Smoked cheese – my first attempt at cold smoking

Posted by louisa on Sunday 25 July 2010 in cooking, eating, smoking | 3 comments

I’ve been intrigued by the idea of curing & smoking food for a while but I only started to seriously consider doing it when Martin from Old Sleningford Farm mentioned a) how cheap cheddar can be transformed by a little time in a smoker and b) how easy it is to build a garden smokehouse.

About a month ago, I decided it would be a perfect project for this year’s birthday new fun craft/experience/skill and started reading into it in more detail. It’s a lot easier to build a hot smoker and there were a number of smokers-cum-bbqs on eBay – but that wouldn’t let me do cheese, and I like smoked cheese a lot. I thought I’d have to build a smoker with an external firebox, feeding the cooling smoke into the chamber via piping – and the thought of that overwhelmed me a little. Then by complete chance, I stumbled upon the ProQ Cold Smoke Generator.

The ProQ Cold Smoke Generator was only developed last year but it’s a wonderful combination of simplicity & genius. Obviously I’m new to smoking so I can’t compare it to other methods – but every other method I’ve read about was way more complicated that this. It’s a carefully (but not overly) engineered spiral of metal mesh. It doesn’t use gas or electricity – just a few seconds of a tealight to get started, then the sawdust smoulders away of its own accord for up to 10hrs, without any further intervention, stoking or encouragement. I think what finally won me over though was the instructions on the ProQ/Mac’s BBQ site showing how, with the CSG, you could make a smokehouse from a cardboard box, two bits of dowel, an old baking tray and some cooling racks. Recycling and frugal!

Pickling wild garlic (Ramsons) seed pods

Posted by louisa on Monday 28 June 2010 in eating, wild food | 1 comment

I love wild garlic. It was the first wild food I really tried and the one I’m still most comfortable with given how easily identifiable it is, and how it makes the world green when everything else is still hitting the snooze alarm after winter.

Usefully, the woods next to our house are *filled* with it, more than anywhere else I’ve seen – we’ve even got a sizeable patch growing at the bottom of our garden, which made it very easy to forage for a few handfuls of leaves at a time when I wanted to fling them in a recipe. Unfortunately though, like when you have most things in abundance, you don’t think about the time when they’re not going to be there any more – and I didn’t think about preserving any leaves until it was pretty much too late.

I’ve got a baggie full of stems in the freezer though – for using like spring onions in stir frys – and I was already thinking about how to preserve some seed pods when ManUpATree Nick Weston published a post on pod pickling. Very convenient timing!

Growing salad leaves – frugal, organic & green

Posted by louisa on Friday 25 June 2010 in eating, growing | 0 comments

I just sowed my fourth pot of loose salad leaves of the season.

We finished the last of the just-about-to-bolt Winter Gems lettuce this week and have got a tray of Lollo Rosso seedlings in our porch/greenhouse but loose leaves has been filling the gap between those beautifully – and in three or four weeks, this new pot will be offering up its tasty leaves too.

Until we started growing our own, my partner John and I weren’t big salad eater, but mostly from disorganisation than anything. We didn’t have meal plans and we’d regularly find lettuce going soggy/brown in our fridge – we’d buy it for one meal, then eat some more at a second but then we’d have meals that didn’t work with salad or eat out, and soon the lettuce would be past it. We realised that didn’t make sense from a frugal or food waste point of view so tended to not have it at all at home, to save the waste.

Now though, from early spring to about the first frosts, we can eat fresh salad leaves whenever we want them – and without waste. A little gem lettuce is just the right size for a meal for us, or for a sandwich, we can just pick a handful of loose/”pick and come again” leaves.