Tapas

At Tastes Deli we sell lots of unusual and hard to find ingredients. I get to experience "The Delia Effect" first hand and see exciting trends emerging in what people are cooking and buying. Such as the sudden demand for pomegranate molasses, sumac and za'atar (thanks Yottam Ottolenghi) or marshmallow fluff (Hummingbird Bakery and their Whoopie Pies).

One of the most satisfying parts of my job is when someone comes to the shop for the very first time, driven by a desire to track down a particular item they need for a recipe but have been unable to find anywhere else. It's great to be able to say we have the elusive item and take them to it.  More often than not, a conversation ensues about the journey to find this ingredient, or the recipe(s) for which it is essential.

And so it was that I was told about the Morito App. Morito, the tapas bar of Moro, published its own cook book in 2014, along with an accompanying free app (i phone and i pad only). The app turns out to be a mini recipe e-book with enticing photography.

Queue, four happy hours cooking tapas dishes at home and far far too much food!

Peas, Gem Lettuce & Sweet Herbs.
Cous Cous with Broad Beans, Cumin & Yoghurt.
Grilled Onion, Pepper & Lentil Salad.
And my favourite: Beetroot, Almonds & Mint.
Plus some Morito flat breads which don't appear in the app, although the recipe is elsewhere online.



With the exception of the red peppers and the fresh pomegranate, all the veggies were English and every ingredient can be found at Tastes Deli! I made four portions of four of the dishes, plus two portions of the cous cous and spent just £15 on the vegetables. We ate like Kings for days afterwards!

Ultra Local Produce

The most local product on sale at Tastes Delicatessen at the moment are the gooseberries. Grown in Tom's "secret garden" less than 50 metres from the shop. Yes metres, not miles!

Tom harvests the fruits every year and usually distributes them among his friends and family (and his trusted deep freeze). Last year he started to supply our shop as well; to give those who he doesn't know a chance to enjoy the delicious tart berries.  Gooseberries don't seem to be available in the supermarkets and there aren't any wild bushes near here, so demand is high. Tom is picking at the moment and I have a waiting list of customers to reserve berries for when he comes in!

This year's supply started last week and already customers are returning for their second batch; having stewed them, made jam, compote and fools. There is something pleasing about being able to create a dish using a fruit picked just hours before and I'm sure the enjoyment is enhanced when you know it is unlikely to be repeated until next year.  I really enjoy hearing about the dishes our customers have created.

Today a customer popped in for spelt flour to create a cake with the gooseberries she bought yesterday. She even bought the recipe with her; from Diana Henry's A Change of Appetite. I had a quick flick through the book. Some really lovely looking dishes in there, mouthwatering and beautifully presented. The gooseberry, almond and spelt cake looks fantastic. If anyone else fancies trying it, the recipe is available online at www.sourdough.co.uk. I think I've found a week's worth of Diana Henry dinner recipes now!

Other gooseberry recipes I've heard good things about include:
Gooseberry Curd from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (while searching for that online I found 3 other good looking Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall gooseberry recipes)
Gooseberry & Vanilla Jam from BBC Good Food.
Gooseberry Fool from Nigel Slater.
Gooseberry & Elderflower Fool from the National Trust.
Gooseberry Cobbler from Delia Smith.
And Tom says just stew them with a bit of water and serve with a dollop of cream.

A new vegetable

When was the last time you were introduced to a new vegetable? I can't remember, myself. I know there are vegetables that have been new to me. Turnips for example. Strangely, I'd never cooked one of those until recently. But I'd seen them. I knew they existed (apparently since 2000BC according to selfsufficientish).

Earlier this year, I met a vegetable that I didn't even know existed. Which is because, until recently, it didn't! It is a brand new vegetable. Which I find pretty amazing. The culmination of fifteen years of work by Tozer Seeds, in Surrey, using traditional plant breeding techniques.

And so, appropriately in the season of good intentions, and eating more vegetables, may I introduce to you The Flower Sprout......

It looks like tiny cabbage, on a sprout stalk, with green frilly leaves and streaks of purple. It tastes like a subtle sprout with the nuttiness of kale. And its extremely versatile - steam, stir fry, boil, blanch or mircowave. It even has its own web site with plenty of recipes. It is also packed with vitamin B6, C and E.

Available now at Tastes Delicatessen!

 













Update: I've now added some recipes to our pinterest board.

Another great day to be a shop keeper!

