Fast Food

I like to cook. But I also like to work in my shop, which sometimes doesn't leave a lot of time for cooking. You've probably noticed by now that most of the recipe suggestions I post here and on pinterest are not really recipes, but more ideas of what things you can throw together to create something tasty. I like to think that still counts as cooking.

This dish is another example of things hurriedly thrown together and tasting great. It's one of my favourite super-fast emergency-dinners made entirely from things I can grab on my way out of the door of my shop!

Boil saucepan of water and throw in really good quality slow dried pasta (it cooks in less than five minutes). I used some squid ink tagliatelle from our new Casa Grande range.
Meanwhile get everything else ready: chop a handful of sun dried tomatoes (or open a jar of the pre-chopped sun-dried tomatoes), flake some of Mike's Smokehouse manuka smoked salmon fillets (I used one starter size pack to serve two of us) and open a jar of pesto.
When the pasta is cooked, drain it and return it to the hot pan.
Throw in the tomatoes, and salmon and a tablespoon of pesto.
Give it a good stir and serve, seasoning with some freshly ground black pepper.

I know I can make this in less time than it takes to get a take away delivered.

Wraps

Here are a couple of very quick and simple meal ideas which I'd forgotten about until I found these photographs on my memory card.

Recipe 1: Chicken Wraps

• Marinate thin strips of chicken in Capsicana burrito sauce over night.
• Fry chicken.
• Add strips of pepper to pan and fry.
• Warm re-fried beans.
• Place beans, chicken and peppers onto soft tortilla wrap.
• Roll up.
• Serve with salad and sweetcorn (optional).
• (Optionally) Take very bad photograph really quickly in hurry to commence dinning (see below)!

 

Recipe 2: Fish Wraps

As above. Replace chicken with white fish.

I actually preferred the second version. The lime flavour in the burrito sauce was much more prominent with the fish, and rather lovely!

Introducing Birch Syrup

Last week I met Ross, a tree tapper, amongst other things. He owns a forest in the Voru region of Estonia, and uses traditional methods to extract the sap from his birch trees to create a delicious birch syrup. At the moment he is the only person in Europe to do this commercially. It is hugely labour intensive, but Ross clearly loves it and the resulting product is worth all the effort involved.

Birch syrup is made in much the same way as maple syrup; rising sap is extracted from the trees in the spring and converted into a syrup using a process of evaporation and reverse osmosis to remove the water. Ross powers his equipment by burning the wood from naturally fallen trees.  He believes the other carbon emissions from his production (transport, bottles etc) is less than that which his forest absorbs, making this a carbon neutral or possibly even carbon negative product.

 

The finished product is unique and delicious.  Depending on when the birch sap is extracted from the trees, the resulting syrup tastes quite different. The early syrup is ideal on pancakes, porridge, or anywhere you might use honey or maple syrup. It is delicate and sweet, with an intriguing woody, caramel, liquorice like flavour.  The syrup extracted later in the season (and by later I only mean a matter of weeks) is used more like a savoury condiment. It has an even greater depth of flavour, is more robust, though still sweet, minerally rather than woody and more savoury than a maple syrup.  Late birch syrup can be used in sauces, dressings and gravies, to flavour home made beer, mixed into gin for a dirty martini or as a substitute for good balsamic. Late birch syrup is almost entirely fructose, giving it a very low glycaemic index. It also contains lots of minerals including calcium, thiamine and magnesium.

It takes around 120 litres of birch sap to create each litre of birch syrup (far far more than with maple syrup which requires only 30-40 litres) and the sap can only be collected for a few weeks each spring, when the birch trees are using sugar to produce new leaves. You can see why this, one of the oldest sources of sugar known to man, is rarely harvested nowadays! Ross only taps his trees every three years and only extracts around 10% of the trees sap each time. This way his forest continues to thrive.  It is coming up to harvest time right now, and Ross is readying himself for a frantic period of tapping. But before he heads back to Estonia, he delivered some birch syrup to Tastes, where it is now on sale. 

The Philosophy of Best

Last month's awards season inspired blog post was one of the best yet in terms of stimulating conversations with customers and suppliers alike.  Customers have delighted in seeing some of their favourites mentioned and some have been tempted to try new things. The lovely people at Stockans, were so pleased to have been most popular savoury biscuit that they are sending me a box of goodies so I can offer samples to customers soon (I'll let you know when).

