Sunday, February 14, 2010

les delices de ballater (part 4?)

Sheridans of Ballater, our nearest quality butcher, has excelled. It is, apparently, National Sausage Week, and said butchers, makers of the Pork and Irn Bru breakfast hangover sausage, have, somewhere in the tea-raddled corners of what might once have been been a creative mind; created a whole new range of bizzare sausages. In the interest of completism, they have created the all-in-one breakfast banger; with beef, bacon, egg, haggis and black pudding. We demurred from sampling that one, and purchased some of the pork, leek, pancetta and cheese (which we had for lunch, and were very nice), we also thought we'd try the smoked pheasant, parmesan and pork. There were, in fact, too many varieties to try, although I have to say that their plain pork chipolatas are hard to beat.

I finished the day by making marmalade, the seville oranges appeared briefly in the farm shop, and it is always hard to resist them especially when everything is grey outside. I'm glad we didn't go mad and buy a lot, a kilo of citrus fruit has made a lot more pots than I had anticipated. It has been said in other places that it is remarkable how pervasive marmalade can be, despite a certain amount of feline intervention (at floor level, there's no fur in my pots!), I was pleased that I managed to contain my jam, more or less, to the pots, with only occasional sticky patches to remind us of the endeavour.

Sometimes, when I am doing the washing up I watch the sun setting over the mountains, a couple of night ago, there was quite a sunset...