Posts by Andy Redfern

So Easter is coming and one of the great traditions of Easter is the Hot Cross Bun. I have never made them before so I decided I would have ago this year. The Hot Cross bun is a celebration food that celebrates the end of Lent and piles in all the things you may have given up for the last seven weeks. Made from a heavily spiced dough, the bun is laden with rich fruit. A delicious treat – and one we shouldn’t eat too often!

Hot Cross buns cooling in Andy's Kitchen

So with apologies to Nigella and Felicity Cloake of the Guardian who’s recipes I have butchered here is the official Ethical Superstore guide to making your own Ethical Hot Cross Bun.

Ingredients

200ml milk
¼ tsp powdered nutmeg
½ tsp powdered Suma Organic and Fairtrade cinnamon
¼ tsp powdered mixed spice
Pinch of saffron
7g of powdered “easy bake” yeast (or Doves Farm quick yeast)
50g golden Traidcraft Fairtrade caster sugar
450g Doves Farm organic strong white flour
100g butter
½ tsp salt
½ tsp ground ginger
3 eggs
150g Suma Organic currants
50g mixed peel
3 tbsp Doves Farm organic plain flour 

Cooking time: In total this is going to take four hours and for the best flavour prepare the spicy milk the day before.

1. Heat 200ml milk gently in a pan along with the cinnamon,  nutmeg and mixed spice until just boiling. Set aside, preferably overnight.

2. Next day warm the milk to body temperature and then add yeast and 1 tsp sugar.

3. Mix the flour and  butter in a large bowl and rub together until well mixed.

4. Add the rest of the sugar, the salt and ginger.

5. Beat together two of the eggs and add with the yeast mixture to the flour\butter mixture. Stir in, adding enough milk to make a soft dough.

6. Place on a floured surface and knead for 10 minutes until smooth and elastic.

7. Cover and leave in a warm place for  a couple of hours until it has doubled in size.

8. Place back on a floured surface and knead for a minute or so. Flatten it out and scatter over the fruit and peel. Knead again to spread the fruit around evenly.

9. Divide into 16 equal pieces and roll these into round, bun shapes. Put on If you care grease proof paper lined baking trays and mark a cross on the top of each one. Cover and put in a warm place until doubled in size (again!).

10. Set the oven to 200 degrees Celsius and beat together an egg with a little milk. Mix the plain flour,  a pinch of salt and enough cold water to make a stiff paste. Paint the top of each bun with egg wash, and then draw a thick cross where you scored the cross on each bun.

11. Put into the oven and bake for about 25 minutes until golden.

12. Meanwhile, mix 1 tbsp caster sugar with 1 tbsp boiling water. When the buns come out of the oven, brush them with this before transferring to a rack to cool.

13. Eat with lots of butter, lots of friends and lots of chat of how to make the world a better place.

Have fun and have  a great Easter. Once consumed on Easter Sunday you will a strenuous Easter Egg hunt to burn off the calories. Make sure you have lots of Divine Easter eggs well hidden around your garden!

I love the summer holidays. It offers a little time to relax and unwind. It allows a little more time to spend with the kids. How we love those long blissful days of chilling out and engaging in fun activities. At least that’s the theory.

National Trust Pond Dipping Kit

Sometimes the actual experience is a little different. Not enough time to squeeze everything in and yet the kids seem bored before the day has even started. Everyone wants to do something different. And no one wants to do anything that doesn’t cost a fortune. It hardly feels like the “joys of family life” that I signed up for.

So once Harry Potter has been watched and the actual two weeks away has been taken – then what? Some days we will reach for the trusty National Trust membership card and take a trip to North East England jewels like Gibside or the Souter Lighthouse but I am hoping that this year the words “National Trust” will come to mean more than a quick dash round a stately home followed by spending a small fortune in the cafe and gift shop!

The new National Trust range we have just listed may well prove an entertaining distraction on some of the days those which look like a blank canvas -rather than those that look similar to the train timetable at Clapham Junction!

Each National Trust kit comes in a sturdy box with all you need to begin engaging with the particular aspect of outdoors that it focuses on. My personal favourite is the National Trust Bug Hunting Kit which offers everything from the specimen pots through to your very own pooter for collecting the bugs. I think it was reading Gerald Durrell’s “My family and other animals” that inspired me to get down on my hands and knees to study the little creatures that live all around us. The wonder of a centipede as the wave of movement ripples down its body. The amazing colour of the butterfly or dragonfly as it gets carried on the wind from leaf to leaf. The amazing world of ants all working together. So for the price of afternoon tea for the family we can set out on a bug hunting, pond dipping, bark rubbing, flower pressing or rock pool splashing adventure.

