reaping the rewards

This has to be one of the most infuriating growing seasons ever. Rain, wind, and sheer cold has meant that so many vegetables I'm growing are so very far behind.

There's nothing worse in life than those awful heart stopping moments when you're really late for an event or work.It puts me out of kilter for the rest of the day.....playing catch up. It makes me feel anxious.

 And I feel like that this year about my vegetable growing. I'm already worrying that this year won't be a good one produce wise - especially when this year it means so much. I'm taking my food challenge very seriously and am relying on what I grow to help me achieve my target this year -that 80 per cent of what I eat has to come from Leicestershire and Rutland.

The good news is that Leicestershire is now officially out of drought measures. I'm pleased...I  really am, but the lashing down of rain virtually every day in April has put the kibosh on my potato planting schedule down on the allotment.

Digging in claggy, bog like conditions is not high on my list of all time pleasures...and my dears....my language! Still,  swearing like a trooper at the rain, the ground and anything within a 100 yard exclusion zone did make me feel better!

So no new potatoes in late June for me....oh no, and the first sowings of peas aren't going to be ready  until at least six weeks after last years. This time last year, a huge crop of Alderman peas were standing tall (six foot high) and proud and almost ready to be picked.

At the moment, they're still sitting snugly in my cold frame along with beans, beans and more beans, plus sweetcorn, pumpkins and next years purple sprouting broccoli in the little plastic greenhouse.

But it's not all doom and gloom. May I introduce the stars of the allotment at the moment which are the pounds  of gorgeous purple sprouting broccoli - I picked two pounds worth today

 and pounds and pounds of rhubarb. Six pounds of the stuff in one picking....

There's something about those first bowls of stewed rhubarb with the addition of star anise, the promise of rhubarb jam next week and perhaps trying a new recipe which I haven't been given yet.It's from a friend of a friend, and allegedly it's the best rhubarb relish/chutney ever.

Can't wait......and can't wait to plant out all those beans.But frost is still being forecast so patience is a virtue.......

How do farmers and commercial growers cope with the vagaries of the English weather? Whoever you are, wherever you are, I take my hat off to you!

from Australia with love....

I love wine.This will come as no surprise to those of you who know me.

Fizz, red wine, rose and white wine.In that order.  I shall be having a glass of red in an hour's time.Unless my friend Laura has already bought a bottle of white to share when I get to the pub tonight.

I love the whole ritual of having a glass of wine....pulling the cork out (or increasingly unscrewing the cap), listening to the sound of the wine pouring into the glass.And sitting there savouring that first sip.

I shall be featuring the local winemakers from Leicestershire in another post.....yes, there are some! But my heart, and my tastebuds are still back in Australia right now.In Margaret River.....

If you like your wine, then you are spoilt for choice there. Numerous wineries, some small,  some large are producing memorable, taste tingling wines for every occasion.

They sell their wines from the cellar door, and I spent quite a few days there travelling around the wineries...not just tasting the wines but admiring the gardens and settings......

One of my favourite visits was here

Established in 1986, I loved the broad sweeping avenue upto the cellar door

 There were pretty ,well manicured gardens too...

And this is where we tasted the wines....

Their Jete sparkling rose and sparkling white were as effervescent as the friendly and helpful assistant who poured a steady stream of  wines across the Howard Park and Madfish ranges.Bottles bought, I was hungry.Through the huge windows you can see above, I saw a group of people tucking in to lunch energetically.

When I asked where the menu was I found out that was lunch for the staff. And a good lunch it looked too. That's what I call spoiling the staff!


But many of the wineries do serve lunch....in beautiful settings.One of them is at Watershed....the Boy and I enjoyed a long, lesiurely Sunday lunch at Watershed Wines, five kilometres out of Margaret River itself.

After trying out a number of wines, I decided on this rose......ice cold, fresh and fruity.....exactly the right wine to accompany a tasty risotto and drink in the gorgeous view.

