Beth Eats Local

Success. After two weeks, finally a 100 mile meal worth sharing. Witness my breakfast of champions (don’t grimace - in a blog about food, I was going to use that phrase at some point, it’s better that we get it out of the way now.) I made wholewheat pancakes, wrapped them around some strawberries from the allotment and drizzled honey over the top of it. The full recipe is below with producers that I use.

4oz wholewheat flour - Wessex Mill

1 egg - Through We Love Local

Pinch of salt - Maldon Salt

½ pint milk - Middle Farm Unpasturised Whole Milk

Glug of oil - Sussex Gold Cold Pressed Rape Seed Oil

Mix the flour and salt in a bowl. In another bowl beat together the egg, milk and flour. Add the flour a bit at a time, then put it in the fridge for at least half an hour. After half an hour, heat some oil in a pan. The pan should be quite hot, but not as high as it can go. Add some batter and rotate the pan to spread it out. The first pancake will be quite oily, but the ones after will be fine. Flip the pancake over after a minute or so. While it’s still hot, chop some fresh strawberries into it, roll it up and drizzle honey on the top. Eat and enjoy.

To make this even better, how about chopping up the strawberries into a Tupperware pot, drizzle honey over the top and then put inside a rucksack and carry several hundred miles to Wales, including up a steep hill. When you’ve done all of that, the strawberries will have infused the honey with their sweet, sweet juice and will be almost unbearably delicious.

These pancakes have been a life-saver. Without my usual muesli, I have been at a loss what to have for breakfast. I’ve tried the day before’s left-overs. I’ve tried scrambled eggs, but try as I might I can’t eat eggs or left-overs day in, day out. Pancakes, it seems, are a whole different matter. On Sunday night I made up a whole load of batter and then used it for the next three days while I was at work and needed to eat quickly in the mornings. Pancake batter gets better if you leave it - something to do with the gluten in the flour needing time in the water to work properly (ah, lovely gluten).

It seems that this project is all about rhythms and routine, and in a life with very little routine, that’s quite a hard lesson to learn. In the past two weeks I have been learning to plan ahead, settle in and ultimately, calm down. I’ve learned that my veg box lasts for less time now that I am leaning more heavily on it, and that I need to be going up to the allotment 3-4 times a week to harvest. I am thanking myself for starting the project at the beginning of June (intentional), after the dearth of the hungry gap has passed and the strawberries and redcurrents and beans and peas and early carrots and potatoes are all ready to eat. We are harvesting a lot of strawberries at the moment, a couple of pounds a week – at least. I wondered out loud to my allotment mate why they were so expensive when they were so prolific at the moment and he suggested that it was labour costs – which then moved into a conversation about migrant labour. I’m learning that food affects everything.

One of the things that I have been learning to deal with in the first two weeks is panic. In the first week of the project, I panicked and spent a lot of money on food. In part, this is because I was stocking up on things like flour and oil, but I also spent money on vegetables that I didn’t really need to. I learnt the hard way how much more expensive vegetables in shops are than getting them through my veg box. To compare, a bunch of asparagus in a shop costs £1.99. Asparagus is in season at the moment and I got two to three times as much asparagus in my veg box and this costs me £8 a week for half the box (I share with my housemate). The asparagus in my veg box was much thinner, much less uniform than the stuff in the shops, but there was so much of it that it didn’t matter.

My veg box (or my half of it) lasts me nearly to the end of the week. Nearly. For the rest of the time, I have to rely on what I can get from the allotment. This panicked me at first. What if there’s nothing to harvest? What if the insects have got it? What if, what if, what if. It suddenly struck me that this was a fear that was millennia old but that curiously, in a life led close to supermarkets full of food, I had never felt before. I stopped panicking after I went on a foraging mission with my friend Kat. We got samphire, sea beet, mallow and sea kale (this is quite rare in Britain, but abundant in Brighton and we only took a bit). This is only a tiny fraction of the wild food available at the moment. I made comfrey fritters the other day (using left-over pancake batter). I’m not going to starve this week.