Slow Food London set a challenge: could regular Londoners go slow for an entire year? Would it be easy? Would it be hard? Would there be times when it would (slowly) start to go wrong?
Here, Susan Paul talks us through her fifthteenth week:
Our youngest son has been at home this week and has been enjoying plenty of home cooked food before going back to university. I have made lots of family favourites: slow cooked beef with onions, parsley and anchovies; hake roasted with vegetables, thyme and Balsamic vinegar; pot-roast chicken with sage, onions and tomatoes; an omelette with potatoes and chives, amongst other things.
He is a keen cook so we also put together a few basic ingredients and some basic utensils for him to take back with him.
English apples are particularly good at the moment. I bought three different varieties at the Ringden Farm stall in the Barnes Farmer’s Market and they were all lovely. Later in the week I bought some Cox’s apples (£1 for 4) at the greengrocers in Barnes and they were delicious too. So for around 25p you can have a very healthy and delicious snack. They had very good Packhams pears too which cost around 30p each.
I also bought some watercress (grown in Hampshire), which we had with the pears, some stilton cheese and a dressing made with rapeseed oil, white wine vinegar and honey.
The British cheese we have tried this week is Duddleswell, a hard, sheep’s milk cheese from West Sussex. We used the last of it for some cheese on sourdough toast for Sunday supper.
We have lots of mint in our garden so I have been putting some in a jug and pouring boiling water over it to make a very soothing hot drink.
We also have lots of sage; some I have used to make stuffing and some for the pot-roasted.
I keep meaning to mention another good thing about the “challenge” which is as well as cutting down on food waste I have noticed a sizeable reduction in other waste as there is almost no packaging from our food shopping.
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