Ginola

Coach trip has been a guilty pleasure of students and those on duvet days for years. It reminds me of our 24 hour coach journeys to the South of France as a child. The combination of the deliciously camp host, angry Brits abroad and randomly rubbish locations they are dragged to makes for the most cringy and absorbing television. Why do these people want to stay on the coach anyway?

But I was very excited to hear that season two of the show stopped off in St Maxime in the Cote D'Azur, near where I have been on holiday recently. The coach trippers were treated to a game of football on the beach with local celebrity and vineyard owner - David Ginola. Now I haven't seen the episode in question yet, but I'm imagining the wondrous ex-footballer cum vintner stepping out of the Azure sea in an Ursula Andres style, locks flowing. I can't wait for C4 catch up to roll out it's entire archive and prove me right.

Ginola has been taking his wine production very seriously though, he won a silver award at the London International Wine fair for his Coste Brulade, which is apparently a delicate, dry rose. When David appeared on the One Show to talk about his wine the producers asked a load of Geordie women (he once played football for Newcastle you see) to rate it against standard rose plonk and they loved it too.

Popina

On my recent trip to Broadway market, I noticed - and treated myself to - a savoury tart from the Popina stall.

I knew it rang a UKTV Food bell in my head, and I remembered that Popina had featured recently in Rachel Allen Bake! the show sees her and a class baking something each week from her cookery school in Ballymaloe, Ireland. There is also a recorded insert each week where she meets an artisan baker/chocolatier etc.

Rachel met Isidora Popovic who runs Popina from a factory unit in Colliers Wood. Each tart is created by hand and has no colourings or flavourings, and all the ingredients for each of their tarts are listed on their website. They also showed the lucky individual whose job it was, among other things, to crack 6000 eggs each week by hand.

Popina tarts, brownies and pastries are on sale in Portabello market as well as a host of London farmers markets. Find out where here .

Tarra-gone

Needing to use up the masses of tarragon I acquired for the mushroom risotto and short on time and inspiration, I decided to make 30 Minute Chicken and Tarragon Pasta from the BBC Good Food website.

Oh my God, I made a mess of it. Two cloves of garlic is way too much and I didn't chop them enough at all, I was choking on chunks of raw garlic. Plus I accidentally added loads of the woody ends branches of the tarragon, which were also inedible. Utterly vile. It is sad when so many nice ingredients make a meal so disgusting. It's put me off tarragon - and possibly even pasta and garlic, for quite some time. Glad to see all the hours of food TV I watch is so useful to me in the kitchen.

Mushroom stroganoff

I spent a lovely Saturday in Broadway market, which I'll write about more in the next few posts I'm sure. I picked up a little box of "exotic mushrooms" on the way round. Not quite exotic enough to send me tripping off to casualty, as happened to my uncle last year, but still quite unrecognisable to my untrained eye.

I decided to make a mushroom stroganoff, it's always the favourite meal at my parent's local, and I thought I might be able to try and recreate it. I roughly followed this recipe from the excellent BBC Good Food website. Although I used red wine instead of sherry and sour cream instead of crème fraîche. It turned out really nice, although I should have seasoned it much more - John and Gregg would not have been impressed.