The Comfort-Lover's Veg

This is my veg box.

I did start to grow my own veg when I first moved into my house. Great beans, rubbish carrots. When I became ill, that was the first thing to go. And by the time my energy was coming back, I had discovered the wonderful local farm which grows everything from potatoes and leeks, to tomatoes and sweetcorn, with the usual assortment of squashes thrown in.
Which leaves me with a dilemma. I want to grow my own veg, but I’d be growing the same things at the same time as the farm, and I fill my freezer with veg stews and soups as it is. Plus the veg in this veg box is about as fresh as you can get. Everything is dug up or picked the day before you collect, and you can’t get much fresher than that.

Okay, so it’s a fifteen minute drive away. But, like most people who get their veg there, I’ve gradually joined forces with others who live near me (i.e. within walking distance), so usually no one collects every week. Veg share. If I gave up the veg box, there would be plenty of people to take my place and not let me back in. An eighteen month waiting list of people at the last count, and I’m not going back to the end of that queue. No way.

So I’m not giving up my veg box. Despite never quite knowing what’s coming next, the weird squashes and vegetables you’ve never heard of and haven’t a clue what to do with, and curly kale coming out of your ears when it’s in season. And Jerusalem artichokes, which, in my opinion, should be allowed nowhere near polite society.
Sad to say, this is my last veg box but one of the season. This veg is so fresh the boxes only appear during the growing season, from May to January. Hence a freezer packed full of stews and soups to carry me over the lean times when it’s a return to the supermarket or a scurry round the health food shops in search of an organic potato fix. It would, of course, would be exactly the same with any veg I tried to grow here in my garden. In fact worse, because I’m higher up and on much poorer soil to start with.

So I think I’ve just talked myself out of digging and watering and the eternal non-chemical war with slugs. Or maybe not. I was thinking of getting a greenhouse, and pottering about with a few tomatoes. But now I think I might be brave and go for a polytunnel instead. A small one, of course. I like the idea of its own little eco-climate and growing things like grapes and melons and experimenting with the slightly more exotic. I assumed that all polytunnels were of the strictly commercial variety. But apparently not. They come in all shapes and sizes, and I’ll still have room left for a few fruit bushes and trees and an a home for three or four ex-battery hens. (If I get that far). And keep the flowers, of course.

So that’s my plans for the spring sorted out. Which will have to wait as there’s no way I’m digging in soil that’s only just recovering from being snowbound and deep frozen for the past weeks. Meanwhile, I shall do the winter thing of staying in the warm cooking up lots of swede and carrot and potatoes with a few leeks into a big pan of soup for next week. The best packed lunch in town!

And I know spring is on the way. This week, I only had my own veg to collect for once, so I walked down the little track to the farm, on the principle that every walk can be a dog walk and with a youthful collie the more walking opportunities the better. We strolled back with the veg in my arms, dog sniffing happily in the undergrowth. It was one of those still winter evenings when you can just smell spring in the air. A pale sky stretched above us, laced with the black branches of trees. A bird was singing. Can shopping possibly get better than this? Then I discovered that funny thump, thump noise was the sound of me leaving a trail of potatoes behind me in the mud....

Perhaps it was as well there were only the squirrels there to see the ensuing scrabbling about in puddles in the dusk, and they had other things (as in dog) on their minds.

Right, time to cook that veg and have another go at making yoghurt. I was all set last week, but as everybody up here in the mountains had been snowbound for weeks, last weekend was when everybody caught up with each other. It was like Christmas all over again, which was great, except by the time all the visitors had gone, so had the milk. So I had the rest of the chocolate and a glass of wine instead.

It’s still raining outside, up here on my bit of mountain, and plain nasty. So soup and yogurt-making, here I come.

The Comfort-Lover’s Answer to Snow.

Hot buttered toast.

