Making herb beers

Cheers!

Recently while perusing the fascinating A Modern Herbal by M. Grieve, from 1931, I came across the following paragraph under 'Nettles':
'The Nettle Beer made by cottagers is often given to their old folk as a remedy for gouty and rheumatic pains, but apart from this purpose it forms a pleasant drink. It may be made as follows: Take 2 gallons of cold water and a good pailful of washed young Nettle tops, add 3 or 4 large handfuls of Dandelion, the same of Clivers (Goosegrass) and 2oz. of bruised whole ginger. Boil gently for 40 minutes, then strain and stir in 2 teacupsful of brown sugar. When lukewarm place on the top a slice of toasted bread, spread with 1oz. of compressed yeast, stirred until liquid with a teaspoon of sugar. Keep it fairly warm for 6 or 7 hours, then remove the scum and stir in a tablespoonful of cream of tartar.  Bottle and tie the corks securely. The result is a specially wholesome sort of ginger beer. The juice of 2 lemons may be substituted for the Dandelion and Clivers. Other herbs are often added to Nettles in the making of Herb Beer, such as Burdock, Meadowsweet, Avens Horehound, the combination making a refreshing summer drink.'

Lemon balm

I immediately set to experimenting with that and the result is indeed a very refreshing lightly alcoholic drink. Initially I steamed the herbs, then tried boiling them for 20 minutes but now I infuse them for 24 hours, the same as for elderflower cordial. The results are all very similar. Since the infusion method is easiest and uses least energy, I will stick to using that.

Since we aim to use only local ingredients, I replaced the ginger with lemon balm, which we have aplenty and which gives a nice citrus tang.

Here are a couple of nice & easy recipes to try. No doubt, more variations will follow as more herbs and fruit become available throughout the year.

Spring weed beer

Bottling time

Makes 5 litres

Ingredients
A pillowcase full of nettle tops, dandelion flowers, cleavers (sticky willy) and lemon balm
A handful of wild hops (optional)
500g sugar
1 tsp brewing yeast
1/4 cup sugar for bottling

1. Pick your ingredients and put them in a large pot.
2. Cover with boiling water (2-3 litres) and leave to infuse for 24 hours. 
3. Strain and boil for 5 minutes.
4. Pour the liquid into a large fermenting bucket with lid, stir in 500g of sugar and top up to the 5-litre mark with cold water (and ice cubes to make it cool faster).
5. Leave to cool to 25C and add the yeast.
6. Ferment for a week.
7. Dissolve 1/4 sugar in 1 cup of warm water and pour into a sterilised demi-john or similar large container. 
8. Syphon the brew from the fermenting bucket into the demi-john, to get rid of the sediment and mix in the bottling sugar.
9. Bottle the beer immediately in sterilised bottles and leave to bottle condition for at least five days. 
10. Serve chilled. 

Elderflower beer

Elderflowers in our hedge

Makes 5 litres

Ingredients
30 elderflower heads
A few sprigs of lemon verbena
500g sugar
1 tsp brewing yeast
1/4 cup sugar for bottling

1. Pick your ingredients and put them in a large pot.
2. Cover with boiling water (2-3 litres) and leave to infuse for 24 hours. 
3. Strain and boil for 5 minutes.
4. Pour the liquid into a large fermenting bucket with lid, stir in 500g of sugar and top up to the 5-litre mark with cold water (and ice cubes to make it cool faster).
5. Leave to cool to 25C and add the yeast.
6. Ferment for a week.
7. Dissolve 1/4 sugar in 1 cup of warm water and pour into a sterilised demi-john. 
8. Syphon the brew from the fermenting bucket into the demi-john, to get rid of the sediment and mix in the bottling sugar.
9. Bottle the beer immediately in sterilised bottles and leave to bottle condition for at least five days. 
10. Serve chilled, on its own or with a measure of gin and some ice.

Slash your food miles: go local

Rhubarb, one of the earliest crops of the year

Scottish kimchi veg mix

A big part of being self-reliant means relying on home-grown and locally grown produce rather than buying imported food stuffs. Apart from cutting out unnecessary food miles and the pollution they bring, this also has the benefit of reconnecting us to the seasons, learning what is around at what time of year, what can be foraged and what is grown commercially around us. By sticking to what’s in season locally (or at least in your country), you only eat what’s freshest and therefore tastiest and most nutritious.

Until you start growing yourself, it can be hard to know what is in season. We found it very encouraging just how much we can grow throughout the year in our maritime climate, and this can even be extended further with a polytunnel, greenhouse, conservatory, cloches or a simple home-made cold frame.

We particularly like the way seasonal eating divides up the year. There is always something different to look forward to in every season: rhubarb, globe artichokes, broad beans, strawberries, new potatoes, raspberries, apples, Brussels sprouts. It’s a shift from ‘what do I feel like eating’ to ‘what is there to eat’, but once it’s made it comes very naturally. And, once you’re used to the intense flavours of your home-grown produce, exotic supermarket fruit and veg tend to taste bland – no wonder when they’ve been picked before they’re ripe. We’d rather have our chemical-free frozen berries in the winter than buy any ‘fresh’ supermarket berries from the southern hemisphere!

However, eating local and seasonal food doesn’t mean that you can’t experience the joys of world cuisine – you just have to be a bit flexible with the ingredients. We recently started making what we call ‘Scotchi’, kimchi made using only Scottish ingredients. You’d be hard pressed to guess that it didn’t have any ginger in it since the tang from the locally foraged hogweed seeds is very similar. Since we like Asian cooking we have even gone so far as to make our fish sauce from own-caught pollock, garlic and herbs from the garden. However, if you don’t want to go to these lengths you could substitute fish sauce for something with a similar umami flavour, like lovage, which is also a great replacement for MSG.

