Festive feasting with local produce
Dec 4 2009 by Katharine Capocci, The Journal
Locally-sourced Christmas dinner with all the trimmings ticks many a green box, being low on food miles, high on traceability, and all in the best possible taste, as Katharine Capocci reports.
TRADITIONAL turkey dinner with accompanying heaps of myriad veg is a sight for sore eyes on Christmas Day – a festive feast that ticks your five-a-day charts in one sitting.
Christmas is a time to indulge and the big dinner is the focus of the festivities. We can all picture the scene – succulent Kelly Bronze turkey, ready for carving, pork and chestnut stuffing, duck-fat roasties, nutty sprouts, sweet carrots, honey-glazed parsnips, steamed broccoli, and not forgetting juicy cranberry sauce.
But for the chief cook and bottle washer in the household, Christmas dinner takes some work pulling it all together.
And I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve hit the food aisles at M&S with the clock ticking, two days to Christmas, frantically sorting a one-stop-shop festive feast. Not that there’s anything wrong with that – but there is another way, and the locally-sourced route has a somewhat more authentic taste and feel.
With a little more time and planning, and for those who care about food miles and supporting local producers, it isn’t difficult pulling together an impressive festive feast completely locally-sourced.
And it can work out much cheaper than the shop-bought version. Over the page, we show you how to put together your own locally-sourced Christmas dinner.
Traceability, low food miles and quality local produce are all-important all-year-round ingredients behind the success of The Feathers Inn, at Hedley on the Hill, in Northumberland, run by Rhian Cradock and his wife Helen Greer.
Rhian, who also works as a chef at the award-winning pub, uses turkey, beef and lamb reared on farms just fields away from their rustic pub in Northumberland, while game comes from local shoots, and then there’s the chap in the village who shoots hares for him. Now it doesn’t get much more local than that.
The pub is over two centuries old and situated in the most idyllic spot on the old drovers’ road between Hadrian’s Wall and the Derwent Valley.
Rhian’s imaginative menu changes twice daily, embracing the flavours of the region and includes rare-breed local Highland cattle from Whittonstall, wild salmon from the South Tyne and Middle White pork from Ravensworth Grange Farm in Kibblesworth.
Even closer to home, he uses turkey, beef and lamb from Hedley West Riding Farm in the village.