That is this comfort-lover’s answer to snow. Especially after a couple of hours of the daily dog walk spent traipsing up and down the lower slopes of mountainsides covered with the white stuff, while trying to avoid those icy bits in the middle of the path. The up and downside of living on the edge of a village, partway up a mountain in Snowdonia. Beautiful; but oh, so cold!

To be honest, I never in my wildest dreams expected to be making my own butter. Well, at least not so soon. One day, maybe, had been my vague idea. Along with cheese making and creating wine from that grape vine that hasn’t been quite planted yet. Yeah, right.

You see, I have made butter as a child, but I remember that as involving a lot of shaking of a jam jar for very small results, and my wrists and elbows aren’t that young any more. And, besides, I have a life.

So how did I end up with butter as my very first comfort-loving venture? It was the yoghurt, I suppose. Just before the snow hit, I shot down to the nearest town for emergency supplies of dog food and live yogurt (my village does sell yogurt, but not generally of the live kind), along with tahini for my attempt on hummus, and a few other bits and pieces.

Then I dithered. Lots of wonderful kind people gave me recipes and advice, and I trawled my way through the Internet, trying to work out which one I was going to try first. Which is when, quite by accident, I came across instructions for making butter in a blender or food processor.

Now, I love my faithful old food processor. I’ve lost all the blades except the sharp one – plus any other fancy attachments it came with - long ago. But I make all sorts in it, from coleslaw to cakes. Butter, I decided instantly, I had to try.

Being snowed in, my only source of the essential (as in, only) ingredient had to be the local shop. Real double cream is a bit thin on the ground in my village, but this being after Christmas, I pounced on two left-overs on the reduced price shelf, right on their sell-by date. Yoghurt could wait!

The instructions said to leave the cream at room temperature until it reached 55 degrees. I can see I’m going to have to invest in a food thermometer at some point. Being snowed in, I compromised by putting the cartons on a radiator for a bit, keeping an eagle eye on my dog, who – unlike the cats – is not fooled by packaging, and will try anything once. (Or more)

The rest of the instructions were to put the warm cream into the blender/food processor and let it turn on the lowest setting until you heard the tell-tale slosh of the fat separating from the liquid. This, said the instructions, could take up to three hours.

Three hours? Mine took ten minutes, at the most. I’d only just settled down to eat my omelette and there, in my food processor, was a lump of buttery stuff in amongst the buttermilk. I couldn’t believe it could be so easy! Well, there are other bits to do, like pouring off the buttermilk and then ‘washing’ the butter with water, but the food processor did all the action for that, too. Then I bashed the butter around a bit on a plate, in a sort of experimental fashion as I wasn’t entirely sure what I was doing, but that’s what the instructions said. This bit, I think, was to get the last bits of liquid out.

When the bashing stopped being fun, I put the result in a butter dish. It was still quite soft, and I was quite sure it was the way I’d done things and this was how it would stay. Sort of half-butter. Not bad for a first attempt and a good learning experience, ready for next time.

But in the morning, there it was in my fridge. Butter. Real butter! Firm and smooth and mind-blowingly delicious. Creamier than cream itself, but with a clean, delicate taste. Sort of like how I remember unsalted Lurpack, but much tastier.

Wow. Toast from the sourdough loaf from the baker down the road (more about that next time), and my own homemade butter. What a combination! And from two 300ml cartons, I’ve got plenty of the stuff. It’ll last me at least two weeks, if not more. And the thing is, that it’s so delicious and satisfying I’m finding I’m not tempted to eat loads of it. Which is weird, but true.

All right, the cream wasn’t organic or local, and I am left with two plastic cartons. That bit still needs sorting. But this is my first step. And what it has taught me is that even something I thought of as time-consuming and complicated is really quite simple. What did it take? An hour of my time, while watching the TV programme I’d have been watching anyhow. And, in the end, it was fun and gave me a huge buzz of achievement. Alchemy in my very own kitchen! Plus I ended up with something that is still blowing my taste buds away.

