OUR FARM

I grew up on a small farm near Swaffham in Norfolk which is not a million miles away from the bakery. This farm has been central to my ethos of locally produced sustainable food. As I grew up our pigs would eat all of our food waste, we grew our own grain for food for the pigs, cattle and sheep, and the cattle provided milk that my mother made into butter with the waste buttermilk going to feed the pigs. We ate our own chickens and grew our own vegetables. My mother would make her own bread and when she was a touch younger, I remember a small hand mill to mill our wheat which we made into bread. The pigs would go off to the butchers and come back as gloriously smoky black hams, deliciously salty bacon and sausages. Our chickens tasted oddly enough, of chicken. You don't know what chicken tastes like until you've tasted a properly reared chicken that has scrabbled around in the yard, nested in the straw bales and, in the case of our little bantams, roosted in the hedge. They are strongly flavoured and taste of the farmyard and the vegetable patch and herbs that the little buggers would constantly be being chased out of. We shot rabbits - delicious little fat things that raced out of the grain as it was being harvested and made them into slow cooked stews on the back of the Rayburn, with some of the late summer tomatoes, our own garlic, and herbs that grew near the back door. Sometimes Mum would soak some beans that she'd dried the year before and throw those in too, which added some body. We had always our own fresh parsley, chervil, tarragon, rosemary and thyme growing just two feet away from the back door, so I grew up knowing exactly what these were and what they tasted like. When there was a lot of work to be done and there were many people around to help, it would always become a social occasion to sit down and eat after the hard slog had been done, and of course all the food came from our own farm. It wasn't a big farm but its amazing how much you can get from a twenty acre patch and how many it can sustain. Food and its ingredients became the punctuation to my life and for that I'm very grateful.

Time of course marches on and my mother who did most of the work herself apart from a steady stream of wwoofers (Working Weekends On Organic Farms) has found it increasingly difficult to maintain the hard physical work that such a lifestyle demands. I had been thinking hard about how to help and ensure the farm's continuation for some time now, but it has been difficult whilst trying to establish my own business. However last year it became apparent that as my business grew stronger and more settled, that we could start to source the Gloucestershire Old Spot pork we used from our own farm. I think that now we have finally managed to do it. We produce quite a lot of food waste (vegetable trimmings, bread returns from markets etc). Last year then, we started to rear our own pigs, using this waste, though we couldn't rear enough to provide all the pork we needed. So we used them to make sausages and bacon which we sold hot in our own bread with home made apple chutney at events like the Norfolk and Suffolk shows. I made the recipe up for the sausages having been inspired by a sausage that I ate in the Pyrenees a couple of years ago, which was coarsely ground, had a little bacon through it, and some thyme. That was it, - no doughy old rusk or other awful filler. They were beautiful, and I came back and made up a few batches of plain and some with apple and warm spices, and some with spinach and herbs. Last year when the wild garlic came out we made a load using just that, - they were sensational. So last year we grew enough pigs to make just our sausages for the summer events calendar, and this year we hope to produce enough to start using them in all our products. We have just added another breed to the varieties we have on the farm - Oxford Sandy and Blacks, which I have bought in as weaners, and we plan to breed from them. I am told they make super hog roasts, so give us a few months and we'll see. We have cattle too on the farm - Aberdeen Angus which we grow to nearly two and a half years old before slaughter, but we can only produce one or two a year at the moment. We still have very wild little bantams who cross merrily with our egg layers to provide table birds and gorgeous orange yolked eggs which will be going into our Easter pies.

My philosophy of using every part of the pig I can means that I constantly wish to make more and different products, inspired of course by our own home grown culinary history. When the pigs are big enough this year we will produce porky hampers using our fantastic sausages half of which we smoke, as well as a range of other delicious pork products, which are detailed on the Limited Editions page. Have a look- but be warned it will be first come first served so drop us an email and be sure to reserve your goodies