“Beyond the throb of the engines is the throbbing heart of all.” John Betjemen St. Pancras station in London is quite the most amazing space, a vast vaulted ceiling headed by a gold clock, set high above a fleet of sleek Eurostar trains. The station dodged the Luftwaffe’s bombs, but fell out of favour during [...]
You might have noticed an almost complete absence of posts about wine from this blog. There’s a simple reason for it. Wine scares me to death. The presence of a bona fide wine expert in the family doesn’t help, either, but that aside, I know very little about wine, despite drinking my fair share of [...]
I’ve never really liked ‘performance’ cookery. Most of the cooking I do is on the hoof, unplanned, un-shopped-for and generally last minute and chaotic. Quite often, it’s done without really enough time. It’s in this type of cooking that the real skill lies. What marks out a great cook is not the ability to produce [...]
Chicken and Other Birds is the latest book from John Torode, the Australian chef behind Smiths of Smithfield and one of the presenters of the BBC’s Masterchef. The purpose of Torode’s book is very simple and very clear. He sees chicken as one of the cornerstones of a cook’s repertoire. “If you can roast a [...]