The Tracing Paper

Recommended searches: London restaurant, local food, broad beans, July recipes, blog news Add UK Food Blogs Search to your Google homepage

6th September 2007 Update
For a bigger, better and more freshly maintained search, try the Food Search at food.feedreel.co.uk, searching more than just blogs but with a refinement to narrow any search to UK food blogs.

My list of UK food blogs (previously below) will now be maintained at FeedReel’s blog directory. And don’t miss the constantly updated listing of UK food blog posts!

The UK Food Blog Search now searches over 140 blogs, all looking at some aspect of food in the UK. Between them these blogs represent an enormous democratic wealth of information and opinion on ingredients, recipes, restaurants, shops and more.

There are some fairly primitive refinements available from the results page to narrow results to recipes, wine or restaurants. These refinements should become more refined shortly!

The blogs currently indexed are listed below now at FeedReel’s directory of UK food blogs. I’m adding to (and correcting) this list almost daily so please let me know of any omissions. Some of these blogs are clearly no longer live, but their archives are still online and worth searching.

The promise of summer fruit Cherry plum blossoms early in the winter

Five months after the cherry plum blossom first broke February’s wintry spell, the fruits are beginning to ripen. Trees in Suffolk are bearing good crops - despite frosts in March, a hot and dry April and unseasonally cold, wet weather since.

Cherry plums (Prunus cerasifera) vary in colour from a deep, almost ox-blood, red to pale yellow, with the fruit ripening any time from mid July to late August. A small group of trees along a hedge-line can give a good harvest over several weeks.

Cooking and eating cherry plums

The fruit are versatile and delicious. Taste and texture, like the colour, vary between trees, but most of the fruit are excellent eaten raw. Cherry plums can be substituted for ordinary plums or damsons in almost any recipe, from cobbler to chutney. With a high pectin content, they’re ideal for jams and jellies (the Cottage Smallholder has good recipes for both chutney and jelly). Alternatively, try pressing them for their sweet juice.

Finding cherry plums

Cherry plums are common across Britain, particularly south of the Wash-Severn line (as the Science and Plants for Schools website’s distribution map illustrates), but too often overlooked. By late August, most of the fruit ends up as a jammy mass beneath the trees.

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