Travel tips-Restaurant reviews-Recipes
For us meat eaters of the world, lamb is the traditional meat to serve on Easter Sunday. Usually a roast meal is served but with just myself to feed today, I opted for some gorgeous lamb rib chops I found in Whole Foods. As a child, roast Sunday lunches were a weekly affair from which […]
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Years ago, when I was regularly cooking family meals and hosting dinner parties, Marcella Hazan’s Fagiolini verdi con peperoni e pomodoro – French beans with peppers and tomatoes – from her iconic The Classic Italian Cookbook, was a favourite side dish to make. It’s a great dish to accompany simply cooked meat – like grilled or […]
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It’s my eldest grandson Freddie’s 8th birthday. I’ve been making the same cake ever since his first birthday – The 1st Birthday Cake – and followed the recipe again today. In fact, I’ve made it more than eight times for my son Jonathan now has three boys, so there’s Ben (5) and Alex (2) as […]
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I always make my own pesto. Partly this is because the jars once opened have to be used up fairly quickly and they are usually too big for one person – and mainly I’m cooking just for myself. But really, the main reason is taste: there is just no bought pesto that comes close to […]
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I’ve been thinking about cooking this dish for ages after having a similar one at the brilliant Bayside Social in Worthing in April. I even bought some chorizo which has been in my freezer. This morning, considering what to eat tonight, I also found some cod. It was a fillet not a nice chunky piece […]
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Earlier in the year, sometime in spring, I was in the local garden centre and spied little tomato plants. I remembered how excited the grandsons were last year when I grew some: Freddie (now 7½) loves to eat them; Ben (4¾) doesn’t like tomatoes but said he was excited to watch them grow. So I […]
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Yes halloumi again. Apologies for two halloumi recipes in a row. It wasn’t especially intentional, but the weather remains warm and rather humid here in London – though nothing like the two days of heatwave (yes only two days, despite all the fuss) of two weeks’ ago. The temperature is only in the mid-20s, which […]
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The current heatwave brings challenges other than simply trying to stay cool enough to sleep, work, live. There’s ‘What can I eat?’ too. I’m not as hungry as usual, which is pretty normal in such heat, but I do need food! I always need food. I’m the kind of person who can’t go out early […]
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I’ve never made madeleines before. They seem to have been in my life for as long as my memory goes back, like scones and clotted cream, the bread pudding and Christmas puddings I used to make as a child with my grandmother. I guess I perhaps ate madeleines for the first time in France. I […]
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It’s been a bit of a French week: I’ve been upgrading my French Peugeot car to a newer (not new) version; I’ve been enjoying the re-run of Rick Stein’s Secret France on BBC TV in the evenings; and there was a French market in Twickenham on Sunday and Monday. I had the eldest grandsons – […]
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