Lilliput Farmer

I made the mistake of looking at Jekka McVicar’s Herb Garden site today (that’s the lady herself on the right, there).  Tim has done some clearing in the front yard and I’ve been having my idle dreams of an Apothecary’s Garden again.

So I looked at Jekka’s list of herb seeds for sale.  I thought I’d start a list of things I’d like to put into my Apothecary’s Garden eventually.

It’s a bit of a big list.  37 ‘essential’ herbs, and an innumberable amount of “ooh, that’s an idea…” kind of things.  All for a garden that hasn’t been planned, cleared or dug yet.  This is dangerous.

It must be winter – I’m dreaming of new gardens

If you’re up for a bargain though, it’s worth looking at Thompson and Morgan’s site, where there is a huge discount on some essential vegetable seeds (SunGold tomatoes for 49p!!!).  I’ve just spent a little over £5 and got enough seed to fill all my available raised beds.  Hurrah!

I’m a great believer in getting as much out of my resources as possible, whether the resources are chickens (eggs, meat, ground clearance and manure) or yarn (one ball of sock yarn makes me a pair of socks with enough leftover for a square for a granny blanket…).

Yesterday we had a roast chicken for tea.  It’s pretty rare to have a roast chicken in this house, so we make the most of it.  The carcass is going to become soup because that’s just what you do with leftover chicken bits in this house.  But before I put it in the saucepan and onto the stove, let us consider the fact that it’s freezing cold outside today. I have lit the fire early.  I have a hot top on my woodburning stove…

I shall stick my chicken stock on top of the woodburner today and make double use of the energy.  Hurrah!  Can’t wait to have enough money to buy a wood range for the kitchen – this will enable us to cook food without using any fossil fuel at all, and makes me lots of different kinds of happy  It’ll be a little while yet as we’re still getting back on our feet financially, but there’s nothing wrong in planning and saving now, is there?

We’re usually a fairly meat-light kind of household.  We don’t eat it often, and are as likely to eat a vegetarian meal as a carnivorous one. I do believe that if an animal has died to give you a meal then you should use as much as possible.

For the Christmas period we bought a turkey and a big bit of pork.  We also bought some beef, but that’s still in the freezer.  From the turkey (designated for serving 5 – 7 people) we ate:

1 roast turkey dinner (Christmas day)
1 turkey and bacon pie
1 turkey risotto
1 turkey soup (made from the turkey stock and last meat)
8 rounds of sandwiches

From the pork we had:

1 roast pork dinner (with excellent crackling)
1 pork-patty dinner
1 swineherd’s pie
several rounds of sandwiches

I figure that the meat for 7 days has cost us £23.00 (the pork was reduced as we bought it at 6pm on Christmas Eve!), and bearing in mind that it has fed four of us for 7 days, has cost something in the region of 82p per person, per day.

I am *very* pleased with that!

Here we stand on the cusp of a new year again.  2012.  2011 has been a long way from a walk in the park for us, and many other people too.  I’m glad to see the opportunity for a fresh start, and intend to make some resolutions.

1. Continue to cook as much from scratch as possible (just taken a cottage loaf out of the oven, plaited one just gone in!)
2. Grow more of my own vegetables.
3. Get out into my garden and do things in plenty of time (no planting things two weeks after the last planting date on the seed packets!)
4. Make more home-made booze.  (Might try some of the homebrew cider tonight!)
5. Do more food storage. (Homemade apple rings are running low already!  Argh!)
6. Experiment with food smoking in our newly-tidied shed (thanks to my lovely husband).
7. Become more solvent.  Quite how I’m going to tie that in with Lilliput Farmer, I don’t know, but we’ll see…

So how about you?  Any self-sufficient/home-made/green resolutions?

We’ve had a lovely Christmas – we finished work at 10.30pm on Christmas Eve and spent the next three days eating, sleeping and hanging out with our family.  Lovely

On Christmas Day we had the traditional roast turkey, on Boxing Day we ate whilst out at a family party (with added ironic Bingo – it was FABULOUS!) and on the 27th we had a huge joint of roast pork.  Yum.  With added “Om nom nom”.

Come the 28th, I was faced with a fridge full of leftovers and a pressing need to turn them into something yummy.  So this is what I did:

