Shop Talk: Having your fill

LORD Sandwich has a lot to answer for. But at least he kept it simple. All he did was slap some beef between two slices of bread and lo - he had created a fast food empire. We all eat lots of sandwiches. About 155 a year each apparently. Most of those are made at home, but a fifth of them are bought ready-made. And it's a sector that's growing rapidly.

And as we get fed up with the gap between our own home-made cheese and pickle and the top of the range readymade - hoisin duck wrap, perhaps, or brie, grape and walnut - we're going for a compromise and buying ready-made sandwich fillers.

Is it really so hard to boil an egg and mash a bit of mayonnaise in? Apparently so.

As it is National Sandwich Week next week (It's also National Condom Week but don't let that put you off...) we've been turning life into one long picnic by testing some of those fillings.

OUR FAVOURITES...

MARKS & SPENCER Poached salmon and cucumber £1.99 for 170g

Chunks of salmon, crispy bits of cucumber, dash of lemon, horseradish sauce, mayonnaise, dill and yoghurt.

Delicious, taste of summer and tricky to do quickly and easily at home. If you're going to be extravagant and buy sandwich fillings, this is the one to buy.

TESCO Coronation chicken £1.21 for 250g

Excellent, the best Coronation chicken - chunks of chicken with peaches, apricots, almonds and sultanas.

MORRISONS Coronation chicken 99p for 170g

Another good flavour and texture.

GOOD TASTE BUT EXTRAVAGANT...

CO-OP Egg mayonnaise 69p for 200g and Co-op Free range egg mayonnaise £1.25 for 200g

We applaud the Co-op for giving our sandwiches a better life, but could taste very little difference between them.

MARKS & SPENCER Free range egg and mayonnaise 99p for 170g

MORRISONS Egg mayonnaise 69p for 170g

SAFEWAY Egg mayonnaise 69p for 170g

SAINSBURY'S Egg mayonnaise 89p for 170g

TESCO Chunky free range egg mayonnaise £1.35 for 250g

All these tasted fine. Just like home-made in fact. And as boiling an egg isn't rocket science, don't let the supermarkets make a profit from your laziness.

WE ALSO LIKED...

CO-OP Corned beef and onion £1.05

A refreshing down-to-earth change from some of the more exotic offerings.

CO-OP Chicken, bacon and sweetcorn £1.55

- because many of the other supermarket offerings containing bacon used a rather nasty smoked bacon which overwhelmed everything.

MARKS & SPENCER Smoked salmon and soft cheese £1.99 for 170g. Very salmony and a very rich smoked taste. This divided testers - you love it or hate it. No half measures.

MORRISONS Chicken tikka 99p for 170g - good interesting taste.

WE DIDN'T LIKE...

MORRISONS Seafood cocktail 99p for 170g

This was very nasty and tasted of imitation crab sticks. Horrid.

SAFEWAY Coronation chicken 99p for 170g - most peculiar taste.

SAINSBURY'S Prawn mayonnaise £1.59

Awful, awful. Gloopy, watery mayonnaise littered with pink prawns which look like plastic - and taste like it too.

TESCO Chunky seafood cocktail £1.49 for 250g

Horrid. Another dollop of gloopy mayonnaise and those nasty pink bits. Not nice at all.

REMEMBER

...whenever experts are advising on quick ways to save money, one of the first things they suggest is not to buy ready-made sandwiches. Buying fillings instead is at least a step in the right direction...

TEN SANDWICH FACTS TO CHEW OVER

* Marks & Spencer were the first to launch pre-packed sandwiches in 1981

* The commercial sandwich market is worth £3.5m a year.

* This is the equivalent of 2,432million sandwiches

* Plain chicken is the most popular filling in bought sandwiches

* Cheese is the most popular filling in home-made sandwiches

* Men buy 57 per cent of all ready-made sandwiches

* Most ready-made sandwiches are bought at work (19 per cent), followed by supermarkets (18 per cent), cafes (18 per cent) and bakers (17 per cent)

* Most sandwiches are made by hand. But Marks & Spencer have an automated plant that butters the bread, fills the sandwiches, seasons them, cuts and packs them - all by machine.

* Ginsters is famous for its Cornish pasties but also makes nearly a million sandwiches a week.

* The British sandwich industry now employs more than 300,000 people - more than who work in agriculture.

Bouquets of the Week

Dear Sharon,

I HAD a bad fall outside the Postchaise Hotel in Bishop Auckland. The management and staff were very good to me, took me in and gave me a lovely cup of tea. When I felt better, they sent me home in a taxi and also sent some lunch for me with the driver and would not take any payment. This is kindness indeed.

Mrs D. Hutchinson, Bishop Auckland.

WELL done to the staff of the Postchaise for their kindness and concern. We're sending them this week's bouquet and also our good wishes to Mrs Hutchinson and hope she has now completely recovered.

Also thanks to those who came to the aid of Sheila Johnson when she was taken ill in the centre of Darlington recently ("out too soon after a dose of the flu"), especially to the lady who used her mobile to phone Sheila's daughter, as Sheila recovered on the benches outside BHS. "I don't know who any of them were, but they were all most kind and caring."

"Well done Orange!" says Jean Brown of Darlington, whose daughter had her mobile phone stolen while on a visit to York. "I rang Orange with some dread as I have had some problems with them in the past. But a very pleasant young man took all the details and the next day a courier delivered a new phone. In fact, it arrived home before my daughter did. Excellent service."

And Peter Roberts e-mailed about the Food and Drink Festival in Leyburn at the weekend. "It was wonderful to see so many small local companies producing wonderful food. It was food with proper flavour, produced with care. I went home with bulging carrier bags and have been delighted with everything I sampled. You wrote recently about the big supermarkets who sell the same things in identical shops all over the country. What a wonderful change it made to have proper local food."

l If you want to say a public thank you for good service or to a helpful neighbour, kind stranger or efficient business, then just write with all the details to Sharon Griffiths, Bouquet of the Week, The Northern Echo, Priestgate, Darlington, DL1 1NF. Each week the person nominated in our main letter gets a real bouquet of flowers or a box of hand made chocolates from The Little Chocolate Shop in Leyburn. www.thelittlechocolateshop.co.uk

APOLOGIES...

IN the office a few weeks ago, I opened my post, picked up the pile and...well, I don't know what I did with it then. All I know is that, unfortunately, it's vanished. I can remember that there were a couple of letters for Bouquet of the Week in the bundle. It might, of course, turn up, reappear down the back of a radiator or in someone else's in tray. But if you wrote to me within the last month or so and have not had a reply or your lette r in the paper, then I can only apologise and suggest, humbly, that you send the details in again. And next time, I'll try and be more careful.

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