We’ve just this week had a very welcome visit from Danilo of The Olive Oil Company. He visited us laden with bottles, and shared his incredible knowledge and passion for the olive oils he supplies us with.

Danilo is the latest in a long line of the Manco family to head the production of their genuine Italian oils; in fact his family have been producing olive oil for over a century! They are based in Puglia, where 50% of Italian olive oil is produced, because the weather there is perfect for olive growing. It’s sunniest between May and September, ensuring the olives are ready for their October harvest.

Danilo prefers to harvest and press the olives just before they are ripe, which whilst it means that you get less oil per olive, the taste is far superior and helps to produce the lovely peppery kick in the back of your throat. He ensures us that this is a sign of great quality oil!
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Despite films like Food Inc showing us the grim realities of industrialised farming in America, the same sort of thing is destined to hit here in the UK. What is being dubbed as ‘factory-farmed milk’ could hit supermarket shelves by this autumn.

English dairy company, Nocton Dairies Ltd, is planning to build an intensive 22 hectares (54 acres – a correction from our original report) farm in Lincolnshire housing 8,100 cows in 8 sheds in the next few months. To put this in perspective, our yogurt maker Judith Freane keeps just 100 Guernsey cows on her 480-acre farm in Somerset, and our milk man Nick Gosling in Wiltshire has just a 110-strong Guernsey dairy herd on 220-acres. Both farms have land for growing cereals to feed their herds in the winter, when the grass is not sufficient enough to feed them.
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Just last week our food writer extraordinaire Rachel de Thample cooked up a veggie storm. The London based cookery school Divertimenti had contacted us…because of our expertise in all things veg…and so Rachel was asked if she would join them one evening to hold a cookery course on cooking with seasonal veg.

The idea behind the course was to show people how to use up a winter veg box. Rachel purposefully selected all of the veg on the top of our customer’s ‘dislikes’ lists, to try to encourage and inspire people to cook with them. The response was certainly very positive Rachel told us, ‘I did a raw beetroot dip which everyone that evening really liked. As that’s our most ‘disliked’ veg, I thought it a good result!’

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We are chuffed to bits at Abel & Cole because our Seville Orange & Mandarin Marmalade has just won Bronze in the World’s Original Marmalade Championships.

A few weeks ago we entered our two marmalades from Thursday Cottage into the Worlds Original Marmalade competition. We heard that there were 720 entries in total, 120 of which were in our category; ‘Artisan Producer’…so competition was steep!
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