Low Carbon Cookbook at the Bungay Beehive Day - 15 July

At the recent Bee Cause meeting in Norwich, organised by Friends of the Earth, Bob Flowerdew declared: if you want to help bees eat organic food, don't give your money to the pharmaceutical companies. It's perhaps the most useful step you can take to help both honeybees and wild bees in their present decline. Protecting wild places and growing nectar and pollen plants your garden are great helps, but the main damage caused to pollinator populations is the high use of pesticides in commercial food production.

At the Low Carbon Cookbook we're organic to the max: recognising that it's not just eating for our own health and well-being that is important, but that by "voting with our forks" and eating plants grown without systemic insecticides we're also backing the millions of creatures who suffer colony and habitat loss as a result of industrial farming. 90% of our crop species depend on pollination and we face a tasteless and depressing food future, if the bees and other insects disappear.

At our next meeting we are converging for a picnic after the (Sustainable) Bungay Beehive Day, organised by the Transition group, Bungay Community Bees. We will be discussing the crucial relationship between bees and our food, and everyone is welcome to join us. Just bring a picnic dish and/or drink with you and a rug to sit on.

This is BCB's second annual day of talks, walks and workshops celebrating the honeybee, and this year will feature the film, Queen of the Sun, and a talk by Heidi Hermann from the Natural Beekeeping Trust. At 12.15 LCC's Mark Watson will be leading a Bee and Flower walk around Bungay's diverse green spaces and at 2pm Charlotte Du Cann will be discussing wild flowers and their relationship with bees, with excerpts from her new book 52 Flowers That Shook My World – A Radical Return to Earth. Full details of the day here.

Meet at the entrance to the Festival marquee, Castle Meadow, Bungay on 15 July at 5pm. For further info contact Charlotte Du Cann theseakaleproject@hotmail.co.uk

Images from BCB trip to High Ash Farm, Caister St Edmund, farmed by Chris Skinner for the benefit of wild plants and creatures (and us).

Ancient and modern superfoods - Low Carbon Cookbook - 18 June

Last year the Low Carbon Cookbook contacted Jeremy Bartlett to see if we could curate one of the raised beds at the Grapes Hill Community Garden. Fortunately for the garden, all the beds were snapped up by people in the neighbourhood: from those wanting some more space to grow veg and herbs or keen to try their hand.

Our original plan was to have a showcase for Transition plants that people might not know about: experimental cereals and pulses, perennial plants that flourish in forest gardens, medicinal herbs and edible flowers. We wanted to have an area where everyone could find out about them (with signs), ask questions, touch and taste.

Unfortunately for us there was no space available, but Jeremy has let us have one or two places for some of those plants. We chose three that came under the heading Ancient and Modern Superfoods: two seeds bearers - amaranth and chia from Mexico and one berry bush, goji from the Orient (via Jo Homan's Edible Landscapes London).

We were inspired by our meeting at Jo Balfe's Nectar Cafe where Jo mixes local goji berries into her teas and muesli and chia into muesli and breads. Both the seeds are highly nutritious and make a sticky and fortifying porridge. The goji berries are an ace tonic. All these plants are easy to grow, lovely to look at and delicious to taste - and once planted free to eat too! Check them out.

Low Carbon Cookbook are meeting on 18 June at 7pm. For further info contact Charlotte Du Cann on theseakaleproject@hotmail.co.uk (01502 722419)

Martin Crawford's ace guidebook, How to Grow Perennial Vegetables (Green Books); amaranth seed heads from Erik's garden.

C is for Chickweed, Cookbooks and Community - I0 April

In Spring something wild starts happening in the kitchen. People start talking about nettle soup and looking into hedgerows and verges in a determined manner. It’s the time of the forager and all manner of sharp and peppery leaves are finding their way into Transition salad bowls everywhere. Old favourites like dandelions, cleavers and alexander flowers are mixed with new try-outs like violet leaves and rue.

At Sustainable Bungay’s Happy Mondays at the Community Kitchen (sit down supper for 50 people), bittercress leaves went into the cous cous, sea beet, sea purslane, chickweed and mallow leaves made a salty seashore salad, picked and shared with fellow Transitioner cooks and growers from London.

