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I bought a pack of these simply because (a) I've been on an apple-eating kick lately and (b) they were a bargain price at Waitrose.
I just ate one out of the fruit bowl, and I'm so delighted I had to write about it and spread the word.
The problem with supermarket apples, as I'm sure you know, is that they tend to look decorative but have no flavour — or about as much flavour as wet Kleenex.
Absolutely not the case here. I'd never heard of Opal apples before. They look like a smaller version of Golden Delicious, but the taste is entirely different (not that there's anything wrong with Golden Delicious).
The Opal is agreeably sweet, but it also has a wonderful background hint of spiciness. Almost a touch of cinnamon.
In fact, think of mulled wine — but not in any kind of overpowering way. Just a subtle suggestion, which makes this apple deliciously distinctive.
I'm going to buy more.
And I may have to dig another one out of the fridge.
(Image credits: pack shot from Waitrose, where, as I mentioned, I bought these.)
Cold weather has now arrived – both in the sense of ambient temperature and annoying minor ailments.
That means it's time for soup. And I am on a quest for soups that are (a) delicious (b) do not contain ludicrous quantities of salt and (c) preferably can be stored for long periods of time — so I can always have them on hand and just pull them out on a whim, or when a cold has made me too miserable to venture to the shops.
Well, Yorkshire Provender Mushroom Soup isn't really designed for long term storage. You can freeze it and keep it for a month... but then that's true for just about everything.
But it's not too high in salt (about half a gram per 100 grams, which is pretty standard for non-canned soups).
And it really is delicious.
And I'm not just saying so because it makes that boast on the carton.
It also boasts the addition of "wholegrain black rice". I wasn't sure what the rice would bring to the party, but in fact it's an inspired addition, giving the soup a meaty density and good depth of flavour. Also, perhaps not surprisingly, a kind of pleasant risotto aftertaste.
I'm including a photo of the carton and also the soup on my table — tarted up with a bit of rosemary from my garden (he boasted) and a splash of milk...
As with all the other soups in this tasting, it was served up with Poilane sourdough toast liberally slathered with organic unsalted butter.
And a glass of water.
With a slice of lemon in it.
This is a terrific soup (well done, Yorkshire Provender) and I will definitely buy it again.
I just wish it could be stored for many months in a cupboard, like the Duchy Organic soups I wrote about before.
I'll be trying their own mushroom concoction as soon as I can get hold of it.
Stay tuned.
(Image credits: The pack shot is from Waitrose. The served-up shot is from my own fair camera.)
As I explained in a previous post, I always like to have some good quality soup in the store cupboard (I don't literally have a store cupboard, but you know what I mean).
And when winter arrived this year, with its grim weather, early darkness and annoying colds, my cupboard was bare.
So I went on a quest for some really nice soups which can be stored for long periods.
I was attracted by the new range of Duchy soups at Waitrose. These can be stored at room temperature for a year or more, so that was a big point in their favour.
And they're organic.
I was mostly looking for vegetarian soups, but the only two Duchy long-life soups available at my local store were chicken and ox cheek.
I went for this chicken one, as the lesser of two evils.
And, I have to say, it was really great. It's a small portion, just right for an agreeable bowl for one person, and the flavour was first rate. Complex and rather mouthwatering.
I'm going to stock up on these Duchy soups. Half a dozen stashed in a cupboard will prove very useful indeed.
And, thanks to a bit of internet research, I find they do produce a vegetarian option — mushroom.
I can't wait to try it.
(Image credits: The pic is from Waitrose.)
I love soup and I always order it when I'm in a promising-looking restaurant.
I am, however, not organised enough to make it for myself at home. And, since I regard it as the ultimate comfort food for when I'm in a hurry or under the weather, I am very much on the lookout for good quality soup that can be stored for long periods and served up at short notice.
I have fond memories of New Covent Garden soups, and they can be frozen for long term storage, so this leek and potato concoction was a natural choice when I recently was on a quest for soup at Waitrose.
However, Mr Potato & Leek proved disappointingly lacking in flavour. I ended up adding all sorts of things in an attempt to jazz it up, but it still fell short.
It also contains a lot of salt (I don't buy canned soup because they're basically tins of salt with a touch of added soup) — so this managed the paradoxical achievement of being both too bland and too salty.
