preserving

On Seville oranges and marmalade

February 5, 2012 Food & drink

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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Messada di bue – Italian-style cured beef

May 10, 2011 Food & drink

I’ve said this before, many times, but it bears repeating – the best thing about cooking is the transformation of unpromising ingredients into something better. Take this dish… normally, I’d never dream of eating a piece of brisket without at least a couple of hours on a low heat, let alone raw, but here it [...]

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Ever thought about pickling a watermelon rind?

April 28, 2011 Food & drink

It’s good to be frugal, but there are times when frugality goes too far and tips over into just plain old stupidity. This recipe falls just to the right side of OK – pickling a watermelon rind, you know, the green part that gets chucked on the compost pile, sounds ridiculous, and it would be, [...]

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How to make salt cod

July 28, 2010 Food & drink

The last time I cooked with salt cod was a disaster. In retrospect, the particular piece of fish I bought looked like it had been sat in a dark and dusty corner of a market stall for several years before some poor mug came along to liberate it. That poor mug just happened to be [...]

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Duck prosciutto – the simple art of making your own ham

February 20, 2010 Food & drink

Salt gets a bad press. I know it’s responsible for the untold misery of heart disease, high blood pressure and a thousand other fairly major medical complaints, but it also has a near mythical ability to preserve food and concentrate flavour, the closest thing to culinary alchemy there is. This duck prosciutto, a ham born [...]

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Dealing with gluts – chutney

September 8, 2009 Food & drink

It happens to all courgette growers. Turn your back for a day or so and the small, delicate fruits transform into gigantic marrows. They take over your plot, they take over your fridge. You kid yourself that courgette soup is nice, then you realise it isn’t. You throw them on the compost heap. Happens every [...]

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Rhubarb relish, ready for winter (already)

July 9, 2009 Food & drink

Around this time of year, rhubarb tends to get tired and worn out. The stalks, those that haven’t been plundered already, are green and thick, with big umbrella-like leaves. Everything starts to look a bit Jurassic, overgrown and gnarled. The slender pink and red elegance of the early stalks has long faded, and the taste [...]

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Confit duck

November 29, 2008 Food & drink

An old method of preserving meat is to cook it slowly in fat, then leave it so that when the fat sets, the meat is entirely encased in it. Any type of meat can be cooked and preserved in this way, but the method is particularly suited to poultry, and especially to duck. To make [...]

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Home-made bacon

November 23, 2008 Food & drink

Bacon is very easy to make. In its simplest form, it’s just the application of salt to pork, with some waiting around involved. My bacon isn’t much more complicated than this, and is based on the method from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s encyclopedic River Cottage Cookbook . Find a piece of pork belly, as big as you [...]

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