I’ve now started growing a lot more at home, and also the blog was starting to be more than just tips on growing good fruit and veg, so I thought it was time for a change!

You can now find me at my new blog at http://www.sowgrowcookeat.co.uk and I’m now on Twitter as @sowgrowcookeat. Hope you continue to follow me over there!

In recent years Britain has lost over half the honey bees kept in managed hives and wild honey bees are nearly extinct. Solitary bees are declining in more than half the areas they’ve been studied and some species of bumblebee have been lost altogether.

It would cost the UK £1.8 billion every year to hand-pollinate crops without bees,– 20% more than previously thought – according to new research launched today by Friends of the Earth as it unveils a new campaign to save the bee.

The new figure –which would inevitably be passed on to consumers in rising food costs – comes from research conducted by leading bee experts at the University of Reading on behalf of the environment charity as it launches “The Bee Cause” to call for action on bees before it’s too late.

Bees and other pollinating insects are responsible for most of our favourite fruit and vegetables. One reason for their decline is a shortage of natural habitats, so Friends of the Earth has outlined simple steps people can take in their gardens to help provide it:

•

• Sow bee-friendly seeds and plant bee-friendly flowers in your garden such as mixed wildflowers packets, single-flowering roses, open and flat-headed flowers like verbena and yarrow and tubular-shaped flowers such as foxgloves.
• Plant herbs in a window-box to provide food for bees and help them thrive.”
• Create a place to nest for solitary bees by piling together hollow stems and creating a ‘bee hotel’.
• Try to provide a small amount of rainwater in a shallow birdbath or tray which honeybees need to keep their hive at the right temperature.

Friends of the Earth is calling on David Cameron to commit to a bee action plan to save bees and save the country billions of pounds in the future. To support this action and find out what else you can do to help bees, join The Bee Cause at www.foe.co.uk/bees.

The campaign is supported by celebrity gardener Sarah Raven. Sarah said, ““Now is the perfect time to get out in the garden and it’s not hard to make a few changes to make life a bit more comfortable for bees.

“Without bees, we’d all be in serious trouble and our diet would be, without so much veg and fruit, incredibly dull. I’ve backed The Bee Cause and would encourage others to do the same.”

Paul De Zylva, Nature Campaigner at Friends of the Earth said, ““Imagine a world without strawberries, apples or even coffee – bees are about much more than honey and our food supplies will be in trouble if they bite the dust.”

“Unless we halt the decline in British bees our farmers will have to rely on hand-pollination, sending food prices rocketing.

“But, as you can see, there are a few simple things we can all do to provide food for bees and help them thrive!

I’m always partial to the odd biscuit or twelve with my cuppa, so I was more than happy when I was given the opportunity to test run the Bakers Pantry Luxury Biscuit Club.

The idea is that every month they’ll send you a selection of luxury, oven-fresh Biscuits from Britain’s very finest traditional bakers and bakeries.

Each month they recommend at least 7 different biscuits to their biscuit-loving subscribers… and as a member of the Luxury Biscuit Club they’ll send you a packet of every single biscuit they recommend – it’s as simple as that!

But these aren’t any old biscuits – they are some of the finest biscuits baked anywhere in the world, and you won’t find them on the high street or in the supermarket – they are exclusive to them and a handful of farm shops and garden centres! Your first selection will arrive on the date you specify, with subsequent selections being delivered at 1 month intervals.

This is the selection of biscuits I was sent to try … well, most of them, as the Clotted Cream Shortbread was swiped and sampled straight away before this picture was taken! Keep reading to the end for details of a competition where the prize is a month’s free membership of the Luxury Biscuit Club!

These are my reviews of the biscuits …
Cornish Clotted Cream Shortbread Lovingly made to a traditional recipe using dollops of real Cornish clotted cream and pure Cornish butter from the Trewithen Dairy, a local family run farm Dairy only a few miles down the road from Furniss HQ in Lostwithiel. These were very moreish, but didn’t have the crumbly texture I normally expect from shortbread.