I haven't given up on New Covent Garden, but this one gets a thumbs down. With regret.
(Image credits: The pack shot is taken from the company's own website.)
I love the French Alpine cheese Comté — you can impress your friends by pronouncing correctly: "con-tay"... yes, as if it was spelled with an "n" not an "m". It has a nutty sweetness and a very agreeable texture somewhere between hard and soft. (I'm trying to avoid the word "rubbery".)
Comté is a form of Gruyere. Indeed, the lowest grade is just sold as Gruyere. But the superior stuff is called Comté, and the top quality is indicated by a green bell on the label. Always look for the green bell!
Until recently, the best deal on green bell Comté I'd encountered was available at Waitrose. Their mature Comté normally sells at £16 per kilo. But if you have a "My Waitrose" and you make it one of your regular picks — yes, if you're willing to jump through all those hoops — you can get 20% off, bringing the price down to £12.80 a kilo. Not bad at all, for the real stuff.
As I say, Waitrose was reigning champion. But today I was in Lidl, snooping around (one of my vices) and I discovered, trembling with cheese-hunter's excitement, that they had a Comté, also green bell, which was on special at £1.69 per pack. The packs are 170 grams, so my advanced command of mathematics tells me it's just a shade under ten quid per kilo.
And you may well want to buy a kilo. The Lidl Comté is just excellent. It has a lovely blend of sweetness and citrus sharpness which gives it almost a lemon curd flavour. I recommend it highly, and at that price it's unbeatable. Buy now.
Even when the price goes back up, to £1.99 a pack, that still puts it ahead of Waitrose, at under £12 per kilo.
(The Lidl image is from here. The Waitrose image is from there.)
Appealingly packaged, this cake looks like it’s going to deliver a mind blowing (and waistline bursting) blast of pure chocolate. In fact, it’s a fruit cake covered with a layer of chocolate icing.
The chocolate icing is perfectly okay, though nothing to write home about, while the fruit cake is boring. It has some unusual spicy notes, which are neither pleasant nor unpleasant — and which don’t save the fruit cake from dullness. Altogether, this festive dessert is ho-hum rather than ho-ho-ho, especially given its enticing packaging.
I bought this as a post-Christmas markdown, for a quarter of its original price, and I was very disappointed. If I’d paid the full price (£15) I would have been seething, and indeed would probably have demanded a refund. Given that this is the "Improved Recipe" gawd knows what the original was like.
Once again, Heston at Waitrose proves hit and miss.
(Image credits: The pack shot is from Ocado. The shot outside the pack is also from there.)
Aha. Another offering from the mad scientist of the gourmet kitchen. An old fashioned prawn cocktail made using Canadian cold water Pandalus borealis prawns.
Well, it tastes like a prawn cocktail all right. And it really is old fashioned — in the best sense — and honest. Very traditional. Notably sweet, but it’s a fresh creamy sweetness and not cloying. A nice residual tang of spice. I’m increasingly impressed. But then I did get it for 79p instead of £3.99...
I guess the main thing I'd say about it is that it doesn't have that nasty downturn in taste which you get from something made with artificial ingredients, like a synthetic sweetener.
It is like a good home made prawn cocktail. Which leads us to the inevitable question. It costs four quid, so why not make it yourself? (Assuming you have the time.) You can even use Heston's own recipe, which is available here.
Incidentally, the prawns are caught using what is called a Demersal otter trawl. There are certain environmental problems with this kind of fishing, which you can read about here.
On the whole, from now on I don't think I'll be buying prawns caught in this way, if I can avoid it. Sorry, Heston.
(Image credit: the pack shot is, of course, from Waitrose's website.)
These delicious little devils have an unusual, refreshing sweetness and — yes — they actually do taste like cotton candy. In the summer they were all over the supermarkets and you could buy them everywhere, always at a premium price compared to other grapes. But there were some competitive deals available, and they were worth searching out.
Apparently these grapes were developed in California from the Lambrusca variety. Thank you, California. The first supermarket to introduce them to the UK was Sainsbury's. Thank you, Sainsbury's. Keep up the great work.
But then these tasty little rascals vanished from the shelves and I began to fret that I'd seen the last of them. I kept searching, despondently, to no avail. Other high-end grape varieties, like Sable, had been exposed as the boring impostors they were. It was cotton candy grapes or nothing. Or, rather, it was cotton candy grapes or whatever grapes were available in Sainsbury's Basics range (often excellent, though constantly varying and unpredictable) for £1.25 per 500g.
