The Thrifty Cookbook: 476 Ways to Eat Well With Leftovers (76 page)

All cooked food, especially meat, as this attracts rats

Anything non-organic (plastics, glass, tin – sounds obvious, I know)

Animal faeces from non-vegetarian animals (i.e. no dog or cat poo)

To help drainage and encourage worms, the bin is best placed on soil rather than a hard surface, but mine works just fine on a stone base and the worms manage to creep in through the cracks in the paving.

It is not necessary to turn the heap to encourage decomposition. If you feel like turning yours over with a garden fork every month or so, the air will encourage the bacteria to work faster, heating things up more quickly.

Victorian garden labourers were encouraged to wee into the compost to accelerate the process. It’s a thought. Alternatively if you want to speed things up you can add comfrey or nettle leaves, sheep, pony, pig or chicken manure, the odd handful or two from a sack of composted farmyard manure from the local garden centre or a spade’s worth from an existing pile of compost.

Most urban compost bins end up in the darkest and therefore coldest areas of the garden, which makes aesthetic sense. Bear in mind, though, that composting needs warmth, so keeping the bin in the shade will prolong the process unless you use an accelerator.

Compost is best used in the garden in spring and summer – as a top dressing or mulch (when the soil is warm and moist), or dug into the soil.

Because it attracts rats and flies, adding meat to a standard compost bin is not recommended. But there are special sealed systems, known as the Green Cone and the Green Johanna, which are designed to overcome this problem and prevent vermin getting at the decomposing food. Then there’s a Japanese way of composting cooked waste including meat, known as the Bokashi bucket system – two buckets made of a special plastic with impregnated Effective Micro-Organisms (EMs), which both begin the breaking-down process and counteract smell. Waste food is then layered with a special bran, also treated with EMs. When the bucket is full, it’s left for 10 to 14 days, after which you can add the contents to your compost pile. Meanwhile, you get on with using the second bucket.

None of these systems comes cheap, at around £50 for a Green Cone, £75 for a Green Johanna and upwards of £80 for the biggest two-bucket Bokashi set. It’s worth checking to see if your local council will provide them on a non-profit basis.

The Organic Gardening Catalogue (
www.organiccatalog.com
) can supply two wooden bins that slot together.

Modular composters, wormeries, Green Cones, Green Johannas and Bokashi buckets are also available from
www.wigglywigglers.co.uk
and
www.greencone.com
.

Most garden centres supply basic plastic composters.

Most of my recipes have been accumulated over so many years that things I cooked first at university, when I started work, for new (now old) friends, when I was travelling round the world or when I began to make a home are all jumbled up together. Reading back through them is almost better than a diary. The pages are full of the memories of people, places, sights, smells and – particularly – things tried or tasted for the first time. All decorated with a load of gravy, egg and flour. I’ve never thrown food away – my mother’s daughter – so this really is the way that I cook.