Compassion in World Farming
I can be a bit of an ostrich when it comes to animal cruelty. I’m happy to donate but I can hardly bear to see or read about the plight of animals trapped in a hellish world. So many humans can get very worked up by a pet being mistreated but are still happy to eat meat from animals that are factory farmed using inhumane methods. Years ago I didn’t want to think or know. I was on a tight budget. I needed to eat. I’m on a tight budget again now but I’d rather eat much less meat and know that the meat comes from an animal has be...
read moreCauliflower soup with blue cheese and orange zest recipe
This is another in our skinflint soup series. This delicious soup was run up with leftovers that could easily have just been thrown away. They made an elegant soup. The two key ingredients are mushroom ketchup and the zest of the orange which transformed this soup from good to sublime. Danny chickened out on the orange zest front. Refused even to taste it. He missed out on a real treat. I got the idea of combining orange and vegetables from a video from dehydrate2store where Tammy mixes dried ground orange peel with dried beetroot and...
read moreDusk
I love the light in a lot of Carel Weight’s paintings. He often favours dusk – the time the French call day for night – the brief drift of minutes when everything seems to shimmer in a strange somnolent way. I often think of his paintings these days as I tend to work in the garden between three and four thirty. I choose the vegetables for supper quite early and they wait in a little trug on top of the feedbins until I return indoors. When long arrows of flying ducks or geese fill the sky I know that dusk is approaching. It’s a...
read moreHomemade pine needle vinegar
It was Danny’s turn to buy the Balsamic vinegar last weekend. Someone had put an expensive bottle of Balsamic beside the cheap ones in Tesco and he ended up paying five times more than he could have. The resulting shriek got me thinking about Balsamic vinegar in general. The price and quality of Balsamic vinegar can vary enormously. We have a very expensive bottle that we use occasionally for dipping or salads and generally have a ‘cheap’ bottle that we use for cooking. But cheap Balsamic vinegar is still much more expensive than...
read moreBlogs worth visiting: The Treehouse Diaries
Yesterday our network started to get very creaky and then suddenly I couldn’t connect to the internet. Panic. My window on the world was suddenly blank. Danny fiddled about for hours while I continued with clearing the leaves to distract myself. And then on a foray upstairs I noticed that there was a newsfeed on the laptop’s screen. “It’s working. How did you do it?” “I don’t know.” Danny is always claims he’s done nothing when he fixes something. Suddenly my laptop was a friend again. Woke before dawn this morning and...
read moreSave money supermarket shopping online
“I usually shop at Sainsbury’s.” Sam confided. He likes good food. He’s a great chef. But was it really worth motoring over to Cambridge or Bury to shop? “Oh no I don’t have time to do that. I buy online. I’ve done it for ages. Initially my neighbours all thought I was mad. But gradually, one by one they are all doing it. Go for it – you can save time and money, Fiona. And the delivery rates are much cheaper now.” We don’t have brilliant local shops in Newmarket. No green grocer, no fishmonger. There are several good...
read moreStir fry with skirt of beef, green pepper and spring onion recipe
Sometimes we need a hefty meat fix. For years it was steak every Friday night, then it was an occasional steak when we found them on sale. Now it will be skirt of beef. Not only is it economical at about £3.50 for 500g it’s tastier than steak and has a wonderful texture. In the UK skirt is generally a largely undiscovered cut of beef. So thank you Jo and more recently Paula for pointing me in the direction of the broad range of ways to cook this superb cut. Having already made a skirt of beef casserole in the slow cooker I thought that...
read moreReview: Marcus Harrison’s Wild Food Mentor course
One of the things that I’ve always longed for is to spend time with someone who can teach me about foraging in depth. There are courses but rarely local to me. Also some of the best ones can be ridiculously expensive once you add the price of the petrol and staying overnight. I have several foraging books and these have proved to be very useful – especially the small edition of Richard Maybe’s Food for Free which can be slipped into a pocket or Jalopy’s glove compartment. But I knew that I wasn’t even beginning to take full...
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