Corned beef & veg hash; apple pie

Today I was volunteering at Heckington Windmill, where I restocked my flour and jam supplies. On the way back I stopped at various roadside stalls and came home with all this:

The apples were 20p per pound from a cottage in a layby between the A155/A153 roundabout at Coningsby and Mareham Le Fen. The cabbage was 50p from Frog Hall on the New York Straight (B1192). I put this lot together with previous gleanings and came up with this corned beef, pumpkin, marrow, apple, pear and potato hash:

Which basically involved just chopping everything up and putting it in two roasting trays and roasting till it'd shrunk enough to all fit into one, then adding the corned beef (which came from Southern & Thorpe in Ruskington) and roasting for another half hour. The only seasoning I've used is salt and pepper, but the sweet juices of the fruit & veg gave it plenty of flavour without needing to complicate things with herbs & spices.

For pudding I made an apple pie by first simmering chopped apples in a little water with raisins and unrefined sugar and a teaspoon of cinnamon until the apple was soft and the liquid thickened:

Then I rubbed 150g of Lincolnshire Poacher butter into 300g of flour with 3tbs sugar, added 3 egg yolks then rolled it out to fit the appropriate dish:

I used the egg whites to glaze the pastry and made egg custard by following this recipe (though I used vanilla essence, not pods) so when it had baked for about half an hour it looked like this:

Now you will spot that there were a few non-local ingredients in there - cinnamon, vanilla, sugar and raisins. These are things I already had in stock before I started this project, so there's no point not using them. But I'm making a note of them and looking into alternative sources or versions as I go, so that when they run out I'll be able to replace them with something local if possible, and if not, then at least something from the British Isles or nearby continent.

But there's no point in being puritanical and fanatical about it - I've no intention of being any kind of "purist". I'm trying to do this as strictly as I can practically do it at the moment, mainly as it forces me to learn more quickly what the limitations are, and which things can be overcome. But I do live in the real world.

Trade, in principle, is a good thing - good for us economically, for greater variety in our diets and for the valuable cultural exchange that comes through it. I'm not against trade at all.

But in the current global food industry, trade isn't done for those good purposes. It's all geared primarily towards profit for the big corporations that dominate the industries, to the detriment of the environment and our health.

So, while some parts of my diet and lifestyle that came through trade (eg sugar, spices, wool etc) may be wholly or partially localise-able if I look for British beet sugar and producers growing things in polytunnels, other parts (eg tea, coffee, cotton) are obviously not. My plan there will be to find ways to, wherever possible, buy direct from producers who work with a sense of environmental and social responsibility.