All Butter Oaties These delicious Oaties are baked to the original Oatie recipe, but “Franks Luxury Biscuits” have replaced the original fat content with 100% butter to produce an enhanced flavour that simply has to be tasted.




Chocolate Chip Cherry Cookies Farrah’s of Harrogate have done it again, this time adding delicious chunks of Cherry to their traditional Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe to produce a biscuit with real flavour.






Fruit Shortbread This traditional shortbread biscuit, which has a buttery flavour and short texture, simply melts in your mouth. The contrast between the buttery sweetness of the biscuit and the sharp fruity flavour of the currants brings out the essence of both.




Banoffee Oaties A lip-smacking oat biscuit which combines the classic flavours of banana and rich creamy toffee pieces beautifully. This special biscuit was a favourite of the judges at the 2011 Great Taste Awards, awarding it with 2 Gold Stars.






Irvings Luxury Chocolate Chip Cookies Cookies, and loaded with chocolate chips! What more could you want in a cookie!?








Orange Crunch Biscuits Again, the clue is in the name – delicious!








So ….. now I’ve started your mouth watering, here’s the all important competition! Bakers Pantry are giving 15 lucky people the chance to win a month’s supply of luxury biscuits! It’s really easy… Simply enter your details into the sign-up boxes on this page and you’ll instantly be in with a chance to win one of 15 luxury biscuit selections.

3 lucky winners will be drawn every day this week (Feb 6th – Feb 10th) so make sure you get your name in the hat. But if you have a Twitter or Facebook account and you want to increase your chances of winning you can click on the link in the ‘Your Competition Entry’ email that they send you. – good luck!

My crusade for the new year is get everyone growing their own fruit and veg. I know that everyone is not lucky enough to have an allotment, a garden or even a patio. However, you can still grow your own food in even the smallest space, which is why I came up with the idea for my campaign – “Grow One Pot.” I want everyone to make a pledge to grow one thing this year and tell me what it is by leaving a comment below, and tweeting about it using the hashtag ‘#growonepot’

“Grow One Pot” came from the idea that you can using one pot or one container can produce a lot more fruit or veg than most people think.

Common things that people use are:
- A window box to grow herbs, or ‘cut and come again’ salads.

- A hanging basket to grow tumbling tomatoes

- A dustbin to grow your own potatoes

- Three canes to form a wigwam shape which can be used for all climbing plants such as peas, beans, etc to scramble up.

There are many wonderful reasons to garden partially or exclusively in containers. Growing crops in containers also gives you much more control over your plants. You can usually move them indoors if you are faced with an unexpected frost, or move them to another position if they do not appear happy where they are, perhaps getting too much sunlight? You can even grow some vegetables indoors if you have a suitable sunny or bright area where you can sit some pots. So it can be easy to have a fresh, year round supply of flowers, vegetables and herbs.

The great thing about container vegetable gardening is that, apart from buying a few essentials, like good quality compost, it can be done on a low budget and is extremely versatile. You can grow plants in virtually anything that holds some soil and has holes in the bottom for drainage. It’s only bounded by your imagination – a chance for some really creative recycling! I’ve used old bathtubs, 20-litre plastic containers with the tops cut off, baskets of various sizes lined with bin bags to hold the water in, milk cartons for seedlings, anything that comes to hand. I almost used some dumped toilet bowl …..only I didn’t like the colour as they were pink.

Using containers makes it possible to grow food in areas where it would otherwise be impossible, and by employing some simple and innovative methods covered in more detail in future blog posts, such as vertical gardening, raised bed gardening, and square foot gardening, you can extract some excellent, and money-saving crop yields from just a tiny amount of space.

I’ll also be resurrecting my monthly blog post of what to do in your garden each month, and include tips on what to grow in your ‘container garden’ that month.

So, start the new year by making a pledge to get your fingernails dirty and growing at least one crop this year. Don’t forget to tell me what it is by leaving a comment below, and by tweeting me (@wegrowourown) on Twitter, and using the hashtag #growonepot. I’ll retweet every one I see!

Happy gardening!

