Lockdown catch up mega post
This morning I noticed that since I started posting more to Instagram I’ve basically stopped updating here, which is bad badness. Where you post matters, because ultimately you’re putting all your effort into growing their platform, and they own you and your audience, so this morning I downloaded most of my content from there and rolled the last few months worth into this post.
Foraging
Most evenings I’ve een going for a walk, mostly to get out of the house. Mostly I stomp round a local industrial estate, because it’s empty. Whilst walking I’ve spotten loads of things I can eat, so I’ve picked them and cooked with them, as well as grazing my way round.
First up there were load of cherries. I made cherry pie and a cherry cordial. Next up were brambles, which mostly got grazed on but also got turned into creme de mure. Lastly, a tonne of apples. These have all been juiced and put on to brew as cider.
Pinto Beans
During a rare outing to Edinburgh with work I popped into Lupe Pintos and stocked up on lots of things, including a couple of kilos each of their turtle beans (blackbeans) and pinto beans. Rather than cooking the pinto beans in the same way as I do the black beans they went in the InstantPot with lots of Mexican Oregano (I over bought that), garlic, cumin, chicken stock and white wine vinegar for 40 minutes of pressure cooking and then 10 minutes on saute mode to thicken them up.
Sausage Pilaf
Nonsense fusion cooking at it’s finest, the combination of Cumberland sausage, rice, spinach and spice was very comforting.
Bacon
I love bacon but cheap poor quality bacon is just dreadful (and everywhere). I’ve been treating myself to packages of smoked streaky bacon from Block’n’Bottle, wrapped up in 6 slice packages especially for Saturday mornings. The difference between good bacon and crap bacon is unbelievable.
Lunch
Now that we’re both working from home all day stopping and eating a decent lunch is important. Towards the end of summer we had lots of big loaded salads as well as things on toast.
Tomales
I roasted a big chunk of pork from Christmas Farm with fennel seed and chilli and then we wrapped up chunks of it in tamale dough (with corn masa from Lupe Pintos). The incredibly uneven packages were then steamed in the InstantPot wrapped in foil.
Making cider
This year has been a bumper crop for apples and with all my walking about I spotted lots of trees. My friend John and I spend a fun day in the pouring rain harvesting them and pushing them though a tiny domestic juicer I got off Gumtree. All the juice has gone into a barrel to ferment. I didn’t add any yeast or sugar, this is 100% wild brewing. There’s quite a scum on the top now, but lets see wat happens by Christmas.
