Are supermarkets really a recipe for success?

As you know, Head Chef Neil is something of a wizz in the kitchen, so it'll come as no surprise when I tell you that he's also a big fan of cookery programmes. 

From the Hairy Bikers to Masterchef, Heston Blumenthal and Hugh Fearny-Whats-His Face, Neil loves a bit of food porn. But as we sat down to watch The Great British Menu last night (zany Tony for the win, by the way) I fell to wondering whether all these TV chefs might have something to answer for when it comes to the nation's shopping habits.

After all, when you're sat watching Something For The Weekend or The Great British Bake Off and decide you want to have a go at recreating a recipe, how often do you find you've got all the ingredients in your larder? 

It's all too easy to assume that those most reliant on the supermarkets are busy parents or people who work long hours and don't have the time or inclination to cook a meal from scratch or go to their local shops. We are the turkey twizzler generation after all. But I reckon the aisles must also be populated by a large number of would-be-chefs trying to hunt down a list of unusual ingredients to recreate a recipe.

My other half is a big fan of using the "right" ingredients. If, for example, a recipe calls for shallots, he will cheerfully head out to the shops to buy some despite the fact that we usually have several white onions in stock that could be used as a substitute.

So with the growing fashion for unusual and exotic recipes (that of course tend to contain unusual ingredients) are we growing to rely more heavily on the big supermarkets which tend to be the only places you can easily find out-of-season or exotic produce?

We've also recently been watching the Mary Berry Story. For the uninitiated, Mary is one of the judges on The Great British Bake Off and at the grand old age of 77 she has written more than 70 cookbooks and starred in a huge number of TV shows. What has been fascinating about the  current BBC2 programme charting her success is how food fashions have changed over the years. When Mary first began her career it was all about teaching housewives and cooks how to make delicious dinners out of whatever you happened to have in the kitchen, making food stretch further and using up every last bit of whatever ingredients you had.

Oh how times have changed.

If we really want to make the most out of our local greengrocers, butchers and farm shops then we need to become more adapt at making meals from seasonal produce and adapting recipes to fit in with what they have in stock - rather than trotting off to Tesco to find yet another exotic spice that will no doubt only be used once and then sit in the store cupboard gathering dust.

We're certainly starting to get our heads around this idea now. On Monday we used lemon Wensleydale in a recipe that called for feta, with great success. So lets all take a leaf out of Heston's book and get creative in the kitchen... rather than rigidly sticking to recipes and being slaves to the supermarket shelves....