This weekend was marked by two foodie expeditions.  The first was the Wing Yip, the Chinese supermarket on the outskirts of Croydon.  The place is a mecca for the bargain hunting foodie - it has exotic ingredients (chicken feet anyone?) Chinese cookery essentials and purse friendly spices.  Oh and lots of brightly coloured sweets with their Manga inspired packaging which appeal to the barely suppressed 5 year old girl that lurks inside me.

On Sunday we decided to take advantage of one of the few free weekends we have over the next couple of months and do some Autumnal fruit picking.  I found a place called Garson's which seemed to be one of the few places that is still doing pick your own this late in the year so on Sunday we trekked over there.  Little did I realise that it was not that far from Hampton Court Palace, which is about 20 miles away from where we live.  C was not impressed.

The weather was less than pleasant throughout the journey and it looked as if the entire trip might be a bit of a washout but luckily before too long the rain turned to sunshine and the day decided to be a nice one after all.  F managed to find every puddle in the place and I was very glad that I'd thought ahead and dug out his wellies.  Bloody Peppa Pig has a lot to answer for!  At one point he had muddy water on his forehead which I thought was fairly impressive.

We came away with two nice sized pumpkins, corn on the cob, raspberries, strawberries and blackberries.  We were all rather surprised to see strawberries this late in the year and most of them were a bit ropey but we were able to get a number of nice ones.

One of the pumpkins will be turned into pumpkin curry tonight, I plan on roasting some to go with chicken later in the week and there'll probably be soup at some point.  The other we'll be keeping until Halloween when we'll have a go at carving.

The berries I'm planning on using in a number of ways - we have friends coming round to play Dungeons and Dragons tomorrow night and I thought that seeing as I have some egg whites frozen after doing ice cream a couple of weeks ago I'd turn them into meringues and have Eton Mess.   The rest I'll turn into autumn jam along with some of the pears from the outlaws tree.  I've never had a go at jam so it should be interesting!