Jottage from Lancaster - A Tale of 2 Veggies

When Hugh calls his book River Cottage Everyday, you sort of assume that these recipes are good for, well, every day. And indeed they are in so many ways. Especially if you have fennel seeds, coriander and cumin as well as rapeseed oil and tins of white beans just there in your cupboard. (As an aside, I cleaned out my food cupboard completely yesterday and tracked down 4 bottles of wine vinegar, 3 bottles of soy sauce and an embarrassingly large amount of cocoa - don't ask). 


However, the sticking point for me isn't always the more obscure cuts of meat as we have a very good butcher nearby. It's the fish and the less obvious veg. I am a stranger to buying fish that aren't in packets (see my previous blog on this) and we don't have the big supermarkets up the road to sell us the likes of okra, durian and those big white radish things. But then I remembered that Sainsburys had opened a big new branch at Morecambe and I was sure that not only would they have a fish counter, but they would sell the amazing choice of veg I was looking for. Sainsburys do have a shop in Lancaster which isn't too bad, but it's an old branch and quite suffocatingly stuffed too full with narrow aisles added to which it's only half the size of most modern big box grocery stores. I haven't shopped there in years because I just don't like it somehow. The Morecambe one is big with wide aisles and free parking (unlike Lancaster). So off we go for a Saturday morning shop. 

'May contain bones'

It was built on the old Morecambe football ground - Christie Park. Surprisingly, the car park was barely a quarter full and the shop had a few desultory people wheeling trolleys around but it was almost empty. I went straight to the fish counter ready to be taught how to buy fish. I saw some Tilapia and I had heard of that but it was apparent that Zoe - who was our server for the day, didn't want us to buy it. I came away with a tiny piece of boneless, skinless haddock ('warning - may contain bones') and 2 rainbow trout - which I thought was really adventurous. Zoe confided in us that although she worked at Morecambe she shopped in Sainsburys in Lancaster. This seemed rather strange but it soon became apparent why she had decided to work in one store every day and yet she travelled the 6 miles to shop in another.

Not one fennel bulb - but TWO!

Celeriac

Sainsburys executives must have swept up the dross from the ruins of Christie Park and judged from the wrappers strewn about exactly how to stock their brand new store. Fruit and veg took up less of the floor space than crisps; and yoghurt selection was dwarfed by the seeming miles of aisles of beer. The shop actually had a very minimal stock of food we might want to eat - in fact much less than our tiny local Tesco. Increasingly furious about this, I flounced about desperately trying to find fennel and celeriac. I have to confess that John did find the fennel eventually but celeriac, a vegetable that is after all in season here, eluded us. Celeriac-less we ended up in afternoon in the pouring rain at Booths in Windermere buying the knobbly veg. Hugh will have us eating celeriac and fennel if not every day, then certainly every week so we will need to find some good stockists of these 2 worthy vegetables for next time.


Our little trip to Morecambe Sainsburys  ended at the till with a very pretty little girl and her dad behind us. They were buying 2 big cardboard boxes of pizza, a Fruit Shoot and a 6 pack of lager. I don't think we will be going there again. 

Jottage from Lancaster - rapeseed oil

When you get home with HDW's weighty tome River Cottage Everyday the first thing you encounter, apart from the lively pictures and somewhat quirky drawings, is a reference to rapeseed oil on almost every page. As a cook who tends to slosh in Tesco generic 'vegetable oil' which may well be refined engine oil as far as I know, and who thinks that olive oil is the height of gastronomic chic, this needed a little searching out at our local Booth's supermarket.


My well-used bottle of rapeseed oil...

I was actually quite excited about going off to buy this very exotic ingredient and rather hoped that the good people of Carnforth may well be deeply impressed - but of course no one noticed - and why indeed would they?

Rape flowers

Rapeseed oil is apparently very good for you - even more so than olive oil. It's deeply yellow, being derived from those unbelievable fields of rape that scatter the English countryside in early summer. Just as an aside, the word 'rape' derives from the Latin word 'rapum' meaning turnip, but the Americans, with their characteristic prudishness, call it canola oil.


So I return home clutching my bottle of bright yellow oil as happy as I might be if I had a fancy bottle of wine. It's now about 6 weeks since that day but every time I slosh some into the pan I love to see its buttercup yellow colour, I love the way it colours everything with a pale wash of saffron and into the bargain it's supposed to be good for me. Even though the bottle was nearly 4 quid I reckon that's a bargain!




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