Initial thoughts 4 - Gifts, decorations and cards

Another part of the challenge is gifts.  This past Christmas, I ventured into sewing, making my wife a cushion, and I thought that producing a range of homemade Christmas presents would be ideal.  My sister-in-law beat me to it this year, gifting us some delicious honey and spice nuts, apple jelly and some mincemeat, all the product of her own hands, so what I am going to attempt to do is learn various crafts and produce presents for my guests.

There will obviously be a cushion being made as there is no point in wasting the knowledge I already have, and edible gifts such as jam, chutney and preserved fruits will be involved as well.  Other things that I may venture into could be hot water bottle covers, biscuits, potted meats, candles, restored furniture, pot pourri… the list is endless and I’d welcome any home made gift ideas.  Email me here.

Christmas decorations are also needed to add to the festive cheer, so holly bushes, fir trees and pine cones are all things I will be marching into the countryside to halck down. I’ll also need a Christmas Tree and decorations so I feel that there may be some other skills I will need to aquire.    I’ll also need to make some Christmas cards, so I’ll be saving all this year’s that I have received to make sure I have some pictures to base my designs around. 

So these are all my initial thoughts.  A rough outline of what I need to do.  I’m taking tomorrow off from planning and on the first of January, I start planning properly and actually making things.  

Initial thoughts 3: Fruit and booze

Fruit is both simple and tricky when you are trying to find things for free.  Obtaining apples and brambles is pretty simple as there are trees and bushes galore in the local area.  Plums are a little trickier, as although I know where there are plum (and damson) trees, they are on private property and I need the owner’s permission and will, of course, have to thank them for allowing me to gather their fruit.  Fortunately, a few pots of jam made from their fruit is always a good way to thank someone.

Similarly, there are dozens of rosehip bushes growing wild in East Scotland, so it is my plan to make some jelly with these, that might be ideal bartering currency or gifts for my dinner guests.

More problematic fruit are the dried varieties that are needed for the likes of Christmas Cake, Christmas Pudding and Mince Pies – three things that I have to produce to retain the traditional Christmas dinner.  Similarly, I am going to have to find nuts for the feast, and this could prove very tricky.  But the main thing I am worried about when it comes to Christmas is the drink…

Part of the reason that I am focusing foraging a Christmas dinner rather than becoming self sufficient, is that I have a normal job – I run a wine shop.  As I spend many hours there, I can’t devote lots of time to gardening, foraging and so my challenge has a reality to it, something that a lot of foraging or self-sufficiency blogs and shows don’t have.  However, there is a problem when it comes to the drinks over Christmas.  Soft drinks shouldn’t be a problem – elderflower or rose cordial is an easy option (I could use the roses that are growing up the front of my house) – but it is the booze that I’m nervous about.

I have, in the past, written some fairly damning pieces about commercial British fruit wines, but I am now going to have to venture forth and try and make some wine out of fruit that I find in the countryside.  I am also going to have to give beer or cider making a shot, which is again something I have not a clue about.  Now if I didn’t really care that much about alcohol, I would be able to produce some filth and just pass it off as ‘acceptable’ but there is a problem.  My guests are going to know that I’ve made this, and will be expecting the same levels of quality that I would demand from a commercially available product… all of a sudden, the critic has become the producer and that worries me a lot!

Initial thoughts 2: Where will I get the veggies from?

It is pretty easy to grow vegetables for a Christmas dinner.  Carrots, Parsnips and Potatoes are all very simple.  You dig a hole in the ground, plant a seed or a tuber, cover them up, water and leave them to it.  They pretty much grow themselves.  The problem I have is that I don’t have any land in which to plant root vegetables and you can’t have Christmas dinner without roast potatoes so I need to figure out how I’m going to get root veg.  Another ‘must have’ on the Christmas table is Brussels Sprouts and I haven’t a clue how I am going to find them.  There are plenty of farmers on the east coast of Scotland that grow sprouts, so maybe that may call for bartering.

I have a very good book on finding mushrooms, called Mushrooms by Roger Phillips and have already found a place where I know Chanterelle mushrooms grow.  There are also many other fungi in woodlands and on trees so I need to learn what is edible and what isn’t.  Due to the desire I have to not be poisoned by a rogue toadstool, I have every intention of finding a guide who can help me positively identify every mushroom I pick.  I’ll then (after having a few of them lightly fried on toast) learn how to preserve wild mushrooms for either use in the feast or give out as gifts.

Seaweed is in abundance on the east coast of Scotland, and with the help of the internet and a few books, I want to explore this massively unused source of food.  I am sure that by drying and rehydrating, they could provide a suitable alternative to cabbage or other green, leafy veg.  I have also heard that there is a lot of samphire on the beaches too, and I hope that I can find out what to do with this plant, that appears to be a staple on all Michelin star restaurant menus.

Herbs are the things that I don’t have a problem finding.  Aside from the two (small) rosemary plants that are already in my tiny flowerbed, I have a thriving sage plant and am going to plant various herbs in pots and keep them outside my house.  Sure, some may get pinched by the occasional passing rambler, or peed on by a passing dog, but such is the way with growing food!  I have heard that there is some wild garlic growing in a park in St Andrews, so hopefully that should provide me with some much needed flavouring.

