I love a good farmer’s market, whether in the UK or the USA you can always be assured of getting your hands on some good local produce. In Chicago you are usually getting fruit and vegetables from Illinois and the surrounding States of Michigan and Wisconsin. In Nottingham it was meat and dairy from Nottinghamshire, and the surrounding counties of Lincolnshire, Leicestershire, and Derbyshire. The same principle just on a smaller scale.

When I am away from England I forget how much good meat you can get at the English Markets. Not only that but at the market I visited in West Bridgford there were three stalls selling Scotch Eggs, one of which was just dedicated to Scotch Eggs. This is tantamount to a personal Nirvana and almost worth the airfare and 7500 mile round trip on its own. I could probably just write this blog about the Scotch Eggs themselves but I will try to maintain a modicum of restraint.

The prime Scotch Egg vendor was the “Handmade Scotch Egg Company” who had a pretty wide and wild selection and samples of all, which was very very dangerous. In addition to the standard option they had ‘Garlic’, ‘Black Pudding’,  ‘Honey and Mustard’, ‘Piri Piri’, and ‘Sweet Chilli’. I did try them all but in the end I just bought the Garlic and the Original. Good Value at  3 for 5 GBP. I have since sampled the ‘Óriginal’ (shown above) and it was very good, thick solid sausage meat and a very yellow yolked egg, which makes me believe it came from a happy hen. Website: http://www.handmadescotcheggs.co.uk

For lunch it was a case of adding up a couple of little snacks. On the day I had seen a quails egg scotch egg from ‘Saxby Rare Breeds’ http://www.saxbyrarebreeds.co.uk  which intrigued me as it was a big compared to size of a quails egg. It was still a bit runny inside and in the end the egg was too small and the sausage meat overwhelmed and to be honest it was a bit soggy and tasteless. Still it was worth trying for the experience.

It was not all bad though as I had managed to get my hands on some mini quiches from the No 8 deli in West Bridgford. A mushroom and wenselydale cheese quiche really hit the spot http://www.no8deli.co.uk/.

Apart from instant food gratification a plentiful bounty of additional supplies had to be garnered from the market. It is so hard to walk past all the stalls without buying breakfast and many many dinner options.

Sunday breakfast was mostly supplied by Grasmere Farm stall http://www.grasmere-farm.co.uk/. Chipolata sausages, Back Bacon, and Black pudding, the eggs came from the Spring Lane Farmshop on Mapperley Top in Nottingham http://www.springlanefarmshop.co.uk/

In the end that was damn tasty too, OK so maybe I should have allowed my Mother the chance to make the plate look prettier before I took the photo, but it was all about the taste in the end. The Eggs had the yellowest yolk you can get, probably grass fed, the black pudding was creamy and flavourful, with a good bit of fat in it so that it was not dry, the sausages not too herby but bigger than a chipolata, and the bacon was solid, firm and lightly smoked. Delicious.

As for everything else that was bought from the market will be consumed on another day. It may make the blog, but really I guess you all want more El Stop news and less of this UK stuff. Five weeks to go…