Meat and two veg........

With the Food4families cookery demo coming up I took the opportunity to meet up with this years RSC runner-up Rick Wyatt to discuss what we are going to cook and how the programme of events would pan out.

Rick is very much a "from the earth" cook, he sources most of his ingredients from his surroundings either foraging for vegetables and herbs or hunting for game in the countryside, it's quite inspiring really.

Food4families is all about growing your own produce and sourcing ingredients from your immediate surroundings and as a town Reading has so much to offer in that respect so it's not really all that difficult to come up with recipes that'll fit the brief. I suppose being inland that slightly hinders the choice of saltwater fish that you can source but we do have an abundance of lakes, rivers and fish farms which are well stocked with trout etc etc.

That's not to sat that you cannot get saltwater fish because the famous Smelly Alley fish company stock super fresh fish daily from the fertile British coast.

I was going to use fish but then again I was going to do three dishes which although achievable within my thirty minute slot is probably a bit too adventurous.

Instead I'm going to go for my take the great family staple that is meat and two veg and I'm going to follow that up with a dessert that makes the most of two classic British fruits.

For the meat and two veg I'll be pre-preparing some slow cooked pork belly and serving that up with a celeriac mash and some fresh peas. I'm also going to make use of the bottle of Calvados that I won at a recent raffle and create a sauce from that and as a little bit of extra pork flavour I'm thinking that I might crisp up some bacon then chop it up into very small pieces or grind into a powder then sprinkle over as a garnish.

For the dessert I'm going to do a simple dish of poached pears with raspberry sauce and chantilly cream, maybe shave some chocolate over the top too.

How does that sound?

Why not come along and have a taste for yourself? October 1st from around midday at Forbury Square in Reading town centre. Rick and myself will be leading up to a demo by Reading's number one chef Paul Clerehugh and there will also be plenty of stalls setup by people who have grown their own produce as well as local professional producers so it'll have a kind of farmers market/family fair atmosphere.

A great deal of the produce in the Food4families program is grown at local schools and it really gets the kid interested in producing vegetables and more importantly they get enthusiastic about eating their greens :-)

Toodlepip xxx