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.

Hey the River Cottage folk liked my amethyst deceivers, check it out (scroll down a bit, my pics are near the bottom of the page). If they are super nice to me I might let them have my squirrel stew recipe. Or maybe they can just read it on the page below...

This article is really good, it busts a few myths about how to save the world. the thing is, everyone likes recycling because it doesnt mean much change. The article points out that it would be better to stay in UK for your holiday and do no recycling at all, than to recycle carefully but still have nice two weeks in the sun. the list goes on, and people stay dumb. Of course it also means local meat is much more carbon heavy than air-freight veg The simple list of what to do is: 1. Go vegan 2. Don't buy anything. But especially not big TVs and gagdets and computer games etc 3. Eat up your food and dont chuck it out/ 4. Insulate your house. If you did that it would far outweigh a few plastic pots being recycled. But its sexier to instal solar and drive a hybrid and think that that is enough/ This is an emergency people!

This article (Acrobat PDF opens if you click the title of this post) explores the problem that arises if we all reduce our food miles. The author argues that poor people who are trying to sell the produce we will no longer buy because its air-freighted, will pay a high price for our good intentions. A prominent environment and development consultant from Kenya has commented: "My congratulations to the author of the article! At least some one else is able to put in clear writing what I struggle to say in so many places. Simplistic solutions such as food miles will hurt the environment more and lull us into the false belief that we are part of the solution when are actually still part of the problem and making it worse." Here is one extract: "A number of studies analysing the total carbon footprint of agrarian products, particularly those sold in the UK, have conclusively shown that the full life-cycle climate change impact of food supply in industrialised countries canno...

Spent a weekend in the woods and collected a few mushies plus some fresh squirrel! I've also had a bumper crop of sweet chestnuts and walnuts from trees down the road. So i had a superb stew made largely from wild local food, apart from the flour (Waitrose farm in Hampshire), thyme (Dennis' allottment), salt (Maldon's, Essex), oil (olive but local rapeseed would be perfectly good substitute. I just happen to have a five gallon bottle of olive oil that was given so am making good use of it!) and carrots (Abel & Cole). Here is my recipe for squirrel stew, incorporating Tristram's suggestions about the first stage for the meat: Preparation stage: 1 squirrel, skiined and prepared ( see Flickr for details of how to do this) A few ounces of flour with salt and thyme mixed in Oil For the stew 1 or more penny buns (cep mushroom) A few spiny puffballs Handful of Amethyst Deceivers Handful of sweet chestnuts , peeled Handful of walnuts Water 6 medium size Chopped carrots Sp...

found this and thought of blog... apparently chicken breasts need 60 miles of cooking at 65mph

There is a tree at the end of our road dropping handfuls of fluffy- looking balls onto the pavement and the very busy road next to it. These are not fluffy at all but very prickly. So one has to stamp on them to find the gorgeous, glossy, yummy, sweet chestnuts inside. I brought some to work. Not sure yet if they are popular but I hope they can at least make a good showing against the Piggy Gummy Treats from M&S that someone brought in the other day. I just got an email from a friend who is planning a tree-planting weekend. Apparently the sweet chestnut "was introduced to Britain by the Romans by 400AD and has naturalised here - it is also a very useful wood!" If you find one, don't mess about. Pick those nice things up!! (Leave some for the squirrels. Or don't. I dont know it so confusing, what species is OK and what isn;t and who gets what. Leave a comment if you feel the need to protest - at anything)

The little purple one was the edible and rather delicious Amethyst Deceiver . The River Cottage handbook claims that they are generic, "filler" mushrooms. I don't agree. They are a bit tough and chewy but that was a good thing. I spent ages poring over these little lilac beauties thinking they might be Lilac Fibrecaps, in which case a very nasty dose of pretty much everything was in store. They are called Deceivers because they have a near relative that is edible but takes on a thousand forms, making it very tricky to recognise. Happily the story ends well with me having a nice purple treat and a full tummy. The one in the background was Charcoal buirner ( Russula cyanoxantha ) or simliar, but it turned out to be full of little mushroom grubs. All the other mushies we brought home were poisonous - or couldn't be identified but were similar to known poisonous ones.

Yesterday we went mushrooming in Epping Forest. We didnt find much to eat, but I was amazed how many different kinds of mushrooms there are when you start looking. We found at least fifteen different kinds. I will put some photos up. We did get some Amethyst Deceivers which are edible, but there arent many of them and the River Cottage book suggests they are not a top mushroom but being pretty can be good fillers or with a nice saffron risotto. We got lots of poisonous ones and a couple I really cannot figure out what they are. Watch this space for photos or upload your own in the comments!

OK so we tried the local thing, I will jsut say that it was bloody hard work but i would have liked to stay on it for a whole year. But I also liked giving up, that day when I had Frosties, that will stay with me. But now I miss the clean feeling I had when on the diet. I think that can be attributed to the absence of processed food. Anyway the thing is we have had several discussions about it and agreed to go back to a similar thing but its the whole of the uk this time which should make it a bit more practical. In the meantime we've been having food adventures with things like rock samphire from the sea cliffs in Cornwall. (And loads of other stuff like making an animation, but those are different stories) So I'd like to keep posting about these interesting UK foods and stay with the local theme and jsut see it more of an ongoing adventure and less of a serious and focused challenge. I also want to write about the thoughts and experiences that came out of being on the diet . ...

