Miss Vickie’s Sea Salt Kettle Cooked Potato Chips

Lightly sea salted, this crisp is a little bit thicker cut than some, but not too much. A very simple crisp. I ate the whole packet (only 38.9g) all at once. I tried to save some for the Chef, honest!, but accidentally ate the lot.

Made with love & care. And very nice too.

Some time ago we tried another Miss Vickie’s; sweet chilli and sour cream flavour, and quite enjoyed it.

Miss Vickie’s Sweet Chilli & Sour Cream / Poivron et Crème Champêtre

Here’s another Canadian crisp from Miss Vickie's. I see the Canadians follow the USA in their spelling of chilli: chili. (Or "child" as my always annoying auto correct would have it.) And again I look at the packaging and think 1887 when actually it says 1987. See what I mean though? It's the lacy edging that does it.

If you've read a number of my posts you may have noticed that I don't usually like sweet chilli as a flavour. And I don't think the sour cream part of the flavour is particularly evident here so that doesn't really impact on my opinion. In this case (unusually for me) I thought the sweet chilli was pretty tasty and I think the reluctant taste testers liked it even better than I did.

Sometimes it's hard to write a lot about a crisp that is quite nice. Not nasty, not fabulous, but quite nice.

So here we are then. A quite nice sweet chilli crisp. Which we quite enjoyed.

Miss Vickie's Jalapeño

A Canadian crisp from Miss Vickie based in Cambridge Ontario. I wonder if there ever was a Miss Vickie? I’d say perhaps yes if this was an old established crisp making company, but since it advertises itself as crafting crisps with care since 1987 I suspect not. 1987 seems a bit recent for a Miss Vickie.

I was, as ever, a bit dubious about the flavour but taken in small quantities I found I really liked it. In fact, all the reluctant taste testers seemed to like this crisp. But they all advised caution. Irish taste tester took a large crisp without asking the flavour and felt there should have been a warning sign. This is not a massively hot crisp but the taste does creep up and hit you if you aren’t careful. Maybe a sour cream dip would work well?

Tall Elegant taste tester thought there was too much salt but no-one else remarked on it.

The styling of the packet is unusually retro with a sort of lace edging to the cream band at the top and a watermark image of an old Canadian farm in pale grey. The packet says proudly kettle cooked in Canada with farm grown potatoes. Sorry. Farm grown? As opposed to what? I do like the bright green though. It’s quite unusual.

And I notice that (because it’s Canadian you get both English and French) the English kettle cooked is translated as cuites a la marmite in Canadian French. In French French this would be chaudron. You learn quite a lot of languages from crisp packets.

Miss Vickie's Applewood Smoked BBQ

Crafted with care since 1987 says the packet. Many of the crispy snack companies I have discovered have been set up far more recently so this probably qualifies as a fairly long standing brand of snack.

I read that Miss Vickie's started out as a farm house crisp made by a a couple called Vickie and Bill Kerr who farmed in Ontario (which is in Canada) but at some time it was bought up by Frito-Lay's. Which means of course that like so many crispy snacks it belongs to the mega marketing monster that is PepsiCo.

So far I have only tried one packet of Miss Vickie's crisps and that not very enthusiastically. Partly because as you probably know I'm not mad for barbecue or BBQ as a flavour. I know a lot of people who love barbecue but I could live without ever tasting another BBQ flavoured crisp. And then there's another reason. As I write I have 7 pills to take each day and one of them, I forget which, has a depressing side effect: it affects your appetite. And in my case it means I don't really fancy crispy snacks just now. I'm just hoping I get over it.

These are the Miss Vickie's flavours listed on Wikipedia: 24 of them and only 2 discontinued. I'm a bit sorry I shall never get the chance to try the Honey & Roasted Garlic flavour. which sounds rather interesting.

• Miss Vickie's Original Recipe (1987)
• Miss Vickie's Sea Salt & Malt Vinegar (1987)
• Miss Vickie's Jalapeño (1998)
• Miss Vickie's Hand-Picked Jalapeño (1999)
• Miss Vickie's Country Onion with 3 Cheeses (1999)
• Miss Vickie's Roasted Garlic & Herb (2001)
• Miss Vickie's Harvest Onion (2002)
• Miss Vickie's Sweet Chili & Sour Cream (2003)
• Miss Vickie's Lime & Black Pepper (2004)
• Miss Vickie's Smokehouse BBQ (2005)
• Miss Vickie's Honey & Roasted Garlic (2005) (Discontinued in 2009)
• Miss Vickie's Roasted Red Pepper Grill (2006)
• Miss Vickie's Vintage Cheddar & Red Onion (2007)
• Miss Vickie's Creamy Buttermilk Ranch (2008)
• Miss Vickie's Unsalted (2008)
• Miss Vickie's Mesquite BBQ (Discontinued in 2008)
• Miss Vickie's Rosemary & Basil (2008)
• Miss Vickie's Crinkle Cut Original (2009)
• Miss Vickie's Balsamic Vinegar & Sweet Onion (2010)
• Miss Vickie's Reduced Fat (2014)
• Miss Vickie's Applewood Smoked BBQ (2015)
• Miss Vickie's Sour Cream & Caramelized Onion (2016)
• Miss Vickie's Harvest Cheddar and Herbs (2017)
• Miss Vickie's Farmhouse White Cheddar (2017)                               

I am going in to work about 6 hours a week now (don't knock it I can't manage any more just yet) and took this packet in to see what the reluctant taste testers had to say. I'm sorry to have to tell you that most of them quite forget they need to tell me what they think, but Slightly Red Haired Bristolian was pleased to approve these crisps.

Not very large crisps, with a slightly heavy bite and a very bright colour, these crisps seem to me to taste strongly of applewood (which I wrongly imagined to be one of the ingredients - it's not). Strange and not really for me. Still, Smokehouse BBQ (on the list above) sounds a lot nastier.

PS The Chef tried one of these crisps and thought it was horrible. He absent mindedly had another and before he knew it had eaten a whole bowlful.