Category Recipes
Berry muffins
What spurred me on to make these here muffins? A near-disaster ending in almost-mutilation! Not to myself, I hasten to add. The other day my lovely friend N was blending ingredients for a butter chicken recipe using a stick blender, and accidentally whizzed her left thumb into the mix while trying to prise out a […]
Anatomy of a wedding cake
I have recently completed a terrifying task – making a wedding cake for my good friends C and M. There was no way I could not take the bait – after all, C made my wedding cake four years ago: a towering edifice in deepest darkest chocolate, decorated with chocolate leaves. It was dangerously […]
Greek spinach and feta pie
The rain is lashing down outside and I have the central heating turned on. I long for the scorching heat of a holiday in the Greek islands, with enough cheap pink wine to sink a ship, sandy beaches and Euro pop blaring out of cafes and rolled-down taxi windows. I want to go to […]
Mighty big bangers
My husband N loves sausages almost more than life itself, and probably slightly more than me and our baby. If he’s not eating sausages, he’s thinking about when he can next eat them. He takes his sausage-worship to almost evangelical heights – not only does he have selected friends that he talks about sausages with […]
Blackberry and cassis compote
Not known for my love of raiding a JD Sports for a pair of crap trainers, I prefer to do non-aggressive form of looting: foraging for free fruit. It’s not stealing as such, it’s just picking fruit off the bushes, but not having to pay for it. I probably sound like a smug middle […]
Gazpacho soup, two ways
Oof – this hot weather in London has been lovely. And I have craved cold soups like nobody’s business, because the thought of heating up the oven or stove has been too much in the muggy heat. I have always been a bit obsessed with the Spanish cold soup, gazpacho, and thought I’d include two […]
Lemon curd cheesecake
I used to work as a freelancer on various food magazines – when I was allowed to write something, I loved it. But most of the time I did sub-editing and proofreading of recipes and supplement sections – it could be the most toe-curlingly-dull work ever. Not least because everyone typically ignores the freelancer, stuck […]
Parmesan, mozzarella and pomodoro bake – thanks Joanna Lumley
Last night I was gripped by a food memory that I hadn’t had since I was an angst-ridden teenager. I thought I wanted macaroni and cheese for dinner, and while I was going through the list of what I needed to buy, I suddenly recalled a recipe that my mum had made at my […]
Blood orange and grapefruit jelly
Argh – why is it that jelly is such a royal pain in the arse to make? Every single recipe I’ve tried gives a specific number of gelatine sheets to use, and the jelly never EVER sets. The recipe I tried below (tsk tsk Nigel Slater) was no exception – it took three attempts to […]
Thai green curry with smoked tofu and aubergine
I am in the rather disconcerting position of having completely lost my sense of taste and all cravings for food after a nasty bout of winter flu. It’s the strangest sensation ever – I don’t feel hungry or want anything that tastes exciting. My palate is currently as developed as a wet piece of […]
Toast & Butter 