What I enjoyed about writing the post was that I got to mention a surprisingly large number of  products we've been selling for years and years. Things which were new before I started announcing new and exciting things on facebook and twitter. It was a great opportunity to mention some old favourites, but also showed how hard it can be for new products to "break through".  Which could be seen as a downside of a loyal local customer base. Once they find something they like, customers return again and again and again. Usually extending their shopping to other non-competing products, but never replacing the original. Fortunately the compact size of the shop means I don't really have many competing products, everything I have is the best in its (sometimes very small) field!  Which reminds me...

Each summer we are visited by lots of Japanese students, who almost without fail will ask "what is the most popular ...". Which is a question I've only ever been asked by the Japanese students or people wanting to source lines for their own deli. I'm not sure if that is a Japanese cultural thing, or just because most of the students I see come from the Eton College Summer Schools where they are learning English from the same people. Or maybe they are all aspiring deli-owners!

At first, I didn't think they were asking the right question. Why would they want the most popular tea? Why not the best tea? Or the smokiest tea? Or the most refreshing tea? Or the lightest tea?

But they might have the right idea. Best is so subjective and we rarely have more than one version of the same thing; we think they are all the best they can be. I couldn't objectively answer "which is the best".  Describing exactly what you think is best in a foreign language is tricky. So why not choose the most popular. Hundreds of local shoppers can't all be wrong! Its taken me years to realise this, the value of the crowd.

I shall update you on the 2015 best sellers next year. To see your favourite product excel just come along and buy lots of it ;) Online sales count as well!

Drum roll please

I've been looking at sales figure for 2014 and thought this would be a good opportunity to give a little mention/fanfare to some of our best sellers. This is a highly unscientifically researched list as it includes all sales from 1st Jan - 31st Dec and is not weighted in any way to take account of new products introduced during the year, or seasonal lines. I think there are also some spurious sales which skew the results (like the French Sticks being used in buffets in great quantities). So any shopkeepers out there might not want to use this as a buying guide. But for those who want to give a little round of applause to our caveat-ed 2014 best sellers, here they are...

Most Popular Bread: French Stick, followed very closely (57 fewer) by the small white farmhouse (sliced).

Most in Demand Breakfast Cereal: Midfields Granola, original granola. Although by weight we sold more of the wheat free version as we have that in 500g and 1kg bags. See, this research lark is highly dubious!

Most Purchased Cake / Biscuit: In a packet the Gingerbread man was the best selling, from our counter, the Marathon Flapjack won. I might need to develop a cross between those two items. It's bound to be a runaway success! (sorry)  "Run Run as fast as you can, you can't catch me, I'm the marathon gingerbread man".

Most Favoured Chutney / Pickle / Mustard: Raydale Preserves Goats' Cheese Lover's Chutney / Biona Cornichons / Tracklements Strong English Mustard (closely followed by German Mustard which actually sold more online). We've seen a huge increase in sales of Strong English Mustard recently. I've no idea why, but according to Tracklements we aren't the only shop to notice.

Most Appropriated Coffee: Beanberry Coffee Company Yirgacheffe Coffee Beans. A really problematic category to study "properly" as our coffee beans are freshly roasted and therefore not all of them are available at all times of the year.

Most Requisitioned Cooking Sauce: Anila's Spicy Medium Curry Sauce continues to outsell all the other curry sauces, and all the pasta sauces as well. Always has done.

Most Sought After Confectionery: Licorice Log. I'm pleased to see RJs are still doing well here. The bags of licorice were the first line we carried to sell 100 units, way back in 2007.

Most Crowd Pleasing Crackers: Stockan's Thin triangular oatcakes. Also, the cheapest item in this list at just 65p per pack. They have to sell well to pay the rent on their tiny bit of shop!

Most Popular Crisps/Nuts: Tomato & Basil Pastinos, which was a surprise to me. I would have said Piper's Anglesey Sea Salt crisps would have been the best seller in this category, but they weren't even second; that was a tie between the Lemon Pastinos and Piper's sea salt and cider vinegar crisps.

... Cheese: Snowdonia Cheese Company Black Bomber (beating the second place cheese by more than 67kg).

... Ice Cream: Salcombe Dairy Madagascan Vanilla.

... Jam / Marmalade / Honey:  Susie's Strawberry Jam and Susie's Three Fruit Marmalade / Berkshire Honey. The honey statistics are really unfair as months go by when I don't have some of our honey varieties whilst I wait for the weather to warm up and the bees to produce more.

... Milk: Semi-skimmed one litre. The second most popular milk was the one litre non-homogenised organic milk. But it was more than one thousand units behind, so not exactly a close contest! I suspect that this year we might sell more of the non-homogensised full fat milk as customers are seeking it out for toddlers and to make their own cheeses.

