Your guide to Party preparations at @BroughMarket @tedsveg @turnips @jamieoliver @borougholives @boroughbutcher #art #wastenot #marketsmatter #london #christmas

The last chilli in the garden edn:100

Party preparations for  our big party at the weekend included a big print making session, competing 80 varied coloured prints from one set of blocks out of an edition of 100. I will complete the edition this week, they were all hand finished, and 20 are available to buy, the rest have gone to new homes already.



Remember to peep at the website www.artfromlondonmarkets.com prints available through the site


It also included a great big shop at Borough.  Now that I am a Borogh familiar I can tell you some secrets about getting the best out of the market, for fruit I went to Jock Stark first, he always has great tasting fruit, and reasonable prices by Borough standards, he is also very friendly and always has something particuarly delicious to try.  Then I went on to Ted's Veg to get my root vegetables and herbs from Lincolnshire, perfect for beetroot and celeriac salads. I went to Turnips for rather expensive but beautiful  lettuces tomatoes, and other unseasonal Italian salady imports; this stall is beautiful but more pricey than average, however they do warn you if you pick up something especially expensive, so I could swop one or two of my not paying attention to the price tag pick ups.  Then I finished up at getting the last few things at Elsy and Bent, which is also at the more expensive end of the market but usually has some very good priced end of day bargains and a very lovely display.

But lets be honest you don't go to Borough for bargains they are to be found in other markets across our city.  You come here for the beauty of the place itself, its luxurious feel of plenty, the craft on and of the displays, and the availablility of absolutley anything your heart could desire food wise. You come to explore the wide variety that is on offer, and once you know your way around you can buy seasonally and choose your goods according to which stall does what better.  So my summary this week would be general: Fruit: Jock, Seasonable English veg: Ted's and fancy European and other imports : Turnips. Just nipping in off the high street: Elsy and Bent. And Olives and pickles from Borough Olives. And my kids love love love the pastries.

This is the first time I have bought anything from the farm to market stall Northfield Farm: I got an enormous lovely piece of beef from Northfield Farm, they cut a joint for me especially and rolled it for me while I was in the market.  We were feeding 85 people at the weekend, so my usual budget was thouroughly blown, the beef alone was £50.  However that piece of beef was both as big as it could be and still fit in my oven and completely delicious.  There is also the reassurance of knowing where it was from and how it was treated before it got to the market.  When it comes to beef I think buying infrequently but of good provenance is the key to keeping the environmental impact down, and the experience of eating it up.  Also spaghetti bolognaise made with the left over roast beef is yum so not a crumb wasted.

We were having our party at the Calthorpe Ground, at Crouch End Cricket club.  And at the end the happiest thing happened, I had made a buffet and as always for a party over catered so I picked up what I needed for lunch for the family staying with us the next day.  Then the lovely Mo who works on the bar took the left over food to a group of homeless people in Green Lanes which he does reguarly, so there was no waste.

Tip: Use a food processor when making tonnes of salad and the salad parts of Jamies 15 Minutes are great recipes to make into a salad bar.


Borough shop: tonnes of mint and corriander, beetroot, celeriac, chillis, peppers, loads of lettuce of various kinds, clementines, limes, apples,pears, grapes, celery, cucumbers, pomegranates, tomatoes of a wide variety, radishes, beef, olives, cornichons, onions, garlic, spring onions, chicory, large mangos, avocados, carrots variety of colours, rocket, fennel, lemons and a price to high to mention

Anti Slavery Act, Hugh FW and waste, displacement cleaning. Ally Pally Farmer's Market @allypallyfm @RiverdaleOrgFm #wastenot #art #food

So the kids are back at school and I have time to spend on the new larger scale piece I have been planning, but suddenly all those domestic jobs I have been putting off are calling me...... this is the disadvantage of working home.  SO I have fixed the door handle on the kitchen door, resealed around the shower tray, and used the washing machine so much it has broken down.  All this displacement activity is then commented on by my husband who in a pleased voice says you have been busy... grrr.  Displacement activities..... but I have a deadline creeping up and need to get on with it. Given that the activities listed are all time consuming but mindless I supose I could rename it "thinking time"...but it is now time for action and not DIY (although I will have to arrange the plumber....).

Slavery and trade: So preparing my piece for John Moores I have been thinking about trade and Liverpool both the current increase in imports represented by the Tetley deal and international trade in Liverpool in the past.  You can't then get away from the fact of the history of slavery and the role of Liverpool in the slave trade triangle. So to come back to the present in October the Modern Slavery Act 2015 was published, which means that very big companies will have to publicise what they do to prevent slavery being part of their supply chain.  Initially I felt a hurray moment, and then I went to the government website, and it became clear that big business with over 35million turn over are required to publicise what they are doing to try to prevent slavery being part of the supply chain, not actually show that there is no slavery in their supply chain.  So it is down to consumers to then find the information and.... boycott I guess, to actually make them do it.....hardly  robustly anti slavery law.  I guess it will make journalists jobs a bit easier, but not strong enough.

