After years of wanting to join in the fun but being too afraid of the huge pans of molten fruit involved, which I imagined would throw great blobs of sugary lava all over my face causing permanent jam splatter scars, I have, under the expert guidance of a friend, finally gone for it and cooked up an enormous pan of lovely plum and apple jam.

Big bubbling pan of jam

As an added bonus all of the fruit collected was free, collected from various sites around Chorlton Ees. Anyone who’s familiar with the Ees will no doubt have noticed the area around Hardy Farm has dozens of apple trees all laden with hundreds of apples which are  ripe for the picking right now. So long as you’re not expecting to find supermarket style perfectly symmetrical shiny unblemished apples there’s probably more than enough for anyone who fancies to go fill as many carrier bags as they can carry.

The plums were from another less well known site on the Ees, the Community Orchard. The Orchard is perhaps an acre of land packed full of plum trees, apple trees, damsons, raspberries and lots of other fruits free for anyone to come along and pick. You just have to find it… and I’m not going to spoil the fun by telling you where it is! I remember the excitement when I first stumbled across it, an adventurous off road sneaky peak through a gap in the hedge revealed something of a secret fruity garden tucked away. Magic.

So with our bags full of lovely fruit all we had to do was work out what to do with it. Here’s where Steph came in. With a growing reputation as Chorlton’s resident jam expert we arranged an early 9am start jam session scheduled to last just over an hour. We were having so much fun though that one thing led to another and 6 hours later we’d not only made 9 jars of jam(!),  but we’d also done a bread making lesson, made two loaves of bread, a lovely celery soup, soda bread, jam tarts, repotted several plants and done an experimental basil cutting.  Rock and Roll!

What a lovely way to spend a Thursday morning.

Steph and Andy

The jam making process it seems it quite straight forward really involving simply boiling up your fruit and adding more sugar than you could possibly imagine necessary then pouring it into sterilised jars to be sealed and labelled up. There’s plenty of books and websites about for you to find out how to do this (or you could just pop round to Steph’s ), so no need for me to go over it here, all I want to say is it’s great fun, very rewarding and reasonably easy. Do it!

Here’s a couple of Jam making websites

The basic method from Self-sufficient.co.uk
Lots of recipes from The Foody
Lots more recipes from Jam Recipes

And here’s a link to a book I’ve been enjoying reading at the moment, the River Cottage Preserves Handbook. This series of books (including Bread, Mushrooms, and Veg Patch) really does seem to be spot on, each one put together by one of the River Cottage’s relevant experts they go through everything you need to know right from the basics. Can’t wait to give the Hedgerow Jelly a go. It’s made with a mix of any foraged Hedgerow berries and crab apples. Or maybe the Bramley Lemon Curd, which sounds like a lovely wintery treat for toast. Mmm.

All I need now is a kitchen to do all this in, oh and a house to have a kitchen in, oh and a garden to grow all the fruit. Ahhh, one day. For now it’s foraged fruit and friends kitchens all the way. Not that that’s a bad thing, in fact it’s great fun. See nothing should stop you. You don’t even need your own fruit or a kitchen to make your own jam, just a nice friend and a sense of adventure.

Perfect!

It was a pretty amazing day really. In the space of an afternoon we managed to make a plain white loaf, a dozen rolls, bread sticks, a focaccia, tortilla wraps and some nachos! All turned out great. Rachel certainly was a natural – she has great baking hands. Watching Rachel and Andy’s synchronised dough kneading it was difficult to tell who was teaching who.

Synchronised bread making

Even the kids got stuck in. Beth helped cut dough into strips to make bread sticks, which Ellie then did a marvellous job of shaping and adding grated cheese to make them extra tasty.

Beth makes bread sticks sticks

Beth and Ellie make the breadstick shapes and sprinkle cheese

Even little Lily helped, she made the important decision that lemons were indeed too yakky to be added to the mix.

Lily discovers lemons are not as tasty as bread

Most of the recipes used came from The River Cottage’s Bread Making Handbook – a fantastic book, packed with great recipes, beautiful photographs all put together with style and enthusiasm that really makes you want to bake. Also all the recipes seem to work well. Who would believe that this was our first venture into Italian bread making?

Focaccia... Mmmm

Or that a 4 year old could really play a major part in producing some of the bestest ever bread sticks?

Breadsticks, millions of em!

Those expensive, tasteless, o-so-straight and boring tubes of tat will never again be spotted in the Cordingley shopping trolley (or there’ll be trouble Rach – I’ve got my eye on you!).

So the first Bread Making Workshop was a great success, we all learnt a lot, but I think the best thing we discovered is that you don’t need to be an expert to do this. It doesn’t take years of practice to make something infinitely better than what’s on offer at the supermarket.

