Freshly baked bread made the traditional way is back once more in The Old Bakery and though we say so ourselves it tastes damn good!

With so much to do each day I have been reluctant to make bread as well. However that doesn't mean that I didn't want to make it regularly at some point in the future. Well that time has arrived and I am now producing all of our own bread needs from scratch in our ovens.

One of the things that I wanted to achieve was bread hand made using quality local ingredients.I also really enjoy the whole process of bread making, something that I was trained to do nearly 30 years ago. I still get a buzz when I open the oven to see the finished product.

I go and get my flour directly from the watermill that grinds it at Leatheringset near Holt. I make a  white loaf and a Granary loaf. My favourite of the two is the granary which I have elected to make using just granary flour and not to mix it with white flour as is the trend nowadays. This means it is slightly more dense but the flavour is far more superior in that it is really malty to the taste.


I have to say one of the real pleasures of this job is having the ability to go and get many of our ingredients directly from the people that produce them. This involves a drive around the beautiful back lanes of North Norfolk touring the countryside seeking out the best that Norfolk can offer.


KIPPERS
I'll leave the house on a sunny morning and head straight up to our nearest coastal village, Cley. The 'ey' is pronounced as in 'eye' and calling it Clay is an instant way to spot a foreigner round these parts.

In Cley there is a small family run Smokery called Cley Smokehouse but it does a great range of smoked product including old traditionals like Bloaters, Bucklings and Red Herrings through to Prawns, Cod Roes, Gravlax and a Hot smoked Barbary Duck breast. This is the first of our local food heroes and my regular order here is several pairs of their un-dyed kippers cold smoked over oak.

We do smoke some food (both hot & cold smoked) at The Old Bakery, our favourite being our Hot Smoked Salmon, also over Oak sawdust. However I would not dream to be able to match the Cley Kippers. I have them most days and as part of a diet they have helped me lose just over two stone! I plan to write a book on this diet called "How to get Chipper, Fitter and Ripper with a KIPPER".

They are really good value as well. AND you can buy most of their stuff on line! So even the 'townies' can get some.




 From Cley I drive back inland to a small village just outside of Holt where I buy my.....



FLOUR

This I purchase from the watermill that actually grinds it at a place called Letheringsett. Whilst the existing building was built in 1802, after a fire, there is a record of a watermill here in the Doomsday book. Once again we are blessed not only with a working mill but one that produces a wide range of flours and is especially well known for it's Spelt flour.

I buy my Whole Grain flour and my Strong White Bread flour from here and have just started buying their Muesli after an extensive period of research (Alison had a bowl and liked it!).

It is a real 'no frills' mill. To qualify that comment a bit I would say that it is a huge building originally with the ability to have four mill stones grinding at once but despite that grandeur the carpark is simply it's working yard and the tours are pretty low key as is the shop itself.

The other day when I arrived as I walked towards the mill's entrance I had to wait just outside the door as a mother duck and her ducklings came waddling out of the dark mill to enjoy the days sunshine. Very rural.









Back into the car and a short drive to the town of Holt for our......


GREAT SNORING QUAIL EGGS

They, the eggs, do not snore. Nor do the Quails from which they oose, and they certainly do not snore greatly. The Great Snoring Quail Eggs are named so because 'Great Snoring' is the name of the village where Top Farm is based which produces the eggs.

That clarified I have to say that I don't actually buy these from the farm but from the department store in the town of Holt. It is just as easy and they have only traveled about 9 miles to get there.
We use the Great Snoring Quail eggs to create The Old Bakery's 'signature' dish which is an English muffin with a Portobello mushroom on top filled with a tomato & basil brushetta which has 3 soft boiled Great Snoring quail eggs nestling within. Yes it is quite yummy but really tricky to get the eggs just on the cusp of runniness.

CROISSANTS

The department store is called Baker's and Larners and if ever you visit Holt you must make a point of exploring the store. Whilst there I buy their frozen pastry croissants which we bake-off every morning for the guests.


MRS' TEMPLES BINHAM BLUE CHEESE

The last item that I routinely buy here is Binham Blue cheese. A semi-soft creamy blue veined cheese full of flavour and a highly respected cheese in this area, vastly out selling other blue cheeses.
It is made in a village called Wighton by an actual Mrs Temple. The milk comes from her herd of Brown Swiss cattle.

We use this in our menu as a choice with scrambled egg on our home made toasted bread . It is my favourite breakfast from all that we serve.


