No washer no tv no mobile no fridge … all these things purposely not being used here in this house. Small car too, I still find the obsession with SUVs and second and even God forbid un-needed vanity vehicles to be stupid.

I’ve utterly no need of the above but last nights meal bugged me from the beginning as bound to fall flat and bingo I was in a perverse sense ‘not disappointed’. It was all toms, courgette, sliced pepper and onion in the dreaded supermarket offering, the first three I intentionally try to avoid, not a good idea as being someone prone to aches and pains. However it was the hopeless excessive use of the electricity that really grated on me.

The night previous I behaved out of character, open to the idea of something different in my shopping basket, a tray of pre-prepared so called ‘Mediterranean vegetables’ probable real cost at max 20p at the factory and cost me i dunno £1.40 at the supermarket but what really bugged me was having to roast them in the bench top oven for what seemed 40 mins and add lots of garlic and herbs to get anything with taste and with the cold chicken it was … a disaster; time was at a premium. I ate most of it but it was not the pleasurable experience I had hoped for. Another important lesson was having to run the electric oven for so long and this is quite obscene, intolerable in these days of minimising carbon footprint. The roasting of vegetables will not occur in this household ever again, I much prefer my five year regime of lightly stir fried veg with pre-cooked chicken, ie all in the same pan, needing only a small gas flame to make the complete meal (admittedly using supermarket pre-cooked chicken). Yes I know, its burning gas but at least it eliminates 40mins of oven roasting, that is the point! .

Rough idea of my hopefully low carbon meal …

cubes of swede, cubes of potato, leek, gently fried with a good ext virg olive oil.

sea salt, fgbp, ajiwan seed, black mustard, the latter two must be fried on the bare pan, not just mixed in.

spring onion, sweetcorn, garlic,

dash of curry powder, maybe a little amchur, few drops maple syrup and a new trick of mine a dash of brown sauce on the chicken as it is fried.

… now at this point one can add a stockpot and some white wine and reduce for 5mins (I use presently a Aldi Chardonnay) or you can proceed as a dry meal.

The result is tasty, nuitritious and minimises my carbon requirement. Everything is to hand, its my daily routine and the other main meal is casserole with lots of veg, generally thick sliced swede, potatos, sweetcorn. Sometimes half a can of spinach or quick sauted spring greens / cabbage.

Everything must start at the individual personal level, as with heating in less warm weather, do as the Chinese and the Russians do … put a coat on! I admit in real cold run the central heating but nowadays at the slightest cold draught with many households on goes the heating! We may have lived in the land of plenty here in the west for a century but nature and physics and the vast chemistry set called climate change necessitate a change in how we consume energy.

People knock China but they had the one-child policy and for many years the bicycle was the near universal method of personal transport. That bogey of voluntary population control really needs to addressed.

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