First month is gone…I say fast, and surprisingly every thing went well. Better than I expected. I will try to record an account on what I have experience, how much food I have use etc.
First of all, I feel great, gratify and looking forward to the next month, and Christmas time where I want to try to do something special fore this special occasion.
Something for all family. We will have a banquet with all wild and own grown food, game, homemade sweets and drinks.
The main benefit from this experience is that I feel more relax because I know I am doing something positive and not only for myself. I am spending most of the time preparing food and reading lots of fact about food, its waste, the problems that are afflicting other people around the world. My mind is free from other thoughts and I find myself thinking intensively, but the all self thinking is very therapeutic. I also observe nature in a different way. I try to gain secrets, or new thought observing the birds in the garden, the behaviour of the chickens, the trees changing colours and all the others thing around us.
Most of the things I know I have learned from observing my father, my mother and my grand parents. We lost that skill because everything is done for us.
So, so far I have eaten homemade bread and homemade jam for breakfast except for the occasional eggs from our chickens.
Lunches were mainly with a variety of homemade pastas, from ravioli with different fillings( all own grown or wild herbs and veg ), gnocchi, linguine and lasagne. Other meals were made with our vegetables, both fresh, from the freezer and jars. We still have cabbage on the ground, leeks and Brussels sprouts.
I used some of the meat from last year pig, including meatballs from the pig head, bacon, pancetta and fat for frying things. I also used two all rabbit, two all pheasant, some fish cakes from the pike and some rabbit burgers. I had some creamy home made cheese with my meals, but I have to say that I did not eat much cheese at all. In fact, I still have lots of it and the last one I made was in the middle of the month.
As cakes, I had my own carrot cake from rescued carrot cake mix and my invention of panettone which I am planning to perfect for Christmas.
Overall I think the diet was balanced with lots of carbohydrates and lots of proteins and vitamins. As fruit I had only pears and apples from our trees.
Coffee was not missing as my wild fruit teas and the spearmint are a very good drink.
We, as a family, drunk juices made by myself and as alcohol, we had homebrew beer and home made wines. In facts, we bought ,I think, only 6 bottles of wine in the entire month.
At weekend I had some sandwiches (unsold and destined to the bin) from the school kitchen. Food going to be wasted because unsold, is a common fact around every western countries. Most of the milk I used for the cheese was out of date or just about out of date, and the nursery staff kept it for me. If you process the milk to make cheese, even if it is out of date, it is still good to be use.
If I had bought the flour and few other ingredients for making my pastas, cheese and bread that were given to me in exchange of my stuff I would have spent around £12 or 15 pounds in the all months. That is 50 pence a day. But, even one pound a day would be still remarkable.
My freezer is still nearly full of vegetable, different meat and juices, so I am confident that I should manage for the rest of the experiment. I still try to resist not to eat too much or save the extra slice of bread or make the pheasant to last at least three meals.
As for this weekend, I did not manage to do anything outside. Snow is deep in the garden and is too cold to be comfortable to work.
Saturday evening the all family had pheasant and vegetables. Sunday we all had my pasta for lunch and in the evening my pizza. So, that was three meals with wild and our own products for all family. In fact, during the all November we ate (no shop food )15 times together. This gives me an indication how far the all family could go with this experiment. Maybe two months? Monday for my lunch I had pasta with pieces of the pheasant breast (left over) and peas. Dinner was 2 fry eggs and three different vegetables from the jars. I opened for the first time a jar of wild garlic, wild nettle and dandelions leaves preserved with my apple vinegar and salt. Really interesting taste. I also open the first mushroom jar and a mix vegetable jar in the liquid saved from a jar of courgettes/gherkins . This last one was also very good. Tuesday lunch more gnocchi with pheasant breast and in the evening more vegetables from the jars with two sliced of sheep liver from the freezer.
(our chickens in the snow)Christopher loves it, so, must be better than I think.
The panettone cake
The panettone cake
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