Being adventurous and resourceful are the hallmarks of the Cookbook. Our ancestors ate a huge variety of wild plants and one of the best ways to get back in synch with living systems is to eat as locally and directly as possible – and with these spring flower and leaf salads you are doing do just that. At our Low Carbon meeting we discussed how to proceed with the project over the last of the winter roots, Norwich Field Bean hummus and Erik’s new garden leaves, including zingy sorrel and land cress. Happy picking! Charlotte Du Cann

Low Carbon Cookbook are meeting on 8 May. For further info contact Charlotte on theseakaleproject@hotmail.co.uk

Falling into the soup - Low Carbon Cookbook - 28 February

“Wasn’t this meeting supposed to be the one where we got down to the business of actually writing the book?” said Erik. We’d been talking casually over potato curries and salads and Erik’s very tasty winter vegetable soup with pumpkin and lovage. We’d spoken about how meeting up monthly for the unwritten Low Carbon Cookbook had increased our awareness of food systems and radically changed our approach to food and our shopping habits. But it was coming up to 9 o’ clock and no one so far had mentioned the W word. To be honest we’d got a bit cosy.

So the three of us got up from Bee’s kitchen table and in the next hour came to an agreement to write something by the next meeting which we would then bring to show each other. Bee will write on the hungry gap and the carbon footprint of cooking, Erik on a calendar for home food growing and I’ll write about freegan and foraged food. All the low carbon cooks from past and present meetings are free to contribute - Erik will contact you about that.

Now, what to say about that freegan tofu… Mark Watson.

For further info contact Charlotte Du Cann on theseakaleproject@hotmail.co.uk

Kitchen Encounters of the Low Carbon Kind - 18 January

Last month the Low Carbon cookbook crew sat before a midwinter feast of spicy dahl, chickpea stew, millet, buckwheat, pumpkins, sprouts, parsnips, almond cheese, wild mushrooms, red bean hummus and something unusual: dried curly kale that tasted of cheddar. Intriguing and very very more-ish.

We were at The Nectar Cafe where the shelves are stacked with local herb teas and hedgerow cordials and jars of lacto-fermented veg, chutney and salsas, all primed for this year's hungry gap. Jo Balfe's cafe, like our Low Carbon Cookbook, is seasonal to the max. To live within these kind of constraints happily, as we have all discovered, requires a whole different approach to cooking and living life. It's something that all cooks and creators find as they bridge the gap between the left and the right ways of seeing the world - the spark that lights the stove.

The spark is what you look for when you write a book, a creative way to mix that left-side heavy-duty information and the right-side possibilities of living lightly in synch with the planet. None of us wants to write an entertainment, or a text book. What makes you pick up a cookbook? we asked each other around the table. To proceed towards a low-carbon future an imaginative relationship with the physical world is necessary, where certain key commitments have been made. We need to be fired up by something stronger, more alluring than any feel-bad information. Tastes and kitchen encounters that connect us with the earth and with each other.

Any surprising, life-changing, downshifting recipes to share out there? We'd love to hear from you. Charlotte Du Cann

Our next meeting will be a mapping exercise to plot out the structure of the book. Bring your pens and paper and a winter dish to share. Or if you have a recipe you'd like to be included, please contact Charlotte at theseakaleproject@hotmail.co.uk

Photo: Masanobu Fukuoka from One Straw Revolution); low carbon cafe conversation. Full text and pix from The Spark That Lights the Stove. The Nectar Cafe is at 16 Onley Street, off Unthank Road.

B is for Beetroot, Beanfeasts and Bees - Low Carbon Cookbook - 13 December

Our cookbook research year has now come to a close. Next year will all be about writing, grounding and, with luck, publishing. At our last meeting we met over a fine feast of autumnal pumpkins and beans and tried out our key downshift kitchen tool, the rocket stove. I had just taken one along to a discussion at Occupy Norwich on Relocalising the Food System (along with a loaf of bread baked by Pye, a scrumped apple and a copy of Local Food).

Christine’s Wild Stove roared up immediately, mine (handmade at the Transition Camp from five food tins) had to be determinedly coaxed with walnut shells and lavender sticks, but soon after the soup was bubbling, the kettle was singing and we were eating under the stars!

Meanwhile this month we're celebrating winter and would like to invite you to our merry midwinter meal on 13 December at The Nectar Café. We’ll be bringing along some of our seasonal delights and raising a toast to all who sail in this low-carbon lifeboat together (and especially those who work in the galley). We’ll be discussing our favourite recipes too so if you have one you’d like to share with us for the book do bring it, yourself and a dish along. If you could let us know you are coming that would be great (it’s a small space!) See you there!

This Low Carbon Life will be meeting at The Nectar Café, 16 Onley Street at 7pm. For further info and to book a place please contact Charlotte Du Cann the seakaleproject@hotmail.co.uk (01502 722419)

John's giant beetroot at the Low Carbon Cookbook table, TN Third Birthday Event, URC; by the light of the rocket stove, Christine's balcony, Inner Space.

