Waste Not Want Not - Introduction

Waste Not Want Not

a diary of recipes from my Welsh farmhouse

new recipes, old favourites and

what to do with leftovers!

tasty family meals using local, home grown, organic, free-range, happy, tree hugging, humanely killed, green manured, unsprayed, healthy delicious food for all the family and all the visitors with a sprinkling of intensively farmed, imported, over packaged cholesterol rich supermarket crap for contrasting flavours and small drops of guilty pleasure (and happier teenagers).

I have written this blog for myself, but I am sharing it with you too. I get ‘cookers block’ regularly and I wanted to be able to glance over previous dinners to gain inspiration. I have also written this to help myself remember the good meals, my memory is like a fine sieve – so this should help block up some leaky holes! And the other reason is to have all my favourite recipes in one place (instead of in a chaotic bundle, and an entire bookshelf full of books which contain one good recipe in each!). I have also written this in the hope that it will force me into creating exciting food packed full of vegetables and deliciousness which will please my family and keep me inspired and motivated in the sometimes seemingly relentless cycle of food.

Life is busy, so I like to err on the side of speed and simplicity (keeping a careful eye on budget and health), I have a large family, a farm shop and run a bed and breakfast. I have called it Waste Not Want Not as a dedication to my late father, who brought us up on this ethos! That is as far as his culinary skills stretched, and most of what I have learnt over the long hard (well some weren’t even hard, quite soft in fact) 42 years of life is from many disasters, perseverance and by embracing the art of cooking with the challenge of using fresh, local, home grown and carefully sourced ingredients, whilst avoiding waste, naturally, encouraged and inspired by my mother, Carol, who grows, cooks and cares about food too. I don’t do ready meals – but I’m keen on making my own! I do like food, and it gives me pleasure to feed people well. I don’t think you can do anything properly if you don’t enjoy it.

Some of my recipes are made up, some are old favourites, and some are just cunning ‘leftover surprise’ ideas. I aim to be economical and healthy, with the occasional necessary splurge. I often read recipes and then do something completely different! I want this book to be for inspiration primarily, but if you want to follow in my footsteps (while you gain confidence and find your own), you are very welcome too – remember that nothing is set in stone, and there is always room for improvement and experimentation! I think cooking disasters are inevitable, and it is important to learn from them and don’t make the same mistakes. I’m still making them - my latest delight was to explode the lamb and pea stew all over the kitchen ceiling and the newly hung Christmas lights (bit of an oopsy with the pressure cooker).

I have to confess I probably assume a basic ability to cook and can’t be pedantic with measurements and explanations (if you need this, go see Delia), I want it to be clear at a glance - easy to see: 1. What is needed, and 2. How to do it. I don’t like fussing, and frankly, I am too busy for it! I am a bit of a chaotic cook, I don’t plan meals at the beginning of the week (but I still aspire to this), I tend to look in the fridge or freezer or veggie basket and create around that and I think perhaps that this style is more suited to eating seasonally - the garden dictates, the weather dictates, the seasons dictate, the fridge dictates and that is also why I have written this as a diary (useless for you Antipodeans and Africans and tropics people, I’m afraid – perhaps you should read it backwards and change the ingredients as necessary). The diary format also helps (I hope) to suggest what meal might follow another during a week or month, and the index is always there if you just want to make ‘cake’ and have no interest in it’s context or when it was made!

Look, I do advocate buying food grown by organic farmers and I do support local farm shops and avoid supermarkets and I think that buying British is more important than importing, and free-range is a must, and I do feel very strongly about it too, but I also have Kellogs in my pantry and HP sauce in the cupboard, and I will buy the kids a pepperami if they must. I am not an organic fundamentalist or an organic nut or anything, but I do think organic farming is the way forward because 1. you don’t eat chemicals (who knows what the cocktail effect is?) and 2. it is completely sustainable: Fertilizer comes from oil. Oil is running out, and it is imported and processed, so even if you are buying local, it is not really local if it has fertilizer on it is it? I still can’t get my head around the banana debate, but my choice here is to buy organic fair trade ones. Yes they travel for miles, but they haven’t been sprayed and the farmers are being paid for growing them. It is all about a balance, and I think that if you eat meat it should be preferably organic and the sausages shouldn’t have preservatives in them and that your everyday food should be healthy and balanced and farmed sustainably. Whist that all sounds very well and good but impossibly expensive, just think about that again. Alcohol and cigarettes are expensive, so are ready meals, eating out, holidays and DVDs. We could manage quite well without these things, so it is all about priorities, and it is also about thinking about how to economise. I would suggest that to eat less meat but make it organic would be a good place to start. Think about serving a couple of meals a week which are ‘free’ by using up the leftovers and clearing out the fridge in a creative (and family friendly) way. Eat eggs, they are still a cheap (cheap, cheap) meal. Shop locally more, because in the supermarkets you can be very distracted by 2 for 1 and special offers on stuff that was definitely not on your list. Make ‘waste not want not’ a reality – I challenge you!

Amanda Nantgwynfaen

www.organicfarmwales.co.uk