Scottish kimchi

• Mix of homegrown veggies, some crunchy (such as swede, Jerusalem artichoke, mooli radish, celeriac, turnip, oca, beetroot, carrot), some leafy (such as Oriental greens, spinach, kale, any kind of cabbage)
• British sea salt
• Alliums for the sauce: spring onions, chives, onion, plenty of garlic (quantities will depend on your amount of veg, we usually use one onion, one bulb of garlic, about 10 spring onions and a bunch of chives for making about 4L of kimchi)
• Spices for the sauce: 1 tsp home-made chilli and pepper powder (use none or less if you don’t like it spicy – this will make a ‘white’ kimchi), 1 tsp hogweed seeds, 1 tsp homemade fish sauce (or ½ tsp lovage seeds for vegetarians)
• ¼ cup Scottish oat flour (milled oatmeal)
• 1 Tbsp juice from a previous batch (optional)

1. Chop, grate, shred your veggies.
2. Make a salt solution of 1 tbsp sea salt per 250ml and submerge your veg in this brine for 24 hours. Weigh it down with a small chopping board or similar to keep the vegetables covered. After 24 hours, drain well but don’t rinse.
3. The next day, make a porridge from the oat flour and leave to cool.
4. In the meantime, blend your mix of alliums and spices in a mini chopper, food processor or similar. Mix the spice blend into the cooled porridge and add a little juice from a previous ferment if available.

The recipe is very flexible, and you’ll soon get a feel for how much sauce you need. It is a wonderful way to use up vegetables throughout the year and you’ll have ready-made salad in the fridge at any time. We love the energy buzz from fermented foods such as kimchi and usually have a little kimchi snack every day.

Local substitutes

Don’t get hung up about exotic ingredients in your recipes. Most of them can be easily substituted for local ones. All you need to think about is what the ingredient does to the dish. Here’s some substitutes we use:

Lemon:    Japanese quince, lemon basil, juice from seabuckthorn berries, a strong infusion of lemon balm or lemon verbena. Lemon balm is available almost all year round here and grows very vigorously.
Ginger:     Hogweed seeds, which can be easily foraged and dried.
Aniseed:     Wild fennel seeds
Rice flour, corn flour:    Oat flour
Guacamole, hummus:    Broad bean hummus
Rice:    Pearl barley, cracked wheat
Black pepper:     Chopped up Vietnamese coriander
Stock cubes, MSG:     Lovage, leaves or seeds
Exotic beans, soya beans and other dried pulses:    Homegrown bean varieties that work in our climate, the dried or frozen podded beans keep very well – good way to use up a runner bean glut
Cucumber in the winter and spring:     Salad burnet, borage flowers and young leaves
Courgettes in the off season:    Winter squash
Garlic after it’s run out in late spring:     Garlic chives, wild garlic
Vanilla, pandan leaf:     Sweet woodruff, meadowsweet
Saffron:    Dried calendula (though you could grow the saffron crocus here)
Liquorice:    Liquorice mint – in fact, you can replace a lot of things with specialty mint varieties
Exotic nuts:    Hazel and cob nuts
Breakfast cereals:    Porridge – the original and still the best
Sweet potatoes:     Heritage potatoes, sweet and starchy squash varieties
Vegetable oil (contains palm oil), olive oil:    Cold-pressed Scottish rapeseed oil
Wine vinegar:    Cider vinegar, homebrew vinegar
Balsamic vinegar:    Elderberry balsamic

Seabuckthorn berries

Another part of discovering what’s around locally is to go foraging. This could be for mushrooms, wild garlic, elderflowers, hogweed seeds, berries such as brambles, elderberries, bilberries, wild raspberries or seabuckthorn berries, seaweeds such as dulse or various greens, like sea beet or rock samphire. Foraging is a good excuse to go for a walk, if nothing else!

Eating seasonal food can mean less choice, except during the height of summer, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Too much choice can be overwhelming and stressful. We tend to have a lot of soups and casseroles in the winter and lots of mixed salads in the summer, but the ingredients vary depending on the month. And a nice leafy garden salad, courtesy of the polytunnel and some hardy outdoor salad plants such as lamb’s lettuce, claytonia and salad burnet, is especially appreciated in the winter months. Go on, cut down those food miles!

Recycle and reuse a dud dishwasher

Many, no doubt, would regard a dishwasher as one of life's necessities. It is, of course, a luxury item, but it's one that always used to sit at or near the top of our list of favourite labour-saving devices. When we moved to the homestead, we started fresh with new kitchen appliances, pushing the boat out to go for A+++ energy ratings all-round, with a view to saving energy and cash in the long run.

Just look at that draining board!

A+++ dishwashers are few and far between and the budget wouldn't stretch to the top of the range premium brand names, so we were pleased to find one available in the next tier.

Long story short, it turned out to be hideously unreliable. Never before (and may it never be repeated) have we owned an appliance in such frequent need of repair. Naturally, this behaviour only manifested just after the end of the guarantee period.

We nursed it along for another couple of years but finally enough was enough. Its latest breakdown was also its last, guaranteed.

Over the course of that dishwasher's troubled life, we decided that it would not be replaced when it died. That day arrived yesterday and so the thinking cap went on: how best to reorganise our dishwashing?

