British food!

[fenchurch]

Our next-door-neighbors, M and T, have been in Europe (first Denmark and then visiting T's parents in the UK) for the past three weeks, so we've been watching their cat and their house. No big deal... they'd actually borrowed our cat waterer and cat feeder, so it was mostly just a matter of going over and spending time with the cat and making sure she wasn't too lonely.

Well, M just stopped by to say thank you and to drop off a basket filled with British foods and a cookbook!! It's James Martin's Easy British Food, which she thought I wasn't likely to have. They both know that we love British food, and actually find it a bit funny (the first time M came over to see our new kitchen, she was looking at the cupboards, opened one and said "Hey! You're American, why do you have Mushy Peas?!?").

The rest, though, is filled with odds and ends, mostly some of T's favorites, apparently, and a few things they'd never seen available in the US... there's some Bramble and Apple preserves, Apple Chutney with Westcountry Cider, Jaffa Cakes (which I can actually get locally, they're just expensive), Cadbury Bournville chocolate (I love this stuff), a small tin of Cadbury Drinking Chocolate (which I usually have to mail order), Thornton's Vanilla Fudge, a Chocoholic Flapjack and a Chocolate Orange Flapjack from the Devonvale Bakery, Moore's Dorset Biscuit Assortment, and a package of Tesco Shortcrust Pastry Mix.

I'm in British food heaven!

Comments

[queenofattolia.livejournal.com]

Heh. You sound exactly like me -- people always look at me funny when I start singing the praises of prawn cocktail and cheese-and-onion crisps. I have fifty thousand British cookbooks from which I actually cook. I love Eccles cakes and flapjacks (I have the best recipe -- they're exactly like the ones they sell in Harrods). And even though game birds and large honking English-style roast beef...things scare me, I love bread sauce and Yorkshire pudding and crispy roasted potatoes and parsnips AND Brussels sprouts.

Dang. If only it weren't 98F here now...