We've had some good days out recently, including two relatively local trips last week to meet up with various friends holidaying in the area.
One day involved a trip to Ely to meet a friend who was house-hunting in Cambridge. We visited the cathedral and then some antique shops as well as a pub and an award-winning tea shop. To my surprise I found a box of new miniature knitted clothes for dolls and bears tucked away in one of the antiques shops and so bought a dress as well as two jumpers as I was fairly confident that these were the right sizes. However do people manage to knit things this small? They turned out to be a perfect fit for two of my bears and the red jumper and hat are ready to be given to one of my god-daughter Poppy's bears.
Poppy also loves little bears and recently gave me Georgia and Gerald to join my clan. They are pictured with one of the chairs that Poppy made a while ago so that my bears would be comfy. They also brought some tasty bear-sized food with them in the form of teensy jars filled with amazingly detailed corn, grapes and pretzels - again, I can't imagine how people can make such intricate things.
The other day out was with friends who were holidaying in Holt. We went to
Felbrigg Hall's Chilli Fiesta - the Technomage being addicted to Mexican food. It was surprisingly busy, despite mostly horrible weather (thank goodness for the large copper beech tree that afforded shelter for our picnic) and there was a good range of spicy produce. We don't often buy things like this when we see them in delis as we can make many of them ourselves more cheaply, but it's nice to support local producers, especially when you can buy direct.
I chose
Jules & Sharpie's lime & green pepper jelly - as that was a combination we'd never come across - and he picked
Cambridge Chilli Farm's Nagalade (ie a marmalade made with very hot naga chillies) as it's a variety we're less likely to grow ourselves. We rounded our purchases off with some
Lymn Bank Farm cheddar in extra strong, onion and black pepper varieties. We've bought from them before and very good it is too. To wash it down, we got lashings of
Breckland Orchard's ginger beer with chilli and the final purchase was a dozen Fresno chillies as our chilli crop is a bit feeble this year.
We attempted deep frying eight of the Fresnos - coated in batter and stuffed with cheese - but the batter wouldn't stick so it was a bit of a fiasco. Must do some reading to work out what we did wrong. The remaining four joined some freshly harvested tomatoes and oregano from our garden as well as some shop-bought onions and garlic in a rather nice spicy salsa last night.
We also sampled our first home-grown potatoes, some Pink Fir Apples, which the Technomage described as "some of the best new potatoes I've ever had". They really were excellent - tasty, firm and delightfully knobbly.
However, I think I harvested them a bit too early so perhaps didn't get the maximum crop. I hadn't realised they were maincrops and not due to mature quite yet. Luckily, several more plants are still growing in other pop-up bins so there are more to come as well as some Charlottes. And we've still got the teensy ones left to eat from this batch.
