The Goods Shed farmers market - Canterbury

Food with flavour.

You take it for granted -flavour- but the truth is that retaining the taste of each ingredient in your dish is actually pretty hard.

This is what makes a good dish for me.

Not how it looks, or how expensive or exclusive it is.

Getting your timing right and capturing flavour of every single item on the plate is what makes a good chef.

A chef who works with the best locally sourced produce takes pride in his work. This is what makes the difference between a chef by passion and a chef by profession.

Not often a dish sings to me but yesterday a The Goods Shed in Canterbury, it certainly did.

It was the hottest day of the year in England and although we were hungry, we didn't really have an appetite due to the heat.

The Goods shed is a covered farmers market with restaurant serving British food prepared with fresh local ingredients from its own market.

Drunken cherries - make your own cherry brandy

Preserving cherries for later, for generations to come.

"My top way of eating cherries is a bowl of cherries. If good, they need no adornment, other than perhaps a glass of pink champagne."
Fergus Henderson.

Before the second world war there were about 40 000 acres of cherry orchards in Britain. These were mainly in Kent, Worcestershire and Herefordshire.
The past 50 years however 90 % of these cherry orchards have disappeared.
The labour was very intensive as the trees were very high, too high to cover the crop from the birds. I were mostly women who harvested the cherries on high ladders with baskets tied to their waists.  
To tackle this problem nowadays and to revive cherry growing, dwarf plants are planted to replace the towering trees. The dwarf trees are covered with netting so the birds can't steal the crop and the orchard has a maximum yield.

 
The people from Food Lovers Britain have started 'CherryAid', a campaign to point out to the supermarkets and consumers that the British cherry needs our attention and preservation. Since the campaign started most of Britain's biggest supermarkets like M&S and Tesco are selling British cherries and Waitrose has stated that imported cherries will be phased out completely for the five week the British cherry season.
So it's fair to say, British cherries are on their way of being saved for future generations.