Whether you're really serious about wine, whether you're going out for a  drive and lunch, then  the wineries here have got it right...from the service, the ambiance and the settings. Everyone I met at every winery I visited were proud of what they produce....and so they should be.

Coming up shortly, back to reality...back to life in Leicestershire and Rutland....and how some back breaking digging will soon be producing dividends...

Local food rules ...in Australia.....

You may have wondered  - or perhaps you haven't, why I've not posted since the beginning of March. Well, I've been in Australia, and as you can imagine , finding food from Leicestershire and Rutland to eat there was rather difficult. In fact it was impossible.Not even a slice of stilton ....

So, I decided to eat only food from Western Australia....and it's a much larger region than our two counties. It's the largest state in a huge country, one so large you could fit Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland into Australia thirty one (yes, thirty one!) times and still have a bit left over.

So there's huge tracts of farmland, and Australia exports an incredible sixty per cent of the food produced, mainly meat and grains.

But Australia now imports more than  a third of its fruit supply and almost 20 per cent of its vegetables.In fact ninety five per cent of the garlic in the shops is imported from China, yet can be grown all year round in Australia. Now that sounds worrying to me.

Visting Margaret River though, about a two and a half hour drive from Perth, there's lots of reasons to be cheerful though. The area is famous for its winegrowing, and wherever you go , there are estates selling wine from their cellar doors(more about those in another post)

You can also stop and buy lots of other produce from growers of avocados, olives, olive oil,  fruits, and berries ...and a simple drive to a winery becomes an adventure.

We stumbled on a hidden gem one lunchtime after a particularly enjoyable wine tasting on the Caves Road north of Margaret River. It was about half past one, and we were hungry.Correction, my son was starving. With capital letters. We came across Olio Bellio ...yes , they grow olives...right next to the car park

Their Extra Virgin Olive Oil is grown and pressed at Cowaramup Creek Farm, a 320 acre property

But they also make lots of other tasty treats....such as lemon or lime pressed olive oil,and  a wonderful mandarin and fig chtney as well as other condiments.And they serve lunch.

So we hoovered up quite a few samples dipped in bread and crackers...and then stayed for lunch. I ordered a delicious walnut, pear and feta salad with their own honey and mustard dressing , my son ordered pizza.He said it was the best pizza he'd tasted for a long time.....and I agreed. Well, I had to have a few slices didn't I? Oh, and as well as force feeding him some salad we shared some potato wedges roasted with rosemary and olive oil.

 Such a lovely lunch, all locally grown and produced....

And to drink, a local lemonade....served in a fully degradable bio cup.

A quiet spot under a shady tree for a lazy lunch ...with all  produce grown or made within a few miles.Local food rules -in Australia as well as Leicestershire and Rutland.

White Room Dining champions local food

My local food challenge for this year, where 80 per cent of what I eat has to come from Leicestershire or Rutland has been going well.

Although the variety of what I've been able to eat hasn't been as wide, the quality of the produce has been good. Kale and leeks from the allotment have been wonderful, but I'm really looking forward to the purple sprouting broccoli getting its ass into gear and actually producing something other than leaves.

Looking ahead I've been sowing lots of tomato seeds, salad leaves and herbs and the potatoes are still chitting away.

Good quality meat is so easy to find in our two counties with lots of really good suppliers and butchers around (more about meat in another post) and of course local butter, milk , cream and cheese are all  available.

The 20 per cent of my diet for other food and drinks is enough for coffee, wine and the odd lemonade plus any odd craving when I'm eating at home.I simply had to have a grapefruit the other week -nothing but the citrusy sharpness of a pink grapefruit would do!

But it's eating out that's the problem.When I'm popping out for a bite of lunch, or going out for a meal, the exact provenance of what I'm eating isn't readily available.

Until last week that is, when I attended Leicester's first pop up restaurant in Stoneygate  - it was called White Room Dining.

The joint brainchild of two friends of mine Lucy Cufflin and Debbie Johnson, it was great....two nights of dining on a really local food menu in what looked like an intimate, beautifully set posh restaurant.