... Oil/Vinegar: Not a level playing field. Technically the best selling oil was coconut oil. But we only have two varieties of that and more than a dozen different plain extra virgin olive oils (and plenty of flavoured ones as well).  So I'm also going to declare Zaytoun's Palestinian Extra Virgin Olive Oil a winner as well. Even though it was actually 4th after coconut oil, rapeseed oil (which we had 2 versions of) and ghee (we only have one variety).

Similarly, the best selling vinegar was Raw Health Apple Cider Vinegar with Mother, but that is used in far more ways than any of our balsamics, and we only offer one cider vinegar.

... Olives/Antipasti: Our best selling product in a jar was the Sun dried tomato meze from Olive Branch. The versatility of this product sort of gives it a head start in the sales figures. Antipasti, dip, sandwich filling, pasta sauce, salad dressing.... I'm not exactly comparing like with like so it's hard for a jar of olives to compete.

... Pasta: A tie! We sold exactly the same quantity of two pastas last year. Both were penne! Seggiano organic penne rigate and Biona wholemeal penne.

... Prepared Meal: In first place the single portion Cottage Pie. In second place the twin portion Cottage Pie. That's a good cottage pie!



... Soft Drink: Luscombe Farm's Wild Elderflower Bubbly (by one single bottle!), in second place was Whole Earth Sparkling Cranberry.

... Soup: Amy's Kitchen organic Rustic Italian vegetable soup sold one more unit than Mouthful's fresh Chicken and Corn Soup (but we only stock the fresh soup in the winter so really the chicken soup is the winner here).

 ... Tea: Another definitive winner. Darvilles of Windsor's 25 English Breakfast tea bags were in first place, with Darville's 50 English Breakfast tea bags in second place. Same tea, different packaging. So I can confidently say my customers love Darville's English Breakfast!

Maybe one day I can have a little awards ceremony. I'll need to think of more synonyms for popular before that.

Top 50 Foods AND Small Artisan Producer of the Year

In addition to the one star, two star and three star awards given out at the Great Taste Awards, the three star award winning products are also entered into further judging to determine the top 50 foods.

This year the list of th top 50 foods included
 Blaisdon Red Plum Jam from The Artisan Kitchen.
 Wild Rata Honey from Wedderspoon Organic.
 Easy Thai Green Curry Paste from coconut kitchen.

Also Sarah, who single handedly is The Artisan Kitchen, was voted Small Artisan Producer of the Year. Here she is beaming at the golden forks awards dinner! Fantastic achievements all round.

Coming Soon! Bacon.

I've been testing out a potential new product for the shop. Bacon. Sounds simple, but in fact, I've been on a Goldilocks style quest for some time. But I think I have found THE ONE. In fact it's an organic smoked Spanish pancetta, very thinly sliced.

Here it is in a salad with broccoli (a Jamie Oliver recipe)

I'm really impressed with it. Lovely flavour, crisps up beautifully, from organically reared happy pigs and not packed with any weird preservatives. Its flavour is so good, that a little bit goes a very long way. I only used two slices in the broccoli salad, which yielded two huge portions and the bacon flavour really came through.

You'll find it for sale in Tastes, soon, but sadly only in Eton. It needs to be kept refrigerated so we won't be selling it in our online shop.

Great Taste Awards 2014

The Guild of Fine Food hold an annual event described as the ‘Oscars’ of the food world and the ‘epicurean equivalent of the Booker prize’: The Great Taste Awards. Thousands of food producers enter their products, which are blind tasted by a team of more than 400 judges over 50 days. This year there were 10 000 products entered and just 34% of those were awarded one, two, or three stars.

Every year I scour the results, looking for names I recognise. Because I know most of our product producers personally, I love to see their names on the list as I know what a big deal this event is for them. To win a star means their product has been independently recognised as tasting great.  And to win the top accolade of three stars, well that is pretty much as good as it gets!

For the last seven years I have been writing a blog post to list all our winners (you can still read them all: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 (part one and part two) and 2013). As much as I love seeing more and more of the products we stock being given Great Taste Awards, my job of list making gets harder each year! This year I started early and pinned a few winners every day to our 2014 Great Taste Award Winners pinterest board. But it has still taken me until November to write the full list, and it is basically just a list, but even so took me an entire day to write. But here it its. More than seventy award winning products I believe! Well done everyone!

 *** 3 stars
 
Out of 10,000 products entered this year and just 123 were awarded the highest accolade of three stars.

