Good old Fortnums

The hanging basket at the front and the planting box on the steps at the back have been looking a bit sad since the pansies stopped flowering.  Fortnums' to the rescue: I spotted yesterday that they were selling trays of primula acaulis (primroses, though in a variety of colours) at £5 for twenty plants.  Quite nice little plants at that, so I snapped up a batch.

Elsewhere in the garden, we now have some daffodils in flower, though the downpours of recent days have flattened a few of them.  The yellow crocuses are through, and the snowdrops are up, if not in flower.  Primroses have been flowering timidly since Christmas.  Someone at art class yesterday was mentioning hellebores, but I see no sign of them in our garden.  We tend not to do very well with them.

I don't think I can put off the marmalade making for much longer.  The oranges and lemons have been lying on the kitchen work surface for about a week now, and we're pretty busy from next week onwards.  I'll only do one batch this year, since we still have about half of last year's output in stock, and only recently finished the 2014 vintage.

My next culinary plan is another crack at pork rillettes, but this time I'll freeze small quantities!  They are so rich that small doses are ample, and I finished up throwing out half of the last lot rather than risk keeping it too long in the fridge.  Another project is to find a decent quantity of dried haricots.  Our juvenile tastes run to the occasional batch of beans on toast, but have matured enough to prefer much less sugar and salt than comes in the proprietary cans (though Fortnums' Campo Largo brand is probably the least worst in that respect).  While on sugar and salt content, it occurred to me the other day to check up on breakfast cereals.  Turns out that Fortnum's equivalent of Special K is much lower in both than Kellogg's.