My ineptitude as a chef doesn't stop me appreciating the culinary delights on offer. My current favourite thing to eat is prawn cocktail. Seriously. I would marry a prawn cocktail if I could.
That might not make me a connoisseur, but it makes me a greedy pig who knows what they like to eat. And as such, the following foodstuffs broke my heart when they went out of circulation. This is a tribute to food I have known and loved -
1. Batchelors garlic butter rice -
Easily the queen of packet rices. And yes, I do think of rice as female. What of it?
Garlic butter rice was the only accompaniment to chicken kievs. We have tried many times in our house to find an at least palatable alternative, but they always fell short of the mark. Then we tried making our own garlic butter rice, but it just ended up a sloppy mess of plain boiled rice and garlic butter, which burned your mouth. I beg of you Batchelors, if by some slim chance you're reading this, please bring it back! No one even knows why you took it off the market, apart from you're a bunch of fun and taste hating wazzocks.
2. McDonalds chicken korma burger
No one I've asked ever remembers this, but it was definitely a real thing; I am not mental. McDonalds brought out a chicken korma burger for a week or two some time around 1990, and I'm guessing it was part of an Indian food range. The burger itself was simple - a chicken korma flavoured patty inbetween two naan breads. There may have been the option to add other things like pickles, but my childish stomach was very much of the 'no icky stuff' persuasion. Nevertheless, they were to die for, and if anyone else remembers them I would dearly love to hear about it, if only to know that I am not actually mad.
3. Nest Noodles -
I know they still make egg noddles in nests, but that's not what I'm talking about here. When I was very small, our family lived in Northumberland/East Yorkshire, and that's where I remember eating these, so maybe they were only sold locally, I don't know. 'Nest Noodles' was the actual name, and they tasted kind of like plain spaghetti, but not quite. I used to eat these by the skipful as a child.
4. Neapolitans -
These were amazing, and I always remember getting them for being good. They were little rectangles of chocolate, all wrapped individually. One of the flavours was definitely 'oil of orange'. I think the blue one was milk chocolate, the red one was dark chocolate, and the green one was maybe mint. I don't remember what the yellow one was, answers on a postcard please.
5. McDonalds blueberry pies -
The pudding to end all puddings. They might still do these in other countries, but here in the UK we haven't had so much as a sniff of them since around the mid 90s. I know McDonalds still do fruit pies, but they're just trying to placate us with things like apple. The only similarities are the pastry, and the fact that the pies are served hotter than fire. Ok, so they're quite similar, but not similar enough. My parents haven't eaten a McDonalds fruit pie since they learned that they don't do blueberry any more. I do not blame them.
6. Fish N Chips -
I must have eaten 763,976 bags of these throughout my childhood. They weren't really crisps, more little savoury biscuits, sprinkled with fish n chips flavouring. But oh my god they were brilliant. Lord knows why Burtons ever took these off the market. If it's because Burtons closed down then sort of fair enough, but I'm too angry and upset to check whether this is the case or not.
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