1 Week Eating Local Part 5

More local eggs for £1

More apples from another boot sale, not as good as the first - all a bit sharp but this lot were £1

I certainly couldn't afford to always replace my store cupboard with local produced food but it's interesting for a one off experiment.
Every thing below is from the local Co-op

All East of England Co-op shops have 'Locally Produced' shelves. Quite a lot of choice of jams, chutneys, cakes etc etc, which I don't need as I always make my own
I bought Marriages multi grain flour - this is what I meant to buy first time. Hill Farm Rape-seed oil is local -Heveningham near Halesworth. The tomato sauce is Wilkin and Son Tiptree - Essex and the sausages are Taste of Suffolk from Bury St Edmunds.(I always buy these or another local company- Brundish Farm - sausages anyway) and as you can see on offer as a BOGOF.

My pepper grinder broke recently so I replaced it with a Maldon Salt Co. (Essex) although I'm sure they don't grow the pepper there!

Then there is milk from Suffolk Cheeses and Suffolk Blue cheese from them too both bought at The Hog and Hen farm Shop. The milk is £1.25 and that small bit of blue cheese was £3! - Blimey!

Lunch same as yesterday scrambled egg sandwich and beetroot.
.
More of the cauli made cauliflower cheese. The sauce was made using the local flour and cheese,

and eaten with a piece of home made bread.

Too much home made bread!

I cooked the remaining cooking  apples and served up a little  with half of a baked egg custard. I did take a photo but it looked very unappealing ( although it tasted lovely) so won't include it.
The egg custard was 1 egg, a little sugar, local milk and NON local Nutmeg.

I'd forgotten how good a baked egg custard is and made with the milk which comes from Guernsey cows and isn't homogenized it was  good and creamy.........and full of calories too probably!

Back Tomorrow
Sue

1 Week Eating Local Part 4

 I looked at the BBC on line weather forecast yesterday and what it looked like reminded me of Craig Revel-Horwood on Strictly describing a poor dancer.....................DULL, DULL, DULL. Every day is a 'light cloud and gentle breeze' and the only bit of sun peeping out is Tuesday morning. I shall need to work hard at not getting depressed and gloomy myself!

Thank you to everyone for comments yesterday. Jayne mentioned the way supermarkets operate a just-in-time way of ordering and how little it would take for the system to implode.  I think that's the way all manufacturers work now.
It's one of the reasons we tried to be very self-sufficient for all the years at the smallholding and now
I like to keep plenty of food in my cupboards, especially living up the end of a lane, on back roads without a 4 wheel drive.

Apologies for not commenting on everyone's blogs. I start the day with good intentions but then time slips by.

Anyway, back to the Eating local.....................I cooked the last of my  beetroot from the garden.

And had a scrambled egg sandwich with beetroot for lunch and forgot to take a photo AGAIN........seems I'm not very good at this sort-of challenge!

This, in case you don't know is a cauliflower!

It's from the local farm shop but not grown there, it just about qualifies as local as it's grown in the Fens on the Norfolk/Lincs border.

Vegetables are grown commercially in parts of Suffolk. On the light sandy soil close to where we lived in Knodishall they frequently grew huge fields of carrots and onions, but they aren't sold locally. They go off to big packing warehouses and then to supermarkets, which could be almost anywhere.

It's difficult to find real local vegetables unless you grow them yourself............Oh how I miss the smallholding years!

I used part of the cauliflower for a curry
The curry started with the last of my onions, one of the local apples bought at boot sale and the smallest of my two remaining butternut squash. Thickened with the local flour and then of course curry powder NOT local! then add hot water. Added some home grown potatoes and some of the cauliflower plus a spoonful of my homemade chutney, pepper and small teaspoon of sugar. I meant to go outside to fetch in some chard but forgot.

The curry was divided into 3 portions and two went in the freezer. Normally I'd eat curry with rice but we don't grow rice in Suffolk..............yet, although with climate change who knows what will happen,  then I thought about making the new-fangled idea of cauliflower rice but quite honestly the thought of it doesn't appeal at all - even if it is wonderfully healthy and ecologically such a good idea, it sounds awfully "windy"!
 Instead I baked one of my potatoes and served up the curry on top. It was delish.

.
Back Tomorrow
Sue

1 Week Eating Local Part 3

Next day

 I had the second half of the quiche with baked potato - getting towards the end of my own potatoes now- and kale again. Same breakfast and same lunch. I thought I'd taken photos of the little apple pies but found I hadn't.

The third day

Toast and honey again.

Used the first of my leeks from the garden plus another of my potatoes to make soup. I used an OXO veg cube for the stock. (IF I was very good I would have home made vegetable stock in the freezer but I don't) 

Still some kale left so a 2 Egg omelette filled with kale and a slice of home made bread. The Suffolk Churn local butter is very hard so when spreading it on bread I melted a little bit in the microwave. It spreads on toast without  needing to melt it, and it's exceedingly good, but double the price of the same amount of supermarket own brand unsalted butter.

Back Tomorrow
Sue