Travel tips-Restaurant reviews-Recipes
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 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 […]
Read MoreTravelling to beautiful places like Nice, as I did last weekend, where there’s the most wonderful food to be enjoyed, just has to be an inspiration once you’re back home in your own kitchen. I thus decided to cook a Niçois meal for the family this evening. Tarte à la Tomate, along with pissaladière (onion […]
Read MoreI’ve always had a bit of an addiction to good bread. I can remember as a toddler standing with my grandmother at her local bakery (she looked after me while my mother worked) waiting for their shop to open and taking home a still-warm bloomer loaf with poppy seeds on top. In Italian delis in […]
Read MoreWe had a very traditional Christmas dinner with turkey, stuffing and all the usual accompaniments, but as Rachael is vegetarian, I wanted to think of a nice alternative for her, and something also quite special. The initial plan was to bake Rick Stein’s ‘Horta Pie’ from his Venice to Istanbul book. Horta are wild greens […]
Read MoreI had half a large round yellow courgette left over after cooking my pasta dish yesterday. I wanted to do something special with this home-grown vegetable, given to me by my daughter who’d grown it in her garden. To stuff it seemed such an obvious choice because once you’ve cut it in half and removed the seeds from […]
Read MoreWhen you cook a large meal, as I did on Sunday, it’s not unusual to have some things left over. I had a good portion of the stuffing for the peppers left and I considered freezing it, but didn’t in the end so decided yesterday to use it up by stuffing a large tomato. I […]
Read MoreI did eat rather a lot in Venice, but I did a lot of walking too; I must have walked miles. And I am a gourmet traveller. Even so, a little restraint in the eating department may be in order for a few days. But that, of course, doesn’t mean I have to live on lettuce (as […]
Read MoreHow could I resist this gorgeous sunny squash sitting on the supermarket shelves? It’s so pretty it’s almost too good to eat … but not quite. And one of the nicest things to do with squash is to stuff them. I have to admit to it carrying a few environmentally unfriendly air mails since it […]
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