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 :)

Wine and wool

Would you look at that? It's Friday already and I haven't done any more posts since I last said I'd put up a couple this week. I suppose as long as I get this one and maybe another over the weekend, that'll still count as keeping my promise!

Well, this week I've been gradually working through the menu on the blackboard I posted on Tuesday. All was going well, but things may prove a little tricky in the next few days, as the beans I ordered from Hodmedod should've got here today, but didn't. Instead, what got here was a note from the couriers saying they'd called when I wasn't home, and rather than leaving the package in the shed or any other obvious place, the damn fools have taken it back with them and I have to wait until Monday before they'll try and deliver it again. Which means I'll have to do some improvising until they arrive.

The reason I wasn't home when the couriers arrived was because I was in Louth, having gone to a wee session on recording medieval graffiti (part of the Wolds Words festival). I said I'd be glad to help with the project, but they'll have to come and excavate my local church first, before I can look for graffiti in it (it fell down in the 1700s and is now just lumps in the ground that cattle mooch over!).

While I was up there though, I happened upon a leaflet from Somerby Vineyards and was instantly excited about the idea of being able to buy professionally brewed wine produced in Lincolnshire. I have done quite a bit of home brewing, but a) mostly beer and b) not from local produce. I do plan to get that going again, though it'll take time to find sources of all the ingredients and so on - meanwhile it's great to know I can still have wine without violating the strict "local only" rule I've placed myself under!

Not content to stop at Somerby's though, I've also discovered the Three Sisters Vineyard and I'm keeping an eye on the Abbey Vineyards group of English wine producers, which promises to have its produce for sale online soon. I'll have to get my hands on some of this stuff and let you know how it goes.

Meanwhile I've started turning some of that Risby Lincoln Longwool yarn that I got a couple of weeks ago into a scarf. Yes - a scarf.

I thought I should start off simply and work my way up, and/or contribute to the local economy by employing someone to knit more complex things for me!! Everyone asks me if it's itchy, but I can assure you it isn't - it's so lovely and soft and cosy, I have visions of half my wardrobe being made of the stuff, but we'll have to see how that goes. I need to talk to the people at Risby about getting different colours and so on, as they've only got the plain on the website.

Now, the windmill has bagsied me for the whole weekend, which means I'm going to have to pretty much devote all of next week to the research, reading and writing for this assignment. The course I keep referring to (in case you wondered) is the MSc Sustainable Rural Development at the University of the Highlands and Islands (online). It's my attempt to get myself more clued up on more detailed knowledge that I can, hopefully, use towards some great endeavour for the good of God's country, and all that.

Wish me luck!

Steak and chips

Vegetarians and vegans look away now!

So amongst the stuff I got yesterday was this lovely, big, juicy bit of sirloin steak for around the four to five quid mark from Wisby's in Horncastle. Here it is cut in half by me cos I forgot to take a shot before I cut it:

I decided to have it with chips and veg, and once you know how easy and cheap it is to do your own oven chips, you'll wonder why the hell you've been buying them all this time. Basically you just chop the potatoes up - I leave the skins on but it's up to you - then using a pastry brush, spread a bit of cooking oil on a baking sheet (just enough to cover the surface, you don't need to drown it), spread the chips out on it and just go over the tops of them with the excess oil on your brush and bung them in the oven at 180°C for half an hour. Job done.

Meanwhile, bash the steak with a tenderiser (or a rolling pin, or whatever), turning it over to do both sides, then make little slices into the top and rub butter and pepper into it like this:

Lay it butter side down in a hot frying pan and let it sizzle for about 4 minutes (depending how you like your steak):

As the butter starts to ooze out from under the steak, stick a few bits of mushroom in to cook in the juices, then turn the steak over and put a few thin slices of cheese on top. You can use any cheese you like - a nice strong blue cheese works well, but in this case I used Lymn Bank cracked black pepper:

And by the time the cheese is melted the other side will be done, and you can put it all together on the plate like this:

That's with the broccoli that you obviously magicked up from nowhere like they do on all the cooking shows. And I can tell you now that this went down without touching the sides, as they say.

