According to my daughter, I am shit at baking birthday cakes. Actually, ANY cake for that matter…
I’ve never been able to get that excited about banana cake. I mean, it’s perfectly nice, can be a bit earnest at times, and, in its worst incarnations, is a bit like eating damp wood. I certainly don’t crave it like I would a chocolate cake. UNTIL NOW. I have just stumbled across a […]
Holy smokes. This is pretty much my favourite recipe of 2016 so far. Who’d have thought – a simple dish of boiled split yellow peas with a few seasonings? Thanks to Kitty who showed me how to make it when I visited her in Leros, Greece, earlier this year. Just to list a fraction of her many talents: […]
Ever experienced the delights of the Vauxhall Roundabout in South London? It’s a sprawling, huge endless loop of busy roads, with a bus station plonked right in the middle looking like a metallic Soviet space structure. Railway tunnels house warren-like nightclubs, storage facilities and the odd cavernous restaurant, such as Nando’s. The Vauxhall Tavern holds […]
Above: sweet potato and apricot cake with lemony cream cheese frosting. I am heartbroken: Boyca da Roca, my absolute favourite cafe haunt in Crystal Palace, closed its doors for good today. Mark, the owner, had to admit defeat in a difficult climate – he told me that since he opened two years ago on Church […]
So. The UK ‘Brexited’ nearly two weeks ago. What a complete balls-up. Rewind 10 days and I was either hugely sad or screaming STUPID STUPID at the top of my lungs. The brilliant writer Emma Beddington has summarised just how I feel in her hilarious blog post where she decrees a new parliament run by mirthless owls. […]
I do love a visit to Peckham, even though these days it appears to have more in common with Notting Hill, what with property prices smashing through the roof. I should know, I tried to buy a house here five years ago, and bid a hasty retreat! In Peckham Rye there are now boutiques selling […]
I’ve just returned from the Greek island of Leros after a holiday where my family and I experienced a record number of minor injuries. It’s as though we were all drunk, all the time! My son bashed and chipped his front teeth on some stone steps, making them a bit piratey. My daughter tripped and […]
I’m having an affair with a restaurant called Theo’s. I mean, I am inside my brain. I spend a lot of time lusting after their Neopolitan-style pizza, when perhaps I should be thinking about doing something important like, um, opening my boring mountain of post and reading about insurance. Theo’s pizza makes shivers go up […]
Who in their right mind would want to go and pick weeds from parkland and make them into dinner? I’m too scared to forage anything much – mushrooms, too terrifying, and for everything else that isn’t obviously a plum, you need to study a handbook and I would worry that it’d be deadly hemlock anyway! […]
Toast & Butter 