On visiting the farmers market without a shopping list.

Cooking just because I want to, and how farmers markets get us closer to our food, even if it makes us feel slightly uncomfortable.

I’m technically on holiday right now, but whilst I wait for my sufganiyot¹ dough to rise, a few thoughts from the weekend. Happy Hanukkah, by the way, and all other festive greetings however you celebrate over the next few weeks. I’ll be back next week for Nibbles before we say goodbye to 2022, but whilst I’ve got you, I’m currently planning next months trip, so if anyone has any Vienna recommendations for us, do give me a shout!

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The farmers market haul: savoy cabbage, leeks, pork and sage sausages which were delicious but fatty (so now frozen and marked for casseroles), both a topside and silverside of beef, lamb chops, local milk, Water Lane brown sauce (I hate brown sauce but this is divine), an excellent sausage roll & the best piece of stollen I’ve ever tasted!

Over the past few years I’ve developed a tradition: I work like mad during the first two weeks of December to get all my work for the entirety of what is usually the busiest month in my calendar done so that I can take two glorious weeks off.

Yes we’ve got the big meals to think of, the Christmas non-negotiables to make such as the mince pies, cheese straws (my Mum’s recipe for us, and my crystallised ginger ones for J which he prefers), our family stuffing recipe and a baked ham (though the recipe is changing up this year: my father arrived at my house one lunchtime as I was writing one for a client and now he’s demanding that recipe), but aside from an excuse to read novels and cookbooks all day, these two weeks are my time to cook whatever the hell I want.

As a professional recipe developer, what we eat at home is mostly dictated to us by client commissions, and the past few weeks of ghost writing have been particularly trying: there have been multiple cauliflower murders whilst I pursued the best version of a recipe I thought was a questionable internet fad in the first place, a chocolate cake which is frankly delicious but I am sure whose textural problems lie in the need to measure using cups rather than using a more accurate scale, and yes I know I’m being paid to do it in the first place, but I also now think you’d have to pay me to hollow out another courgette for stuffing ever again.

This is not to say I don’t love my job, I really do and over the past few months I’ve developed better ways of making things by following a clients idea: the said ham, a chicken recipe I feel is now better than the one published in my own cookbook, and a pasta recipe I now always want to keep the ingredients for to hand it was that good.

But the recipes I’ve religiously bookmarked in cookbooks and food magazines just because I really want to make them, which have no value in teaching me a new method to do things, to try out a new flavour pairing I might use elsewhere? This is their time. That recipe for Beef Momos I’ve literally been trying to carve out time to make since mid June? We’re going to have a dumpling night.

Last year was all about making fresh pasta from scratch, I mastered the French baguette (though I’ve not made another since as it was rather involved - though I do have plans to make one to go with our New Years Eve starter of chilli garlic butter prawns, followed by lamb noisettes and Dauphinoise potatoes and an as of yet undetermined dessert, in case you’re interested) and I made an awful lot of recipes from Yotam Ottolenghi and Ixta Belfridge’s Flavour (affiliate).

Snow still deep in the walled garden, and an exceptional bacon sandwich (which was served with hot spiced apple juice) whilst we explored the market.

This year, I’ve got a few recipes in mind (like those momos!) but I also thought a trip to the farmers market on the first day of my break would provide the perfect opportunity to buy whatever looked good, so I could cook it however I wanted later: many, many food writers write about doing this, but I envy those who actually have the time to do it!

Saturday saw the first ever food market after a series of successful makers markets at Water Lane, a being-lovingly-restored walled garden full of Victorian glasshouses, on, well, Water Lane in Hawkhurst on the Kent / Sussex boarder. I’ve been utterly in love with the place since I first visited for a sun-drenched, middle-of-a-heatwave lunch just after they opened.

In the summer, lunch on the terrace is often bookended by walks around their beautiful vegetable (most of what you eat they grew) and flower gardens, before taking some extra veg and blooms away from you, whilst in winter you can cosy up in their Carnation House and the terrace is given over to other activities.

Call it Petersham Nurseries with better food, better prices, and most importantly to anyone who has lunched at Petersham, better parking!

First, we hit the vegetables. Giant, verdant savoy cabbages bigger than my head (one of those obviously had to go in the tote) as well as fragrant leeks whose allium pungency we could smell as we approached. A couple of them then. Then: some choices. I was initially excited to see Jerusalem artichokes, but then had no idea what we’d do with them. Obviously I know how to cook them, but no preparation sprang to mind that I partially fancied. I’d already got a sack of local potatoes at home, beetroot in the fridge, sprouts leftover from this months feature, and a giant Crown Prince Squash sitting untouched on my kitchen counter.

In the end it was J who demanded the parsnips: one of his favourite vegetables, and there was something very pleasing how they were sitting laid out in little trays, still dusty from the mud of the ground; the last of mine are still trapped down there until the earth thaws a little.

The market was my first encounter with LAM, here-in-Kent-based farmers who supply meat it turns out to plenty of places I like to eat. With a focus on regenerative farming, they grow all their own forage and feed for their native breeds, and debate was sparked between J and I when it was explained to us that, actually, they did most of their non-restaurant business on Instagram; give them a few days lead time as they kill to order, and they’ll be able to get whatever cut you’re after out to you.

Kill to order.

These were words that excited me; a lower waste method of butchery where in most cases there is less stress to the animal. To J, it made him question if he’d buy from there again; he is the bigger meat eater out of us both, but his meat comes pre-butchered, the animal was not killed specifically for him.

It is an interesting debate, especially how those three words really encapsulated the moral and ethical dilemmas around meat eating.

As you’ve already seen we went for some sausages which I won’t lie were a bit of a disappointment, but which we paired with Water Lane’s beautiful brown sauce (happily for those of you not local to me you can buy it online), a few chops that are still sitting in the fridge, and two joints of beef. The mammoth silverside has already been stashed in the freezer, but I can happily report that the topside was one of the best tasting pieces of beef I’ve ever had the pleasure of cooking.

Obviously, it was the meat that sparked the next nights dinner, a good old fashioned British roast: I simply roasted (a hot blast, followed by gentler cooking and a long resting time before I made gravy from the pan juices) the brilliant beef (one of those pieces where the fat tastes as good as the meat) and served it with the aforementioned local potatoes roasted in olive oil with the Water Lane parsnips and plenty of salt, the leeks creamed with a splash of white wine and some double cream that had been hanging around the fridge (this is how I make creamed leeks) and a few heritage carrots I found at the bottom of the fridge that I can’t even remember the provenance of.

Sunday night bliss.

We finished the market at the pastry table: I was very glad to discover Eastbourne based, sister run bakery To The Rise because later that day after a round of Christmas shopping I enjoyed honestly the best piece of stollen I’ve ever tasted. The studded pieces of homemade candied peel was an utter revelation. Their sausage rolls, it turns out, are pretty awesome too.

Right, I’m off to cook those beetroot for a Sri Lankan-style salad. I think they’ll go beautifully for lunch with the last few slices of that now cold, rare roast beef.

1. Israeli jam-filled doughnuts now popular all over the world fried up as a Hanukkah treat.