Breaking Into Tesco

There's a new foodie tv series, Breaking Into Tesco. In a twist on the current local organic Zeitgeist, participants have to invent a processed food product to pitch to Tesco.

Unlike the inspiring Masterchef, where we we watched talented cooks making impressive food, this series featured contestants who didn't seem to have much of a clue.

One of the contestants had invented cherry ravioli. There's nothing wrong with the concept of sweet ravioli, though Tesco's shoppers may not be ready for it yet. But it didn't seem to have occurred to him that cherries are seasonal and so may not be the best choice for a retailer that likes year-round consistency in what it stocks. It also seemed to be news to him that egg pasta is nicest if made with lots of eggs.

Then there was the woman who made 'free-from' muffins. This was a noble aim, and she threw herself into it with embarrassing gusto. But when her original muffins weren't muffiny enough in texture, it took Simon Rimmer to suggest she added beetroot. Now, wouldn't you have thought, given that carrot cake has been around a few years now, that if you were that interested in developing sugar-free cakey things, you'd have thought of trying a bit of root vegetable yourself? At one point she complained, 'I'm not a scientist', which made me throw my copy of Harold McGee at the screen. Is random messing around in the kitchen by members of the public with no special knowledge really the best way to come up with a new product? Can't Tesco do better themselves with their highly trained food scientists and research labs? Really? Surely this show's not really just a barely disguised advertorial for Britain's biggest supermarket?

Monday's winner was a Malaysian woman from York, Jennie Cook, who wanted to sell a noodle soup to officeworkers for lunch instead of a sandwich. Unlike the others, she seemed to know what she was doing on the basic recipe. Her only problem was how to do it in one pot to keep the packaging down without the noodles getting soggy. Jenny was quoted in the Yorkshire Post saying that she entered the competition because,

'I do not like cooking just for myself....I want to see supermarkets
stocking my dishes so I do not have to prepare them myself and can just nip
down the road to buy them and heat them up in the microwave.'

Good luck to her, particularly as she seemed to be the only one on Monday who knew what she was doing.

Of course, I might be being unfair. They might all have been highly educated foodie experts ruthlessly edited to look bad. But then, that's tv for you.

Pigs' trotters are good for your skin

...according to this article in the Telegraph.

Apparently there is a new restaurant in New York, Hakata Tonton, specialising in 'collagen cuisine'. Pigs' trotters are high in collagen, the protein responsible for skin strength and elasticity. As you get older its degradation leads to wrinkles. So if you eat pigs' trotters, so the argument goes, you'll replace the broken-down collagen and have lovely younger-looking skin.

I'm no nutritionist, but surely the problem with this is that when we eat food we digest it and turn it into something else?

If anyone wants to test it, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's brilliant River Cottage Meat Book includes at least four recipes for pigs' trotters. I will be looking carefully at his skin next time he comes on tv to see if he has any wrinkles.

More Yorkshire food blogs

Eating Leeds is great. It's by a couple of young metropolitan types (or so I infer) who write beautifully, take really nice photos of the stuff they cook and seem to be in the know about food.

Yorkshire Deli, by some people who run an online store and a cafe and shop in Ilkley, is very informative and goes into detail on particular ingredients. They should post more often (hint).

Paganum is a Yorkshire Dales food blog by a producer.

Eat In Yorkshire is well classy. It's by the former food and drink editor of Yorkshire Life magazine (get a load of the January posting, where she tells you all about her differences of opinion with the editor) and links to an archive of her restaurant reviews.

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.

The Farm

I've been reading The Farm by Richard Benson.

The author grew up in an East Yorkshire farming family but moved to London to be a journalist. Later, when things got so bad that the farm had to be sold, he came back to help his parents with the sale. It's the story of what life was like in a farming family in the second half of the 20th century, and also how his parents managed to adapt when they couldn't carry on with the only way of life they knew.
It's funny as well as sad and he writes about Yorkshire very well. And it answers a question that has been bothering me for a while: why are there so many tractor magazines in our local newsagents?

You can read an article he wrote in The Observer about the food they used to eat. Pork features heavily.

Old men on the bus

There were two old men on the bus today talking about gardening. One of them said, 'My germination rate improved considerably when I got a heater for my greenhouse.'

Never assume that local food is necessarily low-carbon....

Roast beef at Beningbrough

It thinks it's spring. The chives are snaking up in their pot and the mint is already an inch high. There are crocuses on the lawn and the birds are singing non-stop.

It's the first time it's ever been spring on my birthday, so we decided to celebrate with a trip to Beningbrough Hall, a National Trust house on the edge of the Ouse just west of York.

Naturally I have a foodie ulterior motive. The National Trust has enthusiastically embraced the local food agenda in its restaurants, along with child-friendliness - baby changing rooms, plastic bibs and bowls shaped like frogs, and spectacular bead mazes to play with. Not only are these big enough for a one year old and a two and a half year old to play on at the same time, they're too big for either child to snatch. (We have an ongoing issue with snatching at the moment.)

We joined the Trust in the autumn when we were temporarily based in Cambridge. Mainly it was for the food - rare breed sausage sandwiches at Wimpole Hall, Anglo-Saxon root vegetable hotpot with dumplings at Sutton Hoo, a delicious pork belly confit at Ickworth and fidget pie at Anglesey Abbey (twice). Their restaurants do that thing that Gordon Ramsay always insists on in Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares of not having too much on the menu, just a few interesting and individual dishes cooked as well as possible.

In fact, there wasn't a lot of choice at all at Beningbrough. If you didn't want a sandwich or vegetable hotpot it was roast beef and Yorkshire pudding served with vegetables from the kitchen garden. We had already looked round the garden and the cabbages were truly massive, taller than my two year old. You could have built an emergency wilderness shelter out of a couple of leaves.

Kitchen garden at Beningbrough

Fortunately the chef had resisted the temptation to cook cabbage, and the meal came with some tender cubes of swede and carrots nicely spiced with (I think) caraway. The beef was organic and tough but flavourful. It was one of those meals that isn't in the least bit lacking for being perfectly seasonal. And amazingly, for Feb, we ate it outside. My husband just had a Wensleydale cheese sandwich - his choice....