Hurray for the Foodie Fairy!
What do you mean, you’ve never heard of her. You’ve heard of St. Julia, haven’t you? Smell the wafting of rosemary, onion and garlic? That special hint of candied violets and lemon? That’s her.
Behold the return of the Food Fairy, that sprite which combs the web and finds us foodie supplies which make us most glad, huzzah!
*Ahem* Sorry. Bit of hysteria here over the discovery of, via the Google Vegetarian Cooking group, The Flour Bin, a baking store which supplies commercial and home bakers with wheat, oats, yeast, and good strong wholemeal and white bread flour. Twenty years in the business, this place was written up in the Times (of, apparently, London), and has an online store which provides flours, gluten powder, which beefs up weak flours and can be used as a fantastic short cut for homemade roasts and cutlets; dried fruit, dried mushrooms, bulk nuts, seeds, etc. ‘Twill not ever be as good as the SF Herb Company, to whom we owe eternal allegiance, but a U.K. semi-equivalent. The stock apparently turns pretty quickly, owing to the fact that it supplies commercial bakeries, and it is not terribly expensive — not prohibitively so, anyway, though the basic shipping is £7 — but you can get a lot of weight for that. The Flour Bin just might be what we’ve been looking for!
They have dried fruit, sans the dreaded E220 and its evil minions (except in apricots, but I can live with that). They have mango powder, which comes in handy for chutney, all manner of raw or toasted nuts and seeds, including the lovely linseed or flax. They also have oddities, including Indonesian bumbu, which are “wet spice stir-fry mixtures containing fresh Indonesian herbs and spices including lemon grass, laos root (galangol), and lime leaves, vacuum packed in sachets for longevity” … lovely fresh curry pastes (in the unusual event *cough* that I am too lazy to make my own.)
I may just be a tiny bit in love.
Stay tuned on what we’ve done without gluten powder… Ever heard of “wheat meat?” No? Neither had I. How about “mock duck” or seitan? When the doldrums hit, it’s DIY Cooking To the Rescue…
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
All hail the Food Fairy! Sounds like the fairy has found you a super good find…all those seeds and spices and curry pastes and flours…will be waiting to see what you make with some of them…