Adventures in Food

This link was sent to me by a friend. It's interesting - the Fifers have discovered many of the same things we did. Their perspective is that a local diet is preparation for the future, this is interesting as it suggests people are wanting to prepare for times ahead in which food supplies are cut off and international trade is reduced. Is this a possibility? I think so.

Well not strictly fish, although you could say the whelks and the scallops come into it but they aren't really fish. (We havent yet succeeded in locating local fish, which is probably one the biggest changes in our diet as we used to subsist on mackerel - cheap and healthy though probably endangered or something. But I digress.) i said before that the price of food doesnt really impact on one;s budget but i did notice last time in Waitrose that we are paying more than double the price for milk from Prince Charle's estate than it costs for some equally beautifully packaged and unhomogenised milk with lots of cream on top that comes from just outside our range. The cheaper milk also comes in bigger cartons so it produces slightly less waste. Even though this is a matter of 40 pence, I think it indicates how there can be quite dramatic differences in food prices for very similar items. I suppose people are paying the extra for the status symbol of having Duchy milk. There we are b...

We are now nearly three months in to the experiment and there is still an open question over whether to continue and in what form. I would like to reflect on the experience so far. I have noticed recently that the novelty and initial excitement has worn off and at times it has become a real drag. Its not a matter of craving things, which passed quite quickly and the new eating habits have been easy for me to adapt to and beneficial eg. herbal tea and low sugar. However it is the amount of work involved that makes it difficult. For example, we have to go to a market every saturday and they all shut at one or two, thank god Richmond Farmer's market is open till three or we would have starved a few times. Some saturdays you really dont feel like going to the market so it makes saturdays into more of a workday because there is a routine and a deadline. Also actually shopping is hard because it is all scattered. You go to Waitrose for milk and flour and oil; the market for some greens a...

The one item we are struggling to locate a regular supply for within 100 miles, is butter. Please help! The butter we found so far is either made from the cream on the top of the Duchy Milk or else from a tiny place in sussex that we cant go back to for a while.

Here are some more pictures to show you what we have found recently. First let me tell you - its very exciting - lettuce is now available..since about two weeks actually, say late february. Apparently tomatoes are being sold in Twickenham but our grocer says two more weeks. Here is some pigeon breast being cooked. It is absolutely exquisitely delicious. Its really tender and has a good strong flavour. Its almost like liver actually. here is some nice people on the Roman Road in the east end, selling whelks and cockles from Whitstable. Also delicious. We got a cup of whelks for £3.80. I cooked them in the following way, adapted from the Mendip Snails "Court Bouillon" recipe in ' A Taste of the West Country ' by Theodora Fitzgibbon, an old book i picked up at the delightful Lloyds of Kew bookshop. This is the whelks at the back. The foreground is mussels, not sure where they are from. Whelk Recipe First mix some chopped herbs ( i used thyme, a bay leaf, and garlic) wit...

I would like to comment on the fact that often people wonder whether the food we are buying "costs more". Sometimes yes it is more expensive than if you just went to Tesco all the time. However, I never did and rob only sometimes and when he was skint. but the thing is, how much does even really expensive food cost? Like if I am really going overboard, I might pay, I don't know, a pound for a pint of milk instead of 36p. That's 64p more than normal. I mean come on. That is not really going to make any difference to my life. We get through about three-four pints a week, thats about £2,40. Thats less than a glass of wine one evening down the pub. A week. Between us. For one drink. I really dont think that buying Expensive Food makes much difference. Running an Expensive Car, that makes a difference. Going on Expensive Holidays, makes a difference. Buying Expensive Clothes makes a difference. Paying 64p more for a pint of milk, that doesnt make a difference. And anyhow, ...

A quick update as nothing has been put up for about ten days: We started using some raisins I made from grapes in the summer, which were grown in Finsbury Park. Its a real treat and they have been used in Rob's ever-improving delicious bread. The secret seems to be to have a very gooey sticky dough. I thought it was meant to be quite dry but my loaves come out rather rock-like. Its easy to dry grapes if you have an Aga! I was ill and staying with parents who have one so as I got better I would lay out loads of grapes on a baking tray and put them on top of the aga. Then when they looked like raisins I put them in a bag and that was about six months ago and they are in perfect condition. They do have pips in - in my weakened condition i really couldnt face trying to remove them. But they dont really caus e aproblem either for taste or texture. They are very small and make the raisins crunchy. Actually they are very delicious added to foods. We dont get much acid flavours - so its ve...

