Travel tips-Restaurant reviews-Recipes
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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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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I had the two eldest grandsons, aged 4 and 7, for 20 hours – from yesterday afternoon until late this morning. It was fun as always and such a joy to have their company. Supper was ragù bolognese from my freezer. When they have a sleepover, I like to eat with them, so their usual […]
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I was given some really lovely and thoughtful presents for Christmas. Unsurprisingly, there are always a few foodie things and one exciting one was a box of Seggiano’s black rice. This was given to me by my daughter’s in-laws, Janet and Colin. This organic black Nerone rice was developed from an ancient Chinese variety (it […]
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Tray bakes are very popular at the moment and as winter draws in, throwing a few veggies into a large tray and roasting them in the oven can produce a quick, easy and comforting supper. I often roast vegetables but usually a close-to-ratatouille mix with onions, peppers, courgettes, tomatoes and sometimes, though not always, aubergine. […]
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I’ve been eating a lot of fish over the last week because, frankly, what else would you eat if you love fish and are staying in Cornwall? Especially in a Cornish fishing village. I actually choose a fish main dish over meat most of the time in restaurants but while away last week, I didn’t […]
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This is another recipe from the brilliant Ottolenghi Simple. It’s slightly adjusted to make a smaller portion as I was cooking just for myself and I thought 4 aubergines would be far too much! And anyway, I only had one. Then he used a 350g pack of precooked Puy lentils and mine was 250g … good […]
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I’ve carefully called this post A Ratatouille. Emphasis on the ‘A’. Ten years of food blogging has taught me to tread carefully when it comes to classics and people get very upset if they think you’ve got it wrong. To be honest, I don’t like people messing with the classics too much myself; there comes […]
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I call this ‘stroganoff’ with a little caution: you have to be careful using a classic name for a dish and people can get very upset (including me sometimes!) if cooks stray too far from the traditional. But of course ‘stroganoff’ is traditionally a beef dish and thus turning it into a vegetarian one is […]
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A romanesco is so beautiful, how could one resist it? Well, actually I’d been resisting them for a week or two, seeing them piled invitingly in Whole Foods’ greengrocery section, before temptation became too much yesterday morning and one was lifted carefully into my basket. They’re not commonly found on supermarket shelves in London but […]
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