Now that’s what I call local

The current push in England and certainly also in other countries, is buying locally. It is merely a reversion to natural, “normal” buying habits, “the way it used to be” and the only way it was able to be before globalisation.

It used to be that you went to the corner store to buy your food, and the corner store bought its supplies from a local source. But now as we know, even the food in the corner store comes from the other side of the world. So my husband and I have been trying to be good and trying to buy locally. We have been shopping for meats at local farm shops such as Pride’s Farm Shop in Elstead and Hunts Hill Farm in Normandy, both of which are less than ten miles from our home and which sell their own locally-raised livestock and produce.

But today we were graced with the opportunity to buy locally, really locally. Less than one half mile from us, just down our street, friends and neighbours Bob and Jane held their first farm shop selling their own hand-reared local rare breed free range pigs, butchered at the Laverstoke Park Farm abbatoir just over the county line in Hampshire.

Half a mile? Now that’s what I call local!

After raising hens and selling free-range eggs for several years, “Bob’s Hogs” is Bob’s first foray into livestock. The four Oxford Sandy & Black pigs – which I nicknamed Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner and Cracklings to avoid getting attached to them – were lovingly fed, watered and even massaged (I know, I’m jealous, too) until they yielded some of the tastiest sausages I have ever eaten. A mere twenty minutes after purchasing them we had walked back home, cooked the sausages and offered them up on our plates. Our main comment was that they actually tasted like pork, and not like the fillers and preservatives that are so often used and over used. Delightful!

For dinner we tasted our first ever chump steaks, which I braised with apples and rosemary in Ginger Beer. My, oh my was that good! And in case you don’t know what chump is, take a look here: Channel4.com Food pork cuts/chump. But I’ll give you a hint: think rump. And think succulent and tasty when it’s so local and so fresh.

Forgive me if I pat myself on the back here but our dinner was not only local it was organic, home-grown and foraged, too. After the pork reared a half mile down the road there were the windfall apples foraged from Tongham Wood (distance from my kitchen = 500 yards). The rosemary was cut in the herb bed (distance to kitchen 5 feet) and there were also Anya potatoes from the back potato patch, a lengthy 40 feet from the kitchen. The Crabbie’s Original Alcoholic Ginger Beer was Scottish so it travelled farthest amongst our ingredients, but it’s still from the British Isles. Not a bad record for one meal, I have to admit!

Bon appétit !

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