I am a chilli wuss. For someone of Indian descent, this can be quite embarrassing. People are constantly surprised by my inability to tolerate chilli heat and even my mum has to tone down the heat a little when cooking for me. And North Indian cuisine isn’t that hot to begin with! It’s not that [Read More...]

When I was first sent a press release about Namaaste Kitchen in Camden, I was intrigued. Owner, director and “patron chef” Sabir Karim has described the restaurant as an “Indian grill and bar”, with the grill open to view from the restaurant. Unusually, drinks, bar snacks, and an all-day menu are served seven days a [Read More...]

I met up with a PR friend recently, to discuss new brands and projects her agency are working on, and to catch up about blogging in general. She also has her own blog, so can see things from both perspectives, which is a welcome insight. We met at Carom at Meza (one of her clients) [Read More...]

This month’s Bloggers Scream For Ice Cream challenge theme is chocolate. Instead of making a straight chocolate ice cream, I decided on mint choc chip as it’s a flavour I love but have never made before. Of course, it couldn’t be just any mint choc chip, oh no! I envisaged a triple mint affair using [Read More...]

For many, Pinterest is a place to collect recipes they’ll never make, fashion they’ll never buy, places they’ll never visit and a random assortment of cute pets, inspiring quotes, celebrity photos and house porn. My boards have some of that too, but I also pins things I may actually make. One of the craft ideas [Read More...]

With just under 200 grams of shortcrust flan pastry leftover from making the pea, mushroom and mint flan plus a generous harvest of purple sprouting broccoli from the allotment, I decided to use both in a second flan.   The pastry was just enough to line a smaller oven dish, and I used the scraps [Read More...]

I already own Eggs and Sauces, the first two titles in Michel Roux’s series of reference books on classic techniques and recipes. So I was very happy to receive a review copy of Pastry: Savoury and Sweet. There are chapters for shortcrust pastries, enriched sweet pastries, puff pastry, raised pie pastry, brioche dough, croissant dough, [Read More...]

I’ve really enjoyed the taste tests I’ve run so far – for Christmas pudding, chocolate Easter eggs and alcoholic ginger beer. It’s fun to get together with fellow food lovers to focus on one chosen food or drink. And in terms of generating a useful and fair result, my feeling is that amalgamating feedback from [Read More...]

Pete and I recently spent 48 hours in Amsterdam. Eschewing all the normal tourist attractions, we spent all our waking hours eating and drinking our way around the city. I’ve already written about food specialities to look out for in Amsterdam. In this post, I’ll share places we stopped for coffee, cakes and snacks during [Read More...]

I was recently invited to a tasting event to learn about Scotch beef. It was an eye-opening experience, and I learned a great deal about beef in general and Scotch beef in particular. Firstly, why Scotch beef and not Scottish beef or beef from Scotland? Because they all mean different things: To be described as [Read More...]