Vanilla ice cream. It’s so boring it’s almost a joke, you’d think? That maybe true of the mass-produced, bland, tasteless soft-scoop rubbish you get at any mediocre supermarket, but the real thing is something else altogether. At it’s best – at it’s very best – vanilla is the king of ice creams, fantastic on its [...]
For a few years, I looked after an allotment. The ground was full of rocks and half the plot was shaded by a line of enormous trees that plunged the canal into darkness on one side and the bottom half of our plot into a kind of permanent semi-gloom on the other. We did OK [...]
We’ve got a North facing garden, shaded by next door’s garage and four stories of Edwardian brickwork. There isn’t a lot of light back there, and the ground has a tendency to hold too much water because of the high clay content. I can successfully grow only two things – those Jurassic style ferns that [...]
I made a curry a while ago that called for a couple of tablespoons of dessicated coconut. As you can’t buy just a couple of tablespoons of dessicated coconut, the rest of the massive, opened packet has sat in the cupboard ever since, waiting to be thrown out in the next Great Clear Out, sometime [...]
Every now and again, my freezer becomes so full that the door barely shuts. Obviously, this is a sub-optimal condition for a freezer to be in, so something has to come out before something else goes in. Yesterday, the thing that had to give was a shortcrust tart case – too bulky, too awkward and [...]