Archive for the 'Food' Category

Twice a year or thereabouts, the Continental Market sets up in the pedestrianised part of the city. About twenty stalls sell a wide range of delicious foods, plus toiletries and crafts. Best of all is surely the mobile bakery which turns out fabulous food.

I always look for the stalls that sell French jams, which are always luscious and packed with delicious fruit. Why, in comparison, are most English jams pretty much like jellified flavoured sugar?

There is a fascinating range of jams available, including apple jam (with or without calvados liqueur). It’s £3 per jar, and worth every penny, but I can usually persuade them to sell me four jars for £10 or £11.

You can possibly see from the photo that the jam jar is really beaten around. The lid is stained and full of dents. This whole batch was like that. But inside … beautiful!

When you’re out-and-about, the available fast food can often be really dismal. But at many orienteering events, and other outdoor functions, Wilf’s mobile catering offers fast food that’s really different.

There are pasta bowls, vegetarian chilli bowls with optional cheese and pita bread, baked potatoes with various toppings, tomato-rich pizzas and more.

Even the kids are keen on this food.

A wide range of home-made cakes is available too, and you can buy things like Mars Bars and fizzy drinks if you really want to.

Most of the food is reasonably-priced, although I suspect they’re doing alright on the pasta bowls at £3 which seem to include pasta, some kind of white sauce, mushroom and sweetcorn plus cheese.

By comparison, a chilli bowl with cheese is £2.50 and I would have thought it uses more expensive ingredients and uses more labour.

Now, if only they would use tongs to dispense the grated cheese instead of their fingers…

A loss leader is a product sold for less than its cost. This pricing strategy aims to lure customers to the store, with the hope that they will buy other more-profitable products.

I suspect that these Sainsbury’s Basics Sliced Peaches are a loss leader, at nine pence per 411gram tin.

I can’t imagine that the peaches can be grown, harvested, canned and transported to the supermarket for nine pence, even before considering the supermarket’s own overheads.

Anyway, they taste fine and seem to me to be as good quality as any other tinned peaches, so I’ve bought plenty of cans to stock up. Unlike some stores, Sainsbury doesn’t seem to put maximum-quantity limits on their promotions.

From December to March our local shops stock asian pear, which is imported from China.

It’s shaped like a plump pear, but doesn’t taste quite as sweet. It’s more crisp than a pear, though not as crisp as an apple or even a nashi (which some people also call the asian pear). It’s most refreshing.

It’s firm when ripe, and doesn’t bruise as easily as a pear. The ones I’ve bought have always been ready to eat, but they keep for around three weeks. They don’t seem to ripen off the tree.

The cost ranges from 50 pence each at the supermarket, down to 12 pence each at the asian food store.

Just peel, quarter, then cut out the core and the layer of harder flesh around the core. For maximum flavour chomp into small pieces with your front teeth as you feed it into your mouth. It can also be cooked in any recipe that uses pears.

Salt, sugar and oil are often added to supermarket muesli, although they shouldn’t be needed if the muesli contains high-quality, fresh ingredients with a high proportion of fruit, nuts and seeds.

For many years, I’ve been buying Traidcraft Fruit and Nut muesli, which is mostly oats of course, and contains 36% fruit and nuts. The nut pieces don’t seem to be as large and crunchy as they were when I started buying this muesli ten years ago, but it still makes a much tastier breakfast than the average mass-market store muesli.

The only problem is that it’s a hassle to get. For a while, I bought it mail-order from Traidcraft. Then, for a while it was stocked by my local Oxfam charity shop. Now, I get it from St Thomas’s church store, which is hardly ever open when I’m around. So when I do buy it, I buy up to ten packets at once – every pack that is on the shelf.

It’s £2 for a 500g pack. Other varieties are also available, but some of them (like Traidcraft Tropical muesli) do have added honey and oil.

When you’re next at the supermarket, have a look at the ingredients list for peanut butter. Chances are you’ll see peanuts, salt, emulsifier, sugar or honey, palm oil and maybe more.

Why do we need all these ingredients? When I was a lad, the local health food store would pour a bag of peanuts into a grinder, and collect the peanut butter in a jar underneath. All that is needed for peanut butter is squashed peanuts!

It turns out that you can still get peanut butter whose only ingredient is peanuts. It’s from Meridian and I get it from the Single Step Co-op in Penny Street Lancaster at £3.47 for a large 1kg tub.

Without all the extras, it tastes great! Without the emulsifiers, some of the oil can separate from the solids after a while, but it’s not a big deal. A quick stir blends everything together again, but I don’t even bother with that. I just plunge the knife in deeply so that I get some of the solids and some of the oil with each dig.