Sunday 12 August 2007

First week over!

Well, that's more or less the first week of my eating British scheme passed and it's gone fairly easily. I think I probably did slightly better then last week actually. I have the feeling that things are going a bit to easily if I'm honest and I am really beginning to suspect that later in the year it will become much more challenging.

However, for now, I'm doing well with carrots, onions and potatoes all readily available on the vegetable front and I've just had Scottish venison for dinner, which was good. Of course, things like carrots and onions are seasonal, so I'm really wondering if I'll still be able to get hold of them come the autumn. In the past, people would have stored up a surplus of these foods to last them the winter. When I was growing up, my parents used to grow many of their own vegetables and I can remember the onions being tied up in bunches and left hanging from the beams in the garage roof. These onions would then last through much of the autumn and winter, although we would run out eventually and then we'd have to buy them. These days of course, no one bothers with storing vegetables, since as soon as something like onions goes out of season in Britain, they simply get imported from somewhere else in the world. I've never paid much attention to where onions come from and I cook with them nearly all the time, so things could get quite interesting as the year wears on!

I had pasta for my dinner yesterday, which I must admit was not British! The only way I can see of getting something like pasta which is sourced from British wheat would be to make it myself. I know how to make pasta, thanks to my ex-girlfriend, but I've never really tried doing it regularly. At the moment I'm wondering if it would be relatively easy to dry my own pasta, then I could make it in batches. Mind you, my ex-girlfriend always held that she could make and cook pasta from ingredients in no more time then it took to cook dried pasta from a bag. She even demonstrated this to me, so I know it's true! Of course, this doesn't apply to the 'quick cook' varieties of dried pasta.

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