This recipe for meatballs with vodka sauce is taken from Jane Lawson’s Snowflakes and Schnapps, a Scandinavian-influenced cookery book. Find out more about the book in my review of Snowflakes and Schnapps. With little to nothing by way of recipe introductions, it’s harder to choose what to make. Perhaps it’s for this reason that I went ... Read more »
Snowflakes and Schnapps by Jane Lawson has a Scandinavian feel about it, focused as it is on hearty dishes with a winter theme. But actually, Australian-born Lawson covers a much wider swathe of Europe in this tome. The book’s blurb invites us to “Join Jane Lawson as she takes you on a culinary journey through ... Read more »
A few months ago I reviewed John Torode’s Chicken And Other Birds. This time it’s the turn of his latest book, Beef And Other Bovine Matters. The chicken pie we made to his recipe was a thing of beauty. Would his Aunty Mary’s beef pie be as good? Whereas the chicken pie recipe called for ready-made ... Read more »
This easy sausage curry is a one-pot, easy-peasy, inauthentic-but-tasty recipe is I created during my student days. Throughout that day, I dreamed happily of the dinner I planned to make that evening, secure in the knowledge that I’d already done the shopping the day before and everything I needed was waiting for me in the shared ... Read more »
After screaming in delight at the telly when Mat Follas won Masterchef 2009 my friends and I had a fantastic meal at his new restaurant, The Wild Garlic, during our summer holiday in Dorset last year. Mat also kindly gave me an interview, which remains one of the most popular posts on my blog to ... Read more »
Indulgence Coffee is a book about nostalgia. Published in April, it’s part of a series by Murdoch Books which aims to celebrate vintage style and “a bygone era when dressing up, serving tea in fine china and writing personal thank you notes afterwards were regarded as simply good manners.” In that, it succeeds, full of ... Read more »
West Dorset has become a place of pilgrimage for food lovers. Not only is it a land of abundance, with wild garlic growing… well, wild… along the verges and dairy cows mooing in delight over the lush green grass, it offers a fabulous selection of top class eating experiences of which we sampled only a ... Read more »
Like many others, we watched Big Chef takes on Little Chef, often in horrified fascination – most of that horror being reserved for Ian Pegler’s excruciating screen minutes. Didn’t he just talk the most astounding amount of bollocks? Didn’t he?! Pretty much all of what Pegler said and did annoyed me, not least the fact ... Read more »
Books on growing your own fruit and vegetables seem to be ten a penny at the moment, as publishers leap onto the latest bandwagon, keen to milk the home farming phenomenon. Often dull and weighty tomes, they add little to the existing excellent literature already available. Celia Brook Brown’s New Urban Farmer makes a refreshing change, ... Read more »
Just in case you’d forgotten (as though I’d let you!), back in March I was the proud (and extremely surprised) winner of the first Food Debate, shouting out for cheese. Although there was no prize proffered beforehand, when I stepped down from the stage, organiser James came over to tell me that there was a ... Read more »
The Place of Onions, in old Lille. After last night’s rainstorm the intense sticky heat has broken and today is cool, breezy, fresh… I love it! A drop of… [more]
We went to Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire at The Void this morning, an amazing VR experience where we got to be Rebel Alliance members going undercover as… [more]