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.

A trip in a small boat to the floating markets of Cai Rang on the Mekong Delta was to provide the setting for the next of our adventures in fruit (WOOP! Just realised what I have just written – how cool this trip is!!) .

These markets are incredible. The river was buzzing with life. Hundreds of boats gather piled high with produce from pumpkins and cucumbers to star apples and jackfruit. Each boat has a pole with a sample of the boat’s wares tied up high so it can be seen from afar. We spent some time drifting wide eyed through the boats.

We hired a guide to come with us so we could ask any questions as we were bobbing along. He told us a lot of the people lived on the boats. As we looked we noticed some were set up barge stylee with pot plants and deck chairs.

I’m sure it’s not all quite the jolly boating holiday though. These people have little money and live very simple lives. To me on a visit this traditional way of life that has gone on for hundreds of years seems like a beautiful treasure to cling on to. But it is impossible to know how the people themselves think and feel about it. What might their aspirations be? How happy are they? It would be incredible to be able to spend some real time with the people talking about their lives. But for now we had to make do with floating along with our romantic ideas and Nikon camera.

We stopped off along the way to visit a rice noodle “factory”. This small family run establishment was housed in a coconut leaf roofed barn in a little village by the river. 4 people were working at the various stages of production. Rice powder was mixed with flour and water into a batter that was spread on large heated disks like a crepe. This was peeled of laid out on racks and took outside to dry in the sun. Once dry something like an over sized pasta maker was used to cut the disks into thin strips.

In an amazing use of resources the disk cooking the rice batter was heated by a fire of burning rice husks. The ash from the fire was kept and put back into the land to be used as a fertiliser to grow food. Any “waste” from this process was fed to the pigs who lived in the barn next door.

Further down the river we stopped at an orchard which grew a jumbled mix of fruit trees. Mango, jackfruit, star apple, rose apple, pineapple, coconuts, water coconuts, papaya, bananas, lemons, oranges, limes, lotus flowers all grew together in an area we walked round of about an acre.

As you can imagine the fruit we tasted from the trees was some of the freshest, most amazingly sweet and ripe fruit I’d ever experienced. The jackfruit was a new one on us. I think we’d eaten it before (maybe cooked?) but it was completely different to the fresh version. This huge fruit grows in abundance on trees through out the area. It can sprout from any part of the tree and a tree laden with hundreds of these gigantic monsters (which can weigh up to 36kg!) is quite a sight!

The flesh inside is unlike anything else I have tasted. Yellow fleshy segments are separated from pips and a fibrous inside. They have a mild taste and an almost chewy texture. The flavour? Well I suppose it is just like a jackfruit. Hard to describe. The cooked jackfruit tasted like chicken, this fresh fruit tasted like erm… maybe like a drier version of a mango or pineapple.

Lets hope the roads here don’t “improve” too quickly. Once the way to transport things quickly up and down the whole country is paved the supermarket chains will swoop and all this will be gone. There is a Co-op Mart down the road from where we stayed, we went in for a look around. They were selling cereals and packaged fruit, like they do in Tesco. People were going mad for it.

This market is huge and I would really recommend going for a walk around it, that is so long as you’re not the type who doesn’t like to upset themselves watching things get killed (perhaps a silly thing to say on a vegetarian blog?!). It’s really fascinating. You’ll see things you’ve never seen and get a glimpses of a completely different way of life. I don’t eat fish, but I just love places like this. So active, everyone with their own little business trying to make enough to get by. The atmosphere was hectic (or maybe it just looked that way to me as I was being bombarded with so many new sights and sounds), but in general spirits seemed to be pretty high. A big contrast to the bored counter attendant or zombified shelf stacker at Tescos.

Unfortunately we were so absorbed in gawping at things that we didn’t really take any photos. Well actually we took one:

I mean, what is this!? And what on earth would you do with it? And how does that whole thing fit in that shell? Not sure if you can tell from this picture but these things were huge, the weird wrinkly thing hanging out of the shell was well over a foot long. Possibly one of the ugliest edible thing I’ve ever seen.

