We Bought The Farm

A Little Quiet Time

Advance warning - light blogging ahead. I'm going to be away on business travel for a few weeks. I may get some time to write a few posts, but I doubt I'll have access to the site. If I do, I'll stick up some entries, but otherwise don't expect much news until mid-March.

Another Step Against Spam

After spending half an hour removing over 500 spam comments (2 per page) this morning, I've decided to close down the older comments on this site. I've found a plug-in that makes this simple, MTCloseComments.

I still welcome comment on older posts. There's an e-mail address on the left side of this page, and you can leave a comment on a newer post if you're so inclined. I just don't want to spend so much time policing the back-content of the site, and I find that most comments (although not the ones today) tend to target older posts.

I'm trialling this software, but after a site rebuild, it seems to work as advertised.

The Choir Listens

As the food-recall scare widens through Britain's schools and hospitals, the Guardian's Joanna Blythman takes aim at the supermarket culture that leads to the astonishing breadth of products on the now-expanded recall list:

This overlap is not accidental. It shows the dreary similarity of supermarket food and exposes how supermarkets all use the same manufacturers. While consumers give their allegiance to one supermarket chain, often in the mistaken belief that its representatives are sourcing products and devising recipes that are distinctive, the reality is that the products we buy are more likely to have emerged from one of a small number of factories where a handful of companies churn out essentially the same range of products to several chains, packaged differently to give the illusion of diversity.

My Oh My

Jorn is back!

Bandwagon

Yesterday's Guardian takes on homemade sausages. (Note: they got their casings from the same place I got mine).

I don't recall

I've just come back from a few days in Romania to yet another UK food nightmare.

Britain's largest food recall was under way last night after an illegal dye known to cause cancer was found to have contaminated millions of ready meals and cooking sauces.

More than 350 product lines, ranging from prawn salad to Pot Noodles, were being withdrawn by supermarkets and retailers after the Food Standards Agency (FSA) warned they were contaminated by Sudan I - a red colouring normally used in products such as shoe polish and petrol.

The very long list of recalled products is available (wry smile at the Tesco "Healthy Living" products), and it's amazing to see how this kind of a thing snowballs (the vector was Worcestershire sauce made with a contaminated batch of this chilli powder). I'm amazed at the large number of "own-brand" products made with the same ingredient.

I didn't think we'd have any worry here, but I can report we have none of these products in our home. We're just back from an expensive but productive trip to the Farmers Market, feeling better for what's not in our food. Another solid argument against buying prepared foods. Schadenfreude, anyone?

Sausage

Bismarck's adage about laws and sausages is quoted often enough in the political press to make it cliché. The presumption is that we like the end result, but we'd probably prefer not to know what goes on beforehand.

Bismarck might have been right. Here's Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall on the subject:

Everyone loves sausages, and you can buy them just about everywhere that has a chill cabinet - including corner shops and garages. They run the whole gamut of meat quality, from sublime to unmentionable. The very worst of them - which is, of course, most of them - are made from mechanically recovered pork slurry, blasted off the carcasses of factory-farmed pigs with high-pressure hoses, then hoovered up off the abattoir floor. After being sieved and ground to an even paste, stablised with the addition of chemical preservatives, this is mixed with cheap cereal binders (as much as 50 per cent of the final sausage), artificial flavourings and a few more preservatives to boot. It's finally squeezed into artificial casings that are crimped into sausages at the rate of several thousand per hour. Refrigerated, these have a shelf life of over a month.

But then, he might not. Again, Hugh on the rest:

On the other hand, the very best sausages are made by conscientious butchers, who use lean shoulder and fat belly, along with fresh pork trimmings from their own cutting room, a little (10-15 per cent) rusk made from dried bread, and their secret blend of herbs and spices. They won't keep for more than a week, but with a loyal clientele to support them, they won't need to.

I'm not a butcher, but I am after that quality, so, this weekend, with the casings I mentioned last week, we got around to making our first batch of homemade sausages.

Now, I've made sausage before, but not for nearly a decade and never in England. My last batch I made with my dad in the US, with a bunch of venison graciously provided by a friend with a lucky shot. Somehow, though, I've never found the UK as sausage-friendly. You can buy it in abundance, but you don't have a culture that supports making it. Maybe the point is that it's cheap and abundant and it's hard to beat a good butcher's house special. Maybe the EU straitjacket has put the fear of God into the good householders. Maybe Bismarck was right...

With 40 yards of casings in hand, we wasted no time in putting together our first batch.

