Getting everyone in the family together for a family meal means you’re only cooking once. Good Energy’s Joe Wadsworth (our very own Ray Mears) takes his family off-piste to enjoy a low-carbon meal together.

“Motivated by my experiences watching Arthur Potts Dawson running his low-carbon cooking master classes at the Real Food Festivals in Bristol and London, I decided to see if I could create something similar in the wilds of the Wiltshire countryside. And so it was that last weekend I found myself with my two small children standing on the side of the river Kennet.

Fishing for me has always been a passion and what better way to test the mettle than go with only rudimentary and locally sourced supplies and see if I could create a meal in which the main ingredient went from river to plate and travelled no more than fifty feet.

My children are well used to seeing Daddy not catch anything so it was a triumph of fortune over ability that, about an hour in, and as the kids were tiring of the abject lack of anything remotely exciting happening, I hooked and landed a trout of about a pound and a half.

My low-carbon cooking method of choice was to smoke fillets of the fish using an adapted metal bucket and wood chips. The metal bucket I use has some holes punched in the bottom and the deal is you get a small fire going in there with twigs, wait for it to burn down a bit to embers, then add some oak chippings (tip – visit Wiltshire Wood Recycling and ask them for a few oak offcuts, then shave them to produce the chips), put skewers with the fillets onto the rim of the bucket (wet them first) and then cover with a damp teatowel, or in our case, T-shirt.

Then, ten or so minutes later, it’s just a case of flaking the fillets into homemade bread and, with an optional dollop of horseradish and locally produced beer (adults only), tucking in.