I think that if you really want to know about a person, you should look at the place where they cook.

It’s simple, really. In any house, the kitchen is likely to be the most expensive thing that a person invests in, and it’s also likely to be the single room that gets the most thought, because it needs to be practical, functional, hygienic and easy to manage, but increasingly, people want to see their kitchen as the focal point of their house, as a place where they relax and unwind, where they eat and talk and laugh and cry.

A kitchen is more than just a place where food gets prepared, it’s a place where people live, in the truest sense of the word. It’s a place that they inhabit, and it should be designed around them, so that it works with them.

This means that the task of designing and building a kitchen is often one of the most daunting things anybody ever does to their house, but most people, me included, can’t see past the design that’s already in place. The sink is there, so the new one has to go there, too.

Right?

It’s just a lack of vision, or perhaps it’s about being too close to something to see how it could work differently – something a good kitchen designer can work through and turn inside out.

Here’s how Magnet do it. They provide a service called ‘Full Circle’, which starts the second you set foot in their showroom. You talk to a designer about what you want, and what you don’t want, and he or she will step through what designing a kitchen actually means, and what can be done in the space you’ve got. The designer is exclusively that – all he or she does is design kitchens, so you benefit from all the tricks and experience that being dedicated to a vital task brings with it, all of the ways to make your kitchen ‘yours’.

Ideas complete, everything gets measured up properly, made-to-order, installed and checked. A year later, somebody will be back to make sure that everything is still in order. It’s a start to finish process that takes away a lot of the hassle and injects a healthy dose of expertise. [continue reading…]

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, all five days of it – firstly, spend as little time as possible in the bus station in Detroit in the middle of the night, and, secondly, it’s hard to eat well on a moving bus. We survived on a bag of fruit from a market in Portland and whatever we could pick up on the way, mainly fried chicken and Subway sandwiches. It really comes to something when ‘the healthy option’ is a Subway.

I knew then that this wasn’t the State of the Nation, that there was more to America’s food than I could see from the bus window. We’d seen as much in the wonderful markets of the Pacific Northwest, in Seattle, packed with glistening salmon and seafood, some of it in flight, and we saw more later on the East coast, in Boston, with its clam chowder and Italian food.

There’s more to American food than meets the eye. There also seems to me to be no such thing as ‘American’ food, rather an intoxicating concoctions of other cuisines, mixed and mingled together to create something that, when viewed as a whole instead of as component parts, becomes truly ‘American’.

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I haven’t made any mince pies this year, and I think I’ve only actually eaten one, and that was mediocre at best. It tasted of stale carpet, and Marks & Spencer really should try harder.

This is a disappointing situation, so I did something about it.

Here’s a very quick and simple recipe that uses the bulk of the ingredients that go into a normal mince pie, but arranges them in an alternative fashion.

It’ll catch on, you just watch.

The basic idea here is that mincemeat is sandwiched between a biscuit-like base and a crumble topping, and then sliced up into little bite-sized squares. It’s a wonderful little riff on the boring old mince pie, that captures the same types of flavours, but with a radically different texture, and not at all like stale carpet.

The same … but different.

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Toasters.

I’ve bought loads of them, normally the £15 bargain basement type that last about a year before blowing up and taking the rest of the electrics in the house with them.

It’s a false economy, because many cheap toasters equals one really quite good one that’ll last for years.

Here’s a good example of a quality piece of kitchen kit that rises far above the mediocrity of the el cheapo kitchen appliance, but which won’t, at a shade over fifty quid, absolutely break the bank. It’s by Waring, an American company with both feet firmly in the commercial appliance world, so you’d be right to expect that they know a thing or two about making gear that lasts, and that really shows in this toaster, the WT400 … it’s sturdy, solid, well-built and has a little bit of grunt about it.

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