Nearly ready, nearly ready, nearly ready...oops, ripe and falling off the tree! Picking quince should come with a safety warning, poor old Benji took one right to the back of the head! (Honestly I wasn’t shaking the branch he was under!!).
A quick dash down the garden in search of bukler sorrel before this evening’s dinner service resulted in two aprons full of the most fragrant quince ever. There perfume really is amazing...and the bukler sorrel wasn’t too bad either.
So we now have our first ever batch of homemade and home grown quince jelly on the stove. It may be slightly ambitious of me to call it a jelly at this early stage, it’s still well and truly in its water form, but tomorrow will tell! Where’s that apple pectin powder Roland?? SSH, it will set...I hope!
It’s a real shame that Richard Vines is stopping to grow his tiny little leaves and all those lovely salads, I will miss chatting to Lou on a Thursday morning and hope they manage to keep growing something. So I guess it looks like we'll be out in our kitchen garden every morning, trying to find the sorrels before our Gardener Jane does her weeding!! Poor bronze sorrel, if only you grew in a more sensible place!
Another supplier, Douglas from Euridge Manor Farm, has been growing us some wonderfully little bits a bobs, his red and black kale shoots are great, as his mustard leaf. These little leaves pack such a powerful punch of flavour and really make their mark on a dish - a plate of rabbit with mustard, or the kale on the side of a mallard dish, ace!!!
Back out in our garden, pears and kale are in my sites for the morning...seeing as I couldn’t persuade Craig to get the torch out and pick the pears after dinner service! We also have what looks like 20 or so shaggy ink caps about to shoot up tomorrow, but we'll see - I won’t cook them, but all mushrooms look great in a garden.
On Sunday I'm off down to the moor with my lovely, perhaps finding a nice bog to get stuck in or something! The plan is then to eat far too many roast potatoes, along with a few pints of jail ale, plus I have heard rumours of an apple pie, so fingers crossed! Then maybe I'll pop my head in at Gidleigh Park and say hello to Andy P and the boys, sounds like a good day off to me!
Remember the quince jelly people; hope we’ve got some cheese to serve it with Melinda!
No comments:
Post a Comment