The Hoxton Apprentice, I learnt, was set up in 2004 by a charity called Training For Life, along with social entrepreneur Gordon D’Silva and one of my favourite chefs, Prue Leith. It gives professional training through a paid apprenticeship programme for the long-term unemployed, to help young people get into the hospitality industry.

Trainees do a structured work placement for a minimum of eight weeks in which they learn catering and hospitality skills, from stock control and food hygiene to dealing with difficult customers and wine-tasting. If successful in the initial training, they are taken on as paid apprentices to complete a four-six month term where the areas are looked at in more depth.

The restaurant has trained more than 750 people since 2004, with around 70% of those going into a permanent job within the sector – varying from top London restaurants to international hotel chains and even Buckingham Palace.
“It’s important that the training is relevant and thorough,” explained Nick Boland. “After leaving here, I’d expect our trainees to not only get a job in a bar or restaurant, but to be able to perhaps manage a small bar or similar by themselves in the future.”

Since coming here six months ago, Nick has overhauled the wine list to focus on organic and fair trade producers, and has beefed up the schedule of special events, including a Valentine’s cooking demonstration and – for the Julie Andrews fans among us – singalong Sound of Music nights.

The Blue Engineers

I met Nick at a ‘January Blues’ night with live music from John O’Reilly and The Blues Engineers, who entertained us while we were dining – with the saxophone player even wandering around the tables and behind the bar as he played, much to our amusement.

The Hoxton Apprentice’s kitchen and front-of-house teams are headed by an experienced professional, which means there’s no compromise on the quality of food. The blues night menu highlighted the restaurant’s new dishes for 2012, and I was able to try the chicken breast in lemon, thyme and garlic with parmentier potatoes, and a naughty butterscotch panna cotta with chilli pineapple. The cuisine is modern, simple European, with a selection of five starters (£5-£7); seven main courses (£10-£15); and four desserts £6); and I liked the sound of every single dish on the menu.

Having enjoyed my evening of live jazz in such intimate surroundings so much, I was saddened to hear from Nick that the restaurant faces a funding crisis that could put a potential question mark over its future survival. Training for Life is a registered charity and relies upon external funding to support this restaurant and its other social enterprises. Government cut-backs are, according to Nick, rather short-sighted: “If you just keep one person on welfare, they say it costs the government about £1.2million for their lifetime – how much better to help those people gain the skills and confidence they need to get back into full-time employment?”

Head chef Leon Seraphin

I couldn’t agree more – and hope the restaurant is able to weather the storm of the government’s funding cuts. If you’re in Hoxton looking for an affordable meal at a restaurant with a very interesting story, then pop in. I’m holding out for another Sound of Music singalong.

* www.hoxtonapprentice.com
* Check out sister restaurants Dartmouth Apprentice and Barking Apprentice
* To book The Blues Engineers, email manager Larry Pryce on Larry AT doverstreet.co.uk

The pub has a staggering list of awards and credentials, including being the only UK pub certified by the Soil Association; creator of the first fish policy to gain Marine Conservation Society approval; London Dining Pub winner in the Good Pub Guide three times; and winner of an RSPCA Ethical Business Award. Owner Geetie Singh received an MBE in 2009.

I wondered whether the Duke of Cambridge’s critical acclaim may have gone to its head and turned it into a pretentious gastropub (or that it might be so evangelically organic that I’d feel out of place not dressed from head-to-toe in hemp).

Happily, this was not the case at all. Being several hundred metres off Essex Road means the clientele has made a conscious effort to be there. Mismatched tables and chairs, candle-lighting and friendly staff make it cosy and welcoming, and I was fascinated by the shelves packed with homemade jars of pickles and preserves.

The pub’s commitment to locally-grown and organic produce is impressive: 80% of fresh produce comes from the Home Counties, and only those ingredients which are in season are used. Tea, coffee, chocolate and nuts are Fair Trade; wine, beer and soft drinks are organic; and the pub buys and uses entire animals, wasting nothing at all. Lesser-known, sustainably-caught fish like gurnard and pollack are preferred and only filtered tap water is served.