It may be a slow, wet, August day. But it has gotten off to a pretty good start here! An email from a customer to tell me he "Just enjoyed a nice Omelette with two of your lovely eggs.". Then a visit from another with the gift of a jar of fantastic salsa he'd made (using chillies I'd sold!). Another with photographs of the bread he made with the flour I sold him earlier in the week. Then another drove by, wound down her window to tell me the fruit she'd bought last week was "amazing".

I know I've said before that Eton has the best customers. Time to say it again though!

Thank you to all the lovely customers who make this such a great place to be a shop keeper every day!

We'll get that in Waitrose, it'll be cheaper....

Yesterday I overheard a customer telling her partner to put down the vegetables he was about to buy; "we'll get that in Waitrose, it'll be cheaper".

So today I checked her assumption, and am happy to report it was incorrect:

At the moment our broccoli is £2.50 per kilo, Waitrose is £1.69 per 300g head (or £5.64 per kilo, twice the price of ours). Our baby new potatoes are £1.65 per 750g pack (about £2.20 per kilo), Waitrose are £1.49 per pack, but the pack is only 500g (so £2.98 per kilo). Waitrose's cheapest loose potatoes are 86p per kilo, ours are 60p per kilo. Our peppers are £3.50 per kilo, in Waitose they are £4.68. Even the avocados are 99p for small and £1.39 for large compared to our 90p (for what I think is large). In Waitrose the cheapest carrots, onions, lemons and apples cost exactly the same as ours.

There might be plenty of reasons to shop at a supermarket, but thinking the vegetables will be cheaper than the local deli should not be one of them.

Vegetables

This week we still have:
Apples
Broccoli
Carrots
Garlic
Onions
Pears (Conference)
Potatoes (Maris Piper)
Tomatoes

We also have:
Red Cabbage
Red Onions
And some very large flat muchrooms.

Fruit & Veg Update

This week we have:
Lots of Apples
Cox
Jonagold Red
Royal Gala
Russet

Broccoli
Carrots
Onions
Parsnips
Pears (Conference)
Potatoes
Pumpkins (Little Bear for eating and the huge halloween ones, all grown in Dorney)
Tomatoes

This week’s Fruit and Veg

Thinking about the return of the pickled onions got me thinking about our wonderful seasonal fruit and vegetables*. The range changes quicker than I really expected it would. Spring was so exciting with all sorts of new things arriving every couple of weeks. We had English lettuces, tomatoes, cucumbers, spring onions, asparagus, raspberries, celery, broad beans, strawberries, courgettes, sweetcorn, plums, cherries, runner beans... And, even though we're well into autumn now, there are still new bits and pieces coming into season. This week it is the English broccoli. I'm going to try to list which vegetables we have available whenever something new arrives over the next few weeks.

This week we have:
Lots of Apples
Bramley
Cox
Jonagold Red
Royal Gala
Russet

Broccoli
Onions
Pears (Conference)
Potatoes
Pumpkins (Little Bear grown in Dorney)
Tomatoes

And a quick browse on our nearest supermarket's web site revealed all our prices are lower than theirs where I could find a comparable product! I couldn't find any fresh pumpkins or vine tomatoes sold by the weight rather than by the number of tomatoes. But where I could compare we are cheaper which I'm really pleased about.



* Though we started off selling just seasonal English fruit and veg (local where possible) we now also have imported bananas and citrus fruit.

Salad Days

More and more English vegetables are becoming available and to accompany the asparagus we now have a lot of deliciously fresh salad items; little gems, baby carrots, spring onions, cucumbers, sprouted beans and spinach. All grown in England. Which is very timely as Gordon Ramsay was on the news this morning promoting seasonal produce! Now we just need the sun to start shining again and will be all set for picnicking by the Thames.

May Day

Yesterday way May Day and the official start of the British Asparagus season. Right on schedule I took delivery of my first batch of local asparagus! Grown 3.5 miles from the shop and delivered within hours of being picked. You can’t get much fresher!

On to better things…

This Sunday we went to an autumn food festival at RHS Wisley. It was incredibly popular with queues blocking the A3 and people everywhere. The food festival was fairly small, but the gardens were huge and there were plenty of apples to try. I came away with a bag of cobnuts (which I am contemplating stocking), a bag of apples, a small shrub (its hard to resist!), and plenty of enthusiasm to try harder with stocking more apples next year.