Now I can start moving towards home again, so back into the car and a little like a scene fom Postman Pat you'll see me driving down some more narrow Norfolk lanes as I head to Grange Farm to buy our.......


YOGURTS & ICE CREAMS

From the outsiders eyes Grange farm in the middle of a collection of fields might look like the Grundy's old place in the Archers but that would be so unfair. It is very much a working farm and has the muck splashed around the yard to prove its credentials as such.

I've turned up and seen a dozen or so rabbits 'hanging' from a couple of broom handles which have been balanced horizontally over the backs of a couple of kitchen dining chairs just inside the almighty old flint barn.
The place is old and showing signs of being a little tired but in a couple of the out buildings sits a manufacturing dairy as pristine as any that you will find on any anonymous industrial estate.

Their yogurts are fantastic made with milk from their own herd of cows of course. We only buy the full fat yogurts as our philosophy is that you are probably only staying with us for a few nights so the pleasure gained from two or three full fat yoghurts outbalances any guilt caused.

The Ice creams are used on our evening meal menu and are just as bad for you.... Thank God!


I possess a chiller in my car that plugs into the car's power outlet because as you can see the 'round' is quite an extensive one which I only do once a week or perhaps a week and a half. Having said a long goodbye to their farm dog I head up the track and back into the lanes to the village of Melton Constable where we buy........


SAUSAGES

We took sometime when we first moved here to seek out the best supplier of each of the ingredients that we used and Rutlands Butchers were,and still are, the best sausage producer in the area (in our opinion). With a range of over 40 sausages all made on the premises we are spoilt for choice. However to give our breakfasts a slightly unusual but extremely tasty sausage we generally buy either their Smokey Joe's or Honey Glazed Gammon sausages.

We also buy our Haggis from them as they produce an excellent product which is on our evening meal menu. Delia Smith serves them in her Norwich restaurant on Burn's Night and they also export them to Scotland! All our guests really rate the Haggis and this is one of my favourite evening meals.

It is a real family butchers with Mum, Dad and their four adult siblings who equally give the best service in the country. If I had known about them in the past I would have arranged field trips from my Supermarkets for staff to learn what excellent service really is!





 I may make a slight detour here to Briston the neighbouring village if we have guests who are having an evening meal and have chosen....



CROMER CRAB

These are the sweetest of crabs and we buy them direct from the fishermen who have caught them early that morning (depending on tides). The company is called Norfolk-C-Larder and are another of our local food heroes that have great 'green' credentials.


We also sometimes treat ourselves to one of their lobsters to bung on the BBQ as they are the cheapest when bought straight from the fisherman!



I'm on the home run now, just two miles to home but with one more stop on the edge of our village where I buy the.....


EGGS

Talk about free range, you can see the chickens right across the road in the meadow. Martin's Farm is one of four farms which have the Farmhouses right in the village itself. The eggs are extremely fresh and we tend to buy a little but often so that the yokes are a deep bright yellow.

We buy them from a small...   very small shed where they also have a fridge/freezer with rare breed sausages, chickens, and bacon in plus fresh milk. On other shelves in the shed you can buy seasonal vegetables, it is a very busy little shed.

Martin's Farm has supplied Galton Blackiston with ducks for the BBC 2 TV show The Great British Menu and the family has been farming here for four generations (over 60 years!).

Every year we treat ourselves to a Christmas goose from them as we know that their animal welfare is top notch and that all their food is grown on the farm itself. In fact I probably saw our goose many times as I drove past the field until late October when the field became eerily vacant.


Back into the car, turn right and there we are right back at The Old Bakery just in time for lunch, after I've put all the shopping away of course.




Well that is most of the suppliers but there are a few more that I have to visit in the opposite direction and those I do on Thursdays. For Thursdays are market day in Fakenham and so I tie them in with that. First port of call is the James Beck auction where I may or may not find myself a bargain.

Then I will visit the market buying any.....



FRESH FRUIT & VEG.

I buy any fresh fruit or veg that I think is outstanding in quality. Normally the Pink Grapefruit are far larger here than the Supermarket, as are the Cauliflowers and Tomatoes, cheaper too.


Then I'll drive to Morrisons Supermarket where I will get all the usual basics. Yes I still have to shop at a supermarket.

From there I will drive to my last supplier for our....


