away earlier.

To make the filling, chop up the onions, aubergines, broccoli, and peas. Fry them up with some olive oil and once they're done, transfer them to a bowl. Add in the chopped parsley, the goat's cheese, the egg, and the cream, and mix this all together. Season.

Pour the filling into the tart shell, sprinkle it with parmesan cheese, and put this into an oven preheated to 180 degrees. The tart is finished when the filling is solid--about 30-35 minutes.

What is healthy about this recipe: The usual caveats about butter, eggs, and cheese apply (but they are so delicious), but the whole wheat flour does provide a healthier alternative to a regular shortcrust pastry.

What is seasonal about this recipe: The peas were frozen, but the rest of the veg was seasonal. The nice thing about tarts is that you can vary them to fully take advantage of seasonal produce.

What I learned from this recipe: Flour is an ingredient that we generally take for granted, but we've increasingly been learning that it is an interesting and important ingredient and it's worth paying attention to. The flour we use comes from a local cereals farmer who grows an organic medieval blend of flour that is stoneground (this gentler process keeps more nutrients in the flour than the usual industrial process). I've been seriously impressed with this flour and think that it's worth the extra effort to track down organic and stoneground flour. The results are worth it.

What I will change next time: This is the first time that I've used whole wheat flour to make shortcrust pastry and it needs a little bit of work until I'm ready to use it for my pies, where the visual element is more important. Still, this pastry was promising and I'll be sure to use it again.

Sorrel Sea Bass with Cuttlefish Ink Fusilli

+

One of the things that I enjoy the most about shopping at farmers' market and the like, and buying foods from the people who grew them, is the opportunity for new discovery. Being able to have conversations with producers about their foods, how they're grown/made, how to cook them, etc, is such a great way to learn. This year I've tasted a number of new fruit and veg I'd never touched before--e.g. purple sprouting broccoli, celeriac, Jerusalem artichokes, to name a few--and I appreciate being broken out of my habits.

The newest addition to the list of new discoveries is sorrel. I spotted its lovely dark green leafs when buying my produce at the market last week, and asked what it was. I learned that it's a sharp tasting leaf that is often pared with fish. I decided to experiment.

(In the interest of transparency, I should mention that I've since figured out that I've actually had sorrel before. There is a traditional green herby cold summer soup in Poland that my family sometimes makes, and they've never known how to translate what goes into it. Last summer my grandmother and father got frustrated trying to explain it to me, and finally settled with, "just eat it and stop asking questions! It's good!" Having read around a bit, and now understanding the taste of sorrel a bit more, I am pretty sure that that's what the mystery ingredient in the soup was.)

I cooked up my lovely bunch of sorrel this past Friday evening in a "it's been a long damn week, let's have a nice dinner" sort of effort. I got a massive wild sea bass for it, as Graeme had been whining about how much he wanted to have some sea bass for a couple of weeks now. And I paired it with another new food--cuttlefish ink fusilli. Graeme and I tried squid ink risotto once in Croatia, and enjoyed it, so when I spotted the sinister looking pasta at our local Italian deli, I could not resist trying it again. The flavour is quite subtle--rich and just a bit fishy, but not overwhelming in any way. The fish and pasta paired wonderfully, and I was particularly pleased with the ad hoc veg-and-cheese preparation of the pasta--it had a perfect saltiness and creaminess to suit its fishy needs.


The Recipe:

For the fish:
1 enormous wild sea bass, cleaned
1 bunch sorrel
1 bunch kale
1 bunch parsley
3-4 slivers of butter
1 lemon (be generous with the lemon as its a natural cohort of sorrel)

For the pasta:
200g or so of cuttlefish (or squid) ink pasta
bunch of mushrooms, chopped.
bunch of peas (in this case they were frozen, so I thawed them)
3 cloves of garlic
50g creamy goats cheese
Olive oil

Chop up the sorrel, kale, and parsley roughly, and combine them so that you have one big leafy mixture. Slice open the fish, and line with your slivers of butter. Then stuff it to the brim with your greens, and douse it in a stupid amount of lemon juice. Wrap in foil and bake in a hot oven for 30-40 min (until the sea bass is cooked!). Serve with additional slices of lemons for more dousing in lemon juice.

