Reading Time: 2 minutesGrass-fed or pastured meat and food from farm shops is expensive. Is that right? It may be slightly more expensive (for good reason) but if you want thrifty, nourishing food, take advice from cookbooks of your grandmother’s and great grandmother’s era. You may not have your own, so I mean metaphorically speaking, as traditional nose […]
Food and Farming
On Drover’s Roads, Prehistoric Settlement and Ancient Landscapes
Reading Time: 2 minutesWe recently excavated a rare kind of Iron Age settlement in Warwickshire. From out the ground came evidence that pointed us to our age-old habit of walking with animals. Our site sat in an ancient landscape, most likely riddled with drover’s roads and ancient byways, connecting places of a similar type. Herders traded livestock north […]
How Diverse Grains and Pulses Save Soils, Save Wildlife and Help Us With Food Security
Reading Time: 2 minutesWheat, rye, barley, oats, peas and beans. These grains and pulses have been with us for thousand of years. Yet, we’ve become very wheat-centric in recent years and might not appreciate why diverse grains and pulses have always been a strategy for food security in the past. So they can be now. Local crops for […]
Charcuterie in the Pantry: The Meat Cure
Reading Time: 5 minutesCharcuterie in the pantry or larder. That’s what charcuterie has always been made for. For thousands of years we’ve been dry-curing and smoking meat (before we could import food from all around the world) because we needed to keep going in lean times. And lean times they were, as we had to produce from the […]
Store Cheese in the Pantry – Ditch the Fridge
Reading Time: 7 minutesCheese: take the milk, skim off the curds (solids) from the whey (liquids), press, ferment and age. Hey presto, you have a solid form of milk. We’ve long used this to extend its life and get us through lean times. A tradition thousands of years old. Store cheese in the pantry, and it’ll taste and […]
Bury Your Root Vegetables: Overwinter Storage In Sand and Compost Pots
Reading Time: 5 minutesI bury my root vegetables in sand and compost. No longer do they wilt and wrinkle in a basket in the cupboard, or in the fridge, if I can’t use them quick enough. Would you bury your root vegetables? You may know that you can keep root vegetables in sand or peat (or compost) over […]
