Eating in Guildford

On Saturday, I spent a few hours downtown exploring Guildford's High Street. I wasn't feeling up to either the Dutch pancakes or the German sausage. True to form, the German stall was selling jarred hotdogs and the Dutch lady (in the photo, she was on the way to talk to the German guy) had not only an orange apron, but also orange shoes.

I had a feeling that in a town like (upper crust and posh) Guildford, I'd be able to find somewhere with a strong vegetarian bent. Sure enough, found The Fooderie on Swan Lane just off of the High Street:


They have a tiny corner bar area for eating (where I caught the girl in the photo), but mainly it's a take away sandwich place. I had a lovely chat with the owner, she had started it about a year ago as a vegetarian/vegan sandwich place, but she had to expand outward a bit as business just wasn't good enough. So she also sells sandwiches with local free range eggs and local meats. She'll be expanding into an upstairs area to have actual seating.


I had asked for a recommendation for a hot vegan sandwich. She suggested grilled veg with hummus. My photo doesn't really do it justice, the sandwich was superb, so much so that I sucked down half of it before remembering to take a photo:

A work colleague had recommended to check out the Guildford Saturday market, knowing that I am a vegetarian. I had stumbled upon it early in the day but didn't want to have to carry things around, so I made it my last stop before leaving.

Overall, I thought it was OK, better than shopping at Tesco I guess. I was a little lucky, it was the end of the day and they were starting to drop the prices a bit to sell things off. Mostly they were selling pre-bagged items, the bags were around 1 or 1.20 GBP, but by the time I was there they were dropping most to 1 GBP if they weren't already. I bought 2 bags of tomoatos, zuchinni, mushrooms and pears. (And there are two bottles of organic wine, coffee, and a book I bought at Oxfam.)

Ever curious as to the source of my food, I was pleasantly surprised to find UK sourced spinach (OK, from Lancashire, not exactly from around the corner, but at least from on the happy island.) I was not so impressed upon inquiring about the asparagus....it came from Mexico, so I decided to skip that one. Not so impressive when you consider that Europe's asparagus season is almost upon us.

My colleague had mentioned that I should eat any of the cheese, veg or bread in the house which would go bad before her return, so I went a little creative here with some different things. My work colleague is German, so of course there was no jar of pasta sauce here. However, everything was here that I needed to make my own.

She had left half a yellow bell pepper. I combined it with garlic and half an onion, and added the market tomatos. I then sliced in a few of the mushrooms and one zuchinni and simmered it up. I had brought along the spinich ravioli and some goat's cheese from the Essex farmer's market. I put the whole thing on a bed of Italian watercress which I found in the fridge. Overall, I'm pleased the way this one turned out:

Next up, more Guildford adventures...