The thing is, the massive amount of cooking, baking and preserving that goes on in the RGL kitchen means a colossal pile of washing up. Here's another thing: Has anybody ever possessed a dish draining rack that they were entirely satisfied with? They're generally a bit of an eyesore, never have enough space for the larger load of dishes and always have nooks and crannies that make it absurdly difficult to keep them properly clean.

Space for fully 14 place settings, with no avalanche risk.

Now we have it: Possibly the world's best, and certainly the world's most expensive dish rack and board!

The racks in the dishwasher are, of course, excellent, but they're far too big and ugly to be seen anywhere else but inside the dishwasher, so here's what I've done.

First of all, I stripped out everything removable from the interior of the dishwasher and cleaned all the nooks and crannies inside (frightening). So, no more spray arms or any other clutter within. Next, I gutted the workings, recovering pumps, heating elements, etc., from which I hope to make a few quid on eBay.

This left a big hole in the middle of the wash chamber base, which I simply closed off by cutting a sheet of plastic to size and sealing it in place, creating an easily wiped, watertight, stainless steel drip tray.

The one bit of the workings I left in the machine is the fan drier element, which I may possibly reconnect, if we decide we want our dish cabinet to have warm air drying capability.

We now have vast dish rack capacity, out of sight, where the washing up may be conveniently left to drip dry. It's easily cleaned and sufficiently robust that it should last forever. Result.

As a final touch, with just a hint of maliciousness towards the manufacturer, I modified the branding on the front of the machine.

Remind you of anything?

Homebrew vinegar

There's a lot of hype about apple cider vinegar out there, principally surrounding all the amazing health benefits that come with consuming it. No doubt there's a lot of truth to the claims, whether or not you believe the 'hand-waving' explanations of how it works. Getting the good stuff, however, raw and unpasteurised, can be an expensive proposition.

Around a year ago, a friend asked us, "Are you making your own vinegar yet?" Good question! Hadn't really thought about it. Not very much research was required to determine that we already had nearly everything we needed to give it a try.

In the beginning: strawberry wine plus apple cider vinegar

Basic process

Here's the deal: Acetic acid bacteria in a vinegar culture convert ethanol (alcohol) into, yes, acetic acid, which is the vinegary part of vinegar. Some of the cheaper shop-bought stuff is, in fact, just acetic acid mixed with water and possibly some colouring. A true, brewed, vinegar is a much more complex mixture, full of useful vitamins, minerals and those all-important probiotics, reflected in the culture that produces it. A SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast) is what you want. This is a community of micro-organisms, derived from naturally occurring, wild populations, that work together to ferment products such as kefir, kombucha and vinegar.

Batch 3: apple cider. The SCOBY from the strawberry
vinegar is at the bottom and a new one is forming on top.

An easy way to obtain your starter culture is to invest in a quality bottle of raw, unpasteurised apple cider vinegar. The other key component is something alcoholic. If you're already a brewer of hedge wines or cider: bingo!

To start off our first batch of vinegar, we took two bottles of homemade strawberry wine (so 1.5L), poured them into a 2L bottle, added 1 cup of raw, unpasteurised apple cider vinegar, covered the top of the bottle with a clean cloth, and then left it quite alone for several months.

When next we looked, there was a fine SCOBY at the surface, which appears as a whitish and floppy disc of material. This is then retained for starting further cultures with fresh alcohol.

Using the stuff

Strawberry vinegar, in old malt vinegar bottles.

We bottled up the beautiful strawberry vinegar and started using it immediately. Given how widely apple cider vinegar is touted as a near-miraculous health tonic, we were interested to try consuming our own vinegar in the same way. Most suggest adding a spoonful of vinegar to a glass of water and this is what we now do, several times each day. It makes a lovely, refreshing beverage, with a pleasing tang to it.

As for the health benefits, well, we're both feeling good. I would certainly say that it seems to be very beneficial to the digestion. We also learned that poultry keepers have long recognised the benefits of supplementing their flock's water supply with a little brewed vinegar in their water supply. Our hens were just coming out of a heavy moult, had been off the lay for over a month and certainly looked as if they could do with a tonic. Within a month, and just at midwinter, they came back into lay. Coincidence? Who knows, but they certainly love their tonic and we're keeping it up - 1 tbsp into their 2L drinker daily. In case you're wondering if they drink that only because they have no choice, don't worry - they have several sources of water, including a small stream that flows through their area. They practically queue up to get to the tonic when it's put out.

We have since brewed a batch of gorse flower vinegar, also delicious, and have another batch of apple cider vinegar brewing now, from homemade cider. One advantage of brewing the vinegar from wine, as opposed to cider, is that you get a stronger vinegar (more alcohol = more acetic acid), which is useful if you wish to use it for pickling (minimum 5% acetic acid required).

Particularly if you're already homebrewing anyway, give this a try. The absolute deliciousness of homebrewed vinegar has been a revelation to us.

Make an eco pot scourer

The final product

Ever on the lookout for alternatives to throwaway plastic landfill items, I recently learnt that in the crofts and country kitchens of old the pot scrubbing brushes were made from heather. It's an abundantly available resource, growing in profusion on the moors round about us and though I don't imagine I'll be thatching the roof with it or making rope from it, as folks used to do, I figured I could definitely make heather pot scourers.

A web search turned up a museum photo of an old example, but nowhere could I find a write up on actually making one. Still, having seen what the finished product should look like, I was prepared to give it a go.

