The age of thrift!

Make do and mend! Use your leftovers!
Wisdom indeed from a bygone age - words that we often ignore in our modern/post modern world! But in a climate of recession and environmental disaster they are words we need to take on board again.
In the UK we waste about 1/3rd of the food we buy - that is a shameful statistic but it gets worse - it rises to 80% over the Christmas period! 80%! 80%! That is disgusting! How can we have the brass neck to waste so much food when many around the world go hungry? http://www.lovefoodhatewaste.com/
Anyway (puts soap box aside!) as mentioned in my Pressure Cooker post I made the annual turkey stock yesterday - another remnant of a bygone age it would seem. It is amazing how many folk look at you like you have 2 heads when you say you make your own stock. But what a waste of a carcass if you don't and once you taste home made stock shop bought stuff is never the same. So we made 7 pots of stock (about 500ml each which will need diluting before use as is very strong stuff!) and we eked out 8 meals from the meat (most are now frozen) so all in all this makes an organic free range turkey go a long long way and actually hugely economical.
We have made the conscious decision to only eat organic meat and the majority of this comes from a farm we support in the Scottish Borders (http://www.whitmuirorganics.co.uk/) and we feel that it is respectful to get the most out of each animal/cut of meat. It is amazing when you hear of people who only use the breast meat from a chicken and then throw the rest of the carcass in the bin! No wonder meat is too expensive then!!

The pressure is on!!

Went and bought a pressure cooker yesterday!! I had been planning this for a while and had been doing online research but the crunch came when it was time to make the annual stock from the turkey carcass. Suddenly the thought of boiling away for 4 hours seemed a silly idea when it would take a fraction of the time in a pressure cooker. Add to that the fact that our house does not like condensation at all (a wall was blistering on Christmas day despite having windows open and the dehumidifier on!) So an emergency trip to Argos later and one new pressure cooker was mine. A quick read of the instructions and hey presto the carcass was in and 1 hour later perfect stock resulted! The wife was/is a bit dubious re the new cooker - scared it will explode but having seen the stock and now boiled spuds in it today is coming around to it!
So why bother? For me it is all about reducing further our fossil fuel reliance - using the Pressure cooker reduces cooking times by about 2/3 so that is an amazing reduction in gas usage also and so less CO2 production. That can only be a good thing! And in an age of increasing fuel bills hopefully the savings will pay back the outlay on the pressure cooker pretty soon(ish!)
It's funny -having read lots over the last few years about reducing your carbon footprint I have no recollection of anyone recommending using a pressure cooker - but I think they are the way forwards. Many folks see them as a thing granny used to use - but that's not a good reason for not using them - we so often disparage traditional things but our ancestors knew a thing or two we need to get to grips with!! And modern pressure cookers are much safer than the ones granny used!! So get out and get one!!

Too little too late?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/dec/09/poznan-copenhagen-global-warming-targets-climate-change

It seems that the science on climate change is moving fast and last years reports are already out of date - it may be that we are committed to run away climate change as we have debated and delayed too long!
I am sad - sad that my generation didn't do enough and yet we have a government who jump fast to save the banking sector and now it would seem the motor vehicle sector too but dillydallyed over climate change until it was too late. I am sad that my kids will grow up into a hugely different world and life will be harder, possibly much harder than when I grew up.
But, depressed and pessimistic as I feel I will keep on going in making my lifestyle as green as I can and in campaigning and educating - why? In 30 years time if and when my kids ask me if I did anything to help I want to say yes, I did my part, I tried!

Sad day for Santa

My 5 year old son started school in August and he is loving it and really thriving on it. We have seen many positives from his first term but one downside of having new friends (some of whom are in P7 - the joys of a small village primary) is that O announced last week that he didn't believe in Santa anymore. I was like 'hang on you've hardly begun believing in him don't stop yet!' I thought we would get to at least 7 before the man in the red suit died a death but it seems not!
Children grow up so fast these days - I see this daily with all the teenagers at school - so desperate to enter an adult world and yet so not ready! I just hoped that my kids would spend a little longer in the land of make believe and fairy tale :(

Spend nothing!