But something I was particularly interested to hear about was the Duke of Cambridge’s commitment to its local community. Chefs from the pub have trained the cooks at nearby Thornhill Primary School to create healthy menus of local produce. They have also worked with Kate Greenaway Nursery to create a community kitchen, and taught the pupils at Highbury Fields Secondary School to cook and serve healthy, organic dishes to their classmates. It’s this level of community-involvement that puts the Duke of Cambridge in a different league to some of London’s other excellent organic eateries, like Bumpkin and Daylesford Organic cafés, for me.

The pub’s insistence on seasonal produce means the menu changes twice a day, but you can download a sample menu for each season to give you an idea of the treats in store. On the menu on Thursday night was Stichelton and pear salad; duck with potatoes; sustainably-sourced mussels with white wine, cream and parsley; wild boar; quiche with Portobello mushrooms and beetroot salad and more. I plumped for crispy goose croquettes served with a spicy tomato salsa that cut through the richness of the goose perfectly. At £8-£12 for starters and £12-£22 for main courses, it is certainly not a cheap-eat. But if you’ll consider paying a premium to know where your steak or spinach came from, the D of C is definitely worth crossing the river for.

*See 4Food for articles on topics including food waste, Fairtrade food, and where to buy sustainable fish.

It’s estimated that overfilling your kettle can waste as much power in a week as it’d take to light your house for a whole day. The way the Eco Kettle works is that it allows you to fill the entire kettle, then use a pump on the lid to release only the amount you need to boil into the boiling chamber. The kettle is therefore supposed to use 30% less energy than a standard kettle.

They could do with a few Eco Kettles at work, where the water-boiling situation is ridiculous. In my office building, there are two gigantic hot and cold water dispensing machines on every floor which no doubt cost a lot of money to run, but they’re pointless and damaging because:

1) the water only ever gets to 90-odd degrees after a lot of coaxing, and we all know you can’t make a good cuppa with anything shy of boiled water. So everyone uses a manky old normal kettle instead, while the water machine sits there keeping water semi-hot all day long, for that one strange person who can bear lukewarm tea and coffee.

2) London has some of the best tap water in the whole country so there’s no reason why we can’t drink our water straight from the tap over the sink

3) and stacked on top of the water machine is a pyramid of small plastic cups – about enough for three big mouthfuls – so people drinking a lot of water might get through a dozen cups day, and (despite clear signage) many find their way into the bin.

The water dispensers aren’t as bad as the industrial toasting machines that are on full blast non-stop for four hours every morning in the office cafe, but it still makes me mad.

We’re pretty happy with our new Eco Kettle at home because our previous kettle was knackered and we needed a new one anyway. It matches our silver toaster perfectly, and it has a neon blue light inside it which means making a late-night cup of Horlix feels a bit space-age (they retail at about £30 so you’d expect a few special features) .

But while I like a whizzy gadget as much as the next person, I think my Dad may have invented the original eco-kettle about six years ago…he measured two mugfuls of water (for him and my Mum) into the kettle and used a bit of Tippex to mark where it came up to…which seems to be the rather more straightforward (and free!) way to monitor how much you boil?

It was intriguing to compare the terms and concepts we use to describe sustainable food in the UK compared to other European countries. In Copenhagen, the words ‘biological’ and ‘ecological’ seemed fairly interchangeable with the term ‘organic’, though I’d never heard them used before myself.

From speaking to Danish and Dutch journalists, organic/biological food seems to be the bigger trend in those countries, but there is less emphasis on ‘local produce’. In the UK, I think we’re hotter on ‘locally-sourced produce’ at the moment – ‘buying British’ is definitely the in thing right now. And while I’ve eaten in plenty of restaurants which go big on their local food, I haven’t come across so many which categorise themselves overtly as ‘organic’ (or fewer that serve meat, at least). Our being an island perhaps makes us more inclined towards self-sufficiency, whereas food can be transported by land between European countries more easily.

