Food and drink, recipes and cooking

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

Pecan pie, or how I finally nailed pastry making

February 19, 2012
Pecan Pie

I’ve got a very chequered history with pastry. Sometimes, it works out OK, but not perfect, other times it’s a complete disaster. The number of times the pastry has shrunk back from the rim of the tin, leaving a flat disk of insipid pastry with a slightly upturned lip, is uncountable.  That flat disk with [...]

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On Seville oranges and marmalade

February 5, 2012
How to make marmalade

This is a great time of year to cook. Yes, we’re in the depths of winter, but the first signs of the year to come are starting to appear in the ground and in the shops. The first stalks of forced rhubarb are out, straight from the groaning sheds of West Yorkshire, and it’s the [...]

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Starter to loaf – how to make sourdough bread

January 28, 2012
How to make sourdough bread, from starter to loaf

Bread is the most elemental of food. It’s just flour, water, yeast and salt, and, in it’s most basic form, that’s it. Go ahead and embellish it however you want, but a basic loaf is the stuff of life itself. But, what if you were to go one step more fundamental, and use your own [...]

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Ecclefechan tart, for Burns Night

January 25, 2012
Scottish Ecclefechan tart

Ecclefechan, a small town in the Scottish Borders is famous for a few things, including being the birthplace of both the writer Thomas Carlyle and one Archibald Arnott, Napoleon’s doctor during his extended stay on St Helena, but also, and this is slightly more pertinent for a food blog, for the Ecclefechan tart, a rich concoction of [...]

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Spicy leftover turkey soup

December 26, 2011
How to use up leftover Christmas turkey in a soup

If Christmas Day brings the biggest meal of the year, it follows that Boxing Day must leave the most leftovers. Nobody – NOBODY – gets this right. The smallest turkey is simply too big for most average Christmas dinner tables, and the size of the bird seems to have a knock-on effect on the number [...]

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Apple bread, baking for cold weather

November 26, 2011
Apple bread, from Roast Figs, Sugar Snow: Food to Warm the Soul by Diana Henry

It’s nearly December, so all the apples are in and off the trees now.  That leaves an annual problem…dealing with gluts. Luckily, I don’t have any gluts to deal with, but I do have friends who need to deal with theirs, leading to a slight over-abundance of Bramley apples.  Apple pie? Too predictable.  Baked apples? [...]

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eightpointnine.com’s personalised coffee

November 19, 2011
eight point nine's personalised coffee

One of the key things about coffee is freshness. It’s the reason that any coffee shop worth its salt grinds their own beans, with the very best grinding small quantities very regularly. At home, it’s difficult to get a decent grind out of most domestic grinders….blade grinders just obliterate the beans, and they do that [...]

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How to make boudin noir

November 16, 2011
How to make French Boudin Noir, or black pudding

You either love blood puddings and sausages, or you hate them. I’ve yet to find anybody who’s simply ambivalent. Sitting on the fence just doesn’t seem to apply here. There are many different versions of blood sausage – the traditional British black pudding contains oats to thicken it, the Spanish Morcella has rice, and this French [...]

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