This is a quote from the Slowcoach at slowlondon . I like this site and it is relevant because going on a 100-mile diet is all about slowing down. There is plenty of food around, and a fair amount of variety but the thing is, you have to work for it. What is different about this way of eating as opposed to how i was eating before, is that we really have to spend a lot of time: researching where food items come from and how they are produced sourcing particular brands or products once they are "approved" for the diet going in turn to all the different suppliers eg local shop for apple juice and potatoes, farmers market for fruit & veg, butcher for meat, health food shop for porridge, waitrose for milk. Its all scattered around. turning raw ingredients into useful food eg flour into bread and cream into butter chopping, peeling, cleaning the foodetc finding out how to cook it eg celeriac, bread actually cooking By this time you understand, one is very hungry. This makes the...

Today I went to Stroud on business. I asked Chris about farm shops. We went to one but it was shut at one and we were too late. But there was an egg place down the road. This is the first time I have seen an egg factory. It is free range. it was quite nice. They had many eggs in a shed and a scrap of paper with prices on and a tray to leave your money in. It was £2.40 for 30 eggs which seems quite good to me. here is apicture of the eggs and below is a picture of the shed where they are collected. The chickens lay in cages to the left and right and the eggs roll out into collecting trays. Then i presume people go along and put the eggs into trays. On the other side of the cage is the exit so the hens can go outside and run around the pen where they can scratch about for food and such. We saw that too. They had quite a lot of space. Its on a sort of plateau in the Cotswolds with old-fashioned dry stone walls around the fields. I liked it until the farm dog came up hysterically barking a...

On friday last, the eve of my thirty-somethingth birthday, Sarah took me to Konstam's restaurant in Kings Cross, to both celebrate my rapid descent into middle age and to check out this rather unique eaterie on the border of London's West End. Konstam's prides itself on a principle of sourcing most of the ingredients it uses, not within a hundred mile radius, but within the M25, so we have long planned to go there and see what dishes they are creating. Sarah chose from the menu a recently shot Amersham pigeon with locally grown beetroot, stuffed cabbage with a swede and potato mash and a tarte tatin drizzled with lavender cream, though not all at the same time. She washed it down with a Kent rose that was, by all accounts, delicious and cheeky, fruity and summery, like drinking the darling Buds of May. My experience felt a little less balmy but was, none-the-less, a rattle bag of taste sensations that delighted, frighted and ignited in equal measure. The delight was obviou...

I just read this about food miles campaigns hurting African suppliers . The truth is there is no way to determine all the consequences of all that we do, I don';t mean we shouldnt think about it but perhaps it works best if we just do what we feel like. The thing about eating is that no matter what way you cut it, we are taking something. Something has to die, usually, except in the case of salt which isn't really food. And although plants arent said to feel pain they are still dying for our plates. And also the space they take up is space that could be used by some wild creatures instead but we use the space for our own purposes. The point is, by existing, we are bound to deplete other being's resources. We kind of just have to have faith that there is a general balance maintained, and I suppose you can also try not to be really deliberately selfish and greedy. But beyond that, I really dont think that you can base your actions on whether someone or something else might lo...

Being on a 100 mile diet is turning out to be incredibly interesting in so many ways. I want to discuss that in more depth over the next few weeks, how i'm changing how I think and how I feel physically. For example, I never used to believe that 'you are what you eat' - I had a sense that it doesnt actually matter that much what you eat, its all broken down to calories and vitamins right? But I have been off caffeine, chocolate and every kind of processed food for a while and I feel different. I feel clean and creamy. I am eating a lot of cream. That is coming to an end now as we went to Sussex for the weekend, checked out about five farm and local shops, and as we were heading back to London in a foul gale as what patheitc little bit of sunlight there had been in the day was dragged screaming to its destiny, the way of all flesh, i turned sharply and dangerously into a little farm shop near Fairlight. I was rootling around and asking the farmer what he had that was really...

