That lovely veggie garden feeds us too...

Now we have lots of beds on the go and most of them are either having produced, are producing or about to produce vegetables, we had the first meal yesterday with the meat and vegetables all provided by us. In my mind there is nothing that compares to home raised meat and home grown vegetables. Not only are the tastes and flavours so much better than anything you can buy from a supermarket. I'm a firm believer that you should know where your food comes from, it's not enough to just say 'I'd rather not know', that worries me a quite a bit. In the UK we rarely if ever bought meat from a supermarket, we bought meat from our local butcher, until ridiculous EU rules made it impossible for him to continue and he closed down. This to me is tragic, not only has someone lost their livelihood but a community lost, I feel, one of the best butchers in the town. We ended up using another family butcher on the other side of town(these too are great butchers, I hope they are still there) luckily it was on the route to Joes place of work, not that that mattered really I think we would have travelled to him regardless.
We had an allotment too in the UK and we grew most of our own vegetables, again I hated buying from the supermarkets, I much preferred to buy from the indoor market in town, but that began to be quite a mission getting parked and in the end we gave up on that. Luton needs a farmers market, or at least somewhere you can buy fresh fruit and vegetables. The predominantly Asian(Indian) area of Luton probably the had the best range of vegetables I've seen in Luton, but again parking is such an issue in that area. I think it's important to support your local growers and businesses, if you can't produce your own food, then at least try and buy locally produced goods, if not local then within a 100m/km radius. Then if that fails buy at least from your own country. There are and always will be things that are imported it's they way things are, exporting goods to other countries is important for any economy. I'm trying to make a conscious effort to think more about the imported items I buy, I avoid foodstuffs from China like the plague. We need to be aiming towards Fair Trade items, it's only right that workers in any country get fair pay for a days work, and that's what Fair Trade aims to do. So support it when you can and check the labels for country of origin, checking labels also helps you realise just what is being added to the food you are going to eat and most importantly what you're going to feed your children! There has to be some reason for the increase in illnesses and allergies in children, I'm pretty certain its something in the way that food is produced...but that's a whole new post!!

Time to get back on track and back to yesterdays Sunday lunch, a beef roast with home grown vegetables, it consisted of:

Home grown Welsh Black topside roast beef
Freshly dug new potatoes
Cabbage
Broccoli
Broad beans
Carrots



It was served with home made Yorkshire puds, ingredients such as flour and milk produced in New Zealand, and eggs from my own chickens.

The horseradish sauce was made in New Zealand too, the only item used that was not produced in New Zealand was the Bisto gravy! That was produced in Australia! It's one of those things from the UK that we make a concession for, we could make our own gravy of course, but you can't beat Bisto gravy made in the juices from the roasting pan, any other gravy just doesn't cut the mustard! Or gravy in this case...unlike Joes mums gravy where you really can cut it...with a knife! One slice or two!