When you think of great food France and Italy may come to mind, but Shetland has to be considered as well. Over the year Shetland holds a number of festivals and fairs, mostly music but at the end of October Clickimin will hold the Shetland Food Fair.
Celebrity chef Tony Singh who starred in BBC2's `The incredible Spice Men' will travel up from Leith to take part in `A taste of Shetland' demonstration. If you go into either Tesco or the co-op in Lerwick you may see some Scottish produce but little from Shetland.
This is surprising considering the quality of local food, especially the Lamb. Some people cannot eat lamb as they see lambs in the fields in spring and feel attached to them in some way. Living in the rural part of Shetland we are surrounded by sheep, in fact they are in the field in front of us now. Farmers don't get a lot of money for a lamb so going direct to them is helping them and you get a really good deal as well
We go for Mousa lamb which is local to us, just over the hill. It is cut to your requirements, boxed and delivered to the door and tastes superb. We have recently received our first for this season and have ordered another for February when we have room in the freezer.
Everything being fresh tastes great, for along time in Sheffield we had potatoes with no taste. Here we buy a sack from Weisdale, which last along time without going off, unlike the last bag we had from Tesco which went mushy after a few days and they taste great.
This is the first time we have ever had some space to grow our own vegetables, although its not massive we are able to grow potatoes, parsnips and beetroot. Next week we harvested some of the crop and hope it had grown to a good size and also tastes great. This has spurred us onto to planting more next year after some ground preparation as the ground is very peaty.
You only have to go a local concert to benefit from homebakes and tea at the interval. There a some excellent cooks here and the range of buns and cakes are staggering. Its very hard to go on a diet here.
One thing we do miss is Henderson's Relish, we stocked up recently when we visited Sheffield- seems to be the only place they sell it to my knowledge. Its just great with stews or pies.
During the last few days the weather has changed from the still mostly sunny spells to, Gales and rain. This reminded us to have our tyres changed to `all weather' in anticipation of the colder icy weather. If you believe the weather forecasters they say this will be with us in the next week or so.
