Eating British

Christmas roast chicken

2012-01-01T18:14:00.001Z

Well, I hope everyone had a super Christmas? All was good here at EatingBritish, with plenty of time spent with friends and family, which is what Christmas should be all about really. Of course, no Christmas would be complete without the traditional roast dinner. Most people go for turkey, I think because they can get fairly large and if you're feeding a large family, that'll be a significant attraction. However, we have always felt that chicken, despite being eaten throughout the year and therefore perhaps not as 'special', is simply more tasty than turkey. For this reason, we have always opted for a good, free range chicken for our Christmas roast. This year was no exception.

The carrots and onion help to give plenty of flavor to the gravy. I've blogged about roasting chicken and making gravy before, so I won't mention it in any more detail just here. Anyway, it's important to remember to let the bird rest after removing it from the oven.

And, then serve with the traditional seasonal vegetables.

And yes, it tasted as good as it looks! :-) The traditional Christmas pudding is also a must, obviously.

This is a home made pudding, made to a recipe I was given many years ago. I will cover it in more detail some other time, probably in the run up to Christmas 2012, as it should be first prepared a couple of months before the big day.

Best wishes for the New Year to you all!

Merry Christmas!

2011-12-21T21:53:00.001Z

Merry Christmas from EatingBritish!

I didn't bother with buying a tree this year, but instead decided to use one of the small fir trees I have been growing on the patio. The great advantage being that when we're done with it, I'll just pop it back out onto the patio and next year it will be a little bit bigger. No waste and no fuss, just how I like it.

The blog has been a bit inactive this year, as you'll have noticed, but I am hoping to pick things up again in the new year. But, in the mean time, I wish you a very merry Christmas and best wishes for the New Year!

Spring is on the way!

2011-03-14T20:58:00.000Z

Keeping going with the EatingBritish thing has been a bit difficult for the last few weeks. I think the unusually harsh winter led to very difficult growing conditions for British farmers. Anyway, I noticed today that I am no longer limited to cabbage, carrots, potatoes and Brussels sprouts! No, pak choi and tomatoes are back on the menu! Woo!

So, there they are, just in case you didn't believe me. I was quite hungry after my shopping trip and needing something quick, so I opted to a stir fry, with bacon, pak choi and tomato. I know it might sound odd putting tomato into a stir fry, but it works, trust me. The trick is to slice the tomato (fairly thickly will do) and then add close to the end of cooking, but give it enough time to dissolve to give a thick, rich sauce. Awesome!

Serve on a bed of rice. Nice.

'Underground' Farming?

2011-01-23T14:52:00.000Z

Hello! And, sorry for not posting for so long. What with Christmas and New Year and everything, it's all been a bit hectic just recently and I'm afraid to say the blog has taken something of a back seat. This hasn't been helped by the loss of my digital camera owing to an unfortunate incident involving a plastic carrier bag and a half-drunk cup of coffee. Suffice to say, the digital camera is no long with us. I'm working on buying a new one so I can get back to blogging properly, but in the mean time we'll just have to stick to words.

I came across this article in The Guardian today:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/jan/23/diy-food-producers

The idea of 'underground' food producers is really interesting and not something I've come across before, but I think this kind of cottage industry endeavour is exactly what the country and in particular the countryside, really needs right now. Although, by the sound of it many of the people mentioned in the article are from an urban environment, but still, this has to be a move in the right direction. I would love to try out some of these things myself, such as making cheese or curing my own ham, but I just don't have the space at the moment. I am working to find a solution to this though and if successful, it should certainly give me a bit more to blog about.

I feel I can't post to my blog at this time of the year without mentioning Burns Night, which is coming up on the 25th January. Whilst this is a big thing in Scotland where people are keen to celebrate the work of one of their national heroes, Robert Burns, it's very rarely heard of down here in England. So I was rather surprised to see one of my local butchers having a large banner advertising Burns Night and encouraging people to order a home-made haggis for the occasion. I don't know how successful this will be, judging by people I've spoken to down here, many are reluctant to try haggis because they've heard that it's disgusting. It doesn't even seem to matter that they have no idea what goes into it! It's a shame, haggis is really very nice and I would encourage anyone who hasn't tried it before to give it a go. And, what better occasion than Burns Night?

Strawberry Jam

2010-11-05T07:03:00.000Z

Well, it would seem that Autumn is well and truly upon us now! Although, it has been unseasonably warm for the past few days down here, the leaves on the trees have more or less all turned now. I really like Autumn, I love the colours of the leaves on the trees, I love wading through the piles of fallen leaves and I would go as far as to say that I love the crisp, fresh Autumn mornings when there's a hint of frost. We haven't had too many of those yet, though. Anyway, I've had a bit of a break from blogging, which has prompted some complaints from some of my friends, but you know what? When something is a hobby, I think it's really important that you can put it down and walk away from it for a while, without feeling guilty. If you can't, then that activity ceases to be an enjoyable hobby and becomes a chore. Well, that's my opinion anyway!

Strawberry jam isn't perhaps the most autumnal subject really, but I was really surprised to notice in my local the other day that they are still selling British strawberries! Amazing. And, right now, they were on a buy one get one free offer, so I thought, why not? I bought a couple of kilograms, thinking I could eat some and make jam from the rest. Strawberry jam is super easy - you need one kilogram of fruit, to one kilogram of sugar. A bit of fresh lemon juice helps to freshen everything else and I believe helps it to set. That's it! I must admit that, for the first time ever when I make jam, I used a specific jam sugar this time. Jam sugar has added pectin, the agent that exists naturally in fruit and which makes jam set. So, it shouldn't be possible to create jam that doesn't set when using this type of sugar.

So, to make jam. First weigh out 1 kilogram of strawberries.

Then, wash them and remove the green stalks and leaves. Add them to a decent sized, heavy base saucepan and heat gently until they go all soft. Don't worry about it being dry, the amount of liquid that comes out as you do this is amazing and very soon will be higher than the level of the strawberries originally! Once they are all soft and mushy, this will probably take about 10 minutes or so, with occasional stirring, add 1 kilogram of sugar. I prefer to add it a bit at a time and to stir the mixture around until it is all dissolved before adding more, but I guess you could put it all in at once. It's probably easier to stir if you add a bit at a time. Anyway, once the sugar is added, stir it around and let it simmer gently. As it is doing so, you will notice a foam forming on the top. This should be carefully removed with a spoon, taking care not to remove too much of the jam as well! It will seem like this is an unwinable battle because more foam will form as you remove it, but keep going. The foam is formed by water coming out of the strawberries and if you leave too much of this in, the jam won't keep for as long. Simmer (and keep removing foam) for about 10 minutes or so. After 10 minutes, remove a small amount of jam with a tea spoon and pour it onto a cold plate. Wait a minute or so and then gently push the blob of jam with your finger. If the surface of the blob wrinkles up when you push it, the jam is ready. If not, simmer for a bit longer and try again.

It is important to sterilise the jars you are going to keep your jam in, which should be done with boiling water. Be very careful not to scald yourself doing this! Also, watch that you don't put too much boiling water into the jars all at once, or they might shatter. Pour in a little at a time and swish it around to ensure the glass heats up evenly. Once you've swished a good amount of boiling water around inside the jar, taking great care not to scald yourself, pour the water out and set the jar into a bowl, or the sink, filled with hot water. Take care that there isn't so much water that the jars float! This is to ensure that the glass stays hot so that when we pour in the jam, we don't risk it cracking.
When the jam is ready, simply pour it very carefully into the jar, more or less up to the top and seal immediately. As the jam cools, this will cause a vacuum to form around the top, which will help to preserve the jam. It is better to use proper jam jars with rubber seals for this purpose. Allow the jam to cool in the jars and then that's it.

As an aside, you should now have a bowl of foam that you scrapped off the top of the jam as it was simmering, which should have set by now. If you take off the thick, foam layer from the top, underneath should be a nice, clear, red liquid. This is really just strawberry syrup and it's lovely with some natural yogurt, or even rice pudding. I prefer not to waste anything if I can!

Good news if you like apples!

2010-09-08T20:39:00.000+01:00

I just came across this article on The Guardian website:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/sep/08/apples-growers-hail-tastiest-crop

It seems that the weather this year has conspired to produce a better than average crop of British apples! Good news indeed. However, apparently the blackberries have not been doing so well. I tried making blackberry jam last year from wild blackberries, but it didn't work out very well. I was hoping to have another go this year, so I shall have to see what the local, wild blackberries are like.

Vegetarian Britain?

2010-09-07T07:24:00.001+01:00

As anyone reading my blog will quickly realise, I eat meat. I don't think anybody could be unaware that there has been some discussion about the environmental impact of meat production recently, with many arguing that we could feed many more people if only everyone were to become vegetarian. This is an interesting argument, which I think is based on the issue that we currently grow a lot of food that could be eaten by humans and then feed it to animals. In my opinion, in this case the point is a valid one, this is an extremely wasteful practice. However, I would argue that if we used more traditional farming methods, where cattle are left out to graze in fields and hence eat grass all day, then the problem is significantly reduced. After all, a cow eating grass is doing something truly amazing - converting grass, which humans can't eat, into meat and dairy products, which humans can. This, of course, applies to livestock other than cows as well.

The other side to this argument is one of sustainability and environmental impact. How much of our countryside would have to be ploughed up to grow crops if everyone in the UK were to become vegetarian? Since the original EatingBritish project, I have often wondered if it would even be possible to be a vegetarian and eat only food produced in Britain. I think it would be very difficult, if not impossible, because as far as I am aware we simply can't grow the right kind of crops here. So, if we were all to go vegetarian, it would surely mean that we would have to import an even greater proportion of our food. Would that be sustainable? The recent dry weather and wild fires in Russia have prompted them to ban exports of wheat, which of course has already pushed up wheat prices around the world. I see this as being the problem of relying too heavily on food imports, if something happens to the supply chain, if you can't produce enough food yourself, you've got serious problems.

I have found it very difficult to reliably find grass fed meat in the shops, otherwise I would choose this option all the time.

Roast topside of Water Buffalo

2010-08-28T19:20:00.001+01:00

This was something of a surprise find in the freezer section at Sunnyfields - Water Buffalo meat! The Water Buffalo are reared here in the UK, at Broughton Farm in Hampshire (more info here). They had buffalo mince and topside joints available, so I though it would be good to do a version of the British classic, roast beef. But with buffalo.

To start with, defrost the meat. It is best taken out of the freezer in the morning of the day you plan to cook it, assuming you'll be having it as an evening meal. When it's defrosted completely, pre-heat the oven to 220C. Liberally season the meat with salt and freshly ground black pepper. The piece I bought had some string tied around it to keep it all together, I left this on until it was cooked. Next, roughly chop four or five carrots and three small onions and place in the bottom of a roasting tray. Drizzle the vegetables with a little oil (I used rape seed oil) and place the seasoned meat on top.

Now, place this onto the middle shelf of the pre-heated oven and immediately turn the temperature down to 180C and leave for around 2 hours. Baste the meat with the juices which will collect in the roasting tray about every half an hour or so. After 2 hours (the exact cooking will depend on the size of the piece of meat, so you'll have to use your own judgement a bit here), turn the temperature down to 160C for a final half-an-hour. Then, remove the meat from the oven.

Take the meat out of the roasting tray and put to one side, strain the vegetables and juices into a suitable container (this makes very good gravy!). Now, put the meat back into the roasting tray and cover with kitchen foil. Now leave it for 10 - 15 minutes to rest before serving.

To test if it's cooked properly, before removing from the oven completely, use a metal skewer to make a hole right through the thickest part of the meat, from the top. Remove the skewer and watch the juices that come out, if they are clear and not cloudy, the meat should be cooked. Repeat the test in several areas to make sure. There are fancier ways of doing this, a meat thermometer is probably the best way, especially if you want you meat anything other than well done, but I don't have one of those.

Anyway, that's it! Serve with whatever vegetables you like.

It has a really excellent flavour, kind of like beef, but also quite different. The fat, in particular, tastes very different. Buffalo meat apparently contains less than half the fat of beef, so it can't be bad! I would recommend trying it. I intend to have a go at making burgers from buffalo mince at some point, so I shall certainly blog about that when I do.

Sunnyfields chicken, ham and leak pie

2010-08-25T16:19:00.001+01:00

I was back at Sunnyfields farm a little while ago, actually my first visit this summer! I have often wished that it was easier to get British made 'ready meal' things like pizza and pies, made with British (and preferably local) ingredients. Much to my delight, I found that you can! Although, if I hadn't been at Sunnyfields anyway, it would have been a bit out of my way just for a pie. But still, I could hardly resist giving one of these a try!

It was an excellent pie! It had nice, big pieces of chicken and good sized cubes of ham. The pastry was good too. All in all, a thoroughly good pie. More info on Sunnyfields Organic farm here.

While I was there, I also picked up some locally grown corn-on-the-cob, which was very nice. I had some of it done on the barbecue and it was really sweet and delicious.

Welsh lamb burgers with fresh mint and rosemary

2010-08-05T20:49:00.000+01:00

Judging by my last shopping trip, Welsh lamb seems to be very much back on the shelves, at least at my local supermarket. So, I couldn't resist picking up some minced lamb, which is great made into burgers. Minced lamb has a fairly high fat content (around 20%) compared to minced beef, but this really helps to keep things like burgers moist when they cook. Beef burgers can end up being a bit dry much more easily than lamb burgers. Like nearly all of my recipes, this is really easy to do. Simply place 500g of minced lamb into a large bowl:

This was also a good excuse to use some of the herbs of been growing on my patio, so I picked a reasonable handful of mint leaves and a few sprigs of rosemary. I then washed these and chopped them fairly finely before adding them to the meat in the bowl. I also added a generous measure of freshly ground black pepper, a good pinch of salt, a finely chopped small onion and one egg. The easiest way to mix this all together is by hand, so get stuck in!

Now, heat some oil in a pan, to a fairly high heat, but not smoking. Take small handfuls of the mixture and kneed them in your hands to a suitable 'burger' shape, making sure that they are not too thick. Place these in the hot pan and fry for something in the region of 7 to 8 minutes per side. The exact time will depend on how thick you make them, thinner ones will be quicker and fatter ones will take longer. You can always cut one open when you think they are done, just to check.

Serve! Of course, burgers go well when in buns, but I didn't have any, so I had mine with potatoes and British corn on the cob.

Very tasty it was to!

Honey glazed pork chop with British corn on the cob

2010-08-03T21:27:00.000+01:00

I picked up this jar of honey at my local butcher shop today, so thought I should use it. Pork chops can be good, but a honey glazed pork chop is just better! It's very easy to do, simply season the pork chop with some freshly ground black pepper and some course sea salt on both sides.

Heat some oil in a frying pan to a reasonably high heat and cook the pork chop on one side until it is cooked about half way through.

Now, turn the heat down and gently pour a generous teaspoon of honey onto the uncooked side of the pork chop. Allow the honey to run over the top and then turn the chop over, placing the honey side down in the pan. The honey will quickly caramelise and you should see the caramel creeping out from under the pork chop. It's important that the heat isn't too high at this stage because we don't want to burn the sugar.

Let it cook until it's cooked through, which will probably take another 10 minutes or so, but this will depend on the size of the chop. It should turn a lovely, golden colour on the honey side. You can turn it over again for a few minutes if you want the golden caramel colour on both sides.

I was keen to find a way to use some of the British sweetcorn I bought the other day, so I cooked the cob in lightly salted, boiling water for about 10 minutes, until tender. Served this way with a knob of butter, it's absolutely delicious.

British Sweetcorn

2010-08-03T06:55:00.000+01:00

I was very surprised to come across British sweetcorn in the supermarket! I have seen this before, but only once and that was a few years ago. As you can see, this is part of the Waitrose South of England range, so presumably it has just come into season. I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to do with them yet, I know of boiling or grilling the cob and having it with butter (very nice), but I shall investigate if there are some other good ideas out there.

My attempts at growing various vegetables in pots on my patio has not been very successful. The biggest problem has been with slugs and snails which just come along and consume any young plants, particularly things like spinach or lettuce. I have been using pellets, which seems to be working. I found some excellent 'organic approved' pellets, which are apparently completely safe to pets and other wildlife such as birds which might eat the slugs or snails. Also, they are safe to use around edible plants, which is good. Despite the attacks, the tomatoes are doing well and one is just beginning to turn red:

I'm only growing two plants this year, of different variates, so I probably wont get enough fruit for making chutney again. Unbelievably, I still have chutney left over from last year and, more importantly, it still seems to be edible!

A friend has also been teaching me about Thai cooking just recently, which is exciting. I have to be careful though, as the recipes are closely guarded secrets and I had to promise not to reveal them. However, I might be able to come up with some variants that I can post here, so look out for British / Thai fusion cooking some time soon!

Seasonal produce

2010-07-29T06:40:00.000+01:00

I was impressed on my last shopping trip to see that Waitrose have expanded their range of 'South of England' regional produce! Vegetables on sale included peas, broccoli, dwarf beans, courgettes, two varieties of potato, runner beans and spinach. This is great to see and even better to eat! It gives a real feel for when certain vegetables come into season, which is nice and helps to create a more varied diet in my opinion.

I also came across this article on the Guardian website the other day, which claims that for the first time ever, British grown mange tout will be available, although I think it will only be in Marks and Spencer. I haven't had a chance to check it out yet, but I will as soon as I can!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jul/25/british-mange-tout-sale-first

It really does seem as if demand for British produce is increasing.

Paprika Beef

2010-07-22T20:59:00.000+01:00

A nice, simple dish that can be made with a relatively cheap cut of beef, such as braising (or chuck) steak.

When using these cuts of meat, they can be a bit tough, but this problem can be solved by pounding the meat with a meat hammer. If you don't have one of these, you could always use a rolling pin or something, but you'll need to hit it quite hard. The advantage of using a meat hammer is that they have a face with a number of sharp points on it which really helps to tenderise the meat. Anyway, once that's done, cut the meat into strips.

Then, a hot frying pan, cook the meat along with a roughly sliced onion.

The frying pan shown here is a cast iron type, which adds a wonderful flavour to many dishes, in particular steak. However, any frying pan will do really. While the meat and onions are cooking, season liberally with paprika, freshly ground black pepper and a pinch of salt. Once the meat is cooked through (roughly 5 minutes per side, if you've pounded it quite thin), transfer to a sauce pan. Add some water to the frying pan and use a spatula to make sure anything left over from the frying is transferred to the water.

Remember, this was a cast iron pan! If you're using a non-stick pan, don't use a metal spatula! Pour the water from the frying pan into the sauce pan, cover and simmer gently for 20 to 30 minutes.

That's it! This is particularly good served with mashed potatoes and peas.

