A few words from Rob Mansfield

The above beach is the view 5 metres from my front door while on holiday. Nice, eh?

Anyway, the point about this post is that Cornwall seems to be a law unto itself, when it comes to produce.

One of the advantages of coming somewhere like Cornwall is that the fish in all the restaurants is all local and caught that day.

What’s a bigger surprise is that a lot of the produce in the supermarkets - and I even mean the likes of Tesco - is also Cornish.

They make great play on selling Cornish potatoes, Cornish strawberries, Cornish milk… the list goes on.

Living in London, you’re hard pushed to find anything from within the M25 on the supermarket shelves.

Chef Oliver Rowe managed to open a restaurant, Konstam, based on just such a principle for all his ingredients, but he found it pretty tough.

Now clearly London is an exception, but C’s mum lives near Shrewsbury, a mere spit from the Welsh border, but can she ever find Welsh lamb in the shops? Of course not!

More power to food miles and metres (as one shop in St Ives boasts) - I just wish it applied to places other than Cornwall sometimes.

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In a world of celebrity where no-one famous appears on any medium without having something to plug, the current series of A Taste Of My Life on BBC2, fronted by the god-like Nigel Slater is an oasis among a sea of mediocrity and vapidity.

The format is very simple. Nigel Slater talks to someone famous about their life and the food they remember from certain periods of it.

There’s a bit of cooking, but nothing as serious as full-on recipes, and a little bit of video footage of friends and family to break up the show, but to all intents and purposes, this is just Nigel and A. Celeb yakking about food and their memories of it.

What makes the show so brilliant is that most of the famous people talk about things that we can all remember from our own childhoods and younger days: lemon meringue pie, Angel Delight, shepherd’s pie, fish and chips, vegetable curry, tuna pasta.

Slater himself initially seems a bit of a bumbling interviewer, but actually he’s superb at coaxing out little nuggets of gold simply by being passionate himself about similar experiences from his own childhood.

This series has included gems from people such as Tamsin Greig, Jo Brand, Denis Lawson, Sue Johnston and Meera Syal - not always people you’d instantly be interested in, but the show makes them interesting and you get some sort of insight into their lives that most interviewers (be it print or TV) never manage to show.

The joy of the iPlayer means that there’s still a chance to catch up on some last week’s episodes you may have missed, so please do yourself a favour and have a butcher’s.

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I returned from the supermarket yesterday and unpacked the shopping, when my eye caught an additional label on something I’d bought…

A DELIA Cheat ingredient

I recoiled at the sight of this… how could I have bought something that Delia uses to ‘cheat’ with?

I’m not suggesting everything I make in the kitchen is of artisan quality, but ‘cheating’ in the kitchen is the kind of thing that makes me feel dirty.

Let’s face it, we all use ingredients that make our lives easier: tinned tomatoes, stock cubes/bouillon powder, dried herbs are even cheating, if you think about it.

For me, that’s why the recent Delia series is a bit of a con. Cooking shouldn’t be about ‘cheating’ and ‘cutting corners’.

The end result should be something you feel proud of, not ashamed of.

Given that Ms Smith has spent her life telling us the ‘proper’ way to cook things, I’m disappointed she’s ‘turned turtle’, as it were.

Anyway, what was the item I bought that is a Delia cheat?

A packet of fresh tortelloni… come on, who makes their own pasta every time?

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