Fine foods

Every now and again we get a little frustrated with the food shopping in Saltburn. We do have a brilliant butcher, a nice little grocer which sells the odd 'exotic' item, a great bakery, and a decent Sainsbury's.

But I've moaned before about the limited choice of fresh seafood. And, to give just one example, the only kind of hot peppers we can buy in Sainsbury's are these:

They make no distinction between, say, Scotch Bonnet, Habanero, Jalapeno, or any other kind of peppers. And TLOML, for what it's worth, is the kind of man who's fussy about his chillies. There's one kind for his homemade salsa, and another for the stir fry, and so on.

That kind of packaging is the sort of thing that makes TLOML shake his fist at the sky and cry 'this country!'.

So every now and again I like to remind him that we, too, have large supermarkets in this country. Even in North Yorkshire. We head to the big Morrisons a few miles away.

Check out their pepper section:

What's more, they have a fish counter three times the size of the little ice tray at Sainsbury's, with a good range of fish. All excited about the culinary opportunities opening up in front of us, we bought some oysters to have before dinner tonight. They also were unsatisfactorily labelled, being tagged as just 'oysters' - no variety or provenance. No matter, they'll be good. TLOML will shuck them and we'll eat them on the half shell.

We felt such a thrill going around the supermarket. TLOML said it was like being in America again - high praise indeed.

When we got home I noticed this advice on the oyster packaging:

'Do not eat raw'? Really? It reminded me that we are, actually, still in Yorkshire, in a town where eating raw shellfish is considered a form of madness, or the height of pretension. Or is this Americanisation creeping in? Health and safety gone mad, and so on?

Whatever the advice is informed by, we're going to ignore it I'm afraid. We're renegade grocery shoppers and fly-by-night eaters, TLOML and I. Which brings me to another question. When will Lady P be able to eat raw shellfish, sushi, carpaccio and steak tartare? She's on vegetables and rice cakes so far, but with TLOML as her father that kind of pedestrian diet surely won't satisfy her for long.