… “the Queen Mary 2 of outdoor cooking is the $35,000 Talos Outdoor Cooking Suite sold by Frontgate, a luxury goods catalog retailer. The sprawling stainless steel temple features a searing station with a restaurant-style griddle, a hardwood cutting board, two side burners to heat sauces, a warming drawer, 3/8-inch-thick cooking grates, a 16,000-B.T.U. ceramic…
pastry …
Pastry and I … we don’t get on. At all. I can barely manage with bought pastry, and if I try to make it myself it’s a disaster. I’ve tried everything – food processor, mixer, by hand. It all goes grey and shrinks, and is as unappetising as you might imagine. I’ve been hunting for…
vodka chocolate chillis
I saw this on LJ, and thought of Sasha. Make a slit in the side of the chilli and remove membrane and seeds. Then you marinate them in vodka for 12 hours+. Then you pipe a mixture of white chocolate, vodka and freshly ground black pepper into the cavities, chill, and finally dip in dark…
dude! where's the cheese?
Bought some nice fresh basil at the weekend. This week is busy, busy, busy with deadlines, and we’re both tired. So we decided to have a simple supper last night – pasta with mozarella, olive oil, and the aforementioned basil. The discussion was had about what sort of pasta – we plumped for standard spaghetti…
victoria sponge redux
Well, I tried it again. I used the right size tins, I checked that the oven was the right temperature with a thermometer, I even softened the butter Just In Case. And still, my cake was more like a biscuit. An uncooked biscuit at that. My sponge making days are over. Gloom.
I've never been much cop at baking
But for some reason, in the past week or so I’ve been making some cakey things. I started with carrot and cinnamon muffins (delicious), then did some espresso flavoured cup cakes (also delicious). Then, fired up with confidence, I decided to make a sponge. A SPONGE. How hard can it be?, I asked myself. I…
how to make an omelette
I like this 🙂 “Here is the recipe for the omelette: I break some good eggs into a bowl, I beat them well, I put a good piece of butter in the pan, I throw the eggs into it and I shake constantly. I am happy, monsieur, if the recipe pleases you”. — Annette Poulard,…
outdated
Being tired and hungry, we thought we’d have some porridge this morning, so I found the box with the oats in, and bunged the requisite amounts of them, the milk and the water into a bowl, and placed it in the microwave. And only then noticed that the bag said “best before April 03”. How…
yes, but is it *enough* ?
Browsing through some photographs today, I found this one – taken on 20 January this year. I uploaded it to my Flickr account, and captioned it thus: I needed to make a chocolate mooooooose, so I thought I’d better make sure we had enough chocolate in the store cupboard. I think we did … bigger…
alas, poor spoon
Some years ago, we had a lovely wooden spoon – it had a thin head and a long handle, and when I wanted that spoon, it was exactly the right spoon. One day the handle split; Pete mended it with sticky stuff, but it was never the same, and it broke again – with great…