Meanwhile, in other news, I've discovered the existence of the Lincolnshire Master Gardeners scheme. Which seems to be a most excellent scheme except for one thing: I'd never heard of it. Advertising fail? I think so.

Still, the scheme is there and seems to be doing some good. I might register for some support from it myself as I'm far from experienced in the gardening sphere and have a massive garden that I'd dearly love to turn into a food production zone, but stuff I plant tends to only grow sort of 50% of the time and then never as well as everyone else's! I'll get in touch with them and keep you posted on how it goes.

Rainy day shopping

If it hadn't been for Wayne (best pal of many years) waking me up with a text this morning, I probably would've slept until lunchtime. S was late for school, and by the time I'd got her there and sped to the place where I'm haggling with a car salesman over a Landrover (yes, I know, hardly carbon neutral transport but if you saw where I live you'd agree...), half the day was gone and I still had the shopping to do. Not a good start to the week.

Added to that, the absolutely awful weather threatened to make a real misery of the shopping. But it had its payoffs: because of the rain, most of the cars in the car parks had their windows well and truly misted up, so rather than paying you could put an old ticket on the dashboard and Mr Plod, not being able to make much out besides a small white square of the expected size with some indistinct print on it, would give you the benefit of the doubt. And it was an excuse to duck into Meyer's for a coffee to get out of the rain.

One full English and a slice of lime and pistachio cake later, I finally accepted that it wasn't going to clear up any minute and finished off the rounds. This is what I took back to the car:

If you click on it you can see the details of what, how much, where from and so on. I went a little over budget by indulging in the cakes and olives, and I'm not quite sure why the soda crystals are included in this picture - I was on another planet I think. Put together with stuff I still have in stock and from previous rounds this lot will keep us fed for the week. I've ordered from Hodmedod - they had a special offer on of a 12 can case of their baked beans in tomato sauce, plain beans and the vaal dhal thingy, so I went for that. I'm all for stocking up, and goodness knows if I don't sort myself out a half decent 4x4 we're going to need a survival pack in case this mud gets any worse - don't even start on the topic of snow!

I'm planning to turn this lot into the following menu this week:

We're starting with the steak & chips... watch this space!

Cheese sauce

Apologies for my non-posting this week. Now that the final exam is over I've had to catch up on the postgrad stuff I put off to concentrate on it. And then I've been having computer problems, and internet problems, and - you name it!

I do have lots of things to share with you, and I'll probably stick up a backdated post and schedule one or two to keep my readers (both of them!) going while I work on a pretty gnarly assignment over the coming fortnight. And another wee thing I'm working on...

For now though, I give you pumpkin and potato mash with cauliflower cheese and venison, pork & apple sausages, and sweet onions. I won't say caramelised as I was lazy and just slow fried them with a spoonful of sugar, but it worked out almost as good.

Now, I'm sure I don't need to tell you how to peel some potatoes and pumpkin and boil them in a pot, so I'll start with the tricky customer of cheese sauce, which many people waste a lot of money buying inferior ready-made versions of under the mistaken impression that it's hard to make. It isn't. All you have to do is....

Melt some butter in a saucepan (say, a wooden spoonful), then add flour to it a bit at a time until you make a fairly thick paste like this:

Ignore the onions, I just chopped those ready to go with the sausages. Once you've got your butter and flour paste, you add a little splash of milk at a time and stir it in. As it gets runnier you can add more milk in one go without it going lumpy.

People will tell you nonsense like, oh, saying you have to have JUST the right amount of this or that to make it perfect, but I think that's just people who can cook trying to make themselves sound more skilled than they really are by telling people who can't cook that they're doing something that requires fine care and long experience. In reality, cheese sauce is pretty fool-proof. The only thing you need to remember is to take it off the heat after you've melted the butter, don't put it back on until the cheese stage, and during the cheese stage don't stop stirring!

If it turns out too runny, just add more cheese and it'll thicken up. Too thick? Add more milk. Nae bother, bud.

So now you've got your milky-buttery-floury base, and you want to add some grated cheese. Cheddar works a treat - the more mature the fuller the flavour. But you can equally do it with red Leicester, double Gloucester, and in this case I'm using Lincolnshire Poacher, which is sort of like a cross between Cheddar and Parmesan.

