Welcome!

Having relocated from my previous wordpress blog, this page contains a handful of posts dating back a few months that I have copied and pasted, and new ones will appear on a regular basis. Here's a few words of introduction.....

Me, and my girlfriend Melissa, live in Newcastle. We don’t have a ton of cash to spend on food on a weekly basis – far from it, but we do believe that good quality food shouldn’t be the preserve of those with money to spare. Here’s a bit of a run down on where we tend to buy our food:

Meat – We eat meat on average 2-3 times a week, and when we do it’s from free range, often organic or rare breed animals. A monthly visit to Newcastle farmer’s market to stock up the freezer constitutes the bulk of our meat shopping – organic chicken, rare breed pork, local wild game, Northumbrian beef or lamb – the quality is almost always stunning. Yes, it costs slightly more than cheap supermarket meat but we eat less of it, never waste any, and enjoy the meat considerably more than we ever would if we were to eat cheap, intensively farmed meat every day. We seem to manage to spend around £20 each on meat per month.

Veg – We get a weekly large veg bag from the North East Organic Growers – £11 a week plus £1.70 for a side order of bananas and lemons. This seems to last us the majority of the week without much need for topping up on veg elsewhere. The variety of seasonal veg has been a real joy since we started the scheme and it’s the contents of the veg bag more than anything that seem to dictate our meals every week. Highly recommended!

Fish – We try and eat sustainably caught (and ideally local and freshly caught) fish on a weekly basis – not always easy to find in Newcastle itself although the fishmonger in Grainger Market sometimes has some nice fish. Mackerel is a favourite as are red mullet, squid, lemon sole – whatever looks good on the day. M&S seems to have a relatively extensive selection of prepackaged fish these days too, with the advantage that you can usually tell how fresh it is by looking at the use by date. It’s not local but at least supermarkets like M&S seem to be stocking more and more line caught, MSC certified fish.

Other stuff – Our local free range eggs tend to come from ‘Mmmm…’ Deli in Grainger Market (£1.25/half dozen) as does our bread flour and local rapeseed oil (£3.50 per refill). Cheese comes from the cheesemonger in Grainger Market, or the farmers market. Anything else we generally get at Waitrose, including the local Acorn Dairy organic milk and cream.

Shopping locally and not having to depend entirely on a weekly supermarket shop is a cost effective and healthy way to shop, and provided you’re able to find a spare half hour or so every couple of days to do your shopping it doesn’t require a huge amount of effort. It’s a lot more fun than pushing a trolley down the aisle of a supermarket, and I think the more we can enjoy the whole process of feeding ourselves – buying/growing the produce, cooking/preparing and, of course, eating it, the happier we’ll be. Certainly works for us anyway!