We’d love to know what ethical adventures your planning this summer – let us know by commenting to this post below.

Some might think I am a bit sad, but I read ALL the customer feedback we get via our enquiry and Ekomi review system. There are several key themes of feedback, but there is one niggling subject that seems to divide people equally – “my order was over packed – why do you use so much packaging?” and “my order arrived damaged – why don’t you use more packaging?” We therefore spend a lot of time testing new packaging materials with the aim of reducing the amount we use while seeking to get every order delivered complete and undamaged.

So we’ve been on the hunt for greener packaging alternatives that are resilient enough to make sure your order arrives in one piece. And we have found some great products that fit the bill.

Firstly, over the last year, we have moved to stronger but lighter boxes that provide better protection for your products whilst reducing the weight of cardboard being used. (In fact if whole the whole UK packaging industry followed suit, carbon emissions related to packaging transportation would be reduced by over 30% overnight!)

Secondly, we have switched over to even greener packing materials:

• green bubble mailer – the outer paper is recycled and all the elements are either recyclable or degradable
• green bubble wrap – this is made from a significant proportion of recycled materials and is also recyclable in many areas
• green void fill – this is an inflated cellophane sack that is made from recycled bottles and is recyclable and protects your products in transit.

The last one is particular favourite as it’s called Cell-O Green and is just character different from Cee Lo Green – the US rapper who won best international male artist at the Brits this year. Although he doesn’t know, Cee Lo Green is the star of choice when it comes to packing your parcels efficiently and ecologically. Cee Lo Green may sing about “forgetting you”, but we reckon that Cell-O Green will help make sure you know we’ve not forgotten you or our duty of care for the environment when it comes to getting your order in the best possible shape.

We’d love to know what you think of the innovative steps we’re taking to reduce our environmental footprint while better protecting your precious parcels, and we’d be delighted if you let us know how we could do better – just drop us a comment below!

I’m about to leave the office to travel to watch my first gig of 2011. Packing my stuff reminded me of how many cool eco-products are now important whether you’re off to a festival, a weekend camping or just visiting friends. Windup torches, solar chargers and bio-degradeable tent pegs are now among the first things I pack when setting off on a trip away. Here are my top ten must-haves for the eco-conscious traveller.

Read the rest of The Essential Festival Guide: Our Top Eco Products That Every Traveller Needs »

Dear Santa…

My Name Is Andy Redfern, But you can just call me Andy.

Read the rest of Andy’s Christmas Letter »

There are many reasons why you choose your first bank. For some it was their parents who opened their account for them. For others it was the bank offering the best student bribe benefit. While for others it was just the convenience of which bank was located in their High Street. For me choosing a bank was a no-brainer. I come from a  “Co-op” family (pronounced “kworp” in the part of Manchester I am from). My great uncle was the Chief Executive of the Cooperative Wholesale Society – the Tescos of the 1950s when he was in charge. My grandpa was the chief actuary at the Co-operative Insurance Society in the 1970s. My brother-in-law still works for the Coop Bank today.

My mum was so brand loyal to The Coop that we even had to go to the Coop dentist which was appropriately on the corner of Redfern St in the centre of Manchester. Never did find out whether she got dividend on our treatment or not. In the early part of the 20th Century the Coop really could look after every aspect of your life. From baby food sold in the Coop supermarkets through to the funeral service which the Coop still dominates today. So in this context I opened a Coop bank account in 1986. I have laterally switched to their “fun” online brand Smile because I never need to go to a branch. But I have stayed loyal to the bank. And that loyalty isn’t much to do with heritage. It is down to the fact that they have taken ethics to their very core.

In 1989 they announced their ethical policy and overnight placed themselves in a different league to the other high street banks. The Coop Bank has conducted several stakeholder reports or social audits that look at the views of all of the Bank’s stakeholders. The report is independently audited and you can see clear action plans for how they are going to do more on each of the areas of concern. Even the CIS skyscraper in the centre of Manchester (where my Grandpa proudly had an office on the 19th floor) now has a giant solar panel down the whole of its south facing lift shaft. When you enter the reception you can see a giant display of how much energy is being generated.

And yet can I really say I love a bank after all the banking turmoil of the last 2 years? Well you probably won’t be surprised to learn that Coop Bank didn’t dash for the cash in the sub-prime market. In fact in March 2009 it actually posted a tidy profit for last year – rather in stark contrast to all the “state owned” banks who have fallen from grace.