While the fish is cooking, boil up the pasta as one boils up pasta. Heat up a frying pan, and throw in a generous amount of olive oil. Fry up the garlic, and then add the veg. Let that cook until the peas are a lovely bright colour and the mushrooms are suitably dark and soft. When the pasta's done and strained, throw it in with the veg, and let everything sautee for a couple of minutes, while seasoning with salt and pepper. At the last minute, add in your creamy goats cheese, and stir just until it melts enough to make the past a bit creamy.

You final product will look something like this:

And it will be a tasty treat, especially with a nice bottle of white wine to accompany it!

What is healthy about this recipe: I don't think I need to extol the usual virtues of fish here, but yeah: fish is great, fish is tasty, let's all eat lots of fish. A tiny bit of butter is the only sinister culprit here, and the super duper health conscious can always find a more heart-friendly option. If I may continue being a spokesperson for sorrel, our bitter friend is an excellent source of vitamin C.

What is seasonal about this recipe: Everything! Sorrel is something to buy now now now! (Especially as current leaves of sorrel being sold are still young, and so not extremely bitter in taste. As summer advances, they'll get stronger tasting, so the stuff for beginners is the stuff that's available now.)

What I learned from this recipe: That I rule at making stuff up off the cuff, and that I love our farmers.

What I will change next time: I am now keen to figure out how to make this sorrel soup. It's apparently also very good raw in salads. And we're going to be eating that inky pasta for a long time to come, it's just lovely.

Not sure what foods are seasonal right now?

The River Cottage website has a handy table showing which foods are seasonal and when. It's broken down by food group--vegetables, fruit, fish, game, and so on--and is cross-linked with recipes on the site. It obviously applies to the UK, but if anyone can find a similar resource for elsewhere, please post it in the comments.

Shakshuka

Here's another recipe from Yotam Ottolenghi's 'The New Vegetarian' column in the Guardian's weekend magazine. This is an aromatic North African dish and it seems to be a real 'kitchen sink' type of dish that a lot can be added to--Ottolenghi suggests preserved lemon or feta, but I think that even some meat like lamb, especially if it was tender and falling apart, would go really well with it.

One of the joys of this dish was the scent in the house as I was cooking it. The herbs and saffron filled with air with a mouth-wateringly fragrant scent and it was hard to not pick too much from it while it was cooking.

The Recipe:

(Reproduced without permission from the Guardian's website. The recipe given is for 4, but I halved the quantities when I made it.)

½ tsp cumin seeds
190ml light olive oil or vegetable oil
2 large onions, peeled and sliced
2 red and 2 yellow peppers, cored and cut into 2cm strips
4 tsp muscovado sugar
2 bayleaves
6 sprigs thyme, picked and chopped
2 tbsp flat-leaf parsley, chopped
1 bunch fresh coriander, chopped
6 ripe tomatoes, roughly chopped
½ tsp saffron strands
Pinch of cayenne pepper
Salt and pepper
Up to 250ml water
8 free-range eggs

In a large saucepan, dry-roast the cumin on high heat for two minutes. Add the oil and sauté the onions for two minutes. Add the peppers, sugar, bayleaves, thyme, parsley and two tablespoons of coriander, and cook on high heat to get a nice colour. Add the tomatoes, saffron, cayenne, salt and pepper. Cook on low heat for 15 minutes, adding enough water to keep it the consistency of a pasta sauce. Taste and adjust the seasoning. It should be potent and flavoursome. You can prepare this mix in advance.

Place four saucepans on medium heat and divide the mixture between them. Break two eggs into each pan, pouring into gaps in the mixture. Sprinkle with salt, cover and cook very gently for 10-12 minutes, until the egg just sets. Sprinkle with coriander and serve with chunky white bread.

What is healthy about this recipe: Since the recipe is mostly just vegetables, herbs, and spices, it's actually pretty good. The usual caveats about eggs apply, but everything in moderation...