We ate at Copenhagen’s BioM restaurant and had an interesting chat with chef Brian Johansen. The restaurant strives to be as organic as possible, even down to organic-cotton tea towels and organic paint on the walls. Brian is proud to sell organic Naturefrisk cola, which he admits is “the second worst cola in Denmark”.

The chefs do use local and seasonal produce when they can, freezing berries in the summer so they can still make marmalade in the winter. But they are more concerned about the organicity of their produce than about it being locally sourced. They buy organically-grown fruit grown in Kenya, for example. I asked Brian what their thinking behind this is – surely the food miles created by importing such produce offsets the environmental benefits of organic farming?

“It’s a tough decision between polluting the water in our backyards, and polluting the sky,” Brian says. “If you pollute the sky, it’s all around everyone, but at least they’re getting better soil in Africa where it’s growing. I don’t want to buy local if it’s contaminated with chemicals,” he explains.

I see his point but can’t agree with him entirely; if we don’t prevent global warming from irrevocably damaging the planet, won’t the quality of soil in Africa or anywhere be rather irrelevant?

Food miles aside, the most intriguing term I heard in Copenhagen was ‘biodynamic‘ – a concept developed via anthroposophy, which takes organic farming to a whole new and rather far-fetched level:

“The light of the sun, moon, planets and stars …contributes to the life, growth and form of the plant. By understanding the gesture and effect of each rhythm, we can time our ground preparation, sowing, cultivating and harvesting to the advantage of the crops we are raising.”

Apparently, all Denmark’s best wines (yes, they make wine and it’s rather nice) are currently made with grapes grown biodynamically.

Whatever’s next? Horoscopes for horesradish? Tarot cards for turnips?

Following a helpful suggestion from Mr James Litston, I have this lunch-time pan-fried it with a little garlic until it softened (I cheated and sliced the tough stalky bits out).

Then I added two of my free range eggs from James Murdoch’s Duck Lane Farm, some salt and pepper, and cooked gently until firm.

The result was absolutely delicious but did look rather flat.

Which begs the question, when does a frittata become an omelette?

I’ve just received my next box from Farm Direct and it’s another corker. Some of the new products I’m trying:

-  Free range eggs from James Murdoch’s Duck Lane Farm in Cardington, Bedfordshire

-  An amazing walnut and apricot loaf from Matt Jones’ Flour Power City Bakery in Surrey Quays

-  Red, green and yellow peppers from Ted’s Veg Farm in Bennington, Lincolnshire. Hurrah for these being in season in the UK now. I had been buying them from Sainsbury’s I’m afraid

- Garlic, also from Ted’s Veg

-  Rainbow chard from Martin Mackey Ripple Farm Organics in Canterbury (I admit I have no idea what I’m going to do with this yet but in the photo it just looks so pretty)

I’ve already made a tasty breakfast of onion omelette on walnut bread. And lo, the hangover is gone!

Joining a ‘veg box’ scheme has been on my list of green things I really ought to do for a couple of years but when I checked it out it seemed extremely restrictive – having to commit to the same thing every week, prohibitively expensive, or limited in what they offer.

But at the Camden Green Fair a few weeks back I visited the Farm Direct stall and their set-up is completely different.

You don’t have to order the same thing each time, and you don’t even have to place an order each week – perfect for me as I’m away such a lot. Also, they sell so much more than fruit and veg – they have meat, fish, cheese, fruit juice, bread, flowers, jams and more, with different options each week depending what they’ve sourced.

The depot is close to me in Holloway so I can go and pick it up if I can’t be in for delivery on a Saturday or Sunday. And though delivery normally costs £3.95, you get it free on your first order, and if you have a neighbour who’s also interested, they’ll deliver to you both for free. Apparently there’s someone else in my block of flats who’s already using the service so Farm Direct’s going to put me in touch with them.