TURKEY AND BACON PIE

• Cube enough leftover turkey to fill a cereal bowl.
• Cut 8 rashers of smoked bacon into small strips and fry them in light vegetable oil.
• Add the turkey to the saucepan and let the turkey soak up the bacon juices.
• Season to taste (thyme is good, as is parsley, salt and pepper are essential)
• Add a large serving spoon of butter/marg to the mixture and let it melt.
• Add a cup of bread flour to the mixture and stir well to create a roux which is coating the meat chunks.
• Pour in milk to turn the roux into a thick white sauce covering the meat.  Keep adding milk, heating and stirring until you’ve got a thick sauce which won’t thicken anymore.
• Set aside the pan.
• Turn oven on to 180 deg C or equivalent.  (A ‘medium oven’ as I used to call it when I used a Rayburn…)
• Put 8oz of bread flour in a big bowl.
• Add 4oz of fat (I use generic cooking marg).  Rub together until mixture resembles breadcrumbs.
• Pour a couple of tablespoons of COLD water into the mix.
• Stir and cut with a sturdy tableknife (this bit is important – hands are warm and pastry needs to be cold – use a knife, honestly…).
• Repeat until mixture comes together as a dough.  The amount of water will vary according to the type of flour you use.  I always use bread flour rather than simple plain flour – this is only because I buy it by the sackful.  Use whatever you have.
• Divide pastry into a 2:1 split and roll the larger portion out to line a standard pie tin.  Transfer it by rolling it onto the pin, and then off the pin onto the tin.  Do not try to lift it with two hands or it will split and the cry of “SH*T!” will echo around your otherwise serene kitchen.
• Tip turkey and bacon filling into pie.  Push filling to edge. Brush edge of pastry with milk.
• Roll out the smaller portion of pastry and lay over top of pie.  Pinch edges closed with thumb and forefinger.
• Cut off excess pastry.
• Brush milk over top of pie.
• Re-roll excess pastry and using an amusing or pretty cookie cutter, cut out whimsical shapes (mine were stars as I couldn’t find the reindeer cutter…) and put them on top of the pie.
• Brush the shapes with milk.  Make two little holes in the centre of the pie top with a knife.
• Stick pie into oven on a baking sheet.
• Bake until golden-brown (cue Stranglers song…) which is probably around 25 minutes, depending on your oven – mine’s a fan oven, so yours might take a little longer if it doesn’t have a fan or a little less if it’s a particularly direct heat.

Serve to family.

Do not expect leftovers.

*Burp*

Last night I made rosehip syrup, sourdough bread dough, spiced pickling vinegar and apple chutney.

Today I shall turn the dough into bread, make tomato chutney with the pickling vinegar, at least two different types of cheese (I’m thinking cream cheese and mozzarella) and start some cider off.  I’m so pleased I kept hold of all those old jars which have been ‘cluttering’ my cupboards – without them I’d be really stuck right now!

The house smells of autumn now – pickling spices, yeast and cooking fruit.  Mmmmm…

Today was the perfect English autumn day.  Bright sunshine, a crisp breeze, a slight bite of chill in the air.  Lovely.  So we decided to do what everyone should do on a lovely autumn day – we took the kids and the dog and went out for a walk with some carrier bags in our pockets.

We filled one with sloes and one with rosehips.  The sloes will be sloe gin (Christmas drink of warming choice in this household), and the rosehips will be a combination of rosehip syrup and frozen individual ones to make rosehip tea.  Later on, after tea, I will be squishing apples for cider and apple juice.  I will also be baking sourdough bread and making apple chutney and tomato pickle.  The Cash and Carry shop that we got our pickling vinegar from also had milk *very* cheap – 10p a pint as it was on the last day of use.  So I will also be making cheese

Hopefully, as long as we can get up, (and it’s not oversubscribed) we will be attending a Fungi Forage course tomorrow, and I may be able to get my dehydrator out and preserve what we can find over the next couple of weeks.

I also need to give some thought to pickling my excess beetroot as well…  It’s a great time of year for making sure that a little bit of summer and autumn can be enjoyed right through the rest of the year.  I struck out on jam (I made it, but we ate it all immediately as it was too good and I didn’t make enough), but pickle and booze will be sorted this year.

Happy autumn!

And so here I stand on my soapbox.  See the soapbox?  Isn’t it lovely?  Doesn’t it support me nicely whilst I pontificate?  And what am I pontificating about today?  Why, the fact that “green” isn’t something you buy.

We sold our beloved (but small) cottage a little while back, now, whilst the whole “homebuyer’s pack” thing was in full flow.  In order to sell one’s house, you had to pay to have a man come out and (I kid you not) count your CFL lightbulbs and measure your loft insulation.  He then gave your property a rating as to how energy-efficient it was.  The man who came out to my house had a rather rough ride, as I pointed out to him that energy-efficiency wasn’t something that a house could ever really be.  It was all to do with how the residents chose to live.  We had run the cottage as a holiday cottage for a while, but had to give up because of the costs involved – mainly electricity and heating oil.  It cost a *bomb* to run.  Why?  Because the residents would turn the thermostat up to 28 degrees, and then open windows if it got too hot.  None of them seemed to own a jumper and I was once gotten out of bed at 3am to ‘fix’ the central heating for a woman from Basildon who had been running the thermostat at 35deg (c) for four days with all the windows open around the clock and then wondered where the oil had gone.  I patiently explained that she had burned two months worth of fuel in four days, but she refused to see or understand.

When we eventually moved back into the cottage, I ran it as I thought a property should be run.  I only turned the heat on when I was cold, showered instead of bathed, boiled the amount of water I needed, rather than a permanently full kettle and turned lights off when I left the room.  No kidding – the running costs of the cottage went down by over 60%.

