Birdsong

Back in March, I had a lovely weekend entertaining various family members from far and wide. Because there were a lot of us, and we all like food, it did seem that most of the weekend was spent, either preparing meals, eating meals, or clearing up after meals.  And everybody mucked in and helped.

They all got very into my eco-friendly ways - when there is clearly no dustbin in a kitchen you kind of have to.  "What do I do with this?"

One of the things that I love to do is to make up feasts for the birds - my garden is full of birds and birdsong all the time.

Like Louise, who contributed Tip 2 in my book, I scrape up fat from my frying pan to make my bird feasts and then use breadcrumbs, toast crumbs and whatever other bits and pieces seem like they'll make a tasty treat.

This is the bird feeder we made when my family were over in March, when I came back from holiday.

It was full to the brim when I put it out.  Not a lot left in there now, as you can see!

It doesn't cost a penny to make and it takes no more time to scrape the crumbs off the breadboard or the fat out of the frying pan into a container like this, than it takes to scrape it into the bin.  I have no idea if they actually use the little perch I added by poking a skewer through the bottom of the cup, but it looks cute, don't you think?

Snow Carbon

Can a skiing holiday ever be low carbon?

Skiing and eco-friendly holidays don't really sit naturally together in my mind.  But I was 11 years old when I got the bug for this high adrenalin sport and loved it so much that at 18, I went to work as an au pair near the lovely village of Manigod in the French Alps.

MANIGOD Croix-Fry Merdassier by ARAVISPANORAMA

I then did a French degree in London, but chose to go back to the French Alps for my year in a French university and on finishing my degree, I worked as rep in a ski resort for a season.  As you can see, I was well and truly hooked.

Since then I've been skiing a few times with my family, recently travelling by car (not too high carbon with six of us travelling - as my children take a friend each).

We have always been conscious of trying to keep our holidays environmentally friendly as far as we can.  Some of the ways we do this: we support local businesses, avoid waste as far as possible, avoid all-inclusive places.  You know the kind of thing!

This year, in choosing our skiing holiday, we again tried to find lower carbon options  We were only four rather than six, and so we didn't want to drive, but didn't want to fly either. So for the first time, we travelled by train to our holiday destination.

We found a holiday by train through Snow Carbon travelling with Zenith Holidays to the Hameau des Airelles in Montgenèvre which has recently obtained the EU Ecolabel.

View over the village

Some of the lifts have a choice of chair or cable car, which is great
 because yo can choose which to take according to the weather.

I found Zenith Holidays to be super helpful.  Everything was made very easy and I was really made to feel looked after.  Zenith organised our train travel via Eurostar to Paris and then onwards to Oulx in Italy on the TGV.  Prices were comparable to flying, though no cheaper even though we booked as early as it was possible to book the entire trip. Our Eurostar tickets cost us £70.50 each for the way out and £61 pounds for the way back. It takes aound 2 1/2 hours to Paris Gare du Nord and then you have a short 2 stop train journey on the RER to the Gare du Lyon for onward travel to the French alps. On the Eurostar you can buy a book of 10 metro tickets for around 13 euros. The TGV to Oulx  was £64.48 each return and took around five hours, but we were comfortable and the journey passed very quickly.

We'd decided to take rucksacks as we thought that would be the easiest way to deal with luggage, but in fact a wheeled suitcase or sports bag was what most fellow travellers had!

I'd advise taking plenty of food, snacks and drinks with you for the journey as food is expensive on the train and at the stations.  The Eurostar Lounge both at St Pancras and Paris Gare du Nord are comfortable, so if you have a wait you can generally find somewhere to sit and read.  But the Halle des Grande Lignes at Gare du Lyons only has about eight chairs, so it is not the best place to spend any amount of time.


We were met at the station - actually on the platform by our Zenith rep and then whisked by minibus up to the resort of Montgenèvre, which took around half an hour. All very swift, efficient and welcoming.

Onto the accommodation...