Tools and materials needed

• Sharp knife
• Marline or heavy-duty twine
• Chopping board
• Snips
• Bunch of heather 
• Two sets of pliers
• A second pair of hands

 

Step by step

 

1 Harvest

Step one, obviously, was to go harvest some heather. I selected reasonably straight branches, with a good spread of finer twigs at the top end, and cut lengths of approximately 8 inches.

2 Thrash

Next, I thrashed the collected bundle against a stone wall to dislodge the old flowers, leafy greens and any other loose material, before taking it all indoors to work on.

Materials and tools needed for step 3

3 Trim and tie

After trimming and shaping with a sharp knife, I collected the bundle together and bunched it into more or less its final form. Here it's tremendously helpful to have a helper to hand, first to hold the bunch while you tie on the first knot of sturdy twine and then to tug on the other end of the knot to get it cinched in tight.

The first constrictor knot

The knot I would recommend is the constrictor. If no other good comes of this than more people learning the constrictor knot, my effort will be repaid. It's easy to tie and can be tightened as securely as a jubilee clip. See the tutorial for tying this super useful knot here.

Ready for a tug of war (Step 5)

5 Tighten knots

Have a pair of pliers each for yourself and your assistant to haul in tight on the ends. Once it's tight, finish each end with an overhand knot close in to the constrictor and trim off the excess. Add a second and a third band to the scrubber handle, trim the heather to the desired finish at either end and go do the washing-up! This scourer is also very useful for brushing up crumbs on the table.

That's all that's needed

Towards zero waste

Embrace the reused glass jar

It's unlikely that zero waste is possible for humans, but we can achieve zero food waste quite easily (especially if we don't have children!) and we can also aim to reuse as much as possible and create mainly biodegradable waste.

Here are a few of the things we do, and recommend to all thinking people, to reduce our resource requirements.

Take consumer responsibility seriously

Give your business to businesses that use little and biodegradable packaging such as cardboard or compostable vegware packaging. Of course, it can be hard to tell from the outside how much packaging is used, for example individually plastic-wrapped tea bags, but you're only going to buy that brand once. And it is impossible to know what kind of packaging is used when ordering online, but again you can reserve repeat custom for ethical companies.

Similarly, if you are running a business think carefully about the amount of packaging and the material to use.

Reuse if you can

Fruit leathers in former instant coffee jars

Zero waste kitchen storage looks pretty too

Glass recycling is all very well and does save some energy compared with using virgin materials, but it still uses a lot more energy than simply reusing glass containers, either in the home or through a bottle deposit scheme. So basically never throw out another glass jar again! The low-waste way of life does require a lot of glass jars and bottles for storage and, since we are not buying anything in jars any more, we've got to the stage where we're asking all of our guests to bring spare glass jars. Keeping your dry goods, herbs, spices and snacks in glass jars also looks good in the kitchen and is hygienic, keeping stored food safe from pests.

A good way to reuse cardboard, other than using it as fire-lighting material, is as mulch in the garden, for example as part of a no-dig 'lasagna' bed or around newly planted fruit trees, bushes or hedge plants or simply as weed suppression in a new area you plan to cultivate.

As for plastic - we so rarely have plastic bottles that we had to raid our neighbour's recycling when we wanted some for storing our kvass.

Cut out single-use plastic

There is no need for single-use plastic items. Plastic straws are not one of life's necessities. If you want a takeaway coffee, take your own mug. And there are affordable alternatives to plastic plates, cups and cutlery for picnics, barbecues or parties: palm leaf compostable tableware, wooden cutlery, kraft paper cups and plates.

Use your own containers

Always have a canvas or durable plastic bag with you, in case of unanticipated purchases. Take your own bags and containers when you go shopping. If you're lucky enough to live in a country where you can buy milk direct from the farmer, such as England or Germany, you can even refill your own milk churns. Buy dry goods from bulk shops where you can refill your own containers - or buy them in bulk online when they usually come in a 25kg paper bag, which can then be reused as a bin bag, as mulch or be burnt. Grown your own veg or buy fresh produce loose and transport in your own bags.

Make your own toiletries and cleaning materials

Homemade lip balm in reusable container

Cut out all those plastic bottles in the bathroom and kitchen by making your own toiletries. Waste reduction strategies include:

• Using bars of soap instead of shower gels and liquid soap
• Using shampoo bars or rye flour instead of shampoo
• Making your own washing-up liquid and reusing old containers to store it
• Using vinegar or steam to clean
• Making your own lotions and potions and reusing jars to store them
• Reducing the amount of make-up you wear or cutting it out altogether
• For women, using a moon cup instead of sanitary towels or tampons
• Using moistened old shirt rags instead of  wet wipes/moist toilet tissue and boil-washing them before reusing - an ideal way of using up old clothes, once they're past the 'work clothes' stage.

Eat up

Regularly check what needs to be eaten

Healthy snacks

• Regularly check what’s in your fridge and store cupboards and which items need to be used up.
• Eat up your leftovers. Turning them into a different dish the next day helps with this.
• At least once a year, eat up everything in your store cupboards and freezer, clear them right out and start afresh. This will avoid items lurking at the back of the cupboard for years. You will have the peace of mind that everything in there is at most one year old. We don't even label our preserves because we eat them all within the year. If you're still eating five-year-old preserves you are making too many - take a year off from them and use your produce in a different way.
• Change what you snack. For example, rather than buying a packet of crisps, make your own crisps or have an easy-to-make healthy homemade snack such as cold leftover potatoes with salt and pepper (the original potato snack), a bowl of kimchi, a hard-boiled egg, a slice of homemade bread with herb butter.
• Impress on your children the need to eat up - there are helpful books around on the subject. Not offering too many alternatives seems to work.

