Stay local

"We have what it takes to eat well, eat healthily, eat cheaply and live and work for each other and our families."

The season of rebirth

With our environmental hourglass down to its last few grains, a post COVID world looking financially bleak for millions across the UK and Britain’s controversial leap of faith away from the EU, now is the time we look closer to home in search of nourishment and livelihood. With Wales, Scotland, ‘The North’ and Cornwall all harboring a rise in demand for independence from the UK, it appears that many people across our great isles are tired of the way things are and feel they could do a better job of running their communities. This isn’t a politics blog post however, and it’s not all doom and gloom. Lockdown is lifting, the weather is changing, wild garlic is out and flowers are soon to be in bloom. Spring is the season of rebirth in the UK and it’s the perfect place to start.

This post will aim to offer ideas, tips and recipes that are in line with the British seasons and boosting local economies by using ingredients grown in the UK. 70% of land in the UK is farmland (23 million acres). 36% of that farmland is arable crop land. Most of the rest is grazing land for sheep and cattle. By increasing our demands for locally grown vegetables Britain is more than capable of sustaining itself and in term reducing its imports, airmiles and carbon footprint. By eating less or no meat we can influence our farms to turn away from aggressive grain agriculture and meat rearing, reduce the amount of ecologically baron grass land and increase the biodiversity of the British countryside. I can hear the birds singing already...

Method:
1. Simply soak the peas overnight in cold water with a pinch of salt. They will soften by the morning, ready to be cooked (but you may find it easier to cook them before hand and re-heat for breakfast). I have left out a lot of the traditional ingredients such as clove, bay leaf, onion, and carrot to keep the dish plainer and more palatable first thing in the morning but you can go ahead and add anything you like.

2. First bring to the boil and simmer for around an hour or until the peas are tender while occasionally removing any shells or scum off from the surface. It is best to start off with just enough water to cover the peas as you can add more if you need it.

3. Traditionally this pudding would be cooked for much longer until pureed, but we can speed this process up with a stick blender. Puree the peas with a stock cube and the malt vinegar.

4. Whether you are warming up the peas to have with breakfast or eating them straight away, the last step is to return the peas to the heat and add the butter cube by cube until its incorporated and enriched the dish.

5. Season and serve with poached eggs or cottage cheese or both and spring onions.

6. The finishing touch to this dish is the wild garlic*. This amazing and little appreciated herb grows rampantly throughout the UK on riverbanks, hill sides and verge land and emanates a wonderful garlicy stench into the air during the months of early March to late May. Simply blend with some salt and rapeseed oil to make a dressing and drizzle over your peas and eggs.

*You can’t buy wild garlic, you need to forage it. If you do, check you are picking the right thing by bruising a leaf and smelling (it’s a pungent garlic smell) and aim for the bigger leaves and try not to pull out the bulb. This will give more light to smaller shoots while ensuring next year’s yield is supported.

In the summer months, raspberries will be abundantly growing along hedgerows all over Britain. Scoop up as many as you can while you can (within reason, be fair). A surplus can be used for vinegars, jams or frozen for later in the year. To make raspberry vinegar: place fresh washed raspberries is a metal bowel and cover in apple cider vinegar (not malt!) seal and leave for roughly 2 weeks. If the fruit is covered no mould will form. On return you will find a beautifully aromatic pink vinegar to use as a dressing. Strain off the remaining fruit and bottle for later.

All the herbs mentioned in this recipe can be grown in any UK garden and they love to grow and grow fast! The marjoram, thyme and mint can just be picked and sprinkled straight over the salad, as can the basil but have something else in mind for it. Add basil, salt, garlic and rapeseed oil into a blender, mix and strain to make basil oil dressing. Dress the salad with this and some of the raspberry vinegar and black pepper and you’ll have an incredibly British summer salad. Ingredients which will also go well with this are: asparagus, rhubarb, apple, artichoke, hazelnut… Try anything, have fun with it but keep it local. This goes to show that our cuisine is more than red meat and stodge!

Spiced squash and barley pottage

The Autumn of our years... It’s all gone to pot!

This recipe for pottage has been adapted from a recipe by brandnewvegan.com to be more seasonal British and to use whole teaspoons instead of halves and quarters. There are no fractions in cooking! Be bold with flavours and chuck it all in!

Pottage is one of the oldest known dishes is British culture and basically means cooked in a pot. The contents of the pot can change with the seasons, but the idea remains. It’s cooked in a large pot over a fire or coals, we all gather round it together when it’s done, break bread and eat. This dish epitomizes food’s role in the community and resonates with other cultures and their communal eating practices that we have largely lost in Britain as we became isolated within our own four walls, tv dinners and nuclear families.

The best way to serve pottage in my opinion is to find a round squash, Buttercup squash (not butternut) are good for this, remove the top, scoop out the seeds, oil, season with salt, pepper & garlic (anything else you fancy) and roast until the flesh is tender but the squash still holds its shape (this is with the skin on!) and serve the pottage in the squash. The flesh will take on a lot of flavour from the pottage and is a beautiful treat as you spoon out the pottage with the flesh.

Butternut squash, apple and pear turnover

Now is the winter of our dish content….

There isn’t much more traditional British than the pasty, except that the word came from the French paste(e) which came from the word pasta which in late Latin meant a small square. Somewhere down the line this small square was used to mix medicinal herbs and ointments in and this mixing of ingredients became the origin for the word pâté, pastry, pasty, pasta, pesto, paste, pastiche; it’s also interesting to note that the first food to be named pasta was a barley porridge and pasta as we know it is thought to originate from china. All this aside, Pasties are as traditional to this land as land ownership and Morris dancing.

Method:

1. The squash will take a lot longer to cook than the apple and pear so remove the skin and seeds, dice it up and roast in the oven first thing.

2. Dice the apple and pear, add into the pan with a knob of butter, add the sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg and cook gently until slightly soft. Don’t cook the fruit too much as it will continue to cook in the oven and doesn’t need much to overcook.

3. Add the squash once cooked and set aside.

4. Roll out the pastry or lay it out if it’s pre-made and cut to a square around 6 inches by 6 inches.

5. Melt a little butter and using a pastry brush (or your fingers if you’re a savage) brush the butter around the edges of your pastry.

6. Add your filling into one corner, leaving an inch between the filling and the edge. Fold the other corner over and press the edges down with the back of a fork.

7. Brush the beaten egg over the top of the pastry, score the top with a knife and sprinkle sugar over the pastry.

8. Pop into the oven at 180°C for approx. 20mins or until golden brown, you’ll know when they are done.

As a nation and a culture, we need to believe in ourselves again. We have what it takes to eat well, eat healthily, eat cheaply and live and work for each other and our families. Let’s reimagine British cuisine now that we have had a taste of what it can be. This is just the beginning.