A is for Apples, Abundance, Allotments - Low Carbon Cookbook - 23 November

We're on the home stretch with our cookbook sessions. In October we rounded up the growing year and looked at everything we had discussed - tools, ingredients, ethics, seasons -over our autumnal harvest feast of pumpkins and apples. Now we have a full store cupboard and soon we'll put our full attention on compiling an alphabet of downshift cuisine.

So to whet your appetite and intellect here is a quick ABC taster of the kinds of practical and philosophical subjects you will find within its covers:

Allotments, Beehives, CSAs, Dairy, Eggs, Foraging, Germination, Hungry gap, Industrial food systems, Jam, Kitchen Conversations, Land Grabs, Milling, Nourishment, Organic, Palm oil, Quinces, Rocket stoves, Storage, Tortilla, Umi plums, Veg boxes, Water, Xylitol, Yellow peas, Zero Waste.

I've written about the Low Carbon Cookbook on the Social Reporters blog during our Food and Health week. Do check it out! Charlotte Du Cann

STOP PRESS! Before our next meeting some of us will be leading a discussion on Relocalising our Food System at OccupyNorwich, Hay Hill, at 5.30pm. All welcome!

Photos: Thom and pumpkin at the Transition Camp 2011 by Tamzin Pinkerton, co-author of Local Food (Social Reporting project); apples stored in a drawer by Bee Springwood from Apple Time (This Low Carbon Life)

Gathering the Harvest - Low Carbon Cookbook - 11 October

Last month the Low Carbon Cookbook crew met at the Friends Meeting House for a Kitchen Conversation at the FoodCycle Cafe. Our meal and discussion came just after watching The Shock Doctrine at Little g's first film night and it was hard to concentrate on the niceties of domestic food waste, after watching the violent way Chile, Argentina, Russia and the UK had been chewed up and consumed by the voracious appetites of the Chicago School of Economics.

The food however was delicious and the atmosphere very buzzy in its spiritual surroundings: Thai nut curry with rice and mixed salad and organic bread, followed by a knockout blackberry and apple crumble, served with a seriously industrialised Dream Cream (ah, the perils of freegan food!)

This month we are celebrating a year of low-carbon cooking and sharing and talking about everything edible and grown (including the kitchen sink) with a harvest meal. We are also deciding now how to cohere all our findings and get down to our winter work of Writing The Book.

If you would like to contribute to this TN project or come along and find out what we are up to do get in touch Charlotte Du Cann rootsshootsandseeds@hotmail.co.uk

Photo with Norfolk Biffin apple from Foraging for Abundance (This Low Carbon Life)

Kitchen Conversation 2 - Low Carbon Cookbook - 16 September

Last month we had our first Kitchen Conversation at the Nectar Cafe and discussed Eating Local Food for Real. Our delicious supper of shared dishes, which included some of the new cafe's raw delights - gaspacho, blackberry and apple crumble, and courgetti, a spiralling bowl of small marrows as you have not yet known them, doused in peppery nasturtium and dandelion leaf pesto (a hit!), Mark's Feel the Beet Medicine Salad and Sophie's grapes from her native France.

Afterwards we discussed the varying engagements with local food from allotments, how you can get out (or not) from the supermarket system, the beneficial and low carbon advantages of eating raw food, veg boxes and how eating in season ties you in with the earth and the people and plants of the neighbourhood. Meanwhile the cafe's next door neighbour dropped in with a picture of a hummingbird he had taken in Northern Peru.

We'll be holding our second Low Carbon Kitchen Conversation at Norwich FoodCycle Cafe on 16 September at 7pm. These free community meals are cooked up each week at the Friends Meeting House kitchens from food that would otherwise be thrown away, all donated by local shops, restaurants and market stalls (including surplus veg from Norwich FarmShare). Our topic for discussion will be (you guessed it!) Food Waste, both the big global picture and the small ways we can rethink how we buy and pay attention to the food that keeps our bodies and souls together. All welcome! Charlotte Du Cann

For further info on The Low Carbon Coobook contact Charlotte at rootsshootsandseeds@hotmail.co.uk

Jo welcomes the crew to the Nectar; our shared late summer meal

Introducing Kitchen Conversations - Low Carbon Cookbook - 24 August

Last month we gathered at Christine’s and welcomed Sophie and Nick to our low-carbon table. We ate, as usual, a delicious supper of shared dishes (from rainbow summer slaws to foraged cherry plum pie) and afterwards discussed the Burning Issues embedded in the present industrialised food system. We looked at the scarcity of water, the destructiveness of supermarkets, peak phosphates, and how we can change the menu, both practically and philosophically, in our daily lives and neighbourhoods.

