Things that drive me nuts in Supermarkets

I Just wrote a nice post about a supermarket. But it made me remember two things I hate about supermarkets.....

1) Cashiers that put things I purposely didn't bag into a little plastic bag. If I put two lemons loose on the belt is because I am cool with my lemons being lose. I am happy for them to mix with my other shopping in my main bag. I don't want a little poly bag at home, I have no use for it and it will just go for landfill (incidentally, Plastic bags were only invented in the 1960's - how do they know they take 500 years to decompose in landfill?)

2) Machines where you put your spare change in and it give you a credit note to spend in store AND CHARGES YOU. Seriously WTF? Do you have any idea how much supermarkets pay to have sacks of change delivered in Securicor vans? A lot. Transporting change is expensive, supermarkets give out way more change than they receive, supermarkets pay for change. So here you are, walking in with your piggy bank filled with £30 in coppers. The Manager should come out to greet you personally, thank you for transporting that heavy change to the shop and beg you to spend it at till rather than your paper money. He should probably offer you a couple of quid for the savings you have made him. But no, instead they put a big machine where you pour your money in, it chunders away and prints a credit note for something like £25.10 that you have to spend in store today, the mark up on supermarket stuff is something like 20-50% so you go and buy £30 of stuff (which costs the store £15), your credit note is only £24.90 so you pay with an extra tenner and get £4.90 change (which is the money you came in with that they have just gone and got from the back of the machine).

You went into the shop with £40 (£30 change, £10 note) Spend it all. Came out with £15 worth of stuff + £4.90 (which is only worth £4.20 because you put it in the piggy bank and will pour it in the machine at a later date)


The supermarket keeps your £35.10 and has probably saved an additional £1 on change delivery costs. ARRRGRGGGGHHHH. STOP USING CHANGE MACHINES. Just dump the bags of change directly with the cashier - they will take them, or better still be organised and drop them into your bank once in a while.

Morrisons Wincanton

*Disclaimer* - this is not a sponsored post, Morrison's have not asked me to do this and sadly haven't offered any money either. I have nothing to gain by promoting Morrisons

I love Supermarkets, well I love huge shops where I can walk around and look at interesting food. I wish they didn't come with additional annoyances like 'self service' checkouts - which make everyone's life harder and puts someone out of a job, trolleys which you have to unlock with a pound coin and  not being able to find the Marmite - is it with the stocks or Jams? Oh and having to be in close proximity with the general public.

However I recently visited Morrison's in Wincanton for the first time. It has all the above annoyances and more but.....they way they display the food is so lovely that I feel compelled to blog about it (Oh dear my 5th blog post and already I am reduced to blogging about my trip to the supermarket)

This is what got me when I walked in, the machine says they spray water vapour on the food to keep it fresher long, sound reasonable but I don't care about that , it just looks really cool.. Look how nice that salad looks lined up like that glistening with water droplets. All the round lettuces were also on a "specially designed ice bed" that was also cool.

 Just look at that, I am assuming they have gone for a continental food market look and to my eye it works. Much nicer than the usual look which is more English market - 3 grubby tea towels for a quid in a plastic crate

 I will also talk about the selection, I know, I know, I used to live in London too and enjoyed supermarkets selling obscure African root vegetables and Japanese confectionery. But this is rural Somerset, in our other local food shop they have a 'world food' section - it is where they keep the weird foreign foods the tourists buy like pasta and rice.

So to find fresh Tamarind and Samphire - heaven, interesting food is the main thing I miss about London. Every time they get a chef on Woman's hour they seem to talk about Samphire and I thought I wouldn't be able to try it until we made a trip back to the city. but ta da here it is!

 Rubbish photo, but a great big local food section (we are spoilt for that in Somerset/Dorset).
The Meat, Fish, Deli and hot food counters also looked excellent as ever - they use a weird light on the butcher counter that makes everthing really deep red.

Final photo is just to show how wide the isles are, enough room for 4 trolleys, so you don't get stuck behind and old lady spending all morning deciding between cottage cheese and cottage cheese with chives.

That's it really, I am probably behind the times and I am sure closer to civilisation Morrisons have looked like that for ages, but it is news to me. I own a few shares in Sainsburys from a share save scheme when i worked there as a student. But I kind of wish I had some in Morrisons now.

Hedgehog

I just went out to check the quails before bed it was very dark but Iwas very excited to see a hedgehog on the lawn, he spotted me too and froze.... So I snuck up for a photo before he ran away.....

Oh, it was just the soil from a tray of salad leaves the chickens ate.

Scrambled Eggs

With food sometimes less is more. Some of the simplest meals are also the most enjoyable.

Scrambled eggs do it for me. So simple but so amazing.

Eggs, the fresher the better. We use whatever the ladies have produced for us, in this case its a load of chicken eggs and one quail egg. But often it wouldn't be unusual for us to be using 30 quail eggs.