Then yesterday our little cotton candy friends reappeared. I saw some at Waitrose. They were pricey — £2.50 for 300g — but I snatched them up. A few minutes later I found them in Marks & Spencer at a much better price: £2 for 400g, provided you bought two or more packs.
I bought three. Just as well because the Waitrose ones didn't survive long after I got home; my Sardinian neighbour, who'd also been mourning their absence, helped me demolish the punnet. In fact, he ate most of them, the scoundrel.
I'd highly recommend these if you haven't tried them. If you have, you're probably already addicted.
As I've indicated the current best deal is from Marks & Sparks. These ones are Brazilian, taste great, and are disappearing from my refrigerator even as I write these words...
(Picture credits: the Waitrose pack shot is from here. The rather more attractive Sainsbury's one from here, where you can read more about the variety. Thanks, chaps.)
I became fed up with the bananas in my kitchen spoiling before I could eat them, so for the first time in my life I've begun baking banana bread — just to use up the little yellow devils. (Actually, by the time I get around to dealing with them, they're mottled black and brown little devils.) I went through a large number of recipes before I found one that I thought was suitable, and then I tweaked it until I was happy with it.
Result? Banana bread dining pleasure. But the other day I had a devilish little impulse to tweak the recipe again by adding chocolate chips to it. However, being my snobbish self, I wasn't about to settle for any old standard chocolate chips... Instead, I went off in search of a suitably high end gourmet alternative.
And, to my delight, I found the perfect product right away — on the shelves of my little local Sainsbury's (Putney). There beside the mundane mainstream choc chips were these 70% cocoa Belgian dark chocolate beauties. Absolutely superb, and they worked brilliantly in the recipe. (As a more health-conscious alternative you can use organic sultanas, also delicious.)
I was really pleased that Sainsbury's had exactly the ingredient I needed, and the resulting loaf that emerged warm and fragrant from the oven is absolutely the Rolls Royce of banana breads. Here is the Betty Crocker recipe I use, although NB — I reduce the amount of sugar from two cups to half a cup (!). The result is still perfectly sweet and you'll live longer... And be able to enjoy more banana bread.
(Image credit: thank you My Supermarket for the pack shot.)
Nuñez de Prado is a legendary Spanish organic extra virgin olive oil which has long been a favourite of mine. It's lovely stuff and it only has one drawback — okay, two. The first is the red sealing wax you get as a kind of cap on the cork in the half litre bottle, which is a bit messy to remove. The second is the cost. It's a premium product, and has a commensurate price tag.
Well, Marks & Spencer has dispensed with both of these objections. Since they're selling the oil in one litre tins the whole sealing wax issue is a non-issue. And the litre tins are — astonishingly — selling for about the same price as I used to pay for a half litre bottle.
Consequently, I bought some Nuñez de Prado for the first time in years, and now I'm stockpiling the stuff from my local M&S. Such a great offer is bound to vanish like the too-good-to-be-true dream that it is. So, let's make the most of it while we can.
I did a little taste comparison when I opened my first tin (i now own several) of Nuñez de Prado. I put it up against Ecoato, which is another Spanish organic oil, similar in colour and packaged in similar livery, right down to the red sealing wax (imitation is the sincerest, etc...).
Ecoato is a nice extra virgin olive oil. It has the buttery character of a Spanish oil, but with the slightly throat-burning finish of an Italian specimen. Perfectly fine. But then I tried the Nuñez de Prado.
Straight out of the tin the Nuñez de Prado was stunning. There was an immediate, complex burst of flavours and fragrances. I experienced apples, almonds and a whiff of fresh growing lavender.
Tremendous stuff, and available at an amazing price. Buy as many tins as you can carry.
(Image credits. I searched long and hard for an image of Nuñez de Prado oilve oil in the litre tin at a Marks & Spence website, but could find none. Indeed if you go to the M&S site and search for "olive oil" you are told there is no such product. Anyway, I eventually borrowed the pic from another food blog, Frolic 72 where it's reviewed. It's a nice little blog even if they do think Nuñez de Prado is a Sicilian oil. The 500ml Nuñez de Prado bottle image is from Brindisa. And the Ecoato picture is from Kuzzina, although the bottle I actually have features a somewhat different (older?) label design.)
