Category: Winter

  • Sourdough pain de campagne recipe

    Over on Instagram, my friend Carla has created something of a stir with her bread. As you can see below, Carla has made beautiful pain de campagne to a recipe I developed using some of the great bakers’ ideas as my inspiration.   The smell..the feel..the loud crackling..this is my BFF bread.. thanks @carl_legge 😙…

  • Griddled, sweet and sour marinated pumpkin recipe

    We spent a very happy few days in Ostia Antica near Rome with Carla Tomasi earlier this month. We ate like royalty and had lots of fun cooking with, and learning from, Carla. I’ll share some of the recipes in the coming weeks as I recreate them from my notes. The first recipe is for…

  • Stuffed sardines recipe, sarde a beccafico

    Stuffed sardines recipe These sardines just melt in the mouth with a burst of herby flavour. They are a doddle to prepare and only take 10 minutes to cook. They are ideal as antipasto, as part of a buffet or a main fish course. I developed the stuffing from ingredients I had left over from…

  • How to grow beer

    All you need is a few hop plants (humulus lupulus), some malt and sugar, water and the help of Andy Hamilton. At the end of the summer, we had loads of the female flowers which are the hops on our plants. So we stripped them and dried them on a rack on top of the…

  • Roast lamb three ways

    One of the easiest ways you can make your meal planning easier, cook more frugally and seasonally is to make a major ingredient go further. Here I show you how I used a £20 joint of local Welsh lamb leg to make three different meals for the three of us. I’ve cooked a lot of…

  • Kombucha sourdough bread recipe

    This successful experiment could revolutionise my baking. It means that I can bake sourdough bread in 24 hours without the need to keep an active leaven refreshed. The bread is gloriously moist and chewy as sourdough should be. This has a big malty wholemeal taste with a rich, crisp crust. It’s not at all sharp…

  • Currant ‘champagne’ recipe – quick fizz

    If you want a fizz that tastes spectacular, this recipe is for you. In under a month you get the full bright fruity taste of currants with a mildly mouth puckering tart-tannin background. The aroma is the wonderful woodland smell of crushed currant leaves. All this surrounded with lively & youthful fizz. I’m delighted with…

  • Three-cornered leek recipes

    This box arrived courtesy of a very generous Lindsay on Twitter. Lindsay has a wonderful surfeit of these in Devon and needed an ID for it. She also wanted to be rid of some and so one thing led to another. It’s allium triquetrum or three-cornered leek (aka three-cornered garlic). It’s so called because of…

  • Seedy Penpals January 2014 – My Parcel

    Our Seedy Penpals exchange has got off to a grand start this year. I received this very thoughtful & generous parcel above from Lorraine last week. Squash seeds Lorraine sent us four different squash varieties from US seed supplier Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Co. Pattison Golden Mabre Scallop (summer squash) Gelber Englischer Custard (summer squash)…