Broadway Market

Spirits are high today at Broadway Market, London has seen the storm clouds finally part to reveal a light steel blue sky only slightly tinged with the dull grey that has been part of our lives for the past six months. The sun is making every effort to shine and is intermittently succeeding, flooding the concrete with a glow that makes people fall in love with London. Happy faces all around, people whistling and singing, everyone wanting to know how you are, wishing you a nice day. Everything is better when the sun shines.

Today I'm on the hunt for proper pasture-raised beef fed and eggs from chickens free to roam green fields where they can nibble bugs and worms. Yum. 

And this is exactly what you can find at Wild Beef. Having only ever been to Broadway Market later in the day, I've never seen this stall in all its glory. Today they are fully stocked with vacuum packed cuts of beef, chicken, veal and pigeon. Free range organic eggs are on sale here as well as free range organic butter and cream. Today the gentleman behind the stall, Richard Vines, is giving away huge chunks of beef suet too, which I nab along with some eggs. It's great to be able to speak to directly to the producers and Richard advises me upon questioning that I can indeed render the suet down to tallow, use it in baking or feed it to the birds.

I go on strolling through the relatively quiet market praising myself for managing to get here so early, it seems like the perfect arrival time is around 10.30am when things are just gearing up. Today I find raw milk on sale, which send me into overexcitement as I've been scouring the internet for it for three weeks. The stall-holder tells me they usually run out by the afternoon but today they are well stocked. In my excitement I forget to photograph the stall but get the name: Downland Produce.

It isn't all food though, the market sees an array of organic stall-holders alternating attendance. I'm drawn in by the floral scent emanating from a Shea butter cosmetics stall. At Shea Alchemy there is a small range of skincare, cosmetics and toiletries with product testimonials from Marie Claire. 

The intense hand cream comes in five scents: English rose, French lavender, Orient, Geranium and Organic lemon & bergamot. On first try my thirsty hands soak up the cream quickly without leaving any greasiness behind. And the geranium scent is refreshingly long lasting.

And no trip would be complete without having a sweet treat, so I head over to The London Marshmallow Company. Their display of beautifully pastel coloured cubes sucks me in and they have tasters available. Bonus.

Just look at those! Who could resist?! I'm taken by the standout colours of the Elderflower and Blackcurrant and to go with that I choose a Cherry and Almond along with a marshmallowy take on Strawberries and Cream.

What a perfect finish to the sunny morning!

Beef Tallow

After a year or so hiatus, I'm back equipped with a 'proper' camera and some fancy settings. After trying out various low-carb-this and low-fat-that products to help my never ending quest for better health, a little internet research and experimentation has led me to try out living 'primal'. The in-depth fundamentals of the lifestyle can be found over at Mark's Daily Apple but I've been attempting to ease myself into it all with small changes. Though I'm not yet fully immersed, banishing bread and prohibiting pasta has significantly improved my digestion and already I'm experiencing higher energy levels.

Eating more meat is of course more expensive but using the leftovers can make this way of living more economical and less wasteful. The animal fat is a often discarded as unhealthy and high in saturated fat but as it turns out, saturated fat isn't what clogs up our arteries. So in my quest to produce less waste, I saved up around 500g of hard, waxy white beef fat from the fore rib. Here's how I rendered it down into beef tallow:

The fat itself had been in the freezer so I left it to defrost. Here it is before any prep:

Once fully defrosted, I painstakingly removed all the visible meat and chopped the fat into 1cm cubes then popped into a small stainless steel pan over a low heat:

Here is a picture of the gas underneath just to show how low it really was:

I kept the lid on to avoid the fat spitting and after half an hour, stirring occasionally, fat started to collect in the bottom of the pan:

Once there was enough to drain a little, I drained through kitchen cloth over a metal sieve and strained out all those little beefy crumbs:

After cooking for another half a hour, most of the fat had turned brown and crispy:

So I gave it one final strain and ended up with this much tallow:

Once cooled it turns opaque, white and hard like lard. It can be scooped out and used for frying or even whipped up with essential oils to make a body butter. Apparently it's the best fat for cooking the perfect crispy fries. And no food waste!