Recipes
Game for a pie
Monday 6 June, 2005
With the weather so unpredictable I spent a lot of Saturday in the kitchen. The main event was a game pie, based on a recipe from Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall, and made with a pile of game which had been in our freezer for over a year waiting for me to get organised. We had a rabbit and some venison bought from Stirling Farmers' Market, and 4 pheasant breasts bartered last year for some pork chops.
Shug's recipe had an option for a cold version - simply add a pig's trotter to the mix, simmer for an extra hour and you've got a stock which will turn to jelly when cool. Since we've got about half a dozen trotters in the freezer I thought we'd go for this version.
Smokin'
Saturday 24 July, 2004
Yesterday I got the last pieces of the jigsaw that is our home-built smoker - a length of tubing for the propane gas bottle and a couple of retaining clips to keep it firmly connected to the boiling ring and the bottle. So last night we assembled it, set about discovering its nuances and put one of our Wiltshire cured hams in as a first try.
During the night I made adjustments to the gas ring every 3 hours and added sawdust as required. The temperature ranged from 20-40 degrees centigrade, at first, but settled at a perfect 30 degrees once I'd got the hang of it.
Recipe articles
Saturday 3 July, 2004
I've added a new section to the articles section of the site for recipes. We do make a lot of stuff, using recipes we've found on the web or in books, or made up ourselves over time, so will add the best to the site as and when we use them. Today it was pickled eggs, this afternoon it's going to be mange-tout soup.
We'll only post recipes we've used ourselves, but if anyone wants to send us recipes we'll be happy to try them, add them to the site and credit the source.
15 minutes organic teas
Thursday 15 April, 2004
A quick plug. When we stayed in the Scotsman last month they provided a nice range of teas and coffees in the room, including some of these 15 minutes organic teas. I was disappointed when visiting their site to find that they only sell to trade, but an enquiry got a friendly response advising that they can now be bought by consumers from a couple of vendors.
I ordered from The Tryst and they arrived safely and quickly. The Sweet Camomile and Berry teas are particularly good....
Rick Stein's Food Heroes
Friday 20 February, 2004
Last night saw the start of the latest series of the excellent Rick Stein's Food Heroes on BBC2. It's a must-see programme for anyone interested in real food, and Stein's enthusiasm for the subject is infectious. In the first programme he tackled (no pun intended) Clovelly Herring, organic Guernsey beef, an organic veg grower and a Cornish producer of sparkling wine.
The highlight for me was when 14 butchers from Smithfiled market assembled in a local hostelry to participate in a beef taste test. To a man they were dismissive of the concept of organic beef before the tasting, but lo and behold 11 of the 14 selected the organic Guernsey over supermarket 'finest' and high-street 'cheapest'. The guernsey was grass-fed, hung for a good couple of weeks and the difference obviously shone through.
The Meatrix
Tuesday 10 February, 2004
I've just stumbled across a great site called 'The Meatrix' (from the You Grow Girl forums). It needs Flash and sound to get the full effect, but underneath the excellent animation is a great site concerned with factory farming and local food production.
Home grown tea
Thursday 5 February, 2004
Tonight we're indulging in another home-grown tea - a potato, leek and bacon bake accompanied by some sweetcorn. Everything except the bacon is our own, and next year we hope to cure some pork for bacon so we'll be able to do it all ourselves. It's meals like this that make the effort of growing vegetables worthwhile - there's a deep sense of satisfaction in knowing that not only are all the ingredients organic, produced without a trace of chemical or hormone, but they all come with not a single food mile between them (okay the bacon is from Ayrshire, so about 50 food miles then).
