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 [...]
Cooking a turkey on Christmas Day is a faintly ridiculous idea. If you take an average bird of, say, 6kg in weight, you can comfortably feed at least a dozen people and probably an awful lot more than that. A bird of such colossal size pushes the physical limits of a lot of smaller domestic [...]
It’s getting close to Christmas now, and it’s about this sort of time that I start to panic about stupid things like deciding which type of stuffing to make. I’ll spend an hour or so scattering cookbooks around the dining room, looking for something new and different to cook on the stuffing front. There’ll be [...]
Excellent with coffee, these little almond biscuits from Turkey and the Balkans are quick and easy to make. Mix 400g of ground almonds and 150g of golden caster sugar together and add two or three drops of almond essence and two tablespoons of rose water. Bind the ingredients together with two lightly beaten eggs, and [...]
My son just asked why everything he’d eaten over the past two days had turkey in it. It was a good question. We told him that it’s traditional to cram an entire year’s worth of turkey consumption into a single week at the end of December, and that there was plenty more to come over [...]