Barbecue trout

2010-07-16T21:32:00.000+01:00

The weather here in the UK has, for most of us at least, been fantastic for the last few weeks. Some have even complained that it has been too hot! Typical then, that on the day I should decide to have a barbecue, it turns out to be pouring with rain. Anyway, I'm not the kind of person to let a mere bit of weather get in the way of a good plan, so I persevered. I have been meaning to write about barbecues for a while, since although I like a good barbecue as much as anyone I often find that they are far to heavy on the red meat front. Its always sausages, burgers, steak and maybe some chicken legs if you're lucky. There's nothing wrong with any of those of course, it's just that I find it hard to consume nothing but red meat! So, I have set out to try barbecuing fish, in this case trout.

Here we have your basic farmed trout. I'm not sure of the exact species, but I suspect from the pale pink band down its side that it is a rainbow trout. Now, I've been fishing once or twice and I know that a rainbow trout caught in the wild looks much more obviously like its name-sake, but for a farmed fish this isn't a bad example. My friendly, local fishmonger has already gutted this fish for me and I suggest that you get yours to do the same. The first thing to do, as the coals of the barbecue are heating up, is to wash the fish to remove any remaining blood from inside.

That's more or less all the preparation the fish needs! All that remains is to season the inside of the fish with some salt and freshly ground black pepper. I also added some roughly chopped fresh parsley and a couple of bay leaves. I then used some wooden cocktail sticks to hold it all together so that the herbs wouldn't fall out during cooking. That's the fish ready for the coals!

Since I didn't feel that the trout would be quite enough for one meal, I've also added some sausages and an orange pepper (barbecue's particularly well I find, particularly when seasoned with black pepper and a little olive oil. Leave it until the skin starts to go black). In this case, the fish took about half an hour to cook, 15 minutes per side.

I've served this with a basic potato salad made from new potatoes boiled with the skins on, which were then left to cool and sliced into a mix of natural yogurt and cream, along with some chopped spring onion and some freshly ground black pepper and salt. The fish was really nice, although trout has a very subtle flavour so you have to be a bit careful not to overpower it. Ideally, I would have added some fresh dill to the herbs I put inside the fish, but I didn't have any on this occasion. Let's hope that the sunny weather comes back!

Sausage gratin

2010-07-15T15:27:00.000+01:00

This is a slight variation on a recipe I've done before with sausage and asparagus, but it's a great way of cooking sausages if you're fed up of frying or grilling them! To make, simply cook some potatoes in lightly salted, boiling water until they are nearly done. Test them by sticking a fork or a skewer in and feeling the texture, it should still be firm and just ever so slightly 'gritty' which indicates that the potato is not fully cooked. As we are going to be finishing them off in the oven, this is OK.

While the potatoes are boiling, wash and chop some asparagus, peel and finely chop an onion, slice the sausages (I used three good sized, pork and apple sausages in this case) into good sized chunks. Layer all of these ingredients into a heat proof dish, with the chopped onion at the bottom. I added a layer of cherry tomatoes as well, as you can see. I also put in a good bunch of freshly chopped herbs, in this case thyme, rosemary and sage. A small pinch of course sea salt is a good idea at this stage to. In this case, I am relying on the tomatoes to produce juice as they cook. If you don't use tomatoes, you might find it necessary to add a little stock - chicken or vegetable would work well.

Once you've done that, slice the par-boiled potatoes and use the slices to cover the top of the dish, like so:

Add some grated cheese and some freshly ground black pepper and place in a pre-heated oven at 180C for about 40 minutes to an hour. You can tell when it's cooked because the top will be all nice and brown and the juices in the bottom of the dish will be bubbling away nicely. I'd recommend at least 40 minutes though, just to make sure that the sausages are cooked through properly.

Marrow and broad bean risotto

2010-07-05T21:43:00.001+01:00

I mentioned in my last post that I would write something about marrows, so here we are! I think, as vegetables go, marrows are fairly exciting. To start with, they are quite big and can be huge! Secondly, I think anything that has stripes just looks good. Marrows are the tigers of the vegetable world. Truly, a vegetable to admire. Handily, they taste pretty good to, if you cook them right. This is one vegetable that I would not recommend eating raw. As far as I am aware, doing so won't do you any harm, it just doesn't taste that great. So, I decided to turn this marrow into a risotto.

This is very easy to do. Simply wash the marrow and then cut it into roughly 1cm cubes. Meanwhile, heat some oil in a heavy-based sauce pan (olive or rape-seed oil works very well) and when hot, add some finely chopped onion. Cook the onion until it is nice and soft and just starting to turn brown. Now, add about half a cup of risotto rice. I use Arborio rice, which is particularly good I think. Stir the rice around with the onion and then add enough chicken stock to just cover the rice and onion. Then, put the lid on the sauce pan and leave it simmering for a while. Keep an eye on it and when it looks like most of the fluid has been absorbed, add a little more to again just cover the rice. For half a cup of rice, you'll want about 450ml of chicken stock. You may want to give it a stir from time to time as well to make sure it doesn't stick and burn in the bottom of the pan.

Once you've added about half the stock, add the chopped marrow. Now, I have chosen to add broad beans as well, because they are in season right now, so these can go in at the same time. Flavour the dish with some freshly chopped sage, ground black pepper and a pinch of sea salt. A knob of butter really adds to the flavour, but is optional. Stir it around and add the rest of the stock. Put the lid on the pan and leave it to simmer until the marrow has gone really soft and most of the fluid has been absorbed. That's it!

Now, a risotto should really be served with Parmesan cheese, but of course that's not British. So, I have to admit I went without the cheese, but it would be really good to be able to find a good British alternative to Parmesan. I shall investigate this.

New vegetables in season now!

2010-06-29T21:21:00.000+01:00

My last trip to Waitrose revealed that two new vegetables appear to have come into season; peas and marrow. Now, I use peas in quite a lot of my cooking, as you might have noticed from one or two of the pictures here... But, they are nearly always frozen peas. Frozen peas are great because they are frozen very quickly after being picked, which means that they maintain a lot of the vitamins and minerals that makes them so good for you. Peas are also a good source of fibre, with 100g of peas containing as much as 5.1g of fibre! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peas). However, the fresh peas have a completely different flavour, even if you do need to go through the hassle of shelling them yourself:

I think they are easily worth the effort as they taste so much sweeter and crisper than the frozen ones. I use them either as I would with frozen peas (boil in lightly salted water for 3 minutes), or just leave them raw and have them in a salad or something similar.
I also noticed that marrows seem to be in season now, so I shall post something about the marrow when I've decided what I am going to do with.
At this time of the year, when there are so many good, fresh vegetables available, it seems almost a shame to be eating too much meat. So, an unplanned consequence of my EatingBritish diet is that I've really cut down on my meat consumption during the summer months. When I cooked before starting this project, I tended to rotate through the same dishes on a near weekly basis (very boring!). However, now that I am basing my cooking on what I find to be the freshest and the most in season at the shops, I am finding that my diet has become a lot more varied. Meat is a great source of protein and other things that the body needs, but I think it really comes into its own during the late autumn and winter months, when there simply isn't that much available on the vegetable front. It occurred to me today that, in the UK at least, we have an unprecedented amount of choice when it comes to the food we buy, on a level probably never known by any previous generations. Yet, despite this, how many people sit down to the same meal on a regular basis? How many people really vary their diet that much beyond just a few recipes? I suspect not many. The odd thing is that when I started this project, several people objected to it because they saw modern food and cooking as being about variety. However, in my attempts at sticking to a diet of only food produced in Britain, far from reducing the variety of my diet, I have increased it significantly.

Seasonal produce

2010-06-14T20:15:00.000+01:00

After all the fuss I made about the regional produce I bought in Waitrose last week, I thought it was probably time that I wrote a little more about it. In the end, once I'd sampled some of the vegetables raw, I realised that they were far to fresh to be cooked to death in some complicated dish. When vegetables (technically, tomatoes are a fruit of course...) are this fresh, I think it's almost a crime to cook them beyond the bare minimum. The spinach and the asparagus in particular seem to really benefit from actually being in season at the moment, you can really taste it. So, one super simple dish that I like to do when I get home from work and am hungry and in need of something fairly quick is to just basically cook some pasta and add some olive oil, freshly ground black pepper, course sea salt and the freshest vegetables available. This could be done with almost any vegetables really, but in this case I used asparagus, mushrooms and spinach. This dish is perfect when the vegetables are so fresh because they are not really cooked at all, just warmed through. The end result should look something like this:

This really is the simplest thing to prepare. Put the pasta into little salted, rapidly boiling water. While it's cooking, wash the vegetables. Slice the mushrooms and the asparagus. When the pasta is nearly done, add the slices asparagus for no more than three minutes, it takes a bit of practice to get the timing for the pasta right, but it's worth persevering. A time saving trick I like to use is to wash the spinach leaves in a colander under the cold tap. Once the pasta is cooked, drain the pasta through the same colander, leaving the spinach in. This way, the pasta gets drained and the spinach gets steamed by the hot water! Nice. Tip the pasta and the spinach back into the saucepan, add olive oil, freshly ground black pepper and course sea salt. Stir it around and add the mushrooms. That's it!

We've been having a lot of warm and wet weather just recently, which of course has done wonders for my attempts to grow my own food:

As you can see, the tomatoes are coming on well, the mint is progressing but is still too small to use really. Unfortunately, the sweet peppers are not doing much and appear to have been munched by snails. However, the alpine strawberries are doing well, though I am surprised that they haven't produced any flowers yet.

Waitrose Regional Foods

2010-06-08T21:04:00.002+01:00

I've just got back from doing my shopping at Waitrose, which happens to be my closest supermarket, although I do occasionally go to others. Waitrose have quite a strong focus on local produce and actually have a whole section, albeit a small one, devoted to regional, local produce. In my case, the region in question is 'South of England'. As I say, it's only a small section so there isn't all that much there, but they usually have locally produced potatoes and mushrooms here. Today, I also got organic spinach, plum tomatoes and asparagus. I feel that although the selection is small, I have to do my bit by supporting this initiative. If more consumers buy these products, the supermarkets will release that this really is something that we want to be able to buy and hopefully that will lead to an increase in the range of local produce available. I occasionally go to farm shops and I would like to start using some smaller, local suppliers for things such as meat. The trouble is, it is very hard to beat the convenience of a supermarket. To get to a farm shop, I have to use my car, whereas I can walk to Waitrose. There are one or two smaller, local shops I can drop into on my way home from work, so I shall have to explore that possibility. The point I am trying to make I guess is that it isn't always possible to do your shopping at farm shops and small local suppliers, but at least if you're going to use a supermarket, try to support any local food initiatives they may have. I am sure all the main supermarkets have similar local producer schemes to Waitrose.

Fish and chips

2010-06-08T07:00:00.000+01:00

Personally, it always annoys me slightly that whenever you ask someone to think of an example of British food, the first thing they'll almost always say is fish and chips! Whether we like it or not, I guess this dish has become the icon of British food. According to the Wikipedia article, Fish and Chips as a dish originated in the UK in either 1858 or 1863, so it's certainly been around for sometime. It is actually quite hard to think of another, similarly iconic British dish, unless you start thinking of Chicken Tikka Masala and that sort of thing.
Anyway, I felt that I wanted a change from my usual boiled potatoes the other day, so I set about making my own chips, which I had with a salmon fillet, so this isn't your classic fish and chips dish by any means.

So, to make chips, first cut a large potato into chip-like shapes. This was actually a baking potato and I know that 'professional' chip makers think that the variety of potato makes a huge difference to the quality of the final chips. They are probably right and I think a lot of it has to do with water content, with a higher water content being better. These were Estima potatoes, grown in Suffolk and they seemed to work well. I deep fried them in olive oil, keeping the heat below the smoke point of the oil. Now, I could have used the cold pressed rape seed oil which I've used for various things here before, perhaps I should have done really given that it's British, but it is also quite expensive! Of course, it's smoke point is much higher than that of olive oil, which may have made it better, but to be honest, the olive oil seemed to work quite well.

I let them fry, stirring them around occasionally, until they just started to brown. I then removed them from the oil and allowed them to cool completely, which took about 20 minutes, before putting them back in the hot oil for another 15 to 20 minutes to finish off. It is really important to let them cool completely like this if you want them to be crispy on the outside and nice and soft and fluffy on the inside! It takes a bit of time, but it's worth it.

So, after letting them cool (as shown in the above picture), I fried them again to give the finished result:

They really were extremely good, even if I do say so myself! The crispy outside layer had swollen up and separated from the fluffy inside on many of them, which gave them the most delightful texture. The olive oil also seemed to impart a good flavour. Of course, you always need to be careful deep frying things like this, but I used the absolute minimum amount of oil in the pan and had a damp dish cloth ready in case of a fire! I'd recommend that you do the same if you try making chips this way.

Fine food over the weekend

2010-06-02T21:06:00.000+01:00

I had the great pleasure of attending a friend's wedding last weekend. Weddings are always good fun for many reasons, but one is nearly always treated to particularly good food and this was no exception! Of course, it was great to see all my friends and to catch up, but of importance here is the food, so I'll get straight to the point! To start, we had crab cakes which were made with flaked crab meat coated in bread crumbs and served on a bed of rocket salad. The salad was dressed with what I suspect was a balsamic dressing, which was very good. Unfortunately, I didn't get any good pictures of these unfortunately. The main course was lamb shank, which I did get a good picture of:

Lamb usually makes for a great dish and this was no exception! Here, it has been served on a bed of mashed potato with broccoli. It was very good, the meat was perfectly cooked and simply fell off the bone, just as it should. Dessert was Eton mess, again unfortunately I failed to get a good photo, but it was also excellent.

The wedding food aside, one other dish of note from the weekend was a pizza I had a Fire & Stone in Oxford:

This was a Peking Duck pizza! That's a first for me, I'm more used to the usual ham and mushroom or pepperoni, so I couldn't resist the chance to try something a little more exotic. It was amazing! Thoroughly recommended. Actually, Fire & Stone had a huge range of exotic pizzas, so they are definitely worth checking out in my opinion.

Home grown food

2010-05-26T07:01:00.000+01:00

In my last post I promised to blog about my latest efforts to grow some of my own food. As I don't have a garden, I am slightly limited in what I can grow, but I think you can do quite well with just a patio. So, here are some of the things I am growing this year:

Last year I grow a few tomato plants in a grow bag, which worked really well, but I thought that this year I would go for something that looked a little better! I think the pots provide a bit more flexibility as well as you can move them around and arrange them more easily. Anyway, I have two tomato plants, of different varieties, so hopefully they'll do well.

These are radishes, which are really very easy to grow and make an excellent salad vegetable. They grow quickly, particularly in the hot weather we've been having recently, so I am keeping a couple of pots going planted some time apart. I hope that this will allow me to have an extended supply of radishes, though continuous would be even better.

These will be spinach fairly soon...

This is regular garden mint, which I find is superb for making fresh mint tea! It's a bit too small at the moment, but when there is enough of it, the thing to do is to simply cut a short branch, wash it, put it into a mug or a cup and pour boiling water of it. This makes a suitably refreshing hot drink for the hot weather!

I also planted some Alpine strawberries, which are those really small berries you sometimes see in the shops. They may be small, but they have a lot of flavour, so hopefully these will turn out well!

And these are red peppers! To be honest, I'm not sure how well these will do but I bought them as seedlings from the garden centre and the label said that they were ideal for patios... It will be exciting if they do produce fruit, but I tried growing sweet peppers indoors last year and it wasn't very successful.

I've got space for quite a few more pots, so if I have time I shall be making some additions. The great thing about using pots is that, once planted, they are really low maintenance, except for needing watering and the occasional feed.

British air dried ham and early season asparagus

2010-05-18T20:25:00.000+01:00

Dear Readers!

I must apologise for the rather long break I've had from the blog! But, do not dispair, I have not given up on the project. April turned out to be a rather hectic month and I ended up getting stuck in Canada because of the Volcano and, well, lot's has been happening, so unfortunately the blog took a back seat there for a while. Anyway, I'm back now and there is quite a lot of catching up to do!

My regular readers will remember that I did quite well with growing tomatoes last year on my little patio. Well, I'm trying to do even better this year and have gone all out and got some nice pots. I'm trying to grow all sorts of things this time round, including radishes (which have to be the easiest to grow vegetable ever!), spinach, spring onions (though they're not looking so good), tomatoes, mint, thyme, lemon thyme, rosemary, sage, corriander and alpine strawberries. I shall post some pictures of all of this at some point in the near future and will of course keep you up to date with my progress!

Anyway, today I'd like to blog about the British air dried ham that I bought at Richard Woodall's butchers in the Lake District some time ago. I finally got around to using it! This ham is very much like Palma ham from Italy, if you've had that and as such goes very well with asparagus. Now, of course, asparagus is in season right now (make the most of it, it's a short season!), so I thought that this would make the perfect combination.

And the ham:

Now, this is really easy to do! I've found that many people will say that they don't like asparagus, but I often find that this is because they have never had it when it has been cooked properly. All too often, it's served after having been boiled and it has turned to nothing more than a slightly strange flavoured green mush. This is not good! Asparagus must be cooked gently in my opinion, or very quickly on a high heat. So, grilling works well, or the BBQ! However, in this case, I've opted for boiling in lightly salted water.

Trim the woody part off the bottom of the stalk, but otherwise they should need no preparation beyond washing. Get the water boiling rapidly and then add the asparagus and start a timer. I let it boil for as close as possible to three minutes and then whip it out as fast possible onto some kitchen paper to dry off. For this dish, I then allowed it to cool, before carefully wrapping each stalk in a piece of the ham, like so:

Personally, I think this is a fantastic combination and it seemed to work very well with the Richard Woodall ham. However, aware that nobody should simply take my word for it, I took some to work and shared them around with my work collegues. It seemed to go down very well!