Hugh Fernley Whitingstall's recent anti-waste campaign on TV, and the  Aldi critique in channel 4 Monday night illustrate how there can be a great big gap between what companies say they do and what they actually do, and actually these issues are not unrelated. Excessive consumerism is at the heart of both, and in the model of the Anti-Slavery Act the consumer is expected to be the police.  Funny that I thought that was the job of governments.

The shop
Alexandra Palace Farmers Market: Riverdale Organic

A very muddy walk across the post fireworks park leaves our shoes claggy.  We get to the Farmers market only just in time, as it is in the school yard today just that bit further from where we started up by the Palace.  I buy every thing from Riverdale organic stall as luckily he has yet to pack up.  For organic produce it is reasonably priced and they have some really lovely apples and pears.

Fennel bulb, lettuce, 7 cooking apples, bag of kale, bag of eating apples, bag of pears, broccoli and a celeriac root sold with the stems, first time I have seen that..., and if you have ever wondered about the wisdom of eating things that look less than perfect gnarly celeriac is the thing to try.  £9.80

Development, #Decisions, #CarstenHoller, #JayRayner #Hampstead Community Market

About 6 years ago my smallest planted ten apricot seeds in plant pots.  We had a punnet of apricots  from the supermarket and to save herself from eating all ten, some were surreptitiously emptied of their seeds pushed back together and returned to the fruit bowl.  To be honest I did not expect them to grow.  This year, two of the four trees we have blossomed, and one produced apricots.   So those five apricots were picked by her in the very last week she will ever be in primary school.  Her own belief in natural development proving her right. Her plan is to plant the seeds from these... This picture is the first apricots from her tree.  It is now taller than any of the adults in our family. I have gilded in silver, this stage will not last the tree is still growing, but these first fruit are special.  I will add shellac to keep this stable once I have touched in the gild a bit.

So there are delicious decisions that are made in the short term that lead to lovely trees and have beautified our garden which was a blank grass square when we moved into this house.

I have recently started to follow Jay Rayner on twitter and he posts all sorts of links that are food related and interestesting, illustrating  the state of  discussions about our food futures, which it seems to me reflect our discussions about our futures in general.  What kind of a society do we want?

 There  was a  story  he linked on twitter that suggested one of the "cures" for food poverty was urban free food gathering.  And another suggesting that all the answers lay with GM production, both from the US . These provocative pieces to set the mind racing.

And here, we have the dichotomy of the fancy food farmers  markets, at Borough and Muswell Hill and across London, which I love and am seduced by, but do not answer the developmental need for cheap produce,  which is answered by the more basic food markets which I also love, and which bring us food from around the world.

And then this week I went to Hampstead, to the Community Market.  And while it probably does serve the community of Hampstead as a whole, where property prices are extraordinary, so the average householder is more likely to be an actor or banker than a shop worker or an academic: This was a street market stall charging Farmers Market prices.   The service was very pleasant and polite, and more like a Greengrocer (he chose my produce for me, and packed it up). Yet it was really like playing at buying from a market stall.

  Something about Hampstead as a whole feels a little like a pastiche of its former self.  Unless that is simply me getting more cynical as I get older; when I first got to know Hampstead in the 1980s it was still a haven of the European Intellectuals who had fled the rest of Europe in the early 20th Century.  It is still beautiful sitting as it does on the edge of the Heath, has a theatre and a cinema a few small galleries, plenty of pubs and cafes.

My Hampstead as I knew it, was somewhere students could rent rooms from bonkers opera singers, who had inherited houses, and whose tenants got arias along with their rooms.  Where you might see a member of the Freud family walking down the street.  Which was culturally interesting, including conversations in pubs with strangers.  This was when I was first getting to know London, my college friend had come into London to do his MA and I was still flirting with London like the late teen I was sitting around the edges in Hertfordshire. So I sat in Hampstead the other day with my teenage daughter and saw it through her eyes.  She, urban born and brought up, to her it was just another place.

 How did we ever get to the point where the solution to food poverty got disconnected from the whole notion of poverty itself?  That the problem is not that we do not have enough food in the food supply.  Look at all the overconsumption and food waste in the West.   Where is the intelligent look at development meaning human development, where the solutions are not bigger more concentrated control by transnational corporations contrasted only with going back to picking food up off the streets.  Where are the long term plans?   Where are the apricot seeds that someone has the naivety to expect to grow?  Where is this conversation?

Carsten Holler is on at the Haywood, a disconcerting look at disorientation in the face of decision making, how you can be thrown into the dark, thrown into
a visual migraine of a forest, and spun joyously down a tube as a result of your decisions to participate or not.  I went with my smallest child and my oldest friend.  My smallest child facing big changes and decisions, my oldest friend who is having to face  a serious decision, caught as she is in the changing laws of French Pensions.  She did not go down the slide.