So I followed the recipe and it came out okay and tasty enough but I don’t think my first attempt was great! Possibly should have used a whisk for stirring rather than a spoon, especially once I put the full mixture back into the pan. However it certainly tasted nice and I’ll definitely give it another go. The method was fairly simple:

4 egg yolks
1/2 pint (283ml) of milk
25g of sugar
1 vanilla pod

Heat all but 3 tablespoons of the milk in a pan with the vanilla pod in it. Bring it to the boil and then put to the side for 15 minutes. Beat the egg yolks, sugar and remaining milk in a jug. Remove the vanilla pod from the milk and mix the hot milk into the egg mixture. Then strain the mixture back into the pan and heat and stir until you get a custard consistency.

I must admit I forgot to strain it but it still came out okay. I also squeezed out some of the seeds from the vanilla pod to give it a bit of extra taste. Still, it wasn’t bad for a first attempt

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How it works

You can select a few different types of boxes including healthy eating, pre workout, post workout, select to build your own. There are usually 3 punnets in a box, the large contains fresh fruit, the medium size can have dried fruit, nuts or a mix, and the small punnet can again have dried fruit, nuts, or perhaps a treat mix (this is just an example, please visit their site for more information).

You then choose which day(s) to have the box(es) delivered and rate as few or as many of their foods available so that they can tailor the box to your tastes. You don’t specifically choose what’s in each box, instead the foods are selected based on the type of box selected and the foods you’ve rated. It’s then posted out the day before and arrives with the postman the next day, and easily fits through the letterbox.

Costs

The cost of a Graze box is £2.99, which for a healthy, weekly treat isn’t too bad, and this includes the cost of the delivery to anyway within the UK. Plus the food tastes great and is free from all the artificial rubbish!

However, at present if you sign up via this site you can get your first box for free, no commitment required, so you can cancel straight after if you wish. If you do continue, you’ll then receive your second box at half price, which means two boxes for £1.50, which you can’t really complain at! So for a healthy snack delivered to your door (whether that’s your office or home address), give them a go – Get a free Graze box.

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The breadmaker we bought is the Morphy Richards 48245, which is £60 on Amazon, however at present it’s £48 from Argos until 16th January 2009. It’s not too big and easy to use. I’ve only used it once so far (I’ll update after a month of usage!), however even my first attempt was pretty good. The bread is crispy on the outside and soft and gorgeous on the inside! I think with my next attempt I’ll use a bit less water than they say, just so that the bread is a little firmer, as it’s hard to slice when it’s so soft!

Next step is to get something to slice bread, however I may have to wait a while for that However, if you were thinking about making your own bread then why not? It only takes 3 hours to do everything then maybe an hour to cool. I definitely don’t think this will be one of those kitchen gadgets that gets left to gather dust

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However a lot of people’s arguments were that free range chickens were not affordable to them. Personally I don’t really agree with this argument. A whole chicken in Sainsburys can cost around £4.50, and that would feed a family of 4 and leave the carcass for making at least 3 or 4 decent bowls of soup too. So for about £1.12 per person you’d get enough meat to go with your dinner, and a bowl of soup. From one of these chickens the 2 of us (who are big eaters) get our roast dinner and enough meat left over for risotto the next day plus a large bowl of soup each for lunch.

The trouble I’ve found is that buying free range chicken breasts is expensive, and not very affordable to us. Free range leg and thigh packs are not too badly priced, and we had a box of chicken wings for about £1.50 for 8 the other day, and I love chicken wings! However the chicken breasts are expensive, and whilst free range turkey is cheaper, it’s just not as good for fajitas or stirfry (seems to dry out quicker). I tend to find the breasts at about £3-4 for a pack, yet a whole chicken costs about £1 more!