Salmon Risotto

2010-03-30T22:26:00.001+01:00

On the meat front, the original EatingBritish project was actually quite easy. A quick glance over almost any supermarket meat section will reveal that a significant quantity, if not all, of the meat was produced in the UK. However, one of the areas that does become slightly questionable is fish. When is a fish a British fish? When it's caught in British waters perhaps? I'm still slightly undecided on this issue myself, so instead I make do with sustainably farmed fish, which is definately produced in Britain! In this case, I am using Scottish farmed salmon. I quite like a nice piece of salmon every now and again, particularly pan fried (click on the 'fish' label to the left to see more recipies). However, I thought I would try something a little different this time round and so I tried a salmon risotto.
Salmon is ideal for a risotto because it requires only the gentlest of cooking, assuming its nice and fresh to start with, so it can go into the cooking pot right at the last minute. Here is a nice piece of Scottish farmed salmon:

To make the risotto is really easy. Heat some oil and butter (the oil raises the smoke point of the butter, allowing a higher heat to be used, but still giving the nice buttery flavour) in a pan and fry a finely chopped onion on a medium heat until soft. Add about half a cup of rice. Some would say to use risotto rice, which is certainly very good, but to be honest I used regular, long grain rice and it worked just fine for me. Stir this around for a couple of minutes. Meanwhile, make some chicken stock (I just use cubes, but if you have fresh stock it would be awesome!). After the rice has been in the butter/onion/oil mixture in the pan for a few minutes, start adding the stock. You want to do this quite slowly, allowing it to be absorbed by the rice before adding a bit more. For this amount of rice, I found 3/4 pint of chicken stock worked very well. You can always add more water if the rice still isn't cooked by the time you've used up all the stock, but it's much harder to take excess water out without over cooking the rice!
While the rice is cooking, cut the salmon into cubes, removing the skin first if it was still on. Once the rice is cooked, add the salmon, some chopped basil (dried works OK, but fresh would be so much better!) and two table spoons of double cream. I also added some pine nuts because I like them and some halved cherry tomatos. Stir this all together over a low heat. Continue to cook until the salmon has turned nicely pink and is starting to fall apart. Most risotto recipies would call for Parmesan cheese to be added, but of course, Parmesan cheese is not British. It's an excellent cheese, but I didn't have any and I was keen to try a British alternative. So, I used some of the Winchester mature chedder I've blogged about before (see here), which was a nicely mature chedder with a fairly robust flavour which I think did it's job as a Parmesan replacement fairly well.
This was the end result:

Venison Steak Stri Fry

2010-03-24T20:42:00.000Z

The last dish I wrote about, the roast Venison rump steak, was rather more than I could eat in one go, so I had left overs. A stir fry is often a good way of using left overs from a roast, or many other kinds of left overs come to that. Anyway, in my opinion a stir fry requires relatively little meat, but with plenty of fresh and interesting vegetables. On the subject of fresh and interesting vegetables, I have to say that I am finding the going a little difficult at the moment in terms of keeping to only British produce. This time of year is something of a gap between the last of the previous seasons winter produce (see my posts from January, there was still quite a variety available then) and the next seasons early spring produce. We have had an especially long and cold winter as well, which almost certainly will make things more difficult.

There was actually an interesting article on this on the Guardian website that I came across today, which is worth a look (click here). I had a good look round at the Sunnyfields farm shop when I was there to see what local vegetables I could pick up. I came away with curly kale and purple sprouting brocoli, both of which are quite suitable for a stir fry.

All I did was tear off some handfulls of the curly kale and purple sprouting brocoli and wash them under the tap. I then heating some oil in the pan, added a chopped onion and fryed on a high heat until softened. I then added the washed vegetables. Continue to fry on a high heat until the leafy vegetables start to wilt. I then added a generous portion of soy sauce, some freshly ground black pepper and the sliced left over Venison. I also added some frozen peas. In the picture below, I have also added the left over roasted vegetables from the previous meal and as much as possible of the remaining juice, which will add a nice depth of flavour to the stir fry.

Continue to stir fry for a few minutes more to make sure that the frozen peas have defrosted, then serve on a bed of rice:

Roast Venison from the New Forest

2010-03-22T19:40:00.000Z

On my last trip to Sunnyfields Farm Shop and Market, I picked up a pack of Venison rump steak. I have to say that I am something of a fan of Venison, it's got a great flavour and it naturally very lean. So, this is what I bought:

And out of the wrapper:

I'm not a butcher, but to me that looks like a good bit of bit of meat! To make a nice roast from this, I lightly seasoned the meat with salt and pepper and then sealed it in a very hot frying pan. This simply involves putting a little oil in the pan and getting it nice and hot, but not smoking. Then, simply place the meat in the pan and leave it alone for a minute or so. Then, turn onto the other side and leave for about a minute or so. Keep turning until all the sides have been browned:

Here, I have placed some carrots, a chopped onion and 4 cloves of garlic, roughly chopped. I added some cold pressed rape seed oil over the vegetables and then placed the sealed meat on top. Put this in an oven at 180C, for about 45 to 50 minutes. The exact cooking time will vary depending on the size of the joint of meat of course. The best way to tell if it is cooked is to push a metal skewer into it, at the thickest point and check that the juices coming out are clear. If not, then it needs another 10 minutes or so. Once it's cooked, remove it from the over, cover it with more kitchen foil and leave it to rest for about 5 to 10 minutes. This helps to ensure that the meat will be nice and tender.

When rested, slice thinly and serve!

British Tomatoes

2010-03-09T19:43:00.000Z

I was pleasently surprised to find that British tomatoes are already available!

These, as can be seen from the label, have been grown at Thanet Earth in Kent, which is the largest greenhouse complex in the UK (http://www.thanetearth.com/). Of course, the important question is; Did they taste good? They were really quite good, juicy and sweet as a tomato should be.

Richard Woodall Cumberland Sausage (Part 2)

2010-03-08T20:59:00.001Z

Having talked so favourably about the Cumberland Sausage from Richard Woodall's in the Lake District, I thought it was probably about time that I commented on the sausage itself, cooked by my own fair hand. I think I mentioned that they sell sausages by the yard, so I brought 2 yards of sausage. These are hefty sausages, they are probably nearly an inch in diameter, so there's a lot of meat in yard long one! Cumberland Sausage is traditionally cooked in a coiled shape, and served with a kind of sausage casserole, so that's what I've done here. First off, here's the sausage in the pan:

Fry the sausage in a little oil in a good, non-stick pan. It will probably need about 8 to 10 minutes per side. While that's cooking, bring some lightly salted water to the boil in a pan and add around 200g of red lentils. I find it best to wash these first, but not all recipes seem to mention that. Simply put them in a sieve and rinse with plenty of cold water - the water running off will turn a milky white colour. I think doing this for a minute or so will be more than enough.

Once the sausage is cooked, transfer it from the pan into a baking tray and cover with foil and place this into a pre-heated oven at around 120C. Add around 200ml of red wine to the still hot frying pan and boil vigorously until reduced by about half. Pour the resulting red wine reduction into a bowl and set to one side.

Add a bit more oil to the pan and bring back up to temperature. Fry a chopped onion, three cloves of garlic and a generous measure of dried rosemary and oregano herbs. Of course, fresh herbs would probably be better and one can usually get away with using smaller quantities. If you are lucky enough to have fresh herbs available, you should definitely use them!

Once the onions have softened, add a tin of chopped tomatoes, a chopped red chilli, the cooked lentils and the red wine reduction from earlier. Whilst this is simmering, prepare around 5/8 litre of beef stock and add to the pan. Continue simmering until the mixture has reduced to a thick, casserole like consistency, Serve with boiled potatoes and peas!

Shown here is just half of the sausage! This actually made three meals for me, which was good. One last thing to mention, ideally metal skewers should be used to pin the sausage into shape during frying, but I didn't have any, so it tended to uncoil itself as it cooked. It still worked fine, but it does look better when the sausage forms a nice, neat spiral.

Edinburgh, Chutney & Tebay Services

2010-03-03T20:31:00.000Z

On my way up to Edinburgh, for my recent visit, I felt I couldn't drive past Tebay Services without stopping there for a coffee and maybe to do a spot of shopping. I've blogged about Tebay Services before (here), so I won't write more about it here and now, but surfice to say - well worth popping in should you find yourself on that particular stretch of the M6.

Anyway, I had been very kindly invited to lunch on one of the days of my visit, so I thought that this would be the perfect opportunity to pick up a gift of some sort. I was really looking for some kind of local food produce and after much browsing I found a selection of rather lovely sounding chutney:

They looked rather delightful, though I must admit I don't know what they are like to eat! However, I hope they are good. In return for these, I not only recieved a really rather good lunch, but was introduced to a whole new world of chutney swapping. This kind of made me wish I'd come armed with some of my tomato chutney from last year! I shall have to try to make some smaller jars of it this year when the tomatos are back in season, to use as gifts. Anyway, I received a lovely looking jar of homemade tomato and red pepper relish:

Which I sampled this evening with some Pondhead Farm pork sausages which I picked up at the Sunnyfields farmers market when I was last there. The relish was really rather good, with a subtle sweetness from the peppers carefully balanced with the vinegar. Very nice indeed.

As I say, next time I make chutney or relish of my own, I shall certainly invest in some smaller jars - they really do make excellent gifts.

Richard Woodall Cumberland Sausage, Hams and Bacon

2010-02-25T20:39:00.000Z

On my return journey from Edinburgh, I took the opportunity to visit a place that I have seen on TV before - Richard Woodall's shop in Waberthwaite in the Lake District. I think the Lake District has to be one of the most beutiful parts of England and at this time of year it has a certain bleakness to it that is hard to describe. Anyway, Richard Woodall's shop is famous as being the first place to make prosciutto style ham in Britain. He is also famous for being a supplier of pork products to the Queen, including bacon, sausages and the air-dried ham. So, I could hardly pass up the chance to visit!

Driving into the Lake District, I was almost immediately greated by some amazing views:

But, that wasn't why I was here! The village of Waberthwaite itself is really tiny, little more then a scattering of houses, a school and the famous post office / Richard Woodall's shop. I grew up in a rural area in England so I am quite aware that many of these communities are struggling to survive these days and very often the closure of the local post office can prove to be the final straw. It was really good to see an example of a business model that can clearly work, by combining the post office with something else, in this case the butchers shop, it becomes much more viable. Of course, I'm sure it helps to have a famous product to draw people in.

Inside, the shop was just amazing. It's not very big, so the first thing that I noticed was the smell which comes from the hams hanging up from the ceiling:

They sell these hams whole and assured me that one would last for a long time if I were to buy one. However, I felt that that was probably a little bit too much ham to buy in one go, even for me! So, I settled for a 250g pack of the air-dried ham. They also sell sausages, which I already knew to be very good because I had some for my dinner the evening before at the Brown Cow Inn, also in Waberthwaite.

Now that's a big plate of food! There were two sausgaes, the mashed potato and swede, peas, chips and under the fried egg, a large piece of black pudding. I have to admit that I wasn't really able to do it justice, but I did my best! Really, without having spent the day out walking in the fells, I can't imagine that many people would be able to do better.

Anyway, I was intrigued that Richard Woodall's sell their sausages by the yard, rather then in the short sausages that I usually buy from the supermarket. I also picked up some smoked bacon and some unsmoked bacon, both of the short back variety. I shall blog more about these things soon! It almost goes without saying, but all of these fine products are made from locally reared pigs.

Edinburgh

2010-02-24T20:23:00.000Z

I recently had the opportunity to visit Edinburgh, where many moons ago I used to live. I'm one of those people that is really bad at getting around to doing all the tourist stuff when I live somewhere, so going back as a visitor gives me the chance to do just that! As a tourist, I felt the one thing I really had to do was to visit Edinburgh Castle. It was really interesting and well worth the £11 entrance fee in my opinion. Here are some pictures.

The approach to the castle iteself:

This is a view over the city towards Arthurs Seat, taken from the castle:

More views of the city:

Of course, I couldn't really write about this visit here on my blog without mentioning food in some way or another! So, here we are, I had lunch in the Queen Anne Cafe, which was really good. Since I was in Scotland and doing the whole 'tourist' thing, I felt I had to have the haggis, with neeps and tatties:

It tasted as good as it looks! I lived in Scotland for some time, so I've had haggis before, many times. I have to say that I rather like it. All I can say is that if you've never tried it before, do so if you get the chance! Here, the haggis itself is at the bottom, under a layer of tatties (mashed potato) and neeps (mashed turnip). People often worry about what haggis is made of - commenting that it's all the disgusting parts of the sheep, but personally I consider the heart, lungs, liver and kidneys to be some of the more flavoursome parts. All of this is mixed with oats and herbs and spices and well, really you'll just have to try it for yourself.

Edinburgh is awash with tea shops - several of which are new since I was last there. I have blogged about the botanical gardens before, but they have recently opened their new West Gate building, which houses a really rather nice resteraunt. Having been terribly well fed every morning at my bed and breakfast, all I could face on this particular occasion was a cream tea, but it was really very good:

Perfect.

Pickled beetroot & Chilli Jam

2010-02-14T19:08:00.011Z

I had another trip to the Sunnyfields farm shop and market yesterday and couldn't resist picking up a couple of local items that I haven't tried before! These were Sunnyfield's own pickled beetroot and a jar of chili jam. I also picked up a bottle of English extra virgin, cold pressed rape seed oil, which I have blogged about before (see here) and makes a truly viable alternative to olive oil.

I'm quite a fan of pickled beetroot, since my parents used to make their own when I was young. Funnily enough, I don't think I liked it very much then! But, my tastes have changed a bit since then. Anyway, I had a simple salad for my lunch today, making use of chili jam and the beetroot. I also used some local eggs and some bread which I also got at Sunnyfields.

There are two cheeses here - a basic cheddar from the supermarket and some Lyburn Winchester Mature, which is very good.

The symbol to the left of the label on this cheese is the 'New Forest Marque', for which more information is available here. This seems like quite a good idea and apparently ensures that 'high standards of welfare and husbandry' have been applied (in the case of meat products, of course!). I have to say that whilst browsing around the market stalls at the Sunnyfields market, I noticed at least one alternative symbol apparently designating an origin within the New Forest area. I presume that this would be an unofficial symbol, so wouldn't indicate any kind of official endorsement. I shall blog on this subject again when I find out more.

Venison Meat Balls

2010-02-09T20:37:00.003Z

One of the other products I picked up while I was last at Sunnyfields Farm Shop & Market was a pack of venison meat balls. I opted to cook these in the simplest way I could (my regular readers might spot a trend here!), which was to pan fry them and serve them with a rich tomato and herb sauce. Pan fry on a medium heat, turning occasionally until cooked through (the juices should run clear when they are cooked, but I prefer to cut one in half just to check - you can always cover this one with plenty of sauce so that no one can see!).

To make the sauce, heat some oil in a heavy-base sauce pan, then add a finely chopped onion and fry until soft. Add three cloves of garlic, finely sliced and a generous measure of finely chopped basil and parsely. I tend to use dried herbs, but I am hoping to start growning my own once the weather starts to get a bit warmer. Season with freshly ground black pepper and continue to fry, stiring often, for another minute or so. Add a tin of chopped tomatos. At this time of the year, there are no British tomatos available and the tinned variety offer an excellent way of getting a good, solid tomato flavour into food. Go for the highest quality ones you can, the own-brand ones can be OK, but they tend to be more acidic than the slightly more expensive varieties. Add a generous measure of soy sauce, cover and simmer gently. Leave to simmer for about 10 - 15 minutes. The soy sauce should add enough salt, but taste the sauce as it's cooking and add more if you feel it needs it.

I served my venison meat balls with the tomato sauce and peas on a bed of pasta.

Sunnyfields Farm Shop and Market

2010-02-08T21:02:00.005Z

It's been a while since I last shopped at a farmers market, so I was keen to see what Sunnyfields (http://www.sunnyfields.co.uk/) market and farm shop would have to offer. I was not disappointed! For one thing, they have a fairly nice cafe which serves good, wholesome food cooked on site. I had my lunch there when I went, which was apparently their 'sustainable dish of the day'. It was sausages and mash and it was really rather good.

As well as serving really rather good food, they have a small but well stocked farm shop and an open-air market. The shop has a good selection of organic vegetables, meat and dairy products. The market appears to be attended by a number of local producers, offering a good selection of produce! It's well worth checking out I would say!

Whilst I was there, I picked up some excellent bacon and some 'traditional' Venison sausages, both of which were excellent.

Both of these were good, but the venison sausages were fantastic. I cooked them in the oven, at 180C for about 40 minutes. I served them with boiled potatos, peas and the chutney I made from the tomatos I grew back last summer.

Roast vegetables and Venison Burgers

2010-01-27T17:15:00.006Z

Many winter vegetables, such as parsnips and carrots are almost unbelievably good when roasted! Even if you don't like these vegetables boiled or raw, I'd suggest given them a try this way. Here, I've roasted some carrots, parsnips and shallot onions.

I sliced the parsnips length wise into halves and did the same with the larger of the carrots - the smaller ones can be left as they are. I peeled the shallots, but otherwise left them whole. Simply place the lot in a baking tray or roasting tin and cover liberally with oil. I used cold pressed rapeseed oil, which has a wonderful yellow colour and a good flavour for this kind of cooking. However, olive oil would work well to. Add a good sprinkling of salt and pepper and then place in the oven at 180C (I don't know what gas mark that is, sorry!) for about 40 minutes, or until you can push a fork into the parsnips fairly easily. The end result should look something like this:

I used my roasted vegetables to go with pan fried Venison burgers, which I simply did in the frying pan over a moderate heat and served with boiled potatos.

Baby Cabbage

2010-01-20T16:34:00.005Z

I came across these during my latest trip to the supermarket. I haven't seen these before and they are British, so I thought I'd have to give them a try. I've only used one so far, just in a simple dish with spaghetti similar to one I've blogged about before (click here to see it). They are slightly sweeter then a fully grown cabbage and have a really nice, firm texture. Actually, it tasted really rather good! Looking more closely I think shows all the signs to look for when choosing a nice, fresh cabbage:

The colouring on this leaf is just perfect! It looks really rich and inviting and there is a healthy sheen to the stalk. This is what fresh cabbage should look like, not the limp, dull, lifeless things you often see.

Anyway, I did rather well for British vegetables this time round, as you can see:

Vegetable	Grown in
Baby green cabbage	Lincolnshire
Baby Chantenay carrots	Nottinghamshire
Curly kale	Lincolnshire
Parsnips	Suffolk
Shallots	Lincolnshire
Leeks	Cambridgshire

This really is a good season for British vegetables!

Jerusalem Artichokes

2010-01-18T17:14:00.006Z

A slightly strange vegetable this one! I wasn't sure what was the best thing to do with them to be honest, but I opted for a cream of artichoke soup. This is really easy to make, just peel the artichokes and chop them into rough cubes. Then, heat some oil in a pan and gently soften a chopped onion and some garlic. Add the artichokes, roughly 50 ml double cream and water to cover. Then, season with salt and pepper and simmer gently until the artichokes are tender. Then, simply blitz it all together in a food processor or blender, until smooth. That's it! Personally, I think artichokes have a very distinctive flavour which is something of an acquired taste.

On my last shopping trip, I also noticed that baby British carrots seem to be in season already! I used then to go with a honey glazed pork chop I had the other day:

Cavolo Nero Cabbage, Sprouts and Bacon with Spaghetti

2010-01-08T16:03:00.003Z

After all my talk in my last post about making shopping more adventurous by selecting products based on what is most local and most fresh, I thought it would be good to show something of an example. This approach to shopping really works best for vegetables and in fact I would go as far as to say that it is the best way to buy vegetables.

