Beth Eats Local

It has taken me some time to realise that Google doesn’t know everything.  My first reaction to desiring a particular food item is to google every permutation of its name until my fingers bleed, but I’m coming to believe that perhaps virtual food detection is a narrow street that I have walked the length and breadth of.  Perhaps it’s time for this culinary gumshoe to take to the streets.  If I told you I hadn’t been to the farmer’s market in the whole two months I’ve been doing this project, you’d beat me up, right? 

Though my diet harks back to pre-medieval times, my lifestyle certainly doesn’t.  I sit in front of a computer for three days a week at work and often for a further two days working on my own projects.  I’m a videoblogger, I run conferences on social and digital media.  The phrase ‘Web 2.0’ makes me feel all funny inside.  On top of this, I do a lot of non-tech stuff – from learning to mend bikes to organising clothing swaps.  In short, I haven’t got time.  Internet research is the easiest available option.

It’s starting to strike me that this isn’t really the point.  This project is scaffolded by the internet – I use it to find suppliers, to find recipes (it isn’t unusual for me to be looking at my computer while cooking), to communicate about what I am doing and to connect with others, but I think that I could be doing so much more. 

I could, for example, be using this project as an excuse to explore the 100 miles in which I live.  Unfortunately for me, a good portion of the aforementioned 100 miles is in the English Channel.  I have made tentative plans to get an unsuspecting yachtsperson at the Marina to teach me how to crew a boat but as I don’t eat fish, this won’t do me much good nutritionally.  Luckily, there is plenty of land left to explore and as of now I vow to explore it.  Yes, alright, I’ll go to the next farmer’s market, and if you insist, I’ll visit some pick-your-own farms.  What, you want me to talk to people while I’m there?  Well, ok.

As I write this, I have cunningly used the internet to find a directory of PYO establishments in the vicinity - http://www.pickyourown.org/uks2y.htm.  Later, I’ll spend a couple of glorious hours with an Ordnance Survey map, plotting the routes between them so that I can visit more than one in a day.  Then I’ll have to turn my brain to the tricky problem of how to transport soft fruits on a bicycle.  My life has become more adventurous and innovative since I started this project!    

They say you should listen to your body because it will tell you what it needs.  Recently, my body has been telling me that it needs to  go on long country walks and read books about explorers.  What it hasn’t needed to do (it was very clear about this) was look at a computer.  No posts for a while then.   Wait a second…  my body just told me that- as of right now - it needs to be a responsible local food correspondent and that it will edit the two videos sitting on my laptop and put them up as soon as possible.  I’m not sure if someone coerced my body into saying this… 

I spent last week at my parent’s house in Lancashire celebrating my mum’s birthday.   Actually, I spent last week doing the aforementioned walking and reading, but told her that these were valuable ways of celebrating 60 years of someone’s life.  This was the longest time that I had spent away from home since the project started and I was expecting it to be more of a challenge than it turned out to be.  The rules that I have set myself state that I can take food from Brighton with me if I travel somewhere, but that I should try to source food from within 100 miles of where I’m going whenever possible.   Obviously, I had big plans to scour the internet for sources of Lancashire food, but time – my nemesis – galloped away from me and I found myself on the eve of my departure with little idea of what I was going to eat while I was up there.

Luckily, my mother had not been so indolent.  She had been to a local farm shop and found me honey, flour, and cheese (which I didn’t eat for reasons I’ll discuss in another post).  The dairy farm at the back of the house (literally at the back.  As a child, I would go to school with clothes that stunk of cow shit from being on the line on the wrong day) provided milk and eggs.  The rest of my diet was not so much 100 mile as 10 metre – veg from my mum’s garden.  I brought butter up from Brighton though it went rancid before I could eat it.  It usually does this and I usually eat it, but somehow, in my parent’s house, without the funny smells and fruit flies that I am used to, it seemed gross.  

My mum’s new hobby also provided some sustenance.  She’s volunteering for the BTCV at Haigh Hall near Wigan.  They’re getting the old walled kitchen garden productive again.  It provided me with both a pocket full of raspberries and a fix for my secret garden fetish.   I was pleased to note that they had planted a medlar tree.  As well as secret gardens, I have also become fixated on medlars despite not having ever tried one.   I was also pleased to note that I knew the difference between borage and comfrey when my mum didn’t.  Competitive?  Moi?

