Strawberry ice cream and pigeons

Monthly farmers' market at Murton last Saturday. Top buys this time included locally-grown strawberries, and pigeons from the Black Sheep Meat Company.

I have a new ice cream machine, so the strawberries were made into strawberry water ice - simply pulp and sieve the strawberries, add lemon juice and icing sugar, and freeze in machine. The pigeon breasts were flash-fried and went into a salad.

Verdict on both - the strawberry water ice was great, but a little too sweet, because the strawberries were so sweet to start off with. The pigeon breasts tasted like little morsels of liver. Thrown into a salad of spinach and lettuce leaves, with crispy bacon on top and a red wine vinegar dressing, they were lovely.

My top foodie mistakes #1: crispy duck

Or, buying spring roll wrappers instead of pancakes.

Jamie's Dinners by Jamie Oliver (God bless him) tells you how to make crispy duck. It's easy. You bung a duck (or in my case, a couple of breasts) in a hot oven where it crisps up all by itself without you having to do anything clever. You cut up some cucumber and spring onion. You make some plum sauce by boiling up plums with sugar, soy sauce and pinches of chilli powder and five spice. You shred the duck with a couple of forks.

Then you unwrap the pancakes. They appear to be made of plastic. The instructions tell you to dip them in hot water. So you do. They soften, and suddenly become very, very sticky. You drop one. It folds up. You peel it apart, and then the corner folds into itself again, and sticks. Something seems to be wrong. You have a hunch that making a pile of them in a bamboo steamer would probably not be a good idea.

In the end I served them all pre-filled, on a plate, which misses the point of crispy duck. More importantly, it was like eating crispy duck in plastic wrapping. It was one of those meals where you start off thinking 'this isn't too bad' but as the meal goes on you think 'actually, this is really quite awful' and in the end, 'I don't think I can face another.' We ended up unwrapping them and just eating the duck. Which, as it came from Loose Birds of Harome (bought at Murton farmers' market) had lived a full and happy life and was delicious.

7 reasons why Yorkshire food is the greatest

For some reason, culinary Yorkshire doesn't seem to be on the map as much as I think it ought to be. This is a list of things that I think are great about Yorkshire food.

1. Offal has always been in fashion.

And not just any offal. In Yorkshire it's not just soft things like chicken livers and the odd kidney. Here, it's tripe and brains.

2. In Yorkshire, farmers' markets are not poncey or ridiculously expensive.

How could they be? They're full of farmers. They first time we went to the York Farmers' Market at Murton I thought I must have got my wires crossed, because there were people outside selling chicken feed and you have to walk past a ring where they auction cattle. Besides, Yorkshire people are notoriously mean - as M.C.F. Morris wrote in 1928,

'The love of bargaining is a very noticeable feature in the Yorkshireman's character, and in that work it is not easy to get the better of him ; he fairly revels in the contest. He enjoys it as the ordinary man would in playing some absorbing game.'

NB. This may not apply in Harrogate.

3. In Yorkshire they still have proper shops.

Butchers, fishmongers, greengrocers.... for all those times when Waitrose and Aldi between them fail to satisfy.

4. Yorkshire has the best reasonably priced restaurants.

Obviously there is no Fat Duck or Gordon Ramsay round here, but Yorkshire fills 36 pages of the 2008 Good Food Guide , with a meal at most of the listed restaurants £30 or under. OK, it's a big place, but the whole of East Anglia only gets 28, and most of them cost way more. It's a good range, too - trendy city brasseries, gastropubs or just really really good fish and chips.

5. Fish and chips

You can get fish and chips anywhere, but try getting some better than the ones you'll find on the Yorkshire coast - at the Magpie Cafe in Whitby or the Golden Grid at Scarborough.

6. Yorkshire is full of local producers

It helps being a county with a load of agricultural land, of course. There are fish from the coast, sheep from the Dales, cheese from Wensleydale and Swaledale.... Near us there are happy pigs and plenty of cattle. Further west is the sinister-sounding Rhubarb Triangle (enter at your own risk).

7. Afternoon Tea

Maybe it's the climate, but afternoon tea is taken seriously here. You can expect to get a proper pot of good strong tea and no-one will give you a funny look if you ask for some extra hot water to adjust the strength/make it go further. Top of all afternoon tea experiences is Betty's at York or Harrogate. If you can't face the queue, at least get some cakes from the patisserie to take home. Yorkshire curd tarts are the local speciality, and no longer made from cow's colostrum.