Slow Food London

Going Slow Week 34 - A journey of the highs and lows of eating Slow for a year

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 thirty-fourth week:

It has been a busy working week and so I have used some of the things made in the past and stored in our freezer – “slow convenience food”: carrot and lentil soup with the addition of winter greens, yoghurt and sunflower seeds; onion soup, with the addition of toasted cheese; bacon and barley soup with spinach leaves; one of the lovely chicken and potato pies with some purple sprouting broccoli.

I am finding that the fresh vegetables I buy at the weekend from the farmers market or, as was the case last week, from a smallholding in Norfolk, are staying fresh for at least a week and sometimes longer. I usually decide what to eat each day based on the vegetables that we have in the fridge and then add in the meat, fish, eggs or cheese that I have bought at the weekend or from the freezer. So, I rarely need to shop during the week.

The black kale has kept exceptionally well.  So having washed, removed the stalks and finely sliced the leaves, I stir fried it with some bacon pieces, crushed garlic, finely sliced red onions, leftover pink fir apple potatoes and a spoonful of rapeseed oil mixed with a little English mustard and a spoonful of sweet plum vinegar. I bought the plum vinegar from a farm shop, it is good and I am going to try making my own when it is time for plums from late summer/early autumn.                         

The Howgate Wonder cooking apples were excellent. I cooked them with a little brown sugar, a stick of cinnamon and water (just enough to cover the bottom of the pan) until they softened.  They were particularly good since they held their shape and the water turned to delicious amber syrup.

The British cheese we have tried this week is Kirkham’s Lancashire, a crumbly textured cow’s milk cheese which we toasted on sourdough bread and ate with some of the onion and raisin chutney made in week 21.

As a consequence of making use of so many good things in our freezer, I have spent very little money on food this week so I splashed out on a small rib of especially “slow” beef for a supper with friends.  I roasted it to medium rare and we ate it with horseradish cream (using the preserved horseradish from week 32), chestnut chutney (made around Christmas time), roast potatoes and parsnips and some shredded cabbage and leeks sweated in butter. I also bought another lovely Phil Truin chicken, which I roasted with root vegetables for a family gathering.

Other good things have been; maple syrup sponge puddings; rice pudding with nutmeg, bay leaves and lemon; Seville orange gin; some Stilton cheese on a Cheddar shortbread with a little bit of quince jam (made in week 24) and thyme leaves for a canapé before the roast beef supper.

The preserves I have made over the course of this challenge, most of them fairly easy and some ridiculously simple to prepare, have proved to be delightful treats which have frequently elevated good food to a higher level and I am glad that I have bothered to make them.

I really don’t think I spend any more time on food preparation since starting the “challenge”.   In fact I seem to spend less time. I do however think about food more but in a very positive and enjoyable way

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Going Slow Week 33 - A journey of the highs and lows of eating Slow for a year

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 thirtythird week:

The food left from the family gathering at the weekend was put to good use:

I stripped the remaining meat from the enormous Phil Truin chicken and used the bones, and even the skin, some parsley stalks, thyme and black peppercorns, covered the lot with cold water and let it all simmer gently, covered, for two hours. I usually add carrots and or onion or something but the remains of this bird filled my biggest pan and so there was no room! This nevertheless resulted in a very good stock indeed. It seems therefore that good quality bones make good quality stock - I am going to save it for something special.

The enormous liver from the enormous bird was sliced and fried with mushrooms and only a splash of sweet sherry and some salt and pepper added. With some winter purslane stirred through at the end of cooking, piled on to some buttered sourdough toast, it made a special Monday supper.

I used the leftover chicken meat between layers of leftover pureed carrot, leftover bread sauce, leftover gravy and some fresh young spinach leaves for a pie (actually 3 separate pies) topped with potatoes mashed with butter and milk and seasoned with freshly grated nutmeg and a little salt. All this use of leftover food may sound a bit like a “dog’s dinner” but we ate one for supper on Tuesday and it looked and tasted absolutely delicious – equal to a good Shepherd’s pie – possibly better.

There were a few roast potatoes left from the weekend meal too. These were sliced and browned in a pan and then with the addition of beaten eggs, a little salt and the last of the White Lake goat’s cheese provided another delicious omelette.

So, we are continuing to get exceptional value for money as well as the taste benefits from all this high quality food.  

On Tuesday I had lunch with Shane Holland, Chairman of Slow London when he introduced me to Terroirs near Trafalgar Square. It is described as a wine bar but also serves delicious and “slow” food. We sampled a range of small dishes; duck rillettes with cornichons, smoked eel with celeriac remoulade, a salad of endive with walnuts and a salad of cavalo nero with anchovy dressing. And to drink, cloudy Prosecco which was particularly good with the food. It was a special lunch and I came away with even more enthusiasm for the “challenge” having had lots of my questions and concerns positively dealt with by Shane. 

