Hillheads Delivery

Our £25 delivery (now costing £29.25) came from Hillheads Farm shop a few days ago. Being more in Blog Mode, I thought to take a photo. My first thought was how plastic heavy it was, but this is the normal for foods in this country. Our order included:

1 each: white cabbage, iceberg lettuce, celery, swede/turnip, cucumber, 

1 kg (2.2 lb) each: carrots, onions, (new) potatoes, leeks, tomatoes, bananas

2 heads of broccoli, 1 bunch of spring onions, 3 bell peppers, 6 apples, 5 pears, 6 satsumas (sort of a tangerine but easier to peel)

500 g (just over a lb) of mushrooms

I wasn't sure about what to do with this food, so I erred on the side of caution: I filled one sink with slightly soapy water and the other with cold rinse water, and ran each of these items through each. I set the lettuce, celery and leeks upside down to drain. Bill and I dried each of the other items. 

We bought our usual 25 kg bag of potatoes last autumn and are getting near the bottom of it. Maybe in late January or early February we were out of onions and so went back up to Laidler's and got another box of those and on a whim we bought another net of carrots. Only they weren't the usual horse carrots (ugly, awkward shapes) but nice, large, straight ones. We still have carrot overload though. And now we have more. Plus boxes of blanched carrots in the freezer from the first net we bought. 

There is a story in the book, The Medical Detectives, by Bert Roueche, The Orange Man. Turns out he ate too many carrots. We'll not make the same mistake. Looking at my copy of this book I'm reminded that it was autographed for me 30 years ago by Philip Brachman, who taught some of my classes at CDC. I remember him as a lovely man and a superlative teacher. Sadly, he passed away a few years ago.

I can see I will be using part of the carrots with the cabbage to make coleslaw. Cooked carrots mashed together with cooked swede is quite nice. I had run out of spinach and my planted salad leaves aren't quite large enough to harvest as yet. While I wouldn't choose iceberg lettuce, I'm grateful for it all the same and shredded carrots are a feature of all my lunchtime salads. When the carrots start going off, I will chop, blanch and freeze them, then add them gradually to stir fries, a common meal in our house.

The rest of it we'll sail through rapidly. While I'm quite happy with my Hillheads order - and I could have added some dairy products had I realised, I think when we are close to running out we'll be supporting the South Gosforth fruiterers in North Shields with our next order.  The chaos and mayhem of empty shelves at supermarkets doesn't seem to be a feature of the local shops, which we've generally used over the past decade. While they took a while to organise delivery services, we're happily back on board with supporting those local shops and only buying at the supermarket the items that can't otherwise be obtained.

Hope you are all keeping safe and well!