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!

Why Didn't The Chicken Cross the Road?

For the past few months, every time I have driven down the lanes behind Bloomfield Hatch Farm there have been Bloomfield Hatch chickens exhibiting their free-range status by meandering carelessly across the road. Apparently, this group of "ladies" are particularly adept at escapology. More so than any of their predecessors. They escaped from the fields so often that the farmers had given up on trying to keep them in. They seemed to be able to get home at night anyway.

So this week, I was telling a customer about the habits of the chickens which lay our eggs, and she said I should post a picture on facebook. Always keen to find something to post about that might actually be interesting, the very next day I set off to collect our eggs and armed myself with a camera. And what did I find? Not a single chicken on the road anywhere. None. And no obvious reason why not. So I can't even tell you why the chicken did, and then didn't, cross the road. Sorry.

I had to settle for snapping a picture of a chicken not crossing the road. Enjoy!

Tastes Delicatessen ABC

I rather like the advertising on the back of the Wilkinson's lorries at the moment. From Aftersun to Batteries C.... Zinc capsules.

It reminds me of a book my grandparents gave me when I was a child. In the book, Big Bird and I were on a scavenger hunt (my name was actually in the story - a bigger deal in the 1980s than today!). We had to find something for every letter of the alphabet. So in homage to my Sesame Street Scavenger Hunt, here is Tastes Delicatessen A-Z:

Apples, Biscuits, Cheese, Dulce de Leche, Eggs, Fluff, Gingerbread, Honey, Ice cream, Jam, Kaffir lime leaves, Lemons, Mustard, Nougat, Olives, Pate, Quiche, Root beer, Scotch eggs, Tea, Uncle Joe's mint balls, Vinegar, Wedding cakes, Xacuti curry powder, Yoghurt, Zahtar.

It was actually easier than I expected and I didn't have to resort to using adjectives like Wilkinson's "yellow duster", although maybe the mint balls was a bit of a cheat (it was that or unsalted butter).

I'm also amazed by the prevalence of the letter C. I could have managed 26 items starting with the letter C alone; chutney, cheese, chocolate, crackers, conserves, cured meats, crisps, condiments, cookies, cassoulet, curry sauce, capers, crispbread, chorizo, cous cous, chilli sauce, clementines, consomme, chickpeas, coffee, cake, cranberry juice, cheese wedding cakes, chopped tomatoes, coconut milk, cream, confit de Canard.

Happy Easter Everyone

Hope everyone has an enjoyable long weekend. I’ve been meaning to post a blog entry about this year's Easter Eggs. But I didn’t order anywhere near as many as I needed and the delicious Italian chocolate eggs have all sold out. I didn’t even get a chance to photograph them, let alone put them on our web site. Oh well, in 11 months time I’ll do it all again (but order 3 times as many).

The cost of wheat

The cost of wheat is rising quite dramatically and having a knock on effect everywhere. I've not put up any of my prices, but may have to soon as much of my stock is already costing me more. The first things to go up were the eggs as the increase in the cost of wheat put up the cost of chicken feed. Next it was bread, and then cheese (twice in one month). The smart people where I buy flour from stockpiled wheat a couple of years ago and say prices have gone from £60 to £220 per unit in that time. Their stockpile mean their prices have remained static. The only trouble is I sell very little flour, but a lot of cheese, bread and eggs!