On the way home on Saturday, I stopped off at an Asian supermarket close to where we live. It’s a ramshackle, haphazard kind of place, piled high with a huge range of things. There are sacks of rice piled high, fruit and vegetables – big bunches of coriander, five for a quid, coconuts, curry leaves, [...]
It’s often the odd cuts of meat that offer the most interesting possibilities to the chin the kitchen, the parts of the animal that are sometimes viewed as little more that waste in waiting. So it is with chicken wings, piled up high in the corner of a butcher’s shop, looking as if there’s no [...]
It was the school fair on Saturday, and among the bouncy castles, secondhand toy stalls and pop-up cafes selling the most excellent pakora wraps with fiendish chilli sauce, there was a coconut shy. The rules of a coconut shy are very simple – throw a ball at a coconut perched on top of a stake, [...]
I was told that Jerusalem artichokes were so easy to grow that it’d be hard to get rid of them once they went into the ground. “They’ll spread like weeds”, said the old bloke on the plot next door. I dug the tubers in early one morning, the ground wet and the mist clinging tightly [...]
This might sound stupid – and that’s mainly because it is – but the reason I tried this recipe is simply so that I could chop up a whole chicken with a massive cleaver. I’ve spent years in fear of dinging the edge of my ridiculously expensive German knives doing something as mundane as jointing [...]