One of these went to the Blaisdon Red Plum Jam from The Artisan Kitchen. Here are some of judges' the comments:

• Lovely deep ruby colour and sheen, a good set, and fruity aroma. A delicious jam with deep dark flavours and a hint of tartness.
• Nice to find a jam that tastes of fruit not sugar.
• It was very well cooked, the aroma was fresh. A jam with a variety of uses.
• This is an old fashioned fruit jam, the plum comes through uncluttered with additives or over powering sugar. 
• Flies the flag for doing the simple things very, very well. 
• There's a lovely set to this jam and the plum flavours carry great balancing acidity and tartness.
• A well made jam with a distinct, pronounced plum flavour.

Sarah also received four one star and three two star awards for her other preserves, including the Blood Orange Marmalade we also stock.

Wedderspoon Organic also received three gold stars this year. For their incredible Wild Rata Honey. Judges' comments included:

• An utterly gorgeous honey
• This honey tastes amazing!
• Winnie the Pooh would choose this honey for his pot. it is delicious, smooth, sweet, floral with a little pine-iness on the back taste giving it a clean bright flavour

Wedderspoon Organic also received a gold star for their raw manuka honey.

The coconut kitchen were awarded a fantastic three stars for their Easy Thai Green Curry Paste. Judges' comments included:

• It has a good deep flavour profile.
• Great umami hit of fish sauce that has been balanced against the other flavours very well.

Wessex Mill achieved a clutch of awards again this year, including three stars for their mixed grain bread flour, four two star awards and four one star awards which included: Wessex Cobber bread flour, half & half bread flour, wholemeal bead flour, six seed bread flour, plain flour, strong white bread flour, self raising flour and French bread flour.

Azada were awarded three stars for their virgin almond oil for the second consecutive year! 

** 2 stars

There were 697 two star awards given out this year. This included Mike's Smokehouse Manuka Smoked Salmon which we've been stocking since we opened and it's still a favourite.

Olive Branch's Sweet Olive, Fig and Almond relish was awarded two gold stars. The unique product is similar to a sweet chutney, and pairs particularly well with goats cheese. It can also be used as a luxury topping for ice cream or over Greek yogurt as a snack. Olive Branch were also awarded a gold star for their red wine vinegar with orange honey and their red wine vinegar with thyne honey. 

Our newest tea blender, Tea Huggers,  received an amazing two gold stars for no less than three products! Good Morning Tea, Good Night Tea and Skinny Fit Tea. A great start from a new start up.

Teapigs' were awarded two stars for their  rooibos creme caramel tea and one star each for chamomile flowers tea, tung ting oolong tea, liquorice and peppermint leaves tea and jasmine pearl tea.

Like Teapigs, Tracklements come away from the awards each year with a collection! This year they received two stars for their chilli jam (again), and one star each for fig relish, strong English mustard, strong horseradish & cream, beetroot & horseradish relish and apricot and ginger chutney.

* 1 star

Brand new business, fairly local to us in Eton, BakedIn entered their Chocolate Brownie Kit and Carrot Cake Kit. Both were awarded gold stars.

Other products which are new to us also won gold stars; sweet chilli popcorn from Popcorn Kitchen.  Turron de Guirlache from el Lobo, English Truffle Oil from The Truffle Hunter and Pineapple Fruit Crisps from Nim's.

Along with lots of old favourites, most of which are available in our online deli.
Anila's Tamarind and Date Chutney.
Real Organic Food's Korma Curry Sauce.
Luscombe's Wild Elderflower Bubbly.
Granny's Secret Wild Apple Juice.
Pukka Herbs' Three Fennel Tea.
Grumpy Mule organic EthiopianYirgacheffe coffee.
Meridian 100% peanut butter and smooth cashew butter.
Stokes were awarded a gold star for the real mayo, real tomato ketchup and real brown sauce.
Piper's Chorizo Crisps.
Azada Olive oil and lemon and base olive oil which are included in our olive oil gift boxes, both were awarded one star.
Oro Bailen extra virgin olive oi.
Biona raw virgin Coconut Oil.
Dressing number 3 (sweet honey paired with tangy wholegrain mustard) and dressing number 14 (a delicious, spicy dressing for salad, pasta or fish) from the French Dressing Company.
Iliko's clotted cream caramel sauce.
Cartwright & Butler Butter Thins.
Peppersmith's Lemon Peppermints (which also won a gold star in 2012).

In our fridge, our Spanish chorizo from Brindisa was also awarded a star as was Colston Bassett Stilton, Barkham Blue, Rosethorn Blue and Cornish Blue, Shemin's medium curry paste, Tim's Dairy Greek Yoghurt and Tom's Pies; Chicken, Ham Hock and Leek. Along with Mike's Smoked Duck and  Smoked Salmon Pate which complete yet another hat-trick for the smokehouse.