Bread is a fundamental part of our diet: 99% of UK households buy bread and 74% of us eat it at least once a day, whether it is a quick slice of toast before we rush out the door to work, or the essential part of that hangover curing bacon sandwich.

Unfortunately, the majority of households buy the tasteless pap created by the Chorleywood Process, that is sold by supermarkets up and down the land.

With that in mind, if you make one New Year’s Resolution this year, it should be to make your own bread.

The Chorleywood Bread Process, which was introduced in 1961, produces bread of phenomenal volume and lightness, with great labour efficiency and at low apparent cost. It isn’t promoted by name. You won’t see it mentioned on any labels. But you can’t miss it. From the clammy sides of your chilled wedge sandwich to the flabby roll astride every franchised burger, the stuff is there, with a soft, squishy texture that lasts for many days until the preservatives can hold back the mould no longer. If bread forms a ball that sticks to the roof of your mouth as you chew, or you can scrunch a slice of it into a white pappy little ball, this is down to the Chorleywood Bread Process – but don’t dwell on what it will shortly be doing to your guts.

Have a look on the ingredients list on the back of one of these loaves, and there is a list of ‘improvers’ and ‘additives’ as long as your arm.

I think sometimes people get scared of making their own bread, because they hear bakers using words like ‘sourdough’, ‘ferment’ and ‘sponge.’ In fact, it couldn’t be any simpler. With just flour, salt, water and yeast, you can have a fantastic tasting, additive free loaf of bread on your table within hours. Also, if you are that pushed for time, you can do a loaf of soda bread from start to finish in under an hour!

Once you have mastered the ‘basic’ loaf, if you look in books produced by great bakers such as Richard Bertinet, Dan Lepard and Andrew Whitley, you will see that with just a few small tweaks, and the addition of some other ingredients, these four ingredients can produce an infinite amount of yummy things!


If you want to take it one step further, join the “Real Bread Campaign” which is co-ordinated by the charity Sustain: the alliance for better food and farming. The Real Bread Campaign is a not-for-profit initiative that brings together bakers, independent millers, cereal growers, researchers, activists and anyone else who cares about the state of bread in Britain.

So make make your own bread at home. As I mentioned , you only need flour, water, yeast and salt. It is as easy as falling off a log, and I can guarantee that once you have tasted your own homebaked bread, you will never go back to eating what I consider to be the tasteless, mass produced pap that masquerades as bread in supermarket the length and breadth of this land.

I should really think up some better puns for the titles for my blogs as one of my New Year’s Resolutions …!

As you know, I’m always looking to show people how you can create great food with great local ingredients.

With that in mind, I have huge pleasure in introducing …

Andy from “Andy’s Kitchen.”

I’d chatted to Andy for a long time on Twitter, but we had never met, until we both went on a foraging course with Mark Lloyd, and we then got chatting, and decided to collaborate on certain projects.

To tell you more about Andy in his own words, “I am a very keen home cook, who now enjoys running one of the most popular UK Food Blogs, the blog which can be found at www.andyskitchen.co.uk includes recipes, reviews, competitions, foodie news and lots more. I also have an allotment so enjoy growing as much produce as possible, and last year I purchased a classic VW Campervan, so Im looking forward to creating many culinary camping recipes, and blogging about our camping trips.”

With Andy on board we can offer you some fantastic recipes, and great features, and we can offer you the producers some great recipe creations with your fantastic produce.

More to come soon ….!

Looking back at my 2011 New Year’s Resolutions post, I was pleased to see that I had accomplished some of my ‘resolutions’ for last year, although lack of time and job hunting made sure that I never had the time to get round to doing all of them.

This year, I’m going to take more of a relaxed approach to things, and if they happen, they happen. More ‘plans’ than ‘resolutions!’

One of my goals for this year is to do more writing. I’m about to see one of my articles in print for the first time in Great Food Magazine, which will hopefully become a regular column. I’m also still writing my cookbook, but have still to find that elusive publisher!

I’m also going to be doing some guest blogging, and I have some plans to expand and revamp my own blog. More details about that soon!