The Hameau des Airelles was lovely.  We opted for a two bedroom apartment which is said to sleep six people, as there's a sofa bed in the lounge. For four it felt spacious.  Six would be fine, but cosy.  But there's no way I could see six people fitting in their ski boots into the ski locker without them getting wet from snow dripping off the skis and other  boots - four was a jigsaw, which we failed on the first time and had to dry out our boots the second morning with a hair dryer - not very eco-friendly, I know!  The problem with the ski lockers is simply that there's no use of the wall of the locker to be able to slot boots onto pegs upside down, which is all it would take.

Your bed linen and towels are provided, so you don't need to lug that with you on the train, which is very helpful. Towels for the spa are provided too, but in good eco-friendly style, they invite you to keep them all week.

When you check in you are given a little cardboard box containing 6 dishwasher tablets.  In the apartment, you will find a teeny-tiny bottle of eco washing up liquid, a dish washing sponge, but no tea-towel. They are giving you a clear message that you will use the super efficient dishwasher provided rather than wasting lots of their precious hot water on washing up!

There's a row of recycling bins across the road from the apartments, and instructions about this in their booklet.  Most packaging is recycled, but they don't take yoghurt pots - that's a French thing that I have never understood and must investigate one day!  Surprisingly, for somewhere professing to be eco-friendly, there's nowhere for food waste.  Obviously if you are going eco, you will not be generating a lot of food waste, but we did have a chicken carcass, banana skins and such like to dispose of.  From my research, I have learnt how important it is to keep organic waste out of landfill. So the fact that there's no separate food waste recycling was disappointing, but again that's a France thing (and yes I'll look into it sometime soon) and not really something within the power of the apartment block, though I did think that it was a shame the residents' waste was not used for heating.  Surely that would have been an option these days?

For skiers, the biggy is of course how easy it is to get to the lifts and get home again.  Well, getting to the lifts was a doddle.  Skis out of the locker, cross the very quiet road onto the side of a ski slope , put your skis on and enjoy a gentle green run down to a choice of two chair lifts.  In the evening, you need to be at the Serre Thibaud chair lift by 4.25 pm and there's an easy blue (or hard red / black if you must) which takes you home.  In April, ski-in ski out places are not always that, but this one was.  However, I will say that the bottom of the run got slushy most days which Mr Pitt and I both found hard work on the legs at the end of the day.  Still, you don't go skiing if you don't enjoy a bit of a challenge and it was always a great feeling to get so close to the door on your skis.

The apartment had a well stocked and designed kitchen, so eating in was a pleasure, particularly because next door to the apartment block was a warm and friendly and very inviting little grocery / delicatessen called the Coccimarket.  In fact, it was so inviting that other than the first night when we found take away pizza, chips and salad from 'La Capitaine' as we'd missed the supermarket, we actually chose to eat in every night.

So what did we do to be eco-friendly, food-wise?

• We took our own reusable shopping bags
• We shopped daily so that we only bought what we needed and didn't waste anything unnecessarily.
• We went for fresh seasonal vegetables and avoided packaged food.  The meat was fresh and local, with an adequate variety for the week.  There were different meats available each evening. 
• We bought some cheese, sauscisson sec and honey from a local producer who had a stall in the foyer of the apartment block on the second evening.
• We brought fresh bread daily from the bakery and toasted what was left in the morning for breakfast.  We saved up the bread crumbs from the chopping board and used them to make some breaded pork escalopes one night and other days we put the bread crumbs on the balcony for the birds - and they cleaned up in no time!
• We used up leftovers, when we had them, the next evening by adding them to what we were eating, or having them as a starter and yes, I confess, I ate chilli for breakfast on the last morning - but you know, I had a long train journey and there was just no point in wasting it.   
• The supermarket was a great help as there was plenty of fresh unpackaged food, and they sold things singly - including eggs! You could also buy home-made jam which you could buy a small quantity of in your own pot.  They did this at the bakery too.
• We made baguette sandwiches for the train journey home which finished up our jar of mustard and we took the remaining lettuce in a bag to eat like crisps on the train.  We kept the paper from our daily purchases of baguette to wrap our sandwiches in for the train.