Children, at least, can be reasoned with on the subject of food waste. Our only food waste is usually cat food. This is where livestock, like chickens or pigs, comes in handy. We basically treat our chickens as if they were pigs; they eat almost anything and love cat food.

Drink sensibly

• Drink tap water rather than bottled mineral water. Filter it if need be.
• Eat a juicy piece of fruit or make your own juices/smoothies/cordials rather than have packaged juice or sugary soft drinks.
• Buy milk direct from the farm if you can.
• Grow your own tea herbs. A few containers of tea herbs such as mint, lemon balm, camomile and sage don't take up a lot of space. They can even be grown on a windowsill in a flat or on a balcony.

Compost

• Compost your food and garden waste.
• Bury meat bones and fish heads in the garden to enrich the soil.

Buy second-hand

Save things from the landfill!

• Preloved furniture is often a fraction of the price of new furniture and, depending on age, can be higher quality wood, with better workmanship and any VOCs (volatile organic chemicals) will be long gone. Charity shops, antiques barns, auctions, house clearances, furniture projects are all good sources for tables, chairs, sofas, chests of drawers, wardrobes and bed frames.
• Charity shops are a great source of clothing too, especially for bargains on winter coats and party dresses, and you can assemble a fun mix-and-match china crockery selection and glassware for your kitchen.
• There are lots of second-hand books in excellent condition around (I say this even though I am an author myself and, of course, wouldn't earn any money from second-hand sales of my own book). Ditto for second-hand technology such as laptops and mobile phones.

One by one, these are pretty simple changes to make, but each step by each individual takes us a little closer to the goal. Some require a little discipline but nothing too onerous. And all of the above save us money, sometimes serious money. The most important first step? Just thinking about what we consume and questioning whether we really need to consume it.

Further adventures in homemade toiletries

I talked in an earlier post about some of the harmful mystery chemicals used in body care products by reputable manufacturers, and about how easy it is to produce safe and effective homemade versions of most, if not all, necessary toiletries.

Here are a few more examples to increase the repertoire of basic building blocks, from which a myriad of possibilities extend.

Good dental hygiene without SLS

Tooth powder

It was actually toothpaste that got me started on all this years ago, when I discovered that the foaming agent Sodium Lauryl Sulphate, contained in nearly all commercial tooth pastes, was giving me terrible mouth ulcers.

Being slightly less savvy in those days, I merely looked around for another commercial toothpaste without the SLS. There are two or three, but what I didn't think too much about at the time is that they still have a range of other mystery chemical ingredients that don't seem to contribute materially to the core business of cleaning teeth.

Now I know about this simple and effective homemade tooth powder alternative: 

1 part Epsom salt

2 part Sodium bicarbonate (baking soda)

3 part Bentonite powder (Fuller's earth, diatomaceous earth, etc.)

+ a couple of drops Clove oil

Homemade tooth powder - yeah, it's a grey powder...

Combine all of these and blend using a mortar and pestle or an electric mini chopper and store in a small, wide-mouthed jar (or similar), which will allow you to easily press your moistened toothbrush into the powder and load it up for brushing. I was a little concerned about the lack of a fluoride supplement, so I checked it out with my dentist. He reassured me that this isn't of great importance to an adult with fully developed teeth in good condition. 

Epsom salt (Magnesium sulphate) is an old school substance with a surprising number of uses around the home and garden and also as a home remedy. The original tooth powder recipe I started with called for sea or rock salt, rather than Epsom salt. Its purpose in the mix is as a gentle scouring agent. Epsom salt does the same thing, but brings an additional benefit: I had been suffering a bit with leg cramps during the night and read somewhere that this can be due to a magnesium deficiency. Since I switched to the Epsom salt version of the tooth powder: no more cramps. Result!

Sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) is well known as a gentle scrubbing and cleaning agent. It also neutralises acidity, which is actually what causes the degradation of tooth enamel that leads to decay.

Bentonite is a type of clay, made up of the tiny calcite skeletons of prehistoric, microscopic, ocean-dwelling diatoms. It also has a range of home remedy uses, stemming from its powerful detoxifying properties. It can be made into a paste and used topically, to treat skin lesions, or prepared as a suspension in water and taken internally, to treat stomach upsets. In the jungles of South America, tapirs eat the stuff, which is what allows them to safely eat toxic plants that would otherwise kill them! In the tooth powder, it acts as a cleaning, mineralising and detoxifying ingredient.

Clove oil adds a pleasant flavour and natural antiseptic properties.

 

Sun lotion

Homemade sunscreen in reused container

Sunscreen is an essential for anyone who spends much time outdoors. It's another great example of the shock value to be had from reading the list of ingredients. For a start, as with pretty much every skin cream or lotion, the number one ingredient is Aqua. That's water to you and me! I suppose this comes down to a general consumer demand for 'non-greasy' lotion formulae, but it comes at a price. The active 'moisturising' ingredients absorbed by the skin from creams and lotions are, necessarily, oils and fats, not water. Anybody who has ever been swimming knows that water doesn't moisturise the skin. In order to keep oils and water nicely mixed, they have to be coated with emulsifiers: great source of mystery chemical ingredients right there. To thicken these watery creams to a nice consistency, one has to add gums, such as guar or xanthan. More items not required for the core purpose. The list goes on.

So the moisturising creams, ointments and sunscreen that I make have a simple lipid base. The basics are things like coconut oil, olive oil, shea butter, lanolin, beeswax. All readily absorbed by and beneficial to the skin. You can vary the ratios to get the sort of consistency you want. For lip balm, as an example, up the proportion of beeswax to make the final product that bit firmer.