The search continues for edible tomatoes. Oh, there's no trouble finding tomatoes that look beautiful, but as I've bemoaned before, they generally have all the flavour of wet tissue paper.
So when I saw Tesco's Finest Sweet Emerald (you have to laugh at these names) green tomatoes on special, I thought I'd give them a whirl. Even though they are green.
I've bought speciality tomatoes before, including ones which claimed to be deliciously sweet. And, more often than not, I've been disappointed. But not this time. These tomatoes have an excellent flavour and, yes, considerable sweetness. I'm accustomed to using tomatoes to provide a bit of bright (red) colour to dishes, sliced on top as decoration as much as an additional vegetable. So using green tomatoes required a bit of a rethink.
I found they were at their best served thinly sliced on top of a nice chunk of smoked salmon in an open sandwich. (Mmm, I'm making myself hungry just thinking about it... Is it time for lunch yet?) But I'm sure you'll find plenty of uses for these Sweet Emeralds.
They're not cheap, but at least they are an example of a product that actually does what it says on the label.
(Image credits: Both shots are from Tesco's own site.)
I reckon that if you get one good recipe out of a cook book, then it's worth having. By this criterion, Paola Gavin's Mediterranean Vegetarian Cooking makes the grade. The one recipe I've adopted so far is a simple and tasty butter bean salad. Here is my variation on it: You soften thinly sliced red onions (3 medium) and crushed garlic cloves (4) in extra virgin olive oil for about ten minutes. Add drained butter beans (one 420g tin) and cook gently for another ten minutes. Two minutes before you take it off the heat, add finely chopped fresh coriander. About three tablespoons.
My main innovation here, besides using red onions for the colour, is to use canned butter beans. Life is too short to endure the soaking and cooking of dried beans which Paola Gavin suggests. And the results are, I suspect, every bit as good.
But what are butter beans? When my brother in Canada said he'd never heard of them, his first question was whether they were the same as lima beans. I firmly told him no way. Lima beans are green and have an asringent alum-like taste. Butter beans are a pale whitish-yellow and, as their name suggests, have a creamy taste. I never liked limas but I find butter beans very palatable.
Yet a quick search online suggests that the beans are related, if not the same thing. There are at least three competing theories: lima and butter beans are exactly the same; they are the same thing at different stages of development; they are different. Confusion reigns. My taste bud tells me the third option is the correct one.
(Image credits: the general butter bean shot is from IFNG. The Waitrose tin is from Ocado. The book cover is from the Great British Book Shop.)
Public health advice on food and diet is as changeable as the wind. Remember when eggs were public enemy number one? Until the experts did a 180 degree policy turn on them. Or butter, which was considered lethal, and people were encouraged to eat cruddy industrial margarine instead. Similar reversals have been visited on coconut oil and palm oil.
The only consistent piece of advice, and one I trust, is that we should eat plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables. And there does seem evidence that one particularly beneficial vegetable is broccoli. (When no less an authority than New Scientist recommends the stuff, I pay attention.)
The trouble is, I hated eating broccoli. It was difficult to chop the damn stuff up, it stunk the place out during cooking (even when I added a bay leaf to the boiling water I used to steam the broccoli) and unless it was absolutely fresh it could taste disgusting — sulphurous.
But then two things happened. I discovered tender stem broccoli (a hybrid of broccoli and Chinese Kale which involves no tedious chopping) and my ingenious brother James recommended eating the stuff raw. No troublesome cooking, no objectionable smell, and absolutely no loss of nutrients (even steaming must lose a few).
So now all I do is wash the stems, then use them to dip into humous. Delicious. And I'm getting my greens. My preferred broccoli is Tesco's Organic Tender Stems, but it's been out of stock recently so I've been eating the Waitrose version. Both are fine, though it may not shock you to learn that the Tesco's product is often more competitively price.
(Image credits: the Tesco broccoli is from My Supermarket. The Waitrose image is from Ocado.)
Okay, I admit that this is virtually identical to an earlier Meal of the Week post, right down to the manufacturer of the bread. But this time it's the Crosta & Mollica Focaccia Pugliese which I used for the base of this mozzarella-tomato-and-basil treat.
