Broadway Market - near London Fields

Yum yum is all I can say. Our friend Wendy recommended Broadway market (http://www.broadwaymarket.co.uk/www.broadwaymarket.co.uk/welcome.html) for a Saturday activity.

For those of you that don't know Broadway market, it's not strictly speaking a food market. It has a long history as a community market with a jellied eels restaurant that has been serving the market and local communnity since 1900. The market was crumbling as the community moved out of London but in 2004, volunteers from the Broadway Market Traders’ and Residents’ Association revived it. The market has grown beyond expectations. It is now described as the most successful community market in London. It has the feel of Columbia Road flower market (which is nearby on a Sunday morning) and a very mini Borough market, with other bits and pieces. Apart from great foodie stalls there are fun stalls including home knitted children's clothes - knitted by real grandmas, a guitar stall (which my husband who plays guitar says he's never seen in a market before), and the usual vintage clothing and other crafts based stalls.

We spent the first half an hour of our visit resisting eating lunch from every stall. You must know what it is like to go food shopping when you are hungry - don't do it! (You can end up with way too much food. An amount you just can't eat in the allotted week that the shopping is meant to last for - been there done that!). We chose to go backwards in the course decisions, starting with dessert first, buying a gorgeous piece of apple strudel from a Popina stall (One of my favourite companies -http://www.popina.co.uk/), followed by some cheese for dinner (and some pecorino for a butternut and pecorino soup I plan to make for a family party in a few weeks) and then finally settling on lunch from a pie stall that was gorgeous ( The Pie Cart by Mike Meehan - I have a card but no website). I chose steak and cheese and my husband had a lentil, butternut squash and Thai curry pie, warm and lovely.

We were both satisfied and were able to continue browsing without eating the whole market. Next, another of my favourites, La Tua - freshly made pasta. We bought some pumpkin tortellini, it's divine and in memory of our wedding dinner, some of their fantastic gnocchi (we had it flown over to France for our wedding). La Tua is expensive but truly worth the money. http://www.latuapasta.com/ There a few fruit and vegetable stalls there and I managed to get some end-of-season Jerusalem artichokes (we made a great, creamy soup from them on Saturday night which we followed with bread and the cheeses from the market). We also stumbled upon an unusual stall just selling variations on the classic pork Scotch egg. As I don't eat pork but love the idea of this hard boiled egg snack, I was intrigued. I make Scotch eggs at work and keep meaning to make them with beef sausage meat, in fact at work this week I was discussing the very idea of doing this soon. Anyway the stall was great. Everything from three bean to smoked haddock Scotch eggs, we opted for the smoked haddock and were not disappointed. Unfortunately I didn't get their card but I will return to this great place, if only for one of those pies or Scotch eggs.

It's really worth a visit even if it's just to 'people watch' and maybe listen to some of the fantastic bands and buskers.