Take a Walk on the Wild Side!

Today is the first day of Spring and with it comes a new food season. Think Jersey potatoes, salad rocket, watercress, Spring greens, asparagus, kale, spinach, salad onions, purple sprouting broccoli ...

Yum - so much to look forward to.

Some of our seasonal greens can be foraged from our woods and hedgerows at this time of year. Nettles make a wonderful soup (once you have cooked the sting out of their tale!) Another versatile food bursting with goodness is the common Wild Garlic. It is a member of the allium family and the pretty white flowers and broad pointy leaves can both be used in endless ways. Like spinach, the leaves can be wilted and popped in to risotto, soup, omelettes or served as a side vegetable. The flowers can be sprinkled in to salads to give a gentle hint of flavour in much the same way chive flowers do in summer. 

A lovely way of using wild garlic is in hummus by whizzing together a handful of chopped leaves with the usual ingredients of chickpeas, tahini, olive oil, lemon juice, cumin and salt.

Another idea is to make wild garlic pesto by whizzing together with pine nuts and olive oil (taste and add regular garlic if too mild in flavour).

It is thought that by eating the leaves and flowers, rather than the bulb, that this won't cause bad breath. I'll leave you to come to your own conclusions! 

Try these freebie treats - it's sure to put a spring in your step!

Service with a Smile!

Sitting happily in the passenger seat on a motorway journey this week, the windscreen wipers doing their best to obliterate the oncoming torrent, I gazed out of the window at the scenery, lampposts and signs rushing by. I was struck by the signage for motorway services which now inform drivers of extras,  ie the addition of Costa, Starbucks, M&S, Waitrose etc. Unless drivers are jiggling in their seats or passengers are crossing their legs, one has the luxury of driving the extra mile to reach the destination of choice.

My favourite service station has to be Tebay services near Penrith with its pond-side restaurant and home cooked, locally sourced food. It is the only family run service station and now has a sister site near Gloucester. NB Tebay is a real word. I am from Yorkshire and there are lots of Peter Kay jokes about t-internet. This isn't one about t'ebay!

My childhood motoring memories were of Granada Service Stations which ran from the 1960s until 2001. In the 1960s Service Stations had silver service restaurants (without alcohol) to meet the demand of more people being on the road and the introduction of the Good Food Guide. A far cry from today's fast food offerings.

Granada did, of course, diversify, providing the ITV for the North West, renting TV equipment and working with small hotel chains. 

When I was ten or so, my father bought his first brand-new car; a Ford Granada. At school that year we were learning about pie-charts and the boys carried out a survey on cars. When assessing their information and slicing up their pie, the percentage of Granada owners was deemed too small. The teacher asked us to put up our hand if we were the Granada owner. My hand went up, along with that of my friend Jane. "Ah, two owners?" the teacher quizzed, "I think we'll just put them in with the other Fords". Jane was mortified. Theirs wasn't a Ford but it was a Granada ... A Granada Rental Van!

Travelling around the country and filling up at stations was a joy as a child. There were football coins, Olympic stickers and Green Shield Stamps to be collected. My father had so many Green Shield Stamps that as he delivered his speech on my sister' wedding day, he gave her away ... With Green Shield Stamps!

Fair and square!

Martin Luther King Jr famously said "Before you finish eating breakfast in the morning, you've depended on more than half of the world." 

Fairtrade tell us, shockingly, that there are times of the year when many people who grow the food we eat for breakfast can't feed their own families.

We are currently in the middle of Fairtrade Fortnight and the message this year is to support farmers worldwide with their "Sit down for breakfast, stand up for farmers" strapline. This could be as easy as buying and using Fairtrade coffee, tea, cocoa and bananas, surely something we could all do. Personally I'm going to take part this year and, hopefully, not just for a fortnight. I regularly buy Fairtrade bananas but haven't taken much notice of whether other products carry the logo or not. I do recall that last year even the banana sales were down in some supermarkets.

The Fairtrade Foundation is a movement for change, ensuring that farmers and workers in developing countries get fairer trading conditions and producers have opportunities to invest in businesses and communities for a sustainable future. It is a registered charity and has been active for over 20 years. 

I have just had a quick rummage through my cupboards looking for the Fairtrade logo on my produce. Sadly it wasn't on many of my products 'though I did find it on this ...

... My Cadburys Dairy Milk ... Fair AND Square!                                                                

Fudging it!

Yes, today I am dealing with writing this blog in a vague and inadequate way (definition of fudging!) I am totally unprepared and therefore winging it.

I have decided to share with you my recent invention. I start each morning with a bowl of porridge. It used to be with full fat milk, then semi, now skimmed. It used to be with Golden Syrup, then honey, now fudge! Yes! I have recently discovered that a cube of fudge melted into my bowl of goodness is a delicious sweet treat. Oats, of course, are the good guys. They are high in fibre, a source of carbohydrate and help to lower my cholesterol as well as keeping me full until lunchtime. 

In my defence, I don't have fudge every day. Most of the time I have porridge with blueberries or a chopped banana. But, if you do have some fudge lurking in the back of your cupboard, go on, give it a try!

A Box of Tricks or Pure Magic?

