Someone on Twitter last night tweeted she’d seen an advert for frozen baked potatoes. ‘WTF’, she said, ‘get a potato and put it in the oven/microwave’.
Personally, I think anyone who puts a raw potato in the microwave to bake doesn’t deserve to have a potato in the first place but I’ve nothing against frozen potato-based products. Especially when they’re filled with cheese and onion.
Speaking of cheese and onion, by a happy coincidence, yesterday a delivery of Bannisters’ Farm products arrived. All of them potato-based. Oh yes, there’s a happy Meat Eater in the house at the mo.
Amongst the delivery were potato skins filled with cheese and roasted onion, baked potato halves filled with mature cheddar cheese, ready baked potatoes and a bag of roasting potatoes.
I love proper oven-baked potatoes – who doesn’t – but they need about two hours in the oven (unless you put them in the microwave, but see what I said above about microwaving raw potatoes) to cook them to perfection. Which is where frozen ones come in. The cheese and onion filled potato skins I cooked yesterday only took 20 minutes (you can also microwave them for 3 minutes or put them on a BBQ).
You may be thinking ‘okay, they’re quick, but I bet they’re full of crap’. Aha – wrong! The ingredients are simply: potato, cheddar cheese, roasted onion, water, sunflower oil, Monterey Jack cheese, mustard powder and white pepper.
But the proof of the potato is in the eating though, yeah? Yeah. The skin was crispy, the potato was soft and fluffy and there was a creamy topping of cheese and onion. I’d have liked a stronger cheese taste and one of my potatoes was mostly potato but one of The Meat Eater’s was mostly cheese so he said if you average them out, that makes them perfect. I think there’s logic in there somewhere.
I served them with Quorn Mini Kievs and baked beans.
The Bannisters’ Farm range costs between £1.39 – £2.50 and is available nationwide from Morrisons, Ocado, Tesco, Waitrose, Iceland, Booths, Nisa, Farmfoods and selected Sainsbury’s Local stores.
For more information visit www.bannistersfarm.co.uk
