Delivery Time

With a new year comes a new veg box from the Riverford box company. My friendly delivery man David managed to call during a brief 30 minutes of sunshine on Thursday, I hope he didn't get too rained on during his rounds. 

This weeks box contained classic January UK veg including carrots, potatoes and leeks. A few Spanish imports of cherry tomatoes, ramiro peppers and broccoli brightened things up, giving a bit of variety, but I can never decide if this irritates me or not. It's lovely to have peppers and tomatoes in January (especially knowing they're organic and shipped rather than flown across) but when you buy a veg box to get a sense of the seasons it seems almost counter productive. It does however make meals easier. I'm the only one eating the green veg so if we got just that it would take me weeks and weeks to get through. 

January is great for some veg, such as kale, potatoes and cabbage but it's definitely not a very fruity season. After the deluge of oranges, satsumas and other citrus fruits over Christmas January feels a bit boring. I always thought oranges must be out of season and flown across the world for Christmas but according to the Riverford website they get their oranges from Spain between October and April, so I know what I'm buying in my next box. Although it's still Spanish and not as local as my UK apples I got this week.

As well as maybe getting some Spanish oranges next time I'm considering another addition to my regular order. Riverford offer meat boxes as well as their veg ones. The cheapest one is about £30 but you do seem to get a lot from it; a stock pack, beef pot roast (1kg), pork belly joint (700g), beef diced (400g), 4-6 lamb chops and chicken quarters. The website says this should last two adults about a fortnight, which for us is probably about right as we only have meat about 4 times a week. 

The convenience of getting all our veg and meat delivered is quite tempting especially because you couldn't get it as locally or all organic in the supermarket. What I'd really love is a local farm shop somewhere close to Preston but I haven't found one yet, maybe I'm not looking hard enough.

My Beans Dilemma

Baked beans are an incredibly versatile food stuff. Pop them in stews or pasta sauces, have them with your full English, on toast or a baked potato; they're great however you eat them. They are low fat, vegetarian and one of your five a day portions of fruit and veg, definitely a super-food.

Their simplicity is one reason why they're so useful at lunch times. Take in a few slices of bread and you can easily have beans on toast for lunch and feel all warmed inside and healthy too. It's not a huge hassle, but taking them out the tin, finding a microwavable  container, cooking them and then washing up all seems more effort than taking sandwiches. Then there's the problem of size, one tin is a little too big for a lunchtime and the smaller tins at 150g are just not quite enough. So the new 200g snack pots are great because you have the right amount of beans for lunch and you can pop the plastic containers straight into the microwave and then bin them straight after.

It's so easy. Just open, cook, then bin the packaging. But that's "bin the packaging" not recycle the packaging. One of my favourite things about baked beans is that (apart from the plastic wrapping around 4 packs) they come in completely recyclable packaging. I've never met anyone who wouldn't automatically recycle tins, it's ingrained in our lifestyles. But the new plastic containers are much harder to recycle. I definitely can't here in Preston, I might have been able to recycle the main pot at university in Durham but not the plastic film lid. So the question is, do I sacrifice sustainable packaging for convenience of cooking?

I don't have an answer to that. I love the convenience of the new pots, but hate the waste that the new product brings over the old version. It seems backwards to move from a sustainable packaging to non-sustainable. Maybe I am being a little naive about what people do with their tins at work, I might be in the minority to carefully wash mine and pop into my bag to take home to recycle if there aren't facilities in the office. For now I'm sticking to leftovers and sandwiches but I'm still jealous of colleagues who sit eating their warm (just the right amount of) beans on toast at lunch time.


What are your green dilemmas? Post a comment to discuss!

Eggcelent Choice

I am proud of my farming heritage. My grandparents owned a small dairy farm in rural Northamptonshire and now my aunt and uncle run an organic egg farm only a couple of villages over. I always feel a link back to the countryside and the farming landscape even though I have no day to day experience of it. I didn't grow up on a farm but I have many happy memories of playing in the fields and "helping" with the farm chores when I was little and visiting, although I doubt how much actual help we were when feeding the lambs or herding the cattle.

Farming is a hard profession, even more so now that supermarkets are trying to push down prices for customers which often means pushing down profits for the farmers not the shops. During my lifetime, partly to cope with this, farming has become much more industrial with the use of chemicals, fertilisers, antibiotics and intensive methods. This often means bad news for wildlife and the environment as intensive methods and chemicals push wildlife out to the very edges of the countryside. I've talked about Fairtrade and the benefits for the environment and farmers that paying a fair price has but haven't yet talked about organic farming and the benefits this has in this country and abroad.

The Soil Association is the main certification body for organic farming in the U.K. For farms to be organic they must satisfy strict standards:

• Artificial chemicals are prohibited
• Pesticides are strictly restricted
• Animal welfare is at the heart of farming with a truly free-range life for animals
• Diversity and rotation of crops and animals allows the soil time to recover and prevents the build up of pests and diseases in the soil
• The routine use of drugs, antibiotics and wormers is banned
• The use of genetically modified crops and ingredients is banned

I always get my eggs from my uncle and aunts farm, this sometimes means travelling by train with a rucksack containing a dozen eggs but normally they survive the trip. When they first started farming organic eggs it was amazing to see the contrast with the normal shop bought eggs. Not only do they last much longer (because we get them straight from the farm which makes them about two weeks fresher than buying them in the shops) but their colour, taste and size is different.