Of course the more you bake the better your bread will get, but this was all of ours first attempts at making over half of the things we made and all turned out well. I believe the key skill in bread making is the determination to outwit the marketers who create your addiction to shop bought bread.

It is not necessary to have the most amazing kneading techniques, special equipment, years of practice and oodles of spare time, but rather you need to be able to resist the lure of colourful packaging, health claims and subtle hints towards your own incompetence – ‘you couldn’t possible make a loaf so light, crusty and tasty as this’. Well here is the proof that you can.

Once again, here it is, a thing of beauty – the first loaf from Rachel, Master Baker Extraordinaire (family baker for over 3 hours):

Perfect!

Reclaim the power! Bake your own bread!

Anyone who is interested in taking part in a bread making workshop, or having us come to your house to run one for your family and friends please contact me.

There’s also lots of information on there about what real bread is and why we should be eating it including what is wrong with industrially produced bread.

This campaign is not about making it easier for a few people to have the luxury of going out to buy fancy artisan bread. Bread is a fundamental part of our diet, three quarters of all people have it as part of their diet every day, and as such it is vitally important that the bread we eat is good for us. Industrial milling breaks the grains down in a way that destroys many of it’s nutritional qualities, so much so that vitamins have to be added back into the mix by law. These re-added vitamins are more difficult (or impossible?) for our bodies to take in than those that were originally naturally present but that the industrial process has removed. Other aspects of the way most bread is produced makes it all but impossible for some people to digest properly.

There’s also the issue of supporting local businesses. The Real Bread Campaign reports of a study that found that on average local businesses put more than three-quarters of their income back into their local community , thereby helping it prosper. Compare that to the big supermarket giants, where the money is sucked out of your community straight into the pockets of a few shareholders. I can understand why some people may find it hard to resist the pull of the supermarket, however I think it is important that if and when it is possible people should be moving towards supporting their local shops as much as they can.

Remember, every little helps. Or is that hurts?

It’s been going a few weeks now and more and more producers are being added all the time so you should be able to find somewhere near you. Or if you know a local producer that’s not on the map let them know about it so they can get themselves added!

For more on the problems with (amongst other things) industrially produced bread read Felicity Lawrence’s “Not on the Label”.

For more information why and how to bake your own bread read “Bread Matters” by Andrew Whitley.

Despite it’s fairly long list of ingredients, it’s really easy to make, and incredibly tasty. I saw the book in the shops yesterday and I have to say it looks pretty tasty too. I wanted to hug it (erm is that it bit strange?). It’s one of those big chunky books with unfinished paper, loads of beautiful retro illustrations and quirky pages with bits and pieces that you can take out. None of this really has anything to do with food and it being a cookbook I suppose you’d probably prefer to know whether or not the recipes are any good before you’d decide to go buy it. All I can say is that if this recipe is anything to go by then it definitely will be. I was too busy stroking the pages and drooling over the quirky design to actually read any of the other recipes it contained. Oops.

Leon Gobi (serves 6)

• 1 medium onion, halved and thickly sliced
• 1 carrot, thickly sliced
• 2 tbsp sunflower or peanut oil
• 1 red chilli
• 2 thumb-sized pieces of root ginger, washed but not peeled
• 5 cloves garlic, peeled
• 1 large tsp Madras curry powder
• 1 tsp turmeric
• 1 tsp black onion seeds
• 1 medium sweet potato, washed and cut into 2.5cm dice
• 4 heaped tbsp ground almonds
• A good handful of sultanas
• ½ a small cauliflower, broken into florets
• 1 x 400ml tin of coconut milk
• 150g frozen peas
• Juice of ½ a lemon
• A really big handful of coriander, roughly chopped
• Salt
• 2 heaped tbsp desiccated coconut, to serve

1. In a large saucepan, cook the onion and carrot over a medium to low heat in the oil for 15-20 minutes with the lid on, stirring occasionally. Season with salt.
2. Blitz the chilli, ginger and garlic to a paste in a food processor. Stir the paste into the onions once they have begun to soften, along with the spices (including the onion seeds). After another five minutes, season with salt, add the sweet potato chunks and the almonds and mix well so that everything is well coated.
3. Turn the heat up a bit and stir in 500ml of water and the sultanas. Bring to a simmer and leave it to bubble gently for 10-15 minutes with the lid off, stirring occasionally.
4. Add the cauliflower florets and the coconut milk and simmer for a further 10-15 minutes, covered. Check that the sweet potato and cauliflower are both cooked, turn the heat off and stir in the peas.
5. When you are ready to serve add a little salt, the lemon juice and the chopped coriander, stir and leave for a minute. Serve with rice, or naan (or both!) with a sprinkling of dried coconut on top.