While we were at the market we saw the first thing of the trip that really made me stop in my tracks. Stop reading here if you are a bit squeemish. As we were leaving the market we walked behind a van and saw a woman crouching on the floor with a knife in her hand. There was a pile of frogs on the floor to her right. In front there was a pile of guts. To her left there was pile of frogs without guts… Just as we walked past she picked one of the frogs up and with a quick stab and a squeltch removed the guts and then threw the guttless frog to her left where it landed with a splat in it’s new pile. It’s not the kind of thing we’re used to seeing at home, but perhaps it should be? I really think people ought to have more of a connection like this with what they are eating, how it is kept and ultimately how it is killed for them to eat.

The fish market is on the north side of the river, just west of Shamian Island near where you get the ferry across the river. Map here.

Also there are pics from the ice festival, which wasn’t quite what we expected. It seems from this year it has been taken over by Disney. You can imagine our joy when we were greeted by a huge Mickey Mouse, lots of merchandise and general selling out of a previously independent event. Booo. Still, we had a good time. Well actually it got 3.5 out of 10, but you know we had as good a time as we could at -23 surrounded by plastic Disney characters when we were expecting world famous ice sculptures.

I have to start the post off with this though:

It is the breakfast from the hotel we were staying at, The Lungmen, which was just opposite the station. Have you ever seen anything like it?! There was a huge choice of dishes, from grain based porridge type soups, steamed bread, different steamed vegetables, sweet potatoes, black eggs, white eggs, fried eggs, stuffed buns and loads more. It was brilliant! We had no idea really what we should be eating with what, or how, so we just had to go for it. I have to point out though that these plates and bowls are very small! We didn’t really have like the equivalent of 8 full sized plates of food just for breakfast! Honest.

So, to the photos… **Click to enlarge + for more info**

Last week when I went to do my shopping at K+N in Birkenhead (top veg shop!) I saw they had a couple of crates of English tomatoes for sale at £2.99 each. £2.99!! The box was over 5kg! So that’s less than 60p per kg or about £1 less per kg than normal price. I knew it was good, but I’d never normally get through so many before they went squidgy.  And then a flash of inspiration, I remembered seeing Hugh making tomato sauce for the year from his home grown yearly glut and decided this was my chance to do the same (shame they weren’t home grown though).

This is really good. K+N probably buy from wholesale market in Liverpool, which I assume works a bit like a normal market, only bigger. Often at the end of the day you’ll get people practically giving things away, and they pass this on to their customers. Reminds me of I was walking through Kirkgate Market in Leeds a couple of weeks ago and a guy was shouting “Bag of bananas a pound! As many bananas as you can fit in a carrier bag a pound!” He had a hoard of ladies surrounding him grabbing at bananas and stuffing them into bags! So funny. I love the atmosphere in a market. Everyone shouting, people everywhere, so much going on. Imagine the staff of Tesco stood at the end of the aisle passionately trying to get you to buy their over priced ready meals and toilet fresheners. Nah, never going to happen really is it?

Obviously the bananas were unlikely to be fair trade nor would they or my tomatoes have been organic, but there is something about buying produce directly from a person with their own shop or stall that to some extent counterbalances these concerns. Although the ideal would be to shop by these principles all the time, it is not always practical, or as much fun! I remember being told as a kid “Don’t cut your nose off to spite your face”  more often than I imagine could have been necessary and it has obviously sunk in. I wonder why people kept saying this to me? What was I up to? Must have been up to no good anyway. Maybe I just remember it vividly as it’s really quite a gruesome thing to be saying to a small child. I was probably traumatised. Anyway what I’m trying to say is there is a lot to worry about when choosing what food to buy (or at least I find there is, more and more all the time) and you’d drive yourself (and other people) crazy and be likely to burn out and give up if you tried to stick rigidly to your principles all the time.

Well that went off on a bit of a tangent I wasn’t expecting! Back to what I was saying. So I’d seen Hugh making tomato sauce and decided I’d do the same. The result was fantastic! Such a sweet rich sauce! The 5kg of tomatoes converted into about 2.5 litres of tomato sauce which I now have handily stashed away in the freezer for any recipe calling for a tomato based sauce. Actually it didn’t all make it to the freezer, we had some just as it was on pasta (YUM!) and another portion was used in a sweet potato, marrow and lentil stew which we had with dumplings (more about these another time – so good they deserve their own post!).

