Many thanks to Karen Homer of A Cook's Library for this guest post on seasonal September eating the Slow Food way [editor Georgie Knight].

Cobnuts by gorgeoux via Flickr
Karen Homer: When I say I eat the Slow Food way
people often assume this means I spend a fortune on food, create
elaborate banquets full of rare ingredients and wash it all down with
equally pricey wine. If only this were true! But I appreciate that
one of the common accusations that has been levelled at Slow Food
is that it is elitist and only for foodies, or that it is an
expensive hobby for those with a sizeable disposable income.
Well, this simply isn’t true.
Everyone can eat the Slow way whatever your budget; in fact, the
benefit of dedicating a little more time to cooking a simple meal and
sitting down to eat it with friends or family is even more
appreciable when you are sticking to a budget.
One of the easiest ways to do this is
by eating seasonally.
Eating seasonally is one of the best ways of eating sustainably, and
as Carlo Petrini wrote in his mission statement for Slow Food ‘…Our
movement is founded upon this concept of eco-gastronomy – a
recognition of the strong connections between plate and planet’.
Furthermore, when you eat seasonally,
particularly if you shop at local farmers'
markets you are meeting a further criterion for eating
the Slow Food way and that is making sure your food is clean and
fair, and that producers receive fair compensation for their work.
September is a wonderful time to start
eating the seasonal way. Forming a bridge between summer and autumn
you have a glut of produce from 2 of the best British food seasons.
Take raspberries for example, a berry associated with high summer
that has a second crop in September, and plums, greengages and
damsons, the stone fruits that we use so well in jams and puddings in
this country. Making jams
from a glut of fruit now is an investment of time that will save you
money and be a pleasure to eat for the rest of the year.
Unusually for England fruit is
plentiful at this time of year with soft and stone fruits but also
the apple
season is getting into full swing. There are plenty of
heritage varieties of apple that need preserving so seek out orchards
and farm shops and taste the forgotten flavours of an Ashmead’s
Kernel or Laxton’s superb. A simple lunch of apples and English
cheese such as Cheshire
and a few oat biscuits beats a sandwich any day.
There is a huge array of vegetables to
choose from: summer lettuces and salad leaves are still plentiful but
hearty roots such as glowing purple beets, turnips and larger bunched
carrots as well as new-crop onions and main-crop potatoes are
appearing marking the beginning of stew season; roughly chopped
vegetables, slow-braised with a little meat or stock or even just
with some hearty pearl barley are economical dishes that take care of
themselves in the oven and the steaming pot can be brought to the
table for the whole family to dip into.
Slow Food is an organisation that is
keen to preserve biodiversity, heritage varieties of grains and
vegetable and rare breeds species of fish and animal via its Ark
of Taste initiative. Plenty of the 24 products in the
UK Ark are good eating at this time of year. Red
grouse for example, found mostly in Scotland and the
north of England is a fading delicacy but without grouse shooting the
heather moorland of Scotland would revert to scrubland. Grouse is not
exactly a budget food but for a rare seasonal treat use every last
scrap of this bird, serving a feast with bread sauce then making the
bones into stock
(something you should do with all your roast carcasses for economy
and taste) and perhaps making a soup of grouse stock and oatmeal with
the result.
Kentish
Cobnuts are a delicacy local to London that are
abundant in markets and even supermarkets these days and are
delicious shelled and toasted in a dry pan then scattered over a
salad, of seasonal watercress and a roasted wood-pigeon breast,
finely sliced; pigeon is another (cheaper) game bird that is worth
preserving.
It is not necessary to spend a lot of
money on eating well. Buying an inexpensive cut of meat (and it
needn’t be large) such as beef
shin or ham
hock and braising it with seasonal vegetables, bulking
meals with inexpensive grains such as the British spelt
grain and using a glut of seasonal vegetables for
soups
are all ways of stretching good produce over a number of meals.
The Slow food ethos is not about food
snobbery but about respecting the food you buy and eat, however much
or little it cost. And by eating in tune with the seasons you will
both respect what nature has to offer at different times of year and
save money too.
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