Click here for more curry recipes

Click here for naan bread recipe

Mushroom season is here. Hurrah! I’m not sure if it’s normal, but the floors up here seem to be carpetted with them too, hurrah! We’ve seen over 55 different types so far. I’m thinking of starting a new section on here devoted to my little friends, so if I can work out how to do it I’ll be posting all the different types we find plus notes on edibility, habitat etc.  But obviously don’t believe anything I say, we use three different books, which though generally a good mix, cross referenced say different things sometimes and I don’t want to be responsible for anyone else’s poisoning.

The books we are currently using are the Collins Gems “Mushrooms”, which is great, has good, clear pictures, pretty much all the common things you are likely to see and references similar mushrooms things can be confused with, then “Mushrooms” by Roger Phillips, which is really comprehensive, but maybe a little too much so when you’re just starting out, it’s best to look for things in the little book first and then check there’s nothing else simlar in this one. We also have the River Cottage “Mushrooms” (all these people clearly spend days trying to think of original titles), which is great for all the edible species, has recipes and the author John Wright has a few amusing mushroom stories to tell which makes it a livelier read than most of the guides.

It’s been a few days now since we dared to eat something we found and we’re both still alive, so let us be your guinea pigs, puff balls are indeed safe to eat. We spent a couple of days on a campsite in Kintyre at Point Sands campsite and the morning after we’d arrived realised we were surrounded by little puffball mushrooms, so picked maybe a couple of dozen, peeled off their skins, fried them in some butter and garlic and had them with pasta for our tea. How exciting!  To be honest they weren’t the most amazingly tasty mushrooms I’ve ever had, just maybe not as strong mushroomy taste and slighly fluffy texture, but they were ok, and definitely good for a cheap meal.If you fancy trying them you just need to make sure they are all completely white all the way through. The name puffball comes form the fact that as they mature their insides turns into dark spores which are then puffed out of the top of the mushroom. They don’t do any harm to you in this state, it just doesn’t taste nice.

There was also maybe five or so rings of what looked like fairy ring mushrooms on the same field, but we weren’t sure and were too scared to try them. But anyone who could identify them could pick themselves a real feast at that campsite. It’s also an incredibly beautiful place to stay, right on the beach, you just walk out of your tent onto the white sandy beach, which is really long and looks out west to Islay and Jura, providing one of the most beautiful sunsets I’ve seen. We took our table and chairs out to the water’s edge and had cheese and biscuits and a bottle (oops two bottles) of red wine to watch it.

Among the other interesting things we have found so far were the Fly Agaric, hundreds of them in the woods on the walk back from the Glenashadale Falls in Arran. Due to their hallucenogenic properties they’re often said to be poisonous, they are not deadly though, they’ll just make you a bit sick then you’ll be fine apparently, I still don’t fancy it. I read they affect your judgement, so if for example you tried to jump over a small branch you would really leap high in the air to clear it. They have the same effect on deer, who love eating them and then leap around the forrest like nutters.  I find that pretty hillarious, maybe we should all take guidance from the deer and go out into the woods and have fun leaping around.

I saw a clump of chantarelle mushrooms, but didn’t pick them. It was pretty obvious what they were too, so not sure why I decided not to, bet they would have been nicer in my pasta than those blinking puffballs.

Inside the Chantarelle

Andy spotted a Destroying Angel, a  beautiful, delicate but deadly poisonous mushroom. Luckily it’s pretty unmistakeable, however I think it may be the type that poisoned the Horse Whisperer author recently. It causes liver failure and survival rates are pretty low, by the time the symptoms start most of the irreversible damage has been done. Scary.

Destroying Angel

We’ve also seen a shaggy ink cap, blushers, amethyst deceivers, egghead mottlegills ( I love the names!) and lots more. Here’s a few more photos and watch out for the new mushroom section coming soon.

All sorts of food are having all sorts of “nutrients” added to them, and we are lead to believe that they are somehow better for us than fresh, unprocessed food. High in this, low in that, added this and that, pro-something… it’s confusing, nobody knows what it all means or what combination of these things we need to eat to not get cancer, heart disease or a whole list of scary illnesses.

He suggests that the culture of food is changing rapidly. Where once we used to sit around the table and enjoy a meal with our family eating food prepared from scratch we are now happier to eat on the move or in front of the tv, basically anywhere where is consumption of food is quick and has little interaction people, or the actual food you are eating. Driving this he says is “a multi-billion dollar food-marketing machine that thrives on change for its own sake” and “the constantly shifting ground of nutritional science that, depending on your point of view, is advancing the the frontiers of our knowledge about food or just changing its mind a lot because it knows much less than it cares to admit.” So basically in order for the supermarkets and food manufacturers to make more and more money we are made to feel we need their processed, pre-prepared food to live faster, eat healthy and be happy. A lot of food marketing is designed to encourage us to eat in front of the tv or in the car: when we eat mindlessly and alone, we eat more. Its scary. And sad.