Farm Direct is also much clearer on exactly where all of their produce has been sourced from, right down to the name of the farmer, unlike veg box pioneers Able & Cole who aren’t able to give you specifics. I loved reading that my minced lamb came from Nicola Bulgin’s Beatbush Organic Farm in Methwold, Norfolk; my chicken from Gill Wing’s Organic Farm in Sussex; my natural yoghurt from Chris Timotheou’s Dairy in Chalfont St Peter; my splendid rye loaf made by Matt Jones’ Flour Power City Bakery in Surrey Quays, London; spinach from Martin Mackey Ripple Farm Organics in Canterbury, and so on.

I’ve already had one salad using my rocket, cucumber and carrots and it was deeee-licious. They even threw in a bunch of dahlias for free as I had a promo code from the Fair!

But however much I’ve been impressed by the service and the quality of the produce they offered, I simply couldn’t justify it if it costs a lot more than I budget for. But I’ve just priced up what I’d normally have spent at Sainsbury’s and it’s barely any different.

In fact, the lamb, chicken and rocket came in cheaper. The total cost for the basket at Sainsbury’s would have been £17.39 (see pricing to the right).

For infinitely better quality produce, all locally-sourced, I paid just £18.36 with Farm Direct (see pricing below). And I didn’t have to struggle home on the bus with all my shopping bags!

There are still a few staples which I’ll have to go to the supermarket for – Ryvita, Actimel, tinned stuff and so on. But I’m hoping I might be able to stock up on these once a month since they aren’t perishable. Farm Direct also seems very open to new suggestions so I might put in a request for cottage cheese in case that’s something they can work on…

Inkaterra has some of the most exciting, sustainable hotels in Peru. It all started in the 1970s with Inkaterra Reserva Amazonica right in the Amazon jungle. Next were La Casona in Cusco, part of the super-luxury Relais & Chateaux collection, and Machu Picchu Pueblo Hotel right by Machu Picchu. Inkaterra has now launched another sister brand, ‘by Inkaterra’, which is slightly more affordable but retains the same eco credentials.

The hotel group has its very own research arm, the InkaTerra Association, and employs its own scientists – guests can help out too while staying there.

All the guides or ‘interpreters’ employed to give wildlife tours are local, and real experts. I know what a difference this can make – when I went backpacking in Peru we got totally ripped off. The guides who took us into the rainforest didn’t have a clue what they were looking at and I had to point out wildlife to my friend.

Across its various properties, Inkaterra has been responsible for the discovery of many new species of frogs and orchids and planted countless trees and restored other habitats. Machu Picchu Pueblo Hotel holds the record for the highest number of native orchid species found in their natural environment in the world!

With all this talk of sustainability, Bumpkin seemed a particularly appropriate choice for the press lunch – all of their produce comes from right here in the UK (except its olive oil – which we really do struggle to produce in this climate, apparently), right down to seasonal cocktails. I enjoyed a lovely duck breast with spring onion and tarragon cake. This does go against my Meat Free Monday efforts, but I didn’t have meat at all over the weekend so I reckon Sir Paul would forgive me?

Inspired by the lovely, locally-sourced salads on the menu at Bumpkin I came home this evening and vowed to have one more go at growing something for myself on the balcony. I know what I got wrong last time – the soil level was too low, so the lettucey shoots had to struggle too high to reach the sunlight and went all limp and wobbly and died. So I’ve topped the soil right up, and also sown just a fine row of seeds, as opposed to chucking in the whole packet like I did last time (also wrong, it would appear).

If it doesn’t work this time, those bloody troughs are going in the bin.

In other balcony news, we most definitely have some birds visiting the feeder now as the sunflower hearts have almost all gone. Wildlife triumph!