So, on a typical trip to the supermarket, I will hunt around in the vegetable section to see what's good and what's not, adding things to my trolley based on freshness and and how local it appears to be. Once I feel I've investigated everything on offer, I usually have a good selection in the trolley. At this point, I'll sometimes put one or two items back if it looks like I've got more than I'll need to last me a week and make a mental note to look for them again next week. Having chosen the vegetables, I will then choose what meat to buy based on the vegetables that were available, rather than the classic method of having a pre-set menu in mind before reaching the shop.

Now, I don't deny that this approach to shopping does take longer, but I still manage to do it in the evening after getting home from work, so it really isn't too bad. Sometimes other, more focused, shoppers get a bit irate at me for constantly going backwards and forwards in the vegetable section rather than following the unwritten (and unsigned) rules for correct supermarket navigation. But, I find that by taking a little longer over the shopping, it actually becomes a more enjoyable experience and I leave the shop significantly more relaxed than if I'd been barging around.

My last shopping trip was a great example of the benefits of this process. I found two vegetables that I haven't cooked with before, both of which are British produce. These were Jerusalem Artichokes, which I'll come back to in a later post and Cavolo Nero cabbage. The cabbage just looked really exciting! It's a very dark green colour, almost black in places. It has very long, narrow leaves and the packet informed me that it was originally from Italy but is now grown in the UK. So, I couldn't really resist getting some to give it a try in something. I also picked up some spouts, also UK produce, which are really good value at the moment – I got 50% extra free! I heard somewhere that there was something of a glut in sprout production this growing season, so suppliers have been selling them off cheap to try to get rid of them. I don't know how true that is, but they do seem to be exceptionally good value at the moment, for whatever reason.

There is a very simple and very quick recipe that I find is great for using winter greens, such as cabbage, spinach or indeed spouts. I'm not entirely sure what to call it really, so I won't give it a name beyond the one I've put as the title for this post, which says precisely what it is. Wash and chop about 5 or 6 leaves of the cabbage and remove the stalks and outer leaves from a handful of sprouts. At this point, put some spaghetti into a pan of lightly salted, boiling water. The pasta I use takes about 8 to 10 minutes to cook, which is just perfect for this recipe. Chop some bacon and then fry in a little vegetable oil until it starts to go crispy at the edges. Add the cabbage and continue to fry on a high heat until it starts to wilt, stirring it around occasionally. Then, add the halved spouts and continue stirring it around for another couple of minutes. Once the spaghetti is done, drain the water away and return the pasta to the pan. Liberally pour over some extra virgin olive oil and stir it around to make sure the pasta doesn't stick together or to the sides of the pan. Add the fried bacon, cabbage and spouts and stir around. Finally, I really like to add a generous portion of pine nut kernels, which are almost certainly not British, but I just love them! I like to add a little course sea salt and some freshly ground black pepper as well. Stir it all around in the pan once or twice and then serve immediately. This really is a very fast dish to prepare – it can be done in only the time it takes the water in the pan to come to the boil and the pasta to cook through.

Happy New Year!

2010-01-06T15:47:00.001Z

Firstly, I would like to wish all my readers a really great New Year for 2010! May your year be full of wonderful culinary treats.

Many people may well be thinking more about dieting and cutting back on the food at this time of the year, after the over indulgences of the Christmas season. Personally, I think there is always room for good food, but if you are dieting at the moment then I really do wish you the very best of luck!

I don't really go in for new year's resolutions much myself, but if I did one I would make would be to try even harder through 2010 to explore local and British produce. I'd like to think that some of my readers may have been inspired to do something similar. Ingredients, in particular vegetables, always taste better the fresher they are. This is one of the reasons why vegetables you've grown yourself always taste better – you can't get much fresher then something pulled or picked and used within minutes. It stands to reason that the further vegetables have to be transported, the less fresh they will be and the less fresh they are, the less tasty they will be. Put simply, locally produced food such as vegetables, will be tastier than those grown hundreds of miles away.Of course, the availability of local vegetables is subject to the seasons, so it might be hard for someone who is used to cooking the same recipes over and over throughout the year. There isn't necessarily anything wrong with this and it should be possible to use local ingredients for at least part of the year. But personally, through doing the EatingBritish thing a while back and by continuing with this blog now, I find that my shopping habits have changed significantly. I still do most of my shopping at the supermarket, simply for the convenience really. However, instead of going along with a fixed menu for the week ahead, I go with an open mind and choose the ingredients that are the most local and the most fresh. In this way, the diversity of my cooking has increased enormously! And, it really adds some excitement to a shopping trip because it becomes something of an adventure. The adventure doesn't stop in the supermarket though, it continues in the kitchen when you get back home as you explore a new ingredient. If you've never tried shopping this way before, perhaps I could suggest that you make a, slightly late I admit, new year's resolution to try at least once in a while!

Fresh Basil Cafe, Belper

2009-11-04T16:40:00.005Z

Gosh, it's been a while since I've posted anything! Sorry! Things have been a bit hectic just recently with two weddings and much to do at work. Anyway, I thought it was time for another post.

One of the weddings I was at was in the small town of Belper, in Derbyshire. A quick search of the Internet before I went revealed that a cafe called 'Fresh Basil' was a good place to eat, so I thought I had to check it out:

Inside was a wonderful Deli, with all kinds of meat and cheese for sale. There were also a number of tables set out, in what was obviously the cafe part of the establishment. I was very keen to have some kind of local, Derbyshire speciality if possible, so I was delighted when looking over the menu I spotted "Hot Derbyshire Salad". I was, in fact, about 10 minutes too late for ordering food, but to their great credit, they made it for me anyway, which I think says a lot. It's a shame that this level of customer service isn't more prevalent. Anyway, the dish that arrived was truly something to behold:

It's a mix of hot black pudding and bacon, with sliced apple, served on a bed of leaves with a balsamic vinegar dressing. It was really good! I have to say, I'm not always the biggest fan of black pudding, but here it worked really well. The sharpness of the fresh apple perfectly balanced the heaviness of the black pudding.

Anyway, I can most heartily recommend this place, if you should find yourself in Derbyshire, near to Belper. It was definitely worth the visit for me. The wedding was good to, of course! :-)

Cornwall

2009-09-16T11:29:00.007+01:00

Well, I'm on holiday in Cornwall! I am staying in the village of Mousehole, which is a lovely place on the coast. I haven't had too many opportunities yet for sampling local produce, but no trip to Cornwall would be complete without at least one Cornish pasty:

I really like Cornish pasties - there is something so earthy, if that's the right word, about the design. It's so obviously designed as a means of holding the steak and potatoes and other bits and bobs together in a package that can be easily held in the hand. Of course, this really is the whole purpose of sandwiches and things like that - food in an edible package. This particular example was enjoyed during a visit to Healey's Cornish Cyder Farm (see here) and a fine Cornish pasty it was to! The cider farm was a really interesting visit as well (cyder, with a 'y' is a Cornish variant of the spelling of cider, apparently). The guided tour was worth the money I felt and we were taken round the farm and shown how the cider is produced. We also got a ride in a trailer pulled by an ancient tractor, which took us around the orchard where the apples are grown. One interesting part of the tour was a small 'museum' where they have a collection of old machinery used for cider making in the past. According to our tour guide, a Cooper (someone who makes barrels) would undergo a 7 year apprenticeship before being able to qualify as a professional. At the end of their course, they would have to produce an inverted barrel which should look something like this:

Now, I profess to know absolutely nothing about wood work, but this looks a hard task to me! Not only did they have to get the shape right, but it also had to be completely air tight and this would be tested by immersing it in water and watching for any bubbles coming out. If they failed this task, they would have to do another 2 years apprenticeship before having another go! Unsurprisingly, many dropped out along the way. Our tour guide knew of only one place in the UK now where barrels are still made in the traditional way, by one man, up in Scotland. I think it's kind of sad that these traditional industries have died out so extensively and how we generally have so little respect for manual trades such as this compared to past times.

Cornwall is also famous for clotted cream, although there is some competition between Cornwall and Devon for which is the best! I couldn't possibly go without a traditional cream tea of scones with strawberry jam and clotted cream:

Very nice. The clotted cream came with a particularly thick crust, which is of course how it should be:

Lovely.

Home grown

2009-09-04T16:13:00.007+01:00

I was up in Lincolnshire visiting family earlier this week, who, being in possession of a reasonably sized garden, are much more into growing fruit and vegetables than I am! Actually, the apple trees seem to have produced an abundance of fruit this year compared to previous years.

They have also had an excellent crop of runner beans, although I think everyone ends up in the same position with runner beans in that you wait for ages and then they all come at once! Someone from work was selling runner bean chutney a couple of weeks ago - a product of a glut of runner beans and wondering what to do with them I suspect, but an enterprising one at that.

The squash were also looking good:

And, I couldn't help but notice that the hawthorn berries were ready to be picked:

So, I have gathered a good crop of hawthorn berries. I plan to have another go at making fruit leather in the manner described by Ray Mears on TV a couple of years ago. I tried this once before (see here), but it didn't really work properly, so I'm keen to have another go. Watch this space!

The first crop of tomatoes!

2009-08-27T15:36:00.003+01:00

225g of tomato goodness! Actually, there are so many tomatoes still forming that I am beginning to wonder what to do with them all. Though we did have some stormy weather last night, so I think a few of the longer branches might have been damaged. None have broken off, so we'll have to see if they recover. However, it looks like I'll easily have enough to make a good quantity of chutney! Super.

Blacksticks Blue cheese

2009-08-21T16:20:00.004+01:00

I tried this cheese the other day. I'm generally a fan of blue cheese, so I though I'd give this one a go. I have to say, it's fairly good! I enjoyed it with biscuits, always the best way to enjoy cheese in my opinion. Well, crusty bread works well to I suppose, but biscuits felt the way to go in this case. I'm not sure how best to describe it really, it's kind of creamy like Stilton, but maybe not as much. The flavour was subtly different as well, I recommend giving it a try!

According to the British Cheese Board (http://www.britishcheese.com/why_eat_cheese), 65% of adults admit that cheese is one of their favourite foods. Well, there you go.

Plants - Grow your own chillies, sweet peppers and tomatoes!

2009-08-18T16:33:00.005+01:00

To my great delight, I noticed while watering last night that some of my tomatoes are starting to ripen! It's such a great feeling, watching plants grow knowing that you're going to be able to enjoy the fruits (literally!) of your labour very soon. I never cease to be amazed at how few people even try to grow their own, it's great fun and requires very little space. I only have a small patio and yet I can still grow a decent quantity of tomatoes, even if they are now a little on the rampant side:

Unfortunately, my attempts to support the plants with canes has failed, with the result that they have tumbled all over the place. However, they still seem to be doing well, though I am concerned that some of the fruit is resting on the ground which probably isn't good. I'll have to do something about that soon.

The chillies are continuing to do well, actually, they are nearly all ripe now I think, so I shall have to pick them soon:

Wild blackberries

2009-08-12T16:45:00.004+01:00

The season for blackberries seems to have come rather early this year! I am lucky enough to live next to a large park with plenty of wild blackberries, so I took the opportunity to head out and gather some.

My plan is to use them to make jam, although I may need to get more then this for that. Actually, I was surprised that there weren't more ready to be picked, though as you can see from the pictures, there will be plenty more in a few days time. I try to avoid picking any that are below roughly waist height, since these are easily reached by dogs and foxes...

Plants - Grow your own chillies, sweet peppers and tomatoes

2009-08-11T16:16:00.004+01:00

All of the fruit I'm growing seems to be doing really well! The chillies are coming along nicely and I think some of them will be ready for using fairly soon:

The sweet peppers are also looking good:

I'm not sure how much longer it will before these start to ripen, but I don't think they'll be ready for a while yet. I have three other sweet pepper plants, one of which is now flowering, but the one featured in the picture is along way ahead for some reason. Treating them with washing up liquid solution for the white fly didn't do them much good and resulted in the leaves curling up a bit, but the good news is that they are all producing new leaves which look perfectly healthy!

Last, but not least, the tomatoes are doing amazingly well and I'm looking out every day now for the first red fruit:

These are just the fruit that are easy to see, there are plenty more hidden underneath the branches of the other plants! The leaves have started to turn a bit yellow, which I think happens has the plant starts to put more energy into producing fruit. I have pinched some of the tops out to let the plants focus on ripening the fruit and I have been giving them a little liquid fertilizer every time I water. Hopefully, this will mean that I get lots of great tasting tomatoes!

Home made, fresh chicken stock

2009-08-05T16:25:00.008+01:00

Well, I promised a post on making fresh chicken stock from a roast chicken, so here we are! Obviously, the first step is to roast a chicken, which I assume you'll have done. I will also assume that you have eaten your fill of the meat and are left with a carcass which looks something like this:

Using a sharp knife, remove as much of the meat as you can. This can be used for all sorts of things, such as stir fry's, risottos, etc, so it's worth keeping and we don't really need it for making the stock.

If you followed my recipe for roasting a chicken, then you'll have the vegetables (onion, carrot, celery) left over from the roasting tin. Put all of these, along with the carcass into a large saucepan and add enough water to nearly cover everything:

Now, cover the pan and bring to the simmer with a low heat. Leave it simmering for approximately two hours or so. You'll need to check on it from time to time to make sure it isn't getting too dry, so add more water every so often. After about two hours, it should look something like this:

When it is done, the bones will be completely clean and the carcass will have fallen apart. Now, to extract the stock, simply strain this through a sieve, using a fork or something similar to squeeze out every last drop of juice. When that's done, you should end up

with something like this:

Once this has cooled down, it can be frozen and kept for quite a while. Fresh stock is excellent for making risotto! Enjoy.

Plants - Home grown chillies

2009-08-04T16:34:00.002+01:00

Well, the plants I'm growing are continuing to do really well! Actually, I noticed the other day that the chillies are starting to ripen! So, some good curries are not too far away. The sweet peppers are coming along nicely to, but they are still green.

Roast Chicken

2009-07-27T08:54:00.005+01:00

Roast chicken is something of a British classic in my opinion - and very simple to do! Simply take a chicken, season it with salt, freshly ground black pepper and some herbs. In this case, I've used parsley and basil, which I find add a good flavour to most dishes. Chop a couple of carrots, an onion and some celery and place around the chicken, as shown in the picture. The idea of these vegetables it add flavour to the gravy, which we will make from the juices that come from the meat. I usually lightly drizzle olive oil over the chicken and the vegetables as well. Then, simply place in the oven. It's best to follow the cooking guidelines on the label of the chicken as times will vary depending on the size.

As it's cooking, take it out of the oven a couple of times to baste it. Simply tip the tray up and use a spoon to cover the roasting chicken with the juice that will have formed in the tray. Once the chicken is cooked, it's time to make the gravy. This is really easy and I don't know why more people don't make their own gravy when the cook a roast - the flavour is so much better then the dried gravy granules that you can buy. Remove the chicken from the tray and leave on a plate to rest, covered with a sheet of kitchen foil to keep the heat in. Using a sieve, strain out the contents of the roasting tray into a suitable container, such as a measuring jug. Then, pour a few table spoons of cold water into the roasting tray and stir this around to pick up the last of the juices. Pour this into measuring jug with the rest of the strained juice. You will probably find that the gravy separates into two layers, the top one of which is fat. It's probably not a good idea to have too much fat in your gravy, so you can use a spoon to carefully remove as much of this layer as you can. Once that's done, you can thicken the gravy if you want. To do this, simply mix a little flour into some cold water in a cup. Then, place the gravy into a small pan on a low heat and slowly add the flour and water mixture whilst stirring, until you get the desired consistency. That's it! It might sound a lot, but it really is very simple and the same procedure can be used to make gravy from other meats as well as chicken, such as roast beef.

I like to keep a roast simple, so in this case I served it with boiled potatoes, English green cabbage
One of the great things about roast chicken is that you can use all the left overs to make the most amazing fresh chicken stock, but I'll cover that in another post. Enjoy!

Plants

2009-07-24T08:54:00.003+01:00

Well, I haven't posted for a little while now, but needless to say the plants have been getting on well! The tomatoes especially have been growing like anything and are now producing fruit: I am really looking forward to being able to eat some of these! Although, judging by the number of flowers on the plants, I'm going to be inundated with tomatoes. I shall probably have to make some chutney, so that I don't have to waste any. But, that will be great as I can then have tomato goodness through at least some of the winter.

The sweet pepper plants are also doing OK, although they suffered a major attack of white fly. I dealt with this by spraying them a strong solution of washing-up liquid in water, which isn't terribly good for the plant, but is much worse for the white fly. I gave them three treatments in all and it seems to have done the trick, so fingers crossed!
As you can just see in this photo, these are starting to produce fruit as well, which is exciting! Hopefully the washing-up liquid wont have done too much damage.

Pad fried British chicken breast with sautéed vegetables

2009-07-07T08:37:00.004+01:00

This is a great recipe for chicken breast, which I absolutely love. Like nearly all of my cooking, it's very simple, although does perhaps require a little more effort than many of the recipes on this site.

First of all, lightly season a chicken breast with salt, freshly ground black pepper and some dried basil. I tend to use dried herbs for this kind of cooking, saving the fresh stuff for use in salads and stuff, where it has more impact.

Then, heat some oil in a pan, you going to want it to be really quite hot to start with, but not quite smoking. Place the seasoned chicken breast into the pan and fry on a high heat on each side until brown. This will take around 2 to 3 minutes for each side. The idea here is to seal in the juices of the meat. Once sealed, turn the heat down and cook for about 20 minutes, turned occasionally. If the chicken breast is really thick or you want it to cook more quickly, then you can 'butterfly' it. To do this, simply cut it length-wise down the middle, but not all the way through, so that you can open it up, in a manner similar to opening a book. This way, the two halves will be thinner and so will cook much more quickly.

While that's cooking, it's time to sauté the vegetables. In this example, I used the most exciting British vegetables I could find. At this time of the year, that includes quite a lot, so I have used red and yellow sweet pepper, courgette, aubergine, mushrooms and spinach. Simply slice and chop all the vegetables, as you would for a stir fry. I fried some chopped onion first and then added the aubergine, followed by the mushrooms, the courgette, the pepper and finally the spinach, waiting for around 2 minutes between each and stirring continuously. I used a good handful of spinach leaves, which looks a lot when you first put it in the pan, but the leaves shrink to a fraction of their original size as they cook. Season with salt, freshly ground black pepper and some dark soy sauce. Cook for a further 5 minutes or so, stirring regularly.

