The Simplest of Meals can be the Greatest of All

First Day at the First Ever British Food Bloggers Stall

Thanks to MsMarmiteLover for the photo.

After weeks of preparation the first UKFBA stall was unveiled last Thursday and it was a huge success. Chris Drefus, from the blog 'More Tea, Vicar?' bravely volunteered to take the first slot, offering to bake his own breads and cakes. As he discovered, baking on a commercial basis in a domestic kitchen with one small oven and just a few loaf tins and baking trays is quite a challenge, but he rose to it tremendously, staying up until 3am baking. It was all rather manic for him in the days leading up to the stall, rushing around buying ingredients, getting the health and safety people to visit his kitchen, deciding what to bake. Like most of the people who will be at the stall, Chris is not a professional baker and has never sold his goods commercially before and so it was a brand new experience for him. Watch the video, filmed at the stall, to see what he has to say about it.



Although the stall is in London the UKFBA is a national association and we have members organising meet-ups and events across the country, which is wonderful to see happening. So, if you live outside of London and would like to get involved with the UKFBA community visit www.ukfba.co.uk to see what’s going on in your area, or to get something organised! And if you’re in London do stop by the stall, which will be at Covent Garden every Thursday through the summer, to say hello. This week the stall will be hosted by one of our selected producers, Boutique Bakehouse.

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Scotch Eggs

These were the scotch eggs I made for the picnic and bike ride I went on the other weekend. When I talked about them on Twitter there was some demand for a blog post so here it is!

Scotch eggs are one of those things that give high reward for little effort. Despite being very easy to make they are impressive and incredibly good to eat – so much better than anything you can buy in the shops, with the added advantage of containing fresh ingredients and nothing else. What’s more, you can eat them freshly cooked while they’re still warm and lovely and crispy on the outside; much my preferred way of eating them, as lovely as they are cold.

All you need to do is hard boil some eggs but, and here’s the trick for the perfect scotch egg, make sure they aren’t completely hard in the middle but at that almost-hard stage; about 7 minutes should do it for large eggs. Then you just wrap them in good quality, seasoned sausage meat - herbs mixed in if you like - dip them in a beaten egg and then breadcrumbs and fry them until they're crisp and golden and the sausage meat cooked through.

I’m right in the middle of testing recipes for my cookbook at the moment and shall be perfecting this recipe for inclusion, so you’ll be able to read the full recipe when it’s published next spring. In the meantime, here are some photographs of the steps to make scotch eggs.