It’s a good job that my parents like me as I spent my week filling their house with strange smells and unknown substances.  They weren’t pleased when I dribbled sourdough starter all over the kitchen, despite me protesting that it was a joyful union of wild yeasts and bacteria.  It’s a good job that I didn’t take my ‘vinegar’ with me.   This vinegar is cider that I left for a month on the window ledge in a bottle.  At first all that happened was that it attracted suicidal fruit flies and I had to scoop them out and attach a tissue to the top of the bottle with an elastic band.  After that problem was solved, a thick gloopy goo started forming inside the bottle.  It looked utterly gross and I started to think that I was going to have to throw it away.  Instead of doing that, I swallowed down the bit of sick that was rising in my throat and sieved the goop out of it.  When I tasted what was left I had, would you believe it, vinegar!  A little research on the internet has told me that the gross gloop is in fact called ‘mother of vinegar’ and is a ‘form of cellulose and acetic acid bacteria that develops on fermenting alcoholic liquids’ (thanks wikipedia!).   I did it!  I am a successful vinegar maker.  Now all that I need to do is read the book I have just inherited called ‘Vinegar: Nature’s Secret Weapon’.  It also features two other chapters entitled, ‘Honey: Nature’s secret weapon II’ and ‘Garlic: Nature’s secret weapon III’.   Oh, and I also need to use the bumper crop of apples I am expecting this autumn to create more than a teacupful of this elixir.  Salad dressings, you are now within my reach…

You never expect it to happen, and when it does, it hits you hard.  I’m talking of course about the end of the allotment strawberries.  For a few weeks, I had been in the habit of going up there, harvesting a couple of pounds of fruit and then stuffing pancakes with them for breakfast and I mean stuffing.  But, no longer.  I had planned to build a solar dryer and dry some for winter breakfasts.  No such luck.  I’m always slightly too busy to start building the dryer and what I considered my main drying crop is now over.  As I am reluctant to face a strawberry-free winter, my next plan is to borrow a friend’s dehydrator (electricity, evil electricity), go to a U-pick and pick an amount that will see me safely through to spring.

So, no strawberries, and to add insult to injury my clandestine redcurrant and raspberry stash has been rumbled too.  I was, oh-so-secretly, harvesting fruit from my friend’s abandoned allotment.  Abandoned in the sense that they moved to Bristol, leaving the allotment in the care of someone who didn’t (care that is).  The grass was chest height and hid my furtive doings well from view, but now it seems the allotment has been commandeered and handed to someone else, or at least the one next to it has.  I shall keep a weather-eye on it and see what’s going on.  I really hope that the allotment hasn’t been given to someone else yet because there are vines in their shed and greenhouse which are just about to spew forth pounds and pounds of grapes.  These too I was planning to dry in my not yet existent solar dryer and possibly make some wine from them.  I was planning to bathe in grape juice and make shoes from the skin.  I was planning to…

No strawberries, no grapes.  Looking at my meagre harvest of 20 blackcurrents, five redcurrants and six raspberries, I felt very sorry for myself.  Chris – housemate and fellow allotmenteer - suggested in no uncertain terms that I stopped sulking, but what does he know, Mr Cocoa and Sugar (I’m such a bitter person).  Sulk.  Sulk.  Sulk.  There is a silver lining to this very dark cloud, however, as I have just found some cherry trees on waste-ground near where I work.  I picked some yesterday, wearing office lady attire, going through my innocent foraging story in my head should some thick-necked security guard come along and ask me what I was doing.

There’s more on foraging to come, as I have started a foraging group (we go out on the last Sunday of the month for people who are interested) and we had our inaugural trip on Sunday.  I won’t say too much about it as I’ll be posting a video (this was supposed to be a videoblog, but video is way more time consuming than text to produce and I refuse to let blogging get in the way of eating). 

Don’t worry about me too much.  Though there’s a dearth of soft fruits in my life, there’s always, always rhubarb.