I have no intention of moving my bank accounts and have already convinced 2 of my kids to bank with Coop. Perhaps it has always been in my DNA to bank with the Coop but they keep giving new ethical reasons to stay.

So Easter gets ever closer – just 10 days left in the Ethical Superstore diet (regular readers will recall I have been challenged to only eat food and drink that can be purchased from ESS for the whole of lent).

I guess the biggest change for me is that I have ended up cooking virtually all of my meals for the last few weeks. Helen (my long suffering wife and fellow blogger) has put up with cooking me a vegetarian option for years, but the idea of then having to cook my option separately using Ethical Superstore ingredients was a step too far! So most evenings I’ve come home and cooked a meal for myself. Previously, this would have been getting a veggie ready meal out of the freezer, popping in the microwave and 4 minutes later sitting down to a portion of vegetable (plus salt, sugar and fat) goodness. For the last five weeks I’ve been looking at a pile of ingredients and waiting for inspiration.

I suspect this will be the biggest change when this little project comes to an end. Ready meals just don’t do it for me having now cooked for myself for the last 5 weeks. Even with my cooking and slap-dash approach to quantities, the taste and the freshness is way better than the average pack of freezer fodder.

So what have been my highlights?

Read the rest of 10 Days to Go! »

So just 2 weeks to go until Easter and the “eat only stuff I can buy at EthicalSuperestore.com” has been going pretty well. I am now a total convert to having a vegetable box delivered every week. I love the serendipity of opening the box to see what we are going to be eating this week – healthy soups, stir frys and casseroles are now the order of the day.

However, my unblemished record has been a bit tarnished in the last 10 days. Ethical Superstore was nominated in the Emerging Retailer category at the Retail Week Awards. I had to go down for the plush event with 2000 guests in my bow tie and dress suit. Having paid £400 (how can that be justified???) I decided I’d better eat the food and as far as I know the Grosvenor House hotel doesn’t buy its food from us. The event was pretty good fun – Jimmy Carr was very entertaining . . .

Read the rest of Two Weeks to Go »

Sometime in late March 1999 Waitrose received its first delivery of Geobars and my favourite snackbar was born. Of course, I’m a little bit biased as I was part of the launch team that created the product while I was working for Traidcraft. It was also bit tricky to see it on the shelf as Traidcraft was in Gateshead and the nearest Waitrose back then was in Newark – 160 miles away.

The team at Traidcraft – myself, Joe Osman (now a director at Traidcraft) and Stuart Palmer (now managing a hospital in Malawi) – were given just 10 weeks to create a product, design and produce packaging and get it manufactured and delivered to Waitrose. The original favourite name was going to be “Zanzibar” – taking the best fair trade ingredients from Africa and making a classic snackbar product. However, the fairtrade honey from Tanzania had dried up at the time and so Chilean honey was used instead. Zanzibar no longer seemed appropriate and so the Geobar was born.

Apparently 90% of all product launches fail – so the fact it still graces the shelves of supermarkets up and down the land is testament to the great ingredients and tasty recipe. As well as being the first snackbar to carry the Fairtrade Mark, it was also the first Traidcraft product to carry the mark. Until that point

Read the rest of Traidcraft Geobar is 10 years old »

So we are now in week 3 of Lent and still the Ethical Superstore diet is going pretty well (in summary, for six weeks I’m only going to eat what we sell in the Ethical Superstore range).

At first my biggest problem was giving up milk in tea and coffee. I really didn’t like the taste without milk and the various substitutes work well for most things apart from in tea and coffee. However, I think I’ve become acclimatised to no milk in my hot drinks now – in fact I accidentally put it in my tea on Tuesday morning and couldn’t understand why my tea tasted so horrible. Maybe black tea and coffee will be a change for life….

Bread making continues to be the high point using the Doves Farm bread kit. Experimented with adding a little sugar and vegetable fat (around a teaspoon of each) and ended up with a bigger loaf and a more even “rise”.  There is a chocolate cake in the range too – so I think I’ll make that my treat this weekend.

I guess that the biggest challenge of eating only from the Ethical Superstore range for anyone with a  busy life, is the lack of ready meals. The Just Wholefoods range comes close and has allowed me to make meals with cous cous and biriyani without too much effort. The veggie bangers are lovely too. Also at £1.35 for  a pack that serves two people – they are good value too.

However, the only reason why the challenge can work at all is the fantastic

Read the rest of A Change for Life? »