Saturday, July 23, 2011

The blog might have been quiet, but I have not…

Ey-up, Grigsoners! I’ve not posted for a while on the blog because I have simply run out of money this month. The move up has been pretty expensive and I only had two week’s pay to last me the whole month. Most of this has gone on petrol and boring moving things. However, I have been getting to explore the city and I’ve managed to find an excellent little farmers’ market very close to me. Tower Grove Farmers’ Market is small yet perfectly formed and has plenty of stalls to keep me busy.


I have found suppliers for Guinea fowl, wild rabbit, marrow bones and all-sorts of tricky to find poultry and meat-cuts.


There’s also a lovely English lady called Jane who has an English bakery stall, plus a great tea stall too. I am looking forward to getting to know these people. I also went to St Louis’s most popular farmers’ market at Soulard last week. This one was rather disappointing as it wasn’t really a farmers’ market, just a huge normal food market really. Not that there’s anything wrong with that; I’m sure I’ll frequent it for fruit and vegetables, and there was a few good proper farmer-run stalls there, but no meat or fish really.


Talking of fish there are two great places for that kind of thing here – Bob’s Seafood sells a good range of sea fish and will order fish in for you too, plus they’ll portion the stuff as you request. Should be good to get the usually tricky-to-find mackerel and herring. There is also a huge Asian supermarket called Seafood City which is quite an experience; there’s a host of live fresh and seawater fish and crustaceans including eel. There’s also live turtle, which I actually found a little disturbing. Many of the species are killed in-store which is a bit gruesome. The killings only seem to occur once a week. Go on a Saturday and there fresh fish a-plenty. Go on a Thursday and it is a sorry site


One of my best friends of the blog is, of course, the internet and have found that Amazon.com of all places has an excellent grocery department. I have managed to get preserved ginger – a favourite ingredient of mine and never seen by me anywhere in a grocery store in the USA thus far. I’ve also managed to get some seaweed, not a thing really associated with English food anymore, though still popular in Wales and Ireland.


Lastly, I have also been attemping to flex my green fingers. Some herbs and vegetables are simply unavailable – both sides of the pond. I have therefore got hold of some heirloom seeds and have planted some winter savory (required for the lamb’s head in brain sauce recipe!) and chervil.


I’ve also bought a mint and a marjoram plant. I don’t want to get too cocky, so I am sticking with these four for now and I shall see how I get on. I am a terrible gardener so I won’t get too excited about it yet; my mint plant is already riddled with some kind of powdery mildew, though some chervil seeds have germinated, so you take the rough with the smooth. The aim is to get a full herb garden growing. We shall about that one…

5 comments:

  1. We were behind you in line Saturday at Jeremy's (MO Grassfed beef). Be sure to check out the Farmer's Market Wednesdays at Schlafly Bottleworks. There will be some overlap with Tower Grove vendors, but also some differences. Also check out Global Foods Market in Kirkwood (http://www.globalfoodsmarket.com/) and Jay International on South Grand. Welcome to STL!

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  2. Thanks for the info!

    How on Earth did you find me on here? Join the blog on here or via facebook.

    I'll check out both of those places...

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  3. Didn't mean to be an eavesdropper but I heard "Neil" and Jeremy said you had an English food blog. You're the second Google result for "neil english food st louis". So welcome and enjoy!

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  4. Ah, well that makes sense then!
    Thanks again for checking out the blog. If you have any more suggestions for finding foods let me know! In fact I am going to put a list of the tricky to find foods very soon (probably this week, actually), so if you have any ideas there I'll be most grateful...

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  5. I'm actually of the opinion that as America's obsession with food grows - as evidenced by the popularity of all the cook off reality shows - we'll see smaller, local restaurants give the chains a run for the money. Small chef-owned restaurants with smaller, focused menus are serving up great casual food using locally sourced ingredients.

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