I find that you can often tell when the chicken breast is cooked through by poking it with a sharp stick, or a fork, whichever is most convenient at the time. The idea is to make a small hole through the skin and into the meat. If the juice that comes out of this hole (you might need to press down on the chicken breast around it) runs clear, then it is probably cooked. Like all recipes, I suggest you try this out just on yourself to begin with, so you can remove the meat from the pan and cut it in half to check. With practice, you'll get it right.

Once everything is cooked, slice the cooked chicken breast into strips and serve on a bed of the sautéed vegetables, with boiled new potatoes. Nice.

British soft fruit

2009-06-26T15:10:00.005+01:00

This is without a doubt one of the best times of the year for buying British produce in supermarkets! On a recent trip to my local supermarket, I found strawberries, blackberries and raspberries in the fruit section and aubergines and courgettes in the vegetable section, all grown in Britain.

I'll come to the vegetables in a later post, but for now I want to talk about the fruit. I always think that soft fruit grown n Britain tastes better, which I think is simply because it hasn't had to be shipped or flown a great distance to get here. Or, it could just be that we grow different varieties of fruit here, I don't know. But, I do know that it tastes great and that's the main thing!
I like to eat fruit with my breakfast and a great way to do that is to blend the fruit up with some natural yogurt and have it with some kind of cereal in place of milk. Here, I have rinsed the strawberries, blackberries and raspberries and then added them to around four or five large dessert spoons of natural yogurt. Blend this all together briefly – I don't like it to get too smooth, I think it should still have identifiable bits of fruit in it. Then, simply pour over a bowl of cereal, in this case I'm using an oat and honey cereal. You could add some sugar if you want, I didn't because of the honey already in the cereal I'm using.
That's it! Something very simple, but hopefully it'll inspire you to go out and buy British soft fruit while you can. Remember, it's a relatively short season...

Plants

2009-06-25T15:54:00.005+01:00

My attempt at seeing how much food I can grow myself at home, despite only having a small patio, continues to go well! The tomatoes are doing splendidly and are beginning to produce flowers, as you can see here:
I've had to do some minor structural engineering to support them though. I've grown tomatoes before and the plants do seem unusually bad at supporting themselves. Looking at the leaves and the stem closely reveals them to be covered in lots of tiny hairs, which makes me wonder if in the wild the tomato plant would sort of 'Velcro' itself to other plants growing around it. Otherwise, I really don't see how they would get on in the wild with no one to make some sort of supports for them. Of course, tomato plants such as these are the result of many, many years of careful selected breeding, so it's quite possible that the original tomato plants were more than capable of supporting themselves. Through selective breeding, plants will have been developed to produce the most fruit, which could well have lead to plants that seem intrinsically top heavy and unable to support themselves.

I have also been growing chillies, although I haven't blogged about these before. A friend has very kindly been looking after these for me whilst I was in the process of moving, which was much appreciated! However, I now have them in my flat and they are doing really well! They have produced fruit before and I did have an attempt at making curry from them, which worked well, but I am looking forward to perfecting it. I did try eating one of the fruits whole, straight from the plant, which was something of a mistake. They may be small, but they are very powerful! The plants themselves make quite nice house plants as well; they produce small, pale purple flowers which actually smell really nice. When the sun shines on them through my patio doors it makes the whole living room smell! Home grown chillies and free air freshener to boot, you don't get much better than that.
The sweet peppers I planted are also continuing to do really well:
I believe that these will get to be about one or two feet in height before producing fruit, so they have some way to go yet. It's interesting that one of them has got to be much bigger, by almost a factor of two in terms of height, then the others. I'm not sure what could have caused this, except perhaps it has had more sunlight, so I have rearranged them to see if I can't even things out a little bit.

I have also planted some butternut squash seeds, which have germinated and are growing very quickly:

This is quite impressive as I only planted these just over a week ago! These will be able to go outside once they are strong enough. Luckily, I have two spare spaces in the grow bags I'm using for the tomatoes, so I shall plant these there.

Wild Venison

2009-06-17T09:22:00.003+01:00

You've got to admit, there's something inherently exciting about any food with 'wild' in the name. 'Wild boar' sounds so much better then 'pork', for example and I'm sure even 'wild carrots' would attract more attention than the common or garden variety. So, when visiting a relatively local farm shop recently I came across wild venison, well, I could hardly turn down the opportunity to try it out. They sold either fillet steak or rump steak, so I went for the rump steak as it was slightly cheaper. I incidentally also bought some carrots while I was there, although they were not described as being 'wild'.
Venison is quite an interesting meat – it's quite dark in colour and has a heavy, almost livery smell when raw. It's also naturally very lean, as the packaging in this case testifies. It can be cooked just like a fillet of beef or any other steak really – in a pan. Of course, there are many other ways of cooking venison, pot roast in particular springs to mind, but I quite like to have the steak almost just as it is. So, simply season lightly with salt and black pepper (freshly ground if possible!). Then simply place in a hot frying pan, or as I'm using here, a grill pan. The pan needs to be really hot before the meat goes in as we are aiming to seal in the juices and hence the flavour. If the pan was too cool and the meat heated up slowly, then it would lose a lot more juice.
Cook on one side for three to four minutes, before turning and repeating the same on the other side. I tend to turn the heat down a bit at this point, so that I don't fill the kitchen up with smoke, but it should still be kept fairly high. How long you cook it for depends on how you like your steak. Deciding when a steak is done the way you like it is something that takes a bit of practice (best to get this right before cooking for guests!). My method is to press my finger onto the top of the steak in the pan (you have to be fairly quick, to avoid getting burnt) to feel how firm it is. You can then compare this to either your top lip, the tip of your nose, or the centre of your forehead. This isn't as crazy as it may sound! If the meat is as soft as your top lip, for example, then it will be rare. Likewise, if it feels more like the tip of your nose, then it should be roughly medium. Obviously, if it is really firm, like your forehead, then it will be well done. Note that this is really only good as a rough guide line! You'll need to try it out once or twice to get the hang of it. If you're just cooking for yourself, then it doesn't matter if you cut the steak in half to see how it's doing in the centre and if it's not done well enough, then simply put it back in the pan for a few more minutes. If you are aiming for medium to well done, then it helps to turn the steak over occasionally since this makes sure it gets more evenly browned, which makes presentation easier and it will slightly speed up the cooking process.

Plants

2009-06-08T16:26:00.004+01:00

Well, it's been a busy couple of weeks there, so sorry for not posting for a while! But, while I've been away the tomato and sweet pepper plants have been doing really well. I have now transferred the tomato plants to grow bags, which are outdoors. It will still be a while before they have any fruit, but hopefully they'll do well. The sweet peppers are also looking good and I have now separated the four strongest plants. It's always sad having to throw away all the others that have grown so well, but none of them would survive if left in the same pot and I simply don't have enough pots (or space) to keep them all...

Plants

2009-05-21T16:57:00.006+01:00

Well, the tomato plants I'm growing are doing really well! They are almost ready to be planted out in a grow bag. In the end I kept the five strongest seedlings and planted them into individual pots. I only photographed one of the five, which happened to be the biggest, but the others are similar. The peppers are not growing anywhere near as quickly, although they are coming along. I have decided to wait until they grow their second set of leaves before transferring them into separate pots, just like I did for the tomatoes. Actually, this works out really well because by the look of it they will be ready for this at just about the same time as the tomatoes are ready to plant out.

I don't know quite how many I shall keep, probably only three or four. I have to remember that all the other seeds I have bought but not planted yet will need some space!

Crops (rapeseed and potatoes)

2009-05-19T16:17:00.008+01:00

I'm sure anyone who has been through some British countryside recently will have noticed the bright yellow fields of Oilseed rape. I always think that these look absolutely beautiful, especially when contrasted with the green of other fields nearby and a clear, blue sky. As far as I am aware, most of this crop will be used to make vegetable oil for cooking, or bio-diesel. I did a feature a while ago on rapeseed oil, which has a high smoke point making it ideal for, amongst other things, stir frying.

I also noticed that potatoes have been planted and are just beginning to shoot. These don't look quite so pretty, but are certainly quite useful!

Tebay Service Station

2009-05-18T08:38:00.011+01:00

I recently had cause to visit the Tebay service station on the M6, whilst driving down from Edinburgh. You might well ask why this is so interesting, given that there are plenty of service stations along the M6, why should this one be so unique? Good question, but as far as I am aware, Tebay is relatively famous in the world of motorway service stations. At least part of the reason for this is that it has a fabulous shop that sells all kinds of local produce range from food such as sausages and vegetables, to various craft items. In short, given my interest in British produced food, I could hardly drive by without popping in! Actually, I had hoped to visit during my original EatingBritish year, but somehow never quite had the time (I was also without a car for much of it, so that didn't help either).

I didn't stop for as long as I would have liked really, since I still had about 300 miles to go and was keen to keep moving. However, I wondered around the shop and they do indeed sell an amazing array of local produce. In the end, I bought some lamb, cranberry and orange sausages and, in keeping with my efforts to work my way through all the different cheeses produced in Britain, some Blue Wensleydale cheese.

Both turned out to be really good! The cheese is wonderfully creamy, fairly similar to Stilton in flavour, but perhaps a bit rounder. The sausages, which I cooked in the oven (30 minutes, at 190C) and served with potatoes and peas (the way I nearly always do sausages), where absolutely delicious.

If it wasn't so far away, I would definitely go back! However, I will have to resolve to pop in if I am ever passing that way on the M6 again and I would recommend it as a good stopping point should you every find yourself over that way.

More information is available from their website:

http://www.westmorland.com/tebay

Plants

2009-05-05T16:37:00.005+01:00

The tomato plants I've started growing are continuing to do really well:
They will soon be ready to be transplanted into individual pots. The time to do this is when they get their second set of leaves. The first leaves to form will have smooth edges, as you can see in the picture. The second set and all subsequent sets, will have jagged edges, so it's quite easy to tell when they are ready. You can just see in the picture that the new leaves are starting to form, but it'll be a day or two yet.

The sweet pepper plants are starting to shoot as well!
I shall leave the cling film on for a little while yet, just while one or two more shoots appear.

Chicken and asparagus stir fry

2009-04-30T16:22:00.008+01:00

Another nice recipe for using all that British asparagus that's now in season!

This is a really easy and really tasty recipe. First, cut the chicken breast into strips and place in a bowl with some soy sauce (for a British alternative, consider anchovy sauce, it doesn't taste the same, but it adds the same kind of rich, saltiness that you get from soy sauce), chopped garlic and dried (or even better, fresh) basil. I also like to add a generous portion of freshly ground black pepper. Mix all this up and set aside for around half an hour.

Then, simply chop two or three (depending on the size) shallot onions, half a red pepper, half a yellow pepper and some asparagus. I like to keep the asparagus fairly long, so I cut it into three or four sections. Add some oil to a wok and heat until it's nice and hot. Then fry the shallot onions until they are soft and beginning to turn brown. Add the chicken and continue to cook on a high heat. I find that you can tell that the chicken is cooked through when you can break a piece in two using only a blunt wooden spoon, but this will generally take about 5 minutes. Stir regularly while it's cooking to avoid anything sticking to the wok. Next, add the chopped sweet pepper and cook for another 3 to 4 minutes, until beginning to soften. You could also add some frozen peas at this point if you like.

Add the asparagus last, as it requires the least cooking and you don't want to over cook it.
Cook for a further three or four minutes. Serve with rice, as shown above. That's it!

Tomato plants

2009-04-29T16:23:00.005+01:00

To my great surprise, the tomato seeds that I sowed earlier on are already shooting and looking fairly healthy: So, they no longer need to be in a propagator, so I have removed the cling film covering from the pot. I will let them grow a little bit bigger and then I will transplant them into individual small pots. I didn't expect anything to happen quite so soon. There is no sign of activity from the sweet peppers yet and I haven't had time to plant all the other seeds.

Asparagus

2009-04-28T16:40:00.006+01:00

Apparently, British Asparagus is now in season! It's a very short season, so make the most of it while you can! As an example of all the wonderful things that can be done with Asparagus, I made a sausage and Asparagus gratin. It's very simple:

Finely chop a medium sized onion. Cut the sausages into roughly 1 inch lengths and mix with half of the chopped onion in a heat proof dish. I like to use whole Asparagus, rather then just the spears, but I think it's best to cut off the woody bit right at the very bottom of the stalks. I then chopped the Asparagus stalks into sections and mixed them in with the sausages and onions. Add some salt, pepper, a splash of olive oil and some herbs (fresh herbs are always best if you have them!), I like to use basil in this kind of dish, but parsley would also work well. Add half a tin of chopped tomatoes and the rest of the chopped onion. Then, cover with thinly sliced, raw potato and a final dusting of salt and pepper, as shown:

Cook this in the over, at 190C for about an hour. After it's been in for about 45 minutes, I like to take it out and add some grated cheese to the top, but this is optional.

OK, maybe I need to work on my presentation, but I'm not a professional chef (poor excuse) and I can assure you that it was very tasty!

Sausages

2009-04-23T16:54:00.004+01:00

Sausages made from British meat always seem to be available, so I tend to eat them quite often. A slightly less well known form of sausage is the beef sausage and there are some particularly fine Aberdeen Angus beef sausages around in the supermarkets. I always prefer to cook sausages in the oven, which takes about 30 minutes at 190C. This gives plenty of time to do something else, like make a tasty sauce to go with them!

Such a sauce can be made easily enough from some chopped shallot onions, which have a much sweeter flavour then 'normal' onions, half a tin of chopped tomatoes and some garlic. Simply fry the shallots in some oil until they are soft. As far as I can tell, British shallots are around in the supermarkets at the moment. For the oil, olive oil works well, but for a British alternative, consider cold-pressed hemp seed oil. This has a slightly different flavour, but it's quite nice and it has many of the same good qualities of olive oil. Add some salt, pepper and chopped garlic (about 3 sections from the bulb). Stir this around and let it simmer away until the onion is soft. Then, simply add half a tin of chopped tomatoes, stir, then cover and leave to simmer gently until the sausages are done. I have never found tins of chopped British tomatoes, but it would be equally possible to use fresh tomatoes, but they should be peeled first, which does take some time (to make this a bit easier, blanch them in boiling water first, but remember, they'll be hot afterwards!).

Once the sausages are done, I like to chop them and stir into the sauce before serving with pasta or mashed potatoes. Of course, unless you make your own pasta, it probably wont be British.

Home grown vegetables

2009-04-22T16:26:00.009+01:00

Well, it's been a while since I last posted! I've been busy moving down to the South of England and starting a new job, which I think is a good enough excuse.
Anyway, I now have some outdoor space, so I can finally grow some of my own food! This is quite exciting because it means I'll be able to have British grown tomatoes, courgettes and butter-nut squash. Well, British tomatoes will be in the shops eventually, but it'll take a while. Mind you, the seeds I've bought will take a while as well, so we'll have to see which is first - watch this space!

I also bought seeds for coriander and basil, both of which I use a lot in cooking. As I found when I did the year of eating only British food, it's very hard, if not impossible to find British produced herbs. And, because there was a special offer on, I got some sweet pepper seeds as well, but they'll only grow indoors, along with the herbs.

So far, I have only planted the tomatoes and the sweet peppers:

I don't have a propagator, or a green house, so I've used clingfilm over the top of the pots. Not very exciting yet, but watch this space, they should start germinating soon! Now is the time to get planting most things, in fact it's almost too late for the tomatoes. The butternut squash and the courgettes will get planted next month. I will transfer these to grow bags on my patio once they are big enough to fend for themselves outside.

The impact of the credit crunch on farming?

2009-01-20T18:14:00.003Z

Five months ago, when I round up this blog for a temporary pause, we were facing a situation of rising food prices. This was caused by a few factors, but largely by the rise in the cost of fuel. Of course, as we all know, this has changed somewhat now and the cost of fuel has come down to a much more reasonable price. But, what impact will the credit crunch have on farming and hence on our food? I found this video quite interesting, from Farmers Weekly Interactive:

Agriculture and the recession

What surprised me the most is that it seems that farming has historically done quite well in a recession, so we might expect to see more of the same this time round. However, of course, this time it is going to be much harder for farmers to get credit, which is likely to have some impact on their business. I have to admit that I really don't understand all the issues at stake here, but I will continue to look into it.

Cauliflower soup

2009-01-18T16:56:00.013Z

British cauliflower should be coming into season in February, so I thought I'd post a relevant recipe, for cauliflower soup. I think cauliflower is one of those underrated vegetables, like sprouts, that get their reputation because many people only every experience them when they haven't been cooked properly.

Anyway, I'd recommend giving this a try, even if you don't normally like cauliflower. The base for this soup is a simple Roux, which is nothing more then a mix of heated fat and flower. In this case, we'll be using butter for the fat. A Roux is the base for many white sauces and some soups, such as this one.

However, to start with, you'll need to cook some cauliflower by boiling it in lightly salted water. At the end the cauliflower should be firm, but not crunchy. When it's cooked, place the cauliflower and the remaining water from the cooking into a bowl to cool. It is important that this is allowed to cool to nearly room temperature before the next stage.

To make the Roux, melt some butter in a saucepan and, once it is nice and hot, add flower. Some recipes suggest equal measures of flower and fat, by weight. I prefer to add the flour slowly, one spoon at a time aiming for the right consistency. Once the flower and butter are combined, you should end up with a thick, but smooth, yellow mixture.

Next, we need to thin the Roux, using the water we saved from cooking the cauliflower, which by now should have cooled to something close to room temperature. This water will contain some of the flavour from the cauliflower, which will help to flavour the soup. Add the water slower, stirring the mixture continuously. Once enough water has been added, we can put the cooked cauliflower in.
Now, all that remains is to thin the soup to the desired consistency, and to season with black pepper. Remember that the water we cooked the cauliflower in was already lightly salted! You should end up with something that looks like this:

Serve with crusty bread and a sprinkling of parsley!

A new beginning

2009-01-18T15:17:00.004Z

After a lapse of around 5 months, I have decided to continue with the EatingBritish Blog! My last project, to try to live for a whole year eating only food produced in Britain was quite successful. In fact, one of my conclusions was that it is not only possible, but quite easy to do this, even with supermarket shopping.

So, I thought that there wasn't really much point in simply repeating the original experiment. This time, my goal is simply to promote British food. Of course, I have continued and will continue, to buy British food produce whenever I can. After getting into the habit with the original project, I find that I still buy my vegetables this way, if I can't get the British grown version, I don't buy it.

I will soon be moving to the South of England for a new job, so that opens up new possibilities with regard to local food. It will be interesting to compare the experience of buying local food there to that here in Edinburgh - I shall be sure to blog about this!

I also intend to post more recipes, so watch this space!

The end?

