Tag: Food for free

Glut!

Be careful what you wish for. Indeed. But one only realises this truism retrospectively. In early spring, I’d admire the blossoms on the trees and wish for a good harvest. Dreamily, I’d imagine making jams and pies and crumbles – all the ways I could enjoy and preserve my fruits.

The promise of things to come Image: Karen Costello-McFeat

Wandering about the garden, complimenting the trees on their constellations of blossoms; stroking their leaves to show them that I care; I hadn’t quite thought through the consequences of my actions. Yes, like King Charles, I do talk to my trees and perhaps I communicated my desires a little too well this year. Because, this year, to counter the absolute failure of my vegetable crops, my fruit trees have outdone themselves.

A sweet start

The first fruits to appear were the berries: raspberry, mulberry, blackcurrant and redcurrant. Each morning, I’d toddle down the garden to pick what had appeared – some going into the bowl with my cereal and some directly to the freezer.

Mini mulberries
Image: Karen Costello-McFeat

Next up were my sweet plums – early and delicious. I’d serve them instead of biscuits and give them away to anyone who wanted them. So far, so good. I had plenty to freeze and plenty to share. Everything was under control.

Then the freezer began to fill and more and more fruits ripened. Some, like the greengages and alpine strawberries were consumed immediately after picking, but the rest, well, no-one could eat that many.

Apples, apples every where

My fabulous old apple tree clearly liked the wet spring and warm summer, because it has excelled all expectations. Every day I pick the windfalls, and every day there are more.

Apples and plums Image: Karen Costello-McFeat

My miniature Russet apples were ripe, so they have been picked and stored in the fruit bowl. Extra apples have been set aside to give to friends. This afternoon, I’ll need to make some apple puree – a perfect baking supplement for those who don’t use eggs. By putting the puree in two tablespoon amounts in small plastic bags and freezing, I shall have enough egg replacements to last the year!

Waste not, want not

As anyone who has read my blog will know, I hate waste. My gorgeous daughter-in-law, Genevieve, gave me the perfect recipe book: PlantYou: Scrappy Cooking. In it, the author shows you how to use up all the scraps that otherwise might make kitchen waste. I was fascinated.

When preparing apples, there are equal quantities of cores and skin as flesh. Even these can be used and only then, the left-overs thrown into the compost. Okay, it is a bit fiddly and time consuming, but I love a challenge and the opportunity to use up everything.

Take these – and make these –

My apple cider vinegar is happily burbling away on the window sill and the apple scrap ‘honey’ is in the fridge. The ‘honey’ is perfect for porridge and yogurt and delicious on toast. It will keep in the fridge for a month, though I suspect it will keep a bit longer than that. And if you don’t want to do it straight away, store a large freezer bag full of scraps in the freezer and make on a rainy afternoon. (Sadly, I made mine on a boiling hot day making myself and the kitchen, very hot indeed. The fridge objected and promptly konked out. Luckily for me, my husband guessed what was wrong and both the fridge and myself cooled down and went back into operation!)

Food for free

Perhaps it is my Celtic ancestry or perhaps it is my innate love of foraging, but there few things that give me more joy than finding food for free. Mariia is clearly similarly inclined. When we came back from the West Country proudly bearing our full punnet of blackberries, she produced the 1.5 kilos that she had picked with Hermione!

But one can never have enough berries and the season is too short to tarry. Our local park has a magnificent and very old mulberry tree. As a consequence, it has the biggest, fattest mulberries around. Determined to get a little bit of its bounty, we all set off one warm summer evening. We returned with another 1.5 kg.

Putting my mini-mulberries to shame
Image: Karen Costello-McFeat

Unfortunately, many park visitors are not aware that they are edible (though I tell everyone that passes) or perhaps they know and don’t want stained clothing. Nothing is entirely free. The price tag for blackberries is scratches; mulberries, purple blooms on stained hands and tops.

Swap

And if you have more than enough of one thing, then barter is the way to go. My book group buddy Lesley was leaving town for a few days, but her plums were ready to pick. In a wonderfully sociable way, she invited us round to harvest them and have a cup of tea.

I brought a basket of apples, and Viv brought some delicious tomatoes fresh from her allotment. Everyone left happy! I made more jam and of course, had to check that it was okay. It was a sacrifice I was prepared to make.

Share

For me, the most wonderful part of having a good harvest is that I can share it. Anyone who comes to the door is likely to leave with a bag of something. And I can make jams and honeys and vinegars to give as tiny gifts too. My great friend Liz, whose apple harvest is even greater than my own, has her apples pressed and gives bottles of her truly delicious juice away. When I took the children to primary school, an elderly chap would leave a wheelbarrow filled with apples outside his house on the route, and many an apple crumble was made from his generosity.

When we have plenty, it makes sense to share it. In fact, the only thing I have had a shortage of is jam jars. I sent a plea to all my friends and now, I hope, I have enough. (And some will be returned filled!)

