Long leisurely lunch

Nice to have six round the table again yesterday.  We’d booked Celia and Andy, and since Annie is visiting her brother not too far away we invited them too.  It being Sweet Olive season, we baked some baguettes and served bruschette as an appetiser.  Home made bread, home grown tomatoes and basil (but garlic from Sainsbury’s).  Main course similar to my birthday tea: filet mignon de porc en croûte.  Since the fillet was on the small side, we lined the pastry with sliced prosciutto (Spanish at one end, Italian at the other), a couple of mushrooms, some Speldhurst sausage meat and a big handful of herbs from the garden.  Martyn knocked up a pan of delicious roast veggies, and we had some Alexandra potatoes with a little butter and chopped herbs from the garden.  So, ingredients from far and near - and the egg for the pastry wash came from the farm down the road.  We hadn’t tried Alexandra spuds before: though they came from good old Fortnums, they tasted as good as, if not better than, freshly dug charlottes (and anyone who can tell us where to get Alexandra seed potatoes wins a bottle of Lidl Prosecco).  Simple pud: soft fruit with a drop of cranberry juice.  And Annie brought a delicious lemon cake.

The guests seemed to enjoy each other’s company, as we did theirs.  It’s not often that we meet Celia and Andy without plants changing hands.  We recently got a superb pot of French tarragon (forget the tasteless Russian variety!) from Andy, and enjoyed some a few days ago with baked chicken thighs.  Yesterday, Andy went away with a couple of rooted white potentilla cuttings - probably the fourth or fifth generation of the ones I nicked from outside the Tonbridge sorting office.  

A propos cuttings, two other potentilla colours seem to be rooting: a primrose one liberated as cuttings from the garden of an art group friend, and a yellow one nicked from the Magistrates’  Court car park in Sevenoaks.  Our Rosemary has got rather leggy, so I chopped out a couple of boughs the other day and took cuttings.  Several dozen of them.  If they thrive, we’ll plant them - or more likely, ask Ben to plant them - across the front to fill the gaps left by the box tree moth caterpillars.