Organic, free-range eggs have a much deeper colour and taste, well, more eggy than battery farmed eggs. The yolks are the colour of oranges rather than the pale yellow of primroses. Also, shops want standard size eggs and this hasn't yet been communicated down to the chickens. Because of this we often get the too big or too small eggs that can't be sold in shops. When a new batch of hens comes to the farm they often start by laying double or triple yolk eggs (I've no idea why) and so these eggs are much too big for the shops so we get them. My university friends were amazed by double yolk eggs and I hadn't realised this was an uncommon thing. It can make cake making tricky but an extra yolk in scrambled eggs is a brilliant treat.

Organic farms must adhere to strict welfare conditions and the hens have freedom to roam the fields during daylight and are put away to bed in large sheds when night falls to protect them from foxes and other predators. It's quite amazing to see thousands of hens wandering around in a field but they do look quite happy-as happy as hens can look.

Because pesticides, chemicals and antibiotics are restricted or banned on organic farms the soil and natural environment has time to recover and bloom. Farmers are encouraged to incorporate wildlife friendly schemes into their farms which helps to bring back the balance between nature and farming which is needed to get the full potential out of organic farming.

There are of course downsides to organic farming. It takes up more land, sometimes uses more energy (battery farming is unethical but very energy efficient) and water and doesn't always produce as high yields as intensive farming but the benefits of yummier food, happier animals and better environment must surely be worth something.

How organic farming is used globally and the more general impacts, pros and cons it has are discussions for another blog. For now I'm off to enjoy some bright yellow scrambled eggs! Have a nice Sunday and if you're ever in Waitrose why not try the Organic Free-range Columbian Blacktail eggs, you might even be eating some from my relatives farm!

Snack Time

Well after a three hour train journey from Leicester back to Preston today I didn't do very well with my I Spy train list.  I saw a river, bridge over the railway, some flooding, a road, graffiti, budleia and a successful traveller making a dash for an almost departing train. I only managed one church spire before darkness closed in and the dark is my excuse for missing the rest of my list. Hopefully I'll do better later in the week when I'm on another train.

When I'm on train journeys I try to make sure I take food and drink with me, mainly because of the prices on trains and at stations but also because there seems to be a serious lack of "ethical" snacks. This has mainly been an assumption up to now but today I thought I'd check out the on board shop on my Virgin train to see if I could back it up with facts.

I was  happily surprised to find that all the hots drinks were Fairtrade and according to the shop menu,

Virgin Trains is proud to use only Fairtrade Certified hot drinks, to help protect farmers and deliver you the very best quality.

 I'm quite impressed by this and I like the fact that, on these trains at least, the ethical choice is now the only choice. There aren't that many places where only Fairtrade drinks are served, although there were still fizzy drinks which were Fairtrade.

The only other Fairtrade items I found were some Fairtrade Jelly Beans (I didn't even realise they existed!). There were also some UK produced oat bars which had "fully recyclable packaging". The packaging was plastic and while it probably is recyclable somewhere I doubt it would be accepted by my council. On the recycling topic it annoys me that there is nowhere to recycle on trains, not even behind the shop counter.

In general I was pleased that there were ethical/environmental options for both food and drink, but there's still a fair way to go. It would be great if Fairtrade was the norm for all products that could be.

Thankfully I avoided the shop choices as I'd brought a snack with me. This weekend I tried making roasted pumpkin seeds for the first time. They were a lot better than I expected and very easy to make. Remove all the seeds from the pumpkin, brush a tiny bit of oil onto a hot frying pan and then put in the seeds. Wait until the seeds swell and turn brown and then remove from the heat and cover with sugar/salt/chilli powder or paprika. I think I used a bit too much chilli powder but they were great otherwise and staved off hunger until I got home to finish off the last of last weeks pork.

Leftover lunches

We haven't had a new veg box for two weeks now and we still haven't finished all the veg from the last one!
We did buy a particularly large box but I'm amazed how well the food keeps. I suppose it's because it comes straight from the fields rather than being transported for a week or so before it gets to the shops.

It's been a week of leftover meals. We cooked a joint of pork on Sunday and have been using the rest of it up over the last few days.

Tuesday was Cheesy Pork, a variation on my Mum's Cheesy Chicken which is left over roast chicken with cheesy sauce and rice. It's a family favourite and has been adapted to most left over meats including turkey and pork. We've never tried Cheesy Beef but I think that's because we're rarely left with leftover beef!

Wednesday was stir fry pork: vegetables, pork, rice and gravy. Very quick using leftover rice from Tuesday and pork from Sunday. Great for popping in a Tupperware box and taking to work when I'm working in the evenings.

Tonight will be broccoli and pork pasta. Really simple if you cook the pasta and broccoli in the microwave together. Again a great one for lunch or dinner when working late.

As well as all this evening food the pork's been in sandwiches for lunches every day! I reckon the one joint we cooked on Sunday will have done over 15 portions when we finally finish it. Brilliant value I think and it means less cooking for the rest of the week, especially if you use left over roast veg in the first few meals.

Next week I'll need to use up the cauliflower, celeriac, broccoli and half a leek that are still lingering in the fridge. I've got a baking potato somewhere too. More leftover meals (probably with lots of grated cheese) and then we'll be ready for a nice new box. I love the way you can see the food going down over the weeks. On delivery day I'm struggling to shut the fridge then two weeks later I discover things I'd completely forgotten we had! What are you favourite recipes for using up leftovers? I'd love to hear about them.