A Christmas Eve

Posted on December 24, 2015 by Ralph Bullivant

It still does not feel like Christmas and we only have a few hours to go.

Once they are done for we will be in to the next year and the wait for the next one.

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But a few hours spent walking round Birkenhead helped to send us on our way.

It was good to see those people that weekend in and out sell us the good food that we eat and shake their hand and wish them well for the season.

Early garlic

Posted on December 20, 2015 by Ralph Bullivant

About ten years ago I pulled up some wild garlic that are in the orchard by the Cottage in Ireland and brought it back over here to put in a bed on the left hand side of the garden. Most years it comes up some time in a March – a profusion of green stems and leaves with a few white headed flowers smelling of garlic.

I could catch a smell of it this afternoon. The warm weather had caught it early along with with the bluebells and daffodils.

They are all pushing themselves up eager for a bit of sun and heat and we are all sitting here waiting for a bit of proper col;d, some cold to take us back to the bone.

For food we had a small tribute back to the lunch some of us had had in Maray on Friday – cauliflower in good sauce, lamb chops with garlic, carrots with feta and roasted sweet potato. Although there were two of us working in the kitchen it all came out without too many bad smiles.

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An Alternative Tour of Liverpool

Posted on December 19, 2015 by Ralph Bullivant

This morning we went on an alternative tour of Liverpool culminating in an unexpected shop full of good food.

We started at Homebaked with a bacon sandwich and brown sauce , pink lemonade and black coffee. Having finished we drove round the football ground cutting back through some of the streets with their tinned up houses and blank spaces.

I could not help thinking about having been in Brighton three months ago houses where houses of a similar size in the same tight streets are worth hundreds of thousand of pounds.

What would it take for those same house to be made over and made up.

To get some idea we drove over the back of the City to walk through Granby Streets. On the drive over we both noticed how the Victorian layers of the City lurked just beneath the surface in the faces that we passed on the streets and the buildings.

We were not quite sure what to expect when we got to Granby street. It was only once we were out of the car and walking that a sense of the place started to across us.

The first street we walked down was boarded up but each house had been decorated, bright colours and images, striking in the grey day.

As we walked on we could see that some of the houses had been done up. The brickwork was clean and somehow they looked more solid. As we carried on walking we were struck by the waste of those other houses we had passed that had been allowed to fall by the wayside.

We then drove on quarter of mile to try and find a mythical food store from Toxteth that had been voted BBC Radio 4’s best food retailer of the year – The L8 Superstore.

We weren’t quite sure what we were looking for. I had just been told to drive up Lodge Lane and we would not be able to miss it on the right hand side.

That was about right. We suddenly came across it a riot of green and fruit and veg spilling out over the pavement and into the street.

We didn’t have much time to go through the shelves of good food in detail but it didn’t take me long to find some Maghrabieh. So we stocked up on that and some print pink pomegranates, a jar of pickled chillies and two sweet potatoes.

Driving back home into Birkenhead we stopped off at K & N the grocers and The International Store to get some land chops and herbs for tomorrows falafel. Although their shelves might have been stocked higher there wasn’t too much difference between what was available in Toxteth and what was available on Oxton road, Birkenhead – apart from the Maghrabieh.

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A tall tree

Posted on December 13, 2015 by Ralph Bullivant

Having a Christmas Tree in the room is a bit like having an extra member of the family come stay, especially when it is about 13 foot tall and is just two inches short of the ceiling. I hadn’t quite meant to come away from Church Farm with the tallest tree that they had but twenty minute trudging through mud and comparing the merits of the various trees on offer that is what we ended up with.

The others were too thin at the bottom, or too thick at the top, or they weren’t quite the right shade of green, or there was a kink in the trunk. So we came away with the tallest and just about managed to sneak it in.

Around the settling of the tree I made a pan of crurried parsnip soup, a roast chicken and four tomatoes stuffed with an egg. They all went down well on a wet and grey Sunday.