Love it or Hate it?

In our household we are Marmite haters. Same goes for Bovril. Yet today I found myself in the supermarket buying a jar! Why on earth would I do something so stupid?

Well, I was making Ham Broth this morning and as I pottered around the kitchen I got to thinking about how I'm not allowed Worcestershire Sauce anymore and how I still hadn't found an acceptable replacement for the many recipes I used to splash it in (though my sister does have a bottle of Sheffield's secret sauce for me when I next visit). Anyhow, I remembered a friend mentioning that they stir a spoon of peanut butter in to vegetable stew to give it a bit of a meatiness to it and that got me thinking about whether marmite would add that richness that I was so missing in the worcestershire sauce.

When I plan our meals for the week, I occasionally get stuck in a rut of rotating the same 5 or 6 meals fortnightly so sometimes I have a week where I take out the cookbooks and we try completely new meals. One recipe I found (dark and sticky stew) called for a spoon of marmite stirred in. Having already been thinking about Marmite earlier in the day, it was fate, I couldn't just skip it from the recipe, it had to be tried.

So, there we have it. A jar of marmite in a hating household. I don't think this will swing me to the love side, I could never smear it on my toast but if it helps replace the worcestershire, then I guess it can't be so bad.

In other news: I've been backblipping