Following the vegetarian edition of OFM this weekend, will try to follow Paul McCartney's example and not eat meat for a week. And as long as I stick to curries this shouldn't be a problem as I am having a bit of a craving for a good Leicester dhal and rice, with puri's and samosas. So made a chick pea and potato curry tonight - one of the easiest and most delicious, with fennel and coriander from the garden.
Forgot I was on veggie week and had bacon and eggs for breakfast, but made up for it by making delicious pakora with spinach out of the garden for lunch. Inspector X gave me her recipe - it's so easy - but it's on the gram flour packet too, if you can find any. I asked in Tesco just to see if they knew what it was, not expecting them to have any, and they bought me Rye flour. So went to Ipswich to the Norwich road shops where they have everything you could possibly ever want and spent too much on scotch bonnet peppers, plantain chips and frozen samosa's as well.
My friend Joe and I are at Alder Carr drooling over the cheese counter when we hear that so is the food critic from the Telegraph. I am not quick enough to give her my suffolkfoodie card but I understand food critics don't like food bloggers much so maybe it's for the best. Great Ploughmans though - big chunk of Suffolk Gold and a home made scotch egg. And a special hello to the nice man buying cheeses beginning with g for his dinner party - we want to come! www.aldercarrfarm.co.uk
Such a quaint little tea rooom of the kind you think have long gone. Full of teapots on display and a reasonable menu of snacks and main meals. I had a cheese and ham toastie which was two slices of sliced bread toast redeemed by nice home cooked ham. They have a couple of foodie shops here in Needham, a good butchers and one of the best charity shops ever where they don't select out the junk first - you could set up house from here.
Hola! A new sign outside the Victoria in Thurston. Are they really Spanish? Love the sign and can't wait to find out.
Lovely food. I had their version of Welsh Rarebit with salad and the most delicious piece of lemon cake filled with home made lemon curd with greek yoghurt on the side. Mum had a bacon sandwich in ciabatta-type bread and a piece of plum and orange cake. They say they use their own produce and it shows in the moist yellow cake made with their own eggs. We both had their own fresh apple juice. And they have some really nice plants too. Not your usual garden centre. www.harveysgardenplants.co.uk
My friend from France is here and the one food she remembers (and wants to buy) are the Scotch eggs we had from the Edris of Ely butchers! So we eat them in the Abbey Gardens. I had a Cornish Pasty.
Invited to the opening night here at the new LP club (used to be Ruin) where downstairs the wood fired oven burns continually, making the best properly thin and crispy Italian-rather-than-American pizza in minutes. And upstairs in the bar some very good singing - one of them has got through the first round of the X Factor!
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Tracey Macleod features The British Larder (near Woodbridge) in last weekend's Independent. Also listed are Trinity at Crown and Castle in Orford, Maison Bleue in Bury and The New Roundhouse at Thorington.
Had a little wander round the shops while my son played football and bought a whole chicken from this butchers. I've shown him how to joint it and make coq u vin with some of it, saving the rest for another meal. It was £6 - way more than a supermarket but we could certainly taste the difference. Grow my own veg but the sign on the shop opposite was tempting too as have just been on an apple hunt with my sister. Found lovely sweet wild ones that were just like Gala - apart from the holes.
So many tomatoes at the moment that I have had every recipe I can think of and made soup, pasta sauce, ratatouille and lots of others. But this was simple and delicious and used up a bit of old ciabatta at the same time. So easy I'm not going to put it in Recipes - just spread pesto (from a jar not home made) on the bread, halved cherry tomatoes and a shaving of parmesan, then grill until brown. If you teach your children this they can make it after school, and it works really well on half a muffin too, just call it mini pizza.
.. because it was Matt singing upstairs on the opening night of LP's...