Also, now that we have a larger allotment, it will give me more space to expand my chilli empire, although the freezer and larder are groaning under the weight of last year’s harvest, both frozen and pickled. Even though our growing space has been tripled, I’m still going to have to scale back my current seed order for 2012, as otherwise I’ll run out of space in April, never mind by the summer!

You must have all been busy doing your Christmas shopping this month, as there was only one entrant that complied with all the rules!

So, for the final time this year, I am pleased to announce that the winner of this month’s competition is …

Vicky’s “Lottie Sushi”

In Vicky’s own words, “This may seem unlikely, but I believe these sushi work well, and achieve the same balance of flavours sought by the Japanese. I’ve substituted nearly EVERY ingredient!

The only essential ‘exotic ingredients’ are soy sauce and pickled sushi ginger. Everything else is from the allotment, or Torbay supermarkets! (They’re not big on ‘World’ ingredients round ‘ere, unfortunately.)

Firstly, the ‘nori’ substitute – Cavolo Nero (henceforth known as ‘cavolo nori!’).

Ingredients

Cavolo ‘nori’ (a couple of dozen leaves)
Dill pickled cucumber – a few slices
1 small pickled beetroot
1 small parsnip
1 small carrot
0.25 pint cider vinegar
1 tbsp sugar
salt
200 g pudding rice
2 eggs
soy sauce
sesame oil
sesame seeds
You will need a rolling mat. (You may be able to work with a clingfilm and a tea towel, to support the rice as you roll, but I haven’t tried it.)

Method

Cut the central veins from the cavolo leaves. Salt the strips quite heavily, to try to emulate a seaweed flavour, and steam until tender. They need to be very tender – no ‘al dente’ here! Set aside to drain and cool.

Cook the rice. The ‘absorption method’ is very good: weigh 200 g of pudding, (or risotto or sushi rice but NOT long grain) into a bowl, add salt, then – still on the scales – top up with just under 500 g of water. Cover with a plate and microwave for 3 minutes. Give it a good stir and allow it to stand while you get on with the rest.

Cut all the vegetables into 2mm x 2mm sticks. You need to cook the parsnip and carrot sticks. Simmer them gently in the cider vinegar and 1 tbsp sugar until tender.

Check the rice. Give it a further vigorous stir to bring out the starch and make it good and sticky, and micowave for a further 2 or 3 minutes to finish absorbing all the water. Allow to cool.

Make a thin omelette by beating the egg with a dash of soy sauce and frying in a little sesame oil. Allow to cool, blot the surplus fat from the omelette with kitchen roll and trim it down to a square.

Now, all ingredients prepared, you’re ready to roll! You’ve got enough rice here to make three different sorts of sushi – the ‘nori’ rolled one, one wrapped in an omelette and one rolled in sesame.

Arrange the nori on the rolling mat to make a square sheet. Pat a third of the rice onto the bottom third of the nori. It’s important to get the rice even, and I use a teaspoon dipped in water to trowel it into shape!

Arrange the vegetable sticks along the rice, just slightly below centre. Roll up, firmly squeezing the rice as you go. Wrap in cling film and chill for several hours.

Make the other two rolls the same way. The sesame coated one doesn’t have a supporting sheet of nori or omelette for the rice, so you may like to lay it on cling film (without rolling it into the body of the sushi!). I tried assembling it straight onto the naked mat and it worked very well.

The real treat of this recipe is that you can make it well in advance, then cut it into neat sections just prior to serving. It should last a couple of days in the fridge.

Serve the sushi with soy sauce, pickled ginger and wasabi, if you’ve got it and you like it. They also go well with a chilli dipping sauce.”

Fantastic idea Vicky! Send me your address through the contact form, or by email, and I’ll get your prize of a sausage making kit from the lovely people at ‘Design A Sausage’ in the post. I can’t promise you’ll have it for Christmas though!

Vicky runs her blog “High And Tight In Brixham,” and is well worth a read.

Keep your eyes peeled as there will be another Cultivate, Cook & Click competition every month in 2012!

After a break ladies and gentlemen I am pleased to announce the return of the Cultivate, Cook & Click Competition!

