Autumn, the best time of year visually, still warm, but with a nip in the air, and the best time for food in my book too.
A daytrip to Saffron Walden yealded some interesting foodie items, Walnut and apricot bread, beetroot, onions, squashes, fresh carrots, a bloomin’ great marrow, cavalo nero, a lettuce, local beer, local honey, some sorrel and two books. The Graham Kerr Cookbook by the Galloping Gormet (Where’s his bio-pic BBC? He’s not dead yet granted, but you could get Martin Sheen to play him, look at the back story, it’s got everything!) And Eating and Drinking, a food anthology of prose poems and other bits and bobs all arranged under various headings.
The beer was slightly too yeasty for me, with not quite enough fizz, tasted a little, well dead to be honest. Flavour was right, but it just fell short of the mark. The honey was from Gerald Smith Honey of Stanleys Farm in the town and is so good I’ve put it in with roasting veg as well as had it on toast and in porridge.
The cavalo nero went into some chicken broth as a soup, love those bitter irony leaves. The other squashes, beetroots, carrots and the mahoosive marrow were roasted with a whole head of garlic and the onions to create literarly gallons of soup. Soup’s a favourite in our house at lunchtime, it’s hot, quick and in a mug you can eat it with one hand while holding the nipper.
Finally the sorrel has appeared in salads and various other things, and there’s still loads left in the fridge.
The cabbage and the beer came from Sceptred Isle, the root veggies from a little ‘local &/or organic’ gazebo round the back of the town hall and the bread from a stall in the Market square. So in all, £20 the lot, not a bad autumnal haul.
Yay for the arrival of Autumn.