2 heaped tbsp shea butter
3 heaped tbsp beeswax
2 heaped tbsp coconut oil
2 tbsp calendula oil (to make this, cover a handful of calendula blossom with eg olive or cold-pressed rapeseed oil and leave to infuse for up to a week, then strain out the flowers)
2 tbsp zinc oxide (be sure to get non-nano)
1 tsp lanolin
1 tsp raspberry seed oil
1/4 cup olive oil

The active sun blocking ingredients are the zinc oxide and raspberry seed oil. To increase the SPF, simply add more zinc oxide and/or rasp seed oil.

Melt and combine all in a double-boiler (or just a smaller pot inside a larger one, with hot-simmering water in the larger one), then pour into a jar and allow to set.

With this sunscreen it's important to make sure you're properly covered, so it should be reapplied several times a day. It may not be strong enough for Australia or the Med, but it does just fine for UK conditions. Experiment carefully until you're sure you have the right formula for your situation.

Bath salt

Nothing could be simpler:
Just add 1 cup of Epsom salts per bath!


The possibilities really are endless, particularly once you start making your own herbal extract ingredients, and especially if they're also home grown. The companies making big bucks out of all this stuff want you to believe that it's fabulously complex and the teams of scientists they have developing their products have developed formulae with unparalleled effectiveness. Sure, they work: but they're also much more complex than they need to be to work. The simple reason: maximisation of profit!

Brew your own hedge wines

Crab apple wine for dessert

Rosehips and apples in the steam juicer

Making your own booze from foraged or garden fruit is simple and rewarding. A good hedge wine is no substitute for a good red wine - but it definitely has its own place in the drinking panoply. Often home-made wines are quite sweet and make nice dessert wines. Tart wines are good for cooking with and for turning into home-made vinegar. Both tart and sweet hedge wines make wonderful mulled wine. On a chilly wet night, hot fruit wine is the ultimate comfort drink. Just add sugar to taste while you're heating up the wine. We haven't bought any cheap red wine for making mulled wine or cooking with since we started brewing our wines.

People make wine from just about everything, even pea pods and rhubarb. We've experimented quite a bit over the past four years and we find some are worth the effort and others not. We haven't tried rhubarb but suspect it might fall into the 'probably not worth it' category. Some flavours are good to mix (rosehip with apple, for example).

Probably not worth it

• Pea pods: This has been described as similar to Riesling - obviously by someone who never tasted actual Riesling! It's wine that tastes strongly of peas, which made it brilliant for cooking risotto with, where it added a pea flavour to the rice.
• Gorse flower: A pain to pick! We'd been hoping for something with a hint of coconut. Instead we got a bit of a rough sherry. Again, good for cooking only.
• Carrot: There are much nicer ways to consume carrots!

Bramble wine

Well worth it

• Rosehips
• Elderflower
• Elderberry
• Crab apple
• Apple
• Plum
• Gooseberry
• Bramble
• Combinations therof

Drinkable

• Parsnip
• Strawberry

Ready for bottling

How long does it take?

We usually start our 5-litre batches in a large plastic bucket, rack (i.e. transfer) them into a demi-john with a fermentation lock after about a week, then rack a couple more times over the following six months. After about six months, we bottle. Ideally, you'd then leave the bottles for another six months and start drinking your wine exactly a year after starting the process. In reality, we start drinking them soon after bottling, safe in the knowledge that some of them are going to continue maturing.

What equipment do you need?

Our recommended list would be:

Fermenting in the demi-john

• Steam juicer: a very easy way to get juice from your fruit.
• Oxygen steriliser powder: to sanitise your equipment.
• Hygrometer: to measure the specific gravity of your wine. This tells you how much sugar you need to add and how strong your wine is going to be, if fermented to completion.
• Large plastic bucket with lid: to start the ferment. Ideally this should have a scale on it and it's very useful to add a thermometer strip on to it so that you know when it's ready to add yeast.
• Wine yeast
• Demi-johns: you'll need quite a few of these.
• Rubber bungs with fermentation locks, to fit your demi-johns
• Racking cane
• Syphon hose
• Bottling wand
• Empty bottles, ideally with reusable stoppers or screw caps
• Optional: Campden tablets and finings

A little sample after bottling

The process

Making hedge wine is much simpler than brewing beer. We follow this straightforward procedure:

1. Steam the fruit for 90 to 120 minutes in the steam juicer.
2. Meanwhile, sterilise your plastic brewing bucket, a large wooden spatula and a small measuring jug.
3. Pour the hot juice into the plastic bucket. It should be about 1 litre of concentrated juice.
4. Add 1kg of sugar and stir well with a large wooden spoon to dissolve the sugar in the juice.
5. Top up with cold water to the 5-litre mark and stir again.
6. With the measuring jug, take a sample of the liquid and measure the specific gravity in your hygrometer. Add more sugar if needed. We usually aim for a specific gravity of 1080. Taste the sample for interest's sake.
7. When the temperature of the liquid drops to about 24°C, add 1 tsp of wine yeast. Stir and loosely pop on the lid.
8. Leave to ferment at room temperature for a week or so. You'll see that it's fermenting by the 'foam' appearing on the surface and the sediment forming on the bottom (and by the tasty smell).
9. Sterilise a demi-john, rubber seal, fermentation lock, racking cane and syphon hose.
10. Syphon the wine from your bucket into the demi-john, taking care to leave most of the sediment behind.
11. Leave for a couple of months, rack again, leave again, rack again.
12. After about six months, fill into sterilised bottles. A bottle wand, though not strictly necessary, is extremely useful for this as it makes it easy to stop and start the procedure with each bottle.