I also have a chilli plant in my kitchen window that appears to continuously be producing fruit.  I’ve frozen some chillies grown from this plant, so may use those in the autumn months when I’m making preserves and chutneys.

I reckon that with a bit of lateral thinking I should be able to provide the necessary veg for a Christmas feast, even if it does mean bartering with allotment owners or farmers.  The next thing I need to figure out is fruit.

Initial thoughts 1: Where will I get the meat from?

What is going to be the centerpiece of my Christmas dinner?  Turkey is obviously out due to the decided lack of these silly looking birds wandering around central Scotland.  I could opt for Roe deer, of which there are plenty in the woodland surrounding town I live in, but that would be a hell of a big thing to kill when the nearest I’ve ever got to shooting a gun was a Super Soaker.  There are, however, a lot of birds in Fife, so this is where I am going to focus my attention.

It is a rare day that I don’t have to dodge a stupid pheasant that decides to run out in front of my car when I’m on my way to work.  Instead of braking or swerving to avoid it causing a bird shaped dent in the front of my car, maybe I should start aiming for them and cooking my kill.  Having said that, the thought of slightly squashed pheasant isn’t one that particularly appeals, but there is still the option of shooting them.

Failing that, there are a lot of ducks and geese that migrate over the estuaries that surround the Kingdom of Fife, so shooting a few of those out of the skies might be a way to a free feast. 

There are other sources of meat that roam around wild on the east coast of Scotland.  There are rabbits all over the place that could be picked off with an air rifle and made into something delicious.  Living on the coast, I can always take up fishing.  I’m forever seeing people dangling rods into the water off the pier outside my house so, obviously, there must be something worth catching in the briny deep.  There is a very buoyant crab and lobster fishing community in the village I live so, hopefully, I might be able to convince one of the fishermen to advise me on how to catch shellfish from the shore.  I think that if I can catch a lobster or crab, I can create some sort of shellfish starter for the meal.

So as you can see, there is a wide selection of wild animals available that I can catch and kill, once I have the skills to do so.  A couple of geese following a shellfish starter would be a pretty good Christmas dinner in anyone’s book, and all the more rewarding in that I will have got the ingredients for free. 

The problem I am going to have is getting the vegetables…

The Challenge

I love watching Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage television programmes, as I want to have his life.  I want to have a farm of my own, bomb around the countryside in an old Land Rover, keep animals for the slaughter, grow vegetables, forage from hedgerows and cook all of this lovely native produce in my big farmhouse kitchen.

The lives most of us have, make such an apparently idyllic existence impossible.  I have to work day to day running a wine shop so I can’t spend every day out in the countryside looking for wild food.  I do live in a picture postcard cottage overlooking the sea (the damp and lack of central heating is the pain for the pleasure of a nice view), but aside from a small, yard-wide strip of flowerbed in front of my house, I don’t have anywhere to plant veggies, so can’t grow anything.  I also doubt that my landlady would be too enamored with me if I dug up the Fuschia and put down some carrots, so growing in the flowerbed (aside from the odd herb)  is out too.  Even if I did have the space to raise some chickens and a pig, I wouldn’t know the slightest thing about looking after them and they would end up scrawny and tasteless.

I decided that, the furthest I could go towards self sufficiency was to try and find some free food when I went on my daily walk.

In the autumn of 2011, I decided to try and embrace a little of the free food life and ventured into foraging with some mixed results.  My triumphs included one harvest of chanterelle mushrooms from a place I found late in the season and the discovery of some damson trees that netted a bumper crop that I turned into delicious jam.  My foray into rosehips ended in disaster with my nighttime harvest turning out to be rotten, and a plum jam batch that didn’t have enough pectin and failed to set properly.  With this varied success, it is clear that I’m not overly skilled in the art of foraging and cooking, so it makes the challenge I have decided to set myself, all the more difficult…

A few days ago I went to a supermarket to buy a selection of things for Christmas.  Nothing fancy as I was not hosting a Christmas dinner, it was simply things like pickled onions, ingredients for a River Cottage Beetroot Tarte Tatin, lemonade… the usual paraphernalia that you get into the house for Christmas and rarely eat the rest of the year.  The bill came to £45 and that was simply for things that are accompaniments to the main Christmas dinner.  I realised, I’d just wasted the best part of fifty quid.

I then read that the British public spend, on average, one hundred and forty five pounds on Christmas dinner alone, and we waste one fifth of that.  We also spend, on average, over £500 on presents every year, resulting in a average bill for Christmas of nearly £650 per family.  I have decided that, for Christmas 2012, I will attempt to make a full Christmas feast for 12 people, for the value of the food thrown in the bin – thirty pounds – and provide presents for twenty pounds.

This will mean I have to hunt, find, grow (where? I still haven’t a clue), barter or make everything in a traditional Christmas Dinner and provide a present for each guest for a tenth of what the average family spends every Christmas.

This blog is my journey, through embryonic stages of research, attempting test recipes, learning new crafts and skills, meeting experts who can help me and, hopefully, to the end result – a stressful Christmas Day 2012 making the Christmas dinner that cost me nothing.  I hope you can join me on this journey.