Leon is a fast food chain with a difference. Firstly, the food is quite good, and secondly, it’s prepared on the basis that it should taste good and do you good at the same time. This, Leon: Baking & Puddings, the restaurant’s third cookbook, stretches that last point to the maximum. There are recipes in [...]
{ 3 comments }
Hunger makes beans taste like almonds – Italian folk saying It was cold today. That feeling of winter has been creeping in for a few weeks now, the leaves piling up and swirling around the bottom of trees and against walls, things turning brown, dying, hibernating. It felt like winter, and I’ve started to cook [...]
{ 0 comments }
Go into any supermarket, and most butchers, and there’ll be shelves full of neatly butchered meat, prize cuts of rump, sirloin, tenderloin…the premium parts of the animal. What’s missing is the rest of the beast, all the other parts that don’t make up the standardised, easy to handle, easy to cook cuts that people so [...]
{ 1 comment }
Baking is one of the most difficult forms of cookery, at least in my opinion. It’s more a branch of science than a culinary endeavour, one that needs precision and technique, both of which are some way beyond me. I’m also not an habitual eater of dessert. I like the odd cake every now and [...]
{ 4 comments }
For a few years, I looked after an allotment. The ground was full of rocks and half the plot was shaded by a line of enormous trees that plunged the canal into darkness on one side and the bottom half of our plot into a kind of permanent semi-gloom on the other. We did OK [...]
{ 3 comments }
It’s easy to forget just how influential French cooking is, how it’s still widely regarded as the ‘mothership’ of cuisines, the place where all the best techniques, the best ideas, the best recipes come from. If I had to choose just one cuisine and eat it for evermore, it’d be French. That might sound treacherous [...]
{ 0 comments }
Good meat is important. If you’re going to eat an animal, the least you can do is to make sure that it was treated well when it was alive, and that you use its meat with care and respect. Can you always do this, though? Do you get a clear picture of where your meat [...]
{ 0 comments }
I’ve been lucky enough to chance across a series of excellent cookbooks lately, all of which share a similar quality. They’re not just about food. Food might be their reason for existing, but this clutch of books have more, they have a feeling about them, a feeling that the author has got under the skin [...]
{ 1 comment }