Cheers!

Things we don't buy any more

The new-look bathroom cabinet

We recently found a three-year-old supermarket receipt and were amazed to see how many items on our shopping list have been struck off since then. This got me thinking about consumer responsibility - how much personal responsibility and consumer power we have and how we should take a little time to reflect on what we actually need and what kind of business and production practices we want to support.

Do we really need another cheap T-shirt or fresh strawberries in mid-winter? Leaving out such items is no real sacrifice. A more sustainable lifestyle need not involve 'sacrifice', but it may mean less choice (though arguably better choice) and the reintroduction of seasonality in our diet, etc. It might involve spending a bit more on quality organic meat, dairy products or baked goods made by local producers, but overall you will save money by not buying rubbish you don't need, shrink your energy impact on the planet and create less waste. If quality food produced locally costs a little extra, then we should support that, rather than import, with all the packaging and transport implied from, for example, a country with water shortages, which is effectively exporting a resource they can't afford in the longer term.

Our switch in consumer habits happened naturally, without us really noticing, as we started to produce more and more of our own goods and it's had some surprising fringe benefits. Giving up shampoo and conditioner in favour of rye flour has put an end to my split ends, for example. Not buying any baked goods from the supermarket has eliminated heartburn and bloat. We have never eaten so well in our lives, both in quality and variety terms, and our personal grooming has not suffered by making our own toiletries nor is our house any less clean using our home-made cleaning materials. Not coincidentally, there is now a lot more space in the bathroom cabinet and we've no doubt improved our indoor air quality at the same time.

So what don't we buy any more?

Cleaning products

Home-made vs. shop-bought:
The home-made version lasts longer
despite its smaller size.

No more shop-bought, with all their unnecessary and toxic ingredients, washing powder, washing-up liquid and dishwasher detergent (we now make our own), rinse aid (now vinegar), household cleaner (we now use vinegar, bicarbonate of soda, steam etc.). Instead we buy bulk tubs of bicarbonate of soda (baking soda), soda crystals (washing soda), citric acid and borax substitute.  

Toiletries

Goodbye shampoo and conditioner (we now use rye flour with home grown herbal infusions), face cream, hand cream, sun lotion, lip balm, ointment and salves (we now make all these ourselves), tooth paste (we now make our own tooth powder), deodorant (we now use bicarbonate of soda), moist toilet tissue (now moistened cloths, cut from an old shirt, that are then boil-washed and reused), sanitary towels/tampons (I now use a mooncup, a fantastic product that more women should know about).

Fruit and vegetables

Plenty of veg here all through the year

Other than few top-up onions and garlic cloves we haven't bought any vegetables for three years now. It is surprising what all we can grow here in Scotland and it's no problem to grow enough throughout the year. It might be easier to grow some things in Spain, Italy, Portugal or Australia, but we are blessed with a mild climate here in the UK and shouldn't need many food imports at all. All that's required is a small shift in attitude, from 'What do I fancy?' to 'What is there to eat and cook with?' The seasonal constraints encourage experimentation and creativity in cooking. You can't just follow the same routine all through the year, making the whole enterprise more fun and interesting.

With fruit it's a little more difficult in our climate, but we haven't bought any fruit so far this year. This meant that after the fresh apples were gone, we were down to frozen berries, dried apple rings and fresh rhubarb from March until June when the strawberries kicked in. However, there were plenty of fresh greens to snack on instead, including peas, common fennel and salad leaves, so getting five or ten servings of fruit or veg a day was not an issue.

Jams, jellies and chutneys

A cupboard full of jams and chutneys

These are so easy to make and easily keep for a year without any added E-number preservatives. I try to tailor the quantities I make to what we actually need and don't even bother to label them since we aim to eat all jams, jellies and chutneys within the year, jams and jellies by end of June and chutneys by early August.

Meat and fish from the supermarket

We've made a big switch to more sustainable meat sources, i.e. vermin. Here this means rabbits, pigeons and, the most delicious vermin of them all, roe deer. All of these can be hunted locally and farmers are generally very happy to have someone reduce the number of rabbits and pigeons. Similarly, mackerel is a great eating fish and a freezer compartment can be quickly filled with them and other small scale local catches while they're in season.

Baked goods, bread and flour from the supermarket

Supermarket bread and cakes have never been a favourite, and finding out about the hidden ingredients didn't help. We now buy 20kg sacks of rye and wheat grains and mill our own fresh flour. As a by-product we get nutritious organic bran. The rye and wheat flour is used for baking sourdough bread, and the wheat flour is also used for all other baked goodies - cakes, pancakes, beer batter, pizza bases, dumplings, chapatis etc. The home-milled flour makes everything taste incredible. I was surprised at the difference it made.

Crisps, biscuits, chocolate, ice cream

We now make our own snacks - guaranteed without palm oil, which seems to be popping up everywhere these days from 'traditional' oatcakes and biscuits to chocolate. Homemade ice cream is just the best and a great way to use fruit from the garden.

Herbal tea bags

All herbs are brewed fresh from the garden where we have a large herbal tea plant collection and some of them are dried for winter use. No pesticides here!

Soft drinks and juices

We've never been big drinkers of juice or fizzy drinks, preferring plain water, tea, coffee or alcohol, so this was the easiest choice to make. Juices can be a good way to use up garden vegetables and fruit and we've now started making kvass from our rye sourdough loaf.