We also decided to open out these monthly discussions and invite everyone to take part in a conversation over supper on all aspects of food and carbon reduction.

Our first Kitchen Conversation will be on Eating Local for Real on Wednesday 24 August at 6.30pm at Jo Balfe's new cafe The Nectar at 16 Onley Street, just off the Unthank Road. Jo is a member of the TN Permaculture group and gives regular workshops on cooking and eating local and raw food. We'll bring our own local low carbon dishes to share and Jo will be offering drinks and pedal-powered desserts.

We'll be holding our second Low Carbon Kitchen Conversation at Norwich FoodCycle Cafe in September. These free community meals are cooked up each week at the Friends Meeting House kitchens from food that would otherwise be thrown away, donated by local shops, restaurants and market stalls (including surplus veg from Norwich FarmShare).

Everyone is welcome at both events. Details and times will be added soon to the calendar. Watch this space! Charlotte Du Cann

Bicycle blender outside The Nectar; Low Carbon Cookbook Crew; blight-free organic potatoes at The Spuds Don't Work anti-GM rally outside the Forum

Kitchen Conversation 1: Eating Local for Real at The Nectar Cafe, 16 Onley Street. KC 2: Food and Waste will be at FoodCycle, Friends Meeting House, Upper Goat Lane in September. For more details contact Charlotte Du Cann rootshootsandseeds@hotmail.co.uk

It's all about the veg - Low Carbon Cookbook - 19 July

Suddenly the salads got intense, as the rain finally fell and the conversations shifted from the hungry gap to what am I going to do with all these courgettes? At our monthly meeting we discussed the lowest carbon ways to store the upcoming harvests from runner beans to gooseberries. Top of the glut preservation methods was lacto-fermentation (see Olivia’s blog on this subject) as as we sat down to our customary feast of local, home-grown, organic, freegan, fair-trade food. Erik’s jar of fermented parsnips added a zip to the new season’s potatoes, broad beans, sugarsnap peas, radishes, sea beet, French beans, asparagus (last of), artichokes (first of), eggs and raspberries. Mark's 14-herb medicine jelly refreshed our palates (and our systems).

Our other hot topic was rocket stoves: I’d just returned from the Sunrise Festival (see next week's Gatherings on the blog) and worked at the (totally off-grid) Tin Village making pizza in a wood-fired earth-oven. All our food was cooked on these extraordinarily simple and effective low-fuel stoves. Christine also talked about her super-efficient wood oven in the cottage she shares in the Thetford Forest. Community and field kitchens are a key way to share resources, swap skills and focus on the earthy, essential nature of food and cooking in a way that is hard to access with the batterie of the modern consumer kitchen - all its decadent recipes, techno-gadgets and supermarket-wrapped produce.

For low-carbon cooks the downshift is not just in the what, it’s also in the how. Charlotte Du Cann

For more info about the Low Carbon Cookbook or to join the group email Charlotte on theseakaleproject@hotmail.co.uk.

Local fruit: dessert and Morello cherries from Paul Jackson's and Bungay Library Community Garden; home-grown gooseberries and blackcurrents; whitecurrants from neighbours; home-made jam from Norman;s's gooseberries and Malcolm's strawberries: small rocket stove by Wild Stoves at the Sunrise Festival, Bruton, Someset.

Low Carbon Cookbook (the book part) - 15 June

May's Low Carbon Cookbook meeting took place at the Bicycle Shop cafe, where we also welcomed Olivia for the first time.

Although this meant we had to forgo our normal practice of bringing ingredients and dishes to eat, share and discuss, we took the opportunity to look at the material we've gathered so far, which we then mapped out on a large piece of pink paper in notes and sketches.

The structure of a book began to take form as we went round the table taking turns to describe some of our favourite low carbon recipes. We talked seasons, seeds, lactofermentation, herbs, flowers and fruits as well as how to live without a fridge and what exactly organic means.

We all got very hungry! I’d already eaten, but normally we would have been enjoying Bee's winter slaw and omelettes, Charlotte's oriental slaw, Erik's pumpkin soup and pickles, my freegan pizza and medicine jelly, and Olivia's Norfolk Black Turkey Egg n’ Nettle Quiche with Spelt Pastry, and all the compotes, breads, freegan gleanings and homegrown and foraged leaves, roots and sprouts that we were talking about.

It was exciting though, to get the actual book underway. Who knows? In a year's time you may be reading The Low Carbon Cookbook, paper version (recycled, of course). Mark Watson

Low Carbon Larder - 18 May

This month after a Spring in action meal that included raw nettle pesto, local asparagus, home-grown rainbow chard and Hunza apricots, we checked out our several Low Carbon Larders, and conducted our monthly round up of seasonal veg, exchanges of practical tips (wood-fired stoves, how to bottle tomatoes, individual porridge mixes) and big picture thinking.

