Food and drink, recipes and cooking

Recipes and cooking, ranging from simple and easy to something a little more challenging.

Rhubarb, ginger and chilli pickle

May 12, 2013
Rhubarb, ginger and chilli pickle

This time of year always brings the first glut of the season – rhubarb. One day, there’s none, but the next, there are vast parasols shading slender stems rocketing skywards, growing thicker and darker day by day. Rhubarb is the most hardy and forgiving of vegetables, and it is a vegetable and not a fruit, [...]

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Jerusalem artichoke and chicken pie

April 26, 2013
Jerusalem artichoke and chicken pie

I was told that Jerusalem artichokes were so easy to grow that it’d be hard to get rid of them once they went into the ground. “They’ll spread like weeds”, they said. “you’ll never get rid of them”. I dug the tubers in early one morning, the ground wet and the mist clinging tightly to [...]

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How to preserve lemons

April 20, 2013
How to preserve lemons

I have this theory about people who cook. It involves their cupboards. I think that you can tell if somebody is serious about cooking, and I mean really serious, after a quick rummage through their kitchen cupboard. That might sound obvious, but it’s not the weird and the wonderful I’m looking for. Everybody has barely [...]

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How to bake French-style brioche bread

April 12, 2013
French brioche bread

Baking bread. It sneaks up on you. It starts slowly, just a little experiment, maybe a curious attempt at a simple loaf. Nothing out of the ordinary, just flour, salt, yeast, water and time. You find that it works. It works better than you could ever dare believe it’d work. Your bread tastes real, substantial, [...]

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Thornbridge Brewery’s Raven

March 24, 2013
Thornbridge Brewery's Raven Black IPA

I’ve recently hit a little Friday evening routine, detouring on the way home from work to plunder the shelves of the brilliant Saltaire Wines (@SaltaireWines) for a bottle or two of Proper Beer. Most weeks, I seem to come away with something or other from Thornbridge Brewery. Thornbridge’s beer is punchy and interesting, and has [...]

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What makes Skrei cod different?

March 17, 2013
Norwegian skrei cod - a Scandinavian delicacy

Cod is very firmly on the endangered list, and we’ve come to accept that its consumption comes with a healthy dose of guilt. That’s no bad thing – trawling has decimated Atlantic cod stocks over the last few decades, with numbers plummeting. That’s true of Atlantic cod – our main source – but stocks in other [...]

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Lamb shawarma, or Mother’s Day lunch

March 10, 2013
A Middle Eastern street food classic, a lamb shawarma - spicy, subtle and wonderfully rich meat, served in pitta bread.

It’s Mother’s Day today. It’s a bittersweet experience, the pleasure of seeing our kids with their homemade cards and bunches of daffodils tinged with the regret of not being able to give my own mum the same things, not being able to hug her and tell her I love her any more. It gets easier [...]

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Braised neck of lamb with apricots and cinnamon

February 25, 2013
Neck of lamb with apricots and cinnamon

Most of the time, I use fairly standard cuts of meat, the usual things that you find anywhere and everywhere, but the advantage of shopping at a proper butcher’s is that there’ll often be some odd bits on offer. This dish revolves around one of those oddities – neck of lamb. Neck isn’t used that [...]

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