Baking bread. It sneaks up on you. It starts slowly, just a little experiment, maybe a curious attempt at a simple loaf. Nothing out of the ordinary, just flour, salt, yeast, water and time. You find that it works. It works better than you could ever dare believe it’d work. Your bread tastes real, substantial, [...]
I’ve recently hit a little Friday evening routine, detouring on the way home from work to plunder the shelves of the brilliant Saltaire Wines (@SaltaireWines) for a bottle or two of Proper Beer. Most weeks, I seem to come away with something or other from Thornbridge Brewery. Thornbridge’s beer is punchy and interesting, and has [...]
Cod is very firmly on the endangered list, and we’ve come to accept that its consumption comes with a healthy dose of guilt. That’s no bad thing – trawling has decimated Atlantic cod stocks over the last few decades, with numbers plummeting. That’s true of Atlantic cod – our main source – but stocks in other [...]
It’s Mother’s Day today. It’s a bittersweet experience, the pleasure of seeing our kids with their homemade cards and bunches of daffodils tinged with the regret of not being able to give my own mum the same things, not being able to hug her and tell her I love her any more. It gets easier [...]
Most of the time, I use fairly standard cuts of meat, the usual things that you find anywhere and everywhere, but the advantage of shopping at a proper butcher’s is that there’ll often be some odd bits on offer. This dish revolves around one of those oddities – neck of lamb. Neck isn’t used that [...]