Fat free waybread with currants

I've been making this bread pudding-like thing since I invented it a few years ago. I didn't really have a name for it, but recently my daughter has been taking it to school as a satisfying treat between her mock exams, and just seeing her put it in her pocket as she leaves for the journey to school has got me referring to it as "waybread" lately, so I suppose that's as good a name as any!

It's a sort of something-for-nothing recipe, using mostly things you've always got in the cupboard and things you'd otherwise throw away.

It starts with the crusty ends off your loaves of bread, and any bits that don't slice right - I just keep them in a bag in the freezer until I have enough to make a mush out of. When you've got a fair amount (usually the offcuts from a week's worth of bread make enough for us), break it up into small bits like this:

Then you need to soak it in milk - I use skimmed because of my dodgy gallbladder, which keeps this a fat free cake effectively - about a pint is usually enough. What I do is just splash a bit in then stir the bread around, adding more until it's all coated and mostly sits beneath the liquid level if you mush it well down. Then leave it to soak for at least an hour with a teatowel over it.

Once it's had a good soak, get your minion to mash it with a fork until the crusty bits are all broken up and it's properly gooey - thus:

Then I shake in some sugar - sorry, I never measure any of this, though I keep meaning to, but I always forget as I'm usually pretty busy doing loads of things at once when I'm doing this. It depends how sweet you want it of course, and you could use sugar, golden syrup or honey, whichever has the flavour you prefer. As a ballpark figure I'd say to start with about 100g of sugar or 3tbsp of honey/syrup, and see how you go. Unrefined (brown, golden granulated etc) sugar is always best, but any will do. If you have them, traditional cake spices like cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg go well in it, so I usually put in half a teaspoon of each. But it still tastes good when I forget to!

At this stage, your mixture is likely to be too runny, so use porridge oats to thicken it. I usually add them a handful at a time, mixing in and giving it time to soak up some of the liquid before adding more, until it reaches a stodgy consistency that can be pressed into a baking dish (as opposed to poured). 

Then if I have any, I mix in a couple of handfuls of dried fruit. I've been looking into cutting down the food miles on cake ingredients and just like the almonds that usually come from California, you can get perfectly good European currants and raisins. I got 3kg of organic ones, grown in Greece, for £22.35, which I make as equivalent to paying £3.72 for your average half kilo pack at the supermarket.

I know the "super value" type is probably about a third of that price, but getting the largest volume for the smallest price is not what this project is all about. It's about learning the true cost of things, being willing to pay a fair price for responsibly produced and sourced products and to adjust your lifestyle in accordance with what this teaches you as regards what are life's necessities and luxuries. If sultanas at £2 per kilo mean huge volumes of them flying over the Atlantic constantly while supply lines by freight train across Europe puts the price up (no doubt thanks to some dirty dealings at the WTO which in reality only "liberalises" trade in one direction!), then I can live with not eating as many raisins for a clearer conscience!

Here's the stodgy stuff in its dish (greased!), ready to go into the oven at 150°C for about an hour:

And when it comes out, let it cool down and it should just fall out of the dish when you turn it upside down. Then you can chop it up into treat size squares and enjoy it with a nice cuppa! Kept in the fridge it'll last about a week, and travels well as it's pretty squash/break/crumble resistant.

One variation I sometimes do is when I have a bit of leftover marzipan from something else, brush your favourite jam over the top while it's still warm out of the oven and stick the rolled out marzipan on it for a bit of added sweetie goodness!

That's genuine crap photography there, an endangered species as phone cameras are doing all but make the tea nowadays! Apple will have my attention when they start doing that! ;)

Pasta & sauce

Well, there's so much to share - where do I start? How about a nice, easy pasta meal? This is what we had on Wednesday - a better alternative to those jars of sauce that are full of preservatives and devoid of flavour.

Start out with your vegetables and meat. I've used spring onions, cherry tomatoes, garlic and a red pepper here, with the leftovers of a haslet - this is a traditional Lincolnshire meatloaf made with pork, breadcrumbs and herbs.

You'll find it in your supermarket delicatessen, usually the cheapest sliced cold meat there is that actually is meat (as opposed to those teddy bear/smiley face "luncheon meat" things), but I buy them whole from local butchers. I used to work in a butcher shop where we made them out the back, so I've a fair idea how to judge a good one!

There's an amazing tomato "project" going on in Lincolnshire. They're using the methane generated by the rubbish at the local tip to warm greenhouses where they grow summer fruits all year round - how cool is that? They don't seem to have much of an internet presence at the moment so I can't give a link, but I'll ask the guy I know who's involved with it to throw me a bone there so I've got something more to give you later. I think this is happening elsewhere too, though.

Anyway, having chopped everything up it was a simple case of draining the pasta, leaving it in the colander while I reused the pan to cook the sauce. I warmed a bit of rapeseed oil and put the veg in, stirring it occasionally till it was softened, then added the garlic and haslet. I've been putting the garlic in later recently to stop it from burning in the pan, which tends to happen when you're still trying to figure out the vagaries of electric hobs. Once the meat had started to release its juices, I put in a whole pot of half-fat crème fraîche:

...and mixed it in till it was heated through, grinding in a bit of salt and pepper to taste. The Co-operative's crème fraîche is from British dairy farms, so I'm using that at the moment, with a mental note to look into that as I don't want to let the supermarkets off the "clear provenance" hook just for putting a British flag on the pot!

Then I tipped the pasta in and mixed it round on a very low heat (to stop the pasta sticking to the pan) till that was also heated through again. Now, if I'd been entertaining guests, then at this stage I would probably have put the whole lot in a nice oven-to-table dish, grated a couple of different kinds of cheese over the top and put it in the oven to melt the top. But it was just me and the kids, so I spooned it straight out of the pan onto the plates, and just grated cheese over the top:

I have biomass heating here thanks to my landlord's forward-looking attitude, for which I pay a flat rate each month for unlimited fuel that comes from the woods on the estate, and which they send round by tractor. As I'm also off the mainline sewers and have my own septic tank, it means my water bills are also very small. So this speeds up cooking quite a bit, as I can use the water that's sitting there, already hot, in the pipes, to pre-heat saucepans and a lot less time is spent on the hob waiting for water to boil.