Some people put black pepper in at this stage, but while black pepper is like crack to me (I put it in everything and can't get too much), cheese sauce is one of the few occasions where I prefer white pepper. It's up to you.

Just throw a handful of cheese in to start with, return it to a low heat and patiently stir it until the cheese has melted and blended in. Keep adding more cheese until it reaches the thickness you prefer, and then you can take it off the heat and leave it aside until you want to eat it. The whole operation takes around 10 minutes if you're organised, and you can make enough to feed a small regiment for peanuts. What's more, you can make up larger quantities and it'll keep in the fridge for about a week, ready for another meal. Try it, and you'll never go back to shop-bought again.

Incidentally the base for this sauce (butter, milk, flour) is known as a roux, and can be turned into lots of different sauces depending what you put in it next. One I often do is adding tomato purée, salt and parsley rather than cheese, for a sauce that makes a wonderful tuna and pasta bake - just sprinkle crushed crisps and grated cheese on top and you're laughing.

For this meal I baked the sausages (because my grill doesn't work) until they were nearly done, then put them in the pan with the onions so they could pick up each other's flavours:

 ...then mashed the potato and pumpkin together with a little milk and some salt and pepper, and served it all with those onions I mentioned and the rest of it, thus:

Beans!

This week's shopping has been a bit chaotic as I'm still in scouting/discovery mode at the moment. Once I've been doing this for a bit longer and got a good grasp on what's available and where, and how to substitute and adapt certain things, I can then get more organised.

What I've always done as regards grocery shopping is to make a weekly menu of meals and a shopping list of the things required, which I've then stuck to as much as possible (with the odd deviation when a long day has driven me to the chip shop). Of course it's very tempting to just take that list to the supermarket and get everything in one go, and hang the global consequences. But I've tried to resist that as much as possible by using local butchers for my meat, nearby farm shops/greengrocers for fruit and veg, and then just using the supermarkets for canned food and things like pasta, rice and so on. And then I've tried to support the more "ethical" supermarkets like the Waitrose and the Co-op (though I'm fast revising my views on the latter as they're disappointing me on a regular basis lately).

There's nothing wrong with that approach, but I do want to see what I can do about the canned food problem. I do live in the real world, and there are times when one just wants to take something from the cupboard and be eating it within minutes. So I've cast my net, on the prowl for enterprising souls who've had the resources to do more* than I ever could in this area, and was delighted to come upon the Hodmedod bean company. While outside the sacred boundaries of Lincolnshire (trust me, if you've ever been here you'll know it's a de facto nationality, not just a county!), they're not so far away just down there in East Anglia, and the work they're doing through organisations like the East Anglia Food Link is very heartening and encourages me in my long-term wish to see something like it here in God's country.

Now, as my good friend pointed out when I enthused about it to him, £1.19 is quite a bit more than most people are used to spending on a can of baked beans, and there's the delivery to think about too. But I'm finding on this project that what you shell out as extra premiums for things like this you more than make back on other things that are much cheaper. For example, the carrier bag full of freshly picked apples that I got from the local farm shop yesterday for 50p, versus Asda's 6 apples that have been in storage for the best part of the year and will go off if you don't eat them in a week for £1. I mean, just look at my scrumpings from yesterday in Spilsby:

Here you're looking at 6 eggs for 80p, parsnips (25p), carrots (30p), swede (50p), broccoli (55p), the aforementioned carrier bag of apples for 50p, huge bottle of white wine vinegar for £2.25, Lymn Bank cracked black pepper cheese for £2.50 and a jar of local honey for £3.65. I've looked on the Tesco online shopping website and the cheapest I could get an equivalent bundle for would be pushing the £20 boundary.

I'm finding that even factoring in how chaotic I am with all this at the moment, I haven't spent any more on food than I would've done previously. My weekly food budget for me and the two teenage girls has been £40 for about the last five years and I haven't gone over that since starting this project. As you see, we've been eating well! Check out this week's menu on the kitchen blackboard:

Not exactly your average low income family's weekly fare.So when you think even an enthusiastic bean eater isn't realistically going to go through more than three or four cans a week, you've easily made up the difference between the Hodmedod beans and the supermarket's offerings.

