Pizzas

It was not a busy day yesterday as my back pain let me down, not able to start working on the wooden floor in the garden house. I hope on Monday it will be better. The days are now starting to get very short, and with the combination of darkness and damp wet weather that syndrome of SAD is there, in the corner of the early evening, waiting for you to sit in the lounge, switch on the TV, open a bottle of wine and les  jeux sont faits. Well I decided to make some more bread, ravioli and pizza for everyone. Two different types of pizzas, as mine has to be shop free one.The flour I had in exchange three weeks ago is now finish and I had to improvise a dough with strong brown  bread flour instead. I did use again the yeast from the beer ( it keeps for very long time, possible a couple of months.by the time is finish or inefficient the next lot of beer has been fermenting any way).
The brown coloured pizza was better than last time. I did add some anchovy oil which I kept in the fridge from last time we bought them ( September? I keep the  anchovy jar oil as it is good as a condiment. Now more than before nothing is going to be wasted ).
In the morning went out to look for dandelion leaves and nettles leaves in order to make the ravioli. Well no much is left out  there. it tells you that by the end of October no much food is available from the wild. I kind of knew that, and this is way my freezer is full of wild herbs and other stuff. Do I have enough? Difficult to say but I am confident because I have got lots of cultivated peas,beans,beetroot and so on.
To the filling for the ravioli I add some marjoram and sage from the garden and mixed with the other herbs and mashed potatoes. Ravioli are for Josie and Sheila as both b provided some products to my exchange. Vegetables and flour.
Thinking about the wild herbs in the garden, in a book written by Vivien Weise called  Cooking Weeds, there is an interesting table regarding the content of proteins per 100 grams of edible parts of weeds compared with vegetables we buy in the shop. Here is the sample:

Vegetables                                                 Weed

White Cabbage    0.2                                 Chickweed           1.5
Chicory                0.4                                  Daisy                   2.6
Red cabbage        0.4                                 Sorrel                   2.8
Lettuce                 0.9                                 Dandelion             3.3
Spring leeks         1.0                                 Dead nettle            4.1
Chinese cabbage  1.3                                 Fat hen                  4.3
Spinach                2.5                                Good King Henry    5.3
Brussels sprouts    2.8                                Ground elder           6.7
Curly kale            3.0                                 Common mallow     7.2

Average              1.4                                 Average                  4.4

What is interesting for me is that my favourite cultivate vegetable ( white cabbage ) is the one with less proteins. On the other hand, the ground elder, which I have discovered this year to be edible ( thanks to a history program on channel four) has one of the highest content. Ground elder is considered to be a terrible weed/pest, but as Vivien suggests in her book, do not fight it, instead eat it. Within the cultivated ones, Brussels sprouts has is one of the highest, and as we know, nobody likes it!!!
Now that the festive season has started two months early what we a re going to do with our shopping?

According to the Love Food Hate Waste campaign we waste, on average, a third of the food we buy each week. However, during Christmas, WRAP claim that this increases by a massive 60 to 80%. You only have to set foot into a supermarket before Christmas to see people queuing down the aisles with trolleys laden with food. Many of us buy food as if we are feeding the five thousand, going to be snowed in for a week and the shops will be empty for a month.

This represents a staggering 230,000 tonnes of festive food worth approximately £275 million that gets thrown away across the country during Christmas and the New year. I am shocked and horrified.

My way of thinking is this: buy less do not meas eat less, it only means waste less. If the figures are correct we would better buy less food and at the same time we will be not only saving millions but also feeding millions of others around the world. Is not good enough to be generous at christmas, giving money or other thing for charities and carry on wasting soo much food. All that waste, as we know means only one thing : more hunger somewhere esle. We know that water and land is exploited;we know that people are exploited;we know that is not good for the environment, so we need to think twice before we buy food.
My suggestion will be: waste less and you will be already given the best present to million of people around the world for this christmas. I like this to be a new trend because we underestimate the value of this savings.