Butter, we like this one, it doesn't come far to get to us, they make it on the farm where they milk the cows and it's pretty cheap really

Chuck it all in a pan. Some of the egg yolks are a bit paler than I would have liked, this is because we have some new hens that are still getting up to full health. Add plenty of Salt (Maldon if you are posh) and freshly milled pepper.

Whip it all up

Don't cook it too long, you want it slightly runny. As long as you trust your eggs.

Osso Bucco

I get all our meat from the market, There is one of those guys who auctions it off the side of his lorry, I always thought this was some kind of scam that you would end up with a bag of rotting offal or something but actually we have found him excellent we pay about half the price we would in the supermarket and the meat is better.

Last month I got: A joint of lamb, a joint of beef, a joint of pork, a bag of lamb chops, a bag of sirloin steak, a bag of pork chops, a chicken, a large pack of sausages and a large pack of gammon for £30, enough to feed us for a month.

Anyway, I went again yesterday and in the mixed bag was a packet of Osso Bucco. I had never seen this before and wasn't sure what it was, from the name I thought it might be some kind of African game animal....google revealed a slightly less exotic answer, it is the cross section slices of leg of beef or veal. The slices have a circle of bone in the middle with a lovely big hollow of bone marrow.

It works best stewed so you can get the meaty goodness from the bone marrow, I kept it simple, in a big pan I fried the Osso Bucco for a bit, added loads of onions and browned the lot. I would have added a stock cube but we didn't have any so instead I chucked in some cayenne pepper, dried onion, juniper berries, pepper corns and a splash of so sauce. Then I poured flour over the whole lot and fired for a few seconds then poured a whole bottle of ale over the top and stirred it until all the flour mixed into a thick sauce.

The whole lot then got poured into a pot with a lid, I studded it with hard boiled quails eggs (we put them in everything because the quails lay so many!) and stuck it in the oven for an hour or so until Lizi got home.

We served it with mashed potato it was amazing on a cold rainy day.

Establishing a pecking order

On Sunday we added, three new hens to our flock bringing the total to six, I have since learned that we should have quarantined them first but I didn't know so I am keeping my fingers crossed that we have no problems. 


It was only a short drive home but our new birds had been through the stress of a poultry auction which must be incredibly distressing, to let them calm down and settle in we shut them on their own inside the hen house with some food and water for the rest of the day. 


When we did open the pop hole they were quick to come out and started wildly pecking at the grass in a way that makes me suspect they had come from somewhere that didn't have any. 


Our new girls are in a bit of a sorry state truth be told, they are white leghorns, nice and young but a bit ruffled. a lot of their feathers are dirty and  scruffy, they have almost no tail feathers and naked vents and bellies. However the seller they came from had some really amazing looking hens of other breeds in the auction and there is no sign of parasites or disease so I think the wear is just superficial. I was chatting to a proper farmer type at the end of the sale who had also bought three birds from the same batch, he was holding all three quite happily in one hand so I assume he was fairly experience, anyway, he said they were nice little birds and would be fine with a bit of feeding up, he put the poor condition down to then being part of a very large flock where there was probably quite a lot of competition for resources.


The Leghorn is pretty much the standard commercial bird in America where they like white eggs. They are egg machines, wiry little birds that put all their energy into egg production and stay lean as a result. They are flighty and quite jumpy but quite hardy (although I expect the huge combs are going to need a bit of vaseline in the winter!) 


There was a bit of bullying when the old and new hens met, the old hens giving our poor little new ones a bit of a hard time, however it wasn't too bad because the leghorns are so nippy and flighty that they were good at just keeping out of the way of the bullies. 


When I went to shut them up the old birds were sitting like queens on the top perch and all three of the leghorns had squeezed into a next box as far away as they could be, I left them like this and in the morning all seemed fine. 


However on the second night we had problems, it was getting dark and the leghorns refused to go in the hen house, instead they were trying to nest down on the outside of the house in the drizzle. Predators are professionally controlled by the surrounding farmers but leaving hens outside the house was a needless risk so we needed to shut them up. I caught one and put him in the hen house and shut the door. When I looked through the vents it was horrible, all three of the old birds jumped on the trapped leghorn and started pecking her to bits, I quickly got her out and didn't want to risk putting her in again. 


Instead we got an empty rabbit hutch, filled the nest bit with sawdust and made a perch from an old bed strut taped onto some bean tins. It was a bit cramped but safe and dry. We put the birds in and they all jumped into the tiny next bit and stayed there. 


I was a bit worried because but last night was very relieved, when I went to shut them up all six birds were roosting quite happily together in the main hen house. 


Looks like the settling period is over and the pecking order has been established. Hopefully harmony with reign for now on.

First Post

Here it is, a new blog, thoughts and musing mostly loosely related through the following topics: family, country living, gardening, allotments, poultry, smallholding, food, self sufficiency, thrift, homebrew,  bushcraft, hiking, outdoor living, wildlife and garden gate enterprise.