But moreover, if you're going to commit to sustainable eating (as it were), you can't go tutting all the time at things being more expensive than the supermarket. It's exactly because of the global food industry's constant driving down of prices that we're in the situation that forces a revision of the whole affair. People put their money where their mouth is, I firmly believe that: if you're not willing to shell out a few extra quid towards this lark, you might as well make yourself a bumper sticker that says "Let the world burn - I got 2 for 1 at Asda!"

Anyway, if I order two 12 can cases of beans from these guys it'll last me a good while, and I'll get free delivery! But I'm also working on persuading someone local to stock them. I'm thinking Meyer's in Horncastle might be interested. I've been a happy customer of their café for a couple of years now, and have recently started using their deli for local produce. I got my usual Lincs Poacher cheese from them and have started using it to make cheese sauce - gives a fuller flavour than Cheddar.

This time I also got a bit of Just Jane to see what the kids made of it. S says it reminds her of Dairylea, but with a "cleaner" flavour (her word), and I concur.

Now, if you'll excuse me, my lunch has been sitting there waiting to be eaten while I've been typing this, and I think you'll understand that it's taken iron discipline to get this far. Yes, I know it's only 11.30am but I had breakfast at 6 and I'm starving, so there! :)

*Refering to the "do more" idea... that was short-hand for the context. In fact, it's a lot for someone to do, to switch over to this way of living (as I know!) and it's not to be disparaged and held up against people who establish their own organic farms and what have you. In fact if everyone "only" committed to getting even 50% of their diet supplied from local produce, it'd make a HUGE difference.

Phew!

Don't worry, you haven't missed anything particularly interesting, food-wise, while I was sweating away in that exam yesterday. It was just a vegetable soup on Sunday and the leftovers from that yesterday. The most exciting thing (which I don't say sarcastically - I really was disproportionately excited) was when my Risby Lincoln Longwool yarn came in the post - look!

I can't wait to turn that into something cosy! Sadly, Jean at church forgot to bring her bits and bobs so there was no knitting lesson on Sunday, but we'll let her off as it was one of those days... Besides, I've been looking into it and I'm almost confident that I already know all I need to follow a simple/easy level pattern.

Before I get going on that, I've got to make the curtains for S's bedroom. We moved in here in early August and she's been making do with some ill-fitting ones because her room has two windows and we've been unable to find any curtains she likes that are available in the right size, except when it was the only pair left! So she chose some fabric on ebay and I'm tasked with making the dashed things up. There's all that catching up to do on my other course as well, and the laundry. At least I did the floors this morning, that's one thing out of the way for a while!

It reminds me of the service for the blessing of the plough: there's a list of all the grand and noble things we do as people and communities, which ends with "but first, we must plough the fields". An earthy reminder of how important it is to return to the immediate, not to undervalue the mundane, daily tasks that keep us all alive and ticking over. Nor to undervalue those people who do them on behalf of the rest of us.

Anyway, we had a stab at making fresh pasta on Saturday for a venison ravioli dinner, so here's the report on that for you!

First I got S making the pasta. She's a reasonably competent cook: though prone to not bother cooking at all from laziness, when she makes an effort she can always turn out a good end product and the only supervision she needs is the reminder to clean up after herself! So we got a recipe for pasta dough from the BBC website and adapted it on the fly to Heckington windmill's flour.

This proved a challenge not least because this particular batch that we're on is a bit chaffy, on account of the poor wheat harvest last year meaning the local farmers couldn't spare us any but the stuff they couldn't sell to anyone commercial. We milled it, but what came out was unusable as wholemeal, though just about usable as white flour, once bolted. Our manager Jim has been on the case of getting some better grain, while we who bake with what's on offer have been... improvising.

Lacking a pasta machine, S just gave it some elbow grease with the rolling pin while I cooked some venison mince with onion, garlic, chicken stock and breadcrumbs (fresh - I keep the ends of the loaves I make and grate them into crumbs) seasoned with salt and pepper. S then assembled the ravioli...

