Christmas

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

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)

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

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

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

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)

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.