I had bought some cavalo nero from the farmers market last week and decided to use it for a salad similar to the one we had eaten at Terroirs. I stripped the stalks from the leaves, washed and dried them and tossed them in a dressing of rapeseed oil, wine vinegar and a clove of crushed garlic and added some shavings of some of the Lord of the Hundreds cheese from last week. This was a very good use of the cavalo nero.

A couple of days in Norfolk at the end of the week and I bought more vegetables from a smallholding which has a stall at the side of the road. More cavalo nero (called black kale in Norfolk), Pink Fir Apple potatoes, onions, carrots, cabbage, leeks, Conference pears, eating apples (Spartan variety) and cooking apples (Howgate Wonder variety).

I used the black kale for another salad but for this one I stripped the washed leaves from the tough stalks, cut the leaves into very fine shreds and tossed them in a dressing of rapeseed oil, blackberry vinegar (made in week 11), mustard and added a few roasted walnuts. We ate this salad with some roast partridges, boiled Pink Fir Apple potatoes with parsley butter, bacon stuffing and bread sauce and it was very much enjoyed by all.

The British cheese we tried this week was Wissington, a Ewe’s milk cheese made in Norfolk. It has a mild flavour and we ate it with soda bread and fig relish, which was a lovely combination. 

Other good things this week: Brancaster mussels, pear and almond crumble with chestnut honey, and egg and bacon sandwiches with tomato relish.

An exceptionally good week of food in terms of flavour, economy, quality and enthusiasm for Slow Food. 

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Going Slow Week 32 - A journey of the highs and lows of eating Slow for a year

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 thirtysecond week:

I have been looking more carefully at meat in “slow terms” and was surprised and pleased to learn that lamb raised in Britain is most likely to be a reliable choice. Furthermore, whilst lamb described as “new season” or spring lamb” is moist and succulent, bought later in the year it is likely to have a more distinctive taste. So, I cooked some leg of lamb with lentils, sliced fennel and anchovies for a wholesome and delicious supper.

A sizeable family gathering gave me an excuse to buy a very large Phil Truin chicken (almost 6 kilos!) from J. Seal, our butcher in Barnes.  Someone had ordered it for Christmas but failed to collect it so it had been stored in the freezer. Consequently I bought it at a discount. I roasted it and we ate it with some Desire potatoes roasted in goose fat from Christmas, purple sprouting broccoli, bread sauce and gravy using stock made from the giblets. These chickens are delicious and in my view if you want a large bird, preferable to a turkey. I have plans for the remains of this lovely bird.

An omelette made by browning a few previously cooked sliced potatoes in a pan and then adding the beaten eggs seasoned with salt, and some thin slices of the White Lake goat’s cheese from last week.  Once the eggs are almost set, finishing it off under the grill. Served in generous slices’ with some dressed young spinach leaves it made an economical but actually rather classy, Saturday lunch.

I bought a horseradish root and used some grated into a dressing of rapeseed oil and blackberry vinegar to flavour a beef stew - one of our sons took most of the stew back to University for a treat and I have frozen the rest for another day. Having looked up uses for horseradish root I decided to peel the remainder and cut it into chunks, covered it with wine vinegar and stored it in a strerilised jar.  Apparently, whilst this process will mean the horseradish loses some of its pungent flavour, it will produce delicious and unusual aromatic vinegar.

The British cheese we have tried this week is Lord of the Hundreds, a hard, sheep’s milk cheese with a mild but nutty flavour – it is a favourite of mine.

Other good things have been: some pureed carrots with a little bit of cream; some fresh crab with lemon and nutmeg buttered toast; a delicious kitchen supper at the home of friends; some finely sliced cabbage wilted in butter; some (new to me) winter purslane, bought at the Farmers market. It has a delicious flavour rather like watercress but less fiery.

I have continued to try more British beers, all of which have been excellent. Needless to say I am still very much enjoying the challenge, saving money, avoiding waste, enjoying the health benefits of the “slow food diet” and learning a lot.

 

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Slow Meat: Eating Less, but Better

Six small words, but what do they really mean when we are talking supper, lunch or even breakfast? What do they really mean to someone who thinks he shops pretty well anyway? What is “less”?

The UN tells us that the average person on Earth eats 42kg of meat a year; here in the UK it’s double that at 82kg, in the USA for an average citizen it’s treble, a whopping 120kg. Leaving aside cow burps and flatulence, this is a climatic nightmare, as a host of nations from China to Russia are chowing down to play catch up, which means a whole lot more ruminants, swine and fowl.

Traditional small scale agriculture acts as a carbon sink; small fields with cattle cause the grass to be trampled into the soil, sequestering the carbon – something now utilised in mob grazing; sheep turn what is effectively waste ground on our uplands into flavourful lamb, and create the jaw-dropping vistas that we flock to the countryside to see when we have a spare weekend. Pigs converted our waste to delicious pork, and poultry were nature's bug eaters.

The reality of our burgeoning meat consumption is that only a fraction is farmed in a way that we would like to believe it is produced. Polyface Farm in Virginia, Northfield and Sillfield Farms here in England, are exceptions to the rule, not the norm.