Was this energy saving because I’d bought a whiz-bang gizmo to tell me what my fuel efficiency was?  Did I buy new, ‘A’ rated appliances?  Did I reinsulate the loft with Lithuanian goats?  No.  I was just sensible.  I didn’t try to *buy* green.  I *lived* green, and that made all the difference.

Now, I understand the lure of the green gadget as much as the next man (and the next man is probably my husband, so that’s quite an admission, right there), and I do have a rather abiding passion for the free energy monitor that the Nice-Man-From-The-Council-Who-Looked-Like-David-Tennant loaned me.  Sadly the council then made him redundant and never picked up their energy monitor, so I still have it.  I phoned them, but they don’t want it back, so I’ll keep hold, thankyou very much, District Council.  I also have a bit of an illicit relationship with those catalogues that occasionally fall out of magazines – Harrods Horticultural is guaranteed to have me breathing heavily as I look at polytunnel accessories every time.  But deep down, I KNOW that all that will happen is that a bit of my hard-earned cash will go to the gadget-sellers and that a bit more CO2 will be released into the atmosphere to manufacture and ship my gizmo.  It won’t change my life.  It won’t make me happier.

But here’s the rub: it’s just so much *easier* to spend a bit of money to make yourself feel green.  There are so many shiny gadgets that you can buy and so much self-righteousness to revel in.   Not turning the heating on when it is cold is *hard*.  Getting up a little earlier to make bread is *hard*.  Growing things is *hard*.  And all these things are hard when the alternative is really, really easy.  And socially acceptable.  I’ve had friends come into my house and ask whether I can turn the heating on.  No. I can’t.  I don’t *have* central heating and there’s no wood cut.  Sorry.  The look they give you is something akin to astonishment.

I make the choice to live in a more difficult way because I see what the alternative is doing to our earth and our society.  I’m not some kind of paragon of virtue as I’m currently wrestling with the overpowering desire for a tumble drier as I have far more clothes to dry than the weather is allowing me to pin out…

So please, if you’re thinking how to be a bit more green this autumn, don’t buy a gadget.  If you really have too much money and don’t know what to do with it, give it to Friends of the Earth or stick it in a homeless person’s hat.  Your useless green gadget could be a night under cover when they might otherwise freeze to death.  Instead, put a jumper on.  If you’re still not warm enough, try a hot water bottle (I like the stoneware ones – they stay hot for ages) and a hat.  After a week or two you’ll find that your internal thermostat alters anyway, and you no longer need to be as warm to feel comfortable.  And you’ll *really* be making a difference to both your CO2 footprint and your bank account

I’m a great believer in trying to make things rather than buying them.  Particularly when it saves money.  These days of tighter budgets and higher prices make it not only ecologically sensible, but also financially sensible.

My friends Frank, Emma and I had a day a while back when we experimented with making soap.  It was a lot of fun and very successful – the finished product was much better than anything I could buy in the shop, and as a happy side-effect, it is one of the only products that another friend, Jo, can use without triggering her allergies.  Hurrah!

We use solid soap in the shower, but in the kitchen we tend to use liquid soap handwash, and it ran out just a couple of days ago.

Bother.

However, after a little thought, I thought I’d have a little experiment.  I got a bit of homemade soap (oatmeal and honey – about 200gms) and cut it up into little bits.  I poked the little bits into the old handwash bottle (600ml) and topped up to about 5ooml with water.  I left it overnight.  24 hours later the whole bottle was filled with lovely scented handwash!  Wow!  Who knew it was so simple?

I try.  Really I do.  But sometimes I just come up short, and my allotment is a classic example of that right now.  Due to somebody grumpily complaining about “the state of the allotments”, the Parish Council are having an inspection in two weeks’ time.  In that time I need to clear beds, mulch a LOT and hack/slash my way through the vast number of brambles at the back of my plot.  I’ve no idea when I’m going to find the time to do all this inbetween of the 17 squillion other things I’m meant to be doing.

I don’t want to give up my allotment because whilst it is a very far way from being tidy, it *is* a source of great joy and food.  My spuds have done well this year, as have my raspberries, volunteer pumpgettes & courkins, broad beans and tomatoes (amongst other things).  We’ve eaten well from the plot and I am afire with ideas of doing even more next year.

So I think I’m going to try to set up a bit of a routine.  I’m a girl of routine, and hopefully establishing an allotment time in my daily routine will help to get on top of things.

I’m currently reading “Brave Old World” by Tom Hodgkinson and enjoying it thoroughly.  Even as a confirmed idler (he edits “The Idler”), Hodgkinson recommends at least an hour per day on the allotment every day.  He says that he tries to make it the hour after lunch.  Hmmm.  I think I could probably try that…

I wish my allotment looked like this...

...but tragically it looks more like this. With the occasional carrot...