What is seasonal about this recipe: Not that much, to be honest. If you're focused on seasonal eating, it's best to leave this dish to the late summer.

What I learned from this recipe: I'm usually a lot stingier with herbs than I was with this recipe--this one uses handfuls of chopped coriander and parsley--but I think that it's worth trying to use more herbs with other dishes because the results can be spectacular. I should also make an effort to incorporate more saffron into my cooking.

What I will change next time: I'd like to try the same dish but with different vegetables and maybe some meat.

Beer Bread

A few years ago, I had a friend who was a beer bread factory--every potluck or lunch or whatever we had, she whipped up a loaf. She insisted that it was because it was the easiest delicious bread recipe there is. She was right. However, when she passed the recipe along to me, I tried it, and somehow, the beer did not back out, nothing rose, and I ended up with a loaf of dense flour that tasted of stale beer. I was, understandably, put off.

I had pretty much forgotten about the wonderful phenomenon that is beer bread until it randomly came up in conversation with one of my housemates last Sunday afternoon, and I felt inspired to try again. Graeme thought I was nuts, as we had just spend Friday and Saturday doing nothing but baking until we ached for the farmers' market, and we were both so tired of the kitchen. But in the excitement of the market, I'd forgotten to buy my usual quota of bread for the week, so I wanted something, and I remembered that it took not even 10 minutes to prepare beer bread dough, and that we had leftover Old Hooky in the fridge from Graeme's beef and ale pies.

So I returned to the dreaded kitchen, and got to work. The great thing about beer bread is the basic recipe takes almost no ingredients, and the really fun part is adding in some herbs, or onions, or cheese, or whatever, to go with the beery yeasty flavour. At the market the day before, I'd been enchanted by one of the sellers' potato bread with caraway seeds, so I decided to go in that direction for flavouring. I'll post the recipe I made, but if you're going to try it yourself, I really encourage you experiment--you can throw anything into this!

The Recipe:

Caraway Beer Bread

3 cups white flour
1 tsp raw cane sugar
1 tblsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1.5 tsp caraway seeds
1 tblsp linseeds
12oz/350g of a nice ale
some rock salt

Mix up the dry ingredients. Pour in the beer slowly and stir to combine. It should form a thick and lumpy (in a good "rustic" sort of way, not a "I'm not properly mixed" sort of way) dough/batter. Pour/spoon it into a greased bread tin, and sprinkle rock salt on top to give the crust some texture. Bake at 190C for 45 minutes, until it's risen and looks beautiful and wholesome and golden. Your kitchen will smell like beer.

That's seriously it! Best recipe for a lazy baker. This bread tastes lovely with a strong cheese.

What is healthy about this recipe: There's nothing too healthy or unhealthy about it, although obviously white flour is not ideal (even though we try to use our nice stoneground stuff when we've got it around). The linseeds made a lovely addition though, and added some texture to the bread, as well as lots of omega-3.

What is seasonal about this recipe: Flour is always in season! Although as it's spring and all the nice herbs are popping out of the soil, this is a great time to experiment with different herbs in this bread. I really want to make some with dill.

What I learned from this recipe: That I am, in fact, capable of making beer bread, and that I have a near-psychotic compulsion to bake.

What I will change next time: I definitely want to try and make a wholewheat version. According to the fantastic blog Farmgirl Fare, all that really takes is a little bit more beer to make up for the denseness of wholewheat flour.

McDonald's Jumps on the Ethical Meat Bandwagon

They've got an new campaign focusing on the treatment of animals on their farms, the quality of the cuts of beef they use, and natural rearing methods. It's interesting that even the world's biggest fast food supplier is now concerned with proving its meat ethics.

While I'm of course far too skeptical to be swayed by such a move and think the campaign is likely 100% (free range?) bullshit, I do find it really heartening that even a company as powerful as McDonald's is feeling pressured by an increasing public awareness of the ethical issues surrounding meat. That can only be a good sign for how influential this movement is becoming. Although with popularization there is always the danger of the discussion becoming all about stupid lip service and using the right language to prove your ethical cred, and losing a lot of its meaning. Which such a campaign certainly hints at.