About

I love food in general and home cooking in particular but, to be honest, I'm slightly obsessed by recipes. Regrettably, I was hopeless at recording the recipes that I'd devised or that I'd accidentally bumped into over the years and that's why I started this blog. It was an attempt to make myself a bit more disciplined about writing things down. Happily, it's worked pretty well for me.

Most of the recipes on this blog are fairly straightforward and easy to cook at home. They could come from anywhere but most are Western European because that's what I know best. In fact, if they're not British, then they may well have a French accent. That's partly because I've spent some time there but it's also because French recipes seem less common and less fashionable these days and I don't want to forget them.

This is not in any way a commercial blog and any product mentioned has been paid for with hard-earned (well, moderately hard-earned) cash. In addition, I never accept any form of advertising, partnerships, sponsorship or any so-called “guest posts” from commercial organisations.

If you'd like to leave a comment or drop me an email, then I'd be very happy to hear from you but I don’t have any social media accounts. I don't think this is entirely due to me being a curmudgeon: I'm just not very good at electronic communication and I can never find the time to improve. You may need to be a little patient with me. 


If you were wondering about the title of the blog, then go ask Alice or, even better, her friend the White Knight.




Popular posts from this blog

Hollygog Pudding

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For this month's Random Recipe challenge Dom of Belleau Kitchen has asked us to come up with desserts and to pick a random recipe from one of our cookbooks dedicated to desserts, cakes or puddings. I suppose it just proves that I like more general cookbooks, but after a quick search through the bookshelves I found only one such book: “The National Trust Book of Traditional Puddings” by Sara Paston-Williams, published in the eighties. (Although this particular book is now out of print the National Trust currently sell several books that cover much the same ground and seem to be derived largely from this original collection of recipes). There were two recipes on the randomly chosen page in the book: I could have selected a roly-poly pudding, but who could turn down the opportunity to make something called Hollygog pudding? The original recipe comes from Kiddington in Oxfordshire and, in fact, it is a kind of roly-poly pudding filled with golden syrup and cooked in milk. Not the ...
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Palestine Soup

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Palestine soup has nothing whatever to do with Palestine. It seems to have been given that name because it’s made with Jerusalem artichokes. Jerusalem artichokes have nothing whatever to do with Jerusalem and aren't artichokes. Anything that odd just has to be good. In fact, it’s one of my favourite vegetable soups and it so happens that it’s also very easy to make and, thankfully, low in fat. I first came across Palestine soup in cookery books dating back to the early 1900s, but I think the dish is a fair bit older than that. Most recipes combine the Jerusalem artichokes with turnips or potatoes, which maintain the creamy white colour of the finished soup. I like to add carrot, which provides a nice touch of sweetness but does change the colour. (Unless you can find a heritage variety of white carrot). A few years ago, Mark Hix published a Palestine soup recipe with some hazelnuts added, inspired by Auguste Escoffier’s ‘Purée de Topinambour’. The hazelnuts enhance the fla...
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Duck Apicius

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Ever since I picked out a modern interpretation of an Apicius pork dish in Dom’s first ever Random Recipe challenge (and that was quite a while ago now) I’ve been playing around with some of the other recipes (I use the term loosely) in this text from ancient Rome. Since my Latin is a little rusty, I’ve lazily resorted to translations I’m afraid. A brief QI style digression: There are actually ten “books” in the Apicius writings that (sort of) add up to a complete treatise on cooking. The books are named in honour of Apicius, who was known for his love of fine food, but were actually compiled long after his death. And I think that’s more than enough facts for now. You need a fair amount of imagination with some of the “recipes” in Apicius: there are few exact quantities given or methods described and some of the ingredients, such as the plant silphium or laser , no longer exist.  So I feel justified in bringing you a fairly free adaptation of an Apicius sauce...
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