We’re quite lucky in that we can go shopping to our local Costco, and they’ve started to sell free range whole chickens, typically in a large format (around 2.3kg per bird!), but at a cheaper per kg price than the supermarkets. So today I’ve spent the afternoon with 2 large chickens and have cut them up into 4 large breasts (1 breast is more than enough for the two of us, so that’s 8 dinners), 4 leg/thighs which will do for a roast dinner (so 4 more dinners) and 4 chicken wings, great for the BBQ. Plus I’ve taken both carcasses and am currently making soup with that, which I’ll freeze, ready for when I fancy something warm for lunch. I should get about 8 soups easily out of them. The cost of all this? £15 and less than an hour of my time. Now I’m no butcher but it’s relatively easy to cut up a chicken, and even if it’s a smaller one from a supermarket, it works out so much cheaper than buying things separately.

So in the future, if you want to save yourself some cash, buy the whole chickens and cut them up yourself. All you need is a good short but sharp knife to cut through the cartiladge (you can twist the leg and wings first to get the bone to pop out). From £15 we’ve got 8 dinners of fajitas, stirfry or risotto, 4 roast dinners, 4 wings and about 8 soups for lunch or a light dinner. I really don’t think you can complain with that return of investment! And, of course, it tastes so much better than indoor reared chickens

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During the time between realising that standard mayonnaise used battery hen eggs and now, we’ve been trying out a few different types of mayonnaise, all organic as that was the only type that used free range eggs. SO Organic Mayonnaise from Sainsburys was the best option, although a little too creamy for my liking. The others were more like salad cream, and just as runny. I’m glad that Hellman’s have kept to their word and got the new free range version out as when it comes to mayonnaise, nothing beats hellman’s in my book.

Just make sure it’s stamped ‘Free Range Eggs’ on the side to be certain. Also remember, most premade coleslaw and potato salad will not have free range egg in the mayonnaise. To find free range eggs in various products you’ll need to at least look at the top of the range (Tesco Finest, Sainsburys Taste the Difference etc), unless you shop in Marks and Spencers or Waitrose (lucky people!). Even then, not all top of the range use free range eggs in their products. So there is still a need to check the ingredients if you want to be 100% sure.

I hope one day everything sold can be considered free range and we wouldn’t have to stand and check the labels, let’s hope that day comes soon!

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My Salad garden is also bursting with seedlings. This is a metre long window box that I sowed various lines of seeds in. At the top is a mixed lettuce (most of which seems to be green and not the red variety!), then there’s rocket, a bit more lettuce and then radish at the bottom of the photo, which is going to need repotting soon. We’ve already had 6 lettuce out of the garden, all tasting so fresh and so much better than the shop bought stuff!

I’ve also bought some courgette seeds and have them in a tray in the greenhouse, although not much seems to be happening with them yet. According to the packet instructions I can plant them between April and July so hopefully they’ll catch on soon. I’ve never tried growing courgettes before but as we always have them in the fridge I figured it was worth a go.

My chilli plants are all doing well too. A couple of them are about a foot and a half high. A few little flowers have been appearing on them so hopefully we’ll start to see some fruit soon. Unfortunately they’re getting attacked by greenfly and my organic aphid and greenfly spray doesn’t seem to do much to deter them, so every morning it’s a case of check the plants over and kill off any greenfly that’s on there. The tomato plants are also growing fairly tall, the flowers are on there so again it’s a case of waiting for the fruit to appear.

Finally my Gooseberry plant is growing just a few gooseberries (about 3!). This time last year it was getting established in the garden and gave us a couple of dozen fruit, however when we had to move, I cut the bush back, uprooted it and dumped it into a pot. I’ve since replanted it into a nice large terracotta pot whilst finding the roots riddled with ants (I’d stood it on an ants nest without realising), so hopefully it’s in a better place now, and it makes a nice pot plant anyway!

So despite the unpredictable weather, the plants are still growing reasonably well. I’ll try and keep the updates a little more frequent in the future!

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Until recently I had presumed that ‘Farm Assured’, often denoted by a Red Tractor, was the better version, along with ‘Freedom Foods’, which is the RSPCA’s own mark. As it happens, the Freedom Foods mark IS okay, the farm assured one? No, not really. They just lay out the minimum baseline of rules that need to be followed and that allows for intensively farmed chickens.

