Edinburgh, Chutney & Tebay Services

 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.

Sunnyfields Farm Shop and Market

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.

The first crop of tomatoes!

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.

Plants

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.

Home grown vegetables

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.

Tomato chutney

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!

Tomato chutney and frozen vegetables

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

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.

Winter foods

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...

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.