March 2012 was the month where I started to spread my wings. What better way to celebrate the arrival of Spring than a day out in Shropshire on a dual mission.
Without sounding like Cilla off Corrie when she’s on Britain’s Best Bakery narration duties, Shropshire is the home of the fidget pie and also the town of Much Wenlock where locals and visitors alike queue around the corner for the pies of John Ryan (and his sons).
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Here’s your chance to own a limited edition copy of Life of Pies. A humorous travelogue of one man’s search for the ultimate pie.
Life of Pies by Martin Tarbuck
People often do strange things upon approaching middle age. They try to solve unanswered questions or come over all obsessive about the most innocuous of activities.
Some decide to run a marathon or climb Mount Kilimanjaro or learn to play the guitar. Me? I just wanted to find the perfect pie.
We all love pies but who is going […]
February 2012 saw me still tippy-toeing around the North West in my often extended lunch hour and so it was that I found myself being given the evil eye by a track suited youth outside Macclesfield court house. Not surprising really as I was doing a voice recording and holding my phone like one of those tits out of the apprentice. He probably wanted to stab me.
And it is doing (sort of)….
I spent today sifting through nearly 1,500 photos of pies and pastries I have consumed in an attempt to whittle it down to a publishable printed selection.
In a desperate attempt to drum up interest in the book prior to pre-launch, I’ll be banging a few of these photos online in rough chronological order to whet your appetite over the next few weeks.
Horsey horsey So finally, after eating twice the number of pies I had originally planned I bring my mission to a close.
It started on a Friday in January with a trip to Hampsons in Knutsford and me waving a knife about in my car passenger seat to chop up a meat and potato and ended with me sat in a Pie & Ale House in Manchester eating a Horse Pie almost two years […]
Unlike Mariah Carey, all I want for Christmas is to go to Newcastle. It is my last port of call before shutting down the book. I have it all planned out with military precision exactly where I need to go and what I will have at what time. Alas, I’ve been unable to find a day to do it in so I consoled myself last night with a beer or two in the German Christmas […]
“Life of Pies: out Autumn 2013” he said. Yeah well about that.
I’ve faced a two pronged attack you see. On the negative side, I was working too hard to go and roam around the country to get pies and then I kind of lost my job so I wasn’t working at all. The travelling and eating pies bit was no longer a problem but affording them was. Now I’ve got a job again (and it’s […]
It doesn’t sound right that does it? The humble meat and potato is the signature dish of the town of Wigan and is also prevalent in many Lancastrian towns stretching north as far as Morecambe and Barrow.
I’ve had over 100 different ones of these in the past two years and almost all have been typified by their earthy charm’s in terms of filling and of course, the all-important price. A working man (or woman’s) nosebag […]
I got a tweet the other day about the Orrell Bakehouse in Wigan, a pie shop down a back street which made belting pies and is now sadly a pizza and kebab house. Like so many of the back street shops in WN5 or indeed any area it is no more. See the link at the bottom of this piece for a small photo and a bit of nostalgia
I’ve had to lay off the pies for a week or two for one reason or another before pushing on to the conclusion of Life of Pies in the early Autumn so I’ve been using my temporarily pastry free brain to get my records up to date.
Being a boring maths geek as well as a pie obsessive I couldn’t help knock together a chart or two showing my progress to date, in this case one […]
I started off so rigid and uncompromising. I would ONLY eat 200 pies, that they would be meat and potato pies ONLY, and ONLY purchased from local and independent bakers. The meat and potato fetish dried up as soon as I went south of Crewe and the more I travelled, the more discoveries I made which after living in Wigan for most of my 39 years I was blissfully unaware of.
Smile it’s a pie….from the […]
WAYNE ROONEY RETURNS HOME INJURED FROM FAR EAST TOUR scream the newspaper headlines. Poor lad. He probably fancies a pie right now. and I think I’ve found his local pie shop, that’s Wienholts in Alderley Edge, the place where Coleen and the other WAG’s get their steak bakes to go with their fake bakes.
I’m not saying it’s posh around here but I’ve heard off a mate that they call a sausage roll a HAM ROLL, so I am expecting […]
On Sunday night I tucked into what I reckon must have been my 300th pie since my mission commenced* *Or pasty / bake / slice / roll as a substitute where pies were unavailable. It was a Dickinson & Morris Melton Mowbray individual pork pie and it felt apt to be eating such a notable pie for a landmark scoff.
Saturday was spent driving the missus up the wall (as usual) by driving to the heart […]
I’d heard about this place a while back and it came with numerous recommendations. Situated in a non descript corner of Tipton in the West Midlands, I was told that Mad O’Rourkes was THE pie place to go to.
We visited Mad O’Rourkes as a pre cursor to the West Brom v Wigan game and as we approached the establishment it appeared to be heavily scaffolded up and my still empty tummy flipped as I thought “shit, […]
March was a good month for eating pies, according to my records I had 19 of them. Good work eh? Well, yes and no.
I’ve probably alluded to this in the past but the way I operate when I go pie hunting is that I take a camera along with me to get a photo of the goods and I […]