Few things capture the joy of smallholding like a home-grown Christmas meal

Hugh & Fiona Osborne love cooking for friends and family, especially at this time of year.

- Hugh & Fiona Osborne

Almost nothing captures the amazing diversity of skills that a Smallholder needs quite so well as putting a self-sufficient meal on the table. Trying to make these meals has changed the way we feel about food and brought us real joy and some real insights as to how complicated a fully self-sufficient meal really is! I imagine that most of us can identify with those Christmas meals where the poor harried cook labours in a hot and steamy kitchen, getting up at "sparrow's cough" to preheat the oven, frantically trying to balance an unfeasibly large number of pans on a suddenly tiny stove whilst cramming all manner of trays and dishes into an oven that needs at least three more shelves. It's bad enough trying to do all this with ingredients sourced at great expense from supermarkets, butchers and greengrocers so surely producing it all ourselves makes it a nightmare? Well, no, but you have to understand that here, the meal will be ready when it's ready; you see it has literally taken all year to produce.

THE CHRISTMAS (DINNER) STORY BEGINS.

Like a lot of people, our first "baby steps" into growing our own food was vegetables. For us this was a revelation, particularly the humble parsnip! A home-grown parsnip that is plump and freshly harvested roasted with a drizzle of honey from our own hives was completely unlike the sad, old specimens bought from a supermarket. It was sweet rather than starchy and had a fantastic flavour. Our eyes were opened to the fact that many foods available to us commercially are produced around cost, ease of transportation and reliable cropping rather than flavour and interest. As smallholders we could produce foods that were delicious, unusual, or labour intensive that simply cannot be found in the shops. We decided to produce more of the foods we love and at least once a year, to attempt a meal that was entirely produced by us.