Even our Christmas turkey producer, Copas, was awarded gold stars, one for their organic turkey and one for their free-range chicken. Loseley bakery, who make quiche for us throughout the year, were award a gold star for their Stollen, which we will have for Christmas, and Lewis and Cooper's Plum Puddings (which we also have each Christmas) won another gold star.

Thanks to all our producers for creating such delicious foods for us to sell and enjoy!

Thai Cooking with Coconut Kitchen

I've been testing out our new range from the wonderful Coconut Kitchen. A selection of sauces based on those used in the Coconut Kitchen restaurant in Abersoch, North Wales.

I started with the Wok fried Pad Thai Noodles recipe from the Pad Thai Sauce bottle. I didn't have any chicken or prawns so used a lot of vegetables (carrots, mushrooms, peppers, sugar snap peas, and sprouted chick peas instead of bean sprouts). I'm pretty sure the flavours would be better if I'd used something to absorb more of the sauce, rather than the al dente vegetables. I did toast the peanuts in the pan before frying the onions, so they were ready to garnish. That is my only tip here! This is the coconut kitchen recipe:

Ingredients, Serves 2:
Rice stick noodles (partly cooked in hot water), vegetable oil, 2 garlic cloves (crushed), 1 chicken breast or 16 king prawns, ½ onion (sliced), 50g  beansprouts, any other vegetables of choice (carrots,
mushrooms, sugar snap peas, broccoli or peppers are good), spring onion, coriander, lime wedges and crushed peanuts to garnish.

To cook:
Fry the garlic and onion in the oil and add the chicken or prawns and vegetables, cook for 2 minutes, add the partly cooked rice noodles. Then add 1 bottle of Coconut Kitchen Pad Thai Sauce, stir fry the noodles in the sauce until fully cooked. Add the beansprouts, serve and garnish with the spring onion, coriander, peanuts and lime.

I made some simple sweetcorn fritters as a starter, mainly because I wanted to try out the dipping sauce!

To make the fritters boil 2 sweetcorn cobs and slice off the kernels. Put half of the kernels along with 1 egg, 1 spring onion, 1 de-seeded red chilli (or more if you like the heat), 30g plain flour (white or wholemeal), and half a teaspoon of baking powder into a blender and puree until fairly smooth. Small lumps are fine. Stir in the rest of the sweetcorn. Heat 2 tablespoons of oil in a large pan and spoon in the batter. I use about 1 tablespoon per fritter. Fry until browned (about 1 minute), flip over and brown the other side. I served them with Coconut Kitchen Sweet Chilli & Garlic Sauce  and chopped avocado and was really pleased with them.

With the abundance of vegetables I used, we had a lot of Pad Thai left over, certainly enough for another two meals. I used the left overs as an accompaniment to baked salmon. The rice noodles didn't really survive the reheat, but the flavour from the Pad Thai was still delicious, possibly better than it had been the night before. Of course, I marinated the salmon in Coconut Kitchen Chilli & Garlic Sauce. And that was wonderful! The chilli sauce is divine. Just the same as you find in good Thai restaurants with the right level of sweetness, and other flavours complimenting the chilli - not just hot and sweet like some can be.

I've been sneaking it into a lot of things. Like the avocado salsa I made to go with some sweetcorn muffins (using up both the half avocado I had left from the weekend's starter and more of the glut of fresh sweetcorn).

Stuffed Portobello Mushrooms

Last week I received a batch of brand new recipe booklets from Olive Branch. The little books contains nine inventive ways to use Olive Branch products (plus a few more ideas on the back cover). Things like Poached Chicken with Lentils and Dill using their olive oil and red wine vinegar. Or Baked Cod with Sundried Tomatoes using sundried tomato mix. There is even a recipe for Sweet Olive and Ice Cream!

On Thursday, just before heading home, and in need of a quick supper for one, I flicked through the booklet and found something perfect:  Stuffed Portobello Mushrooms.
All I needed was:

• Olive Branch's Green & Black Olives with Sundried Tomato, Feta & Greek Basil.
• Some Cheddar cheese (I used Keen's).
• A large flat mushroom.

I had all of that in stock, so collect them up and headed for home.
Within half an hour, I had a delicious light supper ready. I even tweeted about it!
In fact, I liked it so much, that on Monday, in between working on paperwork at home, I made the same dish again for lunch. Still delicious!

Next time you're in Tastes pick up a free booklet from the display on the wall but the steps. You won't be disappointed.