...while I knocked up a basic tomato sauce for us to have with it. For this I finely chopped two small onions and heated them with some garlic until softened, roughly chopped about six tomatoes and bunged those in with it, then added some dried oregano and thyme (grown in the garden - about a teaspoon of each), about half a tube of tomato purée and a glass of water. I let that heat through and bubble a bit to get it to the right consistency, then threw in the meat mixture that was leftover from making the ravioli.

As that was going on, I was boiling the ravioli in a large pan along with a couple of corn cobs. Not having much experience with fresh pasta - and none at all at making it at home - I figured the "when it floats" rule would probably apply for knowing when it was ready. It seemed to work well enough, as we found when we'd assembled the meal into this:

And tucked in. Obviously, we slathered the corn cobs in butter with lots of freshly ground pepper mixed into it - the only way to eat them! S, not being used to the taste of fresh pasta, initially balked a bit, but soon got used to it and at the end we agreed it had been a satisfying and tasty meal. I'd estimate the cost per portion at somewhere between 2 and 3 quid. And I've made a mental note that I need to start making my own tomato purée. And since I made this meal I've discovered Squizito.... which is local-ish. Watch this space! :)

Now, back to the studying! 

Dairy: episode 2!

Now, since the last time I posted about dairy, I've run out of milk twice and replenished my dairy department with the milk from Sainsbury's in Spilsby, for three reasons: firstly, I happen to know their milk comes from a local farm. Secondly, I happened to be going to Spilsby for other reasons at the time anyway and thirdly, when I went into the shop and checked out the milk, it turned out that their normal, standard milk is pasteurised, but not homogenised.

Today I ran out of milk, but had no reason to go to Spilsby and couldn't really justify the 7 mile trip just for some milk. Bear in mind that the nearest milk-selling place to me is 3 miles away and wasn't open at the time I needed it, so I went to the next nearest place, which is a filling station in Horncastle (4.5 miles).

Sadly however, a quick look at the labels revealed that all of their milk was homogenised, which I'm no longer willing to accept, having learned what I have in the last week or so on the matter Summary: homogenising milk may make the fat in it more harmful and it also makes the milk more allergenic. Hence the explosion in "lactose" intolerance in the past decade or so, which is actually an intolerance or allergy to homogenised milk and all products of it. If people were advised to examine labels rather than simply avoid all dairy products, many would find they could enjoy a normal diet!

So I went a little further into Horncastle and tried the Co-op, but their milk was also homogenised. So I went over the road to Tesco and found that although their standard milk is homogenised, their "Pure" range and their special Channel Isles milk are only pasteurised.

So I got a big bottle of skimmed (my usual), which was about 40p dearer than the same size bottle of standard - a price I'm willing to pay as it won't break the bank and it's much better for my health. I also got a bottle of Channel Isles for £1, which I thought might be nice to make up the porridge we have for breakfast, from Heckington Windmill.

Altogether, good news that you can still get unhomogenised milk in a mainstream supermarket, but bad news that I had to try three shops before I found any. And I'm rather disappointed in the Co-op, I must say, as one expects better of them, seeing as how they pride themselves on their ethical business approach and they charge about as much for 4 pints of homogenised as Tesco do for the unhomogenised.

But buying from any of these retailers is something I'm sad to do, when you think that they pay so very little to the farmers that the latter are constantly under threat, and yet when you look at the price they charge us, you have to wonder where all that money's going. No mention of the Russian sanctions in that article, I see, and the effect they're having on us. And clearly, this is just one example of the unustainability of global food industry on economic and political levels. It saddens me to think that the vast majority of British shoppers are oblivious and uncaring about it all - it feels at times as though they'd happily watch the world burn if it shaved a few quid off their grocery bill.

I'm waiting for the farmers' market to come to Boston this month so I can get my hands on some more Lincolnshire Poacher raw milk. I bought some of their butter direct from the farm when I happened to be passing it last week, but you need to pre-order the milk to buy either at the farm or on the market stall.

