Slow Food London set a challenge: could regular Londoners go slow for an entire year? Would it be easy? Would it be hard? Would there be times when it would (slowly) start to go wrong?
Here, Susan Paul talks us through her forty-eighth week:
All of a sudden there are lots of new vegetables starting to appear as well as herbs. In our garden we have mint and chives in abundance already and I have been using them at every opportunity. I have been looking back over my Slow Food Diary and see that there are so many more lovely things to look forward to including corn on the cob, jersey royal potatoes, tomatoes (we haven’t had tomatoes, except once or twice from a can, since early October 2015 I think!), strawberries, and raspberries for example. We have eaten asparagus three times this week too.
Two lovely meals out this week (a special family celebration week) and both restaurants featured Hake as a fish option on their menus. This is a delicious fish, which is currently sustainable, but now that it is becoming a regular feature on restaurant menus I wonder how long it will remain so. I ate it with spring vegetables in a fish broth at the Duck in Stanhoe and it was delicious. Our other family meal was at Hawksmoor in Knightsbridge (really nice staff) well known for its quality steaks amongst other things – expensive though.
Other good things have been: leftover roast chicken, stir fried with some new potatoes and spring vegetables with the added flavours of fresh mint and lemon; pork chops (I removed the rind and a layer of fat from the pork and roasted it longer than the chops to make a good crackling) roasted in the oven with root vegetables (parsnips, swede and onions) and eaten with young spinach and apple sauce; two more British cheeses from the Urban Cheesemaker in London, Napier, which we toasted on sourdough bread with red onion chutney, and High Cross which we crumbled over a salad of land cress, chives and gently softened leeks.
My husband has made more pasta. Linguine this time, which we have frozen as I plan to use it with cockles, which I hope will be available at the fishmongers next week. He has also made some soda bread with added goat’s cheese, onions and rosemary, which is delicious.
This has been yet another good food week for our household and more lovely things to look forward to in the coming weeks.
The BBC Food and Farming awards have been announced this week and it really does seem that Britain has so many good things to offer in terms of food and drink.
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