Debbie Johnson runs Powder Blue, an interior design shop on Francis Street.She  also stages sets, props etc for magazine shoots etc and as you can see from the above photo she has a dramatic, creative flair......(she also has an allotment on the same site as me  and need I add that's it's the prettiest, tidiest allotment there!)

Lucy Cufflin is a cordon bleu chef who's worked around the world, owns her own catering company,  has a shop, and has written her own amazing cookbook called Lucy's Food.

The setting for the pop up was an upstairs  store room at Powder Blue...two weeks before it was full of boxes.

 The menu looked like this....

Wine and canapes for the thirty diners were served downstairs in the shop..it seemed like a party....some knew each other , others meeting for the first time,...and then we went upstairs for the main meal.

The starter was a pannacotta of hand caught Rutland trout from Rob Waddington (www.thelodgebarnsdale.co.uk) with fresh horseradish and beetroot.

It looked like this

A creamy pale pink panacotta with the local beetroot mixed with horseradish adding a welcome tangy bite .The accompanying bread was locally made too with ale and honey by Jasmine Sore.

Next course up was a terrine of duck with vine fruits seved with Lucy's own muscat jelly and melba toast.The duck terrine came from just over the Nottinghamshire border -well textured and tasty with a generous proportion of brandy...and I can't forget the tingle of the intense flavour of the accompanying muscat jelly . I want more - and soon!

Individual puddings of venison with panch puren and local Everards Tiger Ale were then served. I've been to Bouverie Lodge where the organic locally reared venison comes from before  ..and I suspect many who were there at the pop up will be beating a path there to www.bison.org. to buy some. I saw men falling on those puddings with glee, and quite frankly the gasps of pleasure from some of them  as they devoured the puddings were positively pornographic....


For the finale, Lucy's apple tart with walnut pastry with local Brucianni's ice cream.You can't buy the ice cream for home consumption and it's a shame. I'm sure it would be a profitable venture -with  people like me who want to buy local produce banging the door down in a bid to buy some.

But the whole pop up restaurant experience  isn't just  about the food...it's about the ambience, the collective experience of everyone who's there. And that's where this pop up scored highly - the decibel level of the oohs and aahs as each course came out, the busy  happy sound of people enjoying their food and talking about it. Most tables were booked by friends, but for those of on mixed tables, meeting new and interesting people was great and especially on my table the conversation flowed as freely as the food and wine.

You can hear more about what happened at what was billed as Leicester's first Pop up restaurant by clicking this link below - and do the diners thinks there's a  good market for this type of thing?


http://soundcloud.com/localfoodrules/white-dining-pop-up-restaurant

And if you're running a local supper club, especially one using local food, then please let me know.....
In the meantime, the beautiful photos here in this post were not taken by me, but by Joanne Withers  at www.ninephotos.co.uk/

Meeting the monks who make butter

Making butter by the jam jar method was interesting if not arm achingly time consuming . So I searched for somewhere in Leicestershire or Rutland where I could buy locally made butter. Thanks to @katescurios on twitter, I found out that at Mount St Bernard Abbey in the north of Leicestershire,  thousands of litres of milk  and hundreds of pounds of butter are produced each year.

So off I went to the Abbey, a beautiful, peaceful place that draws you in and  makes you want to spend more time there in quiet contemplation.

But I was there to find out more about the butter making...and met Brother Nick who is
 one of the monks who helps in the dairy.

The dairy is behind the abbey shop....before getting there though,you have to walk through the yard...where all the girls live who produce the milk......

They are all Holstein cattle, a herd of about 100 who live in the yard during the winter before spending the summer months in the lush green fields surrounding the abbey.

In addition to working in the dairy Brother Nick is completing an MSc degree....but he says he enjoys the quiet of the dairy and producing something that is of value to both the monks and the general public.

Milk from the dairy supplies the 30 plus strong community at the abbey..and one of their largest customers is an independent milkman who supplies customers within a five mile radius.That 's what I call a local delivery round!

