Food and wine pairing is achingly fashionable at the moment. I’m afraid my knowledge about which wine to pair with what food doesn’t extend beyond when to drink Chablis and why Cabernet Sauvignon doesn’t work with rhubarb crumble. I am, however, very good at food and performance pairing. In case you haven’t come across it, […]
Category: Recipes
Foraging for Wild Garlic
I was brought up by the sea. I’m a comical swimmer and a bemused sailor, but give me a shoreline to walk along and I’m content. It’s the best of both worlds – feet on solid ground and eyes on the waves. Foraging for wild ingredients turns a coastal walk into a glorious expedition. Depending […]
Grey Days and Double Crumpets
On grey days I like carbohydrates and a good laugh. This weekend I’ve savoured spring bulbs, a new pair of hole-free wellies, an old-fashioned joke and a plate of home-made crumpets. Crumpets and I have a long history. I wrote recently about childhood memories of my Great Auntie Susie’s plain, honest Lancashire hotpot. My great […]
Picnic in the Fourth Dimension
There’s a plant that explodes into life in Oxford’s University Parks each year that, for me, sounds the klaxon for spring. It far outstrips me in size and its shock of yellow, sprouting branches, shooting wildly from a carpet of blue flowers, is so joyously absurd that everyone stops to stare. Its startling colours and eccentric […]
Hotpot With High Kicks
When life gets really tough for animated characters Wallace and Gromit, they have a sure-fire way to steady their nerves. ‘Hold tight, lad’, exhorts Wallace in A Grand Day Out, ‘…and think of Lancashire hotpot’. There’s something robustly fortifying about hotpot; essentially a slow-cooked casserole trapped beneath a layer of sliced potatoes. It’s about as dainty […]
Six Ingredients In Search Of A Recipe
In the league table of celebrated plays that should never be performed on stage, Shakespeare’s gruesome Titus Andronicus has to come top. But I’ve always thought Pirandello’s 1921 play Six Characters in Search of an Author may be up there too. His opening night audience in Rome yelled ‘manicomio’ or ‘madhouse’ throughout the performance and the humiliated Pirandello had […]
The Darkling Thrush and Pontack
It’s that bleak, oppressive time of year when light is sparse and joys are scant. ‘Winter’s dregs’ was how writer Thomas Hardy described it, in his poem The Darkling Thrush. Depending on my mood, I either sign up to the plucky courage of Hardy’s wind-battered bird, trilling merrily from his twig. Or I side with […]
Miss Galindo’s Canape
I love the concept of the canape. All the flavours of an entire plateful, heaped extravagantly into one perfect mouthful. But I’ve just discovered something I love as much as the canape, and that’s the derivation of the word. Canape was coined in 18th century France and means ‘sofa’ – a welcoming, capacious, inviting seat on […]
When Colours Run Riot
There was a phase in the 1970s when interior design ran riot. I remember my grandpa announcing proudly that he’d decorated the walls of his small front room with four wildly different wallpapers and picked out the woodwork in egg-yolk yellow. I thought of my grandpa as I walked around David Hockney’s new exhibition A […]
Still Life with Soup
Few things give me as much pleasure as a still life painting. Giorgio Morandi, Alice Mumford, Ben Nicholson, Edouard Vuillard all do something magical to a jug of milk, a white vase and a pot of jam and turn the mundane and everyday into something magnificent. I even like the term itself – ‘still life’ […]
Cups, Spoons, Weights and Measures
It’s the season to take stock, count up, measure out, pledge, promise and decide. I’ve made resolutions for the first time in five years and on my list is ‘read more poetry’. Expert resolution-makers say that simply vowing to do more of something is cheating. But I’m happy with my slightly vague ‘more’ and whoever […]
Longstocking Cocktail
It’s an Eggs On The Roof tradition that at this time of year I toast you with a cocktail. Last year I saluted you with a pomegranate creation I called Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day. This year I’d like to say thank you with a quince vodka and clementine juice affair. I’m full of […]
Apple and Cheese Get an Invitation to the Ball
Do you remember when I wrote about ‘nowness’? In the final weeks of his life, it was the word Dennis Potter used to describe his intense love for the present moment. My Granny’s way of describing ‘nowness’ was what she called ‘having a minute’ and this morning I found yet another version. In 1817 John […]
Faster than the Speed of a Poached Pear
The news that scientists have recorded subatomic particles travelling faster than the speed of light has been greeted with astonishment. I’m no doubt missing out a million links in the scientific chain here, but in its simplest form it shoots craters into Albert Einstein’s sacred principle that nothing travels faster than light. It might be […]
Smoked Salmon and Pentimenti
The Leonardo da Vinci exhibition at London’s National Gallery has only just opened, but it’s already sold out. Not bad, considering that fewer than twenty of his paintings survive. I was captivated to hear that the work newly attributed to Leonardo, Salvator Mundi, was only firmly established as being his by its ‘pentimenti’. Loosely translated, pentimenti are ‘marks […]