That all means this meal is very quick - by the time I'm done chopping the veg and meat, the pasta is almost ready, so it's from scratch to table in about 15 minutes. But even your on-grid urbanite, using two pans, could have it on the table in 20 - 25 minutes, I expect.

And there are plenty of variations on the same theme you can do. For example, sometimes I set some chopped ham and crushed garlic marinading in soy sauce earlier in the day (or the previous evening) and that replaces the haslet, adding a different flavour that my kids can never go back for enough extra helpings of. And obviously you can completely omit the meat for any number of vegetarian varieties.

Sweet stuff

I did mention in a post not so long ago that I'd been in the business of trying my hand at traditional Indian sweets, and promised to share the results with you. I've been sitting on this one for a while, but without further ado I give you my first attempt at chocolate burfi.

The first challenge was to acquire some almonds produced as close to home as possible. My research turned up that the vast majority of almonds we find in the shops have come all the way from California. This being unnecessary when they grow perfectly well in Europe. Being the lazy so-and-so that I am, I got ground almonds because I can't be bothered to do all the soaking and peeling and grinding myself - not right now, though I'll have a go in future. I got 1kg of the stuff for £14.28 (incl. P&P) from Real Food Source. I buy in bulk when I can online, to make it more worth the delivery charges. These particular nuts were grown in Spain. That's not far - I drove there last autumn! :)

So, I found the simplest recipe with the fewest ingredients and stages. It was a bit tricky because a lot of the ones I found online were sort of half-in and half-out of American measurements. All-in I can handle - as long as you use the same size cup for everything you're alright. But this half-measures thing confused me. They'd say something like "250g almonds" and then "½ cup milk" in the same recipe. So I'm thinking, do they have a specific cup size in mind considering that the weight of almonds is specific and weight-based as opposed to volume? I don't know why people do that!

Anyway, I figured I'd give it a shot. These ground almonds and sugar were added to this milk:

Which made a gooey paste like this:

And when I heated that up, stirring "occasionally" (a lot), it turned into this:

I had a feeling it was meant to be "drier", but I didn't have time to stand there all night stirring it and waiting for it to reach some undefined state when in all possibility I'd use the wrong ratios of ingredients due to the badly-written recipe. So, at this point I cut my losses and spread it in a dish like so:

Approximately a geological age later, it had cooled down, so I melted some chocolate and spread it over the top. When that had cooled down, I cut it into squares like this:

It was quite a long way from being the thing it was meant to be - certainly not pick-up-able as we had to eat it with cake forks, but I think I learned from the experience and as you can see by the fact that the dish was half-empty before I even got a chance to take a photo, its lack of resemblance to what it was meant to be didn't prevent us from enjoying what it was - in fact it was pretty damn delicious, whatever it was!

I'll have another go next time, using less milk. And then one day I'll see what difference it makes if I don't use ready-ground almonds.

In the process of this project I learned lots about the nut industry, including the fact that walnuts, cobnuts and various other nuts are still grown in Britain. I plan to investigate these guys' produce when I've got a penny or two spare - at present I'm reeling from the house having been council tax banded at last... !

Experimental

Here's a weird little one for you.

I haven't been doing much shopping, as I've just got loads of stuff in stock, so rather than what I've always done - which is to make a weekly menu in advance then go out and buy all the stuff for it - I've been just rustling things up each night as I go, out of whatever suggests itself to me of what I have in the house. But as I'm using a lot of new and slightly off-beat ingredients this means there's quite a bit of invention going on. Which is fun.

I soaked some black badger peas, intending to have them on Sunday, but then decided to do roast veg and sausages instead. But by Tuesday the peas, having been soaked now, needed to be used fairly sharpish. I looked around for fresh stuff to put with it and there was some chicken breast (from Whisby's in Horncastle), a savoy cabbage and some spring onions (local farm, 40p and 30p respectively). If in doubt, bung them all in together and see what happens!

So I boiled the peas up with a bit of baking soda to help them soften, adding sliced cabbage leaves to the pot about half way through. That gave me this:

I then started off softening the chopped spring onions in the frying pan, then cooked the chicken a bit before adding in the peas and cabbage.

All was going okay so far, but it was all a bit too 'al dente' and I felt like it needed some kind of sauce, so I put in about a pint of chicken stock and some salt and pepper. I still thought the peas needed to be softer, so I put in some baking soda and then, remembering the tradition of eating these peas with vinegar, I splashed a load of that in too, which helped the baking soda to work its stuff as well. In the end it came out like this:

I'm not sure if you can tell the difference from these pictures, but the second one was much mushier and juicier.

I served it up to the kids with no small amount of apprehension, and they did come to the table with doubtful looks on their faces. After I'd had the first mouthful though, my fears were allayed - how could anyone not like this? And surely enough, the kids were both soon going up for second helpings and saying we must do this again. Result!

Now, I've no idea what to call this - suggestions are welcome! I expect it's pretty close to the sort of thing our ancestors would've eaten, though as the bean/pulse group has been largely left to the veggies and vegans of the world, it's not so often these days that you'd come across a meal based on them that includes chicken. But I'll bet this has enough protein in it to replace any bodybuilder milkshakes!

Biscuits and dinner

Pretty much all of yesterday I was doing a lot of cooking. I started out first thing with bread, as we were running low and I wanted there to be toast available when the kids crawled out of their pits around midday (well, the new Pokémon game came out yesterday and Somebody had been saving their pocket money, so all-night binge-playing was always going to happen).

While the dough for that was rising, I made some melting moments biscuits. As all my recipe books are still in boxes in the shed since moving in August, I'm limited at the moment to what I can improvise or recipes I find on the net, though I'm hesitant to use up data with research for a simple biccy recipe, so my small repertoire of memorised recipes has to serve. This one was pretty much a whole packet of butter (minus what I kept back for greasing the trays) whipped together with 100g of sugar, crack an egg into it and mix it in then work 250g of flour in (mine is currently from Sibsey Trader Mill). I weighed it into roughly 50g balls and rolled each one round in oats before flattening it a bit on a baking tray. 15 minutes at 180°C and they came out looking like this:

Which went very nicely with our afternoon tea! :)

Then I got started on some badaam ki burfi, which is a traditional Indian sweet and the simplest equivalent I could find to those chocolate barfi I got from Ambala which I can't afford to keep paying delivery charges to buy from them! More about that after I've finished the final stage: chocolate topping!

