Author Archives: eating-local

Bev: going vintage!

Let’s support the trend for vintage clothes and other stuff!
What with seeing the wonderful  film “The Economics of Happiness” recently and joining this blog, not to mention watching “The Story of Stuff” as preparation for our showing of it on March 14th, reducing my consumption footprint has been much on my mind! One way of reducing [...]

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Bev: I’ve found a source of local dried beans!

I met someone at a conference who farms in Suffolk and grows field beans, so I arranged to buy a whole load from him! (We were served field beans for the conference lunch and they were really nice spiced up – a slightly coarser texture than haricot or cannellini beans, and they are brown, but [...]

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Bev: delicious carrots spurned by supermarkets!

Look how well they clean up!
One thing that really amazes (and infuriates) me is the way supermarkets reject all fruit and veg that isn’t a standard size or shape and this results in enormous amounts of waste. When you buy from the farmer’s market, you get good veg as it comes out of the soil [...]

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Bev: ‘Eating Local’ in Sunday Telegraph

It was exciting to have an article in the Sunday Telegraph yesterday about our Eating Local project! There is a picture of Helen and me in my kitchen with lots of veg from the Sunday market. You can also read the article by Sarah Lonsdale here.

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Bev: spicy lentil soup with baked potato

It sounds a bit odd to have lentil soup with baked potato, but it was a fairly thick soup, so I suppose it was a bit like Indian dhal. Anyway, it tasted delicious that way. Here’s the recipe for the soup (sorry I’m no good at measurements – they really don’t matter, as you can [...]

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Bev: getting started

I did a big vegetable shop at the Sunday Farmer’s Market – I hope the veg will last me all week. It had better, as my share of it came to around £7, which is one third of my weekly allowance! Simon’s veg is really lovely and fresh and I stocked up with potatoes, carrots [...]

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Ann and Ian : final reflections

It has been an interesting and worthwhile experience to attempt to eat as much as possible locally sourced food. It became easier once we knew where to go for different items, but it is a shame that eating local does not necessarily mean shopping local. We had lots of interesting conversations with local shops, but [...]

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Penny: Local bread

We managed to source all the ingredients for our bread locally. It’s very straight forward to make in a bread maker. First thing in the morning, there is nothing more scrumptious than being woken with the smell of a freshly baked loaf. We found we missed the snacks of life but a slice of toast [...]

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Ann and Ian: into our last week

When we started the eating local project, we worried that our meals would be repetitive and uninteresting – lots of root vegetables and cabbage. How wrong we were! Once we found out where to source local produce, especially vegetables, we have found a great variety of food available, and with a bit of creativity, we [...]

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Bev: Eating local in the news!

I was really pleased that the piece I wrote explaining why eating local, seasonal food is a good thing has appeared in the Cambridge News. (It was posted on this blog earlier but it’s hard to find it now, so here’s the link if you want to read it.)

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Bev: simple joys and pigeon stir-fry!

One of my weekly joys is shopping at the Sunday market – the picture shows a very bundled up me on the right buying veg from Mayflower Organics (Simon Steel in Littleport). Another great joy is people’s kindness – as soon as people hear about the project, they give me things: a bag [...]

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Helen: the bounty

I was passing through Barton this afternoon and decided to stop by Burwash Manor, a group of converted farm buildings housing a range of independent shops, including a number of food outlets.
I headed for The Larder, a welcoming farm shop. Quick to attract the shop assistant’s attention, i tentatively enquired, “Do you stock any local produce that comes [...]

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Helen: resisting supermarket seduction!

One of the first thing to get your head around if you are to “eat local” is that supermarkets are pretty much off limits.Little did I know when I cycled to the supermarket to buy my first ‘local’ shop at the start of the challenge how few products were grown within the 30-mile radius of [...]

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Bev: the joys of chilli!

Oh, the difference a bit of chilli makes! Lovely Liz Serocold brought me some beautiful dried red chillies she’d grown last year and I have been adding them to soups and stews. Who needs black pepper and stock cubes when we have chillies, fresh marjoram from the garden, bay leaves and lots of fresh garlic?! [...]

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Ann and Ian: pasta making

This week we decided to try something different, as we wanted a change from potatoes and rice, and we were missing our favourite pasta dishes. So Ian had a go at making pasta (local flour, rapeseed oil and local eggs). It wasn’t quite like shop-bought pasta, but tasted good, and went very well with a [...]

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