Barefoot in the kitchen: January 2017

It's back to the old blog style a little bit today with a return to food and cafes. I have been meaning to visit Castle Farm Cafe for ages...it pretty much ticks all of my boxes: it's organic - it is based at Castle Farm Organics who supply amongst others Komedia with organic veg; the cafe is part run by the gyus behind Acorn Vegetarian Kitchen, my absolute favourite restaurant on the planet and this week, to add to my desire to show support and eat amazing organic veggie food, I heard about the trouble they are having with an application for a tiny extension to their licence to accommodate their growing list of evening events.

I was dismayed to hear that the council have received so many complaints from local residents about the negative impact that evening events and the sale of alcohol until the dizzy heights of midnight (I know!) will have on the community and so, before jumping in I thought I had better pull my finger out and try it for myself. On this, a rare child free day off work (no, it turns out I don't feel that guilty at all) I am as I type sitting in the barn that homes Castle Farm Cafe, with a hot water bottle on my lap, a candle flickering on my table and some truly delicious food on my plate.

It is cold today. I have just been to my Mum's house to wash my clothes and have a hot bath. On my own. Without a litany of requests being shouted through the door primarily involving reasons why the presence of a two year old is necessary to my enjoyment of the bath. I really did not think that the day could get any better (apart form the minor blips of reversing my car into a wall and then in a separate but equally embarrassing moment, of my car boot flying open depositing a travel cot, curtain fabric and my weekly shop on the main road. We wont mention these things again if you please). It turns out however that it can get better. A lot better.

As with the menu at Acorn the problem for me was what to chose. In the end I plumped for a warming bowl of the Soup of the Day which is aptly named Super Green and has Kale and pesto bobbing about in it making me feel both warm and exceptionally smug. On the side I could not resist a Westcombe Cheddar toastie. I am starting to think that it is biologically impossible for me to resist anything on a menu that has the words Westcombe and Cheddar next to each other, it really is amazing cheese and in this here toastie with onions it is heavenly. The menu looking amazing as it does mean that I will have to come back to try all of the dishes as they all sound so amazing. Whilst sitting here I have seen some beautiful arancini balls leave the open kitchen and some awesome looking pizzas have passed my table too. I have overheard a conversation about how amazing the banana bread is and another customer talking about the super green soup and what an amazing surprise it is to have gorgeous leafy green kale popping up on every spoonful.

It is cold today but I am already excited about spring and summer trips here to sit outside and look out over the valley eating all this amazing seasonal organic produce and supporting a local independent business that really brings something amazing to this little corner of Somerset. As our towns and even our villages become ravaged by the effects of supermarkets and chain stores it is more important than ever that we make the time, and yes sometimes a little extra effort, to support people like Castle Farm Organics and Castle Farm Cafe. I cannot think of a single way in which a local business providing locally grown organic food and hosting evenings of sauerkraut workshops and environmental film screenings, not to mention creating employment and a vibrant heart to a village that is not a pub or village shop can be negative. I for one think what they are doing is great and that more rural areas need business like this to bring people together in what can very easily become a drinking cheap Tesco wine on your sofa and only leaving to go to work existence. I only hope that when we come to create something at Dream Farm, our neighbours can see this too.

Truly super super green soup

Pizza coming out of the oven

Service area complete with Round Hill Roastery Coffee

Beautiful views from Castle Farm

Impossible to resist on a cold January day

It is now nearly three months since we officially took mortgaged-to-the hilt-owenership of the farm and nearly a month since we actually moved in.

Now don't get all excited folks. We have not, in that time, managed to work a Grand Designs style miracle on the falling down barns you saw in my last post. We are not living in some kind of dreamlike state, in the home of our dreams, glitter ball a twinkling (although more on this later because it turns out that as undoubtedly lovely as it is, on-demand hot water does not equal happiness). No, we are in fact living in a static caravan, or as Big G now insists I call it, a park home. It's a caravan.

