It’s that time of year again when the discount wrapping paper comes off the most insignificant awards in the culinary calender.

The McComb Awards for Dining (otherwise known as the MADs) are now, incredibly, in their third year.

There was such a lukewarm reception to the inaugural MADs, and such a total absence of sponsors, that we decided to run them again in 2010 and are maintaining the tradition for 2011.

We would love to offer an engraved statuette of me to all the deserved winners but in the current economic circumstances it was deemed inappropriate to offer glitzy prizes. I suggested an espresso cup of fish and chip foam to the winner but that was judged “too showy.”

So the lucky recipients of a 2011 MAD will have to make do with my sincere thanks and, of course, the honour of being recognised in possibly the UK’s least influential awards for food and dining.

Event of the Year: Birmingham Chefs Alliance Dinner

Seven of the city’s top chefs cooked side by side at the launch of the revamped Birmingham Food Festival, heralding the latest exciting phase of the city’s culinary evolution.

Brum’s trio of Michelin star chefs joined colleagues from the top end of city cooking to showcase one of the finest concentrations of kitchen talent anywhere in the country. Ingredients featured venison, crab, sea bass and langoustine during an epic seven-course meal at St Martin’s in the Bull Ring, which was converted into a dining room for the lavish occasion.

The multi-skilled team of chefs was overseen by Simon Hellier, head chef at the ICC, who ensured there were no blows in the kitchen or duff plates served to any of the 180 guests.

No other UK city could lay on a dinner of this scale and ambition cooked entirely by homegrown talent. October 13, 2011, was the day Birmingham’s threw down to gauntlet to all-comers and said: come and have a go if you think your cooking’s hard enough.

Best Cafe Lunch: The Green Cafe, Ludlow

Hereford-born chef Clive Davis, who has done the rounds at Pied-à-terre, Bibendum, Zafferano and Rowley Leigh’s Kensington Place, works small rustic miracles in a converted riverside building in Ludlow.

One of the least demonstrative cooks you will come across, Davis melds kitchen experience to individual flair and a total appreciation of simple, big flavours.

I had a fabulous bowl of gnocchi with Italian-style pork and fennel sausage, cooked in a ragu. The bangers are made to Davis’s specification by the butcher at the Ludlow Food Centre, just down the road.

There followed a faultless vanilla panna cotta with unpimped raspberries, washed down with a jug of the sort of sparkling English blackcurrant cordial they used to serve on the lawns of country houses in the 1920s.

If this place was in Hoxton, the national food critics would be flocking to it. But it’s in Shropshire and the journey might give them a nose bleed.

Worst Soup of the Year: Peanut soup, Turners, Birmingham

Michelin-star chef Richard Turner rarely puts a foot wrong, even when he is wearing his flip flops in the kitchen. But Brum’s version of a post-watershed Gordon Ramsay hit the buffers when he gave an underling free rein to develop a recipe for a starter.

The thing with peanuts is that it doesn’t matter what you do to them (spice them, mash them, cook them sous vide) they always end up tasting like a pub snack.

I am pleased to report this was a brief aberration and the dish was killed off before you could say Sun-Pat.

Annoyingly, the “peanut incident,” as it has become known, only served to highlight Turner’s otherwise stupendously good cooking.

Best Posh Lunch of the Year: Purnell’s, Birmingham

The best things sometimes happen when you least expect them.

Now it’s not that you wouldn’t expect a good lunch at Glynn Purnell’s, it’s just that I hadn’t planned to be there on the day in question.

I walked in off the street and nabbed a table for one having scooped the grand total of £25 on the Premium Bonds. Fail to eat at Purnell’s today, regret at leisure – at least that was my argument for spending the cash on gastronomy rather than groceries.

Like all the best lunches, I can barely remember what I ate. I know the starter was a delightful beetroot salad. I shouldn’t have liked it that much because beetroot has been all over the place this year, but that’s the difference between a master and the wannabes. Purnell can do things with a root veg that make your eyes water.

It’s the essence of things I can recall, like the red wine octopus – delicious – and the precision cooking.

I’ve said it before and I’ll keep on saying it: places like Purnell’s (Edmunds, Simpsons etc) offer terrific value for money with their lunch menus. Here, you get three courses for £26 for some of the best cooking in the UK.

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