One of the perks of being a food blogger is that you get unsolicited emails from companies desperate for you to sample their various wares. A week or so ago, I had an email from a coffee importer asking me if I would like to try an "unground quality coffee of my choice". 'Yes, please", I said. "Send me some Blue Mountain".
As you know, Blue Mountain is a fiendishly expensive coffee, as recommended by Ian Fleming and Mister Bond, the harvesting of which involves natives scaling rocky cliff faces at so many thousand feet above sea level. Well, the coffee has yet to arrive.
More promising was the email I had from some PR girl representing the organic food delivery company, Abel & Cole.
I'm already a fan of Abel & Cole, and the future Mrs Aitch and I have the "de-luxe organic vegetable box for two" delivered in the raw hours of each Friday morning. They sent us a complimentary free-range chicken, which was excellent. It's quite hard to write about chicken. It tasted- well, like a chicken, and it did have a noticeably crackly skin, which was good, and I suspect was probably better than the free range chicken we had the other day which came from Sainsbury's.
I then had a rather pushy email from the PR Girl instructing me to write at least two posts about the chicken, which was vaguely annoying, as I had never agreed to do this in the first place- a deal's a deal, right? and frankly, it's pretty difficult to wax lyrical about the difference between a free range bird and a supermarket bird isn't it?
By the way- a small apology to my readership. You will have noticed that my posts have in the last few weeks dried up. Wedding preparations, Stag Nights, Choirmasters, Trumpeters, Chauffeurs, Tailors, Florists, Estate Agents, Surveyors, Lawyers, Energy Efficiency (HIP) Inspectors: all these have taken their toll. I'm sure things will get back to normal, when The Girl and I return from our honeymoon in Sunny Marrakesh.