What has become clear in the last six months is that this is not going to be a cookbook in the usual sense. There will be recipes (dishes you can bring-to-share), but it's focus will not be Cuisine. Instead it will chart a whole new attitude to eating and buying food: cooking from scratch, considering provenance weaning ourselves of a high meat and dairy intake and getting used to eating in community, instead of alone on the fast-track. It's about swapping stuff (Mark and Erik exchanging alexanders for last-of-the season kale), using less energy (pressure cookers, living without a fridge), not wasting anything (freegan food, roadkill, foodcycle Fridays in Norwich). And about creating a culture that is happy to eat simple things.

Food in the last decades has become an obsession with pleasure and convenience- artificial, over-luxurious, over processed, shipped from everywhere in the world. It needs to become practical, deep, connected, nutritious and tied into the local territory. Here's where we start: by paying attention on what is on the table, giving it right value and meaning and asking questions. Civiliations famously arise and fall accordingly to their ability to feed themselves. If we want to evolve into people who are synch with the planet we’re going to have to radically downshift our kitchens. It might be the end of the Magimix, but it won’t be the end of the world. Charlotte Du Cann

For more about the cookbook contact theseakaleproject@hotmail.co.uk

Carrying 15 kilos of millet home to the larder; low carbon cookbook crew tuck in!

Low Carbon Cookbook - 20 April

We met just after the equinox and Spring had unaccountably entered the kitchen. In the Chinese five element system Spring is the wood season where everything branches out and all green, sour and sharp things provide the most nourishing and energetic energies for the body. So leaves were our main focus and foraging for them our main topic of conversation (see Elena's post in This Low Carbon Life and Transtion Circle West's foraging day).

Star attraction on the table was our community toss-it-in 24 green leaf salad (see list below), some from our vegetable patches and others gathered from our local lanes). More chickweed went into the omelette and we were all surprised by the alexander stems which, while no one could accuse them of being like asparagus, were much nicer than any of us remembered.

Afterwards we discussed vegetable oil as one of the key ingredients of the low-carbon larder. We looked at the production of five oils – hemp, olive, sunflower, sesame and rapeseed – finding out the value of cold-pressed, where the seeds were grown, what kind of methods and machines were used to extract them, the myriad medicinal uses of sesame, even finding a solar-powered olive oil company in Italy! We discussed prices, freight, health, fertilisers, human waste . . . the whole complex business of crop growing and all its (mostly) invisible resource and land use. When push comes to shove oils that could be grown here commercially are hemp and rapeseed (now both grown on a small, and expensive scale). Sunflower too at a pinch. We’re going to miss those olives! Charlotte Du Cann

Some of our 24 Leaves of Spring: rainbow chard, parsley, fennel, ground ivy, sorrel, rocket, endive, sage, purslane, landcress, tansy, mugwort, chives, parsley, lovage, dill, alexander, bittercres, salad burnet, dandelion, hawthorn, jack-in-the-hedge, chickweed, cleavers, plus violets and primroses.

Low Carbon Cookbook - 22 March

These are dried field beans grown by William Hudson, Norwich FarmShare’s key advisor. They’re part of the Food & Farming group’s Beans, Oats and Flour project that’s looking at crops that can be grown in the UK as the constrictions of climate change and peak oil hit our fossil-fuelled food system. They’re also called cattle or tick beans and are a popular staple in Egpyt. Right now in fact when we’re not feeding them to cows we’re exporting them to Egypt where they are known rather more appetisingly as ful medames. In the next Low Carbon Cookup, we’re going to be exploring the future with this down-to-earth relative of the broad bean, as we get on down to the business of writing a Transition cookbook. We’ll also be looking at the production of oils – reporting back on the olive, sesame, rapeseed, hemp and other essentials of our low carbon store cupboard. This week on the blog in our LCC Transition Themes slot we have invited Joanne Brannan to write about a foraging for wild leaves at her innovative low carbon farm in Suffolk. Joanne runs a CSA (with Transition Ipswich) and is a Guardian gardening blogger, so keep an eye out for her post on Friday. Last month those peppery, bitter and sour green leaves were definitely entering our month-by-month vegetable calendar and springing up amongst the root veg in our shared feast – sorrel, lovage, rocket, chickweed, nettle, endives, radicchio, fennel, lamb’s lettuce, bittercress. MMMMmmm. Can’t you just taste that Spring! Have a good one! Charlotte Du Cann Worth a Handful of Beans by Mark Watson