Last week, I made one of those freak miscalculations that left me stranded in Leeds Station fairly early in the morning with nothing to do.

My train left at 10am, so I had an hour to wander around and explore the parts of the city south of the River Aire around Holbeck.

Breakfast seemed like a good idea, and a touch of twittering later, I was heading towards The Engine House Cafe.

Twitter is a very strange thing, and I’ve fallen for it completely – there’s a world of people out there who can answer simple questions like ‘Breakfast. Near Leeds Central. Where?  GO!’ within seconds.  It astonishes me that such generous and well-informed advice can come hurtling through the interwebs, straight to my phone, with such ease and fluency.  To those who say they don’t get twitter, well, your loss.

It seems that there’s a lot of people in Leeds who are passionate about both twitter and a decent breakfast.  It would seem that if you’ve got an hour to spare within a ten minute radius of the station, you’ll breakfast like a king.

Somebody had commented earlier that a full English breakfast “requires proper atmos for full enjoyment. Smoking crack in a clean loo just isn’t the same” *.

Apart from it being a great line, there’s a lot of truth truth in it, so I was a little nervous about choosing The Engine House from the dozen or so recommendations I’d managed to gather.

More below…

This is a guest post from my son, Ethan, aged 8.

Ethan has been learning about imperative verbs at school, and for one of his exercises, he had to complete a task and write a set of instructions about what he did, using words that connect each step and are very direct.

We thought Ethan’s instructions and the photos we took of his task would make a great post, so here they are, in Ethan’s own words, with nothing changed!

And, for the record, Ethan’s biscuits were incredible.

ethan’s recipe below…

Eating the right type of fish is becoming increasingly important, with some species on the brink of collapse because of over fishing and the frankly shameful practise of fishermen not being allowed to land perfectly good fish because of their quotas.  We’re at a crossroads in our relationship with the ocean, and there’s really only one way to go…treat the seas with more respect, or there won’t be any fish left.

Selfridges Project Ocean Fish Guide app is a great little resource for those times when you’re stood in front of the fish counter, trying to remember whether or not a particular fish is OK to buy from an environmental and sustainability point of view.

It’s a simple concept – the app lists most of the fish commonly available to the British market and indicates whether they’re OK to eat or best avoided.

The call on whether to eat or not comes from the Marine Conservation Society, so you’re in good hands.

Aside from the all important eat/don’t eat list, there’s a clutch of fairly tempting fish-related recipes from the likes of Angela Hartnett and Tom Aikens.  Antonio Carluccio’s Sardines in Tortiera looks like a must-try – butterflied sardines, sprinkled with chopped oregano, breadcrumbs and lemon juice, quickly baked.  It’s simplicity itself and neatly demonstrates why Italian food is so good – good ingredients, cooked with restraint and allowed to shine.

More below….

I’ve said this before, many times, but it bears repeating – the best thing about cooking is the transformation of unpromising ingredients into something better.

Take this dish… normally, I’d never dream of eating a piece of brisket without at least a couple of hours on a low heat, let alone raw, but here it is – a raw piece of brisket that tastes much more expensive than it should.

It’s brisket masquerading as fillet steak.

So, how do you add so much value to a piece of the cow’s cheapest meat?

Salt.

Salt, herbs and time.

Start with a piece of beef.  The fact that the meat will be given a short cure means that you don’t have to go for a tender cut – the salt will tenderise even the toughest cuts if it’s given enough time.

Any cut that’s very lean will do, but I plumped for a flat piece of brisket this time.  The butcher cut me a 400g piece and tried to avoid as much of the fat as possible, such is the value of using a proper butcher and getting to know him or her.

Incidentally, my butcher is great – she knows I cook some slightly out of the ordinary things, and takes a genuine interest in them.  That’s a very good quality in a butcher, or any local business person, for that matter.  There should be more butchers like Binns of Saltaire.

Now for the magical part…you’ve got some beef, now you need to get some flavour into it.

More below…