I found this interesting ad on gumtree about fresh bread http://www.gumtree.com/london/95/8354295.html The fact is we aren't following this diet properly any more but have adapted our regular diet taking on board some of the things we have discovered. I have some conclusions to share that may be of interest. I'll put them up presently. Watch this space!

I met hilary at her allotment at a secret location in west london. She supplied four packs of local butter from Berkely Farm Dairy near Swindon. She also gave me some greens to take home and told me about some organic slug pellets she is using that work without harming cute things like birds. The greens were amazing: fresh oregano - i am attempting to grow a cutting sorrel - a revelation in a world without lemons - I must have some! purple sprouting - the staple of local organic eating some green leaves - nice! This hanging around in a garden plot and trading cuttings reminds of what the women get up to in the amazon chacras where we were so many years ago. Its nice to feel that sense of unity with people who live so far away. Thanks Hilary

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...

We had a long weekend in Exmoor which is over 100 miles away. What a conundrum! We took the opportunity to see what produce they have in the area and went to the local farmers market in Minehead. We also stayed on an organic B&B farm (Hindon), where they serve huge breakfasts made from the pigs and lambs and cattle that you meet as you head off up the hill afterwards for your walk across the moor. This makes a good change as most local food is not organic. If we tried to live on local organic food we would be in intensive care by now. We brought back some goodies and I would like to mention that the taste of the cucumber, potatoes and eggs that we brought back from Exmoor were all fabulous. I think it must be the rich red soil. I am serious - I noticed the difference in quality and will miss the eggs - that was one of the best omelettes ever! - and the sweet, fluffy, rich potatoes. I never knew potatoes were anything more than general Filler food. More holidays in Exmoor Please!

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.

An argument is raging or, at the least, negotiations are taking place, into just how long this diet of discovery should continue before I am pushed, through despair and repression, into an illicit, clandestine affair with a forbidden toffee apple or am found by Sarah in an uncompromising menage a trois with a cadbury's whirl and a kinder surprise. In short, if I don't get some proper chocolate soon I'm going to kill some bastard.

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...

O.k, so there are a few of you out there with slightly more discerning tastes than mine - sensitive souls who can indeed differentiate the subtle flavours of water into categories of good and bad, hard and soft, wet and not-so-wet and so on. I am willing to be educated on this subject by anyone patient enough to teach me. After all, this is a diet of discovery and I am humble enough to suppose the possibility of enlightenment. But the more important point I was attempting to make, though it was seemingly lost in all my spitting, is that, although it is fine to have these pleasantly packaged foreign brands on our shelves, Perrier in particular seems to have become a national institution, a mainstream favourite, and that emphasises beautifully mine and Sarah's argument that people in this country are not emoting with what is being grown and produced in their own corners of the world. Clear, crisp, unadulterated mineral water cascades over the rocks of each and every range of hills in...

Water, water, everywhere, and it's all a lot of poncey crap from Italy and France, beautifully packaged and carefully marketed, that wends its way into the receptacles of Londoners who use it as prop to help them make believe their city is chic like Paris when it is nothing of the sort, it is just the grubby old capital of a country that obtains its water from across the sea. The point I am trying to make, through this un-dignified rant, is that water is indeed everywhere and it all tastes the bloody same. Perrier, for instance, though I could have easily picked out Badoit, Barisart or Pellegrino, arrives on the shelves of our abundant supermarkets in sexy looking, stylish bottles that are pleasing to the human eye. There is little wrong with this, beauty has its place. The home should be filled with gorgeous things. But it's the human tongue that counts here and mine says the only dissimilar thing its buds can gauge between the continental waters and our very own mountain spri...

Another restaurant adventure yesterday (excuse: business lunch) drew out some very interesting conversation but sadly, once again, no local ingredients. This time it was the local pizza restaurant where they didnt really know anything about the ingredients. And this time the waitress definitely wasn't shy, and definitely seemed offended by the enquiry into the origin of the food being served. "What's on the menu, that's what we sell, eat that - like it or lump it" was the gist of the response. Once I had explained that I would eat the food, I just wanted to see if anything came from England, I was told it was 'all imported from Italy'. Admittedly she apologised gently after she realised i wasnt being fussy about my food or about the restaurant. The conversation turned out to be much more enjoyable and fertile than the communications with the waitress. Bob let us know that the Economist had analysed the green-ness of farmer's markets and concluded that ...

My first proper day as a 100 mile dieter began when I returned home following a 24 hour shift at work (I kid you not) and realised I couldn't take a lovely hot mug of Earl Grey into the bath with me. Bollocks, I thought, I'll have to make do with a refreshing mug of Hawthorn leaves that our dear friend, Barbara, had picked for us, instead. A strange sort of brew, Hawthorn leaves. I sank back in the water and stirred to the aroma of fruit and freshwater fish, leaving me with a curious sensation, a taste in my mouth that made me wonder if I had just consumed apple juice and trout oil in equal measure. I duly fell asleep and dreamed of rosehips. Rob x

Well the day has finally come to begin the diet and we are not as prepared as it would be nice to be. eg we have a random assortment of allowable items in the house and we haven't decided all the rules yet. But we are making a start, and even if its a bit shaky its already proving interesting. It started with a new years day trip to a chinese restaurant in Richmond with a friend who was staying. We quickly had to come up with the first rule, which is for eating out: ************************************************************************* Rule One - Eating Out We aren't foregoing eating out altogether because it is an important social activity. We will avoid it where it wont affect social relations, and we will use it as an opportunity for finding out about food and raising discussion with co-eaters. The rule is we have to ask where the ingredients come from and choose the most local item available on the menu. *******************************************************************...