And then for dinner I just boiled together all the week's leftover veg (swede, pumpkin, carrot and a couple of spuds), mashed that all together with a splash of milk and some seasoning, and we had that with wild boar sausages from Oslinc (I get their 3 packs of sausages for a tenner deal every now and then), then a bit of balsamic glaze just for jolly, and it was a tasty, low fat meal:

The kids had Bill Grundy's pistachio ice-cream (also from Oslinc) but I passed, as my dodgy gallbladder was still complaining from the fat in the biscuits!

Scarf II: The Revenge

After I finished my own scarf, I was a bit er, inundated with requests. However, as most of the people requesting didn't really understand the concept of fair pricing (you really can't expect someone to labour a fortnight over a 100% wool scarf then flog it to you for a fiver!), I've only actually taken up one of those requests and just yesterday posted off a rather festive thing to my sister in North Carolina.

For this one I used 2 ply lambswool from Risby Grange, having emailed the proprietors and struck a bargain for big cones of different kinds of wool at £7 per 100g. That meant smaller needles, and then as I got going I started to get very frustrated with the fact I kept having to unravel and restart cos I just couldn't seem to keep the edges straight.

I spoke to my friend Meera who is a very talented hand-embroiderer of ribbons that she sells for people to edge saris with, and she suggested using some of her ribbon along both edges so I could have a bit of leeway for errors and make progress. I took up the idea, and then realised that this thing would have to be lined or the edges would be too stiff for the middle, if you get what I mean?

So, looking for natural fabrics suitable for lining and produced as close to home as possible, I stumbled on Thomas Ferguson's Irish Linen, and we had a winner.

All these super high quality products were starting to intimidate me a bit as I started putting the thing together after I'd finished knitting the length of it. I knew my meagre skill couldn't really do justice to it all as I'm very much an improvisational craftsman in every sense: I just make things up and figure them out as I go, I've never had lessons and don't have time to either, so I just work intuitively and correct/cope with problems as they arise.

But I think it all turned out ok in the end - there was a point where the cotton ran out as I was machine sewing the ribbon on, which made a bit of a blip on the reverse side, but I think my sister will forgive me that as it won't show when it's being worn.

She asked for a figure-of-eight style, with the ends sewn together instead of tassled, so that's what she got. I snapped myself wearing it for her to get a sneak preview before I posted it, so I don't think she'll mind me sharing that with you before it gets to her in the post!

Reprieve...

So having got the worst of that module out of the way now, I've got until the next module starts in February to amuse myself as I see fit. I'm a bit hyperactive really, so I'm not one for sitting around watching Jeremy Kyle when there's places to explore, skills to learn, people to meet and projects to get myself up to the neck in. And students to take on, which I've somehow agreed to saddle myself with two more of since I last posted here.

The local/sustainable food project has really just become an integral part of my lifestyle now, I keep forgetting it's a "thing" I'm meant to be documenting and posting about. But I do have some things to report...

Firstly, I got my hands on some Kettler's Cottage soap and hand salve, and I can't say enough good about it. For starters, the soap seems to be less harsh than your basic commercial stuff, so I'm not needing to use the hand salve as much as I'm used to using my usual cream. The salve itself takes a bit of getting used to (if you're used to cream/lotion) as it comes in a very solid block - well, it was very solid indeed when I got it as it had been in the gift shop of the freezing cold Boston Stump - but I've learned that keeping it on a warm windowsill makes it more erm, "rub-able", and you really don't need very much of it for the desired effect. I've got the cook's kitchen variety, which has a nice lemon-eucalyptus smell to it which I like. I'm sticking with it anyway.

Next on my toiletry quest will be shampoo, which is a bit of a challenge as I have a "troubled" scalp that has historically required the use of special shampoo - not just your basic Head & Shoulders but the really tough stuff. Whenever I've succumbed to the yearning to smell of something nice after I've washed my hair, and deviated from the usual stuff for a wash or two my scalp has itched like hell, but I'm wondering if it's because I've deviated in the direction of cosmetic shampoos that are bound to irritate me, whereas if I went in the direction of more simple preparations this might not be the case. I just need to find someone local that makes something I can try - watch this space.

My delivery from Ambala came - eventually! Unfortunately they use a private courier who, unlike our faithful Royal Mail postie, has no idea about the vagaries of rural addresses, and this invariably results in much frustration and hassle, so it wasn't until Monday when the second email saying they'd delivered it (but not to my house) came and my neighbour from across the field brought over the parcel that had been left in his shed. These were the delights that awaited me behind the parcel tape:

In fairness it was worth the wait... the chocolate barfi together with that amazing coffee make an afternoon treat absolutely to die for. After no small amount of wrestling with myself I let my buddy Wayne share in the experience when he popped by and his reaction was to stop mid-sentence, slap the table several times and cry "My God! My taste buds have just come to life! They've been dead all this time!" I don't think I can give any higher praise than that. Also, the garlic sauce goes absolutely amazingly with steak and chips!


Now, if you'll pardon me, I've got a late lunch here of Lincolnshire haslet with melted Just Jane cheese and homemade balsamic glaze on my own bread.

Elevensies

Well, I'm meant to be putting the finishing touches to my presentation as I'm meant to send off the PPT for it this afternoon. It's at times like this that procrastination makes me more productive than ever at just about anything besides the thing I'm meant to be doing. Right now, I'm enjoying a rather luxurious elevensies snack which is usually much needed by this time of day (I have to get up absurdly early):

What you're looking at there is a cup of that awesome coffee of yesterday's eulogy fame, paired with my own homemade bread, buttered and topped with Norwegian gjetost which is a weird sort of cross between cheese and caramel that I saw at Myer's, had a try of and had to indulge in for the sheer novelty factor. I've just finished consuming this little lot as I write, and it's certainly done its job as far as pick-me-ups go. The flavours go surprisingly well together.

I'm on St Helen's goat's butter at the moment, which I found at Tesco for £1.90 a packet and which comes from just over the Humber. When I can get my hands on the Lincs Poacher brothers' fantastic raw butter, I do so, but the short shelf life, restrictive regulations around it and the fact I can only get it by driving miles up to their farm or waiting for the once-a-month farmers' market in Boston means it's never likely to be our staple - unfortunately. We've tried various organic and otherwise British butter that's readily available locally, and St Helen's is the one we're unanimous in preferring for flavour.

