Newby Hall, near Ripon

Baked pototo alert: at the Garden Cafe at Newby Hall, near Ripon, North Yorkshire, I had a baked potato filled with mildly curried chicken with grapes and pine nuts, quite expensive at GBP6.75. The assistant lifted it out of a metal box that steamed as its lid was raised. The potato itself was well cooked all the way through, but it was hardly fluffy and its skin was sad. I wasn't too disappointed as the copious filling was enjoyable and overwhelmed the poor spud.

But this is supposed to be a photo blog

What sort of photographer am I? A photo-opportunist? No; I’m not a cad. A photo-forager? No; I don’t usually go out deliberately looking for photos. I once fancied myself a photo-flaneur, loafing about aimlessly aiming to stumble upon some moment of photographic bliss, but my recent reading of Edmund White’s book The Flaneur put paid to that conceit, and it’s not really what I do anyway. Perhaps I was just attracted by the Gauloise fragrance of the word and its hint of continental intellectualism. Still, I have contributed one or two photos to the flickr group Gallery Flaneur. No, I just go about my daily business with a camera in my pocket. If anything that strikes me as beautiful, interesting, telling, touching, important or just useful: snap. Serendipity. So I suppose I am a photo-serendipitist.

Example 1. Northwood House, Leeds, taken from the top deck of the number 36 bus as it stopped for a moment at traffic lights just north of Leeds bus station. This handsome old building (Grade II listed) rising out of a sea of urban ordinariness was an arresting sight, vaguely reminiscent of the gunship The Fighting Temeraire being towed away to be broken up in JMW Turner’s painting in The National Gallery. Ricoh GX100 compact camera with a bit of postproduction tweaking to get rid of the squashed flies and grime on the bus’s window.

Intro

Snaps are the main feature of this blog. Snacks - bought from cafes, not home-made ones - are included as a public service to counterbalance the self-indulgence of showing my photos. Snacks means baked potatoes (= jacket potatoes) and fish and chips.

A good baked potato is hard to find in this microwaved world. We (your blogger and lady S) do not expect a small cafe to offer the apotheosis of the baked potato as described by Nigel Slater in The Observer, steaming hot after one and a quarter hours at Regulo 6 with perfect fluffy flesh and crispy brown skin, but neither do we want to waste our money on a sad dod of half-cooked starch in a pale, limp apology for a skin. Something in between will do, the closer to the Slater end of the spectrum the better.

We will recommend places where you can get a decent baked potato or fish and chips as we come across them in our research programme, which is necessarily desultory and totally unsponsored. A decent baked potato is one that is properly cooked all the way through, with reasonably fluffy flesh and a properly crisp skin, or at least a skin that looks as if it’s seen the inside of a real oven even though it may have been tarted up for a second or two in a … [can’t bring myself to type the word, sorry]. I love the Slater skin, obviously, but I also enjoy a skin that’s as thick and tough as old boot leather.

Our part of England is called Up North (that’s well beyond Potters Bar if you want to get technical), so most of our tips will be for this area.

So far we have no recommendations for fish and chips - we’ve sampled some chip ’oyls (Yorkshire term for fish & chip shops) but haven’t been impressed with any of them. We’ve had better luck with baked potatoes, so here are the first results of our baked potato research.

One or other of us has had a decent baked potato from these establishments, visited between January and June 2010:

Fodder, 4 John Street, Harrogate HG1 1JZ, 01423 564 252.

Terrace Café Bar, 83 Bingley Road, Shipley, West Yorkshire BD184SB, 01274 533 084.

Francis Tea Room, 7 South Street, Scarborough YO11 2BP, 01723 350550 (mine had a very good corned beef and spiced apple chutney filling).

A Little Chef on the A1 or A1(M) somewhere in the north. Sorry I can't be more specific. I'll post the precise location if I remember it or visit it again.

So much for this being a photo blog. All in good time ... Meanwhile, have a look at my flickr page.