Any eco-disasters? Yes!

We spotted a lovely looking mountain hut advertising lasagne and paninis, so we went there for lunch one day.  Never again.  The lasagne was only pasta and bechamel sauce and was so awful it was inedible and you can probably imagine how much that pained us to leave food uneaten.  The etiquette at the place was to put stuff into a bin, but we decided to leave the uneaten lasagne on the table, so that they would see that it was inedible.  The waitress had made a face at it when she collected it from the chef, so we were pretty sure they'd get the message, but unfortunately my Italian was not up to an explanation.  The place was lovely but they need to change their lasagne supplier!

So, now for the big question.  Can any skiing holiday be eco-friendly?  All that energy required for the lifts!  I'm sure it can't be.  So all you can do is think about making up for it in other ways as much as you can.

These days the ski-passes are reusable, so don't forget to give yours back at the end of your stay - and get back your 3 euro deposit.

Don't buy skis (yes I did all those years ago when I lived in a ski resort and was using them every day - but they are now languishing in my garage).  As well as the added carbon footprint (and effort) of transporting your skis to the resort, the technology has changed over the years.  Skis get out of date.  It is best to hire and get the latest technology while the skis get good use made of them.  As I was skiing on my hire skis and wondering what it would be like to ski on my old skis I wondered what happened to all those old style skis.  As we left the resort, however, I did find out what had happened to a number of them as I noticed that the fences to the fields were made up of tall, slim old style skis!

Next year, though, I'm thinking about getting even more eco-friendly with my skiing and going entirely for cross country skiing and snow-shoe walking. The only energy used then (other than the embodied energy of the equipment of course) is my own. A great advantage of choosing cross country skiing is that a ski pass for the week cost 43 euros as compared to the 199.50 euros of a downhill ski pass. And if you think that the adrenalin rush won't be the same - just you try it...  I remember it well from my mountain-dwelling days.  You can't beat the feeling of getting to the summit entirely under your own steam! 

Zenith were great.  They explained the train travel and organised to book the Paris to Oulx bit on the first day the tickets went on sale, which is three months prior to the travel date. They got us discounts on ski hire and ski passes as well as providing the taxi to and from the station, and getting in some provisions for the first evening/ morning.  I'm not a package holiday kind of girl, but sometimes it just makes sense.

If I book again, which I quite likely will, I'd be tempted to book the Eurostar tickets actually with Eurostar the first day possible which is 4 months prior to travel.  Our tickets this time were through Rail Europe.  There was no problem at all with them, but we did arrive back at the Eurostar in good time for an earlier train, and there was very much a 'don't give a damn attitude' from the lady at the Eurostar reception when I asked if we could be allowed on the earlier train.  She said there was nothing she could do because it was booked through an agent and we'd have to contact the agent.

I've travelled with Eurostar before when speaking at conferences in Paris and remember once being put on the earlier train even though I'd actually paid less for my ticket then than I did this time.

Oh yes,  next time I'll pack a tea towel too!

Cooking up the stock

It is amazing how delicious stock made from vegetable peelings can be! It is so easy and costs hardly anything at all to make.  I can't believe we've only just realised.

We've been cooking up our chicken carcasses for many years, usually adding a bit of onion or leek and some herbs to the pot. In an effort to reduce food waste and get more from our food generally we started to add bits of vegetable peel, carrot tops, the trimmings from leeks etc, which featured in my book, 101 Ways to Live Cleaner and Greener for Free. This makes a most delicious stock which we use as a base for making soups and risotto, both of which are great ways of making a cheap meal and using up leftovers as you can put anything in them really. (It's Tip 6 on page 23!)

But then we didn't have chicken for a while.  Gradually the stock in our tiny freezer diminished but the desire / need / longing for lovely warming home-made soup didn't.  That's when Mr Pitt had the idea of trying just the vegetable peel.

