Slow Food London

Going Slow Week 51 - 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 fifty first week:

I have made a few more things in preparation for friends visiting us next month –lemon curd ice cream, lemon shortbread biscuits, bacon and onion stuffing and some cheese biscuits using Norfolk Dapple - our British cheese for this week– all now stashed in our freezer and more importantly I remembered to label each package properly.

We have loads of mint growing in our garden and so I have also made sweet mint vinegar in large quantity, which I plan to use in salad dressings, soups and stir-fries as well as with roast lamb.

All this may sound very time consuming but it honestly hasn’t been. I have enjoyed doing it but I have been pre occupied with many other things this week and making these simple foods has been rather light relief in comparison.

The courgette flowers bought on Saturday were simply griddled in a very hot, lightly oiled pan – and we ate them with some baked courgettes filled with some of the bacon and onion stuffing and added fresh mint which was very good.

I made a dressing using anchovies, rapeseed oil, garlic, a little sugar and sherryvinegar, to have with a salad of thinly sliced purple radishes, some lovely purple salad leaves, cauliflower florets and some small cubes of bread, which had been made crunchy by tossing them in oil and roasting them in the oven.

My husband still makes coleslaw each week and he is now adding spring cabbage to the carrots, onions, parsley, and parsnips with the dressing that can now be regarded as his own recipe I think.

We had a very good supper with friends at Terroirs choosing a number of small plates to share between us: charcuterie, snails on toast, asparagus with boiled egg and Parmesan, small artichokes with anchovies, oysters with shallot vinegar and, to drink, some delicious cloudy Prosecco.

Other good things this week: roast chicken and stuffing for a supper with our children; more rhubarb dessert cake; more asparagus this time with soft boiled eggs, sourdough toast soldiers and real butter; short rib of beef with new potatoes and green leaves with horseradish dressing; roast hake with rosemary, rock salt and garlic; quails eggs with rock salt and thyme.

One of our sons tells me he has been to the Westmoreland Motorway Services on the M6 recently. This family run service station sells locally sourced food reasonably priced and has the added bonus of some stunning views.

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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 fiftieth week:

I have used a lot of eggs during this challenge. I keep meaning to try a soufflé, as I don’t think they are as difficult to make, as the name seems to me to suggest. I am sure I will get around to it before long but this week I made an omelette as usual. This time I heated some leftover roast parsnips in the base of the pan, added the beaten eggs with a little salt and finely sliced spring onions and then put a layer of thinly sliced Mayfield cheese on the top and cooked it over low heat until just set. We ate it with some young kale leaves (a new thing for us) and a dressing made with rapeseed oil, English mustard and plum vinegar.

We had an unexpected visitor – known for his good appetite - to supper and so I retrieved some of my husband’s cheese and potato soda bread from our freezer and we ate it warm with some good butter whilst our chicken was roasting. I had also made a rhubarb and orange dessert cake so we had that for pudding with a glass of iced orange gin. The remainder of the cake went in our freezer for another day.

I am always glad that I have bothered to freeze some good things. I have done much more during this challenge and am trying to be better organised about how things are labelled and stored. I am not quite there yet though. This week I thought I had defrosted a chicken and potato pie, which, it transpired, was actually macaroni cheese so we ate that for supper instead: it was fine; unlike the time I meant to defrost a pot of stewed rhubarb, which turned out to be carrot soup. I really am going to make more effort on this and have reorganised the drawers in the freezer with a view to avoiding mistakes in future.

I tried more strawberries from two different sources but none were either sweet or tasty – I think perhaps it is still a bit too early for them. I was delighted to see small apples at the Ringden Farm stall this week and they still taste very good; so we will be relying on those, some stewed Bramley apples and stewed rhubarb for our fruits for the time being.

The British cheese we tried this week was Mayfield. I used it in the omelette as already mentioned. It has a sweet and nutty flavour and the texture is rather like Emmental – we liked it very much.

I am still using the horseradish vinegar made earlier in the challenge but all the blackberry flavour made last summer has been used. This year I plan to preserve more things in “industrial quantities” as they have really added a special something to our food.

Other good things this week: more asparagus, simply boiled briefly and eaten with butter; roast pork with a black pudding beignet and spring cabbage for a pub lunch out; a casserole of rabbit with bacon and prunes; turbot, wrapped in foil and baked in the oven with lemon and thyme. I bought courgettes, courgette flowers, some small cauliflowers and some purple radishes amongst other things at the Farmers Market this week, so I have to give some thought as to what to do with them for next week – something special I think.

 

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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 forty-nineth week:

Running a bit low on green vegetables this week I fell back on some good old frozen peas. These are a brilliant “slow” convenience food. I used them to make a vibrant green soup achieved by sweating red onions and garlic, adding some cold vegetable stock and defrosted peas which I blended together adding a little salt and some fresh mint after reheating.  This is a lovely soup for spring, which we ate with more of my husbands home made soda bread. This time with added thyme and our British cheese for this week, Ducketts Caerphilly, an unpasteurised cow’s milk cheese from Somerset. It was a delicious combination.

Other good things have been: some short, fat, ridged cucumbers which are good enough to eat alone but which we had with some fresh crab meat on brown bread and butter; a chunky piece of hake which I roasted with root vegetables and added green leaves and a dressing of rapeseed oil, blackberry vinegar and mustard; leftover roast chicken soup with barley, bacon, mint and lemon zest; asparagus with soft boiled eggs and sourdough toast; leftover lamb with finely sliced onions, garlic, tatsoi, more of the chunky cucumber, mint vinegar, fresh mint and lemon zest . 