2008-08-16T19:35:00.004+01:00

Well, it has now been a year since I started the Eating British project! I can't believe how quickly the time seems to have gone either. My blogging has taken a bit of a nose-dive of late - the pressure has been piling up at work a bit, so I haven't really had as much time for the blog as I would have liked.

Actually, I would say that is probably true for the whole project - I simply haven't had enough time to be able to do everything I initially hoped to do. Still, it's been an interesting experience and one that has lead me to realise that it is actually quite easy to have a British produced diet, for most things. I must admit, there were some things I never quite got sorted. Snack food was perhaps the main one! I probably should have taken carrot sticks or something with me to work, but I'm really not the most organised of people, so that was never going to happen! :-)

In recent news, I have started trying to grow some of my own produce. At the moment, I'm limited to what I can get away with growing in my flat, so it's just chillies and mint at the moment, but it's a start! I have been using the mint to make mint tea in the mornings, rather then my usual coffee, so that's something else locally produced! The chili plants have started flowering, so I'm hoping they will give some fruit soon.

Of course, all this seems a bit late now that my 'official' year is over. With the rising costs of food, it almost seems as if this project is over just as things were starting to get interesting! For the near future, I'm going to have other priorities, but I hope that once things settle down again to be able to restart this project. I will continue to try buy British where I can and to encourage all of my friends to do the same.

Actually, that has been one of the most rewarding aspects of this project - that people come up to me to tell me about the last meal they cooked with all British (or nearly all!) ingredients, or how they decided to use a British cheese in place of the one they would regularly buy. That really was my main objective right from the beginning - to get the people around me to think a little bit more about the food they are buying and where it comes from. And, of course, to try to promote British food to them as much as possible! Somewhat disappointingly, this is perhaps the area where I have achieved the least, mostly because I haven't been able to put enough time in to it.

So, what was the conclusion? Is it possible to live for a whole year, only eating food produce in Britain? Well, I now feel qualified to say that the answer is "Yes!" it certainly is. I have learned though that it does require a bit more organisation and this has proved to be my weakness on more then one occasion. It seems to me that most of the major supermarkets are getting into the 'local food' thing now, so I imagine that it will just get easier and easier. An example of this was sweet peppers - this summer I was able to buy British sweet peppers in Sainsburys, but this was certainly not the case last summer. Rising food prices may pose a threat to this though. As supermarkets strive to offer the best deals for consumers, the temptation to go for cheaper, imported products will be strong. These will be cheaper on the shelves as well, so they may well be more attractive to consumers. Some people have commented that this poses a very serious threat to farming in Britain - so I will certainly be keeping an eye on this situation.

I still have quite a few pictures to post, so I shall do that as soon as I can - watch this space!

Summer vegetables

2008-07-20T16:24:00.002+01:00

I can't believe it's been a month since my last post already! Things are getting fairly busy at work at the moment, so I haven't had too much time to give to this project. However, I have still been trying to eat British wherever possible.

One thing of note is that Sainsburys now stock British sweet peppers! These certainly weren't available last summer, so this would appear to be an indication of a shift towards increased local food production. Well, by local, I mean within the UK.

Actually, I have really noticed a difference between this summer and last summer. It is now almost a year since I started this project and although it has never been as challenging as I thought it would be, it has definitely got easier as time has gone on. It seems to be becoming really fashionable to eat locally produced food now, which it certainly wasn't just a couple of years ago. This is an interesting shift and I will be watching to see how it pans out over the next few years.

The biggest challenges have been with things like snacks. Some brands of crisps boast about being made from British potatoes, but I can't go round eating crisps all the time! :-) Also, I tend to eat meals at work quite often. I usually have a baked potato with cheese for lunch, which is very likely to be produced from British potatoes and cheese. Actually, eating out in general presents the biggest challenge and I regret that I haven't had more time to research what position most restaurants take on using local ingredients.

Anyway, I shall post a more thorough review nearer the time!

Royal highland show

2008-06-26T20:28:00.002+01:00

Last week saw the 168th Royal Highland Show, which ran from Thursday 19th to Sunday 22nd of June. With it's promise of a wealth of local produce and producers, I could hardly turn down the opportunity, so I went along on the Thursday.

This was my first visit to the Highland show, though I have been to other agricultural shows before, most notably the Lincolnshire show which was the destination of a few school trips when I was growing up.

My first destination on arrival was, of course, the food and local produce area. This was crammed full of stalls, some from familiar names and many that were unfamiliar. But, the best bit was that nearly all of these stalls were giving away free samples, which given the number of them, meant that it was almost (but not quite) unnecessary to buy lunch.

The first stall we came to was an Orkney Cheese stall. Here, I learned that there are no less then 2600 diary cows in Orkney. Not bad for a population of just under 20,000. I am told that there are many more sheep, but I don't know how many. Of course, I had to sample some of the cheese, which was actually one of the brands that featured in my cheese tasting back in February. I sampled both the mild and the mature versions and both were very good.

Next, we came across Fletcher's of Auchtermuchty, who were there promoting their Fletcher's Game and in particular their venison. Now, as I've mentioned once or twice before, I'm quite a fan of venison. I got chatting to the guy on the stall and he told me that deer have never been domesticated, which is something I'd never thought of before. Unfortunately, there were no free samples here! :-(

Actually there seemed to be a lot of cheese stalls. We visited the stall from the Snowdonia Cheese Company next. They had a number of what I would call 'special' cheeses, which were a basic cheese mixed with herbs or fruit. Two in particular stood out in my opinion, which were the Green Thunder, made with a mix of garlic and herbs and the Red Devil. The later, as the name might suggest, was made with chili pepper combined with Red Leicester cheese. Both were delicious, but I think my favourite was the Green Thunder.

Also present were Rowan Glen, which also featured in my last cheese tasting and one I hadn't heard of before; McLelland, who had some strange names for their cheese, such as "Seriously farmy Cheddar". Now, it was very good, but what on earth does 'seriously farmy' mean? How can a cheese be 'farmy'? Even after several free samples, I still didn't get it.

It wasn't all cheese however. I also spoke to people from Scarlett's (Scotland) Honey, who currently have around 1000 hives. I thought that sounded quite a lot, but when the lady explained to me that they also have to move the hives around during the season so that the bees get more variety, it occur ed to me that this must be seriously hard work! By moving the hives, the bees are exposed to a greater variety of flowers, which makes for a different flavour to the honey then if they were simply left in the one place.

Perhaps one of the biggest surprises was a company called Mash Direct, who are making and selling ready mashed vegetables. Now, normally I am deeply sceptical of such things and always tend to give the pre-chopped salad, pre-grated cheese and pre-mashed vegetables a wide berth at the supermarket. However, whilst working my way through my free sample of mashed potato and turnip (which was very nice, I have to say), I got talking to the guy running the stall. He explained that their thinking was that by pre-mashing the vegetables, the appearance was no longer so important. We've all heard about supermarkets being so fussy about what vegetables have to look like before they can be placed on the shelves. Apparently, by cunningly avoiding this problem, Mash Direct are able to use older and more flavoursome varieties of vegetable. To be honest, I didn't buy it, I think the real issue is that we need to move away from this idea that every vegetable has to look a certain way, rather then resorting to pre-mashing our vegetables so that no one has to see how ugly they are.

Pork pies

2008-06-07T17:24:00.003+01:00

I heard on Saturday Kitchen this morning that Melton Mowbray pork pies have recently been awarded 'Protected Geographical Indication'. This means that they have legal protection against imitation products across the EU! Champagne has famously enjoyed similar status for many years now.

Check out the Melton Mowbray Pork Pie Association website for more details:

http://www.mmppa.co.uk/index.html

I think this is exactly what British food needs because it will hopefully lead to increased recognition of quality, regional produce. All to often, when people think of British food, or try to name some classic British dishes, they can only think of the bog standard 'fish and chips'. Fish and chips can be great, but British food has so much more to offer then that! Think of Stilton cheese, Lincolnshire sausages, Yorkshire pudding, Cornish pastie, I could go on and on. I think it is a real shame that we seem to have almost completely forgotten that we have so much regional variation and that 'British food' isn't a single genre.

Tomato chutney

2008-06-04T17:33:00.005+01:00

I mentioned a few posts ago that the tomato chutney had turned out to be a bit of a disaster. I have to say that it tasted amazing, it was really fresh and crisp and went really well with sausages. Oddly enough, after having been left to mature for 3 months in the stainless steel container, everything was fine. But, once it had been open for a few weeks I noticed that the container had begun to leak. Closer inspection revealed that the side was beginning to split and it was obvious from the inside that some form of reaction was going on between the tomato chutney and the steel. As you can see, it didn't look good:
So, I decided it was probably best not to eat any more of it :-(

Well, I shall just have to make some more, which I can do now that British tomatoes are back in season. This time, however, I shall use some glass jars to store it!

Grilled salmon fillet

2008-06-04T17:08:00.005+01:00

I've mentioned grilled salmon fillets a few times now, so it seem about time to put up a bit more information! I usually cook my salmon using the following method:

Step 1: Lightly season the fillets with salt and freshly ground black pepper on all sides, including the skin side. Then add finely chopped Dill to the side without the skin, as shown:

Step 2: Next heat some oil in a pan. Notice that I'm using the Oleffra cold-pressed rape-seed oil here, this isn't strictly necessary, but it is at least British!
Step 3: Get the pan nice and hot and then fry the fillets, starting skin side down. You can tell when they are ready to turn by looking at the side, once it has turned pale pink up to about the middle, it's time to turn it over. I prefer not to over cook the salmon, but at the same time, you don't want it raw in the middle either. I have found that it takes a bit of practice to get this right and, of course, depends on the size of the fillets. However, it generally takes about 10 - 15 minutes to get them just right. You can always make sure by cutting into one to see how it's doing on the inside. This spoils the presentation a bit, but at least you know it's done! :-)

Step 4: Serve with boiled potatoes and peas, as shown:

Step 5: Enjoy!

In season...

2008-06-01T16:40:00.004+01:00

Many interesting things are coming back into season now! I noticed last week that British tomatoes are back on the shelves in Sainsburys. Although, I got a punnet or British grown, yellow tomatoes from the farmers market a few weeks before that. My tomato chutney turned out to be a bit of a disaster, but I'll say more of the that once I'm able to put the photos online... So, this gives me the chance to try making some more.

Asparagus is back in season, so I expect to be cooking one of my many classic dishes - grilled salmon fillet on a bed of lightly steamed asparagus. Super.

Local strawberries and raspberries seem to be big at the moment. I don't actually eat all that much fruit, but if I'm going to have either strawberries or raspberries, I only ever get British ones in season, simply because they taste so much better then the imported ones you can get at any time of the year.

Edinburgh taste festival

2008-06-01T15:54:00.004+01:00

Well, it has been a long time since my last post again! I must say, however, that the eating British thing is still going on, I've just been far too busy with work and stuff to be able to update the blog for a while.

Anyway, this weekend saw the Channel 4 Taste Festival come to Edinburgh again. Since I missed it last year, I figured that I really should make the effort to go this year. I only went to the evening session, on Saturday, but I think that was enough.

It was quite expensive, I paid £25.00 for a premium ticket, which included £15 worth of 'crowns'. For some reason, none of the stall inside accept (real) money or plastic, so they use their own, internal 'currency'. Strange, but fair enough. I was a bit annoyed that from the outside, there was no way of knowing how much things were going to cost once you got in, so it was quite difficult to work out whether it was worth buying the premium ticket for £25.00, or simple getting a regular ticket for £12.50. Still, that's only a small complain really.

Once inside, the event had a really nice, festival type of atmosphere. There were stands there representing many of the more exclusive restaurants in Edinburgh, such as David Bann, Fourth Floor at Harvey Nichols and Tigerlily, to give just three examples. I suppose the great thing about this festival is that you get the chance to sample the food from such restaurants, for somewhat less then it would cost to actually go there (I assume, I don't think I've been to any of the restaurants that were there). This isn't for free however, the cost of the 'meals' varies from 6 crowns, up to 10 crowns. Many of the main courses cost 10 crowns. I have to say that the portion sizes were extremely disappointing and I heard many people around the festival complaining about that. I guess that it's only supposed to be a taste, but when you've forked out 10 crowns (equivalent to £5) for a dish and you get only two or three spoonfuls, it does rather feel like your being ripped off a bit.

After inspecting all of the restaurant stands, I was quite hungry. I went for three main course options; the braised shin of Ross-shire beef, pearl barley and root vegetables from Martin Wishart. I also had the confit breast of Borders lamb with Ayrshire potatoes and nicoise garnish from Number One at The Balmoral and, for something a bit different, I went for the spicy Thai smoked tofu fritters, with homemade mango chutney, plum sauce and mustard leaf from David Bann. I have to say that they were all very good, although the shin of beef wasn't really anything special. I tried to have a burger from Malmaison, but the queue for these was huge. They were clearly very popular, but I suspect that this was more because people had figured out that they represented the nearest thing to a proper meal at the whole festival, rather then there being something amazing about the burgers themselves.

As well as the restaurant stands, there were also three or four live theatres, where they were holding regular shows on various food topics. I went along to a talk titled "Discover the secrets of Scotland's natural larder" which was given by Sue Lawrence. From the title, I was expecting to learn about great local food, particularly local delicacies that grow here in Scotland. Sadly, the talk itself fell rather short on this front. She cooked (live) a creamy chicken risotto (not exactly a traditional Scottish dish), smocked haddock and black pudding done in the over (I'm not sure what she called this now) and an Orkney fudge cheese cake. They all looked amazing, but guess what? No one got to try them out! This really surprised me, she had easily made enough of each one that everyone who was watching could have had a taste, so I really don't understand why they didn't do that. In terms of the risotto, she added chopped up Ayrshire bacon. Interestingly, she explain that Scotland has only one local cure of bacon, which is the Ayrshire bacon. England, in contrast has many different ones. She finally served the risotto with Parmesan cheese, again, hardly from Scotland's natural larder... But, she did point out that it worked very well with Isle of Mull Cheddar.

The smoked haddock and black pudding was rather more interesting. She was using uncoloured smoked haddock, so not the bright yellow, high visibility variety. She placed these on a baking tray, rolled up slightly and stacked a slice of Stornoway black pudding on top of each one, so at least this was local. She then wrapped each of these in a rasher of Ayrshire bacon. This then went into a hot over, along with some cherry tomatoes, at 230C for around 10 minutes.

The cheese cake was simply made from grated Orkney fudge, mixed with cream cheese and lightly whipped double cream. When left over night, the fudge apparently melts into the other ingredients, making it all smooth and creamy. For the base, she recommended either an oaty biscuit, or a shortbread biscuit. I will have to try this one out next time it's my turn to make cake at work! In conclusion, it was all very interesting, but I felt slightly cheated by the title of the talk!

I also went to a talk by Clare MacDonald, who replaced Antony Worral Thompson. Apparently, he couldn't be there because it was his wife's birthday. Honestly, I'm sure I would have been able to come up with a better excuse then that! :-) Clare talked and talked and talked. Eventually it became clear that she wasn't going to be doing any cooking at all, so people started to drift away. Before I succumbed to the temptation to find something more interesting, she talked about how she considered food to be the central core of family life - a point of communication, and how important it was for everyone to sit down and eat together. She also argued that there are so much 'myth and misery' about food at the moment. We're constantly being told that we mustn't eat this and we mustn't eat that. She pointed out that moderation is the key and that it's much better to enjoy the food you like, but not to eat too much of it, then to eat it and feel guilty. The phrase 'no s**t, Sherlock' sprang to mind. She did, however, also stick up for local food. Interestingly, it was at this point that a noticeable number of people got up and left. She argued that it is vital to support the local economy, something I completely agree with. She particularly mentioned British pork, something that I have written about here already. Now, of course, the people who left at this point may well have simply hit their boredom threshold, but there do seem to be quite a number of people who find this idea of supporting local farmers to be something quite offensive. It's almost as if they consider farming to be something dirty and unclean, which should be done far away in other counties where we can't see it. Strange.

Overall, it was an enjoyable way to spend the evening, especially since the weather was amazing! Typically, there were plenty of lobster pink people by the time I left.

New local food outlet in Edinburgh

2008-05-06T17:28:00.003+01:00

I've started trying to do my weekly shopping in different places, to try to get an idea of which might be the best. Up until now, I've done nearly all my shopping in Sainsbury's and it's been fairly easy going. They are quite good at labelling their produce with country of origin information, so finding the British items hasn't been difficult.

I thought I'd give Tesco a try for a change, so I headed over to the Tesco's in Causewayside. However, on the way, I noticed a new food outlet called Earthy Foods & Goods (33-41 Ratcliffe Terrace).

I popped in to see what they were about. It turns out that they are a shop specifically aimed at selling organic, local produce. I've never really focused on the organic side of things, I must admit, but I was intrigued to see how much local food I'd be able to pick up there. I chatted with one of the guys working in the shop and he told me that it's a low point in the season for British food at the moment, since we're coming to the end of the root vegetable season and the other stuff hasn't started coming in yet. So, there wasn't too much to choose from which was British. There was plenty of food in the shop though and if I hadn't been sticking to the Eating British project, I'd have had an easy time picking up my weekly shop.

As it was, I think I've managed to get a weeks supply of food. I purchased two pork chops, 500g of minced beef, 4 leeks, some potatoes, a box of 6 eggs and some Serano ham (made in Britain, from Tamworth pigs, apparently!). I already had some bits and bobs left over from last week, but the total came to just over £20, which isn't too bad.

I had one of the pork chops for my dinner last night and it was really good. I'm usually fairly sceptical about organic food tasting better, but for some reason this really did - it was one of the tastiest pork chops I've had for some time!

More information on Earth Foods can be found here: http://www.earthy.co.uk/

Royal botanic gardens

2008-04-13T17:23:00.002+01:00

I had my lunch at the Botanic Gardens today. There is a nice cafe there, where I have had tea and cake on many an occasion. I was pleased to notice today though, that there was sign advertising that they do their best to local, seasonal produce in their cooking, which is great! I had braised beef, which came with dumplings, potatoes, carrots and green beans and it was really tasty. I do wonder how much of it was locally produced, it was very busy so I decided not to ask them. But, it's good to see that they are at least supporting local producers on paper.

Biofuels

2008-04-13T16:27:00.002+01:00

I have been prompted by an article in BBC CountryFile magazine to comment on the topic of biofuels. Of course, this doesn't directly fall under the heading of 'Eating British', but it would appear that the impact of the biofuel industry is already being felt by consumers here in the UK. It was never my intention to stray into this kind of area with this project, but I've begun to feel that it is unavoidable. It is no longer possible to have any kind of a complete discussion on the topic of British food without taking into account the wider, global picture, which includes things such as biofuels.