So out came an old ice cream tub and all week long we gathered up all the off cuts and peel from every meal we made. In went the carrot ends, the onion peel, potato peel, the floppy green ends off the leeks. A couple of apple cores went in and some orange peel and then into the stock pot to get boiled up just like we'd do with our chicken carcass, but without the chicken.

The vegetable peel stock in progress.

It works!  The ice cream tub is now fully and permanently employed. We've been collecting all our vegetable peelings, keeping them in the ice cream tub in the fridge so we can have a regular boil up even without the meat.

The compost heap doesn't seem to mind.  The peelings get there eventually, but we get more value from them first.

Bon appetit!

Risotto made with vegetable peel stock.

 I think the people at Part-time Carnivore, Come Veg With Me and Love Food Hate Waste,  will like love this, but I wonder what Nigella and Jamie would say?

The Swishing Challenge

I've set myself a little challenge this year.

I'm not going to buy any new clothes for the whole of 2013!

Do you fancy joining me?

We can't all do it, because we need someone to keep at least the more ethical parts of our clothing industry afloat, but if you want to take up a challenge, be kind to the environment and save money too, then here's the plan... For the whole of 2013 I will not purchase any new item of clothing. At the same time I'm going to consider what's in my wardrobe and what I actually wear. I am going to select two items every month and take them to one of my local charity shops.

So does that mean no new clothes at all? No 'new' clothes.  That's right.  But clothes that are 'new to me' are allowed. For specific occasions I'm opting for second hand or "preloved" items. The thing about preloved fashion is that someone loved it enough once to buy it and loved it enough to pass it on when they no longer had use for it. So all it needs is for someone to love it again. I like that!

It's funny how when you make a decision like this, things happen that fit perfectly into your plan.  They were probably happening already, but you weren't attuned to them and so they passed you by un-noticed.

I was walking down Watling Street in Towcester and a red dress caught my eye in the window of a shop.  I didn't allow myself to pay it too much attention because I'm not buying new clothes, remember!  But as I walked back past on the other side of the street the name of the shop caught my eye and I just had to go in. "Re:Love".

From the outside the shop, looked like an exclusive boutique, inside was a very warm welcome from Jackie and Caroline and some very inclusive prices.  This is just the sort of shop I love, somewhere you can find that piece that's a bit different, something that is really you rather than just this year's latest fashion, that everyone is wearing.

An old favourite I hadn't worn
for a while is feeling loved again!

So the first part of the challenge is going well so far.  I've managed two months and bought no clothes at all.

Down-sizing my wardrobe, is going to be a struggle, because I'm a natural hoarder.  I've heard all that stuff before - if you haven't worn it for a year then you should let it go.  But I often like to dig out an old favourite that's been lying long lost at the forgotten end of my wardrobe.

The thing is though, I do love a challenge.  So now it is set, I'm determined.



Despite my in-built reluctance to part with things,  I picked out two dresses in January that I haven't worn for a long time.

  They are ''occasion' dresses.  I've worn them both at weddings.  But I thought that next time I have an 'occasion'  I have newer favourites that are likely to be chosen over these two, or I might find something that is 'new to me'.



For February's charity shop offering, firstly I've picked a shirt I love the style of, but know it is not my best colour!

Secondly, here's a skirt I adore, but have only ever been able to wear it with a safety pin at the waist.  I have heard lots of people say they keep clothes that are just a bit too small.  I heard someone the other day refer to 'incentive jeans'.  But keeping something that is too big? Silly me!  I hope someone else finds it, fits it and loves it for me soon.

The Food Waste Scandal

It is good to see that the horrendous amount of food that we waste is a hot topic in the press this week. This is something that we have to act on to keep the conversation going until we actually do something about reducing the appalling waste that is a global concern. It is hitting the headlines because of a new study by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers. They say "it is estimated that 30–50% (or 1.2–2 billion tonnes) of all food produced never reaches a human stomach. Furthermore, this figure does not reflect the fact that large amounts of land, energy, fertilisers and water have also been lost in the production of foodstuffs which simply end up as waste. This level of wastage is a tragedy that cannot continue if we are to succeed in the challenge of sustainably meeting our future food demands."