Slob Friday

So after a lunch made of Thursday's leftovers and the pumpkin cornbread and suffering from technical problems all day yesterday thanks to certain people taking certain liberties with my computer (to wit: downloading and installing stuff), which resulted in a rather catastrophic loss of important data, I was facing an evening spent wiping the hard disk and reinstalling Windows, and all its accompanying ball-aches.

So, naturally, I wasn't going to be cooking. I popped up to Horncastle and got my local takeaway, and some local beer and crisps to keep me going through an evening of IT annoyances.

And there you have it. Now, I have my final French exam to study for - it's on Monday, the final one of my degree and the one on which my classification will depend. So, today I'll get my "nez à la guidon" and work on the helpful revision tips that my fellow student Janice has kindly sent me.

Can cook, will cook

Thursday is ice cream day, because that's the first weekday that the farm shop at Oslinc is open and we can go and get a tub of Bill Grundy's ice cream to last us over the weekend. Pistachio and coconut are the flavours we tend to gravitate towards, but this week S chose tutti frutti and I stocked up on meat:

I apologise deeply for the blurriness of that shot. What you're looking at there is the tub of ice cream, some venison mince; some venison, apple & cranberry sausages; several kangaroo steaks (I got 9 in total); ostrich & tomato sausages and zebra sausages. That's the kind of fare you get round here! I thought of popping into Cooke's Farm for some lamb, but I'd run out of cash by that time (the Oslinc bill came to just under £35) and figured I had enough to keep us going for a while anyway.

When it came to dinner time, I looked at the stuff that was taking up a lot of room in the fridge and had a short shelf life and challenged my friends on Facebook to help me think up something to do with it all. I gave them a cauliflower, some curly kale and a fennel bulb and said they were allowed to suggest other ingredients and I'd see if I had them!

The four main suggestions were:

From my brother Jack: "roast fennel cauli cheese bake, steamed kale then some roast or grilled meat with some mashed sweet potato"

From Susan: "sweat onion garlic in butter add salt to stop browning.. then add potatao fennel and saffron . slowly add stock fish/veg you make it.. ok leave out the saffron its colour mostly.... boil and simmer till potatoes cooked add leeks... simmer....add fish/prawns so go out and catch something in the fens... simmer 3mins"

From Tony: "Chop kale, onion and fennel and shove in a dish with a little veg stock, garlic and seasoning, top with mashed cauli and bake"

From Emma: "I'd purée the cauli (just steam it, then purée it up in a blender/processor with a bit of butter), put that on the bottom of the plate, then sauté the kale with the onions, add that on top of the purée on the plate, then grill up your steak and put that on top. Of course if it was me it'd be fish but horses for courses. And make sure you put some salt on that kale and a splash of vinegar."

Tony's idea had the merit of potentially producing the least washing up, Susan's had the flavour going for it although I didn't have any fish, and Jack's idea, while good, sadly fell down on the fact I had no cheese. So I decided on a combination of the above. I said: 

"I was kinda liking the idea of the tasty garlic/fennel/onion combo in the frying pan, I've had that before and it *is* yummy. If I blanche the kale in the same water as the spuds and cauli, I can get away with only two pots for that combo. I'll take up the vinegar suggestion, I'll put some in the pan with the stuff fried together in a little rapeseed oil, and then have a kangaroo steak with it."

But what actually happened was quite different, because when it came to it, the big pan I'd planned on using was (I'd forgotten) in the garden, full of stuff for the birds. So what actually happened was this.... 

First I peeled the spuds and got them on the go, then chopped an onion and fried it with the fennel and a bit of garlic on a low heat while I got the kale into more manageable pieces.

Then in another saucepan I started boiling the cauliflower. By the time the cauliflower was done it was time to wilt the kale, so I scooped out the cauli and used the same water. It didn't take long to wilt, then I added it to the pan with the fennel and onions and about half of the cauliflower: 

While that was sizzling, I prepared the kangaroo steak by making slits in the top and rubbing butter and pepper into it. Then I put it in the same pan with the other stuff: 

And then, having had time to mull over Emma's puréed cauliflower idea, it was a case of mashing the cauliflower and potato together with a bit of milk and some salt and pepper. I also put a bit of the kale in it as well (and still had some left over).

