‮hjap‮

Today at the Farmers' Market was the Great Scottish Sausage Taste-Off, although they spelled it differently. (Taste off, without a hyphen, is what the sausages do when you've left them out for too long.) Three of the finest local farms went head-to-head, or rather skin-to-skin, with the Finest™ range from three of our mighty supermarket chains.

A blind tasting was arranged, with paper plates labelled A to F, cocktail sticks at ten paces, and a thronging crowd of blue-rinsed biddies who gave every impression they were standing in a queue when they were, in fact, merely dithering. The cocktail sticks provided were insufficient for me to rectify this situation to my satisfaction, and stormsearch wouldn't allow me to appropriate the knife they were using to cut up soss.

Of the soss on offer (sossonoffer—try saying that with a mouthful of the aforementioned), it was easy to tell the superior locally-sourced farm produce from their inferior, wraithlike mass-produced counterparts. If nothing else, the amount of added water gave it away. On the one hand we had soulless cylinders of reconstituted offal and tubular forcemeat. On the other... was Sausage.

It was quite interesting—one of the supermarket sausages actually had a really nice balance of herbs and spices, but even so the meat itself was pale and bland. (Pigling Bland?) Despite the best efforts of a whole team of food scientists paid fuck-you money by a multinational corporation, there's still no substitute for looking after your animals and not cramming in stupid crap to reduce costs. And thus, as I have always said, do Happy Pigs Make The Best Bacon.

Of the three True Sausages, the one that both stormsearch and I rated most highly was—we were told in nudge-nudge wink-wink say-no-more fashion by the vaguely disturbing chap organizing the Taste-Off—Piperfield Pork, suppliers to no less a luminary than Dr B himself and, oddly enough, the only one of the three I haven't tried yet. My freezer (and J's too) is already way too full of meat, so I shall have to wait until next week's market to acquire some, when the results of the Taste-Off are announced.

(Although I'm told that Piperfield won overall anyway.)

Today I are mostly eatin' Rannoch smoked chicken on organic rye bread, which I picked up from a deli near work. I am having a good day. And I have been organic and locally-sourced, and my Food Miles have been minimal. Much more importantly, the food has been fantastic.