Scotland: National Rural Network
To celebrate Scottish Food and Drink Fortnight, we're asking you to tell us about your favourite Scottish food and/or drink. It could be a memorable meal at a Scottish restaurant, your favourite home cooked meal or the Scottish produce that you prize over all others. Tell us what your favourite food and drink is by commenting in this forum.
Find out more about Scottish Food and Drink Fortnight in Food and Drink Fortnight celebrates Scotland's larder.
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Favourite Scottish Food
The wealth of fresh food available out of our sea and freshwater lochs is something that we need to shout about more and utilise more. Come on - calling all Scotlands food outlets
My personal favourites are Highland heather fed lamb, rich slow matured highland cattle and of course our wonderful prawns out our scenic sea lochs. All cooked to perfection - pink lamb, rare beef and sweet sweet prawns.
Smoked haggis, older lamb and Highland beef
I recently came across the rare delicacy of smoked haggis in Ballards - butchers in Castle Douglas. A fascinating range of tastes and especially good when used to make lasagne :)
Barlochan Farm near Dalbeattie has started to market lamb that is almost 2 years old - what a sensation!!! The flavours are very different from the usual spring lamb and well worth trying.
Barlochan also offer beef from Highland cattle - quite superb!
Enjoy it all...
Pete
Good Food - Lamb
Pete I agree, there is nothing better than last years lamb in about July - off the hill having feasted on young heather tips and fresh hill grass. Tender, lean and totally delicious
Heather Fed Lamb
You rightly praise the great flavour from our naturally fed, slow grown food but we need to shout more about it.
Our native breeds were nurtured and developed over generations to convert poor quality, natural, grazing, by thriving and surviving with little more than fresh air and a good view.
Since the war, a combination of EU and national government policies, ironically, to try and safeguard food supply, when combined with supermarket power, have resulted in market failure and threatened an end to this natural asset. An exodus from the hills, of sheep, beef and stocksmen, comes at a time of looming food shortages.
What was available to all, has now become a niche product.
Scotland's native breeds when fed naturally produce healthy, tasty, high quality protein rich in omega 3 as well as great flavours.
Favourite Scottish Food
I love food. I love locally grown food. Particularily, creative Scottish breakfasts. Some of my best food experiences are, creamy scrambled eggs with oak smoked roast salmon through it from Gloagburn Farm Shop at Perth. Delicious home made fruit compote from a farmhouse B&B at St Boswalls. Porridge with whisky and cream at the MacDonald Highland Hotel, Aviemore. Great creative starts to the day.
Motorway food, I avoid, but the food at the House of Bruar, the rich man's pit stop up the M9, is always a real treat for me.
Gin
Can I recommend Blackwood's Gin - a fine spirit produced in our own fair country! Delicious!
Phenomenal!
Lots of delicious things spring to mind, such as Arbroath Smokies and MacKie's ice cream, but one of my favourite Scottish treats is a nice cold pint of Irn Bru. Yes, you can take the girl out of Glasgow....but you can't take Glasgow out of the girl!
Lobster is over-rated!
My favourite snack, which unfortunately I don't have often enough, is the meat from crab claws. It's so delicious and much tastier than any prawns or lobster I've ever tasted. Mixed together with a little mayo and a few squeezes of lemon juice on fresh brown bread and butter there's nothing to beat it!!
Fresh Scottish seafood, especially scallops!
Not sure about oysters being fav, Norette, but I do love seafood, and its very hard to find anything better than the freshly caught produce you get in some of Scotlands coastal towns and villages - Scallops especially!
Yummers!...
Oysters
There are many Scottish foods that I love, including Stornoway Black Pudding, tattie scones and West Highland Dairy blue cheese, but the one I love above all others is the oyster. And the best oysters I've ever had were from Loch Fine Oysters at the Belladrum Festival. My friend and I managed to polish off 24 of them, and if we hadn't run out of money we probably would have continued!
Icecream, chocolates, tablet & gin!
There is stiff competition in the vanilla icecream stakes. I'm very much torn between Caldwells in Innerleithen, and the icecream in Brora. For chocolates it has to be those made by Lucas Story & sold in his wee shop in the Victorian market in Inverness - in my opinion they just can't be bettered. In the running for best tablet has to be that made & sold in Melrose (can't remember what the shop's called, but it's on the corner opposite the National Trust shop if that's any help!).
And my favourite g&t is definitely to be had in The Dome on George Street in Edinburgh - the gin is just the same as you'll get anywhere, but the building is stunning & I love sitting at the bar people watching.
favourite food
As you say there are many dishes that come to mind, but it has to be steak pie for me - in particular the Cooperative steak pie from Kilsyth my old home town!