It's fast food but with a farming twist
Vicky Rogers, of Cambridge's Radmore Farm Shop, and her family were so busy preparing other family's Christmas feasts, that there was little time to eat. On the plus side, ?it did allow for some innovation in the kitchen.
So here we are in the middle of silly season! I’m currently rearing my head from a pile of order books, delivery schedules and stocklists.
Ben’s hard at work in the butchery and I’m spending any spare minute I can in the bakery! We retreat into our little world of Christmas food.
I can’t help but feel like the duck with its calm head above the water and its feet furiously paddling below the surface. Please don’t take this as complaining, we absolutely love it! We look forward to this all year – the long hours, the stress, the phone constantly ringing, we soak up every minute.
This may sound odd but there is no bigger compliment than a family trusting you with their Christmas dinner. And no bigger feeling of satisfaction than knowing you have put that delicious top-quality food in the middle of each table. Well, with the help from each family’s designated chef, of course.
Our own meals go a little awry during the chaos. We end up eating anything you can make in under 10 minutes. We have a lot of poached eggs on toast, which the whole family love, and we are lucky to have our chickens just outside our door, so eggs are never in short supply. We also have been enjoying scrambled eggs and smoked salmon for a festive treat too. We become experts at ‘make it up as you go along’ cookery as well. With no time to plan anything and only 10 or 15 minutes to get a meal on the table, we throw in random ingredients we have in the fridge as we go along for our own December brand of Ready Steady Cook. Sometimes you end up with a strange combination, and sometimes you strike upon something wonderful. Not that you remember what went into it, so it will never be replicated! One treat of this nature was sausage and vegetable pasta. That’s the name I’m going to give it anyway.
We do, however, thoroughly enjoy the week between Christmas and the new year. The pace slows, and we make the most of having some time to cook some family feasts. We always have a cockerel for our Christmas dinner with sausage meat stuffing and pigs in blankets, roast potatoes and a pile of vegetables. Oh, and we throw in a Yorkshire too.
We always keep some ham and cheese back from the shop so we can have some for Christmas Day tea, but we are always too full to eat it and it gets moved back till Boxing Day. I’m sure we are not the only family to do this.
We usually squeeze a couple more roast lunches in over the course of the next week, having the chance to have a hot meal in the middle of the day is a novelty that we enjoy to the max this week!
The things I’m really hoping to get my hands on this year are a roast duck – these have been really popular among our customers this year, and a slow roast piece of belly pork (our family favourite).
We often have a nice piece of dexter beef for New Year’s Day, possibly rolled sirloin, or rib. Then for a stroll around the farm to walk it all off.
Whatever you are feasting on this festive season, I hope you enjoy it to the full.
Happy new year from the farm!