Put together on the plate it looked like this: 

And obviously, since the dog had been suspiciously not in the way through this process, he had to make up for it by photo-bombing that picture. Thanks, Hackett! He didn't get any, cos me and S scoffed it all up in no time, seeing as it was actually completely delicious. There was plenty left over which I turned into a sort of posh bubble and squeak for Friday's lunch. 

And I'd just like to send a big raspberry to Sainsbury's and their "feed your family for a fiver" boast, because I just fed mine with gourmet exotic meat and tasty, substantial accompaniments, for about £4.50, with plenty left over for another meal! 

Pumpkin cornbread and The Sugar Question!

So, as promised in this post the other day, without further ado, I give you pumpkin cornbread.

The first thing I had to do was make some pumpkin purée, which the recipe calls for, unaware that over here such things aren't readily available in convenient tinned format. But that was easy enough: I just carved up a pumpkin and put the pieces skin side up on a couple of baking trays:

Then baked it at 180°C for about half an hour - till it was prickable with a fork, basically. Then I peeled the flesh off the skin and whizzed it in the food processor, which gave me a nice big jar of bright orange goo!

See, I figured out that image rotation thingy in the end :)

I did this the night before, and put it in the fridge. Then yesterday I just basically followed the recipe, using Heckington Windmill flour, Croft Apiaries honey (bought from Oslinc, my neighbour), and Ownsworth's rapeseed oil.

I spent some time looking up sources of local sugar, thinking that since I'm surrounded by sugar beet fields (my garden backs onto some growing right now!) it shouldn't be hard to find some, only to find that "British Sugar" pretty much rules the sugar world over here. It seems they get to pretty much decide what goes where, to whom and in what format, so I can't get a bag of sugar from the local beet to put in my tea and cakes. In fact the only British beet sugar I can buy comes from the Silver Spoon company. Their stuff comes from East Anglian farms, so I thought "close enough" (since some parts of Lincolnshire kind-of qualify as EA) and looked up their products.

To my dismay, there's no unrefined caster sugar, no brown sugar and no muscavado on offer from them - only that awful overprocessed white stuff, demerara and various sugar substitute/diet stuff. I stopped using white sugar many years ago as it's basically a chemical - it's not even food. Trust me, if you make the switch to unrefined you'll find your cakes and tea are just as tasty and sweet but without the bad aftertaste.

"What bad aftertaste?" I hear you ask. It's the one you don't realise is there because you're used to it, and think that's how it's meant to taste, a bit like the paper taste from your teabags that I didn't notice until one time when the shop had a special offer on loose leaf tea, so I got some and it lasted me about a month. When it ran out I went for the teabags as usual, made myself a cuppa and found that, by the end of, it I felt like I'd just eaten a sheet of A4 and wondered how I'd never noticed it before. In the same way, if you quit the white sugar for a month or so, then have some in a brew, you'll see what I mean. Vile stuff.

So, a bit of a mixed bag, news-wise: I can get local-ish demerara for my tea and coffee, and I already know that works as a substitute for white sugar in some cooking contexts. But it seems that for other sugar purposes I'll continue to depend on Billingtons, which I suppose is at least a moderately ethical company. I'll look into this more after my exam is over next week, as I've a few ideas in mind that this isn't all there is to it.

Anyway, back to the cornbread. I used Billingtons light brown sugar in the end, and poured the resultant runny mixture (which had a distinctly nutty smell to it) into the only suitable dish I have. Which, being somewhat larger than the 8" square recommended, means I did a double quantity. Half an hour at 180°C later, this is what I had:

I won't say there wasn't a bit of a baking powder taste to it. I will need to experiment with it I think, as the local wheat flour (as previously explained) isn't as willing to rise as its imported counterpart, and if you go too far down the whole "add more BP" route, you end up ruining the flavour. I might give yeast a try next time.

