Bay leaf

Confit of rabbit

February 6, 2010 Food & drink

Rabbits are plentiful, sustainable, cheap and healthy*. Cooked properly, they’re delicious. Cooked badly, they’re about as appetising as an old boot. I’ve found that farmed rabbits can be successfully roasted with lemon, rosemary and garlic, but try the same treatment with a lean, muscular wild rabbit and the dish generally ends up in the bin. [...]

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Possibly the best three-bean chilli in the world?

January 20, 2010 Food & drink

I need to point two important things out before I start: everybody does this differently. This is just my way. Yours may be better. The title of this post is obviously a provocative lie. I’ve no idea what ‘authentic’ is when it comes to this dish. Hot? Mild? Beans? No beans? No idea. This is [...]

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Lamb breast, stuffed and rolled

October 22, 2009 Food & drink

Part of the challenge of cooking is to make something unpromising into something worth eating. There are few cuts of meat that present as little to the cook as a breast of lamb. Let’s be frank here. This is not an appetising cut. It looks fatty, skinny, full of gristle and just plain unappealing. On [...]

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Keith Floyd’s Beef Bourgignon

September 29, 2009 Food & drink

The passing of Keith Floyd earlier this month caused me to dig out one of his old cookbooks, Floyd on France, a cornerstone of the Floyd canon and packed full of traditional French recipes described and executed with typical flair. Beef Bourgignon, caught my eye. It is, as Floyd puts it ‘a splendid stew (that) [...]

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Croquetas de bacalao

August 20, 2009 Food & drink

These croquetas are from Sam and Sam Clark’s Moro Cookbook, a book that’s seeing some real service in my kitchen recently. It’s a wonderful book, full of practical and delicious recipes. Croquetas are a standard tapas dish, something you’re going to find nearly anywhere in Spain. They’re the perfect snack food, and, really, what’s not [...]

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Mussels, chips and mayonnaise

June 27, 2009 Food & drink

A few years ago, we had a long weekend in the vastly under-rated Belgian capital of Brussels, famous for beer, waffles, a statue of a little boy having a wee and mussels. I ate mussels three nights out of four, and on the other night I had a lobster, which came with a starter of [...]

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