And while I'm at this trade lark (at least the flour in the bread is local!), what with the coffee and the Scandinavian cheese, I had a craving last night for the kinds of sweets I used to find on offer at the Eid festivals at the mosque - halwa, barfa and baklava in particular. The craving was still strong this morning, so the search was on.

I remembered when my dear friend Khalid from Oman had a gift tin of the stuff sent to me, and went in search of the tin to find out where it came from. I found it in a cupboard, full of small bottles of various food colourings and flavourings, tipped it upside down and Googled the name I saw there. I soon had a basket full of stuff on the way from Ambala foods, which is a British company but it counts as trade because I'm reasonably certain that most of their ingredients aren't produced in these isles. 

Moving back to Lincolnshire though, I've found a source of soap in Kettler's Cottage Crafts. Also, since I spend a lot of my time with my hands covered in various substances, I tend to go through quite a bit of hand cream, which I'm pleased to see they can also furnish me with.

I've long preferred bars of soap to the liquid type everyone seems to be using these days. The only argument I've heard in favour of liquid soap is that it's "more hygienic", and while that might be all well and good if you're in the health or food industries, I don't see why good old fashioned soap - which lasts a lot longer, is generally a lot cheaper and typically contains less to none of the weird chemical mixtures of liquid soap - shouldn't be good enough for us at home.

The fact I can buy Kettler's at Boston Stump gives Boston a chance to redeem itself as it let me down badly this week when I went there for some groceries (as I was there already for other reasons), only to find Mountain's was shut and there was apparently not a single greengrocer in the entire town centre. I left in contempt for Horncastle, which satisfied my every desire despite being a much smaller town. A case in point of what happens to towns when they get big supermarkets!

And now I really better had get on with that presentation. 

Coffee

You can tell I have another assignment coming up. But this is the last one for this module, then I'll be freeeee! At least until the next one begins in the new year.

Now you might remember me talking about the Union Coffee subscription I signed up to not so long ago. I recently got my first delivery - and the person I asked to get a photo of it while I was busy in the garden only managed this one single crappy attempt, so this will have to do:

Among the luscious freebies were two packets of Los Lajones honey canturra from Panama, from the producer Graciano Cruz on the Baru volcano, Boquete. And let me tell you, this is no ordinary coffee.

Hithertofore, the best coffee I've ever had was at Betty's in Harrogate. My brother and I were in the area and hungry roundabout Christmas, and as it was the only place open we, unwittingly, went in. We soon found ourselves barely able to conceal our gasps of shock at the prices on the menu, but - what the hell? It was Christmas and I was tolerably oofy at the time, so we went for it.

I was very sceptical of the idea that any coffee could be good enough to justify the £8 or so they charged for the single small cafetière of whatever it was I ordered. But what I tipped down my gullet refreshed the parts other coffees had never before reached and justified every penny I spent on it. It just kept on giving - throughout the next hour, long after I'd finished off the actual liquid, I was still getting new shades of flavour from it. For a while afterwards, all other coffee seemed like mere black grit in hot water. As an aside, the food was awesome, too, and should I find myself once more flush as I was I fully intend to go back there to celebrate the backlog of things I haven't celebrated in the past couple of years, but should've!

That was years ago. And though I'm not a skimper by habit (I've always preferred to have less of a good thing that costs more than more of a crap but cheap equivalent), I haven't since had anything close to that kind of coffee experience.

Until this. The flavour hits you in waves, then comes back again with new shades you hadn't tasted the first time round. It makes you want to drink it slowly, hold it in your mouth then swallow to savour what it has to give depending where it is on its journey through your digestive system.

You might think this sounds a bit over the top, but I kid you not. Not wanting to use it all up before the next delivery comes, I thought to alternate it with the cheaper stuff I had in stock, but... you can imagine how that worked out. Among the info that came in the box is the statement that it's as absurd to say "coffee is coffee" as it is to say "wine is wine" just because it all comes from grapes. How very true!

Indirectly then, it looks like this is going to be the reason why I get my caffeine addiction a little more under control: because I can't afford to drink as much of this stuff, and because, my taste buds being enlightened by it, I can't just put the scales back on my eyes (as it were) and stick the cheap stuff any more, I'm just going to have to drink less coffee! I can always appease the withdrawal headaches with tea, between my daily Cups of Special Coffee ;)

Carlin fries

Here's those black badger peas again! I hinted the other day that I'd have a go at making this traditional Northumbrian dish, and so I did. I realised as I was doing it that I was basically making veggie burgers!

So, I started with about 250g of dried black badger peas. I soaked them overnight in water then cooked them with a teaspoon of baking soda - just boiled and then simmered them for half an hour. Then I drained most of the water off and mixed in a fair sized pinch each of parsley, oregano, thyme and sage, and ground in a good amount of salt and black pepper.

Then I took a few bits off the ends of the loaves I've been making (the bits that aren't much good for toast or sandwiches) and used a cheese grater to turn them into about two large handfuls of breadcrumbs. I put those into the mixture along with a good blob of cooking oil and some chopped onion, so I had a mixture that looked like this:

I then started shaping it into little patties or burger shapes. I found that after the first one or two, my hands were just too sticky and it was impossible to work the stuff, but a through a bit of trial and error I discovered that if I put a bowl of water next to me and dunked my hands in it between each one, so I was doing it with wet hands, it made it a lot easier. Eventually I had a tray full of them:

It would probably have been better if I'd chopped the onion more finely, which I had actually intended to do. But I found after the first couple of cuts that my knife needed sharpening, and I just couldn't be bothered to do it, so I just hacked at it any old how and that's what I got. Note to self for next time - keep knife sharp!

I then put this tray of patties in the fridge, and left them there while I went to take mademoiselle to the dentist. Now, unfortunately I forgot to take photos of the finished product as we were too tired and hungry when we got back home to do anything but cook them and tuck in like famished orphans. Suffice to say they tasted so good that the following day I ordered a catering sack of these peas! And they were satisfying enough on their own for three of them, with a bit of salad, to be a full meal. 

And I'm posting this quite a while after I actually wrote it as I had intended to schedule it to post this week, but I forgot, so it languished in my drafts box until just now! Sorry!!

Quick food and slow thinking!

That pumpkin purée I made on Sunday has been sitting in the fridge waiting to be used, and since eggs are in plentiful supply hereabouts I decided on an evening when I was too tired to do anything too involved to put two and two together to make a quick and satisfying meal of them.

