At Leon Paul we have a club that has one rule; you don’t talk about it. The reason we don’t talk about it is not because it is dangerous and has Brad Pitt in it, but because it is really quite boring. This makes this blog post hard. The club is Lunch club. For £10.00 a week you can join and then you go onto a rota where 1 person a day goes out buys lunch, and cooks it for the rest of the group. This saves money and means we get a variety of lunches.

One of the main ways we can reduce our carbon footprint is to eat less meat. After some discussion we decided that Lunch Club should go vegetarian. After a few weeks’ things had been go very well, my falafel kebabs are definitely a winner. As my next turn to cook approached I decided to try a BBQ. The only benefit of the current climate change is that it seems that now in London we get more sunny days and less rain, so even now we can still BBQ outside.

I wanted to do vegetable skewers and vegetarian sausages. I needed some skewers. Time for a bit of reusing/upcycling. I have been saving 100s of broken blades for the last few years as I have a plan to try and reforge them… (more on that another day). So I found myself a broken foil, epee and sabre blade. After a quick polish and adding a handle I have made 3 special fencing skewers.

Then for a trip to the supermarket, I tried to buy all the ingredients minimising the use of single use plastics and packaging. This wasn’t as easy as I hoped and took far longer than it should have done, the best I could manage was this:

We have a very long way to go in the UK to become more sustainable and this experiment was a real eye opener for me.

We have a very long way to go in the UK to become more sustainable and this experiment was a real eye opener for me. Here were all the ingredients

prepped and ready to go:

Cooking in progress:

What I learned was:

  • Sabre blades make the best skewers as the triangular profile means the ingredients do not rotate.
  • Epee blades are too thick and break your food, they also store too much heat which ends up burning the centre of the onions onto your ‘skewer’.
  • Sharpened swords look so dangerous, duelling in the old days must have been terrifying!
  • Vegetarian sausages are very, very tasty.
  • Plastic packaging is everywhere.

Ben Paul - Director