According to BBC CountryFile magazine, there are two types of biofuel - bioethanol which is produced by fermenting wheat or sugar cane and biodiesel which is made from oils extracted from plants such as oil seed rape.

Apparently, the European Environment Agency has calculated that in the short term, the UK has the capacity to grow enough fuel to meet 2.5% of our transport needs. Interestingly, as of April this year all fuel sold in Britain must have some biofuel mixed with it.

Of course, much of the biofuel that we'll be using will be imported, from countries such as Brazil. But, what impact will this new industry have on these countries? Will more forest be cut down to make way for biofuel production? If so, then it's hard to see how biofuel could possibly have an environmental benefit. What about the local economy in countries producing biofuel? On the face of it, one might expect that this new industry would be highly beneficial, bringing significant new income to otherwise poor areas. However, some people have apparently argued that this isn't necessarily the case. According to the article in BBC CountryFile magazine, it has been pointed out that in Swaziland, people are receiving food aid, but are also exporting their main crop, cassava, to be made into biofuel.

What impact does this have on us here in the UK? Well, according to the article, the National Farmers Union (NFU) are very much in favour of producing biofuels here. However, the link between biofuels and the rising cost of food has been pointed out by a number of people. I've certainly noticed that my weekly shop has become more expensive and these rises have been blamed on the world wide shortage of grain. This grain is often used for animal feed, so more expensive grain means more expensive meat.

In my humble opinion, I can't believe that this price rise is totally unrelated to biofuels, though I accept that there are many other factors, such as increased demand from countries such as China and India, as well as poor harvests across the world. Also, I would imagine that producers of biofuels will pay more for the raw ingredients then producers of food. Therefore, there will be an unavoidable pressure on farmers to sell their crops for biofuels rather then food.

At the end of the day, I can't help but feel that burning our food is, quite simply, stupid. Particularly when you consider how many starving people there are in the world. How much difference would it make if all of the products currently used to make biofuels were used to help feed the starving in the third world? I have no idea, but I doubt it would be an insignificant difference.

The BBC CountryFile article mentions that second generation biofuels will be made from the non-food part of the plant, such as the stalk, or perhaps from algae. This sounds like a much more sensible idea to me, but these products are not yet on the market.

Local food at the Flotterstone

2008-03-16T15:32:00.005Z

I went walking in the Pentland hills yesterday, while the weather was good. It was good to get out and get some fresh air! Anyway, after the walk, we stopped by the Flotterstone Inn for some dinner. A quick glance over the menu revealed that they serve lamb from Kirkton Farm, which is literally just down the road from the pub (we passed it on our walk). I think it's great to find a place that serves not only British food, but British food from just down the road! This really is what 'eating local' should mean.

The Flotterstone appear to do two dishes with Kirtkton lamb - a rack of lamb, or the Kirkton Navarin of lamb, which is basically a stew of marinated lamb. I went for the Navarin of lamb and I have to say that it was excellent! I have eaten at the Flottersone a few times and have always enjoyed it, but the fact that they serve such local produce is really excellent. If you want more information on the Flotterstone Inn, their website may be found here: http://www.flotterstoneinn.com/

If time allows, it is my intention to review some more of the restaurants of Edinburgh in terms of how much local produce they use, so watch this space!

Cheese tasting

2008-02-29T17:06:00.004Z

Whilst shopping the other day I noticed that Sainsbury's had a larger then usual selection of Cheddar, from different parts of Scotland. So, I thought it might be interesting to buy a selection and have a 'cheese tasting' session in the office at work.

I bought three different cheeses to start with: Rowan Glen mature cheddar (A), Isle of Bute mature coloured cheddar (B) and Orkney mature Scottish island cheddar (C). Here's a picture of the three cheeses:
After some discussion, we found the Isle of Bute cheddar to be very mild, while the Rowan Glen had a nice, creamy texture. The Orkney cheddar had quite a different texture, more waxy then the other two. In terms of taste, the Isle of Bute and the Rowan Glen were both quite similar. The Orkney cheddar had quite a distinctive flavour. Overall, the votes were as follows:

Rowan Glen: 3
Isle of Bute: 1
Orkney: 2

So, the Rowan Glen was the winner by a small margin.

Pig farming

2008-02-17T17:23:00.005Z

It was with some dismay that I read an article in the Friday edition of the Scotsman which outlined the possible future (or lack of) for pig farming in Scotland. According to the article, there were 70,000 breeding sows in Scotland in the mid-1990s and this has now been reduced to only 45,000. It seems that the problem is the rising cost of animal feed, while the cost of the bacon on the supermarket shelves hasn't changed. The article puts this into context with the example of a 12 acre farm which has to buy about 100 tonnes of barley a month to feed just over 300 pigs. This time last year, the cost was around £80 per tonne, but that has now risen to £174 per tonne.

I have commented previously that the predicted rises in food costs due to the increased cost of feeding the animals don't seem to have happened. I am now wondering how much of this is simply because as the costs incurred by the farmers increase, the supermarkets simply squeeze them harder by refusing to pay the extra. According to the article, it has been suggested that if there isn't enough pork produced in the UK, the supermarkets will simply look elsewhere in Europe.

In one sense, maybe this is fair enough. Farming is, after all, a business and as such should be subject to the same elements of competition as other sectors. However, from the reading I've been doing it might not be that simple. I don't in any sense claim to be an expert here! I'm learning about this just as much as anyone else, but it seems that one of the reasons pork can be produced so much more cheaply elsewhere is that the required welfare standards for the animals are much lower. This would, naturally, make the process of farming them cheaper.

So, it comes down to the question of how much the consumer cares about animal welfare. An identical argument has recently been raised and publicised relating to free range chickens - which is more important, that the chicken be allowed to grow and develop in a natural environment, or that the consumer be able to buy as much cheap chicken as they want? I appreciate that it isn't always going to be that simple and I will try to find the time to explore the issue a bit further.

A quick fact about barley - According to http://www.ukagriculture.com, Britain produces around 6.5 million tonnes of Barley per year, 1.5 million of which are exported, 2 million are used in the brewing industry and the remaining 3 million tonnes are used for animal feed.

Poached fish

2008-02-09T16:00:00.001Z

I hadn't realised it had been so long since I last posted! Things have been really hectic at work and I've had some trouble with my heating at home, but I havn't forgotten about my Eating British project! I have eaten out a few more times, since it's cold in my flat! But, I've done my best to stick with the British food where I can.

I've recently tried a new recipe for the trout, which I've previously always seasoned with salt, pepper and dill and then fried. This time, I tried poaching it in milk and butter and the results were excellent! What's more, it didn't take any extra time, so this is still a dish that's at least as quick as most ready meals. To poach the trout, first melt some butter in some milk in a frying pan and while that's happening, rinse the trout fillets (farmed in Scotland, apparently) and pat them dry with some kitchen paper. Lightly season the fish and once the butter has melted completely, place it in the pan:
As it's cooking the fish will turn a different shade of pink. Once it looks like it's cooked about half way, gently turn the fish over and let it cook on the other side. When it's done, the fish will be falling off the skin as you handle it, so be careful if presentation is important! Remove the fish from the pan and then add dill and any other herbs you like to the remaining liquid to make a sauce.
I like to keep this kind of dish simple, so I simply served it with boiled potatoes and peas. That's it!

As far as I can tell, unless you grow your own herbs it's impossible to get hold of British grown ones. At least at my local supermarket none of the herbs they sell have been produced in Britain. Maybe someone knows of a more local source of herbs? I'm not sure I've even seen them at the Farmer's Market, but I will have a look next time I'm there.

Rapeseed oil

2008-01-13T17:26:00.002Z

Shopping at the Farmers Market certainly seems to provide opportunities to try new things! Whilst shopping there yesterday, I got talking to one of the stall holders who was selling a product called "Oleifera Rapeseed Oil", which is a cooking oil made from locally grown rapeseed. As I have mentioned previously, I have been using hemp seed oil for my cooking (where butter doesn't suffice). This has worked really well, although the smoke point of this oil is quite low, which really makes it unsuitable for the more 'aggressive' cooking styles, such as stir-frying. The Oleifera product has a much higher smoke point (about 230 C, according to the website), which means that it can be used for a wider range of cooking styles. I tried some of the oil, soaked into a small cube of bread at the stall and it tasted great, even on it's own, so I decided that I would have to buy a bottle so that I could try it out.

Today provided the perfect opportunity to do that on my Sunday dinner, which consisted of honey-glazed pork chop with potatoes, peas and carrots. Sure enough, I was able to sear the meat in a hot pan without the oil starting to burn, which was great. The pork tasted great, but how much of that was down to the meat and the honey and how much was because of the oil, I'm not sure. I will have to conduct some further tests. There is plenty more information about the rapeseed oil on the website: http://www.borderfields.co.uk/oleifera/

Tomato chutney and frozen vegetables

2008-01-12T15:59:00.001Z

I have finally tried the tomato chutney that I made back in the summer when British tomatoes were still available! I made some mini beef burgers, so I thought that it was the perfect time to try the chutney. The burgers were simply made from minced beef, mixed up with a pinch of salt, some black pepper, some chopped basil and a finely chopped, small onion. I then added one egg and mixed it all together. Then, simply use a spoon dipped in cold water to form suitable size portions of the mixture into small beef burger shapes and fry them gently for about 15 - 20 minutes, turning over about half way through.

Anyway, the chutney was really, really tasty, so that is definitely a recipe I could recommend! My only concern now is that I might not have enough of it to last until the tomatoes are back. Also, I'm not sure how long it will last now that I've opened the container and broken the seal. I'm keeping it in the fridge, so hopefully it will last a good six weeks or so, but we'll see how it goes.

I think I was quite wrong to be so concerned about getting enough vitamins through the winter months as there was one source that I hadn't considered at all; frozen vegetables. I've noticed that in my local supermarket at least, there is a good supply of British grown frozen vegetables, such as peas, broad beans and green beans. Although when I was doing my shopping last week, there weren't any broad beans, but hopefully this is just temporary. I don't know why I hadn't considered this option before, I think people often tend to forget the frozen vegetable section, but I have heard (I don't remember where from, but I will try to find a source for this information) that because the frozen vegetables are often frozen within a couple of hours of being picked, they actually contain more of the original vitamins and minerals then 'fresh' vegetables which have been imported from other countries. The reason for this is that as soon as a vegetable is picked from the plant, the vitamins it contains start to break down, so if it is frozen almost straight away it should retain far more of these substances then the same vegetable which was picked a few days ago and flown over from another country. Well, that's how I understand it anyway.

Review of progress so far

2008-01-12T15:50:00.001Z

Since it's now the start of 2008, I thought it was about time for a review of my 'eating British' progress so far. The first thing that springs to mind is that it really hasn't been as difficult as I thought it would be, well so far anyway!

Of course, I have to be honest and admit that I haven't managed the switch to British food by 100%, there are some things, such as black pepper and lemon juice for example, that I don't think will ever be available from British producers. This is probably the way it should be really, since even though I'm sure it would be technically possible to grow these foods in Britain using heated green houses and other similar technology, it just doesn't make sense to do that when they could be produced a lot more efficiently elsewhere. Also, I have to say that despite this project, I do still eat out occasionally and of course, I can't guarantee the origin of the food I eat at restaurants and I don't force my friends who are kind enough to invite me round for dinner occasionally to cook with only British food. Though that said, I have noticed that those who are aware of my project have probably put more thought to the origins of the produce they are using then they would have done otherwise. One of the main goals of this project was to raise exactly this kind of awareness, so I consider this a positive result!

Before I began this project, I hadn't really paid all that much attention to where the food I was buying at my local supermarket had been produced, so I had no idea of how difficult it would be to only buy food from Britain. However, once I started paying more attention to the source of my food, I began to realise that a significant amount of what I would have bought anyway was already British. I think things have been made easier by the fact that eating locally produce seems to be quite fashionable at the moment, which means that it makes sense to the supermarkets to sell more British produce.

Looking back, I can say that against many expectations, my diet as actually become more varied. I've experimented with cooking venison for example and have adapted my cooking to the range of vegetables available from Britain. I always used to make stir fry with sweet peppers for example, but I've yet to find a British source for these, so I've been using more carrots, peas and broad-beans instead.

Bread proved to be perhaps one of the more interesting items on my shopping lists. I haven't yet found any of the more common brands of loaves which states a country of origin, my guess is that this is because the ingredients are sourced from all over the place. So, since sandwiches are an easy way of making lunch from British ingredients, I quickly realised that I would have to make my own bread. Luckily, I was able to source all of the ingredients for bread from British suppliers, except perhaps for the yeast. Of course, making bread is quite hard work. I was able to put up with this to start with, riding on a wave of initial enthusiasm for the venture! However, I quickly tired of this and found it difficult to be organised enough to make bread in advance. Luckily, I acquired a bread maker, kindly donated by my ex-girlfriend (of pasta making fame). This has made the world of difference to my bread making! Now all I have to do is put all the ingredients into the machine and press the go button. Then, three hours later I have a really tasty loaf of bread. It's awesome.

Early on, I was worried about being able to get enough vitamins through the winter, so I experimented with making fruit leather from hawthorn berries. This was quite fun, although I didn't manage to dry the fruit leather properly, so it went moldy after only a few days. I will have to try this again once the berries are back.

I also found the time to make some tomato chutney, which I haven't actually tried yet. I notice that British tomatoes are no longer available, which is no surprise really, so my stock of chutney will be a good stock of vitamin C and tomato goodness until British tomatoes are back on the shelves.

Fears about the rising cost of food because of the worldwide grain shortage didn't really seem to come to much in the end. I have heard that a lot of grain farmers in Britain have done very well on the back of the higher grain price, but of course this has made things much more difficult for livestock farmers who have to buy in grain to feed the animals. According to Country File on the BBC, many livestock farmers are considering switching to crops, such as grain, because it simply doesn't pay to rear animals at the moment. It will be interesting to watch what happens on this front over the remaining 9 months of this project.

At some point in the not too distant future, I would like to try to review the main supermarkets to see which are selling the most locally produced food. So far, it seems to me that Sainsbury's are one of the best, although since I've been down in Lincolnshire I've been shopping at Tesco's and they seem to be equally good.

Christmas

2007-12-24T11:05:00.001Z

This year, much as every year really, Christmas finds me staying with family in Lincolnshire. This raises certain issues with my eating British scheme, since it would be rather rude of me to insist on only eating British food. However, I have so far been pleasantly surprised that quite a lot of the food we've had so far has been British. The interesting thing is that this is not a consequence on some deliberate effort to buy British, it's just that the food that has been bought from the supermarket has been mostly British. Some of the vegetables even came in bags which had pictures of the farmer that had grown them printed on, which made it seem much more personal.

For example, yesterday we had vegetable soup followed by boiled beef with onion sauce. The soup was made from white cabbage, leek, carrot, swede and onion, all of which were British! Not only that, but there were all grown in Lincolnshire! This is a typical Norwegian dish and the beef is boiled in the soup before being fished out towards the end. It makes a great antidote to all the fried, grilled and roast meat that is normally consumed at this time of the year, since the boiling makes it really tender and all the 'goodness' is preserved in the soup.

On Saturday, we visited a farmers market which was being held in a town near to where my family live. It was very much like the farmers market in Edinburgh, although there weren't quite so many stalls selling really exciting things, such as cider and 'grow you own' mushroom kits. However, there were the typical assortment of stalls selling vegetables and meat and a few other bits and bobs, such as hand-made chocolate. I only recognised one local company, which was Pipers, who make my favourite crisps (I think I may have mentioned them before).

I brought back from Edinburgh some of the Cairn O'Mohr fruit wine that I bought at the farmers market up there a little while ago. After I got quite tipsy at the stall from trying so many of their products, I ended up buying two bottles of the 'Berry Christmas' fruit wine, made from raspberries, strawberries and a hint of spices. We opened one of the bottles yesterday and it was really very nice! It's a little bit like mulled wine in that it has a hint of spices to it, but we served it cold and it was really rather refreshing. I'm no wine expert by any means, but I would think that this would go best before or after food, rather then during. It certainly has enough character to be drunk on it's own, although it is quite strong!

Cheese cake

2007-12-09T16:10:00.002Z

It turned out to be my turn for cake again last week! That's the third time since I started this eating British scheme back in August. Since I've been quite busy at work recently, I was tempted to go for a honey cake again, but this seemed far to boring. I'm an avid fan of Nigella Lawson's programme on BBC 2 and I had recently seen her making a cheese cake, which seemed very quick and easy. The challenge though, would be to make a version of it using British ingredients. I figured that the cheese would probably be the biggest problem. Cheese cake, and here I'm talking about the non-baked variety (I've never understood baked cheese cakes), is usually made using some form of extremely mild cream cheese, such as Marscapone. Clearly, this isn't a British cheese and although I briefly entertained the idea of making a cake using a large block of Stilton (the king of cheese, after all!), I thought that this might not be too popular with my colleagues at work. It was time to call in the professionals.

I called in at I J Mellis on Victoria Street, which is considered by many to be the best cheese shop in Edinburgh. I figured that if anyone was going to be able to help me, it would be them. It turned out that they didn't have anything suitable in stock, although the shop assistant assured me that they usually do and he was able to advise me that the cheese I was looking for was called "Crowdie", which is a famous Scottish cream cheese (you can learn more about it here: http://eatscotland.visitscotland.com/scottish_food/cheese/). He suggested that I should try the Jenners food hall. Luckily, this isn't too far away from Victoria Street and they did have some, so that was the cheese problem solved.

It then occurred to me that the next critical part of any cheese cake recipe is the base. Nigella makes her base by blending up broken digestive biscuits with butter, sounds simple, but are digestive biscuits really British? I don't think they normally quote a country of origin on most packs of biscuits, so I searched high and low in the Jenners food hall, but they didn't have any digestives at all. I didn't really want to go hunting around Edinburgh for biscuits as it was getting late, to it was time to deploy my trusted problem solving technique. I went and had a cup of tea.

Feeling refreshed and inspired by the brew, I realised that oat cakes go well with cheese and so would probably make a reasonable base for a cheese cake. So, I purchased a couple of packs of plain, Scottish oatcakes. Once I got the ingredients home, it was a simple matter of following the standard cheese cake recipe. I broke up the oatcakes and blended them with some butter to form the base material, which I then pressed into the bottom of a round, spring-form cake tin. I think mixed the Crowdie cream cheese with caster sugar and a squeeze of lemon juice, before gently folding in some whipped double cream. I then gently spooned this over the base and left it in the fridge over night to set.

I think it turned out rather well, although I have to say that the Crowdie cheese really does taste of cheese, which made for an interesting flavour when mixed with the cream, sugar and lemon juice. The key test was that several of my colleagues had second helpings, so it can't have been all that bad!