Let me try to paint a picture. It is winter. We moved in the day before Christmas eve despite this being my one proviso leading up to moving day and static caravans, in case you do not already know, are not insulated. At all. The caravan itself is 10 feet wide by 32 feet long with three bedrooms, separated by paper thin walls, a kitchen with a kick-ass gas oven, a shower room and a toilet. These last two are currently more for ornamental purposes as we have no running water or sewage. In fact we have very few of the amenities which until now I took entirely for granted. We do not have mains power and are currently generating power from a fuel guzzling generator which powers, in turn, the caravan itself (it gets very loud when the toaster or a hairdryer get switched on) and a rack of batteries which do much the same only much, much quieter. The aforementioned lack of water is due to be solved imminently thanks to the bore hole we have drilled so that we can get our own water from the many water sources that run underneath the land. This also cuts out the awkward bit where we had to dig up our neighbours field in order to lay pipes for mains water, so ultimately is a win. There is a gas boiler in the caravan already so when we do get water we will also be able heat it. I know. not only running water but HOT running water. I did mention this was the stuff of dreams right? Our heating is fed by a wood burning stove with a back boiler that feeds a radiator in each room. When this works it works beautifully but it is reliant on several things:

Lighting the wood burner. I know, sounds obvious right? However when it's -6 outside and dark and you need to dress yourself and a sleepy toddler, the last thing you want to do is set your alarm an hour earlier so that the ambient temperature outside the duvet is something even remotely comparable to the temperature you have cultivated under the duvet. Even Big G does not want to do this however much his in built man-compulsion to make sure that his family to do not expire on his watch kicks in (which by the way it quite rightly doesn't at 6am in the winter!).
Understanding the thermostat. After a month and two thermostats I am relatively confident that we now have this covered but only time will tell. I am now very good at identifying the early sound of boiling water in radiators. We are staying warm AND learning new skills.
Understanding how electricity generated from a converter works...thankfully Big G does now understand this so we no longer have buzzing lights, power that only seems to last two hours or a boiler that quite literally boils and means we have to put the fire out (see above).

AND YET...we are loving it. Now, don't get me wrong, I know that we are in the fluffy honeymoon period and that by March, when I'm eight months pregnant, I will probably be spending prolonged periods of time at my mums house so I can wash my hair, my clothes and walk around in a t-shirt rather than Ugg boots (yes, unapologetically) and all the jumpers we own. Despite the lack of amenities there is a kind of euphoria that we have both discovered and a couple of interesting things appear to have happened to us:

I have developed a much stronger desire to leave a smaller footprint on the earth now that we have to think about everything that goes in the bin, down the sink or what we want to eat for the next week because the convenience store up the road is no longer there. It appears that the family who owned this land for the last 100 years were 'encouraged' to stop farming because of their disregard for what went into the stream. We do not want to live like that and want instead to actively try and make something not only dreamlike and glitter ball filled but ethical, sustainable and clean.
We have developed a Waltons style goodnight ritual which goes something along the lines of: ME: "thanks for keeping us warm and making everything work and emptying the portaloo for me" BIG G: "thanks for not loosing your shit"*
Little man has taken to finding the north star on our drive home from nursery so "he can show us the way home" and then singing "we're at the fa-arm, we're at the fa-arm" as we turn onto the track. This is utterly heart warming and thankfully replaces the calls of "I want to go to the old house" that accompanied our first week in the caravan.
Spending so much time in the yard means little man has nailed his balance bike and is now on an unstoppable path to awesomeness.
People looking at me like I have an unfortunate illness no longer bothers me...it makes me laugh ever so slightly. It is not ideal. It is not the lap of luxury that we all sometimes dream of but bathing your son in a tin bath in front of wood burning stove and constantly having water on the boil in case an emergency hand wash is needed, feels a little more real than endless hot water.

*subtext: "like we all thought you were going to"

I am not being evangelical about any of this, I am simply noticing things about my self and my lifestyle that I can see the value in changing. In the same way that I think about that food that I put on the table for the family to eat I am now thinking about the impact I am having on my immediate environment in a way that I was not before.

Writing this from the wifi and coffee fuelled comfort of Society Cafe in Bath, having just showered in the gym (if the staff at my gym actually paid attention to the comings and goings of their members I would be in their 'comes here as a token gesture to fitness so she can tell her friends she's been to the gym' group, whilst quietly spending over £30 a month on some hot water and a hairdryer. Who's laughing at who.) and as our first set of building plans gets submitted to the planning department, it is far from ideal but I can safely say that this dream is most definitely starting to take shape.