Sar’s Blog

Sar lives within hearing distance of Sadler’s Wells Theatre with her fiancé. She is an art dealer by day and a writer by night.

She loves food adventures, Scrabble, Sunday papers, weekends with friends, and writing her blog, Backseat Gourmand. Her favourite places to shop online are John Lewis, Graham & Green and Amazon (she has a book-buying addiction).

Earthly Delights

Published on Monday 9th November 2009

It’s autumn and as the weather strips the leaves from the trees, this food-obsessed corner of Clerkenwell has been pickling, preserving and bottling like crazy. Anything that can be has been chopped, cored, boiled up with vinegar and sugar and various spices, and we now have four different chutneys to look forward to in a few months’ time, as well as bottled fruit and jars of deep amethyst pickled cabbage which will be ready for Christmas feasting…I am not sure we can wait that long.

Every jar that comes into our flat is kept and washed, ready to be re-filled and stored. Needless to say, we are running out of space.

I have developed a bit of a hankering for a pretty jar or bottle, and could at any time be caught buying unnecessary amounts of Bombay Sapphire. That’s all I need, since we have limited space and I was harbouring a glass obsession anyway. Still, I’m not averse to the odd gin and tonic.

The BSG hauled a bag full of gargantuan yellow quinces home from the office last week, a colleague’s tree having had a bumper crop this year. They have a rather mutant-apple look about them, simultaneously bringing lemons and lightbulbs to mind. With the look of another world and another time, they’re the sort of thing you’d find gracing the table in a Flemish still life painting, alongside some grapes and a pomegranate perhaps.

After defuzzing each one, he boiled these up for a few hours (the critters take a while), ready for the second phase the following night, when he pressed them through a sieve and boiled the pulp with sugar until it transformed in colour, resembling lava (wonderful to behold, less wonderful to scrape from every kitchen surface around).

We sampled the finished product, a jewel-red and aromatic quince cheese, with some salty aged Manchego after yesterday’s cosy feast with friends, the first of the Sunday lunch series and surely one of the most wonderful things about the colder side of the year.

These small yet concerted efforts to be recession-friendly have coincided with our nightly porings over the lyrical Nigel Slater’s new book Tender; we dream of a patch of land to call our own, and to make real our dreams of self-sufficiency. Until that time, we have resolved to do our bit for Mother Earth and compost our peelings and other foody scraps. I am told that the council provides a very functional brown bin, but I can’t see that it’ll look very good in the kitchen, so I have decided to source my own (we’ll decant into the brown one come collection day…)

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