So, here is a reminder of the rules …

Each month around this time, I will pick four or five vegetables or fruit that are in season, and you then have to devise a dish that uses at least one of those ingredients.

There are no restrictions on the style of cooking, so it can be a recipe plucked from anywhere in the world, but it has to be one that you have cooked yourself!


Each entry has to include:

• A picture of the vegetables or fruit that you are using in the recipe. This has to be ones that you use in the recipe, and not some random picture from Google! Extra points will be awarded when I shortlist the entries if you have grown it yourself.
• A copy of the recipe
• A picture of the finished dish that you have cooked yourself

You can upload your entries by going to the contact form of my blog or by clicking on this link.

I’ll then shortlist the best five, and then publish those on my blog. I’ll then open it up to the public vote, who will choose the winner each month.

The prizes for this month’s winner include a sausage making kit from the lovely people at ‘Design A Sausage.’

I’ll also be throwing in some prizes for this month’s competition too. Well it is nearly Christmas, and what’s Christmas without presents?!

So, for December, the vegetables or fruit that you can choose from are:

• Celeriac
• Kale
• Endive
• Parsnips
• Cauliflowers

You have until 12 noon on 18th December to get your entries to me, and I’ll be publishing the five finalists that night, and giving details on how you can vote.

Voting will then close at 12 noon on 31st December, and the winner will be announced later that night!

This will now definitely be a monthly competition, so don’t get downhearted if your recipe doesn’t get shortlisted, as there will be many more chances to win. In the meantime though, get your thinking caps on, and get those entries in!

I received an email last week inviting me to a Morrisons M Kitchen pop up restaurant to celebrate and promote the new M Kitchen range.

As the website says, “Five of the UK’s leading chefs – Pierre Koffmann, Aldo Zilli, Nigel Haworth, Atul Kochhar and Bryn Williams – have each contributed a classic dish to the delicious menu at the M Kitchen.”

The M Kitchen is a new ready to eat range put together by Morrisons with help from these chefs. The range includes Nigel Haworth’s Lancashire Hotpot, Aldo Zilli’s Pizza Calabrese, Bryn Williams’ Shepherd’s Pie , Atul Kochhar’s Chicken Korma with rose petals, and Pierre Koffman’s Beef Bourguignon.

So, it was with a mixture of both interest and trepidation that I set off to the M Kitchen pop up in Birmingham, wondering how they could turn microwave ready meals into restaurant style food worthy of the surroundings at The Custard Factory.

After a glass of refreshing Morrisons own “The Best” Champagne Brut we were given ciabatta & olives while we studied the menu. For starters, I chose ‘Dumfries house’ beef carpaccio
with Ivy’s Vintage Reserve Cheddar, while Lisa chose Pulled pork with rice, beans and tortillas.

The pulled pork was definitely the winner out of these too dishes – very tasty. However, I was very disappointed by the carpaccio which was devoid of any taste whatsoever.

Moving onto mains, I chose Nigel Haworth’s Lancashire hot pot with pickled red cabbage, and Lisa chose Pierre Koffman’s Beef Bourguignon.

The creamy mash definitely complimented the beef bourgignon, and the hotpot was just at that gorgeous melt in the mouth consistency. However, there was a strange taste in the pickled red cabbage, as it seemed to be too heavy on the cinnamon.

For dessert there was too much choice, so we decided to have a little bit of everything! This included Baked cheesecake with seasonal fruits, Chocolate mousse with raspberries, Tarte Tatin using English apples and ice cream, and a selection of British cheeses including Cornish Blue & Quickes Cheddar.

The chocolate mousse had the surprise of popping candy in the middle, so that had to win, as it immediately made me feel like I was five again! I’ve always been a fan of Tarte Tatin, but this one was bordering on too sweet, but I suppose it is all down to personal taste.

Despite the little niggles that I mentioned above, I very much enjoyed my meal courtesy of Morrisons and was very impressed with what is essentially a selection of ready meals. Also a thank you to the staff who were excellent – attentive, informative but never annoying!

Although the event is free, all the remaining dates have now been booked up, but you can find more details about the M kitchen range here.