Quintessentially British.

Recently reading  a post from a blog that I follow  northsiderdave.blogspot.com  got me thinking about food that seems quintessentially British, savoury pies, fish and chips, pork pies, faggots and marmalade.
 France has it's Quiché but I can't think of any other savoury pastry dish, Spain has a tapas of very small pastry parcels filled with fish or vegetables. Scotland has mutton pie and kippers. Just about all European countries have sweet pastries but savouries are very few and far between. Marmalade, although renowned as British in fact dates back to the 1500's and probably refers to Membrillo made from quince, originally from Portugal.
 When you can't get a thing you start to want it, even if it is something that you would have seldom eaten in your own country, for me in Spain it was kippers and scotch eggs, the kippers I could do nothing about, the only smoked fish there is Salmon, scotch eggs turned out to be easy to make and far nicer than any  that I had bought.

A taste from the past, Faggots.

Now it's faggots, ( thanks Dave!) something we have gone without for of a quarter of a century. I found a recipe on line,  good old BBC. So quick, cheap and simple to make, served with mash and onion gravy, delicious. Something I will make again while we still have pork in the freezer.
I wonder what things other people miss when they live in a different county?

The Seville orange have now arrived in our local farmers market, Simon had already pre-ordered a box  in anticipation of the start of  the short season,  the next week will see me zesting and boiling twenty pounds of oranges, to replace our store of marmalade.

These will keep me busy.

We ran out about a month ago of last years stock, I wish I could remember how many pounds I did, normal fruit jams don't have the same wake up effect of marmalade.
After last weeks power outage we knew it was time to get emergency lighting sorted, someone suggested Argos and they have a LED rechargeable lantern which hopefully we will get on Monday although it does mean traveling a 120k round trip, I'm rather dreading it, Argos ten days before Xmas? probably not a good idea, but it's one that you can charge up in the car, and that is a good idea.

One emergency lantern.

 We also found a gas camping lamp in our local town so come next week we should be set should we lose power again, this shop even keeps replacement mantles for all types of lamps.

Looks like fun.

Misty, our young female kitten had now discovered the washing machine,

Why cant I get it?

she was totally fascinated by it and spent nearly an hour trying to catch the contents of the washing drum, Freddy, her brother couldn't see what was so interesting about it, he is far more into trying to catch the curser on the computer.
Today our local town had a craft fare, unfortunately it was only advertised earlier this week, had I known about it earlier I would have taken a table, it was a very good fare, and unlike the other ones that we have been to recently all the stall holders seemed to be Irish. Again there was some lovely turned wood products all from Irish woods, some very impressive knitwear, I couldn't resist buying a lovely hat for a friends two year old daughter even though her parcel has already been sent, it will be a little extra one for her. Several very good artists were displaying their work, one was fantastic and very original, I spent a long time chatting to her, and of course there were several stalls selling baked goods. We were very impressed with the standard of goods that we saw.

The personal touch.

The last of the Xmas cards have now been made and posted, so that's me done for another year.