It’s interesting, isn’t it, how things come together? Do you find sometimes that a particular thing you did a long time ago comes back around in a spectacularly unsuspecting way? This happens to me often. At work, we call it ‘planting seeds’, an odd comment or email dropped here or there that’s designed to give [...]

Preserving meat … sounds like something that could go badly, botulism-riddled wrong, doesn’t it? Charcuterie is a a slightly daunting area, and it isn’t an undertaking to be taken lightly. I’m nowhere near ready to cure and air-dry a whole leg of pork, or equipped to maintain the specific temperature or level of humidity suitable [...]

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 [...]