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 widely, although it’s readily available, especially in the local Asian butchers … it’s suited to long, slow cooking, so an affinity with curry is fairly obvious. Instead of Asian, this has loose North African overtones, full of apricots, cinnamon and lemon. It’s reminiscent of a tagine.

This is a well-behaved dish. It sits quite happily in the oven for an hour and a half, troubling no-one. It cares not for mere inconveniences such as precision in timing. Feel free to lower the temperature and extend the time. No harm will come to your dinner.

Lamb neck comes in all sorts of shapes and forms. Often, it’s chopped up into small serving pieces – this is mostly the case at an Asian butchers – but for this dish, it’s best if the meat comes from the middle of the neck in slices. That way, there are substantial and interesting pieces in the pot.

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The scandal of horse meat being surreptitiously sneaked into a variety of products that should have contained beef continues to dominate the news, with daily revelations about fraud and generally shoddy practice in the food industry. Today, there have been arrests, and there will be more.

This feels like the very tip of a Titanic-sinking iceberg. There’s more to come, more scandals, more misrepresentation, more dawning realisation that the food on your plate isn’t quite what you thought it was.

I’ve resisted writing about this until now, but the interesting thing here is that this is a scandal of two parts. On the one hand, beef is found to have been cut with horse meat to bulk it out and pass a cheap meat off as a more expensive one. On the other hand, the British are revolted by this, because its horse meat, and we don’t eat horses, do we?

There’s only really one issue here, and I’ve written before about why we probably should eat horse meat. It’s actually a really good alternative to beef – sweet, gamey, quite tender and tasty, but loaded with a level of cultural baggage that’s become ever more apparent as this debacle has played out. Here’s what I told the Metro newspaper when this all kicked off.

The real issue – the issue we should really be bothered about – is one of food safety and security.

Do we know where our food is comes from?

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There are many variations on this simple pancake-style potato dish, from the Swiss rosti, through Polish and Czech versions, landing on an Israeli interpretation, the latke, a Hanukah staple and speciality.

Latkes are at their best when made and served immediately. Making the mix too far in advance allows the potato to brown and take on an unappetising look, leaving them standing after cooking lets the essential crispness of fried potato slip away. Latkes should be crisp, hot and taken straight from the scorching pan to hot plates and onto a table, with as little waiting around as possible.

This version is a mix of potato and parsnip, a great way of hiding some extra vegetables away from unsuspecting young eyes … the parsnip is indistinguishable to the eye, but adds a subtle flavour and a welcome softness to the finished latke.

The best potatoes to use are Desiree, but anything on the slightly waxy side will do. Floury potatoes will disintegrate too easily, and you’ll be left with cakes of mashed potato. They’ll taste good, but the point will be lost.

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Prashad has had a lot of hype.

I approach hype with a healthy amount of scepticism.

I’m good at scepticism – it’s a speciality – and the world of food is littered with things that don’t quite live up to the mark, that aren’t quite as good as they claim to be. For every stellar food experience, there are a dozen more that are passable at best, if I’m feeling very generous.

This all stems from a Gordon Ramsay TV programme a couple of years ago to find the best neighbourhood Indian, Italian, French, etc. restaurant and to whittle them down into just simply the best neighbourhood restaurant in Britain. A couple of local restaurants, Salvo’s in Leeds and Prashad, then in Bradford and now just over the border in Leeds, went ridiculously far in the competition, and were heaped with praise by Ramsay. Neither won, but both were clearly right up there.

All this media hype is matched by some more down to earth Northern truths – I simply couldn’t find anybody who had anything even remotely bad to say about Prashad. Responses were either profusely enthusiastic or non-existent through having not eaten there.

No in between at all … just either ‘haven’t been’ or completely won over.

Prashad is a slightly different take on Indian food. It’s mainly Gujarati food, and entirely vegetarian, and is that rare example where that most definitely does not equal bland, unappetising rubbish. The last vegetarian café I ate in, a diabolical place in York, put me off the idea of vegetarian restaurants for a long time, not that I dislike or even mind vegetarian food, I just think that sometimes it isn’t particularly good, or interesting.

You think that’s fair? Click here to find out…