I once rode across America on a Greyhound bus, from the laid-back city of Portland, through the deserts of Utah and back up through the Wild West to the industrial heartland of Chicago and Detroit, then onto Toronto and my Uncle’s spare bedroom for a week of recovery. I learnt two things on that trip, [...]
A book about pies, perhaps? Absolutely. Quite an easy guess. It’s written by Global Baker Dean Brettschneider. “Global Baker”? I think that just means that Dean’s from New Zealand. He’s got some pedigree, though, and has lived and worked in places as diverse as China and Denmark. That sounds suspiciously like a ‘brand’ … Maybe [...]
I read a lot of cookbooks. There are a couple of hundred on the shelves over there in the dining room, and I’m starting to get to the point where I don’t think many more will be, shall we say, welcome. I can tell a good cookbook from a bad one almost immediately … that [...]
The Levant is the part of the world where continents and empires collide, the crossroads where east meets west with a passing wave at Africa. It centres around the Eastern Mediterranean, encompassing countries like the Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Turkey, the crucible of the Mediterranean and an area still very much at the forefront of [...]
There are dozens of Italian cookbooks on my shelves. It’s a cuisine I return to time and time again, because it’s accessible, exciting and packed with flavour. Its reliance on good ingredients, cooked simply, cooked well suits my own approach to food. Most of all, the food of Italy never stops surprising me – the [...]