I think possibly because of my sister in the USA being pumpkin mad, I tend to think America when I think pumpkin, which went together with two and two to make the concept of pancakes. This is just the weird way my mind works...

So I thought, what if you make a sort of Yorkshire pudding mix and just add pumpkin purée to it? That'd make a more substantial pancake - that was the theory anyway. I ended up making a batter out of about 5 tbsp of maize flour (still thinking America), 4 tbsp of pumpkin purée, 3 eggs and a glass of milk, plus seasoning. When cooked it came out a bit more like omelette than pancake - probably less egg would make it more pancake-like, on reflection - and it looked like this:

You can see how I chopped it into more manageably flip-able bits - I did this amount again, and we ate it with the eggs and bacon you can see keeping warm on there. The whole thing was only about 15 minutes from conception to table, and my youngest's comment was "it's strange but nice to have pancake that actually has flavour of its own and doesn't need to be drenched in sugar". Which I'm taking as a good review.

I've decided to take action on the coffee issue, as I have to just accept that I'm hopelessly caffeine addicted and this isn't likely to change anytime soon. But I don't want to feed that addiction at other people's expense, so I looked around for a good place to get my fix from that didn't break the conscience, and came across Union Direct Trade. I've subscribed to their monthly "Roastmaster" thing, which should keep me supplied with a pleasantly varied caffeine experience - I'll let you know how it goes when I get my first shipment!

One of the things that's emerging from this project is that I'm coming to appreciate things more and more. I'm being forced to really think about what goes into each thing I buy, the supply chains and basically the "true cost" of it, and more and more I'm refusing to accept "bargains" where I know someone else is paying the price for the bargain I get - usually someone who can afford that price a hell of a lot less than I can.

Luxuries are genuinely feeling like luxuries - I'm getting higher quality stuff, with accompanying fair price tags (fair to me and to the producer), and getting them much less often, and because of that, really understanding that they are luxuries, so that things really feel special. Having less of them doesn't make me feel like I'm missing out, sacrificing or going without anything - it's more like I've dumped someone I had a meaningless, casual relationship with for someone that offers a deep, spiritual bond that gets stronger and more meaningful as time goes on.

Some of the things that aren't luxuries but just everyday items, now I'm getting them from right near my doorstep and personally speaking to the people who produce them and seeing for myself the labour and care that goes into them, it's just making me respect these things so much more so that even they feel like luxuries, and I feel lucky and privileged to enjoy them. 

The other day I picked up a bit of scrap wool off the floor and found myself reluctant to throw it away. I thought of the sheep, generations of them, grazing there and the couple that work so hard rearing them and trying to make a living by honest work and trade, and how these sheep basically live their lives for the pure purpose of giving us this wool, then they lay down their lives to give us nourishing meat - lives they wouldn't have lived out in freedom on that beautiful pasture if it weren't for us wanting their wool and meat. Suddenly this wool felt almost like a sacred thing that mustn't be lightly wasted or tossed aside

I wonder really that anyone can put a price on it at all. It pains me to think of how I took it all for granted before, and didn't really think about all that goes into the things I "consume", how this whole society is geared towards fostering that disconnected, ungrateful attitude, that sense of entitlement to have it all, right now, my way, for peanuts - and the impact of it on everything and everyone - how it all comes back on we ourselves as we see our world falling to wrack and ruin in every sphere - social, political, environmental and economic.

And I think, when everyone's so disconnected and detached from their "place", and from the very things they depend on for their lives, is it any wonder that people don't feel any inclination to get involved in issues that must seem to them like they only affect "other people"? That detachment has been programmed and fostered into us all by a lifetime of media programming and conditioning that tells us to just "look after me and mine" as if caring for the world and caring for themselves and their loved ones are two seperate things... it's just too sad for words.

What I'm getting out of this project is a sense of there being two kinds of consumer - one who consumes in the neutral or positive sense, in that they take and use what they need and put back a balanced return, developing constructive relationships with the other parts of the web it's a part of. And another kind that's more like a sort of toxic parasite, voraciously moving through the land, chewing it all up and casting it aside, leaving trails of destruction and desolation behind them - that's the kind of consumer that capitalism wants us all to be, and has indeed made most of us into. It's the kind I refuse to be any more. I want my children and grandchildren to have a chance to live in a better world, not one that's been completely ruined.

And on that note, I'm off to get some dinner!

Peas and bread

Peas go back a long way in these parts. Long before Sir Walter Raleigh returned from across the pond with the fabled potato, the English based a lot of their meals around various pulses and it's a pity that these seem to have been sidelined by the noble spud, into the fringes of our cuisine, of interest mainly to those looking for protein sources in lieu of meat.

A while ago I got myself some black badger peas from Hodmedod's. These fellas have been farmed here since at least Tudor times - a low-carb, high protein staple to fill your belly, with a long native pedigree! They're sometimes known as Carlin peas in Northumberland, where they're traditionally eaten "parched" (roasted and fried), or boiled and drowned in vinegar, on Passion Sunday, in memory of a shipment of them coming from Scandinavia to the rescue of a besieged town many centuries ago.

The other night I decided to do like our ancestors did, and make a meal of them by bunging them in a pot with anything else I had to hand! After soaking them overnight in water, I set them on the hob to boil and simmer for about half an hour - as suggested on the box they came in, I used a teaspoonful of baking soda to help them soften. While they were simmering, I poured boiling water on some shredded cabbage in a bowl, and left that to one side.

Once the peas were done, I drained most of the (now pretty thick) liquid off, added a bit of seasoning and then threw in 200g of beef mince that I had in the fridge that needed using up. When that had been mixed in and gone nice and brown, in went the cabbage. As a nod to Northumbria (an area that, along with the Percy family, has a special place in my heart) I poured in two or three tablespoonsful of vinegar and that was it - we ate it just like this:

I know it doesn't look like much, but it was tasty and satisfying. I used 200g (dried weight) of peas between two of us and I can tell you we didn't need any dessert. In fact it kept us feeling satisfied all evening long, well past the point where I'm usually going to the kitchen in search of toast. We agreed that I'm probably going to have to buy one of their catering sacks of these, as they're pretty much full of about as much "win" as anything can be.