Butter making happens three times a week - and salted, unsalted, cinammon  and chive varieties of butter are sold at the abbey shop as well as three types of milk.

I had to buy some of course, and yes, it's absolutely delicious!

You can hear more on this story here......do have a listen to Brother Nick, the cows and I - as well as the bells of the abbey!

The butter making monks of Mount St Bernard Abbey

If you're a local butter maker living or working in Leicestershire or Rutland, then please get in touch - I would love to hear from you !

My daily pinta

It's so easy to assume something isn't it?

When I started this food challenge, I thought I knew where the milk which is delivered direct to my door each morning comes from.

It turns out I was wrong.

If you live in Leicestershire and Rutland you'll recognise the cheery electric little milk floats of Kirby and West Dairy.There's eighty of them, and they were specially designed by the current managing director's grandfather. The dairy has been in Leicester since Victorian times -the 1860's, and each day thousands of glass milk bottles are delivered to households in towns and villages around here.

I love the fact that my milk is delivered , come rain come shine,  in glass bottles. They're recyclable  - as soon as they're empty I wash them and put them out at  night by the door to be collected.
Some of them haven't made it to the door though....I used lots of them in the summer to use as vases holding masses of queen anne's lace  one year on a huge trestle table for an outdoor lunch.

So it was a shock when I found out the other week that the milk which is delivered doesn't come from Leicestershire any more.It comes from a large dairy farm in Southampton on the south coast of England. I was so sure that it was Leicestershire milk.

And so it was until about five years ago explained Graham Smith the Managing Director of Kirby and West, who invited me down to the dairy.

Up until then there was a huge bottling plant on site, but it all came down to economics. The bottling plant had to go.....but there was nowhere else locally with a bottling plant big enough to satisfy the demands of the Kirby and West dairy.
Now if Graham had chosen to deliver most of his milk in plastic cartons, milk from Leicestershire could be on offer. But it's a fact that , like me, most of his customers prefer their daily pinta in glass milk bottles.

You can listen to the chat I had with Graham as he whizzed me around the plant on one of the milk floats here....

http://soundcloud.com/localfoodrules/local-food-rules-milk


So, for the time of this challenge, I will be buying my milk elsewhere, from the excellent Lubcloud Diary in the north of Leicestershire, which also produces the thickest, creamiest cream .
ever. But the milk comes in - yes you've guessed - plastic cartons.

I'm already missing hearing the clink of the glass bottles being delivered on the doorstep each morning.................

Now this is what I call butter....

You can't beat a bit of butter now and again and so far I've not been able to find any in local shops. I've had to make it myself....

Now before you starting thinking I've put a cow on the lawn, am handmilking too and taking this challenge far too seriously, I haven't!

But I've been using the age old technique

 of throwing some cream (from Leicestershire) into a jam jar

 and shaking it all about

 until the magic moment when hey presto!

It's butter!

I know it's not a huge pat of butter and I haven't got any butter patts or paddles, so I had to shape it by hand.

And there's buttermilk. well I wasn't going to waste that so I whipped up a batch of scones (Mary Berry's recipe) too.

I've still got a few jars of  homemade blackcurrant jam too so all in all....my darling daughter and I had rather a nice Sunday afternoon tea, completely using local produce completely apart from a few ounces of sugar.

 It did take quite a time to turn from cream to butter today  and I'm absolutely cream crackered. Literally.

All that moving and shaking ...my arms are about to fall off!.I must have used hundreds of calories -so it 's a case of Hello home made butter - bye bye bingo wings! Result......(well I haven't got bingo wings  really but making my own butter will prevent them from appearing!)

Should I buy a churn? In the meantime- I really would like to know where I can buy locally made butter. Fellow tweeters on twitter suggest there may be some one from near Hinckley, and someone near Melton.....


Do let me know and let me know. I shall be buying some soon,. I bet they've got really big biceps....