Not a criticism of the UK approach to burger bars (take the major benefit - speed of delivery - remove, and leave an increasingly irate customer to wait to receive not-quite-cooked-enough fries and an insincere apology. But better than the Belgian approach where in my experience the chain Quick ought to be prosecuted under the Trade Descriptions Act equivalent and they once actually managed to serve me a live wasp in a salad!). Anyway despite all this and the Morgan Spurlocks, sometimes you just really want a burger.
I'll start again.

I went to a Slow Food market yesterday by Waterloo station in London.
The Slow Food Movement is an international organisation set up to promote a different approach to food: locally-sourced, seasonal produce, regional traditional styles, emphasis on flavour and quality.

I first came across it in Italy. I'd met this guy on a training course and teased him mercilessly about the cliche of the holiday he'd booked - a group of 6 30-something Brits sharing a villa in Tuscany was just too 1997 New Labour to be reality, surely. But three months of dating later we flew into Bologna and drove to a gorgeous country house villa near Arezzo. Can't now remember the name of the actual village but the one next to it was called Santa Maria del Mezzo strada - the middle-of-the-road Virgin as we called it.
The villa was owned by a sculptor and his parents were renowed cooks and members of the Slow Food movement. They offered to cook a real Tuscan slow food meal for us one night and it was the best fifty euros I have ever spent.
Much of what I ate that night affected the ideal menus I set out in my previous post http://www.thoughts.com/rose22/blog/best-ever-valentines-men us-italian-food-63244/  - the wild boar stew, the fiorentina steak (T-bone) and the amazing duck really stick in my mind and make my taste buds itch with longing to have just one more mouthful. If I hadn't already fallen in love with Tuscany from the sheer beauty of the countryside and the incredible fading glamour of Florence, that meal alone would've made me want to return again and again.

My husband and I (she says regally) usually try to seek out this kind of food on holiday - France is particularly fabulous for local cheeses. But the chance to find the Slow Food from closer to home was irresistible.
We've already found the nearest decent butcher's to our house, but it's expensive and while the provenance of the produce is clear it's often Scottish beef (geographically-speaking French charolais might actually be more local!) We do have a farmers' market, sort of, a few stalls near the local station every few weekends.

But a big Slow Food market looked like exactly our sort of thing. Local food from the London region? Not quite. That's not impossible. Last year we went to Konstam, a restuarant near Paddington where the chef has gone out of his way to try to source his foods from within the M25. He's done a fantastic job - the oil for dipping your bread in is local rapeseed, the fish from the Thames estuary, and actually bits of London can be surprisingly rural (a recommendation? The honey and lavender ice cream was FANTASTIC!) The only disappointment for me was finding that the Norwood Blue cheese was fromthe Norwood house estate in Surrey and not from a herd of cows based in South London...
If the market wasn't quite what I expected, I guess that's because I underestimated London. There was food not just from London itself but included game from Norfolk and Suffolk, oysters from the Kent coast, bacon from Hampshire (shame the p isn't silent...), honey from Hertfordshire... and then a real surprise. Curry from Cafe Spice Namaste was available.. Cafe Spice? The pan-asian restaurant chain? Surely that can't be local slow food? But I didn't realise before that their company ethos is to use seasonal specialities and fresh organic ingredients wherever possible, and that they have won environmental best practice and green point awards. I also felt a bit weird that Eat Natural - a company that makes a cereal bar that you can buy in the supermarket - had a stall there. But why can't a company that has the right slow food ethics and even cooks it's bars in small batches be successful and nationally available? There was also an Italian cheese stall and a place selling west country chorizo - fabulous but with so much paprika I started coughing. I do think there's something rather fabulous about the different food traditions that are now part of the culinary culture in London.

So whay did we buy? Cheese. Of course. I bought a fantastic mushroomy Munster-type stinky cheese from Wales called "Celtic Promise". I know, naff name but really fabulous. I was so enthusiastic about it that the woman who was standing next to me at the stall and being served by the other assistant changed her mind as she was paying and added 200g of celtic promise to her order! My husband bought some fontina and a boccacino. Yum.