Domestic goddess rating: 0% (still in holiday mode) Five-a-day: 4/5 Food miles: about 40
On the menu: Toast, jam & juice (breakfast); cheese sandwich (lunch); mushroom & leek risotto (supper)
I’m just back from a three-day mini-break in Hay-on-Wye, which for anyone who doesn’t know it is a gorgeous town on the Welsh border full of bookshops. We stayed in a fabulous bed & breakfast (Lower House at Cusop Dingle – if you get the chance, stay there, it’s fantastic) and had a great time munging around in dusty old bookshops finding treasures.
Eating seasonally when you’re out is practically impossible, I find, though. It’s a bit like being vegetarian used to be 20 years ago, when everyone looked at you in a wierd sort of way and not a single menu had anything on it that didn’t include meat.
For the seasonal eater in February, every salad garnish turns up with cucumber and tomatoes; every cooked breakfast is bedecked with grilled tomatoes (which is not to say they aren’t spectacularly tasty, of course). I didn’t get too wound up about it – but I did have to take a few days out of my seasonal year. It reminded me, though, how much everyone else in the world takes so little notice of the seasons. It’s just what I’m trying to avoid: that knee-jerk “it’s salad, it’s got to be cucumber” sameness that food takes on when you have everything all the time.
It may have been a break, but it didn’t feel like a holiday – more like a return to something I’d thought I’d escaped. I think, on the whole, I prefer it my way.
Filed under: Cooking, Seasonal eating, healthy eating | Tagged: bed & breakfast, cucumbers, eating out, Hay on Wye, holidays, restaurant food, salads, seasonal food, tomatoes, Wales