When I was researching my book about reducing waste, 101 Ways to Live Cleaner and Greener for Free,  I read Tristram Stuart's Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal.  Reading Stuart's book and writing the Reducing Food Waste section of my book, made me realise how much food we waste in my family, even though we have long tried not to.

 I'd carefully store leftovers in the fridge so as not to waste, only to forget about them.  'Why throw it away now when you can put it in the fridge and throw it away on Thursday?' was a common family joke. But in writing some of the shocking figures about food waste that you can find in my book and will be hearing in the news this week, we became only too aware that we could do a lot better.

So, we started our 'Waste Not' campaign.

Plan you meals
First of all, we went back to planning our meals, like I used to when the children were little. In planning (see Tip 3 from 101 Ways...), I'd always make sure I included something that either cooked from frozen or from store cupboard ingredients as we'd often find we'd all be out on occasions.

Portion Control
Secondly, we made an effort to portion control.  You don't need to cut up and cook a whole head of broccoli and/or cauliflower for a family meal for 6 people.  I know roughly who eats what in our family so I started cutting a set number of florets for each person - and that's often only one of each..  That way we had some left for in the week or we'd use the rest the next week.  We cut down on the amount of meat we bought for a joint.  We'd long had a habit of cooking enough for unexpected guests.  But in fact, you can always do a bit more veg from the store cupboard if you do have extras.  We managed to get the portions under control.  My husband said, 'Oh dear, I didn't cook enough' the first few times it all got eaten in one sitting.  But we just kept reminding ourselves that we were reducing waste.

Do You Need to Peel?
We also made sure we wasted as little of what we were preparing as possible. So, if carrots didn't need peeling, we didn't peel them.  If they did need peeling, we'd put the peelings and the ends in the stock pot to boil up for soups (see Tip 6).  We'd cook up the outer leaves of the cauliflower instead of having cabbage. And we always eat the stalk of the broccoli raw.  Just peel off the outer bit, which tends to be woody, and cut into strips.  Taste it for yourself! It is delicious and nutritious.

Leftovers for Lunch
I started checking the freezer for small portions of frozen leftovers that I could have for lunch while I was at home writing, instead of always making a sandwich.

Bag a Bargain
When we were shopping for something to eat on the day, we started to check the reduced items in supermarkets, .  Not only did we feel we were reducing food waste, we were bagging a bargain at the same time.

Finish Up What's in the Freezer
So for 2013, we are going to keep up the good work. Money is tight this month - it took a five month break from work to sit down and write my book! - so we have decided to use up the stocks in the freezer as well as continuing to reduce waste and squeeze every ounce of goodness out of any food we buy.  That way we will be able to let our finances recover as well as making sure we don't end up with stuff that's been in the freezer for five years that we no longer fancy using.

So, January is going to be the month for 'Wait and See Pie', 'Surprise Stew' and 'I'll Decide What's for Tea When I've Defrosted It'.

So far, we've had turkey curry and turkey, bacon and leek in white wine sauce. And it wasn't even this year's turkey - our portion control is now so good we used up all the turkey within 3 days, except for a bit of stock we froze for soup.

The turkey curry was an adaptation of Hugh Fearnley-Wittingstall's chicken curry recipe from  The River Cottage Family Cookbook and the turkey, bacon and leek dish was made using a béchamel sauce.

Tonight's delight will be Jamie Oliver's Prawns with Chilli, Parsley, Ginger and Garlic on Toast (Happy Days with the Naked Chef - remember that one?) as I found two packets of prawns at the back of the freezer from when we'd bought them on BOGOF probably! Bon appetit!

