We’d travelled a long way, and when we arrived in Rome, it was late, right in the middle of that strange hinterland where the kids flick from being wide awake and excited to worn-out zombies within a couple of seconds. Not feeding them properly helps to hasten the transformation, so we strode out into Trastevere [...]
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 [...]
Douglas Coupland’s Generation A is a story about a time when all the world’s bees have died and everybody is hooked on a drug that makes them want to be alone. It’s full of Coupland’s characteristic little asides and stories, including one where the highly-politicised, overwrought and transitory girlfriend of one of the characters freaks [...]
Every year, I make the mistake of going blackberry picking in shorts. The thorns on the blackberry canes are fine – I can avoid those – it’s the nettles that always seem to grow around them that get me every time, but foraging food isn’t meant to be easy. You should put a bit of [...]
Salt gets a bad press. I know it’s responsible for the untold misery of heart disease, high blood pressure and a thousand other fairly major medical complaints, but it also has a near mythical ability to preserve food and concentrate flavour, the closest thing to culinary alchemy there is. This duck prosciutto, a ham born [...]