BACON & BLACK PUDDING

At a small village called Great Ryburgh (You'll find that many of the smallest villages in Norfolk are normally prefixed with the word 'GREAT'), there is a brilliant Pork Butchers called Perfick Pork.

The guy that set it up came from West London and lived there back in the 60's & 70's when I was living there and he too came to Norfolk in the last 10 years. As I said we sought out the best ingredients for our breakfasts and on tastings his home produced, cured and smoked bacon was, and is, second to none.

We buy the Oak Smoked bacon.

 I love turning up when the smokery door had just been opened, that smoked bacon smell takes me right back to the late 70's when I worked on a supermarkets delicatessen. Every morning I would open the back up chiller to set the days counter up and be hit by that beautiful aroma of smoked bacon that had been building up through the night. For me it is one of those smells that I will never ever forget, very nostalgic and still hits a chord in my heart every single time.
 

Their sausages are excellent too but the sheer choice of flavours that Rutlands produce gives them the edge on that ingredient, whilst Rutlands cannot match the pure quality of Perfick Pork's bacon.

Perfick Pork are another supplier that sell their product online to any where in the country packing it in special containers packed with dry ice on a next day courier delivery.



So that is it, my tour of Norfolk's best producers of fine foods. Yes I could get it all in the Supermarket, Sainsburys 'Taste the Difference' or Morrisons 'The Best' ranges. Sure I could even get it delivered from one of those little shoe box vans that scoot around from house to house.

BUT there is nothing more honest than looking a true artisan in the eye as you buy a top class product at a fair price. Knowing that he or she has an unrivaled passion for what they produce and that as a result WE are keeping THEM in business.

Whilst at the same time their excellent food is giving us our reputation which in turn is keeping US in business!

THANK YOU TO ALL OF OUR LOCAL FOOD HEROES.

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A daily blog would just about finish me off completely. Robert Plant

Avid followers of statistics will have noticed that this blog keeps a record of the all the posts that have been made since we moved to Norfolk. We reached a peak of 102 posts in 2011 when we were setting up the B&B and opening for business. And ever since then as the business has built up the time to post blogs has reduced.

So, dear readers, if you are missing the frequency with which the wit and wisdom that are dispensed in these pages happens, we hope you'll be pleased to know that there are other places to read the various ramblings of our family members.

You'll have noticed that once in a while a poetic muse happens to Mike and scattered throughout these pages are some of the poems he has been inspired to write. That love of poetry has been passed down to another generation; our son is currently posting daily 'Six lines that rhyme'. Enjoy his poetic creations here:

http://swilliamthomas.tumblr.com/

Meanwhile in deepest Somerset our daughter has, this week, completed on the purchase of her first house. You'll be able to follow her adventures in knitting, stitching and crafting her home-made home right here:

http://thehome-madehome.blogspot.co.uk/

Which just leaves me and my coaching / management blog which has been untouched for months. But give it a couple of months when I'll be reducing my days worked externally to 4 and I'll be  blogging, tweeting and musing along with the rest of them. I bet you can't wait!



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Villagers were met by the surreal sight of two guys bent over almost double, not unlike Burke and Hare, shiftily rolling an upside down tree root ball along the main village road.

Last summer we went to Wells-next-the-sea and visited some of the 'open gardens'. As usual they were all really good and most of them quite compact. We were particularly struck by the way one fairly small garden compartmentalised itself into separate areas almost like rooms.

The seed was sown (sorry) for us to create a hidden corner within our garden and when we got home we looked at our garden and decided to use a corner to create just such a room.

During the long time of inactivity towards this task we visited several National Trust properties and started to develop a penchant for their stumperies. We were really taken by the Stumpery at Ickworh. Now we knew what we wanted to be inside our new room in the garden....a stumpery. Hence I started in my quest to obtain stumps starting as I did in last weeks blog.

Now the first thing that we needed was a doorway to our room. A room is not a room unless you can enter it through a doorway. We considered several alternatives for this from buying a wooden trellis arch to making something ourselves and to bending over the native plants in that corner to create a natural archway.

The wooden trellis arches are too expensive and the folded over flora just looked like it needed watering rather urgently so we decided to create an arch from scratch and as cheap as possible.
This meant a trip to my flying farmer supply guy. He lives at the end of the village and, well actually you can read about him on a previous blog called "The Plot Thickens".
Having braved his Alsatians I bought a few large wooden poles and set about building a wooden arch.

I drew up a plan on a bit of A4 paper (I couldn't find any envelopes with decent backs) and to my quite considerable amazement it looks alright!....