I've  subsequently discovered this website, which was a bad idea when it was close to bedtime as I ended up browsing round it for ages and got hardly any sleep that night. On their list of "endangered" recipes was something about making patties or "Carlin fries" out of these peas, which I'm eager to have a try at.

In other news, I figured out how to stop my bread going wonky - in fact, I've just about perfected it I think! I adapted the recipe I posted before  by adding a couple of tablespoons each of powdered milk and sunflower oil, which has significantly lightened and improved the texture of the bread. The wonky loaf issue has been solved by adjusting the feet on my cooker so it's level, and leaving the shaped dough to prove (expand) on the tray for half an hour before baking. Then you get a loaf like this:

...which I think you'll agree is a vast improvement on the previous one.

Pumpkin "lasagne"

Here's one that went down really well with all the family, despite them looking at it suspiciously in the beginning! I got the idea from my sister's brilliant squash gratin, which I had intended to do, but ended up doing this instead.

I started out by carving up a pumpkin so I had lots of slices, half of which went on the bottom of a dish like so...

Then I set about making the sauce, which entailed chopping onions and tomatoes and cooking them in a little oil with some garlic like this.

The stuff on the tray there at the side is the other half of the pumpkin, which I was simultaneously turning into pumpkin purée since the oven was on. Sunday afternoon is becoming the weekly food processing time, as I take advantage of the fact there's bog all else to do, to get done in advance anything that'll make things quicker and easier during the week. In this instance I was baking the pumpkin and using the heat from the oven to rise the dough for some bread on the stove-top, then cooking the bread in the already-hot oven while I made this sauce. I'm not always this organised, but it feels good when I am!

So anyway, once the stuff in the pan had softened a bit, I threw in some chopped apples and let that cook on a low heat while I was scooping the baked pumpkin flesh off the skin to whizz in the blender. Then I added some plain fava beans (from a can), half a tube of tomato purée and a glass of water, and mixed it all in like so:

Once that had started to bubble through, I tasted it and seasoned accordingly - I put in a beef oxo cube (though that could be a veg one to make the dish veggie or just skipped altogether to make it vegan), a bit of balsamic vinegar, half a teaspoon of salt, one teaspoon each of dried oregano and thyme and loads of pepper. This is just what I felt like it "needed" as I tasted it, but it could've been anything.

I actually bought that vinegar in Italy when I drove to Florence and back with my good buddy Wayne a few years ago, on 3 tanks of diesel. I bought so much of it that it's been lasting me all this time, and every time I use it I smile to remember the adventures we had on that particular trip! I'm on my last bottle though, so perhaps (oh darn!) we'll have to go over there again ;)

Once I was happy with the seasoning, I spread the lot out on top of the pumpkin:

Then (and again, skip this bit if you've got non-carnivores present at table) I took some corned beef slices and made a layer of those over the sauce, then grated some Just Jane cheese (any cheese would do, this is just what I had) over that, finished off with the rest of the pumpkin slices and baked it all at 180°C for half an hour. It came out like this:

And as I say, the kids looked askance at it to begin with, but once they tucked in they kept coming back for more helpings (as did I), because it was absolutely delicious!

Knitting progress

While looking for things to keep me occupied while I was procrastinating other, more urgent and important things (as you do), I experimented a bit more with knitting. I ventured to a couple of about.com and Wikihow articles to see if they could help me figure out pattern reading and a few basics, but just found myself even more confused. So I gave them a miss and had a go at seeing what I could work out for myself.

Trial and error eventually produced various kinds of ribbing, which I then used to make these fingerless mittens:

They're just right for driving and what's more, I can play guitar in them - they cover the main bit of my hand while leaving my fingers unimpeded for fret action. That'll probably come in handy at some point as I anticipate being roped into carol services in the not-too-distant future...

Now I was on a roll, and had a few people requesting that I make things for them out of Lincoln longwool. I contacted the good people at Risby Grange and was offered £7 per 100g for either 3 ply wool from the adult sheep or 2 ply lambswool, which I think is a more-than-fair price. I've tasked my good friend in Louth to pick that up for me from their business up there, and pass it onto me next time he sees me, whereupon I shall be able to get going on more projects just in time for when I've another assignment to procrastinate for :)

I discovered in the meantime this American website called Craftsy, which has not only lots of decent free patterns but also lots of reasonably priced designer ones, as well as video classes you can sign up to - in short, it's very good value IMO, and I intend to work my way through it at my usual glacial pace. I'm determined to have knitted myself a jumper (however crappy and amateurish) by the end of the year!

And now if you please, I'm off to enjoy my 45 food-mile brunch of homemade toast, venison sausages, beans and eggs!

Au fait - j'ai aperçu qu'il y a quelque français qui lisent ce que j'écris ici. Cela me semble un peu étrange, c'est à dire que je n'ai pas anticipé que ceci irait vous intéresser. Peut-être coïncidence? Quelqu'un est arrivé ici par hasard? Mais non, tous les jours on dit "vous avez N lecteurs de la France" et je me demande pourquoi?? Allez-y - envoyez-moi un petit message, je ne mordrai pas :)

No shopping & supermarket myths

Now, I haven't put up any posts about shopping for a while, mainly because I haven't needed to do any. A few weeks ago I got entire carrier bags full of apples, onions, potatoes and other veg for pennies from stands with honesty boxes outside people's houses and at farm entrances, and these have been lasting me. Also the big packs of beans from Hodmedod, practically a sack's worth of flour from the windmill and so on.

So all I've needed to buy for a while now has been milk and cheese. Cheese I now get from Myer's in Horncastle, where you're really spoilt for choice. And I've found the longer lasting Tesco 'Pure' milk (the only non-homogenised they do other than Jersey) has saved me a few bucks despite it being dearer per litre, as I can get a fortnight's worth in one go, saving extra trips.

All of which has meant that  this week and last week, the money I'd ordinarily have had to set aside for food could be spent on more fun things instead -- to wit, a trip up to the Flamborough heritage coast where I enjoyed a 10 mile hike with my brother whom I haven't seen in almost a year, and a trip over to Worcester to see a friend in person that I've grown fond of over years of online contact.

So much for supermarkets supposedly setting us free with all their time/stress/money saving conveniences. Apropos of that, I've done an interesting experiment with a friend (let's call him Bob, as he coyly doesn't want to be identified on the interwebz) to find out just exactly how convenient they are...