Farmers Markets (2)

2007-12-08T16:31:00.001Z

I had a friend round for dinner last week, so I thought it would be the perfect chance to try out the Edinburgh farmers market. It was a very pleasant experience, although I did get there a bit late since a lot of stalls had sold out, but I was still able to get almost everything I wanted and a little bit more! This particular friend is a vegetarian, so it made for a slightly different challenge for my Eating British scheme.

In the end, I went to leek and potato soup to start, followed by Stilton, onion and potato pie, with baked apples and ice-cream to finish. I think it all turned out really well, although I might have over done the potato theme slightly... :-) I already had some leeks from the week before, but I was able to get the potatoes at the farmers market. I also bought some Scottish cider, called 'Peel Walls'. Despite the name hinting at possible applications as paint stripper, this was really very good and went well with the Stilton in the pie. I also picked up a couple of bottles of 'Berry Christmas' fruit wine from Cairn O'Mohr, which tasted very nice. Although, the lady at the Cairn O'Mohr stall let me taste so many of the products that I felt positively tipsy afterwards!

I also noticed a stall selling flour, including strong flour suitable for making bread. I went over and spoke to them, thinking of my previous entries on the subject of bread flour and how I've read that high gluten wheat doesn't grow to well in the British climate. It seems that this might be incorrect, since these people have certainly not had any trouble growing the high gluten wheat. This is something I'm clearly going to have to try to get to the bottom of - watch this space.

The leek and potato soup is a great dish for this time of the year and all the ingredients are in season at the moment. It is also very easy to make. Simply melt some butter in the bottom of a good, heavy bottom pan. Wash and slice a leek and fry the slices in the butter until they darken and go soft. Then, add peeled and sliced potato and stir around. Finally, add enough vegetable or chicken stock to cover (and maybe a wee bit more) and then put the lid on and let it simmer until the potatoes are cooked. That's it! Proper fast food.

For the baked apples, I managed to get British Bramley apples in my local supermarket. These are by far the best apples for this kind of thing, I've tried other apples and they don't work nearly so well. As the Bramley's are cooking apples, they are not too sweet to start with, where as eating apples just tend to get a bit sickly. To make these, I simply cored the apples using an apple coring tool. I'm not generally a fan of having loads of different, single use kitchen gadgets, mostly because I don't have space. But, if you need to core and apple and leave it whole, then one of these is essential! Once cored, I filled the whole brown sugar (unfortunately not British, but I'm working on that one) and wrapped them in tin foil. Then, simple bake in the over on gas mark 7, or about 200C (ish) for about 20 - 30 minutes until you can feel that they are soft. Then serve with cream, or ice-cream.

I am also now the proud owner of a bread machine! As I predicted, the novelty of making my own bread by hand soon wore off. I haven't had much time to try it out yet, but I'll keep you posted with how it goes.

Farmers Markets

2007-11-25T14:33:00.001Z

It seems that farmers markets are becoming ever more popular. According to Country File, on BBC1 this morning, 10 years ago there were only four farmers markets in Britain but there are now around 550! There is one here in Edinburgh which is very popular, although I have only been to it a couple of times myself. Something I hadn't realised is that only about half of the over 500 farmers markets in the UK are certified by the National Farmers Retail and Markets Association. Such certification means, amongst other things, that all of the produce which is for sale has been produced or grown by the stall holder and must come from within 30 miles of the market (50 miles if it can be considered an urban market). Luckily, the farmers market in Edinburgh is certified and even won Farmers Market of the year for 2007. You can check if your local farmers market is certified or not at http://www.farmersmarkets.net/index.htm. According to Country File, there is growing concern amongst farmers market operators about large commercial companies trying to cash-in on this growing market, by selling "Farmers Market" branded products. My guess would be that markets that allow this would not get certification because I doubt that these products are going to be locally produced. So, certification is something to look out for!

North America

2007-11-20T17:34:00.002Z

Gosh, it's been a long time since I last wrote on here! Please accept my apologies, but I've been to New York, on business and to Canada to visit a friend. Of course, this trip raised the issue of whether I should try to continue the whole eating British thing while traveling, although it didn't take too much thought to realise that this would probably result in me starving to death. To be honest, I don't really know if Britain exports much food, this is something I shall try to investigate in the near future. Anyway, in the end I decided to try to eat local food as much as possible. Of course, since North America is so huge, it isn't really a challenge to live of American food, so I'm fairly sure that most of what I consumed while away would have at least been produced in America.

The friend I visited in Canada told me that at the moment it is popular there to try to eat food that has been produced within 100km of where you live. I thought this was interesting, since it's basically the same idea that I have, except adapted for living in a country the size of Canada. As I say, living off food produced somewhere in Canada (or North America) isn't going to be too much of a challenge and it isn't going to help the environment all that much either, so limiting things to a certain radius from home would be more relevant. I had been impressed at how much interest there appears to be in Britain for eating locally produced food, but I was surprised to find similar trends in other countries as well. I suspect that the primary motivation in most cases is environmental, whereas this has never been one of my major goals. Rather, my aim has always been to try to raise awareness of how much great food is produced in Britain. I suspect that, in Canada at least, everyone already knows that they produce a lot of good food! Maybe someone can comment on this? I visited a farmers market while I was in Canada and I was really impressed with the range of products on offer, everything from live chickens to pumpkins. I took some pictures, but I still use 35mm film, so I'll post them once I've had them developed.

New York was an amazing place to visit, not least because they seem to really know how to eat over there! :-) Good food, huge portions and decent prices (compared to the UK, anyway), what more could you want? One notable meal was at a place called "Trattoria dell'Arte" on 7th Avenue between 56th and 57th. I think this place must serve the thinnest pizza possible, while still actually having a base. Actually, if anything, it was more like a water biscuit with pizza topping then a pizza, but it was really good. I was glad that it was very thin because it certainly made up for this in it's other dimensions!

Other then that, we ate at a variety of less notable places, but the food was always good, especially the bagels and cream cheese for breakfast. I plan to investigate if it's possible to buy bagels made with only British ingredients, or if I would have to start making them myself.

Well, I said I would try to eat local, but I have to admit that I didn't really find out where any of the food I was eating came from. I did, however, make more effort with beer. The first night there, I asked in the hotel bar if they had any local beers, to which the barman shook his head and suggested that "Samual Adams", from Boston, was the closest they had. A couple of pints later, I could say that this was a pretty good beer, although not really as local as I would have liked. The closest I was able to get, at the rotating bar at the top of the Marriott Hotel at Times Square, was "Snow Dog" which was produced in Brooklyn, if my memory serves me correctly. I didn't enjoy this beer all that much though and I think the waitress was quite surprised that we were happy to pay the 7 USD per person surcharge for sitting in the rotating bar, just to have a beer that you could have anywhere (they seem to specialise in cocktails judging by the menu).

I think that's probably more or less enough for one post! But, on my return to the UK I was pleased to see that Sainsbury's is still selling just as much fresh, British fruit and veg as it was before I left! I've never noticed before that you can still buy British tomatoes towards the end of November! Maybe my earlier concerns about not getting enough vitamins through the winter were unnecessary? We'll see, watch this space!

Dinner party

2007-10-30T16:00:00.001Z

I had some friends round to dinner the other day, which was really nice and presented me with the challenge of creating an all British meal for three people. Actually, since many British ingredients still seem to be in plenty full supply, it wasn't all that difficult, although I had to make one small compromise. I went for a starter of grilled Portobello mushrooms with Somerset Brie and some small British tomatoes, the name of which escapes me right now. The mushrooms were the one compromise, they were from Ireland. For the main course, I made grilled Venison steak with potatoes, peas and roast parsnips and for dessert I had baked apple with McKay's organic ice-cream. I think it was really good, even if I do say so myself :-)

To drink, my friends managed to find some English wine (see entry about wine!) from Sainsburys, which was really nice. I think it was just called Sainsburys English wine, but I could definitely recommend it. I will have to investigate further where the grapes were grown, etc. I will report when I have more information.

Friday cake (2)

2007-10-19T18:23:00.001+01:00

I was lucky enough to be drawn for cake again last Friday, meaning that it was my turn to make cake for all my lucky colleagues today. Feeling that I didn't really do very well last time I was drawn, in terms of making a British cake, I thought I would try a little harder this time. This time, however, I was armed with knowledge of a source of British flour (Doves farm, as mentioned a little while ago), so I set out to think of a type of cake that I would be likely to be able to make from all British ingredients. In the end, at the suggestion of one of my colleagues, I went for a 'honey cake'. I've never made a honey cake before, so I wasn't really sure what to expect, however a quick search on the Internet revealed a few good sounding recipes.

Being a honey cake, one of the main ingredients is honey. And, of course, no cake would be a cake without a good quantity of sugar. The recipe called for light Muscavado sugar. Now, I didn't think I'd have much chance of finding British Muscavado sugar, since it is, I believe, always made from sugar cane. However, it turns out that 'Silver Spoon' sugar is made using sugar beat grown in Britain. In fact, according to the 'Silver Spoon' website, they process the entire sugar beat crop! Gosh. Unfortunately, it turned out that my local supermarket isn't one of the suppliers of Silver Spoon sugar, so that could be why I haven't so far noticed that you can indeed by British sugar. So, I headed to Tesco, who do apparently sell this brand of sugar.

After getting the bus all the way into town to go to Tesco, I find that although they clearly do sell Silver Spoon sugar, they had run out. I tried to get some of the other ingredients, but found that they had no British honey and didn't have the self-raising variety of Doves farm flour. So, I headed back to my local supermarket, Sainsbury's, where I was able to get Scottish Heather Honey and the self-raising flour. In the end, I settled for light Muscavado sugar, made from sugar cane. So, the cake wasn't made entirely of British ingredients in the end, but it was certainly a lot closer then last time!

I thought the cake was quite nice, but we shall have to see if any of my colleagues comment on it! I shall have to do a little more research on the sugar and see if I can find a reliable source of Silver Spoon sugar.

Wine

2007-10-18T16:29:00.001+01:00

I was invited to a dinner party last Saturday, which was very nice, but of course I couldn't really insist that the hosts cook only with British food! So, I thought that I should at least take along something British and since it is fairly normal to take a bottle of wine to a dinner party I thought this would be the logical choice.

I know a very good wine shop in Edinburgh, called Peter Greens, in Marchemont. I was confident that if I was to be able to get British wine anywhere in Edinburgh, then it would be here. There has been much made of British wine recently on TV, so I didn't think it would be too difficult to get hold of some. Unfortunately, Peter Green's didn't have any, although I did learn something interesting about British wine. Apparently, the term 'British wine' refers to wine which has only be fermented in Britain, using grapes grown somewhere else and imported in. Wine that is actually produced in Britain, including the growing of the gapes, has to be called English wine. I have no idea why this might be, but could be something interesting to find out. I shall add this to the list of things to investigate!

Anyway, in the end I settled for a bottle of Elderberry wine, which was really very nice - a kind of dark, fruity red. As you can probably tell, I'm not exactly a wine buff! But, it went well with the meal (roast beef and roast chicken) and I am sure it would have been equally good on its own. It was Cairn O’ Mohr Elderberry wine and I would definitely recommend it.

Winter foods

2007-10-08T17:05:00.001+01:00

I haven't posted for a while - sorry! :-) But, things have been fairly busy. Despite this, I haven't been neglecting my Eating British project. Last week passed smoothly and there are still plenty of British vegetables for sale in my local supermarket - even tomatoes! I do wonder how much longer this will last though, so far my predictions of things getting more difficult haven't come true.

I think there will be a change, but by switching to more traditionally 'winter' meals I should be able to accommodate this. So, I shall be buying more parsnips, turnips, carrots and that kind of thing from now on. This is a different style of cooking to what I am used to, but I made a lamb casserole last week and it was really good, so that's encouraging! Although my knowledge of history is weak at the best of times, I'm fairly confident that in the past people would have been used to changing their diet between the seasons, where as today we tend to eat what ever we want, whenever we want it. I think that the important question to ask is whether this modern lifestyle is really sustainable in the long term?

Curiously, I was talking to someone last weekend and I got to telling him about this project. He thought it was very interesting and wished me luck, but he said that whilst he thought it would relatively possible for me, as one person, to do this, he didn't think it would be sustainable for all 60 million people living in the UK. I wonder if this is really true? I shall have to do some more homework on this one, but it's a big question and I wonder if anyone really knows the answer. I suppose that this was very effectively tested during the second world war when rationing was introduced because we were unable to import as much food as we needed. The fact that people had to really 'go without' during those times suggests to me that the answer was certainly no then. But, will it have changed now? Have modern methods of agriculture made food production more efficient, implying that we would be able to cope better now?

The tomato chutney that I made a little while ago has been fixed, I think. I re-boiled it once I had the time, without the lid on the saucepan, and it thickened up nicely. So that's good.

In a pickle...

2007-09-27T17:40:00.001+01:00

I finally got around to trying to preserve some tomatoes last night, although I'm not sure how well it's worked out. I followed a recipe I found for tomato chutney, but the result is not like any chutney I've ever had!

I basically just boiled nearly 2kg of tomatoes with some onion to release the juice and then added salt, sugar, vinegar and some spices. The recipe said to simmer gently until thick, but the chutney I've ended up with is quite runny, so I'm wondering if I didn't simmer it for long enough. It tastes quite nice, although the vinegar flavour is very strong. The recipe said that it should be left for three to five weeks to mature, so I'm hoping that it will taste less acidic after this time. I did wonder if the tomatoes were a bit too watery, or perhaps it's a little late in the season. Oh well, we'll see what it's like in a few weeks time!

In the mean time, I might see if I can find some other interesting preserves to try out.

Bread

2007-09-26T17:45:00.001+01:00

One of the problem areas with my eating British scheme has been bread. I posted a little while ago that this was a problem because the types of flour that are commonly grown in the UK are not suitable for bread making. The reason for this is, I believe, that bread needs a wheat with a high gluten content and our climate is not really that suitable for this type. While I was doing my shopping last night I had a look at the range of flours that were for sale and was surprised to find some which claim to have been produced from British wheat! This is good news, since I often have sandwiches for lunch. The company was called "Doves Farm", but as far as I can tell they don't have an active website at the moment. However, according to the bag of flour they specialise in organic flour milled from wheat grown on their farm.

Of course, in order to turn the flour into tasty, lunch-time sandwiches, I had to make some bread first. I went through a phase of making my own bread a few years ago, so it's not something completely new to me. Despite this, I still find the process quite fascinating, especially since I don't have a bread making machine to do it all for me! It took quite a long time, but the results were definitely worth it. I basically just followed the recipe on the back of the flour bag, but I used hemp seed oil in place of vegetable oil because I can be sure of it's British origin (well, it claims to be farmed in Britain!). I'm not sure how long the loaf will last before I've eaten it all, but I have a sneaky feeling that after a while the fascination with making bread by hand will wear a little thin. Perhaps now is the time to investigate bread making machines a little more closely?

Hawthorn berries

2007-09-25T17:56:00.001+01:00

Gosh, it's been a while since I last posted! My excuse is that I've been away - a trip down to Southampton on business, London to visit some family and Lincolnshire. All good, but not too easy to keep up with the eating British thing!

Anyway, back now and aiming to try some new British food! While I was in Lincolnshire, I attempted to make fruit leather from Hawthorn berries, following a recipe I heard about from the TV programme with Ray Mears, called "Ray Mears' Wild Food". I collected a large bowl of berries and then squished them all up with my hands to form a paste which I then pushed through a strainer, as I saw on the programme. However, the berries seemed rather dry, so I had to add quite a bit of water to make it go through. I then left the paste to set - it turns into quite stiff jelly quite quickly. Then, I cut this into strips and dried them in the oven. It should be fairly simply, but I must have done something wrong since by the time a got back to Edinburgh, they had started to go mouldy :-( Oh well, the search for a source of winter vitamin C continues!

I tried a new British cheese today - Cornish Camembert, made by Cornish Country Larder Ltd (http://www.ccl-ltd.co.uk). I used it in my sandwiches for lunch and it was really good, with a lovely, creamy texture. It went well with sliced tomatoes and a little salt and pepper.

I don't know how much longer I'll be able to get hold of British tomatoes, so I plan to try to preserve some. I havn't yet decided how to do this, but I shall investigate. Watch this space!

Marrows

2007-09-04T18:18:00.000+01:00

Whilst doing my shopping last week, I came across marrows in the vegetable section. I noticed that these were produced in Britain and so decided to try one out. Now, I've never done anything with marrows before, so I wasn't sure what to do with it. So, it sat in my fridge for a few days while I gave this some thought. In the end, a quick web search revealed that marrows can be chopped up and used in stir frys and things, much like courgettes, or they can be de-seeded and roasted. I'm sure there are other things you can do with them to, but I don't know what they are!

In the end, I went for marrow stuffed with minced beef in a tomato sauce. This is really easy to do and turned out to be very tasty indeed. Simply preheat the oven to gas mark 7 (reasonably hot - about 220 degrees C), then slice the marrow into two halves and then slice each of these length-wise down the middle. The seeds can then be scooped out with a spoon, leaving a decent size trench into which the filling can be put. Arrange these on a baking tray, ready for the filling.

To make the filling, I chopped and fried a small onion and a few spring onions until soft and then added the minced beef. Use a high heat and don't be tempted to stir the minced beef around straight away after adding it to the pan. Leaving it still for a while allows it to get sealed and this held to keep more of the juices in, I think.

Once the beef had browned I added chopped mushrooms and continued cooking until they started to shrink. I then added some salt, pepper, paprika and chopped basil (OK, OK, none of the spices were produced in Britain - I'm working on that one!). Finally, I added about 6 decent size tomatoes, chopped into small chunks and then stirred this around until the tomatoes began to release their juice. I then simply put this mixture into the trenches in the marrow and then put it all in the oven for about 20 minutes. It was great, so give it a try and let me know what you think. I guess you could add cheese or any number of other ingredients to make a bit more exciting.

I have frequently had conversations with people about British cheese. Often, visitors to Britain assume that all British cheese is Cheddar and given how much Cheddar is produced and how many different 'varieties' I can see how they get this impression! However, according to www.cheeseboard.co.uk, there are around 700 different varieties of British cheese! Although they don't list what they all are, which is a shame. I shall have to try to get hold of some of the more exciting ones at some point. I have been a fan of British cheese for sometime and regularly enjoy the delights of Somerset Brie, Shropshire Blue, Double Gloucester and of course, Stilton (the king of cheese, according to the website!). I know there are some great goats cheeses out there, for example, so I'm keen to find a more extensive source of British cheese. Watch this space.