E150a - Plain caramel (colour) - A natural food colour, ranging in shade from dark-red through to dark-browns and blacks.*  Okay, it's not one of the harmful E-numbers, but what's the point?  Is it really necessary?  Traditional balsamic vinegar is made from nothing but fermented grape must.  It gets that lovely caramel colour naturally.  Aspall, who make a lovely organic cider vinegar that I have been using for years, recently came out with a balsamic style vinegar made from English apples.  I was about to buy it when I noticed it had added caramel colour on the ingredients list along with apple cider.  According to their web site, it is "made by blending the finest Cyder Vinegar with the must from reduced Cox Apple Juice."  So the added must from the juice is what's giving it the balsamic-style flavour -- why is it then necessary to add colouring?

I wrote to them to ask this (first by email on 11 July to which I received no response, and then by post last week, to which I did receive a response today) and they said, "We add the caramel colour just to make it darker, it does not affect the taste."  So why add it then?  There's a bit on the web site where they go on about how natural their vinegar is:

Unlike many vinegar producers we neither add preservative nor pasteurise our vinegars. Vinegar is nature’s great preservative so should need no external help in this respect. As for pasteurisation, it only has the effect of destroying many of the nutritional and flavour benefits inherent in vinegar, and so it would seem a crying shame to undo all the hard work of getting this far only to dilute the quality at the finishing post. 

So then why add the caramel colour?  Also of interest is that it doesn't mention the addition of the colouring anywhere on their web site that I can find.  In fact, they imply that nothing else is added to it:  "We simply use apples instead of grapes and the result is a match for many a quality balsamic."  Why can't we just have honest food?

After a bit of poking I have found a Welsh company, Toloja Orchards, who are only located about 25 miles away from me, who, according to their web site, make an oak matured cider vinegar from their own apples, so the next battle is to find somewhere where I can buy it...  Watch this space...

* Stefan Gates, E Numbers: Is your food really going to kill you? The truth about E numbers (London: Cassell Illustrated, 2010), 83.

Finished products! Cauliflower, cucumber and Nant Du bacon salad...

Apple pie! (More apples left, plus I gathered some more this morning, so there will be chutney to come as well...)

Scrambled honesty box eggs with mushrooms and onions, and a side of tomatoes with home-made pesto...

Feeling a bit more cheerful today as I have got lots of lovely treats!

The biggest field mushrooms I have ever seen, picked this morning on the farm I work at:

Also from Blaenau, windfall apples -- and there will be more of these to come as well I'm sure...

And this surprise in my veg box when I got home -- a yellow cauliflower -- yes, it really is that colour, it's not just a bad photo!  I've had purple cauliflowers and green fractal cauliflowers today, but nothing like this golden colour!

Will post photos of all these after I've cooked them...

Okay, sorry, I may have been getting a little morbid in the last post, so a few thoughts about where my thoughts are coming from these days...

In case you haven't heard, there's a proposal to open a major enormous Sainsbury's supermarket right on the edge of our lovely little town that doesn't really have any national chains.  This will totally destroy the town -- I can't even count the number of traders who have told me that they will go out of business if it happens.  So I've been spending a lot of time talking to various people around the town and trying to convince them that this will be a bad thing for our town.  One of the questions people who support the proposal ask me most frequently is where I do my weekly shopping then.  I pause for a minute, and then attempt to explain that I don't do a weekly shop in the sense that most people mean it.  I don't go to the supermarket every Saturday morning and throw loads of packages in my trolley.

My meat either comes from one of the three independent butchers we have in town, or from my chest freezer, which has half a lamb and half a pig that I've bought from farmers I know.  I get a weekly veg box delivery, of locally grown organic veg, and I supplement this with veg from an independent shop in town.  Cheese I buy from one of the butchers or from one of the delicatessens, and the same for my butter.  Eggs I get from an honesty box that I pass on my way to work.  If I want bread, cakes, or cookies, I make these, with flour and sugar from the delicatessen.  We do have a small Co-op supermarket and I go there occasionally to get a few things I can't get anywhere else: loo roll and cream are the two things that spring to mind.  I get wine there sometimes as well, although usually from the independent off-license in town.  And that's about my food shopping!

But when I try to explain this to people who want the Sainsbury's, they don't even seem to understand what I'm saying -- it's like I'm speaking a foreign language or something -- they continue to insist that I must do a weekly supermarket shop somewhere...  So I'm sort of feeling like my life is somehow so drastically different from everybody else's (no weekly food shop, no television, no new clothing...) that I struggle to even find a starting commonality...  Anybody else feel like this?

What is the meaning of life?  Is it just about being happy or is there more to it than that?  Can we still fix the world or is it too late?  Answers please...

Sorry, I know I have not been posting -- still not in the habit of using the computer -- it seems to take so much time!  Not much news to report really -- I'm still working on the ciabatta...  Will try and post something informative with pictures later in the week.  In the mean time, if you're looking for reading material, check this out...