Later that evening, Emma told me she'd been looking it up and apparently what they call cornmeal over there is closer to what we call polenta (course texture) than to maize flour (fine), but it seems no harm was done. I will have another go at this because as far as value for money goes, it's a lot of cake for very little money, and as cakes go it's pretty low in fat and sugar and also dairy free. If I do a version that's all maize and no wheat flour, it'll also be gluten free. A handy one to pull out when allergy sufferers come a-visiting.

Fast food, and bread

Well, I was a busy bee yesterday evening. After that humble cheese sarnie lunch I posted about, there was dinner to take care of. As I'd just come back from a tedious and frustrating meeting at S's school, I was in no mood for fancy cooking, so I bought a French stick from Shephard's in Boston.

When I got home I took those sausages from the mixed grill and squeezed out the meat from inside them. Once they'd released a bit of juice into the frying pan I added some beaten egg and cooked it all together like this:

Meanwhile, S was buttering the bread and chopping up some of those tomatoes and cucumber, so in the space of about ten minutes we went from zero to this for dinner:

Now I defy you to tell me how a ready meal could be as tasty and wholesome as that! Sorry about the rotation, I can't be bothered to investigate the HTML to find out why it's un-rotating pics that I rotated on my computer before uploading them to here.

After I'd gotten that down me and had a bit of a sit down and caffeine fix, I felt more like doing some more cooking. So I got tomorrow's bread sorted - did I promise in another post to show you how I make bread? I might've done, but in any case here's how... 

First I put half a kilo of bread flour in a bowl with half a teaspoon of salt and then, because I'm using flour from the windmill, I use twice the amount of yeast (3tsp) and a teaspoon of sugar to help it get going. This is because it's local wheat, and English wheat can't make as strong a flour as the stuff you get in shops, which is mostly Canadian and has a much higher gluten content than our humble grain. English wheat needs a bit more of a helping hand to get its rise on. This I know from working at a windmill for years and watching Fay's amazing demonstrations. 

So, we start off with this: 

Then add in about 300ml of warm water - I find if I run the hot tap until it's not quite hot enough to hurt if I put my hand in it, that's about the right temperature - so you get this: 

Which I start off mixing with a fork then pull it together with my hands and knead it, sprinkling more flour on if necessary to stop it sticking. You want to keep kneading it till it's soft and stretchy (though it probably won't be as stretchy as dough made with Canadian flour) and can roll around on the worktop without sticking, but only just. Then put it back in the bowl, sprinkled with flour so it won't stick to the sides too much as it rises. 

Leave it in a warm place for half an hour to an hour (an airing cupboard is ideal, but in this case I just left it on top of the stove as the oven was on underneath) and it doubles in size to this: 

Then you want to prise it out of the bowl and knead it again to knock as much air out of it as you can. I tend to be a bit lazy at this stage, so there's usually the odd little air pocket in my bread when it's cooked, but that doesn't overly bother me. Feel free to go for it though if you want perfection! 

Once I'm done with kneading, I make a sausage shape and put it on a lightly floured baking sheet with some expansion cuts like this: 

I have sometimes used a loaf tin, but I tend to avoid them because of a) total and utter confusion over the sizes of tins viz the amount of dough that goes in them, largely due to the annoying habit of recipe writers to call them things like "a 2lb loaf tin" and - well, I've said before how I feel about imperial measurements and b) when I've Googled these arcane terms to find out the actual sizes of the tins in centimetres, and realised it's the same size tin I've got in the cupboard, the bread has only stuck in the tin anyway and I couldn't get it out without ruining the loaf. I do intend to work this out at some point, but right now I can't be bothered, and just use a baking sheet. Which means my loaves have a tendency to do this: 

Which some more expert bread maker will no doubt tell me how to correct if I can ever ask for one's advice without fear of coming away overloaded with extraneous info that I'll never remember. I suspect it might be partly to do with my oven not heating evenly, which is because it's not level, which is because I haven't been bothered to pull it out and adjust the height on the legs at the back (are you detecting a theme here?). It doesn't matter anyway, as it still slices okay for sandwiches and toast: 

So I'm not fussy. 

I also did some pumpkin purée, but I'll put that in a separate post or this one will get too long and data-heavy to load. See, I'm thinking about you folks on your tablets and smart phones :)