Meant to add - check this out http://www.buynothingday.co.uk/ Saturday 29th November!

Spending our way out?

I have to say I am unconvinced about the current theory of spending our way out of the 'economic downturn' (is it a recession yet?)
The Chancellor is apparently planning to cut VAT to 15% so we all have oodles more money to spend! The Government is to increase borrowing to increase public spending!
I am not convinced!
In my (humble) opinion consumerism and materialism are the pathways we have followed that have got us into this mess. We have been encouraged to spend what we don't have through easy credit and now we are to spend to solve this?
As a passionate environmentalist this does not sit easy with me - encouraging us to consume more surely is folly in face of the environmental crisis we face. Do we really need to hit the high street in order to save ourselves from the economic crisis? I always worry when the environment loses out to the economy.
We desperately need to consume less in order that we have any hope of averting environmental disaster - Gandhi said that the world has enough for everyone's need but not for everyone's greed. With the clock ticking as we head towards unavoidable and possible runaway Climate Change we should be looking at ways of tightening our belts, making do and mending not increasing our consumption of this planet's limited resources.

Would you eat it?

Oh my gods!! Just read this at BBC news - apparently the EU are planning to repeal the laws governing uniformity of fruit and veg (you know the one that means your cucumber must be straight etc!) and people are not happy!! The question is would we eat wonky carrots or forked carrots or blemished apples? http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7724347.stm
Of course I would!! Bloody hell in this day and age when money is getting tighter and people around the world have NOTHING to eat can we in the developed world be so arrogant as to reject perfectly good food just because it doesn't look perfect?
It is yet another symptom of how disconnected we are from our food and its production - of course a certain percentage of food will be blemished and less than 100% visually perfect but that is a fact of life surely!! (Should we ban people who are less than perfect? Oh that's right we just bombard society with images of perfection and cause mass neurosis about our image.... another story!)
Carrots get forked roots, carrots are dirty (they grow in soil for crying out loud!) GET OVER IT ALREADY!

Foraging - the hunter gatherer!

Today I got some free meat and some free firewood (a friend's husband shot some pheasants which were donated to me!! and a place near my work gives away timber offcuts that they would otherwise have to pay for disposal of, so a win win situation!)
Got me thinking again about out disconnection as a society from our food production and from Nature in general. We are so used to our vacuum packed meat that bears no resemblance to the animal from which it came, to standardised apples (we couldn't eat a misshapen one now could we?) and have become trapped in the machinations of the supermarkets and multi nationals. I feel this disconnection from the natural world lies at the root of many (all?) of our problems - we don't work with nature and her cycles but rather subjugate and dominate in an attempt to better what she can do! The results - pollution, climate change, unsustainable growth..........
A large part of my spiritual path is seeking reconnection - reconnection with the land, with my ancetsors, with deity. I strongly believe that we as a people need to reconnect and once again realise we are from the land and without it we die! We need to again reconnect wth the rhythms of the Earth our home and our sustainer.
Part of thsi reconnection is regaining our traditional skills of our forebears - the men and women who tilled this land and stewarded the fruits of the Earth - skills we are losing and may never recover if we are not careful. This was brought home to me by the death of my Grandfather 2 weeks ago today - a real countryman who knew the land beneath his feet, her times and seasons and worked with them. He is now dead and with him dies a tribal wisdom that we risk losing out on if we don't honour our ancestors and learn from them. One of my regrest at his passing is that I didn't ask him about the 'old times' and I learnt more about him from his Funeral tribute than I did during his life!
I for one want to return to a more sustainable and honouring way of life, one that is connected with Mother Earth and her times and seasons, one that makes a much smaller impact on this Planet.
Enough rambling for now - I will look more at this another time.

The chickens have landed

So, finally, after many years of dreaming the hens are here!
I have always wanted hens for eggs and possibly meat and one of my conditions of moving house (in April) was that I could get my chooks! So I got the house and run in the summer and last weekend got the hens. They are 3 twelve week old pullets - 8 weeks away from laying but that gives them time to settle in and get used to the kids peering in at them!
So the smallholding dream is now one step closer......