If Christmas Day brings the biggest meal of the year, it follows that Boxing Day must leave the most leftovers. Nobody – NOBODY – gets this right. The smallest turkey is simply too big for most average Christmas dinner tables, and the size of the bird seems to have a knock-on effect on the number [...]
It’s nearly December, so all the apples are in and off the trees now. That leaves an annual problem…dealing with gluts. Luckily, I don’t have any gluts to deal with, but I do have friends who need to deal with theirs, leading to a slight over-abundance of Bramley apples. Apple pie? Too predictable. Baked apples? [...]
One of the key things about coffee is freshness. It’s the reason that any coffee shop worth its salt grinds their own beans, with the very best grinding small quantities very regularly. At home, it’s difficult to get a decent grind out of most domestic grinders….blade grinders just obliterate the beans, and they do that [...]
You either love blood puddings and sausages, or you hate them. I’ve yet to find anybody who’s simply ambivalent. Sitting on the fence just doesn’t seem to apply here. There are many different versions of blood sausage – the traditional British black pudding contains oats to thicken it, the Spanish Morcella has rice, and this French [...]
Years ago, walk down any British town’s high street, and you’d find a clutch of entirely predictable shops. A baker, a greengrocer, maybe a fishmonger if you were lucky, and a butcher. The explosive growth of the supermarket and our hunger for the convenience of shopping for everything under one roof with a big car [...]