Learning lessons...

So, after my last post I had to revisit my own observations regarding palm oil. I realised that the stuff is in many more products than I had initially thought, so I have definitely learned something.
For example, some margarine I was going to buy for baking... on the front of the package it said "contains vegetable fat" but a large proportion of that is palm oil! How are consumers supposed to make ethical choices based on that? Yes, palm oil is vegetable fat but not the kind I necessarily want in my cakes, given its environmental impact. In the end I opted for buying butter - more expensive but at least I know what's in it...for the most part, that is. It just goes to show that we sometimes have to dig even deeper to get to the information we need, the "real stuff".

The end result of my baking session was a apple & raisin crumble cake (or in German "Apfelstreuselkuchen") :-) - flour, baking powder, butter, egg, sugar, apples, raisins, cinnamon...that's pretty much it if I recall the ingredients correctly. There's a whole tray's worth of it and I have frozen a big chunk to have another day. YUM!

Real food or "Does palm oil belong in biscuits?"

Coffee walnut cake

It's still freezing here! To warm us up we have been having steaming mugs of tea and homemade coffee & walnut cake... any excuse ;-) The walnuts came from one of my mum's friends who has a nut tree in her garden and the recipe from River Cottage. It's the first time I made it and it definitely gets the thumbs up!

Pond update & Leftovers of a different kind...

An update from the pond (given the title of my blog): The pond has been frozen over for the last few days but we have been able to spot the frogs under the ice. I have no idea how they manage to live under there but they seem to be doing nicely :-) Lots of birds in the garden as well - one of my favourites is the little wren that comes down to the path by the pond to check what's on offer.

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In my last post I wrote about food waste and using up leftovers. But this is about other types of "leftovers"... Having just moved house I found far too much clutter lurking in the back of wardrobes and in boxes; stuff I hadn't looked at in at least a couple of years and obviously hadn't missed either. And then those things that I had bought and then hardly ever used (luckily, not too many of those but still...) - those things could still be useful to someone else. This is where "Freecycle" comes in. On the attached link you can find information regarding the UK network of Freecycle and also similar ones across the globe. Basically, you advertise what you are trying to give away on your local Freecycle website (and the important bit is give away, so it has to be free and no money should change hands) and people interested contact you to arrange picking the item up. So my "leftovers" can go to a new home rather than landfill. Brilliant!

Now, I guess the idea is not to amass so much stuff in the first place. I am now trying not to buy things I don't absolutely need (and let's face it - how many of us in Western Europe actually need more things?), despite advertising campaigns and society wanting me to continue buying. One exception for me are books - always worth having! One of my favourite books is "Walden" by Henry David Thoreau (free download via the link) - it amazes me that someone in 1845 could write about simple living and the madness of having too many possessions. Very inspiring, still very relevant and definitely worth a read!

Waste not want not...or "Why I love leftovers"

For a lot of people living and working in cities like London the day starts with a takeaway "designer" coffee and lunch could be sushi in a pretty plastic box with all the trimmings. My day often looked like that and more often than not I felt guilty for creating so much rubbish and not using up the perfectly good food we had in our fridge at home. Commuting almost 3 hours per day was my excuse but maybe I was just lazy. Fact is that life was not only an environmental nightmare, it was also costing me a fortune. Fastforward a couple of months and I am sitting here in Wales. Things have changed! These days, tea and coffee is drunk out of proper mugs at home and lunch is more often than not made out of leftovers. It is absolutely amazing what you can create out of those things lurking in the fridge or cupboard. Take today, for example... on the lunch menu is a Kirsten version of frittata... a sort of omelette or tortilla. There were some eggs that needed using up, an open packet of ham, a few mushrooms, half an onion... ta-da! Lunch is sorted! Yes, I have more time now but I wish I had had the inspiration then to make the (little) effort it takes to make my own lunches etc. Better late than never, I suppose.

Behind all this is more than just my "old" wastefulness. A report published last year by the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) called "Global Food Losses and Food Waste" makes shocking reading. It found that "roughly one third of the food produced in the world for human consumption every year — approximately 1.3 billion tonnes — gets lost or wasted", fruit and vegetables being amongst those food items most wasted. Now, if like me, you are trying to grow your own veg and fruit (I have only just started doing this last year), you know how much love and effort goes into growing food. Can you imagine then just taking all of it and throwing it away? No, thought not! So why do we do it with supermarket food? I guess somewhere along the line the relationship with that food has broken down and those packets of tomatoes or tubs of yoghurt are no longer close to our hearts. A lot of the waste appears to happen at source or in the supermarkets themselves but surely, we as individuals can play our role in reducing the waste - for the good of the planet and our wallets. So, let's get creative and see what "meals for free" we can create from the foods that would have ended up in the bin!

Bread

I love the smell of fresh bread! It reminds me of spending time in my uncle's bakery as a child when I was allowed to choose from the different types of bread, rolls and cakes made that morning. He had decided to become a baker during the war when he saw people going hungry and he wanted to change that. What an admirable reason to choose a profession!

I have started baking bread for us and absolutely love it! Kneeding the dough is almost therapeutic and it is so satisfying to have a loaf of bread or a batch of rolls at the end of it. Yes, it can be time consuming but then I suppose lots of things worth doing are. Should you find yourself with a bit of spare time, I can highly recommend giving it a try. What I found immensely helpful was the book "Bread" by Daniel Stevens, River Cottage Handbook No. 3 - it explains every step very well and so far, the results have been brilliant...even if I say so myself :-)! I am in no way as talented a baker as my uncle was - far from it - but with the help of the instructions from the book, I have been able to make bread such as the batch of white spelt & oat rolls and white spelt bread I baked today. How satisfying!

Simple pleasures...

It's the last day of January and finally, winter seems to be arriving. It's cold outside but I am sitting here with a steaming mug of tea and a couple of lemon shortbreads I made earlier this morning. Bliss!

The pond I can see just outside the window appears quiet but I know that the frogs started arriving a couple of weeks ago for their annual rendezvous and are hiding somewhere under the surface, together with a family of newts we spotted the other day.

My attempt at making lemon shortbreads has actually been quite successful - maybe some of them are a tiny bit too brown but overall they taste lovely, light and lemony. I covered half of the biscuits with lemon icing and left the others plain. Obviously, I had to try both kinds... :-)

How lucky I am to be able to sit here, warm and comfortable, watch nature & enjoy homemade food! I feel very blessed indeed!