Sunday waffle-making

It’s that time of year again when the ladies don’t lay much. That, coupled with the fact that none of our little flock is a spring chicken anymore, there haven’t been many eggs to be had for the past couple of months. Gone are the days of a poached egg every lunchtime and as many cakes as we could eat. Instead, there’s warming vegetable soup for lunch and what eggs there are are used for very specific things – waffles for Sunday brunch, for example. We could buy eggs, and occasionally we do, but the scarcity makes our home-produced eggs so much more precious and makes us so much more grateful for the abundance when they are ‘in season’.

a seasonal summer meal – now a distant memory

I like this seasonality of food. I know that, with enough money, it’s possible to have pretty much any sort of food at any time, but what’s the fun in that? How lovely it is to enjoy the first strawberries o the year – picked and eaten on the same day. What delights to see the sequence of British apples arriving in the shops in the autumn. What a pleasure to eat seasonal salad leaves, so that each season delivers a different set of flavours and textures. And eggs are the same in this house – plus the yolks change colour with the season, influenced by what the hens have been eating.

Eating seasonally is a fundamental way of connecting with natural cycles, plus it’s good for the environment.