How do you like your fruit?

This year’s abundance is causing me to think hard about how to utilise and store it successfully. I’ve made crumbles, jams, vinegars and ‘honey’. I’d like to try making pickled blackberries and to attempt drying mulberries. My freezer is full, so I’ll need to think more laterally. I could make apple strings for dried apples, apple butter and if I get more adventurous still, fruit powders.

Nature marches on and there is no time to waste. There are still pears and quinces to harvest, so it will be late autumn when I can put my preserving tools away.

Sometimes, I wonder why I bother. After all, the supermarket stocks everything I need. But where, I ask you, is the fun in that?

Blackberrying

There are few activities more wonderful than blackberrying. It includes the delights of wandering about in nature, a foodie treasure hunt and the gratification of a sweet reward. The fact that these purple delicacies must be reached at a cost: scratched arms, attacks by stinging nettles, and dodgy footing (I once slipped into a mass of bushes and had to be hauled out) makes them more rather than less appealing. After all, no-one waxes lyrical about picking up a punnet of strawberries at the supermarket.

Like all true pleasures, it is transitory. If we delay, we must wait another year. My blackberry obsession starts around the beginning of August when I note those places where unripe blackberries are starting to appear. Sadly, these spots are often by busy roadsides and therefore not ideal, but I know that blackberrying elsewhere will soon be on the agenda.

Never mind the weather

With the very long, hot spell this summer, I didn’t hold out much hope for this year’s harvest. All fruits need plenty of water to plump and thrive and none more than the humble blackberry. Yet somehow, now they are more abundant and juicy than ever.

Nature’s gems
Image: Karen Costello-McFeat

From plant to palate

Much is made of the farm to table movement (which I applaud) but we needn’t go to a fancy restaurant to eat food that is grown organically and recently picked. We need only go to a local, unspoilt area.

I found an amazing clump at the puppy park and was joyfully eating and collecting them under the watchful gaze of a young lad staring out his window. Perhaps the sight of anyone eating anything that didn’t come from a shop bemused him. I waved hello and he smiled and disappeared back into his room.

Similarly, my husband and I were guzzling blackberries on the way home one day when a child, who went to do the same, was told off by his mother. ‘Don’t eat them; they’re dirty!’ she exclaimed. The child pulled back, chastised and went home, no doubt, to foods intensively doused with pesticides, herbicides and other chemicals.

When we miss the opportunity to show children how their food grows and to introduce them to the abundance of wild foods on offer, for free, we disempower them. When we distance ourselves so absolutely from the natural world, we should not be surprised that so few are willing to take steps to protect it.

Spread the joy! Image: Elisabeth Wales on Unsplash

Fortunately, on our berry expedition to Alfriston on Sunday, there was a young family introducing their children to the delights of blackberrying and the sight of it made me very glad indeed.

Some for now; some for later

Once home with our bounty, we needed to find ways to eat them. Since I had some meringues left over from the party, I decided to make mini-pavlovas for my friends. The blackberries provided a striking finishing touch.

Mini pavlovas
Image: Karen Costello-McFeat

The rest were added to my cooked apples from the garden and frozen. Wonderful though blackberries are, they have a terribly short shelf-life.

While we were in Alfriston, we noticed that several of the bushes were a week or so away from ripening, so we shall have to make another trip. As for the harvest, I am thinking up all sorts of ways of using them for autumnal treats: jams, pancakes, in yogurt etc. I would like to try drying them like raisins. Who knows? It might work.

But I don’t have long. Probably two weeks at most. So kitted out with my least presentable clothes and ready for purple stained hands, I shall have to get a move on. I hope you will join me.

Thrift

With the effects of the pandemic starting to make a real economic impact, I thought it a good time to write about how to make the best of life with more limited means. Thrift has gone out of fashion somewhat, but I believe it is time for a revival. Saving money by avoiding waste benefits us all. Even if you are financially secure, the planet will thank you for taking steps to reduce your demands upon it.

Though many of our outgoings, like the mortgage, are fixed, many are much more flexible. Since food is one of our greatest expenses, it seemed a good place to start.

Thrift – a maritime plant that once appeared on the thruppenny bit. Image: Karen Costello-McFeat

Waste not, want not

As you have probably noticed, I love food. Making savings on our food bill should not in any way impact on our ability to eat well. Ironically, making the most of our food and thinking carefully about how we use it is likely to lead to more imaginative dishes and healthier meals.

In the UK, the average family throws away £700 of food per year. (BBC) More shocking still is the environmental impact of all this, since all that food represents growing resources, food miles and packaging.