Christmas Shopping in the Bag

So, the book is finished and available on Kindle.  The paperback is on its way to the printers, but is out of my hands at the moment.  That can only mean one thing...

Yes, I have to accept that it is nearly Christmas!

And that means ... Christmas shopping, planning the social calendar with family and friends, buying Christmas cards, deciding what to eat... and opening the door to Harry Potter's bedroom to find all the stuff I stashed from last Christmas.

Some people (like my lovely sister) have amazing abilities with tissue paper and curling ribbon, but I'm not one of them. So having arrived home from my shopping trip to Bath Christmas Market, where I managed to find lovely local foodie Christmas presents for all the family (hope they aren't reading this blog), I then wondered how I was going to manage to wrap up these goodies.  I can't deny the smug grin that crossed my face when I got down my pile of accumulated gift bags that gets stashed at the top of the cupboard under the stairs (Harry Potter's bedroom) each year.  I have more than enough bags in all shapes and sizes to sort out this year's Christmas wrap.

If you didn't do it last year, don't miss out this year.  Grab those discarded gift bags, ribbons, bows etc and you will save yourself time and money next year, as well as doing your little bit towards a greener Christmas. If, like me,  you did store away a stash of stuff from last Christmas, join me in allowing that smug smile to lighten up the Christmas countdown. There are advantages to being 'green'!

Blackberry Crumble

Throughout this month I have been doing a lot of research about food waste for my forthcoming book.  I was horrified to discover that in the UK we waste 8 million tonnes of food and drink every year. That's a huge carbon footprint for absolutely no need!

Reading about food waste and its carbon footprint has certainly focussed my attention on trying not to waste food myself.  Any food waste I do have goes to my compost bin or my wormery and will then get used to grow future years' vegetables and for potting up my non-hardy plants to over winter them in my conservatory which has really just become a green house.

We will always have food waste, because even if we use our banana skins to fertilise our roses, it is still food waste.  I can't imagine we are ever going to eat our banana skins and I don't imagine we will eat our tea leaves and coffee grains either.  But much of our 8 million tonnes of annual food waste is thought to be avoidable.  That is, we are wasting food that we could have eaten.

I have actually bought very little since thinking so much about food waste.  My weekly shop is now tiny.  That is partly because I have a few vegetables in the garden but also because I am making sure I use up everything I buy.  A couple of weeks ago I bought two chicken breasts from the butcher's - proper whole chicken breasts - not the trimmed pre-packed ones we see in supermarkets.  I made a casserole with them which provided one main meal and then I used up the remaining casserole liquid as a pasta sauce and used the chicken in a sandwich, then in risotto and then boiled up the bones with some leek trimmings and onion peel to make stock for soup.  I'll admit that when my grandma asked me to stay for lunch and share the cooked chicken she had asked me to buy from the supermarket I had to suppress the 'Oh no, not chicken again' thought.  But it did make me realise that I had probably been buying and wasting far too much food.

Now I am buying much less and so I have much more chance of making sure that I use every scrap of food I buy.  But I also realised how much food there was around me that was going for free - just in my garden.

I have often joked that my best vegetable crop is nettles, but I rarely use them in cooking, though I did make a batch of mini quiches with some nettles I pulled up from around a row of carrots and they were delicious.  But all in all I have always thought that there is a lot more in my garden that might be edible and so  I decided to invest in a little help in the form of Richard Mabey's Collins Gem book, 'Food For Free'

I had no idea that you could eat so many leaves and berries, that fat hen can be cooked and used like spinach and that mallow leaves can be deep fried into crisps!

My experimentation is yet to start.  I haven't exactly been adventurous with my harvesting this weekend. Yesterday I combined a bit of gardening with some blackberry picking, so now I'm off to make a crumble.  But, the carrot peel and other vegetable trimmings from this evening's roast dinner are in the stock pot awaiting the chicken carcass and I'm planning to use the resulting stock to make some nettle soup and next weekend I'm going to try out Richard Mabey's recipe for 'Autumn Pudding'.