Today, unlike any other day of my pampered life, I made bread. Neccesity, of course, fuelled my desire to partake in such a fool-hardy venture, even though I was well aware the odds of success for the first-time bread-maker ran to approximately one meeellion to one. My hunger was deep, my lament obvious, my absent daily loaf a bitter reminder that I maybe wasn't putting quite enough effort into this diet of enlightenment. Indeed, Sarah, to emphasize beautifully my point, has been conjuring butter from cream on an almost daily basis this last week, in a way that is both mesmerising and utterly gorgeous. Alas, I had to make a stand. So I decided that if I couldn't find bread in the UK made only from ingredients found within our 100 mile barbed-wire fence, then I would have to instead make my own bread from legal ingredients found within our small and cluttered London kitchen. Fealess, I proceeded to mix the Hampshire flour, the Berkshire yeast, the Essex sea-salt and the tepid Ri...

This has been a very productive week, in which we made our first butter (from the cream off the top of the milk - amazing how little cream you need to get enough butter for pancake making - thanks to Suzanne for your helpful demonstration of how to vigorously beat the cream until it turns to butter), I got to use the wooden butter pat makers I bought in Stroud four years ago when I had romantic notions about my domestic destiny (now being fulfilled!!)... Rob made bread for the first time ever, and luckily he called to check that yes, it is better to remove the cling film from the risen bread before baking it, so the results were amazing ( I can honestly say its the best bread I've ever eaten, at least that I can remember eating, I don't even normally like bread) and I got to eat home made bread with home made butter and home made blackberry jam for the first time ever, eating bread at all was wonderful treat after weeks of pancakes , porridge and potato I also found English win...

For the benefit of those of you, i.e everyone in the world except me, Sarah and a certain female German book-seller trading in Kew, who haven't read Ulrike Bulle's comments concerning my mineral water tirade earlier in the month, the picture you are idly gazing at whilst reading this latest blog entry is that of a bottle of bone fide Hammersmith tap water which has been filtered clean of stomach gremlins and presented us sweetly as a gift. Mmm! Now rumour has it there is an inexaustible supply of this particular variety of H2O flowing under the surface of southwest London, so both Sarah and myself look forward to toasting Ulrike's very good health with the stuff for as long as the diet continues. Does it taste different to Richmond tap water? I hear you ask. Buggered If I know!

I went on the River Cottage website because of their hempseed oil and got help in the forum from some nice person. Apparently Hillfarm Rapeseed oil which is sold in Waitrose is IN at 97.37 miles from Richmond. Hooray! And thanks to the UK Postcode Distance Calculator

This week, what with a bout of flu and a general mallaise brought on by a lack of sunlight, I have been eating little else but Pertwood porridge oats. And they are helping to cure what ails me. Until Sarah found this cereal last week whilst trawling the deep, rich waters of the internet, we had been living off a less-than-healthy but utterly indulgent breakfast of pan-cakes, washed down with local apple juice or hawthorn tea - whatever was our poison. ( And, trust me, hawthorn tea is utter poison of the taste buds.) But now we have a choice of early morning treats and not one of them is chocolate. Still, there is something about these thick, chewy, giant oats from a Wiltshire farm that teases my tongue like the sweetest dessert and nurtures a tiny realisation in me that I have been consuming absolute groul for the past thirty-five years whenever porridge has been served me. For, unlike the flour-like substance of most mainstream brands, you open up a packet of Pertwood oats and the in...

Great news! Silver Spoon sugar is all produced from sugar beet grown in East Anglia. You can read the details of my correspondence with them in Correspondence with Silver Spoon in the 'Link' list to the right.

Our local health food shop (Oliver's) has ordered Pertwood porridge oats specially in for us. They were already stocking some other products from the same farm but not the oats. The other products all have added ingredients, so even the barley flakes are out as they have salt and malt and we can't guarantee the origin of those ingredients. The shop were very helpful and interested and they asked us to tell them about any suppliers of local organic food we discover. I should add the local corner store/grocer are also very helpful and interested and let us know in quite good detail where their UK products come from.

Wow! That was a very interesting weekend. The first week was admittedly an easy ride and it was on Saturday after getting to the farmer's market and being laden with as much produce as we could carry (we can't top up mid-week remember) that hunger started to kick in. Not real proper hungry-people-hunger, but still, enough to make life become rather uncomfortable and to make us think we should go home and cook something rather than continuing to try and find butter. No stopping off at the many cafe's and snack bars, no dropping into a newsagent for a bottle of energy juice. Just feeling really tired and hungry and not being able to eat anything as its all raw and needs cooking. When you take it for granted its hard to really imagine what that will feel like. What I found interesting was that it was actually really easy to see it as not an option. I mean it would be so easy to just think 'well i must have something to eat' and break the rule. But now that rule is ther...