ONCE a week, chef Pam Mollan stands in Huddersfield’s Queensgate Market handing out samples of home cooking.

As she does so she explains that her culinary efforts are designed to draw attention to the fact that our town has an excellent indoor market full of fresh fruit and vegetables, dairy produce meat and other foods.

The initiative, launched three weeks ago by Kirklees’ Investment and Regeneration Service and called Tasty Wednesdays, is one of those win-win ideas. It promotes wholesome home cooking, gives lunchtime shoppers a free lunch snack and tempts them to support market traders.

I went along to the market’s Demonstration Zone last week to watch as Pam, a former lecturer at Kirklees College and catering entrepreneur, offered shoppers a seasonal dish with strong Yorkshire connections – rhubarb and stem ginger crumble – as well as a classic apple crumble.

Those who stopped to taste agreed that both were delicious, but it was the rhubarb and ginger dish that won the most praise.

“I’ll take a recipe back home for my wife to cook,” said one chap.

“It’s a great idea,” said Debra West, visiting Huddersfield for the day from Rotherham to attend a social work conference at the university.

“I wish they did something like this where I live.”

Her colleague Jo Asquith, from Paddock, agreed: “It’s good that you get the recipe – and it’s promoting the market where you can get the ingredients.”

Valerie Barnes, a Holmfirth resident, was paying her second visit to Tasty Wednesdays.

She said: “I tried the soups last week and they were really lovely. I will be doing them myself.”

And that is exactly what Pam wants to hear.

“The whole point of it is that we want to show people that it’s easy to cook,” she explained.

“All my recipes are easy. They don’t contain 10 different ingredients that are expensive and hard to source. They can all be bought in the market.”

Pam, who lives in Calderdale where she runs her own business, Your Secret Gourmet, spent several years teaching both adults and children to cook.

“What I have always tried to do is give people the confidence to cook,” she said.

“One of the problems that people have today is a lack of time. Cookery programmes have brought cookery into people’s homes and travel has brought different tastes but there is still a gap between watching a programme for entertainment and actually doing it.

“However you can take a few basic ingredients and make them into something wonderful that doesn’t take a lot of time.”

This week Pam featured two lasagnes – one meat, one vegetable – and plans to take market goers on a culinary journey through family favourites and more unusual dishes from fish pie and chicken curry to banana cake and potato and cauliflower bake.

She’ll also be running monthly childrens’ mini workshops in the market’s Demonstration Zone. This Saturday she will be teaching youngsters how to make pizzas and future treats will include butterfly cakes, fruit kebabs and pasta salad.

“It’s really important for children to sample real food,” said Pam. “There’s a generation that doesn’t even know where meat comes from.”

Pam raised her own children Harry and Robert, who are now grown up, on home-cooked dishes and says that both are keen cooks.

She said: “To go for a burger or pizza was always classed as a treat – they were never staples in our diet,” she explained. “When they went to university both my boys did the cooking for everyone in their student houses.”

The first Tasty Wednesday on April 10 attracted more than 140 shoppers to sample three soups – cream of mushroom, spicy butternut squash and winter vegetable.

“I got a lot of positive comments,” said Pam. “One person came from Doncaster because they’d heard about it and one father brought his boys in and said they would be making soup the next day.

“If children can be more hands on with the cooking then they’ll be more inclined to eat home cooked food. Cooking has a feelgood factor and can include the whole family.”

Producing wholesome, additive-free foods is important to Pam, whose catering business provides soups, gourmet ready meals, cakes and pastries.

She sells to catering establishments and through farmer’s markets. The new Upmarket Sundays venture at the Brook Street Open Market in Huddersfield is her latest outlet.

Pam, who is one of the organisers of Holmfirth Food Festival, added: “The other thing about buying from local producers and in the market is that you can chat to the person you are buying from and know what you are buying. With the recent uproar over meat that’s important.”

Tasty Wednesdays was the brainchild of Maria Cotton, Business and Development Manager based at the market. She is delighted with its success so far.

“I was trying to think of how we could promote the traders in the market and came up with the idea of turning cookery demonstrations around so that you get the end product at the beginning to taste,” she said.

“I look after the food and drink festival in Holmfirth where we have cookery demonstrations, but I thought that no-one has the time to watch a full demonstration in the market at lunchtime so we needed something short and snappy.

“What we’re trying to do is change people’s perceptions of the market and encourage students and others to come in and see what’s available.”

Next Wednesday will see Pam produce a variety of stuffed jacket potatoes, with sampling from noon until 1.30pm.

Spicy Butternut Squash Soup

Ingredients:

1 small butternut squash (quartered with seeds removed); 2 onions (diced); 1 litre vegetable stock; ½ teaspoon chilli seeds; 1 level teaspoon ground ginger; 1 level teaspoon paprika; ½ teaspoon mixed spice

Method:

Place squash in a hot oven and bake for about an hour. Cook onions in a large pan until soft; add spices and cook for one minute. Add stock, scoop out the flesh and add to the pan.

Simmer for 30 minutes and blend

Check seasoning and adjust if necessary.

Beef Lasagne

Meat sauce:

400g lean minced beef;

1 onion, diced; 1 tin of chopped tomatoes; 1 dessertspoon tomato puree; ½ teaspoon dried oregano; 1 beef stock cube in 300ml hot water; Salt and pepper to taste

Béchamel sauce:

40g butter or margarine; 40g plain flour; 400ml milk; salt and pepper to taste; 100g grated cheddar; 3 sheets of fresh pasta

Method:

In a saucepan cook meat and onions gently without any extra fat or oil until onions are soft. Add tomato puree and cook for one minute. Add oregano, stock and chopped tomatoes and simmer for 20 minutes. Check seasoning.

Make the sauce by melting the butter/margarine in a saucepan, stir in flour and cook for one minute. Slowly add milk, beating well between each addition. Season.

Assemble by smearing a little béchamel sauce on the bottom of a 23cm oblong or similar shallow ovenproof dish. Place one lasagne sheet on top.

Divide meat mixture into two and spread over lasagne sheet. Repeat, finishing off with the final lasagne sheet.

Pour remaining sauce over the top and sprinkle with grated cheese. Bake in the oven, 180C, Gas 6 for 30 minutes until the cheese has melted and it is golden brown.

Rhubarb & Ginger Crumble

Ingredients:

700g rhubarb, trimmed & cut into 2cm pieces; 2 pieces of stem ginger in syrup, finely chopped; 2 tablespoons of stem ginger syrup from the jar; 25g sugar

For the crumble topping:

175g plain flour; 50g rolled oats; 100g margarine; 50g sugar; 50g flaked almonds.

Method: Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/Gas 4.

Method:

Tip rhubarb into a 20cm/8in-deep pie dish and mix in the ginger, ginger syrup and sugar.

For the crumble, put flour into a bowl with the oats. Rub butter in with your fingertips to create crumbs. Stir in sugar and almonds. Spoon half the crumble mix on top of the rhubarb and pat down. Sprinkle over the remainder and leave it sitting loosely. Bake in the oven for about 45 minutes or until rhubarb is tender and topping is golden-brown.