My friend Jaime came to visit a couple weeks ago, on the heels of our trip to Wales.  We took a trip to Southwold, strolled through Cambridge, ate a lot of delicious food, and filled each other in on the last ten months of our life. Jaime’s been living in Israel and has been caught up in a whirlwind cross-cultural romance, which I was SO EXCITED to hear about.

Because we painted this country red, I have a few posts to share with you.  But I thought I’d start with the quintessentially Cantabriggian thing that we did: we walked through the Meadows to Grantchester.  Walking to Grantchester is a Thing: you walk through the Meadows along the Cam to the Orchard Tea Room, where you can get cream tea (tea, clotted cream, jam, scones) and sit in green cloth deck chairs in a leafy setting.

Because I am an idiot, I didn’t realise the first couple times I was there that the leafy setting where you take your cream tea is an ORCHARD – thus, Orchard Tea Rooms.  I realised this as Jaime and I were sitting under a tree and I realised that there were tiny little fruits hanging off – yellow things the size of large cherries.  Closer inspection: it was a plum.  Jaime and I ate a few before running all over the place gathering plums.  On our way our, we saw plums, pears, and apples – a whole cornucopia of fruit – but Jaime and I brought a crap-ton of plums back to the house, half of which we turned into a pie.  A very, very tart pie, but a delicious pie nonetheless.

(for those more interested in the snack than the adventure: we used pre-made pie crust; we filled it up with cut-up plums and added cinnamon and sugar and a little bit of nutmeg; and then we stuck it in the oven at 350F/180C and took it out when it looked done)