Bob and I devised a shopping list of general everyday household food items and took a copy of it each - he to the big Sainsbury's in Lincoln and I to the little market town of Horncastle. We picked these two because we didn't want to be accused of unfairly comparing, say, a large city centre and all its associated facilities with, say, a smaller branch of a supermarket. So we did the opposite - a large branch of the supermarket compared to a small rural town.

The results were interesting. We had assumed that Bob would, effortlessly, emerge from the glass panelled electric doors in half an hour with everything off the list, 'price checked' to be cheaper than anywhere else and with the rest of the afternoon free, while I'd spend all day hoofing it round little individual shops and frustratedly not being able to get everything I needed.

What happened was kind of the opposite. For a start, he found parking stressful despite the massive free carpark offered by the store - thanks to inconsiderate parkers, morons leaving trolleys all over the place and the sheer crowdedness of it, more than 5 minutes elapsed between his turning his car into the premises and his actual walking through the shop door.

The big Sainsbury's, being open 24 hours, was full of the usual aisle-blocking round-the-clock shelf stackers, which meant he had to dodge, shove and snake his way through crowds of rather rude and impatient fellow-customers and their trolleys in these aisles that had effectively become single-track lanes with passing places. This he found very stressful. The rule we'd agreed on beforehand of only buying things that have their provenance and date of picking/packing (where appropriate) clearly marked on them had to go out of the window as this was by far the exception rather than the rule of what was on offer there.

In short, he emerged from the shop roughly 50 dodgem-like, label-scrutinising minutes later, in a foul temper, ranting about everything from the crowds and queues to the fact that despite the constant shelf-stacking, there were still one or two things he couldn't get as there was nothing but empty space and a price tag where they should be. His receipt showed that he'd paid £38.56 and obtained some few pence-worth of Nectar points.

My experience was quite different. I drove into the centre of Horncastle, parked my car (£1.50 for up to 4 hours), and within two minutes from putting the little ticket on the dashboard I was in the butcher's, where all the meat hailed from local farms. I then crossed the road to the greengrocer's, where the origin of everything on offer was clearly marked - a great deal of it with the "LOCAL" label I was on the lookout for. Seasonal produce in both butcher's and grocer's was clearly fresh, but the shopkeepers were happy to answer my questions about the age/freshness of their produce to within a day or two. Then I popped round the corner to Myer's for my cheese, tins and jars and freshly baked bread.

I joined Bob in Myer's café to review my yield: a mere 25 minutes was all it took from parking to sitting down to peruse the menu. I'd managed to obtain everything on the list for just under £27, all fresh, all of local provenance (unless you count the flour in the bread, which was nonetheless still British), and I was in a cheerful mood, having been chatting amiably with shop owners who were happy to bung a bit extra in for the same price, here and there. At no point had it been necessary for me to push, shove or dodge, nor even queue.

So we agreed that the ideas that supermarkets are a) convenient b) less stressful c) cheaper and d) offer equal or better quality than local independent shops are just about 100% myth. In fact, by the time I'd finished my first coffee at Myer's I was still a minute under Bob's time spent in Sainsbury's. We also noticed that the distance I had to carry my shopping from there back to my car was probably no less than the distance from the supermarket door to the average non-disabled parking space, but quite significantly safer and more pleasant to walk, being not full of people driving twattishly in search of spaces.

And there you have it. We've been programmed by years of relentless advertising to believe the four myths mentioned above - it's become so automatic for us to just go straight to the supermarket to get all our things in the belief that we're saving ourselves time, stress and money, when all we're actually doing is filling some fat cat's pockets.

Yes - they provide jobs, which we're told justifies everything else they do. But would they need to 'provide' jobs if their all-providing presence didn't pretty much preclude the possibility of people in the area opening their own businesses? I have to ask myself whether, of the 200 or so people employed by a big supermarket branch, 50 or so wouldn't be happier running their own shops and the other 150 happier working for those 50 than for the whip-cracking, zero-hour-contract-offering, remote ivory-tower-dwelling head honcho? Who can say...?

But I encourage you, dear reader, to give it a go. I'll be giving it another one shortly as I want to compare these two shopping trips with one on a market day.

Catching up

After an absurdly busy couple of weeks, I've just got half an hour spare to make a post. I haven't quit the project, don't worry - far from it! I've been making a bit of progress on the knitting front, working on the study and doing a lot of cooking, besides seeing a bit more of the UK motorway system than I'd ideally like to be necessary in order to see family and old friends.

Here's a good one for you - baked stuffed squash. This one was extremely simple - I was planning on doing a sort of squash lasagne, using slices of squash rather than pasta (if you can imagine that), having got the idea from my clever cook of a sister (who happens to be obsessed with pumpkins and other squash type veg).

But on the day, I couldn't be bothered, so I simply cut the squashes in half, scooped out the pulp and seeds and filled them with a mixture of mashed fava beans, garlic, seasoning and onion mixed with a beaten egg, grated some cheese over the top and stuck it in the oven for half an hour. It came out like this:

And was very tasty. The squash was soft and sweet - even the skin was edible, though I'd probably, on reflection, fry the garlic and onions a bit before adding them to the stuffing mix next time, as the garlic tasted a bit 'raw', though if you used dried, powdered garlic rather than fresh this might not be an issue. And lord knows how many of the 5 a day an entire squash plus half a can of beans counts as.

And now my parental duties must take me out into the cold, muddy outdoor world at this ungodly hour! But I'll be back to continue this catch-up later.

Woolly scarf

Now, you may remember that I had started knitting a scarf with that Risby Longwool yarn that I got a while ago. Being stressed as I was over the last week or so about that assignment, I have to say being able to stop every hour or so and knit a few more rows was quite therapeutic and very calming.

Initially I realised (after I'd knitted about 25cm of scarf) that I'd made it far too wide. At that rate, I'd be needing more wool than I had! So I unravelled it and started again, and this time made it to about 40cm before I realised that at some point I'd put it down mid-row, then picked it up again the wrong way round and knitted when I should've purled. So I unravelled a few rows and made it almost to the end before I had to do that again.

Solving problems on the way (by my usual method: improvisation) of not being able to recall being taught at any point how, when you've come to the end of a ball of yarn, to join in the next one, I eventually got to the part where I had to strain my memory back to my dim and distant childhood to remember being taught to cast off, but I made it to the end and rewarded myself with coffee and a bit of cake before setting about the task of adding the tassles.

