At some point when I was pregnant with my second child, I suddenly started getting obsessed with food.
It might have been something to do with hormones. Or to do with reading the Joanna Blythman book Bad Food Britain , which made me think I didn't want to ever eat a meal consisting of a Peperami and 4 packets of crisps again. Maybe it was some primeval regressive anti-feminist urge to do with feeding my family, or the boredom of maternity leave, or the River Cottagey local food Zeitgeist that was sweeping the middle classes. (All of a sudden simply everyone had an organic box!)
Whatever the reason, I started cooking. I started going to farmers' markets and butcher's shops and greengrocers and ordering organic boxes and growing herbs. I became very boring. My husband humoured me, assuming it was only a phase, drove me to the farmers' markets and ate the organic cabbages.
But I stopped being pregnant, and was still obsessed. So he thought maybe when I went back to work I'd be back to normal. Instead the obsession had only got worse and every spare minute, when I wasn't working, was spent fantasising about food. And we were eating really, really well, for not that much money. And something struck me.
It was because we were living in Yorkshire.
A lot of the things Joanna Blythman says about British food - the lack of local individuality, the shortage of decent independent shops, the replacement of authenticity by chemistry and taste by visual appeal - had rung true with me in general. But round here (on the border between the East and North Ridings) they're amazingly easy to avoid. We found countless fabulous small producers, excellent restaurants and intriguing suppliers. But more importantly, because this is Yorkshire, they were surprisingly cheap.
The point of this blog is to celebrate Yorkshire food and share some of our discoveries. It will also allow me to bore on and on at length about food into cyberspace, thus releasing my husband from the burdensome duty of listening (and allowing him more free time to do the washing up.)
I hope anybody who reads it (if anybody does) will feel free to add their own tips, links and favourite Yorkshire-foodie suppliers.
It might have been something to do with hormones. Or to do with reading the Joanna Blythman book Bad Food Britain , which made me think I didn't want to ever eat a meal consisting of a Peperami and 4 packets of crisps again. Maybe it was some primeval regressive anti-feminist urge to do with feeding my family, or the boredom of maternity leave, or the River Cottagey local food Zeitgeist that was sweeping the middle classes. (All of a sudden simply everyone had an organic box!)
Whatever the reason, I started cooking. I started going to farmers' markets and butcher's shops and greengrocers and ordering organic boxes and growing herbs. I became very boring. My husband humoured me, assuming it was only a phase, drove me to the farmers' markets and ate the organic cabbages.
But I stopped being pregnant, and was still obsessed. So he thought maybe when I went back to work I'd be back to normal. Instead the obsession had only got worse and every spare minute, when I wasn't working, was spent fantasising about food. And we were eating really, really well, for not that much money. And something struck me.
It was because we were living in Yorkshire.
A lot of the things Joanna Blythman says about British food - the lack of local individuality, the shortage of decent independent shops, the replacement of authenticity by chemistry and taste by visual appeal - had rung true with me in general. But round here (on the border between the East and North Ridings) they're amazingly easy to avoid. We found countless fabulous small producers, excellent restaurants and intriguing suppliers. But more importantly, because this is Yorkshire, they were surprisingly cheap.
The point of this blog is to celebrate Yorkshire food and share some of our discoveries. It will also allow me to bore on and on at length about food into cyberspace, thus releasing my husband from the burdensome duty of listening (and allowing him more free time to do the washing up.)
I hope anybody who reads it (if anybody does) will feel free to add their own tips, links and favourite Yorkshire-foodie suppliers.
1 comment:
I have just found your blog today and am really enjoying it. I am on a similar mission in the US.
I have wanted to visit Yorkshire since my dad read Herriot out to me as a child and hope to make it there on my next visit to England. I am so pleased to find that Yorkshire is an amazing place for real food.
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