out and about...a typical saturday

Yesterday was a more typical Saturday than last week's, which featured (in order) Falmouth, Cape Cod; Logan airport in Boston; and sitting in an aeroplane (more of that in a future post).

In our house, Saturdays are usually fairly lazy affairs not worrying too much about starting times, plus Radio 4 (all morning if possible) and a leisurely perusal of recipe books, food magazines, websites and cuttings to roughly plan the following week's food, outside if I can. I don't think there will be many days left this year for sitting outside, but fingers' crossed.

Then, armed with my shopping list, it's off to Newcastle's Grainger Market, one of my favourite places in Newcastle. This week I stopped off at Lindsay Brothers, the fishmongers, for tuna steak and sea bass fillets, and J Armstrong, the greengrocers, for a whole variety of fruit and vegetables. I've been going there for years so have a bit chat (as they say up here) with the blokes behind the stall, and what's nice is that they sometimes throw in something for free, a real treat. Once I'm loaded down with shopping bags, the next stop is Olive and Bean on the outside of Grainger Market, my regular Saturday haunt, for a coffee and something sweet - a cafe latte and lemon and poppyseed cake this time. I haven't quite got over that slight awkwardness of taking photos inside so will have to provide a photo another time.

I also visited the flower lady near Haymarket metro station for my weekly bunch of flowers. She has a great selection of mainly seasonal flowers, cheap enough to treat myself each week. This week, it was a small bunch of spiky, blue, sea holly.

I also found time to pick a few blackberries from the tangle of brambles at the bottom of the garden that is behind mine. I live in a downstairs Tyneside flat, which was built in the 1930s and looks like a typical semi from that time but is in fact four flats.  The garden at the back is split into two with the back part belonging to the upstairs flat, which is rented out and not very well maintained, hence the brambles.  There's also a crab apple tree and some rose hips so my next project is to investigate what to do with them.  The blackberries were super ripe and most of them had gone over so I think they were at their best while I was in America.