Despite a thorough explanation from instructor Derek on how to hold my paddle and how to slow down and change direction, I was still concerned about losing control and smashing up my kayak on the rocks. But Derek assured me the kayaks were practically indestructible. “You might hit into each other, though – the kayaks have got magnets in them,” he warned us.

I’d have thought magnets would make the kayaks heavier and slower, but didn’t like to question it; Derek Hairon is a sea-kayaking expert and wrote the world’s first book on the subject. His company, Jersey Kayak Adventures, has been guiding trips around Jersey’s rugged coast and nearby islands since 2004.

As we navigated through narrow gaps between rocks, I bumped apologetically into my fellow kayakers a few times but nobody seemed to mind. It seemed the magnets in my kayak were particularly strong.

The sea-level in Jersey rises and falls by up to 12 metres each tide, meaning you see different things each time you go out. Travelling by sea-kayak also means accessing whole stretches of the coast you never could on foot. Derek pointed out various bird species, and told us about Jersey’s natural history and geology as we paddled.

It was only as we peeled off our wetsuits at the end that Derek finally admitted he’d been pulling my leg about the magnets. I sensed I hadn’t been the first to fall for it.

But while he might joke about kayak magnetism, one thing Jersey Kayak Adventures takes very seriously is its environmental impact. Kayakers get a discount if they use public transport, and are encouraged to pick up any litter they spot and to drink from refillable bicycle bottles rather than buying bottled water.

There are other companies on Jersey that have shown a similar commitment. Jersey was the first destination in the world to gain Green Globe accreditation, and many hotels and attractions are signed up to the Green Tourism Business Scheme (GTBS).

La Mare Wine Estate is the only Gold award holder on the island, with eco-measures such as using discarded cooking oil as bio-fuel for the mini-bus and giving visitors a 5% discount if they use public transport to reach the estate. Jersey is on the same latitude as the Champagne region of France, so it enjoys an excellent grape-growing climate. La Mare produces not just award-winning wines but also cider, apple brandy, its own range of chocolates and to-die-for preserves.

Animal magic

Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, founded by author and naturalist Gerald Durrell, holds a silver GTBS award. The Trust is involved in species conservation projects around the world, and “zoo” is something of a dirty word. Species at the centre include Andean bears, lemurs, tamarin monkeys and gorillas – you may remember TV footage from 1986 when a toddler fell into Durrell’s gorilla enclosure and the silverback sat next to the unconscious body to protect the boy from the other gorillas.

I went behind-the-scenes with a keeper to help prepare food for the family of seven orangutans. The wheelbarrow of shiny onions, leeks and cucumbers grown in Durrell’s own garden looked more like the Best In Show at a village fete than the scraps I’d imagined the animals might get. And it put me in the mind to try some local Jersey produce for myself…

Suma’s, the less formal sister restaurant to Longueville Manor hotel, is located on the waterfront in Gorey, overlooking the iconic Mont Orgueil Castle. I was spoilt for choice with brill, seabass, Royal Bay oysters, lobster and scallops caught off the very coast I’d explored by kayak the day before. Jersey asparagus and a bowl of the first Jersey Royals of the season were also mandatory.

In the last few years, the island’s cuisine has become an important selling point, and it is proud of its two Michelin stars and many AA rosettes. Marco Pierre White is to open a restaurant on St Helier’s waterfront next year, and the tourist board has recently tied up with Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen. Jamie’s trainee chefs flew to Jersey to learn about oyster farming and growing potatoes, and Jersey produce was then featured on the menu in the London restaurant.

The island’s culinary kudos, coupled with an expanding choice of adventure sports and events, is helping draw a new generation of holidaymakers. “Jersey is attracting a younger crowd now, and short breaks are growing fast,” says Premier Holidays marketing manager Emma Coteman.

This summer in particular, the ash cloud and British Airways crises have raised the profile of any destination easily reached by ferry instead of flying. “Once people experience Jersey and how much there is to see and do, they get drawn back again and again,” adds Emma.

I wonder if it might be something to do with those magnets?