For this I tried various methods, but in the end I stuck with winding it round a bit of card to make little hanks of uniform length, that I then knotted into the scarf.

I used the needles to help widen the holes in the weave so I could push the stuff through. It was dark by the time I finished one end, but it looked like this:

And then today I set about doing the other end and actually got it finished about half an hour ago. Just in time to keep me warm when I go to stand in a muddy field somewhere for Guy Fawkes Night!

I was thinking over the fortnight that I spent making this about how special a thing it would be when it was finished. In my mind I couldn't help placing it next to things of similar or higher price that I'd seen in the shops, and weighing them against each other. The idea of finding an item desirable that's made by a machine, operated by someone who isn't paid enough to care, churning thousands of them out every day before tacking the label of some designer who doesn't give a crap about my existence, suddenly seemed absurd when I compared it to my one-off, hand-made effort. No designer label, no amount of convenience compares for me to the idea that this is made with 100% undyed Lincoln longwool, farmed just up the road from me where that breed has mooched around the pastures for centuries.

Now, I know not everyone can knit. I only just can. And I know not everyone who really can has the time or inclination, so I'm not suggesting that anyone who doesn't sit there all day knitting their entire wardrobe is some kind of consumerist mug. I'm just saying that the process of creating this one thing brought it home to me that it's worth thinking sideways from time to time when we go to obtain something we want. It's worth going a little out of our way and maybe waiting a little while to get something really meaningful, worth far more really than the £20 worth of wool that went into it, rather than auto-piloting it to the chain store for something whose price doesn't reflect anything like its social and environmental cost - only a fat profit for god knows who.

When I put my scarf on after I'd finished it, it felt a lot different, meant a lot more than any garment I've donned since the little outfit my aunt made specially for me when I was a nipper. I shall wear it with pride!

Just as an aside, I found it really bizarre that someone called me "talented" for making this. Seriously? Has that word lost all its meaning? Beethovan was talented. Da Vinci was talented. Isaac Newton and Hildegard von Bingen were talented. I just knitted a scarf - a skill I learned at the age of about 5 and which not so long ago almost everyone had. It doesn't require talent of any description, just a bit of patience. If you want one like this, go ahead and make one - even if you can't knit, it takes minutes to learn all you need to for this project :)

Improvised omelette

I got the idea for this one from a very lovely lady I've been talking to this week. My mind had been blank as to what to do for dinner on Tuesday and she mentioned omelettes, upon which I recalled that I had three dozen eggs on the kitchen worktop.

So what I did was to pour hot water from the kettle over some sliced savoy cabbage and leave that to wilt in its bowl for a bit, while I cooked onions, tomato, kangaroo steak and fava beans together, adding the cabbage once the meat was browned:

Then I beat together six eggs in the bowl that the cabbage had been in, and after mixing some seasoning (salt, pepper, oregano) into the stuff in the pan, I tipped the egg in and let it cook until it turned into a nice omelette.

It was of course then that I remembered my grill doesn't work, as my instinctive next step was to cook the top under the grill. So instead, I improvised by just putting the lid on the pan and letting it cook on a low heat for a bit, until I was satisfied that the top was done.

The ingredient here with the most food miles to it would be the Hodmedod fava beans, all the way from Suffolk - the rest is 100% Lincolnshire :)

And now I've got that assignment out of the way, I've got to catch up on the course reading and prepare for the next one in a month's time. But I've a little more breathing space at least, so I can post here a bit more, hopefully.

Baked bean and kangaroo pie

This is what I did last night, and apart from learning that I need - well, want - to get some little pie dishes, I found it was a meal in itself. Now you might think it's a bit weird to put something as exotic as kangaroo steak with baked beans, but I would've thought it was a lot more weird to find/buy something equally exotic especially to go with it, rather than using what I already had in the kitchen. I mean to say, I didn't get kangaroo meat to "be exotic" but because it's what happens to be available locally and affordably. Like the Lymn Bank cracked black pepper cheese you see here next to it, which has become a firm favourite in our house.

Anyway, I started out by making the pastry. I did an apple pie last week that was a full-fat affair, so I thought I'd best skimp on the fat in the pastry this time and just used 75g of Lincolnshire Poacher butter to 300g of Sibsey Trader Mill flour. I had planned to do half and half wheat and maize flour, but I forgot, so it was just wheat.

If you don't know how to make pastry, it's the age old technique of rubbing the butter into the flour until it goes breadcrumb-like and then adding in whatever you want depending what you're using the pastry for. For apple pie, jam tarts and general sweet stuff I shake in some sugar (about 3tbsp for this amount) but for this meat pie I added salt, pepper and a tablespoon of dried oregano. Then I added a beaten egg and a splash of milk, and gathered it all into a ball, adding more milk as needed to make it rollable. Then divide it between the two dishes:

At this point I probably should've put cling-film or something over them, because when I came to actually roll it out, the outsides of the balls had started to go a bit crusty. But it was alright - it still worked :)

What I actually did was leave the pastry aside like that while I fried up some onions and mushrooms in a bit of rapeseed oil. I tend to do this sort of thing on a low heat lately, as it stops the onions burning while I cut up the meat. After they'd gone soft I put the meat in and just left it cooking in the residual heat from the turned-off electric cooker ring while I rolled out the pastry.

I broke a little bit off each ball to keep by for the top, rolled it out as thin as I dared without it breaking, then made it fit into the little bowls here however I could. Some stretching and cutting was involved, but I got there...

Then in went the meat, onion and mushrooms. And look, there's that magically appearing broccoli again :)

Actually, before I started cooking the onions I'd boiled the kettle and poured hot water over the chopped broccoli and just left it in a pan with the lid on to soften, so it was ready to go in the pie by this time without having to turn a ring on. As I've only got one cooker ring that heats up in less than oh, say, an ice age or two, I do stuff like this a lot. Then I tipped half a can of beans on top:

And put some of that aforementioned cheese in there, before closing it all with the lid and brushing the top with some beaten egg.

Half an hour at 180°C later, it came out of the oven all golden and lovely, and we'd already started tucking in when I remembered I was supposed to get a photo!

And there you go! One baked bean and kangaroo pie from scratch to table in about 20 minutes prep time, 30 mins cooking time. Total food miles probably less than 50, and total cost of about £2.50 per pie :)