The City Kitchen. This is what I have become.
This might look like rape stored it tupperwear, but it tastes as sweet as Gods tears.
When I was like 8 or 9, I fucking loved cookery. I loved making cakes, making biscuits, bolognaise – all the tasty stuff that my dear old mum could whip up, seemingly by magic, in an afternoon. Problem was, I was totally atonal at it. My most successful meal was discovering a gingernut at the bottom of my Lego box.
I had to experiment. Starting mixing cheese with peanut butter, moving on to frying lettuce. Everything tasted crap, everything went in the bin. I found solace in 75% completed meals. My greatest successes were ‘assembling’ dishes – i.e. adding Dolmio sauce to mince beef. I got so good at adding sauce to cooked beef, I actually started to believe Dolmio was am Italian delicacy.
Anyways, flash forward twenty years. Having gone through the motions of thinking i could cook (thank you very fucking much Jamie Oliver. Do you know how inconvenient your books are? I’ve moved 8 times with your self-indulgent cookery tomes, taking up way too much Safestore space). I’m back with 75% dishes. I’ve tried cooking properly. But having just spent close to £60 replicating Robert Rodriguez’s Puerco Pibil and it tasting “okay, slightly bitter”, I’ve all but given up.
The Pibil
Posed Peurco Pibil. With a bit of side salad
I guess those failed attempts at home-made toffee in my mum’s kitchen never quote registered, even though it was probably about £10 worth of sugar and flavouring in the bin (my mum probably considered it investment in my creative development).
Anyways, The City Kitchen. These ready meals are THE MAD NOTES. Killer tasty, 3mins in microwave and no crappy shit in them. So good, I’m actually writing what I just wrote. Way more newsworthy stuff happened today. And then I found it’s basically Tesco’s own brand. Tescos to me has always been ambient, creepy and aggressively self-aware of its own inadequacy and making up for it by projecting HOW FUCKING SUCCESSFUL IT IS to all in sundry, at the expense of style.
Joanne Grew, thegrocer.co.uk – 29 June 2009
“Tesco is targeting City Kitchen at on-the-go professionals and the trial is being rolled out across 17 Tesco Express stores located in affluent areas of London, such as St John’s Wood, Belsize Park and Fulham Palace.”
These have followed me over the last 3 houses I’ve lived in. I am finally an ‘on-the-go professional’? Livin’ the dream, yo.
The meals are free of artificial ingredients and additives. There was a gap in the market for a new range of chilled, convenient ready meals made with quality ingredients, said the spokesman.
“This launch is not about the packaging. It’s very simple: it’s all about the food,” he said. “The current range of ready meals in Tesco is so vast – you can get something from unhealthy to extremely healthy. If you went over to someone in the street and asked what they think of ready meals, many have a perception that they are unhealthy and processed. What we are trying to do is just to get rid of this myth. The City Kitchen range is convenient, healthy and fresh.”
I really want to pat them on the back, commend the range. Now I feel dirty doing so. Plan B – backwards engineering this badboy. I’ll make this dish my bitch. You just wait.
Super Video Graphics Array 