HUGH'S programe

[Hazel at the Hill]

Yep - better produced meat is more expensive so you have to make it go further. Fair enough - I bought a lb of venison at the farmers market on Friday (£4.50) - by the time I'd chopped in:

• a couple of home grown onions
• a punnet of mushrooms (all right, they were from Tesco)
• a handful each of my blue lake french beans, barlotti beans and black turtle beans (all duly soaked and boiled)
• a couple of rashers of ridiculously expensive Gloucester black spot bacon rashers
• third bottle of homemade red wine
• a couple of tablespoons of homemade runny seville orange marmalade

the resulting casserole has split into 7 dishes.

And it tastes bloody good too.

I have no problem buying a £8-£10 freerange chicken when I know that without trying too hard I'll get a couple of roast dinners, about 4 pies and a couple of portions of soup out of it - about a pound a portion, which is not exactly breaking the bank, is it?

[Flummery]

We would have bread and jam for tea too Snadger. But my mum had made the bread and the jam. I wonder how much nourishment (and flavourings and preservatives and anti-oxidants etc) would be in shop bought bread and jam today?

[Hazel at the Hill]

But my mum had made the bread and the jam. I wonder how much nourishment (and flavourings and preservatives and anti-oxidants etc) would be in shop bought bread and jam today?

Not to mention salt which seems to be bunged into virtually everything these days.

[JanieB]

Grandpadragon,

Eeeeugh. I can't stand corned beef, it's even worse than spam. I'm not a lover of anything salty (I don't eat crisps), and I'm violently allergic to beetroot .

So Hazel,

They had massive amounts of salt in previous eras (as a preservative).

My favourite meal when I was growing up was beef stew and dumplings. A real treat on a Friday when we got back from school. We were weekly boarders and not fed particularly well at school.

My Dad was a great believer in offal being good for you. As a doctor he was always bringing back "stuff". He also went shooting for hares, rabbits, pheasants etc for the pot. The only things I wouldn't eat (and still wouldn't) were chitterlings, brains, pig's head brawn, pig's ears.

My MIL, a farmer's daughter, wife and mother, wouldn't touch offal. She said it was only for the really poor - like gypsies etc.

My Dad had a really good veggie garden. He did most of the gardening himself until I was about 12 when he took on more work so employed a gardener. And when I married, I rarely bought fruit and veg as it was provided by myself growing it and from the farm garden. And the hedgerows.

It's only in the last 10 or so years I've had to buy and now I intend to go back to growing it again. I don't eat much meat anyway but what I do eat is bought from our local butcher and as I used to do his bookkeeping I know where it comes from .

[Alison]

My Dad was a great believer in offal being good for you. As a doctor he was always bringing back "stuff".

What was he bringing back from his surgery?????

[JanieB]

Alison, you really, really don't want the answer to that .

[OverWyreGrower]

We hardly ever buy a whole chicken....

We get all our meat from the local butchers, and the meat is reared locally. It's mostly free range, but not "certified" organic. The Hindquarter Website

They make their own mince, sausages, black pudding, cure their own bacon etc.

It's not cheap. Well, not compared to supermarket meat and special offers etc. But I know where it has come from and I trust the people that own/run it.

If we were to buy chicken, we'd either buy chicken breasts or diced chicken (which is the chicken from everywhere else), depending on what we wanted to do with it.

[carlseawolf]

a big thank you to everyone who voted and the lively chat that followed and the future for chickens looks bright according to the results.
just in case you where not the next to post after me then i voted 2 for £5 but changing and will be staying that way as the chicken we had last sunday was lovely ( free range from tesco £4.90 ) so we buy one chicken rather than two and eat more veg instead.

[Shortie]

Agree there Carl... Bought my first ever Free Range chicken breasts yesterday and had them as HM kebabs. I'm a convert.

They didn't shrink (no water pumped in I guess), the meat was thicker and tastier, and I filled up much, much quicker so will need less going forward

[Grandpadragon]

Grandpadragon,

Eeeeugh. I can't stand corned beef, it's even worse than spam. I'm not a lover of anything salty (I don't eat crisps), and I'm violently allergic to beetroot .

Oh Dear I quite like spam to I make the corned beef hash, deliberately too much and then the next day I have to eat it up and so make it like potato cakes and fry it very fattening, but for me one of the lost tastes of childhood.

[chrissie the chippy]

With knowing how many meals we can get from a chicken, we go free range, or try too!

I went to tescos the other day and the shelves were heaving with 2 for £5!!! Kind of an if you want chicken, you can buy ours! I had trouble finding the free range chicken, it had almost disappeared! I'd have thought after the programme they would have stocked their shelves up with more free range...... can't change it if they wont allow us to buy it to create a demand for it

Thinking of trying to find a local farm to get ours from and avoiding tescos, they really painted themselves in a bad light for that documentary!

Trying to get my mum to have some chickens in her garden.... not sure I've got room on the lottie and have a feeling the local kids would have quite a bit of fun with them

[SarzWix]

Has anyone seen this?
Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall was offered access to intensive poultry unit
Why do you think this wasn't shown on the programme?
I'm a bit disappointed to be honest, I think if they did have footage, we should have been shown it. Not that it would have changed my buying choices as we were already buying about 80% free-range/organic anyway.

[Nicos]

Did you notice that in Hugh's programme Jamie said he'd never been in an intensively farmed chicken shed before- and yet in his own programme he was being shown round one!!
Makes you wonder which way round that was too!! ( ckicken or egg situation??)

[SarzWix]

Ye-e-es... Does make you wonder...
It's a bit daft of them to do that really, just gives people an excuse to 'pick' at the facts of what they said or did rather than face the genuine issues raised.
Still, the Co-op was sold out of Organic & Elmwood chickens again, so defo still makin a difference

[The Doctor]

Changing tack back a little, I agree with the point mentioned before about the fact that we don't need to eat meat in our diet. However, nutritionally, neither do we need to use lovely recipes to make any food appealing to look at and taste nice.

We do these things because it makes the eating experience more pleasurable, and that is the same reason I eat meat. I eat it in combination with a balanced diet (my wife makes sure of this!), and eat it as often as I can because I enjoy it so much.

I guess the key bit here isn't the fact that I eat it often, but the fact that I eat it little and often.

On another slightly different point, I think the root of the problem here is partly that people have forgotten where their food (in the form of meat) comes from. They don't like being shown the conditions animals live in, or being killed because it reminds them of something they had probably chosen to ignore.

Personally, I am a great believer in the fact that if you are not prepared to go through the process of killing your own meat to eat it, then you shouldn't, and since many of the people I know don't agree, I guess this is kind of controversial.

I'm not saying you need to have personally killed it (and for some I do it, because I see it as part of the whole process of 'respect') only that you would be prepared to do so if need be, and to make that decision you need to be fully aware of what it entails, rather than burying your head in the sand.