Comments (3) It wasn’t my fault. Someone else started talking about pies and the conversation moved on to plunge pies made by Mike Turton Family Butcher in Ilfracombe High Street. It’s a pie outer filled with mince and baked beans and topped with mashed potato.
So what did I want for lunch today?
Delicious plunge pie from Mike Turton Family Butcher, Ilfracombe, Devon
You’ve guessed it!
A lovely meal in itself on a chilly November day.
To wipe out all the imported American Halloween drivel from our consciousness, today we devoted ourselves to pickling a supply of onions for the year ahead.
I can’t remember how many years we’ve been doing this, but it all started with exasperation at the standard of most pickled onions on sale and lingering memories of those my grandmother used to make.
So a couple of hours hard graft, including several minutes of onion tears (which pass quite fast), produced 11lb of home-made pickled onions according to Ruth Mott’s recipe, which includes black treacle and Demerara sugar.
Home-made pickled onions
Last year’s onions have lasted well and there are two left, which coincidentally I shall consume tonight, along with some chips which I’ll be cooking as a treat.
Halloween? One of these pickled onions will certainly put the wind up you!
. . . home-grown apple is one of the delights of late summer and early autumn. We’ve got two small apple trees and this year they have borne more fruit than ever before.
Apples ripening in the sun
While an apple bought from a supermarket may be bigger, rounder, shinier and smoother than one straight off a tree that is bumpy, misshapen or smaller, it’s unlikely to offer the same full flavour.
Green apples on the tree
When you pick them, you know that these apples have not been sprayed with chemicals or transported by chiller van: they are fresh.
Greensleeve apples picked and eaten in September
They really don’t take much looking after, but their taste cannot be beaten.
Summer, you ask?
Yes, today was beautiful, so after pruning fuchsias, we went for a walk up Hillsborough with the dogs and started blackberrying.
Blackberrying can be infectious. It’s all right, you don’t need an inoculation, but once you start you seem to be enticed into all manner of brambles and stinging nettles which attack your hands, arms, legs and every other part of your body. It doesn’t matter as long as you get to that one really juicy, ripe blackberry you have seen.
We arrived home with a good haul . . .
Freshly picked blackberries from Devon
Then, once all the accompanying travellers had been removed from the fruit, into the pan they went . . .
Freshly picked blackberries in the pan
Boil’em up with sugar and smell that wonderful fruit!
Making blackberry jam
Once it’s reached setting point, bottle it . . .
Blackberry jam reaching setting point
. . . and once it’s cooled and set, it’s ready to eat.
Delicious!
It’s been a very wet and dull August here, which hasn’t helped our runner beans. We were late planting them out as we had to prepare our new vegetable plot.
Runner beans grown and eaten in Devon
But at long last our crop is ripening and picking has begun.
Runner beans growing in spite of a cold, wet August
Our first meal reminded us how delicious home-grown runner beans are: sweet, tender, not at all stringy. Where else can you find such wonderful vegetables?
Exquisite tasting beans
Only in your vegetable garden or plot.
Not something that we eat every day, but a wonderful occasional treat, especially when you can buy fresh cod or other white white fish and local potatoes (which have never seen the inside of a supermarket warehouse or articulated lorry). We buy Braunton potatoes, grown within 10 miles of Ilfracombe, from Norman’s independent greengrocer in Ilfracombe High Street.
Home-made fish cakes and chips with pickled onions
So simple to make too: mix the cooked white fish and mashed potato, adding salt, pepper and a few parsley leaves, then mould into a long roll. Slice the fish cakes, dip in beaten egg and coat with home-made breadcrumbs. We use the end slices of a loaf from our baker’s, The Pantry in Ilfracombe High Street, bake them in the oven and grind in a blender.
The chips are also made from local potatoes, peeled and chopped thick.
Deep fry the fish cakes very hot for five minutes or until ready, then keep warm in the oven, while frying the chips for 15-20 minutes.
The fish cakes are deliciously light and fluffy inside and crisp on the outside. I eat mine with home-made pickled onions, but choose whatever accompaniment you prefer.
We chose a fruity Regatta from Stanlake Park, so refreshingly free of the chemical after-taste (and headaches) of mass produced wines, as the perfect white wine on this occasion.
A potentially dangerous meal if eaten too often and if you’re not careful when deep frying, but lovely to enjoy as a treat with common sense and an otherwise healthy diet.
Probably never if you’ve always shopped at a supermarket, for their produce has to be chilled, stored or worse to preserve it from grower to distribution centre to articulated transporter to shop to shelf, which doesn’t leave a lot of time or room for fresh in its true sense.
Eating fruit or vegetables picked by yourself from where they grow is an ecstasy alien to the concept of the supermarket and is the price to pay for convenience they offer. Convenience when used in conjunction with supermarkets is not common hassle-free sense of the word, but a marketing term which ignores annoyance, hard work, time and expense which a visit to a supermarket involves.
I certainly don’t have the time or garden space or even the climate to grow all my fruit and veg, so the next best option is to purchase it from a greengrocer which sources as much local produce as possible. We are so fortunate to have Norman’s at 40 High Street, Ilfracombe, from whom we enjoy the best home-grown lettuces we’ve had for years, Braunton potatoes grown 10 miles or so up the road and a superb selection of other seasonal produce.
What’s more we can walk there and back (although they do deliver in town), so we save the wear and tear on our car and the cost our fuel spent getting to a supermarket and back, which makes the shopping bill lower even before we’ve entered the shop. Also, when we have had to use a supermarket in an emergency when we’ve forgotten something, the supermarket produce can be more expensive, so don’t believe the advertising spiel that they are necessarily cheaper.
It probably doesn’t take any more time than going to a local supermarket, but I think we eat much better. This is what real choice is.
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