What we do still buy

This is why we call it the 'Reasonably Good Life'. Many of the original good-lifers, back in the 60s and 70s, tried to take it all the way to pure and total self-sufficiency. Entirely admirable ambition, of course, but in most cases the degree of discomfort and inconvenience entailed amounted to actual hardship, which resulted in their children, who might have been expected to carry on the revolution, wholeheartedly abandoning the dream for the ease of modern living. Our view is that total self-sufficiency, in our society and the world as it stands, is not realistically possible.

So, what do we still buy from the shops? Mainly dairy products, booze (though less of this than formerly, thanks to our homebrewing activities), grains, oils (with Scottish cold-pressed rapeseed oil now our preferred cooking oil) and vinegars, black tea and coffee, toilet roll. Despite rising prices, our shopping bill is way down - while our quality of life is way up. It's maybe not as convenient, but when did convenience become the be all and end all anyway?

Brewing Kvass

Cheers!

Kvass is an ancient folk beer from Eastern European and Russian parts. It's what used to be called a 'small beer' - very low in alcohol (in the region of 0.5 to 2% abv) and generally consumed young and fresh.

There are several characteristics that distinguish kvass from current mainstream beers:

• The fermenting organisms. Like sourdough and kimchi, kvass is based on lactofermentation, with a mix of lactobacilli and wild yeasts doing the business, in contrast to the pure brewer's yeast strains typically used in beer brewing.
• The ingredients. Kvass is made from sourdough rye bread, a sugar source, and water.
• The time it takes to make it. Kvass goes from combining ingredients to drinking in about 4 days.
• How easy it is to make. Even if you have no homebrewing experience or special equipment, kvass can be made using gear that most everyone has in their kitchen already.

The drink itself is a refreshing and nutritious brew, packed with vitamins, probiotics and gut-friendly lactobacilli. It has a pleasant 'tang', due to the lactic acid content, just verging on sourness. Those are its general properties. The specifics are highly variable and offer a rich field for experimentation.

• The sugar source can be anything from treacle/molasses, through malt extract or honey, to brown or even ordinary table sugar. The resulting brew flavour is quite different in each case.
• Then there's a whole universe of possible additives, just for the flavour. Fruit, berries, herbs - apparently one's imagination is the only limitation.

If you bake with sourdough, then you've already got everything you need to brew kvass. Even if you haven't got a sourdough starter in the house (and seriously, you need to remedy this as soon as possible), you can make do with using bakers yeast, since it is generally contaminated with lactobacilli which, in this case, is a good thing.

Now, on to the basic method:

Rye cubed.

• Take 450g (1lb) of rye bread (ideally homemade sourdough). If it's stale, so much the better! Cut it into sugar cube-sized pieces, spread them out on a baking sheet and pop them in a warm oven (not hot enough to bake bread) until they're completely dried out, but not so long that they burn.
• Next, place the dried bread cubes into either a large pot, or food-grade plastic bucket, and pour 5 litres (just over a gallon) of boiling water over them. Any fruit or herbs that you wish to add can be popped in at this point. Cover and leave to soak for as long as it takes to drop to around 30°C (86°F).
• From this point on, use good sanitary technique - make sure that all equipment is well cleaned.
• Strain the liquid out, through a muslin cloth or a fine sieve, and into your brew pot, bucket or demijohn - whatever you want to do the fermentation in.
• Add 300g (about 1.5 cups) of your chosen sugar source.
• Add 100g of reasonably fresh sourdough starter culture.
• Give it all a good mix together and leave, covered with a towel or under a fermentation lock - depending on what equipment you have available - for a day. After this time you should see a foamy surface layer, indicating that you have a lively fermentation going on.
• Now bottle it - siphon or pour through a funnel, leaving the sediment behind, keeping a decent air space at the top of the bottle. Tightly cap the bottles, and leave them somewhere cool for a day to finish fermenting. Plastic bottles (recycled fizzy water or other soft drink bottles) are a good choice, since you can easily tell if they're becoming overly pressurised. This is 'bottle conditioning': the fermentation continues inside the sealed bottle and builds up pressure, naturally carbonating your beverage, giving it a wee bit of fizz. If the bottles start to balloon out, just loosen the cap slightly to depressurise.
• Now refrigerate, leave for a further day or two, and then pour and enjoy!

Apparently, kvass will keep for at least a month in the fridge, but good luck resisting the temptation to polish it off long before then!

A healthy and vigorous fermentation.

This is a cloudy brew, full of goodness. You'll find some sediment at the bottom of your bottles - don't try to avoid it, it's just a collection of beneficial microorganisms that your gut will love.

In our first kvass brew, we used a mix of treacle (molasses) and malt extract syrup as the sugar source, and no other flavourings. The treacle imparted a distinct licorice flavour to the brew, which I liked, but which didn't appeal to the missus. No more treacle! But still, it was good enough to convince us that kvass brewing was an avenue worth pursuing further.

Ideal for refuelling after hard labour in the garden.

Second time around, we used a mixture of malt extract syrup and honey, and added some sprigs of lemon verbena, fresh from the garden, to the soaking bread. This turned out an altogether much classier brew, with subtle notes of honey and a beautiful lemony zing.

Kvass is an amazing discovery for us. A lightly fizzy beverage, without loads of sugar or other rubbish ingredients, and with high nutritional value and gut-friendly microorganisms. We're definitely looking forward to many more experimental iterations and exploring where kvass will take us.