Around this time of year, rhubarb tends to get tired and worn out. The stalks, those that haven’t been plundered already, are green and thick, with big umbrella-like leaves.  Everything starts to look a bit Jurassic, overgrown and gnarled. The slender pink and red elegance of the early stalks has long faded, and the taste [...]

‘Bhuna‘ is a particular Asian cooking style where a sauce is reduced and reduced until it is so thick that it just clings to the meat, making the meat appear ‘browned’. Dishes cooked in the bhuna style are rich and pungent, the flavour of the spice mix concentrated down by the fierce reduction of the [...]

During the second half of the nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution gave birth to Blake’s “dark, Satanic mills”, huge cathedrals of commerce producing cotton, wool, alpaca. Conditions in the mills were harsh – the workers started young and the hours were long, the work dangerous. The mills of the North were places to be feared, [...]

This nearly didn’t happen. There were too many things that could have gone wrong, and most of them nearly did. Toasting pinenuts, blind baking a pastry case, the wrong type of honey… To my surprise, things turned out well, and we had a delicate and delicious dessert, sweet and balanced with a deep honey flavour, [...]