And so this is the comfort-lover’s answer to keeping a lively young collie calm(ish) and content during ice and blizzards. Veg soup made from the contents of my veg box (more about that later), local bread, the hummus I whizzed up in two seconds flat in the food processor while the soup was heating up (more about that later, too) and my very own homemade butter.

And next time I’ll have the courage to just shape the butter, so it can properly fit into my wonderful butter dish, which has a space at the top for water to keep the butter cool. My bargain of the month, at under a fiver from my local charity shop. Yipee!

This is the link I found on how to make butter in a blender: http://www.kountrylife.com/content/how21.htm

Here Comes 2010!

I like my comforts.

I love my cottage with its garden and its view of the mountains. I love my fire and I positively adore my central heating. I like nice food, nice clothes and nice shoes, my computer, my digital camera and my iPod. I haven’t yet succumbed to a Wii, but I’m quite sure I’ll love that, too, when I get around to it.

Emily, my faithful little campervan, is one of the best things ever to happen to me. Which means I also love my 1.6 diesel engine and have no intentions of going small and/or electric any time soon. And I do like jetting off to the sun, every now and again.

I like my comforts, but I don’t like the thought that they might be costing the earth. Okay, and I’ve worked my socks off over the years – and cleaned other people’s floors when necessary – to keep my house, and I work hard now. But I don’t like the thought that it might be a famer in India or a family in Africa who are really paying the price. I was always Robin Hood in my childhood fantasies, not the posh one in the corner yelling: ‘let them eat cake!’

Right; so I want to go green, but I want to keep my comfortable life. I’d always vaguely assumed the two were just not compatible, and that’s where I stopped dead in my tracks. And then I was introduced to the charity ‘The Big Green Idea’, who seemed to think it was perfectly possible, and had plenty of hints and tips to help me along my way.
Which means, really, I’ve no excuse.

So for 2010, my new year’s resolution is to go green quietly, in civilised and comfortable mannner. I will not decamp to a yurt or keep pigs in the garden. Hens, maybe: so long as I can keep their feet out of the geraniums and their beaks off the roses. But no pigs. Well, to be perfectly honest, having been a vegetarian for most of my life I wouldn’t exactly know what to do with them.

I will grow herbs and some fruit and veg, but my roses and my Australian bottle-bush are staying put. I haven’t nursed them through Welsh mountain winters just to dig them up now. And, besides, they’re pretty. I like looking at them. They make my garden a joy in summer and a great place for parties.

But this is the middle of winter. And this is my garden.

Gardening? I don’t think so.

In true comfort-lover’s style, I shall, for the moment, start inside. In the warm. With a nice cup of real coffee. (er - not fair trade. Oops! Next time) I shall plan my garden for when the snow finally melts, and I will start my first changes with food. Nice food. Delicious food. This year, I am determined not to do the usual January that-was-one-chocolate-truffle-too-many diet, so that my jeans stop being just that bit too tight. Instead, I’m going concentrate on buying local, avoiding supermarkets and making what I can from scratch (so long as it’s quick, easy and fun).

Instead of giving up on food, my new year’s resolution is to take up the tastiest, healthiest, most varied and exciting meals possible, for a little as possible and as ethically as possible.

This month, our rubbish is going to start being collected fortnightly. So what better time to ditch the plastic? The non-bottle plastic that no one seems to know how to recycle.

Right, so for me, that’s mostly hummus (I’m veggie, I eat mountains of the stuff. It’s the only way I can keep death-by-cheddar at bay) and yoghurt. I’ve made hummus before, so I just need to track down some chick peas and sesame seed paste. The yoghurt I need to think about. My mum used to make it in the 1960s and 70s, with dried milk in an electric thing with its own little pots. It tasted vile. So I need to find the yummiest, scrummiest, cheapest and simplest way of making yoghurt, or I’ll be back on the Greek-style before the month is out.

Time for that coffee and an hour or so in the company of Google, I believe.....