The sauce was so simple to make, I hardly needed to add anything to the tomatoes as the roasting process really brought out the flavours. When I make tomato sauce for pasta with chopped tinned tomatoes I’d normally add a bit of sugar and lemon juice, but after the roasting these really didn’t need it, they were delicious as they were. I also decided not to add any herbs as that way I could decide when I used the sauce in later recipes what should go in then. But if you decide to go for herbs from the start you can sprinkle them over while roasting the tomatoes. You could also miss the onions out if you fancied thinking about them later too.

Rich Roast Tomato Sauce

• tomatoes
• garlic
• onions
• black olives, roughly chopped
• olive oil
• balsamic vinegar
• S+P

1. Put out all the tomatoes you have on baking trays and splash over olive oil, balsamic and dot around big chunks or whole pieces of garlic, how many will vary to taste, I used 10 (!) or so with my 5kg of tomatoes. If in doubt put more than you think, the flavour of the garlic mellows with roasting and the whole cloves probably won’t end up in the final sauce anyway so don’t panic. Sprinkle with lots of S+P.
2. Pop the tomatoes in the oven at a medium heat and cook until they are breaking down and starting to brown in places, will be about 40 minutes or so.
3. Meanwhile finely chop some onions (I used 2 normal and 1 red) and sweat the gently with a little oil in a very large covered pan.
4. When the tomatoes are ready press through a seive (if you don’t want any seeds in the sauce) or colander with smallish holes (if you don’t mind a few seeds and want to do this bit quicker) You’ll need to stir round in the colander pressing it against the edges to get all the juice out and eventually will just be left with the skins, and maybe some chunks of garlic which you then discard.
5. Pour the tomato sauce into the pan with the onions, add the olives and leave to cook through for at least ten minutes. Season with S+P.
6. That’s it! Now just eat it as it is, or leave to cool and then bag up to go in the freezer in separate portion sized containers. Hurrah!

Here’s the garlic I put in. Andy thought I’d gone crazy and insisted on taking a photo.

Just spent a lovely morning wandering around Birkenhead. I really like Birkenhead, there are loads of little independent food shops, including a few brilliant green grocers, all different types of specialist international food stores and also loads of charity shops you can have a good rummage around in. As ‘research’ for my new directory section I’ve just spent the last few hours wandering around these shops, mostly on Oxton Road and Grange Road West, I’ve bought all my vegetables for the week and also had a good chat to some of the friendly people who ran the shops.

I found a great little Asian (mostly Thai) food shop, called  Siam Asian Food, where you can get all kinds of vegetables, huge sacks of different rices, noodles, coconut milk, fresh ginger and the like. Next door is a Polish Shop selling lots of stuff I didn’t recognise as well as the usual pickles and things. There’s a health food shop, which also sells home brewing kits and does all kind of aromatherapy, massage reiki and other interesting things. My favorite place I went today was probably K and N, a fruit and vegetable shop, it’s huge, sells all sorts and the people that work there are lovely. The guy today threw me in some coriander which I’d forgotten to pick up with the rest of the things I bought, how nice? That would never happen at Tesco. There are lots more great looking places, but with my arms aching from several bags of chuncky vegetables it was time to head home. No doubt I’ll be back down to check out some of the other places.

Also in the last few days I’ve been on the mushroom hunt again, this time to Eastham Woods Country Park on the Wirral. Still no edible finds, but we did see a couple of things of note, this rather disgusting looking, and even more disgusting smelling stink horn and lots of some kind of puffball which all had another parasytic mushroom growing out of it. Very odd. So no edible mushrooms, but there is a lot of wood sorrel and several sweet chestnut trees. Wil probably go back in a couple of weeks and see if anythign has appeared. It’s actually quite interesting not finding anything as it, hopefully, should give us some idea of what the conditions need to be like when eventually the do start popping up.

Stinkhorn

strange puffball