It seems the more people worry about their health and let this interfere with their diets, the more health problems they actually have. I am not suggesting that people should just not worry about what they are eating and live on say rice crispies and pie and chips if that’s what they are into, but that people need to realise that they already know how to eat healthily and you don’t really need to be told how to do it.

Basically just “eat food” is the idea. “Eat food” sounds silly, surely that’s what we’re all doing? I’m not sure. Lots of the things being added to basic food like bread, butter etc are not actually food, we know this, but are led to believe that they are somehow better, more healthy with these added extras, or simply do not even think about what is in the food we are eating We trust that the manufacturers would not put things in that are bad for us. It is apparent though that are new diets of processed food are causing chaos with our bodies, and rates of the diseases we are being encouraged to change our diets to avoid are actually increasing. The ‘advanced’ western diet sees much higher rates of obesity, heart disease etc than traditional diets from around the world.

I think I am lucky. Because of where I live I have easy access to a variety of shops which basically don’t even sell this processed food. Most people however shop at supermarkets, and they are full of it. Inspired by Pollan’s article I decided to take a trip down to a local supermarket and have a look at a few simple things to see the differences between what I would prepare at home and what you would buy from a supermarket. “Soup, bread and butter” I thought nice simple things… shouldn’t be too bad…

Leek and Potato Soup (Home Made)
Ingredients: Leeks, potatoes, vegetable stock, butter, maybe a bit of cream if you like it.

Leek and Potato Soup (Shop Bought)
Ingredients: Water, potato (11%), leek (6%), rapeseed oil, split red lentils, double cream, skimmed milk powder, onion, potato flake, modified maize starch, wheat flour, salt, vegetable bouillion (salt, whey powder, yeast extract, glucose syrup, onion powder, flavouring, leek powder, parsley, white pepper, citric acid, celery extract), dried leek, potato starch, leek powder, stabilisers (dip…phates, polyphosphates), yeast extract (yeast, potato starch, salt, yeast extract), parsley onion powder, white pepper.

Bread (Home made)
Ingredients: Yeast, flour, water, olive oil, salt, sugar.

Bread (Shop Bought)
Ingredients: Wheat flour, water, yeast, vegetable oil, salt, flavouring, soya flour, preservative: calcium propionate, emulsifier E671, E481, flour treatment agents, ascorbic acid (vitamin C), E920, flavouring.

Butter (Lightly Salted)
Mine has no ingredients listed, I assume this means it is just butter and a little salt.

“I can’t believe its not butter”
Vegetable oils, buttermilk, water, salt, emulsifiers: mono and di-glyerides of fatty acids, sunflower lecithin, preservative: potasium sorbate, Vitamin E, citric acid, flavouring, colour: beta-carotene, Vitamins A and D.

Hmmm. I know which I’d rather be eating. “I can’t believe it’s not butter”? Have a look on the back of the packet. It is not butter. I have no idea what it is, but it definitely isn’t butter. Hang on though, it has “50% less calories than our regular margarine” plastered all over the packaging, it must be good, and “no trans-fat” – yipeeee, I’m gonna make some toast… but then… from wikipedia,

“Although the manufacturer claims that the product contains no Trans Fat, this may not be entirely true. Checking the ingredients listed on the package shows hydrogenated and partially hydrogenated oils as part of the makeup. This is because the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) allows food manufacturers to make the claim as long as each serving of the product has less than half a gram of trans fat. In a serving of 14g, this equates to up to 3.5% trans fat by weight. A study by the Center for Science in the Public Interest in April 2006 showed that this and several other spreads claiming “no trans fat” do in fact contain trans fats in what may be considered significant quantities.”

Now I’m confused. I actually have no idea what trans fat is. I don’t really know if it is bad for me. Either way I think I’ll stick to butter. It seems instinctively right that something from a natural source would be more easily processed by your body than something that contains a list of chemicals which I have no idea what the effects of are.

So what is the solution? It seems to me we were better off before all this meddling. Preparing food ourselves at home, from whole ingredients. If you make something yourself you will know what’s in it. Try not to shop at supermarkets, they are full of rubbish and crafty ways of making you want it. Eat with people, it’s fun to hang out with friends, it can improve family relationships, and you’ll take notice of and enjoy food more.

Over the next few weeks I think I might spend a bit more time in supermarkets. I’m thinking of doing some more comparisons and maybe making some alternative recipes to to the stuff you can buy there.

]]> http://www.eggbutnobacon.co.uk/2008/01/eat-food/feed/ 1