All the bread and produce bags we sell are GOTS certified: it means they are organic and sustainable, not only great to use but not creating harm at any stage of production. We’ve seen the worst of it. So its great to stock the best of it!
This isn’t a cheery topic, as I’ve been looking more into cotton production. Navneet’s home state of Indian Punjab is a major producer of cotton and has suffered terribly from the pesticides used to produce our global cotton crop and from GM crops failing. I suspect we would have made the same GOTS choice anyway, but having lived in that environment for years its certainly informed what we now do.
If you’d like to know more about GOTS, you can click here.
If you’d like to know more about the genetically modified cotton failures in Punjab and problems surrounding that, click here.
We thought we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention #nationalbakingweek! We absolutely love baking, and Aimee, our brilliant provider of cakes certainly seconds that! Whether it’s a Yorkshire pudding or a red bean cake (yes… really), baking is pure joy. So we made sure we stocked plenty of ingredients - from dried fruit to flour, demerera sugar and spices.
And for all those half term baking marthons, we’ve even got candied peel and dried cherries about to land for Christmas bakes!
So next time you’re keen to try a receipe, remember you can get just the ingredients you need, so you won’t find little bits in the back of the cupboard in months to come as well as #plastic free shopping!
So here we are suggesting that we use walnuts instead of pine nuts. Last evening I added some, slightly crushed, to my pasta instead of pine nuts. Organic, and with equal if not better nutritional value per ounce, and a LOT cheaper, they totally fit the bill. Then there they were, on Countryfile, being made into pesto!
Why walnut not pine nut? Well, pine nuts are wild harvested or foraged. This is ‘a good thing’ but it’s a very short season in natural forests in Siberia, Afghanistan and China. Currently there’s only Chinese pine nuts available and the market price is incredibly high. Walnuts on the other hand can be UK grown, have a full chain of custody and sustainability and be a LOT cheaper. We are trying to find out more on whether pine nuts are causing natural forests to be preserved - obviously that would be excellent! But for now, we’re saying ‘have you tried walnuts instead?’ Because we are absolutely converted!
We’re basking in sunshine today, thanks to our enormous south-facing window! But it’s definitely become cold outside. We’ll have a heater on inside, and run entirely on renewable energy, so you may find our door is closed. But come on in - we’re definitely open, it’s just that we are believers in http://www.closethedoor.org.uk to reduce the amount of heat (or cool) that is simply lost. When we were renovating we also fully insulated our lovely 1907 building. So here’s to some fab coffee, cake and refills over the chilly season!
We’re super pleased: our trade mark registration came through yesterday! So now we can get our application in for a lovely sign, and get some beautiful hand painting inside too,