I have lots of visitors coming to our home in the next couple of months and am trying to get organised by making a few things ahead of time. This week it was rhubarb and ginger ice cream, simply made with rhubarb stewed in some brown sugar, stem ginger, some syrup form the ginger jar and some thick cream. It was a pleasure to make and I think it tastes very good but I will have to wait to see what our visitors think. I am also hoping to make lemon curd ice cream, which is good with the summer berries still to come.

The “eating” apples are pretty much finished for now but we are still eating conference pears for breakfast as well as stewed Bramley “cooking” apples. Also there are still lots of lovely apples juices of numerous varieties which have featured regularly since the challenge – ours come from Ringden Farm.

There were strawberries at the farmers market and they are absolutely lovely and very welcome - t
hey taste much better if they are eaten at room temperature, so remove them form the fridge a couple of hours before you want to eat them.

It may seem that I am spending hours in the kitchen but I’m really not; in fact I think I spend far less time than I did before embarking on the challenge. Also I certainly spend less time thinking about what to have as eating better quality (but not necessarily more expensive) foods, and with the seasons, has reduced the number of options but provided a natural variety of delicious fresh things. 

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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 forty-eighth week:

All of a sudden there are lots of new vegetables starting to appear as well as herbs. In our garden we have mint and chives in abundance already and I have been using them at every opportunity. I have been looking back over my Slow Food Diary and see that there are so many more lovely things to look forward to including corn on the cob, jersey royal potatoes, tomatoes  (we haven’t had tomatoes, except once or twice from a can, since early October 2015 I think!), strawberries, and raspberries for example. We have eaten asparagus three times this week too.

Two lovely meals out this week (a special family celebration week) and both restaurants featured Hake as a fish option on their menus. This is a delicious fish, which is currently sustainable, but now that it is becoming a regular feature on restaurant menus I wonder how long it will remain so. I ate it with spring vegetables in a fish broth at the Duck in Stanhoe and it was delicious. Our other family meal was at Hawksmoor in Knightsbridge (really nice staff) well known for its quality steaks amongst other things – expensive though.

Other good things have been: leftover roast chicken, stir fried with some new potatoes and spring vegetables with the added flavours of fresh mint and lemon; pork chops  (I removed the rind and a layer of fat from the pork and roasted it longer than the chops to make a good crackling) roasted in the oven with root vegetables (parsnips, swede and onions) and eaten with young spinach and apple sauce; two more British cheeses from the Urban Cheesemaker in London, Napier, which we toasted on sourdough bread with red onion chutney, and High Cross which we crumbled over a salad of land cress, chives and gently softened leeks. 

My husband has made more pasta. Linguine this time, which we have frozen as I plan to use it with cockles, which I hope will be available at the fishmongers next week. He has also made some soda bread with added goat’s cheese, onions and rosemary, which is delicious.

This has been yet another good food week for our household and more lovely things to look forward to in the coming weeks. 

The BBC Food and Farming awards have been announced this week and it really does seem that Britain has so many good things to offer in terms of food and drink.

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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 forty-sevenh week:

It was good to see asparagus at the farmers market this week and it was far cheaper than I have seen in other places and also I know the bundle I bought is British. I steamed it and we ate it simply with only a little good butter and some rock salt – it was a delicious treat.

The herbs in our garden are growing very well now and I have started making mint sauce again to have with lamb. This week, a half leg slowly roasted with garlic, thyme, rosemary and new season’s potatoes eaten with purple sprouting broccoli.

In addition to the asparagus to add to the bulging bags of vegetables bought from the Perry Court Farm stall, I bought lots of salad leaves from the Wild Country Organics stall. These included land cress and a new one for me, Tatsoi, apparently a Japanese version of Pak Choi but with more slender stems and a stronger, more fiery flavour – particularly good raw in salads or finely sliced into soups.

Some of the many other good things have been; leftover chicken and barley soup made with homemade chicken stock, leeks, and spring cabbage and laced with fresh mint and lemon; more leftover chicken, stir fried with spring onions, garlic, and pak choi and tossed in a dressing of mustard, thyme, oil and vinegar; a simple Italian meal out – trofie pasta with rocket and Parmesan pesto and a glass of Montepulciano.

I have been seeking out more British cheeses to try and ordered five from The Urban Cheesemaker based in London which also have a stall at Borough Market. We tried three this week; St. Bruce and Howard, which we toasted on sourdough bread, and Ellis (my favourite of the three) which has a delicious rind.

We also had more different British beers – there are so many good ones available now and they are all lovely in their different ways. We have also tried Apple Spirit, which is rather like Calvados. Ours, a generous gift, was produced at Sandringham in Norfolk. It is fiery stuff but very good neat, and can be diluted with ginger ale to make a long drink, which is very good too. 

The lovely apples (ours are from the Ringden Farm stall at the Farmers market) have almost come to end for this season so we are relying on pears and stewed Bramley cooking apples, which are all still very good and also some rhubarb for our daily fruits until the eagerly anticipated summer berries become available.

Chatting with friends about other Farmers markets has made me even more aware of how lucky I am to live near to such a good one as that in Barnes and also our lovely butchers, cheese and fish shops.

I was pleased to read about the National Farmers Union campaign to promote eating British food, which is supported by Tom Kerridge. I am now well aware of the benefits of good locally produced food and really hope many others will be persuaded too.

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