So, when shopping, look for the Freedom Foods mark or sticker on the meat.

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Anyway, I came across this chart yesterday which is a great chart to maybe print off and keep around when you’re planning your weekly fruit and veg shopping, so at least you’ve got a better idea of what will be best and tastiest to buy and eat (probably just covers UK and maybe some of Europe).

» What’s in Season – Red Tractor

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As long as I can remember I’ve always bought Free Range Eggs. To me it’s quite a natural thing. Living by and working on a Free Range farm when I was younger gave us an easy way to buy eggs from there, and then since buying for myself, Free Range eggs have always been the obvious choice. So, since buying free range Chicken I figured we were on the right road.

That was until I watched Jamie’s Fowl dinners, where he had examples of liquid egg, liquid egg whites and dried egg (gotta say, made me feel sick seeing it all!), and then explained how mayonnaise, coleslaw, dressings, quiche etc. have all probably either been made with one of these or at least from battery hen eggs. Wow, sickness feeling got worse that’s for sure! My mayonnaise of choice is Hellmanns, and I was very unhappy to discover that this was one to contain battery hen eggs (or dried egg, I forget). Yuk!! A representative from Hellmanns had been invited to this show and he said that from February they would be starting to use free range eggs and by June all products on the shelves should contain free range eggs only, which made me a little happier, although I still will be having a go at making my own mayonnaise for the time being.

So what else do you not really think about. Pastry? Chicken pies not only have pastry that’s probably made with non free range eggs, but most of these fillings that contain chicken probably get the meat from the battery hens after they’ve spent their year laying eggs. Yep, apparently the breasts from these chickens are used in various pie fillings. We don’t tend to buy many pies, but we have done on occasion, and this thought is even more stomach wrenching than intensively reared chickens.

This just reconfirms that your best option is to cook everything from fresh if you can, or if you can’t, check the labels and if you’re not sure then maybe it’s not worth it. I’ll also be learning how to make mayonnaise and pastry, it’ll be fun and handy to know too! Home made quiches are a lot cheaper than buying them, and you get to control what goes in. And if you’re eating out? Don’t be too embarrassed to find out where your food has actually come from. The more awareness there is, the more chance that changes can and will be made.

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A lot of people are saying that it comes down to cost. A free range chicken is around £5-6, compared to about £3 for an intensively reared chicken. But, do you get everything out of your chicken and make the purchase worthwhile? Beside the obvious reason as in the concern over the conditions these chickens are reared in (do you really want to eat a chicken that’s spent the last 39 days (it’s max life-span) walking around in the 1000s of other chicken’s waste?), a FR chicken will also taste better, have a leaner meat from the exercise it can get, and I’ll say it one more time, it won’t have spent its day sitting in its own waste.

So, how to get the most out of your FR chicken. For the two of us (and we probably eat more than an average person) we get the following out of it:
1. Roast dinner, between the two of us 2 legs, a wing perhaps, half a breast and the meat off the back.
2. Half a chicken breast does for a couple of sandwiches – nothing like fresh roast chicken sandwiches.
3. The remaining breast goes great in a Risotto
4. The carcass will make a gorgeous soup the next day for 2-3 people, perfect for a warm lunch.

Besides the fact that sandwich meat chicken from shops is nothing like the one off your roast bird (well I’ve not found it to be) and it’s extortionately expensive (and who knows if it’s free range or not?), and that I’ve never bought a soup that tastes as good as home made, the above list is what we get off 1 £5-6 bird – 4 main meals, a couple of sandwiches and gorgeous soup!

Okay, so maybe Free Range is still too expensive for some, so at least move to the other option of barn chickens – those that have been reared indoors but have 25% more space, 25% more life-span and have more to do than just sit down and eat all day long. They’re around 50p-£1 more but will at least make a difference (usually marked ‘Freedom Foods’).

So, do you still eat intensively reared chickens? Or have you just given up Chicken fullstop?!

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