Sunday 1 March 2009

Fynn Valley Foods improved pies

Another sampling of Fynn Valley Foods’ 5.5oz pies to follow our walk today. When we last sampled these on the 19th October, the filling was very salty. I wrote to Fynn Valley Foods and told them that we deemed their pies to be too salt. They replied that they had a similar complaint and were going to halve the salt content. Only 6 pie munchers set off from Stalham towards Brumstead, as Margaret was nursing a hangover. The going was good and we soon reached St. Peter’s church, which was unfortunately locked and also had no scratch dials. We then headed south, down Parker’s lane and then eastwards to Ingham and the huge Holy Trinity church, this was our lunch stop. We photographed both the scratch dials in the porch, as we’d only photographed one before. After perusing the interior of the church and admiring the green and red purbeck marble columns supporting the font, we headed back towards Stalham and the squat church of St. Mary. Here we found a further two scratch dials.
The two scratch dials at St. Mary - the one on the left is in the porch!
The church was open and we admired the beautifully preserved font and tried unsuccessfully to identify each of the 12 apostles. This was all too taxing and called for a beer! We headed off for liquid refreshment in the form of a nice pint of Adnams in the Swan Inn. Rejuvenated and with our palates in prime condition, we had a short walk to the car to sample the pies: When cut they had a good aroma, though not prolific and revealed a coarse pink filling, with a little jelly. The pastry was no more than OK, but had a very pleasant taste. The filling, tasty and nicely seasoned. It was good that Fynn Valley Foods had taken onboard the pie munchers comments, as they were now judged to have a score of 7.75 with a standard deviation of only 0.27386. The Walk Master, not only produced a good interesting walk, he stood in as ‘Tea lady’ and also produced Shortcake to complete proceedings! The Pheasant Pâté was kept for the return of the Führer, so Fynn Valley Food’s new recipe pies score a normalised 8.