Having recently signed up to a food box delivery, Hello Fresh, I thought I'd share my thoughts with you. I was persuaded to sign up on my own doorstep by a very nice representative who was also a vegetarian (they do meat and fish boxes too). I undertook to pay around £25 for a vegetarian box containing 3 meals each serving 2 people along with the 3 recipe cards.

The following Monday a large brown cardboard box arrived containing fresh veggies, some fruit and herbs, storecupboard ingredients and some well insulated fridge foods along with the recipes. Everything looked fresh and had good use by dates.

I cooked the first recipe that night and got my non-vegetarian daughter to share the meal. The portions were generous and we actually stretched it to 3 portions to include my son. Delicious! And so the week went on. All meals are made using produce from the best British suppliers and the idea is that food is cooked from scratch, reduces food waste and gets good food from farm to fork in the shortest time possible. The food was indeed tasty and I have learned to use some ingredients I would not habitually buy and combine them in different ways. The recipes are easy to follow and many items are already weighed out for use. The scheme is now endorsed by Jamie Oliver.

Now for the downside. I am the only vegetarian in my family so had to persuade someone else to eat the other portion. I found that the recipes used numerous pans and took 30-45 mins to cook which became a juggling game when trying to make a meat/fish based meal for the rest of the family at the same time. I have been left with bits of ingredients which I thought might be incorporated in the next meal but weren't. I sometimes eat out in the evening or sometimes have a main meal out at lunchtime, eat takeaways or simply just fancy a jacket potato with cheese and beans for tea. This meant that by Sunday I was panicking about using the food and not wasting it so I had to use up the ingredients and follow a recipe dictated by the scheme. As the rest of the family tucked in to a Sunday Roast I was having a Chinese based meal!

Two of the meals I cooked - Hoisin Stir Fry with Rice, Yellow Pepper & Sugar Snap Peas and Rustic Butter Bean Cassoulet with Herb Dumplings.

So I have had my 2 weeks worth at a total cost of around £50. This was the trial period. If I continue the price goes up to around £35 a week. For me, it just isn't working out and so I shall pause or cancel my deliveries. However, if your family are all vegetarians it would probably work out quite well. I do think the concept is good, the ingredients fresh, if you don't leave until the 6th day, and the recipes inspiring. I shall definitely go out and shop for the ingredients and revisit the recipe cards!

If Laughter be The Food of Love!

This year my Valentine weekend has involved a romantic dinner out, gifts of flowers, heart chocolates and a lurve candle and a card filled with lovely words followed by a brunch of rhubarb compote pancakes. Lucky me - married 31 years and still being spoiled!

Last year my husband and I spent Valentine weekend in Chester. After walking the walls, lunch and a spot of shopping we ate our evening meal in a lively Italian restaurant. The food, drink and service were excellent and, just as we were about to leave, my husband pointed to something black under the table and questioned "what's that?" Upon closer inspection, by way of prodding it with our feet, it revealed itself to be a long black sock. "I think it might be mine" he hissed. The bottle of prosecco we had shared may have had some bearing, but I fell about with laughter. "How?" "Aren't you wearing a pair?" "Are you sure?" "Pick it up then!" "No way!"

We paid the bill and ran back to the hotel giggling like schoolchildren. Taking the stairs two at a time and bursting in to the room he pounced upon the laundry bag before holding a solitary long black sock aloft! Yess! Between undressing, bathing and redressing he had managed to trap a dirty sock in the leg of his trousers before depositing it on the Italian Restaurant floor.

We're just wondering what the staff made of it as they swept the floor after closing that night!

Flippin' Crazy!

What a great run of events we have this week! Today is National Yorkshire Pudding Day, tomorrow is Chinese New Year and the following day is Shrove Tuesday! 

Q: What do all these days have in common? 

A: Flour, eggs and milk!

So today we can tuck into our Sunday Roast (nut roast for us) alongside our vegetables, roast potatoes and good old Yorkshire puddings.

Tomorrow we can enjoy a lovely Chinese takeaway, restaurant meal or homemade dish. I love to make the following Mushroom Fried Rice:-

Cook long grain rice as per instructions (adding frozen peas for the last two minutes of cooking)

Cook mushrooms in a little oil and butter and season with pepper (add chopped spring onions)

Scramble an egg and add to the cooked rice

Add the mushrooms and onions and a good long slug of soy sauce

Serve with sweet chilli sauce and a side of Thai crackers (suitable for vegetarians).

Another favourite is Veggie Chinese Pancakes using either tofu or mushrooms instead of duck.

Then, if you haven't had enough batter in one week, you can go for lovely sweet or savoury filled pancakes on Shrove Tuesday. Below is a picture of my breakfast this morning (just a rehearsal for Tuesday) and my waffles eaten last weekend using the same recipe!

If you want to bump up the entertainment value you could have a pancake race. In my camping days we used to have a sports weekend and one of the races for the adults involved lighting a Primus stove, cooking a pancake and tossing it three times before running across the finishing line. A child-friendly version is sometimes done in primary schools and I remember my daughter's class excitedly discussing who was the "biggest tosser" in their year, whilst the teachers passed secret smiles to one another!