Child labour, hard at work in her Sunday finest

We started off aiming for a fairly traditional English pork sausage. I bought in a kilo of pork belly and about 1.5 kg of shoulder. We aimed for two varieties, pork and leek, and pork, garlic and chili. For rusk, I put in about 14 oz of bread crusts, the majority left over from our recent homemade loaves.

A peeled sliced leek went into the pork and leek, two chilis and six cloves of garlic went into the spicy. Sage, salt, pepper, sugar and water went into both.

The results were good.

Leek on the left, spicy on the right

5 lb, 12 oz of sausage in total. We reckon three family meals. The meat cost £7.60 gross (there was some skin and bone throwaway and the net meat yield was 4lb 7oz). The other ingredients were minimal (although the casings aren't necessarily cheap). Depending on how you cost the bread the total ingredients would be less than £10, so well below £2 / lb.

That stacks up pretty fairly. The Sausagelinks site says this:

Typically a good sausage will cost around £3 per pound (which is £6.75 per kilo). In comparison cheap supermarket sausages cost less than £2 per kilo. Top quality organic or rare breed sausages are around £4 - £5 per pound (which is £8.80 - £11.00 per kilo).

These were decent cuts of meat, but not organic nor rare breed, so there is some home economy involved, although Round One was pretty labour-intensive.

I will say this - a three-year-old can be very helpful in the kitchen. One of my projects is to raise our kids with a high level of involvement in preparing the foods they eat. Cat is a crack potato-masher, pasta and pizza maker, and she's no slouch in the sausage-making department either.

And if the proof of the pudding is in the eating, well, mmmmmmmmm! These were great. Not perfect, but delish. We had a good feed on both types this evening. The leek sausages, I find, were more bound - I think the leek fibre replaced the need for some of the rusk. The spicy were better. I would not have minced them so finely (room to experiment, but I think two passes on the coarse mincing blade rather than one coarse, one fine), and they could have had a bit more fat to them (more belly, less shoulder).

You can't taste sausage in the making (because of the risk of trichinosis), so it helps to make notes on the recipes and improve them as you go. These weren't the butcher's secret recipe, but I've got lots of ideas on how to improve them from here. I will report back.

It's Almost Ready

I tried this last night. Needs a little more time to carbonate up, but it's pretty good. Not, I would say, as good as the Bleak Midwinter, but certainly drinkable.

Casing the Joint

Today's post brought my first order of sausage casings from the Natural Sausage Casing Company, a company so slow they don't have a website.

I've been itching to make sausages for a while now. I used to do this when I lived in the US, but finding casings in the UK is a little more challenging than in the US, where I used to buy them at the supermarket (ah, Chicago, hog butcher to the world).

I ordered up a bunch of pig and sheep casings (yes, intestines). I can't say they're without odour. A slightly whiffy box of guts has arrived on my desk, along with a list of the few additional products they sell (different beef casings, for making salamis and haggis and the bigger diameter stuff, a few books and some equipment).

I guess this is as good a place as any to plug a new site I've come across since I started my search for Italian sausage (since satisfied, BTW). I give you Sausagelinks.co.uk. Looks pretty useful. I found the Italian sausage at the deli across the road (they keep it in the back). It wasn't perfect, but it was fennel-y and worked okay on our pizzas.

Ikea Chaos

I can't think of one positive thing to say about the crush chaos at London's new Ikea.

Okay, no one died.

I'm just left in a state of disbelief. 4000 people were at Ikea at midnight. They left their cars abandoned on the road so they wouldn't miss out on the bargains. Five people had to be hospitalised and more than 20 suffered from heat exhaustion in the crush. It reads like something out of DeLillo.

Feasting and Fasting

Today is my 38th birthday. It's also Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent, a season of fasting, abstinence and almsgiving.

Taking that into account, and considering that this is a season of celebration for our family, my wife and I decided to treat ourselves to a night out at the River Cafe last night. Superb.

Knowing we had to get the kids to bed, we took the last seating at 9PM (they close at 11PM due to licensing restrictions). It was busy but not overflowing. I had a starter of dressed buffalo mozzarella with mushroom shoots and leaf and a main of grilled veal with steamed spinach - the biggest piece of veal I've ever seen (or eaten). Lesley had a fish double-header. We got through two bottles of wine and shared a cheese platter for dessert.

