Category: Seasons
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Orange & coffee liqueur recipe
Delightfully simple to make: satisfyingly complex to taste. That sums up this grand liqueur which you could make now and enjoy over the festive season. If you can bear to part with some, it’d make an ideal present for a very special person. The aroma of the brew is what a perfect sunset should smell…
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How to make vanilla extract
This is so simple to do, you’ll wonder why you ever spent the money on the shop stuff. The picture shows my 500ml bottle of vanilla extract. Here’s how I make it… Method Take 6 to 8 vanilla pods and split them with a sharp knife, leaving them just attached at one end. Pop them…
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Easy courgette cake recipe
What to do with all those courgettes now that we’re having a summer at last? Here at Legge Towers, the courgette harvest is ‘extensive’. Not surprising as we have eight plants for the fruit and six for the flowers… And the flower producing plants also produce some fruit too. So I had a good trawl…
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How to make Guanciale, cured pork cheek
Guanciale is the perfect preserved pork. It’s wonderfully versatile & tasty, easy to make, economical to buy & use and looks brilliant. What’s not to like about that? You can see what I made in the picture above: I’m so pleased with the result. Guanciale means “pillow” in Italian, the reason should be obvious. My…
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Potato soda bread recipe with cheese, garlic & thyme
Kaethe from SPUDS (The Sustainable Potatoes United Development Study!) in Ireland said: Cheesy, garlicky soda bread made w/blight resistant Blue Danubes sounds fab, but where is the recipe? Any new take on soda bread ROCKS for us Irish, especially if it incorporates SPUDS…Send a link pronto! Who can resist a request like that? Not me…
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Kefir Bread Recipe
I love the way Twitter works. In particular how ideas get propagated: across the world in an instant and inspiring new networks of enthusiastic people. And also how physical things are shared too. This kefir bread is the result of both such things. My apologies for the pics – they’re taken quickly on an iPhone…
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Cumin & rye flake pitta bread recipe
Here’s a quick and easy pitta bread recipe as requested by my kind and talented Twitter friends @evilgordon & @karlasparlour. I served it with a tasty lamb tangia slow cooked for 7 hours and which had some of the Smen I blogged about earlier. The method is one I’ve borrowed from Dan Lepard, it saves…
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How to make Smen, Moroccan fermented butter
Morocco has a special place in my heart as that’s where I had my honeymoon well over 20 years ago. Since then, I’ve maintained a keen interest in Moroccan & other North African cuisine. One of the ingredients that is traditional to this part of the world is Smen (also called sman, semneh, or sminn) which is a…
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Puntarelle – recipes and how to grow 2
How to grow Puntarelle In my last blog post, I showed you how to use this versatile vegetable. As promised, I’ll tell you how to grow them in this post. We found these very easy to grow last year even with all the rain and lack of sun. If you’d like me to show you…