I've used bolts to hold the thing together just in case children visiting the cottage think it is a climbing frame, which I would quite understand.

Now initially after I erected this thing I decided to create a Hazel hurdle fence to cordon off the room, a wall to my room I suppose.

Having cut many very long coppiced hazel  branches from my own garden I set about planting the uprights.
I had got to about half the height that I was aiming for when I ran out of the hazel wood. Now I started using an unknown tree that we had cut down during January.
Well the hazel fence had already looked in pain and by the time I had finished the whole thing looked like it had a strangulated hernia, twisted and contorted as if in agony.

I decided to put it out of it's misery and killed the fence off dismantling it the very next day. It was so shockingly bad that I couldn't even bring myself to photograph it and this from a guy that has taken photos of Otter Poo and a bloated dead deer floating in a lake!

We needed a new plan. This 'room' will be seen from the dining room by our guests and so we needed something special...

Trawling through the web we happened upon a fedge supplier. Mmmm, I thought that spell check wouldn't like that. 'Fedge' that's right... F.E.D.G.E. Fedge.

Those in the know will be aware that a fedge is both a fence and a hedge or to be more accurate a living fence. In our case made from willow.

Having paid my money the Fedge kit duly arrived comprising of many Willow canes and several pages of instructions. I decided not to disregard the instructions as I normally do with Ikea furniture but to actually follow them closely. Spell check doesn't like the name Ikea either, I reckon the Ikea catalogue would scramble spell checks brain's with it's FYRKANTIG (candles) and it's KNUTSTORP (chair) there would be red underscoring in abundance.

Although interestingly it hasn't raised an eyebrow with Fyrkantig but does suggest that I must mean 'Shortstop' for KNUTSTORP.

I digress, back to the fedge, I worked for the best part of the day working on this wall of willow, firstly removing the turfs and laying the mulching material .....




 Then planting the uprights.....


Next were the weavers which held all the uprights together by binding to them on the horizontal.






Now came the tricky bit, the weaving of the 'weavers'. Firstly to the left then back along to the right. This was the most time consuming bit of it all.

The thing was taking shape now and my room was forming.

The overall effect will be a light fluttery willow leaf wall in the summer months and during the winter it will open the view up into the room and our Stumpery.

The views from within the room towards the house and cottage will then disapear in the summer making this a great hiding place for the young children that come to stay in the Holiday cottage. We feel sure that they will love it.

The final bit was the creation of the Stumpery, where I turned one stump into four.

To do this I volunteered to help some neighbours (Neil & Julie) that had just moved into a bungalow two doors down from us. They were chopping tree trunks down and I asked if I could have the root balls. It was a day later before it occurred to me that actually I should offer to assist in digging out the roots rather than expect them to do it, I sometimes have tunnel vision when an idea worms it's way out of this tiny brain. They were a little stumped at first (did you see what I did there?!!) but it seemed like a good deal so they agreed.

Photos courtesy of Julie.

This was a lovely way to get to know new neighbours and we spent the lion share of the day together, digging and chewing the cud about ourselves and our plans.

They themselves have taken on a garden that looked very similiar to my allotment when I obtained it. When we were done I invited them over to see the Stumpery and I think that they may have actually been reasonably impressed.
I did donate to them my spare willow canes which they planned to use by a ditch at the end of their property to make a similar but smaller 'fedge'.

That said Neil had already seen where I was placing these stumps as he had to help me get them from his house along the road to ours. All we had to do this with was his little old foldable sack trolley.
It was half the size of the root balls it was carrying.

Villagers were met by the surreal sight of two guys bent over almost double, not unlike Burke and Hare, shiftily rolling an upside down tree root ball along the main village road. This was only enhanced by the need to make a right hand turn signal so a car coming in the opposite direction could tell which way we intended to turn.
No one flinched an eye lid. I feel I have turned native as this was definitely considered NFN...

Normal For Norfolk.

It was a very hot day, even for June but this was still March and so I got hot dirty and thirsty but soon my Stump gained a second then a third and finally a little runt, the fourth. This culminated in the end product our Stumpery Room.....

It has a look about it of a group of trolls on a picnic. I have to say that I feel the photos don't do it justice and that it has a quiet place feel about it.

So there you have it by use of a bit of willowology and good neighbourliness I have created something a little odd at the end of my garden and who wouldn't want something a little odd at the end of their garden?







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