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Cheddar Gorgeous
Filed under GeneralAug 4In a lot of ways it is very easy to live any kind of lifestyle without any outside influence. Ellie and me have been going along quite nicely in our own private land of not spending. We’ve had people over for the odd cup of tea but as Bristol tends to empty at weekends for festivals (well the people we know anyway) we’ve not had any major social gatherings.
An old friend from Northampton called earlier in the week last week and asked if it was a good time for him to stay. I originally thought it might not be as
a)It was to be Ellie’s and my last weekend together in Bristol until mid September and
b) I wasn’t sure of my friends reaction to our chosen lifestyle and if we could feed him and his wife!I put him off but by Thursday I began to think it might not be such a bad idea so I called him back and suggested he came down. Andy (my Brother) was having a party on Saturday night which meant there would be entertainment and plenty of his strange home-brew concoctions.
On Friday night I got another call from an old University friend asking if he and his girlfriend could stay. I hesitated again but this particular friend I’d not seen for quite some time (years rather than months) and didn’t want to turn him away. Coincidently this was the same friend who lived in the small holding in Oxfordshire, near where we picked the cherries and where we started this whole free way of living.
So come Saturday afternoon Anthony arrived with his girlfriend and Helm and his wife were due to meet us later that evening once they’d done a bit of shopping in Bristol’s Cabot circus (or Car boot circus as we call it).Anthony was and still is an out and out mushroom nerd and whenever I see him I take the opportunity to go out walking and pick his fungal filled brain. We went up to Ashton Court as I’d been up there looking for fungi with fellow forager Fergus Drennan (don’t you just love alliteration)
We identified a few but none were in any fit state to take home and eat due to the bad weather. During the walk I decided to let them in on the way of life we’d be leading. For some reason I assumed that he, and his girlfriend Leander, wouldn’t be that put by our freegan lifestyle as apart from the bin diving element it is much the same as theirs. The drive back from Ashton court proved my assumption correct as Leander suggested we stop at every supermarket bin we passed. Quite disappointingly we found nothing but potatoes on this particular mission. I’d just recently pulled the main potato harvest that week and we had a huge sackful of the things at home. Still waste not want not, potatoes keep very well so we could quite easily store these without them spoiling.
I thought we’d again struggle to feed six, however Anthony produced a very large bag of carrots they’d bought from Covent Garden market for next to nothing earlier that week to add to the evening meal. So for dinner I made roast potatoes,carrots, shallots and beetroot and covered it with gravy made from the last few days vegetable scraps. Despite filling every baking tray we had it didn’t seem like enough food so we mopped up with some bread (our freezer is now full to bursting with bread after a bin mission to Waitrose) and finished with a home-grown apple and late season gooseberry crumble. We’ve got a dying apple tree in the back yard that seems to be producing palatable apples months earlier than it should be. Some varieties of apple do produce in August but we’ve been cooking the windfalls since mid-July!!Ellie pushed me to tell Helm and his wife Karen how we’d been living. At first I felt a bit uncomfortable telling them as of recent years Helm has lived what many might consider a fairly mainstream lifestyle. He and his wife work nine to five, they like to shop, they are home-owners, car owners and have recently bought a large TV to watch their every growing DVD collection. In many ways their life-style is quite polar opposite to ours. Having said that they both have quite a strong environmental conscience. Not only is the car they drive is perhaps the smallest and most economical I’ve ever seen but despite living in a flat they still compost the majority of their kitchen waste in two wormeries on their balcony.
Helm wasn’t phased by it at all, instead he told me of the times he got free sandwiches on long-distance train journeys as the canteen was closing (why didn’t we think of that on the way back from Totnes!!!). His wife on the other hand seemed to shuffle in her seat a little. She is not the type to say if she did feel uncomfortable but I sort of sensed something might be wrong.Both of them left not long after breakfast the following day claiming they wanted to get back to an event in Northampton. I wasn’t overly convinced but gave them the benefit of the doubt and besides they said they had a good time and I believed them.
Anthony and Leander stayed for the following day and we decided to spend our time in Cheddar and the surrounding Mendips on the search for an ever illusive giant puffball. Our timing was quite strange as we seemed to coincide with two quite nasty incidents. The first was on the way into Cheddar village where we saw some police tape and a policeman coming out of a house in a mask and full protective whites. It was like a scene from Mid-Summer Murders only a little more unnerving! After a walk around the gorge and the town, making the most of the plums growing around and free samples of cheese and beer, we drove up the hill to the top of the gorge. Rescue vehicles were passing us left right and centre all the way up and we could tell that something was going on. We saw what looked like a body on the rocks at the top of the gorge and for the second time that day we all felt a little shaken.
I later looked up both these events and the first was indeed a murder and the second although quite a bad accident the young boy involved was not fatally injured.
So after leaving the soap opera capital of the South West we headed for Ellie’s Mum’s house as Ellie had to pick up her birth certificate for an application. At this point we were still mushroomless but Ellie’s Mum had told us that her husband (and Ellie’s Dad) had seen a giant puffball the day before while he was out walking. We all politely drank tea and chatted for a bit and I sensed that Anthony was itching to get out and find the Calvatia gigantea.
It wasn’t long before we were out in the hills and there on the side of a field we could see a large white dot in the distance. As we got near and nearer we broke into a run before falling at the foot of the Calvatia gigantea. It had already been picked and was sitting loose on the hillside so there were none of the usual worries of depriving the area of a fruiting puffball.
As we Anthony and Leander dropped us off in Bristol we cut the puffball in two and the following night we had one of the most delicious meals I’ve had since we started our Freegan experiment.
Ellie’s mum had given us some rice that had been in her cupboard for years and was approaching it’s use by date and I cooked that up along with home grown shallots, the last of the stock and some saffron I’d got from doing a slot about Freeganism on CBBC’s Gastronuts. That was served up with steamed and then griddled carrots in olive oil and steamed skipped asparagus spears (Ellie had found that day outside Waitrose) with butter fried puffballs (cooked in a butter portion left on a table in a cafe in Cheddar). Following this was Waitrose finest chocolate moose and fresh strawberries.
One Response to “Cheddar Gorgeous”
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Excellent blog Dave – really impressed with CBBC for allowing info re freeganism YAY!
That puffball meal sounds scrummy – must go and see what the wilds of Manchester have to offer.