And, good lord, what a base it was. This gorgeous, spongy, salty bread easily outclassed its ciabatta stablemate. It's the perfect vehicle for this Italian style sandwich and might well be unbeatable.
Anyway, it was such a great sandwich I just want to eat it all over again, right now. Besides the bread upgrade, there were other differences, too, compared to the Meal of the Week version. I used a different mozzarella and olive oil this time. The cheese was Sainbsury's Basic, since I'd run out of my favourite Tesco mozza (for a discussion of the budget mozzarellas, see here).
But the oil was the most notable variation. This time I used a glorious organic olive oil which some Spanish friends gave me (Hi Joan! Hi Gemma!). It's called Baronia de Cabacés and, holy moley, it's delicious. Tear the basil leaves, slice the tomatoes, chop the mozzarella, stack on the (warmed and sliced through the middle) focaccia, grind on some black pepper — and drizzle that fantastic oil. No, on second thoughts don't drizzle. Pour it on.
The most intriguing thing about the Baronia de Cabacés oil is that I'd put it at the back of the cupboard to save for a special occasion. Then, when I finally pulled it out, I was mortified to discover that it was several month is past its "best before" date. So I opened it and sampled it with trepidation. And it's just glorious, with a fresh, green, fruity taste. Somehow citric with being acidic, very light and refreshing.
All this is in stark contrast with a certain famous big brand "fruity" oil which was still a few months within its best before date and basically tasted — to me — like liquid cardboard.
(Image credits: The bread is from Waitrose. The olive oil bottle label, which for some reason — brand update? — isn't quite the same as the one on my bottle, is from Agrícola Cabacés. The other, somewhat dodgy, photos are by my own fair hand.)
In last week's post I promised to provide you with my wonderful beetroot recipe. Well, here it is. Simple and delicious. Not to mention inexpensive.
Take a large casserole and pour some good quality extra virgin olive oil into it. Chop half a dozen spring onions (I call them green onions) into one centimetre lengths and sprinkle them into the casserole. Take an anchovy fillet in olive oil and chop it finely (I use kitchen scissors). Scatter that around the casserole, too.
Add a couple of grinds of black pepper. Slice 500g of cooked beetroot and layer over the top of the onions and anchovy. (The thinner you slice the beetroot the quicker it cooks.) Add some more olive oil. Do not cover the casserole. Bake at a high-ish temperature, about 170˚C, for around 45 minutes. But your nose will tell you when it's done. Don't overcook. Carbonised beetroot isn't fun.
Served as a side dish (it's excellent with cheese and sourdough bread) this is very tasty and will accommodate 2 or 3 people. Doubling the quantities won't do you any harm though. The leftovers will be tasty straight from the fridge.
(Image credit: I confess. This is not my recipe. In fact the photo is of layered beetroot used to cover a beef hotpot. It's pinched from an excellent site called A Glug of Oil.)
I like beetroot but it will be a cold day in hell when I cook one from scratch. So ever since I came up with a wonderful beetroot recipe I've been looking for bargain beetroot to buy. (Apologies for the alliteration.) And the bargain beetroot buy to beat (okay, that's enough) is Lidl's Oakland Cooked Beetroot.
I was delighted to find that this cost close to half the price of beetroot at other supermarkets — 59p (44p when on special recently) per pack. But then I realised that the Lidl beetroot came in 500g packs. In other words, twice the size of the other supermarket's beetroot. A huge saving and an incredible bargain.
What's more, the Lidl beetroot, if anything, has a superior flavour to its competitors. considerably sweeter. Unbeatable — Or should I say "unbeetable"? No, I won't say that, and as an apology for all the alliteration and appalling puns I will post my wonderful beetroot recipe next week.
(Image credits: One reason that Lidl is so cheap — sorry, inexpensive — may be that their web presence is close to non existent. They have a website, but you can't search it for products and no search engine would disgorge a photo of the Oakland Cooked Beetroot they sell. So what you've got here instead is a beautiful photograph of the lovely Chioggia stripey beetroot from a delightful blog about gardening in London, Out of My Shed. Many thanks to Naomi Schillinger.)
I've discovered that Tesco has a competitively priced own-brand extra virgin olive. I'd like to include it my comparison tasting against the current leader, Sainsbury's, and others. But no branch of Tesco nearby stocks it. While I'm waiting to obtain a bottle I decided to try their Greek Extra Virgin.
