The Splat Cooking Blog

I’m having a rant, went round Waitrose yesterday and worked out why my food bill is bigger than our mortgage repayments – Fruit and Veg. Yes, I do try and do a big shop one day a week, and no, I don’t manage to get to the market, of it I do it’s about once a blue moon. I also massively object to the amount of plastic wrapping on fruit and veg – my recycling bin gets full in about 3 days, never mind 14 Days. So after realising that we spend something like £60-£70 on fruit and veg, just fruit and veg I’ve decided to try and do something about it.

1. Make concerted effort to at least get to the Farmer’s Market in Thame every month.

2. As soon as the PYO farm opens we’re going every week!

3. I’ve sent Peter and the children up to the nursery to get tomato plants, strawberry plants, coriander seeds, Thai basil seeds, carrot seeds, we’ve already got raspberry, tayberry and loganberry canes in and growing and Ellie’s potatoes are coming on a treat. Next on the list, blackcurrants and redcurrants. Only problem is stopping the extremely large puppy digging everything up.

4. Indra and I are seriously thinking about trying to get an allotment – boy, this makes me feel old, but if we can get this up and running and save a small fortune on buying fruit and veg from the supermarket and cut down on plastic stufff then fantastic.

As a company we’re looking at ways to be more ‘green’, moving over the recycled packaging for the cooking kits instead of the organza bags, working with a local miller to source flour – we’re really excited as he’s sent loads of samples to try out, just need to sort out the food bill and try to grow more of our own fruit and veg. As most of our garden is on a fairly major slope up to the mill pond it makes digging a huge vegetable patch ‘interesting’, especially with the dog who thinks it’s his right to ‘weed’ as much as possible and dig up all the lovely ’sticks’ we’ve planted just for him – aka raspberry canes.

Just got back home from running 3 demonstrations in the cookery theatre at the Chiltern Food Festival. I ran two Summer Fruits dems and a Tex Mex dem – tomorrow indra and I are doing a comedy double act doing Thai Green Curry.

Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed myself, hopefully the audience did too and I even got a round of applause at the end, wow!

The best bit was at the end of the last Summer Fruits dem Alison had come to have a listen to make sure I wasn’t making a total idiot of myself (!) and just got there as I finished, only to hear one lady leaving say to her husband ‘that look great, shall we go home and try that recipe now?’ That’s what it’s all about, if I can encourage just one person per dem to go home and try something new then it’s all worthwhile.

Cookery isn’t rocket science, it’s food – we need it to live, let’s just make it fun!

The show is on all over the weekend and myself and Richard Fox are demonstrating so come along and say ‘hello’. We are running chocolate Easter Egg decorating workshops and biscuit decorating workshops too.

We have just finished running the Easter workshops, Tuesday was Easter Baking and the children aged from 4-13 made Hot Cross  Buns, Simnel Cakes which they decorated beautifully, Easter Biscuits and did some wonderful ‘marbelling’ with icing and for the finale they decorated their own chocolate Easter Eggs and made my favourite chocolates in the whole world, Jazzies, to go in the middle of their eggs.

We had Kate from the Chocolate Source along to run the chocolate part of the workshop.  Kate aka ‘Chocolate Kate’ is great fun to work with and she really knows her stuff so if you want a chocolate party then you can contact her on 07939 098 070.

The children went home with two big boxes full of Easter Baking and their Easter Eggs with lots of ‘wows’ from parents when they were collected after 3 hours of cooking.

Yesterday we did the healthy version and had 10-14 year olds over to make yummy dishes with Spring Vegetables.  There were a few turned up noses when they saw the cabbage, spring greens, leeks and kale (actually mainly from my husband who stuck his head in halfway through to see where the lovely smells were coming from).  We made a lovely fresh Spring Veg Soup which just ooozed healthiness, followed by roasting different veg in a lovely marinade, Spring Greens and Lemon Risotto (I thought this was just the best item they made, however, Ellie (10) decided that although it tasted fab she was never going to make it again as it involved standing still for 20 minutes and stirring constantly.  We decided that you needed lots of friends round so they could take it in turns and talk to you whilst you were cooking them the risotto. )  We finished off with two different types of foccacia.

Two of the boys on the workshop were off camping straight afterwards and Mum had announced that she wasn’t taking any food with her only what the boys cooked and brought back,  hope she enjoyed her supper, it smelt great.

One of the boys enjoyed making bread from scratch the best, just that feeling of kneading the dough and the fact that it’s so therapeutic and doesn’t take very long to make from scratch only using your hands.

The children also showed their skills at one of the most important aspects of cooking – washing up and drying up afterwards.  This is skill that’s in short supply currently due to the use of dishwashers so we try and build it into the workshops whenever we can!  It’s great to learn to cook food but children also need to realise that the clearing up needs to be done too – Mum isn’t there as the house slave.

I had a very pleasant afternoon yesterday, very relaxing and it beat being in the office.