It wasn't cheap - definitely a luxury in these straitened times. As we were there on the late side and curious about the place, they offered us a tour of the kitchen. One of the waitresses assumed I was a food journalist, an impression I did nothing to dispel. Would it be too much of a stretch to suppose that I am a web-based amateur food critic?

It was a late evening and I woke this morning a bit the worse for wear, not physically, but mentally ready for the Lenten season ahead.

Mass this evening was lovely. I went early for the hour of the exposition of the blessed sacrament. The first time in a long time I've just taken an hour off to contemplate and pray. The mass was concelebrated by our pastor and one of the other parish priests. Choir and organ blazing. Plainsong chants. No kids. A change from the usual, and absolutely fitted to the sober celebration of the season ahead. The service ended with a chanted Psalm 50 (in Latin). The priests remained at the altar in silence for the entire recessional hymn, then walked out. You could have heard a pin drop in the full church.

I'm not planning to fast as hard as I did last year, nor to aim for daily mass attendance. I've got some serious business travel ahead that's not very conducive to choosing the hour, place and type of meals on offer. During Lent I'm going to be working on detachment, trying to empty my mind of mundane preoccupation and leave myself in God's hands more.

Five Years Ago

On a glorious February afternoon somewhere north of the 57th parallel, Lesley Jane did me the grand honour of becoming my bride.

This morning we've been reliving the day with the kids, showing them the photos and Uncle Frank's video. It's bringing back wonderful memories - even with the bagpipe soundtrack.

We've covered a lot of ground over the past five years. Two kids, two years in Brazil. It's impossible to imagine it has been five years, but so it has. I love her more today than I did then. Here's to many, many more!

January Progress Report

I'm a big fan of the Path to Freedom website (although I find their home page a bit busy). I particularly like the way they have been measuring their progress along the path. They publish some pretty detailed data about their efforts on their Facts and Stats page.

This past month, we've started monitoring our own progress. Benchmarking really, although benchmarking while making a conscious effort to move forward, so progressive benchmarking?

I started by keeping a detailed account of our spending habits on groceries this month. I wasn't exclusive - whether we bought nappies or newspapers, washing-up liquid or organic meat, I put it on the list if, to me, it was "grocery shopping."

We found the results somewhat shocking - particularly how much we are spending. But I've decided not to publish that number, although I'll benchmark it and calculate percentages from it in future.

Here are some data I will share. First, I thought we had done a pretty diligent job of shopping at farm markets, through the box scheme, with local shops or direct with producers (a friend has a rare-breed pig farm; we buy her pork), but look at how it breaks down versus the supermarkets:

Even with diligent effort, we didn't even manage 30% spending in these more responsible ways.

I made a breakdown of overall supermarket spending, and found that by far we are shopping most with "supermarket A" - the big one (I don't feel I should really be doing their market research for them).

To me, this really reflects the value of individual transactions. Stock-up trips to Supermarket A account for nearly a third of our overall spending.

I broke down supermarket spending further into "ethical" and regular shops. In my book, Waitrose and The Co-op are both more ethical businesses than the other UK supermarkets. Both have shared ownership schemes (the Co-op is owned by its members, and Waitrose is part of the John Lewis Partnership, which is beneficially owned on behalf of its employees). Thus I consider spending money in either store to be a better way to maintain social capital, although I have issues with shopping at both. Nonetheless, this is one relatively positive benchmarked metric.

To be honest, I didn't think we would enjoy keeping track of all of our spending over the month. I thought we would do it as a one-off, just to see how we were doing. But we both found the results so interesting that we've decided to keep it going, and next month we're going to add a tracker for "% organic" and one for "% alcohol".

I'll report back on the spending index, too. We had numerous overnight guests at home last month, so I've done a "man-day" count and divided the total into a per-man-day value as well (kids count the same as adults for now). That's another measure I'll index and report.

Our goals would have to be to keep making progress toward more socially responsible modes of spending - local, direct-from-producer, organic. From a frugal point of view, we'll also be looking to get the per capita spend down. We'll win here if we start producing from our own garden (still a muddy mess this winter) and start adding more value at home (home-brew, bread making). I did make a big dent in outlay this month, as I packed lunches using homemade bread on all but two days, reducing my usual lunch spend of £50 per month down to just £5. Sure, some of that goes through the food budget, but it was less in any event than I usually spend, and I had more control over the contents.

Of course there are trade-offs to be dealt with. We've moved our son off of baby formula, which will save us money, but organic milk will cost us more than regular, so we may not have net benefits.

One plus, I managed to lose 5 pounds last month. Not quite my target, but not bad by any measure.