This oil is currently on offer at a reduced price — down from £3.25 to £2.50 for a 500ml bottle. Rocket scientists will swiftly realise that this is five quid a litre, which puts it well out of our comparison tasting sweepstakes (where we're looking at four quid or less) but I couldn't resist trying it, not least because I've been wanting to try some Greek oils for a while.
Tesco's Greek extra virgin is pleasant, tasty, and distinctive. It has the interesting characteristic of combining buttery smoothness (which I think of as a Spanish trait) with an herbaceous bitterness (which I associate with Italian oils). Very nice. I compared it with the Sainsbury's own brand, which is also agreeably bitter. The Sainsbury's doesn't have any of that buttery flavour and its bitterness is more complex, with a longer finish, tasting of green grass and dark chocolate.
Which you prefer is of course a matter of personal taste, but the Sainsbury's is remarkably classy and sophisticated for a cheap oil — £1.15 a litre cheaper than the Teso Greek, even when it's on special. And when you consider that the Tesco Greek is almost twice as costly as the cheapest oil in our recent tastings (Lidl's Primadonna at £2.79 a litre) it doesn't seem like a contender for we gourmet cheapskates.
(Image credits: the Tesco Greek is from My Supermarket. And the Sainsbury's one too.)
I'm continuing my quest for the finest budget extra virgin olive oil. Recent notable purchases from Asda and Lidl were both well under three quid a litre, so when I splashed out £3.85 for a litre bottle of Sainsbury's own brand extra virgin olive oil, it felt like an almost obscene act of profligacy.
But the Sainsbury's extra virgin is a classy product. There is a wrapper around the lid which you have to peel away, like on a bottle of wine. And once you remove the screw top you find there is a plastic pull-top seal which you have to remove before you can pour the oil. This has to help protect the freshness of the product. And the bottle is made of dark green glass, which also helps, by cutting down on the degradation caused by light reaching the oil.
So what did it taste like? Well, it is delicious — with an intense, pleasant, aromatic bitterness. It is much sharper, and to my taste, more appealing than the excellent and rather buttery Asda extra virgin.
I'll have to compare it with Lidl's Primadonna as well. Once I've arranged a blind tasting of the three oils I will report back. In the meantime I am going to go in search of other extra virgin olive oils for £4 or less. Coverage of products on the internet is so poor for all the major supermarkets that the only way to really find out what they sell is to visit a large branch.
So I need to investigate Tesco's and Morrison's and perhaps even Waitrose, though they are probably too posh and expensive to meet our price point. My spies have only been able to find ordinary (non extra virgin, non mechanically extracted) olive oil at Audi's, which is odd because at Lidl's, in contrast, they only sell extra virgin. One day I'll have to try the more expensive Italian-only extra virgin oil at Lidl. But at well over five quid a litre that will have to wait another and more affluent survey.
But back to Sainsbury's extra virgin. This is a strong contender for the best tasting of the budget supermarket olive oils. I love it. Keep up the good work, folks.
(The Sainsbury's oil bottle shot is from My Supermarket. Regretably, I couldn't find a suitable photo on Sainsbury's own website. The Asda shot is also from My Supermarket, although it's an out of date image — as far as I can tell, it's the only one available.)
In our continuing search for the best budget extra virgin olive oil, I have to tell you that there's a new kid in town. Now, I have nothing against Lidl's excellent Primadonna, which I've written about here. Indeed when I was in their store the other day I noticed the price had dropped from around three quid a litre to about £2.79.
And I think I know why. I visited Asda the same day I discovered that their own brand extra virgin was on sale for £2.89 a litre (it's normally £3.75). I took a bottle home to try and it was first rate. Perhaps a little more spicy/peppery than the Primadonna.
I got a lift with a friend (thanks, Matt!) and bought half a dozen more litre bottles from Asda. This is going to be my standard oil for a while.
One word of warning though, that picture doesn't accurately depict the oil I bought. It appears to be an old design, but it's the only one available. Once again I'm surprised at how out of date the websites of the major supermarkets are.
Still a great oil, though. And a terrific bargain. Try some.
(Image credits: the erroneous pic, but the only one I could find on the net, comes from My Supermarket.)