Industrially produced meat is also about more than broiler chickens collapsing with urea burns, or hogs with their tails docked so they don’t become carnivorous in their tight pens. It’s about creating a vast food system to feed these animals on pellets, much of it soya, much of it GM, causing large-scale deforestation to make space for crops to feed animals. In fact 33% of the planet's arable land is there to provide feed for animals that should be grazing on pasture.

Sadly, our consumption of fish isn’t much better; we eat only a small handful of species, and we have fallen upon farmed Salmon as though we are eating something as cheap as baked beans. The salmon are fed by vacuuming the seas to provide fish meal, ironically leaving barren seas so that we can eat farmed fish.

So what is the solution? As a committed omnivore – when it’s time for me to meet my maker, please let me have shards of salty crispy pork skin before I go – I don’t want to give up meat entirely. Not only does it taste (yes!) really good, but I want to preserve the skills and heritage of our agricultural communities. I don’t want to see heritage breeds in zoos – unless we eat these animals, then that is where they will be.

What I do want to see is the end of industrial, small pen, and high intensity farming. Bye-bye feedlots of thousands of head of cattle, and yes please to something my grandfather would have recognised. I also realise something has to give, and that means reducing my meat consumption below the global average of 42kg to something more like 30kg a year; less than half what the average Brit eats in a year. It also means more wild and semi wild meat; as much pheasant and pigeon as beef and pork. It also means more esoteric cuts to control my shopping budget by not just buying the prime cuts. Clod, skirt and neck will be my new best friends; rib-eye will be for high-days and holidays only.

But even this won’t be enough on its own, so not only will I decrease my meat portion sizes, I intend to eat meat no more than three days a week. The other four will be at least vegetarian, and at least one of those will be a vegan day. Vegan, that word that conjures up tofu and nut butter, is almost heretical to a Cornishman whose veins run with dairy rather than blood; yet I am convinced that with some intelligent shopping and creative cooking, I won’t consider these totally animal-free days as poorer than any other eating day.

I’ll be writing monthly about the experience, and you’ll be able to follow my progress on twitter As January ushered in the new year, I said goodbye to my meat-filled past by eating supper at The Hawksmoor; a steak dribbling bloody juices and weighing in at a whopping 400g, more than two days of my new “meat allowance”. The game season is now coming to an end, and the “hungry gap” is fast approaching in the market gardens.

It will be an interesting year.

  shanehollanduk

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Shane Holland is Director for England, Slow Food UK, and Chair of Slow Food London

Going Slow Week 31 - A journey of the highs and lows of eating Slow for a year

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 thirtyfirst week:

The cold weather has made me keen to eat slow and comforting food.

Some porridge for breakfast a couple of times this week. Porridge is easy to make, very good for you and it’s cheap. I know there are lots of different methods and personal preferences for making porridge but I made mine in a simple way as follows:

Put 50g of oats in a small pan with 175ml water and 175ml milk.

Bring to the boil and then reduce the heat to simmer the mixture for about 5 minutes or so, stirring it from time to time.

Stir in a pinch of salt and eat it with a little brown sugar, honey or maple syrup.

These quantities make one very generous serving.

Also did some Bramley apples stewed with brown sugar and a stick of cinnamon and have stored some in our freezer for future breakfasts.

Boiled a small joint of gammon, adding an onion, a carrot, a bay leaf and some black peppercorns, which made a good stock. All that was then needed to make a delicious soup was to simmer some barley in the drained stock for 20 minutes and then add small chunks of the gammon, chopped parsley, and some lemon zest. No salt needed as the stock from the gammon was salty enough.

Enjoyed a mid week lunch at the Riding House Café. We sampled several small dishes of what I hope was fairly “Slow Food”: split pea and ham hock soup; devilled crab; Stilton with pickled walnuts; beef fillet with parsnip puree and wild mushrooms; turkey and gammon terrine with black pudding and crisp sprout leaves. It was a nice way to eat - I made a mental note to try using split peas, which I know are nutritious and cheap, and might be a good substitute if fresh vegetables are scarce in the coming months.  A popular item at the restaurant, although we did not try it, is macaroni cheese, which prompted me to make that comforting dish later in the week. 

A quiet New Year dinner at home of venison sausages with blackberry vinegar and mustard dressing followed by roast chicken with lemon and thyme and a few Brussels sprouts. No room for
pudding.

The Farmers market in Barnes was open again on Saturday but with fewer stalls than is usual. Fortunately for me these included those selling apples and pears and vegetables. It was pouring with rain but I was glad to go and stock up with lots of good things for the week. I also visited the Real Cheese shop and bought eggs and some White Lake, a British goats milk cheese made in Somerset. 

Other good things have been: homemade rice pudding flavoured with nutmeg, lemon zest and a bay leaf (I had forgotten how easy to make and cheap this delicious treat is); some roast walnut and parsley pesto which I used to trickle over a potato tart; our usual Rookery Farm eggs, soft-boiled with toasted sourdough bread and butter.

 

 

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