There are numerous ways to avoid wasting food, and just a few are suggested here. The key methods are to shop carefully using a list for planned meals, avoiding specials on items you cannot consume on time and reusing left-overs in imaginative ways. Stale bread made into croutons or bread and butter pudding is delicious; extra pasta can happily be eaten cold in a salad; those slightly limp vegetables in the bottom of the fridge will make an excellent soup. For oodles of ideas, I’ll refer you to the BBC Food website: https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/articles/could_you_cut_your_food_bill_by_a_third

A more unusual way to use ‘waste food’ was something I found on a YouTube cooking site. Here, left-over scraps were turned into fruit vinegars. My early apple windfalls were just chopped up and fermented into a delicious cider vinegar. I thought her strawberry tops idea especially good, so here’s the video!

The same site showed how to revive vegetables and I had great success with my lettuce. Simply by placing the bottom part of a little gem in water (leave about an inch or so) it will develop roots and can be replanted. This applies to an astonishing number of vegetables. It’s a fun exercise with kids if nothing else. Here’s mine.

Little gems – but not as we know them! Image: Karen Costello-McFeat

Grow your own

The most economical way to cut food costs is to grow your own. A packet of seeds seldom cost more that £3 and they are often given away with newspapers and magazines. My husband is hoping to economise even on this by drying the last beans we grew to replant. The cost of it is really your time, and it is time consuming; however, it is a great source of exercise and you save on gym fees!

I appreciate that not everyone has access to a vegetable plot or the ability to garden it, (my role is more supervisory than anything), but we can all enjoy what I call micro gardening. Seeds and sprouts can be grown in an old ice-cream carton; potted herbs from the supermarket can last for months if watered carefully and enough of the plant left to thrive. (A friend managed to divide her Greek basil into three lovely plants – one of which I sacrificed for pesto). Salad, one of the most wasted of foods, can easily be grown in small containers or in a grow-bag on the porch. Just pick the leaves you need and let it regrow. This can also be done through much of winter by choosing hardier varieties or leaving them under glass or even a giant plastic storage box!

The head gardener – aka my husband Image: Karen Costello-McFeat

Food for free

When I was rather more fit, I took some courses on wild foods. They were probably the most fun classes I have ever taken and I urge you, if you are interested, to do the same. The amount of foods available to us on our doorsteps is rather mind-boggling, but a word of caution here. Foraging for lesser known foods should only be attempted with an excellent food guide and ideally an experienced forager. Some rather innocuous looking plants can be deadly.

That said, even the most urban of us can recognise a blackberry and no autumn is complete without a bramble expedition. Where I live, damsons, sloes, elder flowers and berries, hawthorn berries, and rose hips are abundant. I’ve picked and frozen my sloes ready to make sloe gin and plan on harvesting a crop of rose hips for cordial. I’ve dried elder flowers for tea, but sadly missed the berries – though my friends all impressed me with their cordials and jams.

Books such as Food For Free is a classic and readily available. When on a country walk, pack a small plastic bag in your pocket. You may well return home with a feast!

Preserving

Our grannies certainly knew how to use food wisely. They would buy in season when prices were low or pick from the garden and preserve. In an age of microwave dinners, I fear that some of these skills will be lost and hope to encourage everyone to restore them.

Preserving can take a number of forms, with some considerably easier than others. Freezing is by far the simplest, so if you find you have too much of something fresh, put the extra in the freezer for another time.

Though some vegetables require blanching (briefly boiling then plunging in cold water), many do not. I didn’t do this with my beans and they were perfect. I even found a way to freeze summer squash!

I routinely dry herbs and that requires binding the stems and hanging them upside down in a paper bag. When they are completely dry, remove from stems and store in a jar. Some herbs, such as parsley can be successfully dried in the oven on a cooling rack. Either way, you will have much fresher and more delicious herbs than you would ever get in the supermarket. Drying fruits as fruit leathers is both tasty and an effective way to store perishable fruits.

Pickling is a little more complicated (but not much). I was able to pickle my rainbow beetroots and plan to be much more adventurous next year! Making my own vinegars for salad dressings gave me hours of entertainment and something unique to eat.

I confess that canning is beyond me, but I decided to make jams again. Sugar is so ridiculously inexpensive that a lovely jar of homemade jam is unlikely to cost more than 50p. Using my windfall apples and frozen fruits, I made endless batches of jam to last us the year.

Jam for tea! Image: Karen Costello-McFeat

Food gifts

All these make lovely gifts. If money is short, this is the perfect way to show your love by what you have made rather than what you have spent. Taking a little time to add personalised labels adds another unique and thoughtful touch.

Care with imaginative packaging can make the humblest of gifts something special. Since so few of us actually need anything, I urge you to give a scrumptious consumable instead.

With the abundance of food so readily available to us in the West, it is easy to forget how precious access to food really is. (When you’ve tried foraging for it and grinding acorns, you soon have greater appreciation for the supermarket.) By enjoying our food, sharing it and avoiding waste, we are honouring those who have given their time and energy to produce it. So let us give thanks for all the food we enjoy and bon appetit!